http://www.elle.com/beauty/extraordinary-products-revealed-317987?cid=198

Consejos prácticos.

Abstract
Waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is an important ornament display that signals women’s health and fertility. Its significance derives from human development as a bipedal species. This required fundamental changes to hip morphology/musculature to accommodate the demands of both reproduction and locomotion. The result has been an obstetric dilemma whereby women’s hips are only just wide enough to allow the passage of an infant. Childbirth therefore poses a significant hip width related threat to maternal mortality/risk of gynecological injury. It was predicted that this would have a significant influence on women’s sexual behavior. To investigate this, hip width and WHR were measured in 148 women (M age = 20.93 + 0.17 years) and sexual histories were recorded via questionnaire.

Five post-it notes. Five reminders.
That’s all it takes to add a bit more happiness, confidence, optimism, meaning and success to your life.
Sometimes you need something to make you feel lucky.
Sometimes you just need to be reminded that you already are.

Sorry for repeating the same text.

Can good music increase pain tolerance and decrease anxiety?

The authors examined the effects of preferred music, visual distraction, and silence on pain perception. Visual distraction was provided by participants’ choice of painting from a selection of 15 popular artworks. Eighty participants (43 females) underwent 3 trials of cold pressor pain induction with measurement of tolerance, pain intensity, perceived control, and anxiety, and a music listening patterns questionnaire. Preferred music was found to significantly increase tolerance and perceived control over the painful stimulus and to decrease anxiety compared with both the visual distraction and silence conditions.

How ice ages occur may not seem relevant to people who are terrified of losing their balance and breaking a hip.

But according to scientists who study complex systems, a single principle is involved in climate change, sensing prey in murky water and balance. And, the scientists say, the principle may help prevent falls by the elderly.

The idea is that something nonintuitive occurs when any randomly fluctuating weak signal — the scientific term is ”noise” — is fed into any highly variable system like a changing climate or a heavy person tottering on skinny legs. The system is able to detect faint sources of information that lead to greater stability or a new state of order.

For instance, random fluctuations in atmospheric turbulence may push a climate system over the edge to a new cold stability, an ice age. That is called stochastic resonance.

In a study being published in the January issue of The Annals of Neurology, researchers report that vibrating insoles allow diabetics with numb feet and stroke victims with uncertain balance to stand quietly without swaying and losing their balance.

The random vibrations, which were so subtle that people did not have any conscious awareness of them, effectively stimulated the neurons on the bottom of their feet. That provided their wobbly balance system with missing information about how their stance was changing moment to moment.

The body, which is essentially an inverted pendulum, is stabilized by a control loop based on this rapidly changing noise from its periphery.

Unfortunately, as people age the mechanical sensors in their feet, joints and muscles degrade, much as hearing and vision decline, Dr. Collins said. Signals from the feet and lower limbs do not reach the brain to promote balance. People then stiffen their muscles to try to improve stability, and that increases their postural sway.

To deliver more useful noise to the brain, Dr. Collins and his colleagues embedded three battery-powered vibrating elements into insoles made of an elastic silicone gel. When people stand on the insoles, their feet are stimulated by random vibrations that they cannot consciously feel but that nevertheless reach their brains.

In the latest experiments, subjects who had trouble balancing were asked to stand quietly on the insoles, hands at their sides and eyes closed. An overhead camera measured how much their bodies swayed by tracking a marker placed on their shoulders. Subjects with numbness from diabetes and others with damage to the brain from strokes were helped by the vibrating soles.

A mind which is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.