British scientists’ new research shows that mood may actually change how one’s dinner tastes, making the bitter and salty flavors recede.

In a new research to unpick the relationship between the chemical balance in brain and sense of taste, scientists at the University of Bristol, UK, gave 20 healthy volunteers two antidepressant drugs, and checked their sensitivity to different tastes, The Nature reported Wednesday on its website.

The scientists found that the drug that raised serotonin levels made people more sensitive to sweet and bitter tastes, while the other, which increased noradrenaline, enhanced recognition of bitter and sour tastes.

In healthy people, volunteers whose anxiety levels were naturally higher were less sensitive to bitter and salty tastes. ” What hasn’t been done before is to look precisely at which tastes are affected in depression. Now the results are in. We can discriminate between the chemicals and the tastes that seem to be altered,” Lucy Donaldson who led the research was quoted as saying.

It has long been known that people who are depressed have lower- than-usual levels of the brain chemicals serotonin or noradrenaline, or in some cases both, and many also have a blunted sense of taste, which is presumably caused by changes in brain chemistry.

The scientists plan to perform similar tests in depressed people, and in healthy volunteers given another brain chemical called tryptophan which would lower the healthy subjects’ levels of serotonin, as actually happens in depressed patients, according to the report.

Source

Friday, August 1 is a red-letter day for eclipse enthusiasts. On that date, the sun will be partially eclipsed over an immense area that includes western and central Asia, parts of northern and central Europe, all of Greenland and even a small slice of northeastern North America.

A total solar eclipse — the first in nearly two and a half years — will be visible along a narrow track that will start over the Northwest Passage of Canada, gives a glancing blow to northern Greenland, then shifts southeast through Siberia and western Mongolia and before ending near the famed Silk Route of China.

The path of totality for this upcoming eclipse is never more than 157 miles (252 km) wide.

Where it’s visible

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Wordpress 2.5.1, updated a whole heap of plugins… and soon enough, some more ads for ya’ll to see what’s really good n’ the hood.

Laters…

BitchAssNess PSA starring

Diddy (Making The Band Clip)
Jody Breeze (Boyz N The Hood)
Kandi (Xscape)
Mychael Knight (Project Runway)
Loon (Former Bad Boy Artist]
Ike Dirty [Music Producer]
Princess [Crime Mob]
Buckeey [Flavor of Love]

Courtesy of NecoleBitchie

Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.
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For now, men who want to do their part for birth control have meager choices: A vasectomy — meant to be permanent — and condoms.

For years, experts have predicted that male contraception is under development and that more choices will be here soon.

But when? Experts agree it’s still a ways off, but it’s getting closer.

“It has been slow,” said Dr. Ronald Swerdloff, a researcher in the quest to find feasible male contraceptive methods. But there are good reasons for that slow pace, added Swerdloff, an endocrinologist and chief of the division of endocrinology at Harbor-UCLA and professor of medicine at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to take on a new product quickly because of untested liability issues, he said. And “one of the biggest single issues has to do with the fact that contraception in general is a difficult area it would be used by large numbers of healthy individuals.” The safety threshold, he noted, is high. Still, he added, more options are moving closer.

“If we really focus on studies, with funding, it could be four or five years” before more options might be available, said Elaine Lissner, director of the Male Contraception Information Project, a San Francisco-based organization.

The problem, she added, is that the research has been scattergun. “If we [continue to] do a study here, a study there, as we have for the last 20 years, it could take forever.”

At a “Future of Male Contraception” conference, sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Seattle, a variety of methods were reviewed, including:

* Hormonal therapy and testicular warming — Swerdloff and his team found that giving men testosterone and another hormone with testicular warming helped suppress sperm. “The transient testicular warming [like sitting in a spa] causes the suppression to occur much earlier [than the hormones alone],” he said.
* Transdermal gels — In another study by Swerdloff’s team, 140 men applied either a progestin gel called Nestorone or a testosterone gel, or both. The researchers studied various doses and then drew blood samples to measure hormone levels. They reported on the 119 men who complied and finished the study, concluding that the combination worked better to suppress sperm.
* “Intra Vas Device,” or IVD — An alternative to a vasectomy, this method involves inserting silicone plugs into the vas deferens, the tube sperm move through and the same tube cut in a vasectomy. “The sperm can’t get past the plugs,” said Joe Hofmeister, president of Shepherd Medical Company in St. Paul, Minn., the IVD developer. “Preliminary six-month data show that 90 percent of 60 men [tracked to date] have zero motile sperm,” he said. More study is needed to track the IVD for reversibility, Hofmeister said.
* Vitamin A blocker — Columbia University researchers tested a drug abandoned by a pharmaceutical company because it interferes with vitamin A receptors in the testes, lowering fertility. It worked well in animal studies; whether it will do the same in human studies is not yet known.

These approaches, if successful, will take several more years to get market approval, all the researchers agreed.

Source 

A man in central Ohio is accused of having sex with his picnic table.

The investigation began when a tipster gave police three DVDs showing Arthur Price having sexual intercourse with a metal round table on his deck.

The incidents occurred between January and March 2008.

Police say the DVDs show Price involved in a sex act in his bedroom. He walks out to his deck, tilts the table on its side and has sex with it.

Police say Price lives near an elementary school.

Price admitted that he had sex with the picnic table when police questioned him.

He confirmed to police the incidents caught on the DVDs and said he had also had sex with the table inside the home.

Price faces four counts of public indecency. He is free on a $20,000 bond.

Source 

Listening to music can reduce chronic pain by up to 21 per cent and depression by up to 25 per cent, according to a paper in the latest UK-based Journal of Advanced Nursing.
It can also make people feel more in control of their pain and less disabled by their condition.

Researchers carried out a controlled clinical trial with sixty people, dividing them into two music groups and a control group.

They found that people who listened to music for an hour every day for a week reported improved physical and psychological symptoms compared to the control group.

The participants, who had an average age of 50, were recruited from pain and chiropractic clinics in Ohio, USA. They had been suffering from a range of painful conditions, including osteoarthritis, disc problems and rheumatoid arthritis, for an average of six and a half years.

90 per cent said the pain affected more than one part of their body and 95 per cent said it was continuous. Before the music study, participants reported that their usual pain averaged just under six on a zero to ten pain scale and their worst pain exceeded nine out of ten.
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Valentine’s Day actually started more than 1,500 years ago.

According to legend, Valentine was a priest who defied the orders of the Roman emperor Claudius and continued to perform marriages. It seems that Claudius realized no young men wanted to join his army because they didn’t want to leave their wives and sweethearts. When it was discovered that Valentine was still performing marriages in secret, he was sentenced to death. Valentine allegedly cured the jailer’s daughter of blindness, and on the night before his execution, sent a note to her signed “from your Valentine.” He reportedly died on Feb. 14, 269 A.D.

In 496 A.D., February 14 was named by Pope Gelasius to honor St. Valentine.

The first Valentines are credited to Charles, Duke of Orleans, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London during the 1400s where he wrote romantic verses that he sent to his wife.

A woman named Esther Howland is credited with sending the first Valentine in the United States.

The United States Postal Service is credited with advancing the popularity of sending Valentines when the penny postcard was introduced in the mid 1800s. Before that, sending mail was too expensive for the average person, because at the time, the person who RECEIVED the letter paid the postage and not the person who SENT the letter.

Source 

Here are some tips to keep you safe. Or whoop somebody’s ass, whichever you prefer

A six-year-old Indian boy, Aniket Chindak is hoping to enter the record books after ‘limbo-skating’ under 57 cars in less than a minute.

Aniket has already created an unofficial world record by squeezing himself under a row of 57 four-wheel drive cars in 45 seconds.

With legs split, chest bent forward and chin almost skimming along the road, Aniket is no more than eight inches above the ground when he vanishes under the vehicles in Belgaum, India.

The wonder-kid, who started skating when he was 18-months-old, is now training for four hours a day and plans to break his world record of 57 cars with a 100-car skate in New Delhi.

I would try limbo skating but I’d break my damn back…

(TULSA, Okla.) School police officers say prescription drugs are making their way into schools and house parties.

They say kids are calling them salad parties and prescription drugs are the pass to get in. You get whatever pills you can your hands on, drop them in a bowl, mix all the pills up. And having no idea what the pills are, you pull one out from the mix and pop it, waiting for the high.

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By JOHN SEEWER, Associated Press Writer

More than 1,000 people were flooded out of their homes Thursday after heavy rain that swamped communities across the Midwest sent Ohio’s rivers spilling over their banks, the governor said. The storm’s death toll also rose when three people were electrocuted by lightning at a bus stop.

“This is a major, major disaster,” Gov. Ted Strickland told CBS’s “The Early Show” Thursday. “We’ll do everything we can to help people get back on their feet, but this is going to take some time.”

In one Ohio county alone, more than 700 homes were severely damaged or destroyed by flooding, Strickland said. Midwest-wide, the count is in the thousands.

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FBI eyes 2nd bank robberyMIDWEST CITY, Okla. — A man was arrested Wednesday and charged with two counts of federal bank robbery related to three recent bank robberies.

Michael William Allen, 25, of Midwest City, is a suspect in the Aug. 10 robbery of Credit Union Service Center in Midwest City.

Police said Allen was arrested on Aug. 24 at 5 p.m. by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol on unrelated charges.
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This is the guy across the street. We actually ran into him 1 day when my mother and I went to the bank. He was at the vet’s office (he doesn’t have a pet) next door to the bank.. apparently, he was casing the bank. Word on the street is that the police caught him on a speeding ticket.

New Orleans rapper Mystikal was sentenced Thursday to six years in jail after pleading guilty to a sexual battery charge.

Mystikal, whose real name is Michael Tyler, appeared for sentencing in state court in Baton Rouge. An earlier hearing was delayed after his attorney discovered the judge had watched Tyler’s videotape of the attack.

Defense attorney David Bourland said Tyler pleaded guilty after he was promised that the videotape would not be shown to anyone, including District Judge Tony Marabella. Now Tyler wants to change his plea.

Tyler and two bodyguards videotaped themselves in forced sex acts with Tyler’s hairstylist after an argument with her.

Tyler accused the woman of stealing $80,000 worth of his checks. The woman denies the accusation.

Bourland said his client would not have entered a plea if he knew the tape was going to be shown. He said the tape is inflammatory and doesn’t “reflect the entirety of the events.”