Smoking

Tobacco is a $200 billion industry, producing six trillion cigarettes a year – about 1,000 cigarettes for each person on earth. And this is what you’ll find in cigarettes:

~ Formaldehyde, which embalmer use to preserve dead bodies;

~ Toluene, which is commonly used as an ingredient in paint thinner;

~ Acetone, an active ingredient in nail polish remover;

~ Ammonia, which scientists have discovered lets you absorb more nicotine, keeping you hooked on smoking.

If you smoke, you and those around you also inhaling arsenic, benzene, cadmium, hydrogen cyanide, lead, mercury and phonol. In all, 4000 harmful chemicals, including 44 types of poison, of which 43 are proven cancer-causing substances. That should be reason enough why a person should stop smoking immediately.

Bad business

Life insurance companies charge smokers nearly double the amount they charge non-smokers for term assurance. Some tobacco companies also own shares in life assurance companies. What appears to be a good deal for tobacco companies is a bad deal for taxpayers: the health care costs caused directly by smoking, and the lost economic productivity, cost governments up to three times as much as the total earnings of the tobacco industry.

Death

Smokers are ten times more likely to suffer from lung cancer than non-smokers, three times more likely to have a stroke, and twice more likely to suffer a heart attack. Carbon monoxide in cigarettes deprives the heart of oxygen. Smoking can cause headaches, infertility, blood vessel disease, digestive problems, mouth and throat cancer, and blindness.

Tobacco causes more deaths than those caused by all the wars of the past 100 years, including World Wars One and Two. More than three million people die each year as a result of smoking.

Nicotine is a drug. It is more addictive than cocaine, heroine or mandrax. Nicotine is a natural insecticide. Plants such as tomatoes produce it in their leaves to discourage bugs from eating them.



Stop smoking


After 8 hours, the carbon monoxide in your blood drops to normal.

After 48 hours, nerve endings start regrowing and the ability to smell and taste is enhanced.

After a year, the risk of heart disease drops halfway back to that of a non-smoker.

After 15 years, the risk of coronary heart disease is that of a non-smoker.

August is baby month

We bid a hearty welcome to the millions of new earthlings who arrive in August, the month with the highest birth rate. You are the proud results of a joyous Christmas season… even if your parents did not put up Christmas trees.

19.5% of new August babies are born in India and 11.6% in China, respectively 6 and 4 times more than in the United States: approximately 2.2 million and 1.3 million vs 0.4 million. Which means two babies are born every second in India and China vs a new baby every 8 seconds in the US. World-wide, 5 beautiful new babies are born every second.

The global fertility rate is 2.61 while the United States has a fertility rate of 2.05 children born per woman. One in every 31 new cuddly earthlings born globally is born in the US, thus 3% of all new births.

Nearly 40% of the American newlings – 2 out of 5 American babies – are born to unwed mothers. One in ten are born to a teenage mother, according to the National Center for Health. The birth rate among US teenagers is twice as high as the average for all developed countries: 42 births per thousand teenage girls (ages 15-19) vs 21 per thousand.

About 51% of all babies born in the US are boys; 49% are girls. Of the estimated 135 million new babies born world wide every year, approximately 70 million are boys and 65 million are girls. Yes, about 5 million more baby boys! (On average, there are some 36 million more boys and girls – of all ages – in the world.) Boys continue to outnumber girls until about age 40, when the number evens out. By age 65, there are only 88 boys for every 100 women. By age 85, women outnumber men almost 2-to-1, proof that boys over 80 are doubly blessed :)

In the US, the average weight of a baby at birth is 7 pounds, 5 ounces. More babies are born on Tuesdays and Wednesdays than any other day, with Sundays delivering the fewest babies. And compared with other months, the stork flies least in February.

Can you turn sour into sweet? A lesson for life...

The miracle fruit, or miracle berry plant (Synsepalum dulcificum), produces berries that, when eaten, cause sour foods (such as lemons and limes) subsequently consumed to taste sweet. The berry has been used in West Africa since at least the 18th century, when European explorer Chevalier des Marchais, who searched for many different fruits during a 1725 excursion to its native West Africa, provided an account of its use there. Marchais noticed that local people picked the berry from shrubs and chewed it before meals. The plant grows in bushes up to 20 feet (6.1 m) high in its native habitat, but does not usually grow higher than ten feet in cultivation, and it produces two crops per year, after the end of the rainy season. It is an evergreen plant that produces small red berries, with flowers that are white and are produced for many months of the year. The seeds are about the size of coffee beans.

The berry itself has a low sugar content and a mildly sweet tang. It contains a glycoprotein molecule, with some trailing carbohydrate chains, called miraculin. When the fleshy part of the fruit is eaten, this molecule binds to the tongue's taste buds, causing sour foods to taste sweet. While the exact cause for this change is unknown, one theory is that the effect may be caused if miraculin works by distorting the shape of sweetness receptors "so that they become responsive to acids, instead of sugar and other sweet things".This effect lasts 15–60 minutes.

You also have miraculin in you....which can turn your sour things into sweet. All coins has 2 sides....:)

You Know why doctors wear Green at the time of surgery?

You Know why doctors wear Green at the time of surgery?

Every Colour has its own contrast. If your eye sees a wall which is painted fully red for a few moments and stare at a white wall, you will see green. When a person sees the same colour for long time, they are tend to loose the concentration, which we cannot take a risk in a surgery. The best way to avoid the loosing of concentration is to see the contrast colour which stabilises the pupil in your eye. The doctors see blood which is red and to compensate that, they wear green.