Multilingual children may slow ageing process:

A fascinating study has suggested that children who speak more than one language may protect the brain against the effects of ageing.

The study published in the journal Psychology and Ageing found that kids who speak a second or third language may have an unexpected advantage over monolingual later in life.

Knowing and speaking many languages may protect the brain against the effects of ageing, suggested the research at the Tel Aviv University. The team of researchers led by Gitit Kav, a clinical neuro-psychologist from the Herczeg Institute on Ageing at Tel Aviv University, discovered that senior citizens who speak more languages test for better cognitive functioning.

The research, which surveyed people between the ages of 75 and 95 and compared bilingual speakers to tri-and multilingual speakers, found that more languages a person spoke, the better his or her cognitive state was, the Science Daily Online reported the study as suggesting.

A person who speaks more languages is likely to be more clear-minded at an older age, Kav says, in effect exercising his or her brain more than those who are monolingual.

However, she advised caution, saying: There is no sure-fire recipe for avoiding the pitfalls of mental ageing. But using a second or third language may help prolong the good years.

Heart

The heart is the body's engine room, responsible for pumping life-sustaining blood via a 60,000-mile-long (97,000-kilometer-long) network of vessels. The organ works ceaselessly, beating 100,000 times a day, 40 million times a year—in total clocking up three billion heartbeats over an average lifetime. It keeps the body freshly supplied with oxygen and nutrients, while clearing away harmful waste matter.

The fetal heart evolves through several different stages inside the womb, first resembling a fish's heart, then a frog's, which has two chambers, then a snake's, with three, before finally adopting the four-chambered structure of the human heart.

About the size of its owner's clenched fist, the organ sits in the middle of the chest, behind the breastbone and between the lungs, in a moistened chamber that is protected all round by the rib cage. It's made up of a special kind of muscle (cardiac muscle) that works involuntarily, so we don't have to think about it. The heart speeds up or slow downs automatically in response to nerve signals from the brain that tell it how much the body is being exerted. Normally the heart contracts and relaxes between 70 and 80 times per minute, each heartbeat filling the four chambers inside with a fresh round of blood.

These cavities form two separate pumps on each side of the heart, which are divided by a wall of muscle called the septum. The upper chamber on each side is called the atrium. This is connected via a sealing valve to the larger, more powerful lower chamber, or ventricle. The left ventricle pumps most forcefully, which is why a person's heartbeat is felt more on the left side of the chest.

When the heart contracts, the chambers become smaller, forcing blood first out of the atria into the ventricles, then from each ventricle into a large blood vessel connected to the top of the heart. These vessels are the two main arteries. One of them, the pulmonary artery, takes blood to the lungs to receive oxygen. The other, the aorta, transports freshly oxygenated blood to the rest of the body. The vessels that bring blood to the heart are the veins. The two main veins that connect to the heart are called the vena cava.

Blood Delivery

Since the heart lies at the center of the blood delivery system, it is also central to life. Blood both supplies oxygen from the lungs to the other organs and tissues and removes carbon dioxide to the lungs, where the gas is breathed out. Blood also distributes nourishment from the digestive system and hormones from glands. Likewise our immune system cells travel in the bloodstream, seeking out infection, and blood takes the body's waste products to the kidneys and liver to be sorted out and trashed.

Given the heart's many essential functions, it seems wise to take care of it. Yet heart disease has risen steadily over the last century, especially in industrialized countries, due largely to changes in diet and lifestyle. It has become the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States, claiming almost 700,000 lives a year, or 29 percent of the annual total. Worldwide, 7.2 million people die from heart disease every year.

For more visit: http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/health-and-human-body/human-body/heart-article.html

Google helps the web to go social

Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

Friend Connect is Google's new offering Google has joined the drive to make the web more social by introducing tools to enable people to interact with their friends. Friend Connect follows plans announced last week by the world's two biggest social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook. Data Availability and Connect let users move their personal profiles and applications to other websites. "Social is in the air," says Google's director of engineering David Glazer. During a conference call at Google's California headquarters, Mr Glazer told reporters: "Google Friend Connect is about being the 'long tail' of sites becoming more social." "Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard." Charlene Li, principal analyst at Forrester, told BBC News: "Google is tapping into the 'all things social' heat of the moment, but it's adding a different perspective, not as a data source and social network 'owner' but as an enabler." Gamut of uses At the heart of Google's service is the use of Open Social which will allow third parties to build and develop applications for the site. Social networking is going mainstream

David Glazer

Google The company says with Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running right away without any complicated programming. This will run the gamut from invitations to member's gallery and from message walls to reviews. In an example of how it will all work, Google cited fans of independent musician Ingrid Michaelson who can now connect with other fans without having to leave the site. Visitors will be able to see comments by friends from their social networks, add music to their profiles and see who is attending concerts all at Ingrid's website. "Social networking is going mainstream. It used to be proprietary, but now it's going to be open and baked into the infrastructure of the net, not just one site or one source," says Mr Glazer. Walled garden MySpace was first out of the gate when it announced plans last Thursday to loosen its grip on the estimated 200 million personal profiles its users store on its site. Data Availability will allow members to share select information with four partners, Yahoo. PhotoBucket, Twitter and eBay. Google doesn't do anything without thinking about... how can it benefit Google

Charlene Li

Principal analyst, Forrester Essentially the user will still be tied to MySpace which aims to put itself at the centre of the web by encouraging users to store all of their core data at the site to begin with. One day later Facebook entered the fray with a service called Connect. With its 70 million users worldwide, their plans differ from MySpace by allowing users to take their personal profiles to any website that wants to host them and not just the sites that have partnered up. So what's driving this move to dismantle the so-called "walled garden" where social networking sites have jealously guarded their users profiles? Charlene Li, principal analyst at Forrester told BBC News in the end it all comes down to money. "It's a smart move by Google which is trying to play the role of United Nations secretary general by making sure everyone talks nicely to one another, getting the data to where they want to move it back and forward, and participate in open standards. "Remember Google doesn't do anything without thinking about, not only how can this benefit the larger community, but how can it benefit Google." As 99% of sites are not currently socially enabled, Friend Connect has a big potential market in front of it and Ms Li says the route to all things profitable in this space will be through tapping into "the deep profit and user data flowing through Friend Connect." In other words, mining that information through advertising. Google is being cautious about approving sites to use the new code and is creating a waiting list for requests to use Friend Connect. It says it expects to give the go ahead to a few dozens sites in the next few days. As to opening out to a wider audience, Google says it estimates that will happen over the coming months. Meanwhile MySpace and Facebook anticipate rolling out their offerings over the next few weeks.

Bears And Hibernation: New Insights Into Metabolism In Extreme Conditions

ScienceDaily (2008-05-16) -- Due to their ability to produce a potent inhibitor of protein degradation, hibernating bears do not lose muscle mass after long periods of hibernation. The team researched for the first time the physiological reasons for an effect that is well known to the scientific community -- the fact that hibernating bears do not lose muscle tissue, only fat. The team studied the physiological response of muscle cells of laboratory rats grown with hibernating bear plasma outside the period of hibernation.