Eating less can boost your brain and help you remember more.

Eating less could help you remember more, researchers have found.Skipping dessert and having an after-dinner coffee instead could also be good for your brain, as well as your waistline.The news comes from an Italian study into ‘calorific restriction’ – the idea that near-starvation rations boost health and extend life.Scientists have long known of the phenomenon, but have struggled to work out just what it is about severely cutting calories that improves health.Researcher Giovambattista Pani decided to focus on a protein called CREB1 that is known to be important to memory and learning.In experiments on mice, he showed that cutting calories boosted learning if the animals could still make CREB1. He also showed that cutting calories boosts the amount of the protein made in the brain.The animals’ calorie count was only cut by 25 to 30 per cent. In human terms, this equates to about 600 calories a day.

Cadbury spends Euro 6 million on making its chocolate bars stand up.

Since then when cadbury announced plans to ditch 200 staff to cut cost, owner Kraft is spending euro 6 million flipping dairy milk bars upright at the tills. Now, just over a year after the quintessentially English firm was taken over by the American processed-cheese giant, it has spent £6million on new packaging to make the chocolate bars stand erect in their cardboard boxes, the Mail can reveal.The expensive ‘innovation’ is aimed at capturing more impulse purchases. Research showed customers are more likely to succumb to their sweet tooth if they see a complete bar of chocolate rather than just its side.Kraft is using the cash on a new production line at its factory in Birmingham to repackage bars of Dairy Milk, Whole Nut, and Fruit and Nut. Each cardboard box will be fitted with a spring that prevents the bars from falling over. It also pushes the confectionery forward each time one is removed

Statue of liberty was originally meant to be in not in America.

The statue of liberty was originally meant to like Arab peasant and to be at the entrance of Suez Canal in Egypt and her flame was to symbolize the light she was bringing to Asia. The sculptor Barthaldi fell in love with middle east and all it entailed in 1855. Barthaldi returned to Egypt in 1869 with a blueprint of giant statue of a woman that would double as a lighthouse at the entrance of the Suez Canal. Egypt wasn't reaping any of the monetary benefits of the canal even though it was located in Egypt. Barthaldi realized that he could never put his statue in Egypt, because they didn't have the financial means. He was heartbroken and sailed to New York. As his ship entered New York harbor, Barthaldi spotted the deserted, oval island of Bedloe. It was perfect for his statue. The French and Americans were friends, and between the two of them, they paid for the statue. The statue was revamped and sent to the US.

Workers exposed to daylight have better quality of life.

A new study has demonstrated a strong relationship between workplace daylight exposure and office workers- sleep, activity and quality of life. Compared to workers in offices without windows in the workplace, and those with windows in the workplace received 173 percent more white light exposure during work hours and slept an average of 46 minutes more per night. There also was a trend for workers in offices with windows to have more physical activity than those without windows. workers without windows reported poorer scores than there counterparts on quality of life measures related to physical problems and vitality, as well as poorer outcome on measures of overall sleep quality, sleep efficiency, sleep disturbances and daytime dysfunction. "The extent to which daylight exposure impacts office workers is remarkable," study co author Ivy Cheung, a doctoral candidate in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience program at Northwestern University at Chicago, Illinois said.

Menu labeling lowers caloric intake.

According to a new research, menu labeling has made ore people aware of how many calories are in restaurant meals and has some people reducing their intake. The study evaluated the effects of new requirements for chain restaurants to label their menu items with their corresponding caloric content by following restaurant patrons 18 months after implementation of the law- a longer period than previously published studies. The researchers looked at various types of chain restaurants, including burger restaurants, sandwich shops and coffee shops. "Most people have no idea how many calories are found in restaurant meals," said lead study author James Kreiger, MD, MPH, of the public health department of Seattle and King County in Washington. The study found that after the regulations were put in place, more people reported being aware of posted caloric information. after 18 months, customers of taco restaurants consumed fewer overall calories from beverages. Those results may be due to 'customization', Krieger said, people can decide whether to put additional calories of sour cream or guacomole on a taco.

Health benefits of coconut.

Coconut butter was used as a 'universal donor', making it identical to human blood plasma. It was used in the pacific war to save thousands of lives through coconut IV's, and emergency plasma transfusions. surprisingly, coconut water is more nutritious than whole milk. Iys crammed with natural sugars, salts, and vitamins to block out fatigue. Coconut water could potentially be the greatest energy drink in the world, to top it off, it's all natural. Coconut water contains more potassium than the majority of energy drinks. The chloride it holds is at 118g, and it's natural sugar extent to about 5mg. Most importantly, coconut water contains less sodium  than any other energy drink.

McD hamburger perfectly preserved after 14 years.

In 1999, a man from Utah bought a McDonald's hamburger and kept for 14 years. The burger looked exactly the same as and when he first bought it. David Whipple kept the fast food meal for a month to show friends how the preservative packed hamburger would keep its composure. But he forgot about it, finding it two years later in his coat pocket  then he decided to continue bizarre experiment. However, even he was shocked to see that the hamburger still looks the same a whopping 14 years later. 'It sat in  my coat pocket for a year or two after it sat in my truck' David told US talk show, The doctors. 'When we discovered it, we were like, "oh my gosh! I can't believe it looks the same way". Mr Whipple has no plans to part with his historic burger and has said he will shoe it to his grandchildren. 

Pics clicked by chimp to fetch 70,000 pounds.

A collection of blurry photos taken y a chimp, touted as his "take on the world", is expected to fetch up to a whopping 70000 pounds at a London auction. Mikki, the chimpanzee, was taught to use camera by Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid after they discoveres him at the Moscow circus. The 15 year old chimp's snaps of Moscow's Red Square are said to represent his take on the world in a place where millions of photos are taken by tourists, The sun reported. The collection -called Our Moscow Through The Eyes Of Mikki- will be sold at an auction this month and is expected to fetch between 50000 and 70000 pounds. The pictures taken in 1998, include a shot of Mikki being taught how to hold and use a camera before he begins to shoot. "It's a very important piece of work, and it is very exciting to be able to sell pictures at an auction," Suad Garayeva, Creator of Contemporary Art at Sotheby's London, said. 'There's been a lot of interest because its very unusual and it works on so many different levels. It's an alternative view of Moscow as seen through an alternative vision," he said.  

Your brain rewires itself after injury.

When the brains primary learning center is damaged, complex new neural circuits arise to compensate for the lost function, as concluded by life scientists from UCLA and Australia who have pinpointed the regions of the brain involved in creating the alternate pathways- often far from the damaged site. The researchers found that parts of the prefrontal cortex take over when the Hippocampus, the brain's key center of learning and memory formation, is disabled. Their breakthrough discovery could potentially help scientists develop new treatments for Alzheime's disease, stroke and other conditions involoving damage to the brain. For the study, Fenselow and Zelikowsky conducted laboratory experiments with rats that had suffered damaged to the hippocampus. While the rats needed more training than they would have normally, they nonetheless learned from their experiences- a surprising finding.

20 minutes bout of yoga boosts brain function.

A single, 20 minute session of yoga can significantly improve brain function, a new study led by an Indian origin researcher has found. University of Illinois student Neha Gothe and her colleagues found that a 20 minute session of Hatha Yoga improved participants speed and accuracy on tests of working memory and inhibitory control, two measures of brain function associated with ability to maintain focus and take in, retain and use new information. Participants performed significantly better immediately after the yoga practice than after moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise for the same amount of time. The 30 study subjects were young, female, undergraduate students. "Yoga is an ancient Indian science and way of life that includes not only physical movements and postures but also regulate breathing and meditation," said Neha Gothe, who led the study while graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In water, a can of diet coke floats while a can of regular coke sinks.

The artificial sweetener in diet diet coke is hundred of times sweeter per unit volume than regular sugar, However, sugar in regular coke is denser, which makes it sink. Regular coke contains almost 11 teaspoons of sugar per can. On an average, Americans ingest 10.8 pounds of sugar per person from drinking coca-cola alone. Floating occurs because floating objects displace, or push aside, a certain amount of liquid. If an object displaces more than its weight in liquid, it floats; otherwise it sinks. Some other facts about coke are:
1. If every drop of coke ever produced were put into 8 ounce bottles and laud end to end, they'd reach moon and back over 2000 times. 
2. Coca cola spends more money on advertising than Microsoft and Apple.
3. The average Mexican drinks more coke than average American, British, Indian and Chinese combined.  

Soon, robots may be able to mimic human gait.

A group of US researchers has produced a robotic set of legs which they believe is the first to fully model walking in a biologically accurate manner.The neural architecture, musculoskeletal architecture and sensory feedback pathways in humans have been simplified and built into the robot, giving it a remarkably human like walking gait. The robots biological accuracy has allowed the researchers to investigate the processes underlying walking in humans and may bolster theories of how babies learn to walk as well as helping to know how spinal cord injury can recover the the ability to walk, the journal of neural engineering reports. The key component of human walking system is pattern generator (CPG). CPG is a neural network in spinal cord region that generates rhythmic muscle signals