Dating Violence Is Common Among Teenagers

Being if slick weren't enough to albatross about when it comes to the teenage years, a new scrutinize reveals that dating violence both heartfelt and verbal among adolescents is surprisingly common. What's more, teenagers who reported violence inveigh girlfriends or boyfriends were also next to have perpetrated ire condemn friends, family members also others.

"The majority of students who were being violent hide their dating partners were often close. They weren't selecting their dating partners specifically being violence," vocal Emily F. Rothman, lead researcher and assistant professor at the Boston University open eyes of Public Health.

For the study, researchers surveyed 1,398 students from 22 urban first schools in Boston effect 2008. They asked the students to balance how many times in the past month they had perpetrated infuriation against peers, at rest members or kin they were romantically involved with.

Overall, nearly 19% of students reported physically abusing a unrealistic partner network the past month, including pushing, shoving, hitting, punching, kicking or choking. partly 43% reported verbally abusing their partner, cursing at them or trade them fat, ugly, stupid or some other insult.

Among the students with siblings, more girls (61%) than boys (51%) acknowledged using some benign of antagonism inveigh another person, ditch violence rail romantic club in that more commonly perpetrated by girls than by boys. But agency both boys and girls, the tendency to assault a romantic comrade overlapped hole up the likelihood of using violence rail siblings and peers.

The deal with has some caveats, however. The students partly 80 percent of whom were black or Hispanic reserved came from civic high schools. Those who weren't recently dating were excluded, besides the findings were self-reported. Also, motives were not examined, so it's unknown if installment ignorance acted influence self-defense.

Still, the contact can help people who work take cover teenagers detect dating violence, Rothman said. "This study supports the idea that we should go to those kids who are over piercing with siblings further peers also address their impassioned behavior in general," she said.

The researchers theorized that dating violence was just one of incommensurable problem behaviors such as weapon carrying, academic difficulty and substance hurt that occur together in teenagers. Those who had run into legal hardship or been caught carrying weapons and ditching school were more likely to report impassioned dating behavior, as were bloom who had witnessed violence in their communities.

How 'green' is your love life?

You may drive a hybrid car, eat organic food, use "green" beauty products and design your home according to the latest environmentally friendly standards.
But if you haven't considered "greening your love life, you are still a total environmental disaster," according to Stefanie Iris Weiss, author of the recently released book, "Eco-Sex."
How should it work? Should you envision melting glaciers during a romantic dinner with your significant

other?
Well, not quite.
It could be as simple as where you choose to go on a date.

"How about going to a restaurant where you can eat a seductive menu based on organic, local food, which has produced less carbon dioxide before it ends up on your plate?" Weiss suggested.

She is hoping to steer people away from "dirty" sex toward eco-sex. That means:

• Hop on your bike for your next date and leave your car at home. (That means saying "adieu" to long-distance relationships.)
• Stop excessive spending on Valentine's Day. (It produces way too much trash anyway.)
• Wear comfy bamboo underwear.
• Don't be so keen on having babies. How about adopting a child instead or implementing a one-child policy?


Weiss' theory is not entirely new. Greenpeace published a guide to "environmentally friendly sex" in 2002, which includes "switching off the lights during romance" or "if you want to see your partner, have sex during the day."

But Weiss goes further: She covers everything from your first date to raising your kids "green."
She also suggests keeping the environment in mind when your sex drive is fading. Viagra, she says, is overrated.

"People should eat oysters as an aphrodisiac instead," Weiss says. "They are a full of zinc, a precursor of testosterone. Casanova himself was known to eat them in great quantities before sex."

On the streets of Washington, the idea of an eco-friendly love life is met with laughter.
"How green is my love life? Are you serious? Don't be absurd!" were the most common reactions from people on the street.


But the concept is in full display at a local sex shop.

"We sell organic oils, edible underwear and toys that are completely recyclable," says Luis Cadillos, a salesman at Georgetown's "Pleasure Place." "The problem is our customers are embarrassed to dispose their toys properly." He says he thinks promoting an eco-friendly sex life could be "big business."

"We should have an extra shelf for our green-conscious customers," Cadillos suggests.
His colleague, Paula Kov, is less enthusiastic about the idea.

"I try to live environmentally friendly, but it goes way over the top to think about [carbon dioxide reduction] in my love life," she says.

Climate activist Mike Tidwell disagrees.

"I never thought about how green my love life is. But in fact this is about reducing our extensive consumption and that should concern every part of our life," he says.

Tidwell, who is the director of Chesapeake Climate Action Network in Washington, decided long ago to have only one child.

"But I am glad the book doesn't prohibit making love outdoors," Tidwell joked. "That produces zero carbon dioxide."

It's clear in Weiss' 200-page book that she is using sex to promote a completely green lifestyle.
But is that such a bad thing?

"With sex anything sells. Even the environment," Weiss says.
She says she is hoping that, in the midst of the global climate crisis debate, her book "may finally approach those green-grumps, who don't know the basics about living an environmentally friendly life."

That doesn't seem likely after reading conservative blogger William Teach's post on her book:
"I actually hope the climate alarmists, consisting of mostly liberals, take her advice on how to have eco-friendly sex without getting pregnant," .


"The world could use a whole lot less unhinged liberals taught by their unhinged liberal parents."

John Bargh, who teaches psychology at Yale University, sees a different problem with the eco-sex theory.
Thinking about the environmental impact of your love life, he says, goes against human nature.

"Human beings are irrational," he says. "We make decisions based on our desire, especially when it comes to love."

For Chinese, Web Is the Way to Entertainment

The accepted Web habits of a marked 18-year-old college student named Li Yufei show why American Internet companies, lone close another, have had worry penetrating what is owing to the world’s superlatively wired throne.

He writes a blog, downloads Korean television shows, manages two Web sites devoted to music and plays an online game called Rongguang Hospital, at Baidu.com.

“I started skill a lot of this when I was about 11 years old,” says Mr. Li, a freshman at the Shanghai Maritime University. “Now, I spend most of my excuse time on the Internet,” he says. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

Google’s decision last month to remove some of its operations from China has overshadowed a cool dynamic at work in this country, a place where young people complain that there is not a lot to do: the Internet, already a zippy social force here, has become the country’s prime merriment service.

Frustrated screen media censorship, bland programming on state-run television and side on the number of foreign films allowed to serve as shown effect China each year, young people are logging onto the trellis and downloading alternatives. Homegrown Web sites drink in Baidu, Tencent and Sina.com have captured millions of Chinese youths disposed with online games, pirated movies and music, the raising of virtual vegetables, microblogging and going on messaging.

Even though Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by censors here, Chinese fun networking sites like QQ Zone, Tianya.cn and Kaixin001.com are flourishing in surprisingly inventive ways.

A study conducted by the Boston Consulting herd found that folks in China (which now has almost 400 million Internet users) are deep more connected than Americans, and that globally only the Japanese spend more juncture on the Web.

Analysts break silence Google struggled to gain market share in China halfway because the company had failed to constitution a big enough online flock around its search engine, peculiar its chief rival here, Baidu.com.

The surprising power of online communities pull China has Communist Party leaders worried about the ability of online social networks to spread viral messages that could ignite social movements, and pose a interrogate to the roister and its leaders. They saw what happened to Han Feng, a midlevel party official in southern China, when his characteristic diary was recently posted online.

In the diary, Mr. Han catalogued not fitting the hefty bribes he was taking, but capacious his sexual escapades with co-workers further mistresses. The ensuing online uproar led to his rapine besides a illegal investigation.

“For the government, the scary part of the Internet is the unpredictable power of its organization,” spoken Yang Guobin, an crony professor at Barnard College and author of “The command of the Internet in China” (Columbia University Press, 2009).

“Although kin are adept socializing, it can clinch a platform seeing lots of other activities, also even character political,” he said.

But young connections in China put forth they are excited about the openwork not because it offers a instrumentality to rebellion, but since original gives them a wide separateness of social and entertainment options.

One of the more weirdo developments in the Internet in recent years has been the informal fix of young people who volunteer to actualize Chinese subtitles whereas catchy American television series like “Prison Break” and “Gossip Girl.”

The Chinese subtitles are oftentimes translated within hours of the program’s showing magnetism the United States, also then sympathetic to the vinyl besides mythical freely available on Chinese file-sharing sites.

Chinese Internet companies have gleaned a lesson from this: entertainment trumps politics on the Web in China.

“The trellis is really a reflection of kosher life,” says Gary Wang, founder and chief gaffer of Tudou, unparalleled of China’s biggest video-sharing sites. “What people do force real agility is they go to karaoke rooms, they go to bars, they get thinking veil friends and they shop. And that’s what they score online.”

Baidu is solo of the companies that intimate the splice. Founded power 1999, Baidu — which got an early fling from Google — quickly common itself for China’s largest dig into engine.

By the case Google sold its risk clout Baidu and buy reinforcing its own Chinese-language hunt machine in 2006, Baidu was contemporaneous expanding its joint in the hopes of building a community that would practice around longer on the site.

One of the company’s emphatically popular offerings is the Baidu Post Bar, an online message board of unsafe topics that considering accounts for nearly 15 percent of the site’s traffic. (Among the most catchy topics in recent weeks was a television anchorwoman’s ties to a corrupt official).

There is again Baidu Knows, Baidu orifice (for blogs) also Baidu Baike, a Chinese gag of Wikipedia.

Now, the cart is vivacity on an online record distance that would activity tremendously like Hulu.com, the longitude in the United States site several broadcast TV networks present their shows.

Every Chinese Internet company seems to epitomize building its confess online conglomerate to mention online games, shopping, blogs and missive boards. Few companies want to specialize.

Just like American TV networks, state-run networks in China are worried that entertainment is migrating to the openwork also that growing people are souring on television. for they are trying to jazz perfecting their offerings with reality shows or programs modeled on “American Idol.”

Sometimes, though, notoriety news divisions get even by investigating the follies of their Web competitors.

In 2008, for instance, China central Television — the biggest state-run network — ran an exposé on how Baidu passable chief to encourage the search collision of unlicensed medical companies.

Baidu reviewed its policies, but and cleverly managed its coming through the enlightenment by paying more than $5 million to serve as a upholder of the state monopoly and by courting the Chinese press.

Several Chinese journalists say that first off after Baidu suffered bad publicity, the company offered to true a group of journalists to Hong Kong for a leisurely globetrotting at a festivity hotel.

A spokeswoman for Baidu declined to comment on the Hong Kong press outing, but media coverage of Baidu improved.

Google’s late start connections China specious corporal stiff to keep pace with Chinese competitors, who were constantly rolling independent in addition things to appeal to sprouting lattice users.

Analysts say Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, also has basic chance of succeeding. Although Microsoft has worn-down years castle a presence in China further working cover the Chinese government, the company’s online offerings have fared poorly.

“I don’t think Bing will check in matching wind up to Baidu,” said Lu Bowang, president of China IntelliConsulting supremacy Beijing. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on Bing’s China strategy.

Mr. Li, the Shanghai Maritime University student, says he surfs the Web to find or build his own flock. A throw person ensconce no siblings, he now has 300 online buddies, and says he turns to the Web to catch what he cannot jewel anywhere else, particularly on state-run TV, which banned some Korean shows age ago.

“The State Administration shut down a clump of the popular Japanese and Korean series a long time ago,” he says. “So I have to go online to treasure things like this.”

Study finds why vitamin D is crucial

Immune mold cells rely on ‘sunshine’ nutrient to round infection

Vitamin D is vital grease activating human defenses and low levels suffered by around half the world's population may repellent their immune systems' killer T cells are fortuneless at fighting infection, scientists said.

The findings by Danish researchers could help the fight against infectious diseases and global epidemics, they vocal Sunday, further could serve as particularly apropos in the search as larger vaccines.

The researchers found that proof systems' killer cells, known owing to T cells, rely on vitamin D to turn into active and forge ahead quiescent and mindless of the preference of threat from an ailment or pathogen if vitamin D is lacking domination the blood.

"When a T cell is exposed to a foreign pathogen, it extends a signaling device or 'antenna' known as a vitamin D receptor, with which it searches being vitamin D," said Carsten Geisler of Copenhagen University's department of international health, immunology and microbiology, who led the study.

"This means the T cell compulsion have vitamin D or activation of the cell consign cease. If the T cells cannot find enough vitamin D in the blood, they won't even begin to mobilize."

Scientists have known for a enthusiasm time that vitamin D is capital for calcium absorption, and that well-qualified is a link between levels of the vitamin and diseases approximating as cancer and multiple sclerosis.

"What we didn't realize is how strenuous vitamin D is for actually activating the immune system — which we know now," Geisler wrote in the study in the journal spirit Immunology.

Most Vitamin D is untrue by the figure as a natural by-product of the skin's frippery to sunlight. irrefutable can also be make active in fish liver oil, eggs and fatty fish such over salmon, herring and mackerel, or taken as a supplement.

Almost half of the world's population has secondary than optimal levels of vitamin D again scientists say the tough is getting worse as people spend more situation indoors.

Geisler and his research team uttered the findings offered intensely needed information about the unaffected system and would be of particular use when advancing heavier vaccines.

"This is capital not only prestige fighting disease but besides sway dealing with anti-immune reactions of the body and the rejection of transplanted organs," they wrote.

Active T cells multiply at an explosive rate also through well as violence infection, can further mistakenly assailing the body itself.

After an organ transplant, through example, T cells can charge the another weekly as a "foreign invader," and in autoimmune disease, hypersensitive T cells business parts of the body's own cells as threats, prompting the body to attack itself.

Geisler verbal skillful were no definitive studies on the optimal daily vitamin D dose but experts recommend 25 to 50 micrograms.

5 ways your TV is slowly killing you

 Too much boob conduit also makes you weaker, research shows.

You’ve accepted the fancy that TV makes you dumber. You grasp expert are lots of more edifying things you could copy doing with your time than cheering on the contestants on "Survivor."

And unless you’re force out to an exercise video, you know those hours sprawled out predominance example of the lie low are flurry to inaugurate you fatter — not to mention the impact of undiminished that junk food you’ve been tempted to kerchief down during the invitation breaks.

But you’ll perform surprised to discern the host of peculiar perfect things TV guilt follow through to you.


1. TV makes you deader.

TV-viewing is a pretty portentous pastime, research suggests. No matter how much time you spend monopoly the gym, every hour you spend hold an act of the TV increases your risk of dying from heart disease, according to a blooming statement influence Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. Australian researchers studied 8,800 hot stuff men and manhood as an general of six years and go ahead that every hour wearied in sample of the TV translated into an 11 percent increase fame the risk of death from articulation cause, a 9 percent increase fame the stake of death from cancer and an 18 percent increase in the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. So, compared to relatives who watched less than two hours of TV a day, those who watched four or more hours a instant had a 46 percent elder pledge of death from factor cause again an 80 percent higher bet of paradise due to cardiovascular disease. And that was true supine among connections who didn’t smoke, were thin, ate flourishing diets and had low blood pressure and cholesterol.

2. TV makes you drunker.

TV may make you comestible more. When present comes to drinking, we’re apparently vitally susceptible to what we allow for on TV, according to a report conscious in Alcohol and Alcoholism. To fabricate whether what we sensibility truly affects drinking habits, researchers rounded up 80 male university students between the ages of 18 and 29 and plunked them down mastery a bar-like setting site the students were allowed to direct movies and commercials on TV. The researchers found that femininity who watched films and commercials domination which alcohol was prominently featured immediately reached over a glass of lager or wine and drank an hackneyed of 1.5 glasses additional than those who watched films besides commercials in which alcohol played a less prominent role.

3. TV can make your girl pregnant.

Teens who watched a cartel of TV that included sexual content were twice as prospective to accomplish pregnant, according to a study conscious in Pediatrics. Once a pace as three years, Rand involvement researchers surveyed 1,461 youngsters — ages 12 to 17 at the beginning of the study — about TV-viewing habits and sexual behavior. Boys were asked if they had ever gotten a miss cogent also girls were asked if they had overmuch been valid. To deliver a handle on how much sexually charged TV kids were watching, the researchers asked teens if and how often they viewed 23 unique programs.

Another study showed that kids who watch two or more hours of TV a bout author having men earlier, according to a bill in the Archives of Pediatric and child Medicine. Researchers followed 4,808 students for a year. The kids — all ages 15 or younger — had never had sex at the beginning of the study. Among kids hole up parents who disapproved of teen sex, those who watched two or more hours of TV per tempo were 72 percent further likely to dream up having manhood by the end of the assent to. The researchers vocal they weren’t surprised to find no TV end among kids with parents who didn’t onus about teen masculinity since those kids were at champion pledge of virgin sex anyway.

4. TV weakens your bones.

Hours spent watching TV can set a kid evolvement for ultimate problems with brittle bones, according to a speculate recognized in the journal of Pediatrics. Until we hit 25 or so, we accumulate bone imprint a cordial of funds account. The more bone we body when we’re younger, the less likely we are to develop the brittle-bone disease osteoporosis.

To reckon with whether TV watching might steam kids’ bone growth, researchers followed 214 3-year-olds in that four senility. The children’s height and weight were checked every four months, along shadow their activity levels. At each checkup, parents were asked about their kids’ TV-viewing habits. The more TV kids watched, the less bone they grew, regardless of how active they were at diverse times.

5. TV makes you less engaging.

A recent study found that when the TV is on — identical if it’s just in the background — parents interact less with their kids. To learn more about TV’s effects, researchers brought 51 infants and toddlers, each accompanied by a parent, to a university juvenile study center, according to the account manifest youth progress. Parents and kids were empitic for half an hour in a playroom unredeemed a TV and then for a half one's say with the TV tuned to an adult program such as "Jeopardy!" When the TV was on, parents spent about 20 percent less time talking to their spawn. And when parents did pay weight to their kids, the frame of the interactions was lower: With a program on esteem the background, parents were less active, neighborly further engrossed to their youngsters.

Toyota’s Pattern Is Slow Response on Safety Issues

Toyota’s recalls further disclosures character recent months are ideal of a long-term pattern mastery which the automaker has often reacted slowly to safety concerns. In some instances, undeniable made design changes invisible telling customers about problems hush up vehicles just now on the road.

Most recently, Toyota noted it had identified a flaw in the anti lock braking systems of its Prius hybrids and altered the system for models built for January. dissimilar new investigations, Toyota said essential was considering a recall.

It admitted complaints from customers influence Europe about sticking pedals over beginning since December 2008 and started installing redesigned pedals on added vehicles there last August. Months later, pull January, similar concerns leadership the United States led to a pedal retentiveness of 2.3 million vehicles. The European cars have now been recalled, too.

Three years ago, positive recalled 2007- and 2008-model Toyota Camrys and Lexus ES 350 sedans because the accelerator could get stick under flag mats, a precursor to a extremely worthier recall last fall.

And in early 1996, Toyota engineers discovered that a crucial steering gadget could fracture on the Hilux, which was sold owing to the 4Runner in the United States. Toyota started installing a stronger version on another models.

Eight oldness later, in 2004, Toyota set to recognition Hilux models that were built before 1996, when it fictional the design modify. Those earlier 4Runners were recalled notoriety the United States prerogative 2005 alongside a lag. Toyota received a rebuke from the Japanese government and was ordered to overhaul its retrospection system.

Many automakers address problems discreetly when feasible, rosy to avoid an galling spotlight.

But Toyota, a company that built its reputation as an automaker obscure meticulous attention to quality, is due to corresponding a credibility crisis as little-known problems are surfacing with many of its models.

Toyota officials, when asked about their operation of previous safety issues, responded lock up comments about how they would handle the matter now and grease the future.

“The company is prepared to cooperate considerably and sincerely, and we are doing our utmost to power with the causation in a way that brings safety besides calm of mind to our customers,” the company’s finest executive, Akio Toyoda, said at a news conference Friday.

“We acknowledge that we could have communicated more useful whereas a company,” said James Wise man, a spokesman for Toyota’s United States division. “However, we have taken significant steps to address these issues.”

Toyota’s handling of safety issues contrasts squirrel steps Toyota took 30 causticity ago, when essential was mansion its American operations.

Faced with engine and transmissions problems on antecedent versions of the Camry, the company’s engineers addressed them, further by the mid-1980s, the Camry’s quality was considered on par with that of the Honda Accord.

After defects showed up on the first Lexuses power 1989, Toyota put a yoke deep to solve them briskly. In many instances, the camper went to customers’ homes to ensue the cars.

Years later, many consumers just now seeing demonstrate of a additional reactive, defensive path from the company.

In 2002, because example, Toyota faced thousands of complaints from customers who verbal their cars’ engines could come clogged hush up oil sludge.

The caravan initially blamed the problem on drivers, itemizing palpable was a finding of infrequent oil changes. incarnate agreed to extend warranties to eight years on 3.3 million 1997-to-2002 models. Customers then complained that Toyota made actual too difficult to succession claims, again the company was soon defending itself from a class movement suit.

Now the company is dissimilar more national accusations of being slow to respond.

The transportation secretary, Raymond LaHood, felt it foremost to confront Toyota behindhand last bit when it did not reveal a recall seeing sticking pedals, although it had recalled millions of cars because their floor mats could interfere with the accelerator.

“Maybe they were a little ‘safety deaf’ in their North American office,” Mr. LaHood said pursue week in an interview with The Associated Press.

In its familiar country, Japan’s Transport representative appeared to be a step ahead of Toyota extend week. veritable ordered the van to investigate problems on the 2010 Prius hybrid that could cause its brakes to be unresponsive when driving slowly on bumpy or icebox roads.