MaoBah - Interesting Health Topics, Celebrity News and Informational News

Stressful experiences in early childhood can have long-lasting impacts on children’s health that can persist well beyond the resolution of the situation.

A study revealed impaired immune function in adolescents who experienced either physical abuse or time in an orphanage as youngsters. Even though their environments had changed, physiologically they were still responding to stress. How the immune system develops is very much influenced by early environment.

The researchers looked for high levels of antibodies against the common and usually latent herpes simplex virus type 1. While roughly two-thirds of Americans carry this virus, which causes cold sores and fever blisters, people with healthy immune systems are able to keep the virus in check and rarely if ever have symptoms. However, people with weakened immune systems can have trouble suppressing HSV-1 and produce antibodies against the activated virus.

Adolescents who had experienced physical abuse or stressful home environments as children had higher levels of HSV-1 antibodies, showing their immune systems were compromised.

Human genes remember a sugar hit for two weeks. What’s more, prolonged poor eating habits could be capable of permanently altering your DNA.

A team studying the impact of diet on heart tissue found that cells showed the effects of a single sugar hit for 14 days. The cells switched off genetic controls designed to protect the body against diabetes and heart disease.

Regular poor eating could amplify the effect, with genetic damage lasting months or years, and potentially passing through bloodlines.

A four feet tall and thirteen year old boy who looks like he’s nine years old is a father. He impregnated his fifteen year old girlfriend, Chantelle who said she was taking birth control pills but missed one.

Updates have not mentioned whether or not tests were conducted to prove the boy’s paternity, and The Sun did not offer any immediate comment when asked whether it had paid the family for the story.

Police and child services in Eastbourne, in southeast England, said in a statement that they were "aware of a 14-year-old girl that had become pregnant as the result of a relationship with a 12-year-old boy," adding that they were offering support to both young people.

Alfie’s front page picture has sparked renewed debate about teen pregnancy in Britain. The country has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in Europe, and government figures show that about 39,000 girls under age 18 became pregnant in 2006. More than 7,000 of those girls were younger than 16.

Britain had 27 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 between 2000 and 2005, according to a report published by Population Action International. Comparable figures are 10 per 1,000 for Spain, 8 in 1,000 for France, and 5 in 1,000 for The Netherlands.

Britain’s teen pregnancy rate, however, is still far below that of the United States, which registers 44 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 and are more line with English-speaking countries such as Australia and New Zealand, which respectively have 17 and 27 births per 1,000 women between 15 and 19, according to the report.

But the country’s reputation as Europe’s teen pregnancy capital has been an embarrassment to politicians.

In 1999 then-Prime Minister Tony Blair described Britain’s record on pregnancies as shameful and vowed to turn it around.

Chantelle and Alfie have reportedly pledged to raise the child as best they can.

"We know we made a mistake but I wouldn’t change it now," Chantelle was quoted by The Sun as saying.

Britain’s youngest-known father was said to be a 12-year-old boy in a suburb north of London who impregnated a young neighbor in 1998.

 Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered and it’s a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds. It weighs more than a bison and longer than a city bus, according to a snake exper named Jack Conrad. This snake is even bigger than the one you saw in Jennifer Lopez’s movie Anaconda. The snake, which the discoverers named Titanoboa cerrejonensis can eat something the size of a cow and a human would be toast in an instant. Actually, the beast probably munched on ancient relatives of crocodiles in its rainforest home some 58 million to 60 million years ago.

The prehistoric creature behaved like an anaconda and spent most of its time in the water although it is related to modern boa constrictors. It could slither on land as well as swim.

Titanoboa breaks the record for snake length by about 11 feet, surpassing a creature that lived about 40 million years ago in Egypt. Among living snake species, the record holder is an individual python measured at about 30 feet long, which is some 12 to 15 feet shorter than typical Titanoboas.

Here’s some good news for Ophidiophobics.. We won’t be having giant snakes because we are removing most of their habitats by development and deforestation in equatorial regions.

 

Most people think of the sleeping brain as similar to a computer that has “gone to sleep” — they believe that it does nothing productive. But this is incorrect. Sleep enhances performance, learning and memory. And most unappreciated of all, sleep improves the creative ability to uncover novel connections among seemingly unrelated ideas. Sleep assists the brain in flagging unrelated ideas and memories, forging connections among them that increase the odds that a creative idea or insight will surface. After sleep, people are 33 percent more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas. Business attitudes toward sleep may be starting to shift. Claire Stapleton, a spokeswoman for Google, says “grassroots” interest in sleep led to an on-campus talk by Sara C. Mednick, a napping expert. Google also installed EnergyPods, leather recliners with egglike hoods that block noise and light, that allow employees to take naps at work. Other companies that have installed EnergyPods include Cisco Systems and Procter & Gamble.