For centuries, ginger has been a natural remedy in combating various kinds of ailments. Researches and findings now validate the effectiveness of this useful herb. Loaded with antioxidants and vital minerals; this wondrous herb has a wide range of health benefits. We provide you reasons as to why you should have this essential ingredient in your kitchen. Treat yourself with a warm cup of ginger tea and forget all your health woes.

Relieves Stress

Ginger tea is a remarkable in relieving stress because of its comforting and relaxing scent. Taking a whiff of ginger tea can help improve and uplift your mood. It leaves you feeling refreshed and calm, and if you're having a bad day, all those negative vibes will disappear.

Fights Respiratory Problems

In case you're suffering from common respiratory diseases such as cold and cough, ginger tea is highly recommended. Ginger aids in loosening up phlegm and expanding the lungs so difficulty in breathing is removed. It also helps pacify allergies and continuous sneezing and irritation.

Encourages Blood Circulation

Consuming a cup of ginger tea can help improve blood flow, as well as help prevent chills, fever and excessive sweating. Amino acids and minerals in this tea help make the blood flow smoothly, preventing the onset of cardiovascular disease.Boosts Immunity

Packed with antioxidants, ginger tea greatly helps improve the immune system. Drinking a cup of ginger tea every day can help outwit potential risks of a stroke by inhibiting fatty deposits from clogging the arteries. It also lowers the cholesterol level and prevents the risk of heart attacks.

Combats Stomach Discomfort

Ginger tea is idyllic in assisting digestion, thereby improving food absorption and avoiding possible stomach aches in case of overeating. Unnecessary bloating and belching can also be prevented by ginger tea. Ginger tea enhances your appetite and helps in releasing gastric acids that abet in digestion.

What is bird flu?

-It is an infectious disease caused by bird flu virus( H5N1 Influenza A virus )
-Bird flu affect mainly the domestic poultry ( chicken, ducks, etc ) and less commonly in animals like pigs
-Very occasionally, humans may also be infected with this virus


How does bird flu spread to humans?

By close contact with:
-Infected poultry ( chicken, ducks, etc ) and their dropping
-Pigs
-Surfaces contaminated by infected birds and their dropping


Common symptoms of bird flu in humans

-Fever (38 degree C or higher)
-Sore throat
-Cough
-Muscle aches
-Difficulty in breathing, pneumonia
-Pain in abdomen, diarrhea


How does bird flu spread in birds?

-Bird flu spreads from infected birds to other birds through contact
-Contact with nasal and respiratory secretion
-Contact with faeces of infected birds
-Contamination of feed and water
-Contact with contaminated equipments


Signs in birds infected with bird flu?

-Lack of energy and appetite
-Swellings of the heads, eyelids, combs, legs
-Purple discolorations of the combs / "dirty" feather
-Nasal discharge
-Coughing and sneezing
-Diarrhoea
-Sudden deathHow can we protect ourselves from bird flu?

-Avoid close contact with infected and suspected birds and animal, specially their dropping, saliva, and other secretions
-Avoid consuming raw/ uncooked / partially cooked poultry products such as chicken and eggs
-Cooking ( half an hour and 70 degree C ) kills the bird flu virus
-It makes food safe
-Poultry and poultry products can be consumed following good hygienic and cooking practices
-After handling poultry and eggs, wash hands or other exposed part with soap and water

Treatment

For any flu-like illness, seek medical help immediately. Bird Flu treatment generally involves hospitalization as well.

How muscular you are as a teenager may predict how long you live, at least if you are a man.

Swedish experts who tracked more than a million teenage boys for 24 years found those with low muscle strength - weaker leg and arm muscles and a limp grip - were at increased risk of early death.

The team behind the BMJ study believe muscle strength reflects general fitness, which would explain the link.

Experts stress the findings do not mean muscle building makes you live longer.

The effect of poor muscular fitness in those tracked was similar to well established risk factors for early death, such as obesity and high blood pressure.
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The benefits of being physically active at any age are well established"

British Heart Foundation

When the researchers took into account these better known risk factors, they found the link between early death and muscle power remained.

Thin and fat men alike fared worse in terms of life expectancy if they had weaker than average muscles, while more burly men had better survival odds even if they were overweight.

Over the course of the study, 26,145 (2.3%) of the men died. The leading single cause of death was accidental injury, followed by suicide, cancer, heart disease and stroke.

A third of the deaths were due to other causes and the researchers grouped these together for their calculations.

The teenagers who scored above average on muscular strength at the start of the study had a 20-35% lower risk of early death from any cause and also from cardiovascular diseases.

They also had a 20-30% lower risk of early death from suicide and were up to 65% less likely to have any psychiatric diagnosis, such as schizophrenia or depression.

In comparison, the 16- to 19-year-olds with the lowest level of muscular strength had the highest risk of dying before they reached their mid-50s.

The teenagers, who were all conscripts to the Swedish military, were asked to grip and to do some leg curls and arm push ups against resistance to measure muscle strength.

A spokeswoman for the British Heart Foundation said: "The benefits of being physically active at any age are well established with studies showing it can prevent children from developing diseases later on in life, as well as improving their concentration at school, their overall mental health and well-being."

Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said while there was good evidence exercise was beneficial for health, the study did not show doing more exercise would necessarily prolong your life.

And encouraging people to do more regular physical activity could be a challenge, he added.

"Sadly the trials of an intervention to increase exercise have not shown notable benefits, though that does not discourage me and many others from exercising," Prof Evans said.

In recent years, neuroscientists and neuroengineers working in prosthetics have begun to develop brain-implantable sensors that can measure signals from individual neurons, and after passing those signals through a mathematical decode algorithm, can use them to control computer cursors with thoughts.

Now, a team of Stanford researchers including Indian origins have developed an algorithm, known as ReFIT, that vastly improves the speed and accuracy of neural prosthetics that control computer cursors.

Research associate Dr Vikash Gilja and bioengineering doctoral candidate Paul Nuyujukian led the team.

In side-by-side demonstrations with rhesus monkeys, cursors controlled by the ReFIT algorithm doubled the performance of existing systems and approached performance of the real arm. Better yet, more than four years after implantation, the new system is still going strong, while previous systems have seen a steady decline in performance over time.

"These findings could lead to greatly improved prosthetic system performance and robustness in paralysed people, which we are actively pursuing as part of the FDA Phase-I BrainGate2 clinical trial here at Stanford," said Krishna Shenoy, a professor of electrical engineering, bioengineering and neurobiology at Stanford.

The system relies on a silicon chip implanted into the brain, which records "action potentials" in neural activity from an array of electrode sensors and sends data to a computer. The frequency with which action potentials are generated provides the computer key information about the direction and speed of the user's intended movement

The ReFIT algorithm that decodes these signals represents a departure from earlier models.

The system is able to make adjustments on the fly when while guiding the cursor to a target, just as a hand and eye would work in tandem to move a mouse-cursor onto an icon on a computer desktop. If the cursor were straying too far to the left, for instance, the user likely adjusts their imagined movements to redirect the cursor to the right

To test the new system, the team gave monkeys the task of mentally directing a cursor to a target "an onscreen dot" and holding the cursor there for half a second. ReFIT performed vastly better than previous technology in terms of both speed and accuracy.

The path of the cursor from the starting point to the target was straighter and it reached the target twice as quickly as earlier systems, achieving 75 to 85 percent of the speed of real arms.

"This paper reports very exciting innovations in closed-loop decoding for brain-machine interfaces. These innovations should lead to a significant boost in the control of neuroprosthetic devices and increase the clinical viability of this technology," said Jose Carmena, associate professor of electrical engineering and neuroscience at the University of California Berkeley.

Critical to ReFIT's time-to-target improvement was its superior ability to stop the cursor. While the old model's cursor reached the target almost as fast as ReFIT, it often overshot the destination, requiring additional time and multiple passes to hold the target

The team introduced a second innovation in the way ReFIT encodes information about the position and velocity of the cursor. Gilja said that previous algorithms could interpret neural signals about either the cursor's position or its velocity, but not both at once. ReFIT can do both, resulting in faster, cleaner movements of the curso

The results have been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Remember your childhood? When you used to lick and relish that sweet delectable honey and kept asking for more and more? Its unique taste and aroma just cannot be missed. But Honey is not just for stimulating your taste buds but its healing abilities goes beyond what you had perceived. Honey is a storehouse of powerful healing attributes and has incredible antiseptic, antioxidant and cleansing properties for our body, skin and health. We bring before you the amazing health benefits of honey.

Honey is anti cancer

Honey contains flavonoids and antioxidants which help reduce the risk of some cancers and heart disease. Honey possesses carcinogen-preventing and anti-tumour properties.

Reduce ulcers and other gastrointestinal disorders

Recent research shows that honey treatment may help disorders such as ulcers and bacterial gastroenteritis.

Helps in Weight loss

Unlike refined sugar, honey contains vitamins and minerals and not just calories.On the contrary, honey being a good source of nutrients helps you in reducing weight. Lemon juice with a little honey early morning is believed to be the effective anti-cellulite treatment. This is an effective remedy to speed up shedding pounds from your body. Again, honey and cinnamon is another powerful remedy for effective weight loss.

Anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties

Its antiseptic properties inhibits the growth of certain bacteria and helps keep external wounds clean and free from infection. Honey has been used as a natural cure in first aid treatment for wounds, burns and cuts. Its antibacterial properties prevent infection and functions as an anti-inflammatory agent.

Reduces cough and throat irritation

Thanks to its antimicrobial properties, honey not only soothes throats but can also kill certain bacteria that causes the infection.Powerful immune system booster

It`s antioxidant and anti-bacterial properties can improve your digestive system and help you stay healthy and fight diseases. It removes free radicals from our body and improves our body immunity functioning.

Great for your skin

Honey has humectant qualities; as a result, it can be used as a moisturiser in many cosmetic preparations. It not only attracts water but also retains it in the skin, so the skin remains supple and elastic.Not only does it moisturize,but also naturally tones and exfoliates your skin.

Due to its natural antioxidant properties, which play an important role in protecting the skin from ultraviolet damage honey fights against aging and even skin cancer. Honey can be used as a sunscreen to protect the skin from the sun.

Also the application of honey on chapped lips makes them wonderfully smoother and softer.

So make sure you start your day with this cleansing tonic and enjoy it's innumerable health benefits along with that luscious, delicious taste!