Why people Watch Horror Films

Torture. Demented, gory Nazi-like science experiments conducted by mad scientists. And people being killed by bloodthirsty, diseased fellow humans. Horror movies take on all these dark, twisted, and just plain frightful storylines. But why do we watch them? It turns out that there are many reasons: Some people want to watch something that addresses their archetypal fears, while others just want to go along for the psychological ride.

Understanding Archetypal Fears Through Horror

As Halloween approaches, horror themes will permeate deeper into each person’s daily lives. Television channels will broadcast horror movie marathons, homeowners will decorate their lawns and front yards with skeletons and spider webs, and those who really want to be scared will look for haunted houses where they’ll voluntarily subject themselves to real-life movie situations — albeit without actual injury or death. We put ourselves in situations to be scared because we want to understand what our population fears as a whole, according Paul J. Patterson, PhD, an assistant professor of English and co-director of Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Studies at Saint Joseph’s University.
“The horror genre addresses our archetypal fears,” Patterson said in a statement. “You can see throughout history how each generation has defined ‘horror,’ and it turns largely on the idea that something outside of our understanding threatening us.”
A class that Patterson is teaching this semester, “Horror in Literature in Film,” explores how horror relates to the fears of the population during time period in which it was created. For example, post-9/11 films were largely centered on the theme of torture-as-horror, which he says could have been a way for people to comprehend the tragedy. Zombie films may have become popular due to the outbreaks of influenza and the threat of biological warfare, all of which threaten whole populations.

Horror Films Give Viewers A Psychological Ride 

But love for the horror genre may be more psychological. In a 2007 study, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, participants were asked to watch clips of horror films while they rated their emotions. The study authors found that although all participants expressed similar levels of fear at the end of the clips, those who reported being horror movie lovers expressed more happiness than those who were horror movie haters.
“In the real world, people simultaneously can experience both happiness and sadness, exhilaration and anxiety,” study author Joel Cohen, a professor of marketing and anthropology at the University of Florida, told LiveScience. He says that people enjoy excitement, even if it’s from a negative source, “otherwise, things could be pretty dull.”
Other evidence points to sensation-seeking personality types. People who seek higher levels of arousal thoroughly enjoy the response — heightened feelings of awareness — their bodies have to intense experiences. These experiences range from watching horror films to skydiving and bungee jumping. “High sensation-seekers enjoy morbid curiosity in general and horror movies in particular,” Marvin Zuckerman, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Delaware, told LiveScience.
High sensation-seekers enjoy levels of arousal higher than that of low sensation-seekers. This is typically caused by two things: testosterone and the body’s response to the neurotransmitter dopamine. Whether it’s because men want to feel more masculine and brave, or for other reasons, men are more likely than women to enjoy horror films, Zuckerman said. But people who enjoy horror films are also more responsive to dopamine, which is produced in high-intensity situations, and is released as a result of rewarding, and sometimes sinful experiences, such as during sex, alcohol consumption, and drug use (heroin and cocaine).
This heightened sense of arousal can linger for some time after watching a horror film too, Glenn Sparks, PhD, a professor and associate head of the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University, told PsychCentral. He calls it the “excitation transfer process,” and says that it’s the culmination of a heightened heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration process that lingers after a movie, making other experiences, such as hanging out with friends, just as intensified.

Overcoming Fear Of Horror Films

If you want to enjoy a horror flick, but don’t know how, Eduardo Andrade, a professor of marketing at the University of California, Berkley, who co-authored the 2007 study with Cohen, suggests learning to detach yourself from the film’s events. By understanding that the films are acted out, and that all of the blood, guts, and gore are only special effects, you might be able to enjoy them a bit more. “No one’s arm is being sawed off. It’s a special effect. People are not being maimed. These are actors,” Andrade told LiveScience, referring to the movie Saw.

The new science of sleep and dreaming

According Dr James Pagel of the University of Colorado, who has studied sleep and dreams for over 40 years, the advent of electronic imaging is fundamentally changing our understanding of sleep.
Dr Pagel says that while this might frightening for those who are tied to a set belief system, it's very exciting for those in the field.
It's long been known that the stages of sleep are defined by different levels of electrical activity in your brain. After moving through quiet wakefulness to stages one and two, you reach deep, slow wave sleep.
Then, the final REM sleep has some unusual characteristics. Although you are still deeply asleep, your eyes move rapidly beneath their lids, all your body muscles are paralysed and you have no temperature regulation. The whole sleep cycle takes about 90 minutes and it repeats throughout the night.
The fact that the type of dream you have varies according to the stage of sleep you are in is a more recent discovery.
The dreams you have when you're falling asleep are called hypnagogic dreams. They are very visual and intense, almost like hallucinations, but lack a narrative.
The dreams of REM sleep tend to be long, story-like narratives that often closely resemble the waking state, while light sleep dreams are often rambling, unfocused regurgitations of the day's waking activities.
In contrast, the dreams of deep sleep are often bizarre, strange events coming from deep in the mind and are sometimes are more akin to sleepwalking. They can include night terrors, extreme body sensations and intense but undeveloped thought processes.
Related: The lucid dreamers
It’s been a widely held view that dreams only occur during the REM phase, but Dr Pagel says there was never been any proof of this, and that REM sleep can occur without dreaming, and dreaming can occur without REM sleep.
Seeing REM sleep as separate to dreaming has philosophical implications, Dr Pagel points out, because it suggests the biological brain and the mind are not the same thing. He describes dreams as 'tunnelling between the body and the mind'.
‘The interesting thing about dreams is that they have a component which is apparently not biologic,' he says. 'There are characteristic components of each dream. There are the visual components, the images we see. There are the memories, all of which somehow are in our system that we've incorporated into our dream stories. And then there are emotions.’
‘Those three components of the dream clearly have biologic structures and markers, neuroanatomy, electrophysiology, neurochemistry, things we very well understand.’
‘But there are components of dream which are mind-based. In other words, we use our dreams in creative process, we use our dreams in art, we use our dreams in understanding in ways that we don't attain with conscious thought.’
‘These appear to be mind-based correlates that we can see within a dream. Now, most dreams may not show those. Most dreams are reflections of our waking life. But some dreams can be very special.’
Dreaming and creativity are often linked, and to investigate this, Dr Pagel conducted a survey of artists, directors, screenwriters and actors working at Sundance Film Labs in the United States.
‘It was kind of amazing how much they used dreams in their work. It was also amazing that there was a difference based on individuals’ creative interest. In other words, directors used their dreams in responding to change in stress, screenwriters used their dreams in decision-making, and actors just used their dreams across the board. No one uses their dreams like an actor.’

fact about parenthood

Becoming a parent is a major life-changing event, and no matter how many parent books you read, you’ll never be fully prepared for the amount of joy, along with ups and downs it will bring. German researchers have traced the pattern of parental happiness for nearly 20 years, and it looks like a roller coaster of emotions from kid to kid.
"Our results show a temporary and transitory gain in parents' happiness around the birth of first and second children,” the study’s lead researcher Mikko Myrskylä, a professor of demography at London School of Economics and director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, said in a press release. Myrskylä and his research partner studied how heavily a mother and father’s emotions weigh on the timing of their children. “The fact that parental happiness increases before these children are born suggests that we are capturing broader issues relating to childbearing such as couples forming partnerships and making plans for the future,” he said.
Parenting relies on a delicate balance based on a multifaceted set of socioeconomic factors that determines an individual’s happiness. Researchers published their key findings in the journal of Demography, which revealed one of the greatest influences is how many children it will take to change that happiness. Parents’ happiness is highest in the year before and the year following their first-born’s birth. After that though, their level of happiness recedes back down to their “pre-child” levels. The second child they have provides them with the same peaks and dips of happiness as the first child did. But there’s something about the birth of the third child that did nothing to improve or lower the parents’ happiness.
"The arrival of a third child is not associated with an increase in the parents' happiness, but this is not to suggest they are any less loved than their older siblings,” Myrskylä said. “Instead, this may reflect that the experience of parenthood is less novel and exciting by the time the third child is born or that a larger family puts extra pressure on the parents' resources. Also, the likelihood of a pregnancy being unplanned may increase with the number of children a woman already has — and this brings its own stresses."
Researchers studied couples between the age groups of 23 to 34 and compared them to 35 to 49 year olds for 18 years after their first child was born. The older groups were typically more educated and showed the greatest increases of happiness before and after the birth of their first born. The younger group showed increases of happiness as well, except after a year or two their happiness fell back to normal or even dropped to lower than where they started. Teens are a completely different story. They followed a pattern unique to their own, unplanned set of circumstances in which their happiness steadily decreased below their pre-child happiness levels.
“The fact that among older and better-educated parents, well-being increases with childbearing, but the young and less-educated parents have flat or even downward happiness trajectories, may explain why postponing fertility has become so common,” the study’s coauthor Rachel Margolis assistant professor from Western University’s Faculty of Social Science, said in a press release.
Aside from the age when couples become parents, men and women differ from each other. Women have much greater levels of happiness while they’re expecting and then right after birth compared to men. It may have something to do with the fact their hormones control a lot of the bonding that goes on between a mother and their baby. Oxytocin, endorphin, and adrenaline hormones play major roles in regulating the process of labor and birth, according to Childbirth Connection. Oxytocin is often referred to as the “hormone of love” because it fosters feelings of nurturing behavior and secretes during sex, labor, birth, and the moment a mother sees her baby for the first time. But after the first year, women have a much steeper drop in their happiness than men, and then both mom and dad level out for the long run.

The Truth About Vitamins

You might swear by your vitamin supplements and take your pills religiously, but how do you really know if they’re working?
The jury has been out for a while on whether multivitamin supplements actually keep you healthier, or if they just have a placebo effect. But new research has been amassing and finds that overall, the effects of multivitamins are pretty much neutral, ineffective, null and void for people who are already healthy to begin with.
Here’s the thing: vitamins in and of themselves are crucial to our body’s functioning and health. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), there are 13 essential vitamins that we must consume (usually through food) in order to stay alive and well. Those include Vitamin A, C, D, E, K, B1 (thiamine), B2 (riboflavin), B3 (niacin), B6, and B12; as well as pantothenic acid, biotin, and folate (folic acid). Each of these vitamins has a specific health role; for example, Vitamin B6 — also called pyridoxine — helps form red blood cells and keeps the brain functioning well. Vitamin C, or ascorbic acid — which can be found in bell peppers, dark leafy greens, broccoli, berries, and citrus fruits like oranges — is an antioxidant that protects your teeth and gums, and also assists the body in absorbing iron. Vitamin C is helpful in healing wounds as well. Then there’s Vitamin D, known as the “sunshine vitamin” since our bodies extract it from sunlight, which helps the body absorb calcium to maintain teeth and bones.
Vitamin deficiencies can occur when you don’t get enough of one or several vitamins, and deficiencies have been linked to a variety of disorders and illnesses. Certain people need extra vitamins at times, like pregnant women, young children, or people who live in areas that lack sunlight (and thus lack Vitamin D). As a result, doctors often prescribe multivitamins to people who need extra ones. But average Americans who are well-nourished and healthy have become consumers of multivitamin supplements too — a market that has grown rapidly in recent years, yet might be complete bogus, according to recent scientific evidence.

The Bad

Many scientists argue that vitamin and mineral supplements are a waste of money. The American Heart Association recommends relying on food for nutrients rather than supplements because there “isn’t sufficient data to suggest that healthy people benefit by taking certain vitamin or mineral supplements in excess of the daily recommended allowance.” The association also advises specifically against antioxidant vitamin supplements for A, C, and E, since no proof exists that they reduce blood pressure or blood cholesterol.
In a 2013 study that several universities collaborated on, including Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick in the U.K., researchers examined the results of three studies on the efficacy of multivitamins on well-nourished and healthy adults. They concluded that there was not enough evidence to support that the use of multivitamins was beneficial — or even particularly harmful — among healthy adults. “The message is simple: Most supplements do not prevent chronic disease or death, their use is not justified, and they should be avoided,” the authors write.
In the abstract, the authors continue that “despite sobering evidence of no benefit or possible harm,” the use of multivitamins amount adults in the U.S. increased from 30 percent between 1988 and 1994, to 39 percent between 2003 and 2006. “[S]ales of multivitamins and other supplements have not been affected by major studies with null results,” the authors write, “and the U.S. supplement industry continues to grow, reaching $28 billion in annual sales in 2010.” These trends are also visible in the U.K. and throughout Europe, the authors note.
Though the use of multivitamins showed to have no positive effects on cardiovascular, cognitive, or overall health, the authors did note, however, that more research will be needed to see whether Vitamin D supplements are helpful — specifically for people with a deficiency. Some studies have shown that Vitamin D supplements reduced falls in older people, while the majority of studies have shown that the supplement didn’t have an effect on falls at all.
“Beta-carotene, vitamin E, and possibly high doses of vitamin A supplements are harmful,” the authors write. “Other antioxidants, folic acid and B vitamins, and multivitamin and mineral supplements are ineffective for preventing mortality or morbidity due to major chronic diseases. Although available evidence does not rule out small benefits or harms or large benefits or harms in a small subgroup of the population, we believe that the case is closed…Enough is enough.” Well, there you have it.

The Verdict

The fact is, you can derive nearly all of your essential vitamins from healthy foods like fish, leafy greens, fruit, and nuts — or from getting an average of 15 minutes of sunshine every day, for Vitamin D. Choosing the right foods to eat is what the federal government recommends in Dietary Guidelines for Americans, according to the NIH.
Find Vitamin K in kale, spinach, turnip greens, collards, Swiss chard, parsley, and fish. Vitamin B12, meanwhile, can be found in shellfish, meat, poultry, eggs, and some cereals. Vitamin A can be discovered in yellow and orange fruits like grapefruit, apricots, cantaloupe, pumpkins, and carrots. So keep your eyes open for the foods that contain essential vitamins, and you may not need to spend your money on pills. For a list of important vitamins and the foods they’re in, go to the NIH website.

Mysterious Crickets invade American Homes

In 1898, a biologist named S.H. Scudder reported a bizarre striped insect with a large humped back that had been sent to him from a Minnesota greenhouse. He declared it the greenhouse camel cricket, a pest, and then the critter was lost from the archives for over a century.
Holly Menninger, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, was part of a triumvirate of scientists that uncovered the species creeping into North American homes, quiet and undetected. She gestures at the boxes of camel cricket corpses stacked at her feet and apologizes for the smell. “These giant crickets managed to invade our homes with no one really noticing.  Which is kind of crazy,” Menninger says.  “They don’t bite.  They don’t sing.  They don’t sting.” 
They do have a proclivity for jumping towards people, rather than away, and are likely scavengers, feeding on their own dead, fungi and mold or pet food, says Menninger.  They can also be in large quantities.  “I’ve seen places with just a couple, others with tens and then some photos where there are hundreds,” says Menninger.  Menninger recounts her graduate student days when the large critters infested her own basement.
The researchers’ efforts were helped by citizen scientists who went to their basements and cellars to take photos of camel crickets or collect specimens to submit to the Camel Cricket Census.  Photos from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New Jersey also revealed a second Asian camel cricket species with a spider-like appearance, Diestrammena japanica.  There’s not a single specimen of the second non-native species in any collection in North America, according to Menninger who is the Director of Public Science at Your Wild Life, a citizen science and outreach program at NC State that runs the Cricket Census. The results of the research were recently published in the journal PeerJ [1].
“It was certainly exciting to find that we had two species on our hands,” says Mary Jane Epps, lead author of the study and identifier of the second species.  “This involved a lot of going through older literature on the Diestrammena genus and really sifting through to identify the key morphological features.”
Professional scientists and citizen scientists have given the creatures many names since discovering them in their homes and basements: camel cricket, cave cricket, unidentified spidery-thing, two-antennae’d striped monster. The reports have mostly been coming in from the East Coast, where the skinny and stripy greenhouse camel cricket is in much stronger numbers than a meaty and mottled native species, but nobody knows why right now.
Menninger thinks the greenhouse camel cricket could be outcompeting the native species and pushing the native species out. Or, she says, the native species could be transient or the greenhouse camel cricket could be really good at living in houses, and it’s exploiting the new niche.  And, Menninger says, how they got here is also a mystery. “It is clear that somehow it came from Asia, it was in greenhouses and then it sort of moved from greenhouses into people’s houses.  And how that happened –we’re trying to figure out,” says Menninger.
However it happened, Menninger says that she’s hesitant to call the Asian camel cricket invasive because while it’s a foreigner, it seems to be relatively harmless. There’s been no observable damage to homes, environments, or other creatures. As far as Menninger can tell, the crickets have been good neighbors.
Of course, not everyone sees a massive cricket that way. But at least the citizen scientists working with Menninger have found a positive outlet for their emotions. “Some people are scared of them but they suck it up and they turn that fear into something that can be of public value,” says Menninger. “There are other people that are motivated to participate because they feel like they have suffered this plague,” says Menninger, “And so they like commiserate with their fellow cricket-home occupiers.”
And, Menninger says, it gives people an opportunity to discover something new. “We’re always amazed, and we’re motivated to study things that are right under our noses.”

The Stages Of Love And How It Affects Your Health

When relationships first start, you feel like you’re floating on cloud nine and eventually feel stable and grounded. Being in a relationship can change things, from your Friday night plans to your Sunday brunch for two — and even the state of your health. According to an eHarmony study, the five stages of a relationship — butterflies, building, assimilation, honesty, and stability — can make a difference in your overall well-being in the most unexpected ways.
Both the quantity and quality of social relationships affect mental health, health behavior, physical health, and mortality risk. Social relationships, including romantic interactions, can have short- and long-term effects on your health for better or for worse. Whether you’re lovesick or sick of love, it’s known healthy relationships are a vital component of health and wellbeing. Jemima Wade, spokesperson for eHarmony.co.uk, told the Daily Mail: “Here at eHarmony, we're responsible for tens of thousands of relationships and millions of "butterfly" moments every year as a result of getting to know both the heads and hearts of our members.”
One core emotion, love, can be broken down into distinct stages that dictate what happens to couples in relationships physiologically. Love’s impact on health at each stage can shape a person’s behavior and lifestyle. “[E]ach stage may be relived and recaptured as couples grow into a relationship and face different life challenges together,” Papadopolous told the Daily Mail.
With the assistance of Papadopolous, an eHarmony research team sought to identify how the five stages of love affect couples’ overall wellbeing. The participants were asked to complete a psychological test to determine their true feelings throughout the different stages of a relationship. They were asked questions about their behavior and lifestyle in order to accurately reveal the influence love has on a person’s health at each stage.
The findings were grouped into the before-mentioned five stages: butterflies, building, assimilation, honesty, and stability. The stages can be relived as the couple continues to grow in the relationship and begins to face life challenges at different times. They capture how couples evolve from the uneasy "butterflies" feeling to feeling stable and content in a relationship.

Stage One: Butterflies

“Butterflies is a great way to describe it — the time when you can't stop having sex,” Papadopolous said about stage one. This “butterflies in your stomach” feeling is found to be marked by intense infatuation and sexual attraction. During this time frame, 30 percent out of the 33 million people currently in stage one in England reported weight loss, while 39 percent reported a lack of productivity. Both men and women also created more of the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen.

Stage Two: Building

This is when the honeymoon stage dissipates and the couple begins to build their relationship. This stage is marked by feelings of “happy anxiety,” where people’s attention span is bad and they’re unable to focus. The body begins to act as if it were on drugs, as the monoamine neurotransmitters speed up heart rate, trigger rushes of pleasure, and mimic the effects of Class A drugs. Papadopoulos said: “It can also be difficult sleeping. You're literally kept awake thinking about the other person. And there is a sense of happy anxiety, where you feel drunk on love.”

Stage Three: Assimilation

This stage forces a couple to question whether the relationship is “right.” Couples begin to ponder about the future of their relationship and start to form boundaries in the relationship that can lead to a rise in stress levels. “The third stage is when it becomes more serious. You start thinking, 'This is more serious than I thought' and 'I know you, but where are you at in your life? Do we want the same things? and Can we figure this out?'"

Stage Four: Honesty

The assimilation stage combined with stage four is where people begin to open up and show their “real” selves. This induces the first real rise in stress levels and anxiety. Papadopolous acknowledged this is the stage where couples put on their “best faces” through social media and pictures to portray everything is fine. Assimilation and honesty shows an increase in stress levels.

Stage Five: Stability

The last stage in a relationship is stability, which increases levels of trust and intimacy. In this stage, the powerful hormone vasopressin, released by men and women during an orgasm, is known to strengthen feelings of attachment. In addition, oxytocin is released as well, deepening bonds between couples, according to a 2011 study published in the Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism. “This is where we see a real level of contentness,” Papadopolous said.
The quantity and quality of relationships matter when it comes to health. They can have a significant toll on your health in the most unusual ways. It’s important to learn how to identify the symptoms of each relationship stage to have better control of your health.

Sexual Deviance

That Christian Grey has unusual sexual preferences is a well-known fact for all fans of “Fifty Shades Of Grey.” But Christian's sexual fantasies are more like a natural a deviation from the mean; on the other hand, there are some fantasies that can be considered atypical.
At least, that's what new research from the Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal and Institut Philippe-Pinel de Montréal, affiliated with University of Montreal, says. In a study published today in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, a team of researchers has attempted to, for the first time, provide a scientific definition for "sexual deviation."
Atypical fantasies are not a new topic. There has been ample amount of literature on the subject, ranging from discussions on incorporating the concept of paraphilia to sexual interest in atypical objects or partners. The fifth edition of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) explains "anomalous" fantasies while the World Health Organization has published on "unusual" fantasies in defining "paraphilias"—atypical sexual interests that either cause mental distress to a person, or makes the person a serious threat to the psychol;ogical and physical well being of other individuals (according to the DSM-5). While these past efforts address important issues related to the diagnostic criteria of paraphilia, they do not define what comprises an unusual sexual fantasy.
"Clinically, we know what pathological sexual fantasies are: they involve non-consenting partners, they induce pain, or they are absolutely necessary in deriving satisfaction. But apart from that, what exactly are abnormal or atypical fantasies? To find out, we asked people in the general population, as simple as that," said lead author Christian Joyal, in a statement.
"Our main objective was to specify norms in sexual fantasies, an essential step in defining pathologies," Joyal noted. "And as we suspected, there are a lot more common fantasies than atypical fantasies. So there is a certain amount of value judgment in the DSM-5,” he says referring to the fact that the DSM-5 clearly acknowledges that paraphilias may not always be pathological.
The study was conducted on university students. The adults willing to share their sexual fantasies included 1,517 Quebec adults (799 men and 718 women whose mean age was 30 years) who answered a questionnaire describing their favorite fantasy in detail.
Some of the more interesting results:

• The general population has varied sexual fantasies. Fantasies can be grouped into rare, unusual, or typical categories. While fantasizing sex with a horse is rare, dreaming of a threesome is quite typical while thinking of “golden showers” is downright unusual.             
• Men report having more fantasies and were willing to describe them in more detail than women.
• A significant number of women dream of submissive sex (e.g., being tied up, spanked, forced to have sex).
• Women can clearly draw the line between desire and fantasy. So while most will fantasize about themes associated with submission, few will actually want to do it. Men, on the other hand, report that they would love their fantasies to come true.
• Women seem to be generally more faithful than me: while women fantasize having their better halves in their sexual escapades, men more often dream of extramarital relationships.
• There were a significant number of males reporting fantasies including shemales, anal sex among heterosexuals, and watching their partner have sex with another man. 

"The subject is fascinating," said Joyal. The next step? Joyal says his team will be conducting statistical analyses of the data to" demonstrate the existence of homogeneous subgroups of individuals based on combinations of fantasies." The example he offers is that people who have submission fantasies also often report domination fantasies. In other words, though Christian Grey is ostensibly (spoiler alert) a sadist, he might also turn out to be, secretly, a masochist.

Ways To Boost The Health Of Your Sperm

Men dealing with male infertility often wonder what preventive steps they could have taken to keep their sperm healthy.
In certain cases, there was really nothing the man could have done differently. Male infertility can be the result of medical conditions, infection, or a family history. For other men, there were certain lifestyle choices they could’ve made and environmental risks they could’ve avoided to keep their sperm healthy. First of all, healthy sperm does not only mean the number of sperm a man produces. Healthy sperm is determined by quantity, quality, and movement. To make sure men are putting their best foot forward when it comes to producing healthy sperm, let’s take a look at five ways to avoid male infertility.

1. Sleep More

Sleep is recommended as a preventive measure to help avoid everything, from obesity to depression, so why not infertility? A recent study conducted at the University of Southern Denmark assessed the sleep schedule, sleep interruptions, and sleep habits of 953 Danish men in their late teens to early 20s. Researchers also measured the size of each participant’s testicles and gathered sperm sample to analyze sperm count and motility — ability to move actively and spontaneously. Men who reported a lack of sleep or sleep disturbances, on average, suffered from low sperm count, low testosterone levels, and smaller testicular size compared to men who got more shut-eye. Plan your bedtimes a little earlier, fellas.

2. Keep Your Laptop Off Of Your Lap

In today’s world, staying connected and up-to-date on current affairs is all too important. This means never having our laptops or smartphones more than an arm’s length away. For men, this also means the constant threat of infertility. A study published in the journal Fertility and Sterility set out to determine what effect Wi-Fi connection had on male infertility once and for all. Researchers from Argentina gathered 29 sperm samples from healthy men who sat with their Wi-Fi connected laptops on their laps for four hours. After ruling out temperature as the cause for sperm damage by way of an air-conditioning system, the research team found that radiation given off by the laptop’s Wi-Fi connection resulted in DNA damage and less sperm motility.

3. Wear These Boxers

If men are going to ignore warnings on laptop and smartphone use too close to their junk, then they should buy a pair of RadiaShield Men’s Boxer Briefs. These nifty little undergarments for men will only cost you $49 and promise to protect the front and back of male reproductive organs from radiation exposure. In fact, testing carried out by an FCC-certified independent laboratory confirmed that RadiaShield boxer briefs can protect sperm quality, quantity, and movement with 99.9 percent Shielding Effectiveness.

4. Eat Carrots And Walnuts

It seems that a man’s diet can play a significant role in maintaining sperm health. A pair of recent studies claim that eating walnuts and carrots can help boost sperm quality and performance. The first study, conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that men who added 75 grams of whole-shelled walnuts to their daily diet were able to boost the overall quality of their sperm. Researchers attributed this finding to a-linolenic acid, a natural plant source of omega-3. The second study, published in Fertility and Sterility, gives men another reason to eat their veggies. Around 200 healthy men were able to boost sperm quantity and quality up to eight percent just by adding yellow- and orange-colored fruits and vegetables — most notably carrots — to their diet.

5. Don’t Eat Bacon

While eating more carrots and walnuts can boost sperm health, the same cannot be said about bacon. Actually the opposite is true. A study presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s 2013 Annual Meeting in Boston revealed that various types of red meat — especially bacon — reduce male sperm count. Harvard University researchers surveyed 156 men with infertility concerns regarding their consumption of processed meat, red meat, white meat, poultry, and fish. Men who ate a half portion or more of processed meat a day had 5.5 percent “normal” sperm compared to 7.2 percent in men who ate less than half a portion each day.

Algal virus found in humans, slows brain activity

It’s not such a stretch to think that humans can catch the Ebola virus from monkeys and the flu virus from pigs. After all, they are all mammals with fundamentally similar physiologies. But now researchers have discovered that even a virus found in the lowly algae can make mammals its home. The invader doesn’t make people or mice sick, but it does seem to slow specific brain activities.
The virus, called ATCV-1, showed up in human brain tissue several years ago, but at the time researchers could not be sure whether it had entered the tissue before or after the people died. Then, it showed up again in a survey of microbes and viruses in the throats of people with psychiatric disease. Pediatric infectious disease expert Robert Yolken from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and his colleagues were trying to see if pathogens play a role in these conditions. At first, they didn't know what ATCV-1 was, but a database search revealed its identity as a virus that typically infects a species of green algae found in lakes and rivers.
The researchers wanted to find out if the virus was in healthy people as well as sick people. They checked for it in 92 healthy people participating in a study of cognitive function and found it in 43% of them. What’s more, those infected with the virus performed 10% worse than uninfected people on tests requiring visual processing. They were slower in drawing a line connecting a sequence of numbers randomly placed on a page, for example. And they seemed to have shorter attention spans, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The effects were modest, but significant.
The slower brain function was not associated with any differences in sex, income or education level, race, place of birth, or cigarette smoking. But that doesn't necessarily mean the virus causes cognitive decline; it might just benefit from some other factor that impairs the brain in some people, such as other infectious agents, heavy metals, or pollutants, the researchers say.
To test for causality, the team injected uninfected and infected green algae into the mouths of mice. (They could tell that the mice became infected with the virus because they developed antibodies to it.) Infected and uninfected mice underwent a battery of tests. The two groups were about on par with how well they moved, but infected animals took 10% longer to find their way out of mazes and spent 20% less time exploring new objects—indications that they had poorer attention spans and were not as good at remembering their surroundings.
The researchers also studied gene activity in the animals' hippocampus, a part of the brain important for memory and understanding one's whereabouts. They found changes in the activity of almost 1300 genes in the infected animals. Some of those genes affect how the brain reacts to a key chemical messenger called dopamine, and others are important in immune function. Yolken has not yet found the virus in the brain but suspects it may affect the brain through its influence on the immune system, stimulating certain immune responses that might in turn affect gene expression in the brain.
The researchers and others have found this virus in samples around the world but have yet to test whether it’s present in people outside of Baltimore, where the study was done. And a few people carry antibodies to the virus, Yolken says. But he says they are still not 100% certain if and how the virus infects people.
The cognitive effects were small, notes Joram Feldon, a neuroscientist emeritus at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who was not involved with the work. He praises the finding for being innovative, but says “if you ask me if I am worried about the existence of this virus, I am not.”
Allan Kalueff, the director of the ZENEREI Institute in Slidell, Louisiana, who was not involved with the work, suspects that other viruses may affect human sensory processing and behavior. He says he wonders whether these results indicate that there may be health risks to workers in the seafood industry or who work around water where they may be exposed to this algal virus. "But we clearly need more studies, including both animal and plant/algal studies."

Ways Science Can Predict Death or Rate Of Aging

It starts happening sometime around our late-20s. All those bumps and bruises we accrued during our teenage years, though healed on the outside, start to appear in the form of random pains in our joints, or our backs — we just can’t move around like we used to. Some women start to see wrinkles forming (gasp!) We all worry about aging, and some of us think too much about when we’ll die. Although it’s best not to worry about these things, if you’re really interested in getting an estimate, here are four ways scientists have been able to predict death and aging.

Your Sense Of Smell

The nose requires constant cellular regeneration to maintain its ability to smell, especially when it comes to those more subtle scents. But as we age, our cells begin to lose their ability to regenerate, due in part to “age-dependent changes in tissue-specific stem cells,” a 2005 study said. So it makes sense, then, that the nose’s ability to smell will falter as we get older.
A study from earlier this month found just that. After testing the ability of about 3,000 men and women aged 57 and up to identify five scents — peppermint, fish, orange, rose, and leather — they found that those who were worse at identifying each among a group of four were three times as likely to die within five years.

How Strong is your Grip?

It turns out that your level of educational attainment can be a predictor of death, if only by a small margin. Surveys on aging from around the world have already begun implementing strength tests as a way to determine a person’s rate of aging. After all, less strength can be associated with anything from disability to cognitive decline, and a person’s ability to recover from injury to death.
A May study, published in the journal PLOS One, rounded up data from over 50 other studies, and found that a person’s educational level could hint to their grip strength, and thus predict their rate of aging. They found that “a 65-year-old white woman who had not completed secondary education has the same handgrip strength as a 69-year-old white woman who had completed secondary education,” the study’s author Serguei Scherbov said in a press release. “This suggests that according to a handgrip strength characteristic, their ages are equivalent, and 65-year-old women age four years faster due to lower educational attainment.”

A Blood Test for Aging?

There’s no doubt that our blood is one of the best ways to measure our health. Blood tests tell us about disease (STDs, for example), our immune health, and obviously, blood pressure and cholesterol. But recently, scientists also learned that blood biomarkers, molecules within that indicate health conditions, can also determine whether or not a person will live longer.
A study from March this year gathered blood samples from 9,842 people; within five years, 508 of them died. When the researchers tested the blood, they found that four of them — plasma albumin, alpha-1-acid glycoprotein, very low-density lipoprotein particle size, and citrate — appeared in higher concentrations than the rest. Another experiment on 7,500 participants found similar results.
The researchers said that these biomarkers were indicative of diseases to come, since they were signs of general frailty in the body. But it was those whose levels of the biomarkers were in the top 20 percent of all people with the biomarkers that were 19 times more likely to die within five years, when compared to those in the bottom 20 percent.

Think Fast! Your Life Depends On It

It should come as no surprise that a person who is able to react quickly to any sort of stimulus probably has better cognitive function. In a study published earlier this year, researchers at University College London created a simple test, which you can play here, that was able to determine a person’s risk of early death, depending on how quickly they reacted.
The goal of the game was to see how quickly people could push a button when prompted by an image moving swiftly across the screen. If you blinked, you’d probably miss it. Over the course of 15 years, the researchers found that participants 378 of the 5,000 participants who had played the game at the start had died. When they compared these rates to the scores on the game, they determined that those with slower-than-average reaction times were 25 percent more likely to die.

“One theory is that slow reaction time might reflect deterioration of other bodily systems, such as the brain and nervous system,” Dr. Gareth Hagger-Johnson, author of the study, told Medical Daily at the time. “Perhaps, people who are slower to react are also more unhealthy