Enjoyable activities like eating good food and having sex don’t just provide pleasure. They lower stress by blocking anxiety responses in the brain, researchers say.

A team at the University of Cincinnati found that pleasurable experiences also seem to have longer-term benefits because the relaxing effects lasted at least seven days.

“These findings give us a clearer understanding of the motivation for consuming ‘comfort food’ during times of stress,” lead researcher Yvonne Ulrich-Lai said in a statement. “But it’s important to note that even small amounts of pleasurable foods can reduce the effects of stress.”

Ulrich-Lai and colleagues including James Herman, director of the school’s Laboratory of Stress Neurobiology, gave rats access to a sugar solution twice a day for two weeks. They then measured the rodents’ behavioral and physiological responses to stress.

The rats who were given sugar water had lower heart rates and stress hormone levels and were more adventurous and social with other rats than the ones in the control group with no access to the sugar solution.

More experiment details can be found at the link below.

Eating, Having Sex Reduce Anxiety in Similar Ways – AOL Health.

So what do I think of Facebook’s new “Social” inbox?  I’m going to avoid any privacy arguments here and focus specifically on the potential of the service they describe.

I’m going to go along with the sections they have in their release video which is included below.

Read more

Unless you are an avid/regular blog reader it is unlikely that you have heard of BlindType…yet. So does it concern you? In all likelihood, yes, yes it does concern you but by no means in a bad way. How many people do I know who only buy Blackberry phones over iPhones or other touch screen devices because they have a “proper keyboard” or to be more precise a hardware keyboard. BlindType has taken an interesting and probably more successful approach to this problem. However before jumping straight in and showing it to you is probably best to explain a bit more about tactile feedback first. Read more

Are you the kind of person who goes to YouTube when they want to listen to a song?  Be it for listening to something new, on a friends advice, or perhaps just to listen to a few songs you already like but don’t have your music with you.  Well if that is the case then you should probably check out JukeFly.

I’m going to start with explaining what JukeFly aims to achieve and the fundamentals behind the service and then follow up with some screenshots of its interface with annotations as to what does what and where.

Jukebox aims to do one thing really well, make the music you want to listen to, available wherever you are.  Ok sure there are plenty of other services which share this aim such as Spotify, my personal favorite Grooveshark, and indeed Windows Media Player now supports streaming to anywhere you can log into you Windows Live Account.  However, one shouldn’t dismiss JukeFly off the bat as there are a couple of quirks which might make JukeFly a better choice for some users and here they are: Read more

With 100% Design occurring from tomorrow until the end of the week at Earls Court 2 I felt that I should post something design related. Yanko Design is a fantastic source of information when it comes to design. I regularly draw inspiration from their concept postings, general news and indeed from several purchases made from their site and I feel it is a site worth sharing. Still describing their content is not going to do them or their designs justice so here I will list a few of my favorite pieces which I have come across over the years (probably with more weighting on their more recent posts). Read more

Sugar Jesus? Perhaps the next big thing according to several outstanding reviews. It is quite amazing that a band with comments such as “Indie Disco Kings” and “The forerunners of Synth Pop’s thriving underground!” from reputable names such as TimeOut and ArtRocker aren’t already causing mass audio induced euphoria during the daily commute. They are my dirty little secret that I and their loyal listeners can turn to in times when we just need to escape for a wonderful 3:30s (approx).

Ahem, in all seriousness and music review jargon aside, Sugar Jesus really could be one of the next big things to take up residence in that place which brings “silent” humming and foot tapping to our lives. Sugar Jesus has a good blend of “mainstream factors” which apply the easy listening required for instantly likeable music, whilst maintaining a feeling that I can only describe as an unique. You really have to listen to it to understand, but if you do in the future, or perhaps you already have, you will definitely understand the emotion that I am doing my utmost best to describe. They are a band which definitely have something at their heart, and that something…is Damn Good! Read more

This article really makes me feel like Apple are going to get what’s coming to them soon.

Sony tried something similar and it resulted in their worst dip in sales ever and that’s not counting the massive loss in brand loyalty (it definitely affected my opinion of them).

I wonder if the now officially termed “Apple Addict” will be bothered by something like this something like this?

Steve Jobs Is Watching You: Apple Seeking to Patent Spyware | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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