Ever got engaged in a fanciful musing of a castle in the air, or a date with Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt?
Daydreaming has long been derided as a lazy and non-productive pastime. But it has also been able to breed many popular artistic careers, like being a composer, novelist or a film-maker, who develop new ideas.
"When a person is thinking or fantasizing about his unfulfilled wishes, desires, all that for which he is passionate about, he gets carried away by them and starts day-dreaming," says a well known psychologist Dr Aruna Broota.
But, in this fast-pace world, do people have time for day-dreaming?
"Yes, they have enough time to day-dream. The fast-pace moving world has not deterred people from day-dreaming," says Dr Roma Kumar, the clinical psychologist at Ganga Ram Hospital.
Day-dreaming is a visionary fantasy or a reverie indulged in while awake. A daydreamer gets engaged in a fancy speculation, generally of happy and pleasant moments, hopes or ambitions. While for an observer, the day-dreamer has an expression-less stare to a distance, day-dreaming is very normal, feel experts.
"Day-dreaming is completely normal, in fact it is more than normal. It is like trying to think of the happy moments. The person goes back to that time to get more happiness," says Kumar.
Kumar however, adds that day-dreaming can be abnormal if it is beyond a limit.
"Generally day-dreaming is normal but if it is beyond certain limit and when it makes the person non-functional, it can be an obstacle on the path of progress," she says.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Tea and coffee are key to long life
A classic experiment exploring the origin of life has more than a half-century later yielded new results. New results fom the experiment show that
life may have been born violently, in erupting volcanoes in the midst of a thunderstorm.
In 1953, Stanley Miller, then a graduate student of Harold Urey at the University of Chicago, put ammonia, methane and hydrogen — the gases believed to be in early earth’s atmosphere, — along with water in a sealed flask and applied electrical sparks to simulate the effects of lightning. A week later, amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, were generated out of the simple molecules.
Enshrined in high school textbooks, the Miller-Urey experiment raised expectations that scientists could unravel life’s origins with simple chemistry experiments. The excitement has long since subsided. The amino acids never grew into the more complex proteins. Scientists now think the composition of air on early earth was different from what Miller used.
Consulting Miller’s notebooks, his student Jeffrey Bada found that Miller had constructed two variations of the original apparatus. One simply used a different spark generator. The second injected steam onto the sparks.
Miller had reported that he had detected five amino acids produced by the original apparatus. Johnson’s work revealed small amounts of nine additional amino acids in those samples. In the residues from the apparatus with the steam injector, the scientists detected 22 amino acids, including 10 that had never before been identified from the Miller-Urey experiment.
Bada says the results show that the tidal pools near volcanoes, where similar conditions exist, would have been the places where the amino acids could have accumulated in concentrations, enabling more complex reactions to occur.
life may have been born violently, in erupting volcanoes in the midst of a thunderstorm.
In 1953, Stanley Miller, then a graduate student of Harold Urey at the University of Chicago, put ammonia, methane and hydrogen — the gases believed to be in early earth’s atmosphere, — along with water in a sealed flask and applied electrical sparks to simulate the effects of lightning. A week later, amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, were generated out of the simple molecules.
Enshrined in high school textbooks, the Miller-Urey experiment raised expectations that scientists could unravel life’s origins with simple chemistry experiments. The excitement has long since subsided. The amino acids never grew into the more complex proteins. Scientists now think the composition of air on early earth was different from what Miller used.
Consulting Miller’s notebooks, his student Jeffrey Bada found that Miller had constructed two variations of the original apparatus. One simply used a different spark generator. The second injected steam onto the sparks.
Miller had reported that he had detected five amino acids produced by the original apparatus. Johnson’s work revealed small amounts of nine additional amino acids in those samples. In the residues from the apparatus with the steam injector, the scientists detected 22 amino acids, including 10 that had never before been identified from the Miller-Urey experiment.
Bada says the results show that the tidal pools near volcanoes, where similar conditions exist, would have been the places where the amino acids could have accumulated in concentrations, enabling more complex reactions to occur.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Coffee 'can shrink women's breasts'
Ladies, please note – drinking coffee in moderation may be okay, but downing more than three cups daily can shrink the size of your breasts, a new study has revealed.
Researchers in Sweden have carried out the study and claimed that women who take more than three cups of the caffeine-fuelled drink a day could see their bra size drop, theDaily Star reported.
Tests by cancer researchers found half of all women have a gene linking breast size to coffee intake.
Nearly 300 women were quizzed but Helena Jernstroem, of Lund University, said women should not worry too much.
She explained: "Coffee-drinking women do not have to worry their breasts will shrink to nothing overnight. They will get smaller, but the breasts aren't just going to disappear.”
"Anyone who thinks they can tell which women are coffee drinkers just from their bra measurements will be disappointed. There are two measurements for a bra -- the cup size and the girth, so you wouldn't be able to tell."
While caffeine may shrink women's breasts, the reaction is the reverse for coffee-slurping blokes -- it can make their ‘moobs’ swell, according to the researchers.
On the plus side, the study showed regular hits of caffeine reduce the risk of women developing breast cancer.
Researchers in Sweden have carried out the study and claimed that women who take more than three cups of the caffeine-fuelled drink a day could see their bra size drop, theDaily Star reported.
Tests by cancer researchers found half of all women have a gene linking breast size to coffee intake.
Nearly 300 women were quizzed but Helena Jernstroem, of Lund University, said women should not worry too much.
She explained: "Coffee-drinking women do not have to worry their breasts will shrink to nothing overnight. They will get smaller, but the breasts aren't just going to disappear.”
"Anyone who thinks they can tell which women are coffee drinkers just from their bra measurements will be disappointed. There are two measurements for a bra -- the cup size and the girth, so you wouldn't be able to tell."
While caffeine may shrink women's breasts, the reaction is the reverse for coffee-slurping blokes -- it can make their ‘moobs’ swell, according to the researchers.
On the plus side, the study showed regular hits of caffeine reduce the risk of women developing breast cancer.
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