Sexual & Reproductive Health Matters - SRHmatters.org

The public is being urged to take more responsibility for its health to cut smoking and drinking and take more exercise.

But in this week’s Scrubbing Up, Professor Richard Ashcroft, a bio-ethics expert at Queen Mary, University of London, warns that will-power is often too weak.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley told the doctors’ union, the British Medical Association, it was time for people to take more responsibility for the health of themselves and their families.

Lansley argued that if we want to see people eating healthier diets, smoking less, and taking more exercise, then an approach based on lecturing people, supervising what they eat, and banning things would fail - unless people’s behaviours changed too.

He was not saying - as conservatives (small c) often do - that it is none of the state’s business what people eat.

Quite the opposite: he was explicitly arguing for the state having a role in changing how people behave.

What motivates

What Mr Lansley was doing was arguing that we need to look at the ways we try to encourage healthy eating, giving up smoking, etc.

Do they work? Or do they sometimes achieve the opposite of what we intended?
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

A prime example is smokers; despite knowing the damage their vice causes, the instant fix they get from a cigarette overrides any consideration for long-term wellbeing”

End Quote Professor Richard Ashcroft

But politicians who advocate patients taking greater control of their own healthcare fail to understand what really motivates people.

It’s all very noble, but recent behavioural science research challenges the idea that people are rational decision-makers where their personal health is concerned. People are not always in full control of their behaviour.

A prime example is smokers. Despite knowing the damage their vice causes, the instant fix they get from a cigarette overrides any consideration for long-term wellbeing.

The problem is not really that we all have things we like, and knowingly eat or drink, which aren’t all that good for us.

A little of what you fancy

Most of us know that a little of what you fancy does you good, and most of the time we’re right.

Sometimes we’ll knowingly “trade off” different goals we have: I want that ice cream, and I want lose weight, and right now I choose the icecream, knowing that the plan to lose weight is taking a hit. But that’s a conscious choice, even if I regret it later.

The problem is that often we make these sorts of choices unconsciously, or make mistakes. Or our commitment to our goals is weaker than we think. Or - hardest of all - our will is weak.

In other words, it isn’t just that I trade off icecream against weight loss in favour of icecream now. It’s that I do so systematically.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

Lecturing people fails both because no one likes to be hectored”

End Quote Professor Richard Ashcroft

My behaviour is shaped by forces I don’t know about, don’t understand, and even when I do, I find hard to resist or control.

A lot of this is about getting better informed, but health education is only part of the story.

Some health information campaigns are very compelling - think of the anti-smoking campaigns which use children talking about their parents’ lung cancers. But the evidence that they work is weak.

And they rarely have the seductive appeal of the campaigns of the tobacco and alcohol industries. Health campaigns are rarely about pleasure and enjoyment, and they are rarely cool.

But even when I get ‘clean’ information that isn’t intended to bias my choices one way or another - my habits and thought processes are just as important, if not more important, than what I know.

Lecturing people fails both because no one likes to be hectored, and because people don’t necessarily learn from it. And they have other sources of information as well.

Usually what drives me is circumstance, habit and short term reward. So the trick is to find ways to rewire my habits, change my circumstances, and make the rewards pull me in ways I want to go, and not in ways that are harmful to me. And that’s hard.

It is also hard to see how getting industries which have an interest in getting me to buy their (harmful) products in increasing quantities can be trusted with promoting health education and health behaviour change at the same time.

With government advertising budgets being slashed and the Change4Life scheme being handed over to the private sector, this is a serious concern to many working for public health.

The sting in the tail of Mr Lansley’s tale is that “personal responsibility” might be what’s at the root of the problem, not the solution.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10649961

Before you use these techniques, it’s important to point out that they aren’t a substitute for treatment by qualified mental health professionals. This technique is used in cognitive therapy but there’s more to cognitive therapy than mood and thought monitoring. Also, some people may benefit from a different approach.

If you find that the techniques described here get you so far and then you become stuck - or if they just don’t work for you - then it might be better to ask your family doctor to refer you to your local community mental health team.

Using mood and thought monitoring is done using four stages.

* Stage 1 - be clear about what the problem is
* Stage 2 - monitor how bad the problem really is
* Stage 3 - find steps between where you are now and where you want to be
* Stage 4 - work through the steps at your own pace

This isn’t as daunting as it all sounds. If you’re reading this with more than just passing curiosity, then you’ve already acknowledged that there’s a problem and wish that you could do something about it. It may seem overwhelming now, but things can change - if you take it a step at a time.

A few words of warning:

1. This isn’t necessarily a quick fix. It does take working at, and there’ll be times when you feel frustrated at your lack of progress.
2. You may feel that things get worse at the beginning. This is because before you can do anything about your symptoms, you may need to concentrate on them and increase your awareness of them. Being more aware may make you feel worse but it also suggests that you’re working on the problem and (in the long run) may be successful.

Think about your problem. It could be described in general terms - you’re feeling depressed or anxious - or it could be you’ve got a certain phobia or obsessive-compulsion. These labels have their uses, but they say very little about how the problem is affecting you.

To help unpick the problem, it can be useful to split it up into behaviour, feelings and thoughts. You’ll usually find that you can link them: certain behaviours will go with certain thoughts and feelings.

It’s not important at this stage to try to work out which is causing which - as is so often the case with these problems, it’s a vicious circle. Just the same it does help to realise that they feed off each other - as in this illustration.

The behaviours may be things you’d like to do but just can’t - or things you want to stop doing, such as a compulsion, a habit, or even an addiction like smoking.

It’s important to be absolutely clear that these are very real things that you want to change. These specific definitions are, in part, what will define how successful you’ve been in changing things.

Many mental health problems are defined by the kind of emotional distress they cause: the depressed person wants to feel happy again, the anxious person relaxed and the phobic person free of fear.

A first step to dealing with your problems is to try to get beyond the sense of distress and be completely clear just what it is that’s distressing you so much. To do this you need to look at your thoughts - the third part of the cycle - that come with this distress.

The human mind always has a variety of thoughts going through it - if you’re not sure about this try to sit and think of nothing. Not easy, is it?

When you feel distressed, get a blank piece of paper and just note down the thoughts going through your head. This may take some practice. The idea is not to edit them - don’t worry about writing in straight lines or about grammar and spelling. You just need to get your thoughts recorded somewhere other than your head.

Another name for these thoughts is ‘automatic thoughts’ or ’self-talk’ - the running commentary or conversation that you may have with yourself as you move from situation to situation. For some people, this will ring a bell and they’ll immediately know what this is about. Others will find that it may take them some time to learn to ‘tune into’ this.

It will also be important (for further work) to rate how bad each part of the problem is. That is:

* How much is the behaviour getting in the way of life?
* How strong are the feelings you’re experiencing?
* How strongly do you believe the thoughts?

To help you with identifying - and assessing the strength of - the behaviours, feelings and thoughts that need to change, print out and complete the exercise below. Some points to remember when you’re filling it in:

* Sit down to do it at a time when you can be quiet and undisturbed
* Take your time - it’s important
* You may not complete it in one session
* It’s helpful, having filled it in, to wait a day and then review it
* You don’t have to limit yourself to one sheet
* You can spend as much as a week or two to think it through

You should be sure that you’ve completed this stage before moving on to stage 2.

Stage two

So far you should have developed a clearer idea of definite problem behaviours, feelings and thoughts. We’ll call these the internal workings of the problem.

There’s also an external element to the problem - all your behaviours, feelings and thoughts are affected by things happening in the world around you. It’s essential to get to know how events change the internal working of the problem.

One way to do this is to look for patterns over time. To do this, you need to extend the exercise from stage one. When you’re aware of a behaviour, feeling or thought that’s distressing - repeat stage one, but note what’s going on around you at the time, or what events lead up to the incident.

To help you do this use a new form.

If you feel that the distress is with you all the time it may be better to stop and take a few minutes three or four times a day to note down how you’ve felt and what’s been going on around you.

Whichever way you decide to do stage one, it’s also helpful to start tracking your thoughts and feelings over time. This way you may spot a general improvement - or worsening - of things, or realise that certain times of the day or certain regular events improve - or worsen - how you’re feeling.

To do this you can use the following chart either to monitor the number of incidents - such as panic attacks, or to rate each day in terms of how low, anxious or how much craving, for example, you felt.

Stage three

By now, you’ve done a lot of work around your problems. For some people, working at developing this level of insight is therapeutic; for others, becoming this aware of their distress can make things seem worse. You can ask your GP to refer you to your local community mental health team if you need help.

What you should have by now is a clearer idea of:

1. Behaviour that needs to change
2. Feelings that cause distress
3. Thoughts that contribute to the feelings and behaviours
4. Situations that set off the whole cycle or make it worse

Using this information it’s now time to decide what you want to change first. It’s very important not to be too ambitious - this is change by evolution, not revolution. The big changes will come later and by that time they won’t seem so big.

Deciding on what to change first will, of course, depend on the problem. Here are some suggested first changes for different problems:

1. Phobias - just try thinking about the thing without feeling afraid
2. Obsessive-compulsion - try to put off a ritual for one minute, or if it’s something you feel you have to do a certain number of times, try doing it one less time
3. Smoking - go without a cigarette on one occasion
4. Depression or anxiety - identify a negative thought and work on changing it

Obviously, for some problems the focus needs to be on the behaviour, while for others it’s the thoughts. It doesn’t really matter where you start though as long as it’s something that you can envisage being achievable.

Having identified this first step, think about how things would be if the problem had been resolved - not just “I wouldn’t smoke anymore” or “I wouldn’t be frightened anymore” - but what would your thoughts and feelings be like, and what situations would now be no problem.

This is your final step: write them in the goals sheet. Now we know where the journey starts and where it finishes.

Stage four

Working through the steps at your own pace sounds easy this is where the real work begins. If it were as easy as just setting yourself small goals and achieving them then there wouldn’t be a problem.

Certainly, if a step proves too difficult then move back and try something easier, but at each step it’s good to have a definite strategy for how to approach it.

This will also allow you to be clear about when it’s time to move on. The strategy we’ll use here focuses on your behaviours and thoughts.

Think of each step as an experiment in behaviour - are its consequences so terrible? So, if you suffer from a phobia, what was the consequence of thinking about the thing you’re afraid of? Obviously you felt some anxiety; use the graphs to rate your anxiety and try the exercise again the next day.

You can supplement this by practising relaxation techniques and trying to use them while you’re thinking about the anxiety-causing behaviour.

Similarly, if you’ve an obsessive-compulsion, think about not completing a ritual - or leave one small ritual out - and practise a simple relaxation exercise.

The other thing to concentrate on is your thoughts - specifically your ‘automatic thoughts’ or ’self-talk.’ These can prompt all sorts of inaccurate assessment of situations, including:

1. Split thinking - you may be telling yourself that there can only be two extremes in a situation, one totally satisfactory and one disastrous. For example, “If this happens I’ll be ecstatic. If it doesn’t, I’ll just be destroyed.”
2. Catastrophe thinking - you may fail to see any satisfactory outcome or be convinced that it could not happen. For example, “All right, it could happen, which would be great, but I just know it won’t. This is going to be a disaster.”
3. Personalisation - an action taken by another person or organisation is taken as a personal attack. For example, “The boss moved the office just to make my journey more difficult.”
4. Selective recall - the evidence that something is going to go wrong may be drawn from one occasion that something went wrong, when on most occasions everything was fine. For example, “He didn’t like my work that time, I just know it’s going to happen again.”

The list goes on and on. It’s important at each step to note your thoughts down and look at just how accurate they are. To do this, you can ask yourself four questions about each thought:

1. What evidence is there to show this is accurate?
2. Is there another equally believable interpretation of what’s going on here?
3. What action can I take to have some control of the situation?
4. If my best friend were in this situation, what advice would I give to them?

After asking yourself the four questions, re-rate your thoughts and feelings and see if things have improved. Again keep a record so that you can track improvement.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/emotional_health/mental_health/coping_thoughtdiaries.shtml#top

How can a pea grow in a man’s lung? That’s been a water cooler topic for the better part of this week. It happened to 75-year-old Ron Sveden, who had a half-inch-long sprout removed from his lung, which was first reported by a 20-year-old news intern at the Cape Cod Times on August 8.

The story was picked up by TV stations, newspapers and websites around the world.

Sveden was very sick when he was hospitalized on Memorial Day – he was having more difficulty breathing than he usually does with his emphysema.

Sveden was expecting to learn he had lung cancer. Instead, he tells a Boston television station: “I was told that I had a pea seed in my lung that had split and had sprouted.”

Dr. Jeff Spillane removed the obstruction. He tells CNN at first he couldn’t see that a pea had been lodged in the lung because there was so much infected, swollen tissue around it. “His whole lobe was collapsed and there was pus behind…it was entrapped in what we call granulation tissue.” But once removed, he says it looked like a pea or a bean. “It had a shoot coming out.”

Spillane, a thoracic surgeon at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts, doesn’t know how long the seed was in Sveden’s lung, but he believes it stayed in the airway because Sveden’s existing lung disease didn’t allow him to breathe very well and he couldn’t cough it out.

“Most of the time I’m dealing with pretty devastating illness,” Spillane says. But this case is different. “He really did get a very good outcome.”

As for the likelihood of something sprouting inside the body, experts say it’s not impossible. Walter Reeves, a horticulturist, author and radio host in Atlanta, Georgia, says it’s conceivable if a seed gets lodged in a lung.

“Isn’t that what happens when a seed is underground and gets moisture and warmth? They [seeds] don’t need light” he adds, at least not for the first two or three days.

Reeves doesn’t have more details about Sveden’s situation than what’s been reported in the news media, but he points out that this could happen only with raw peas or beans or peanuts. Cooked peas or other legumes cannot germinate or sprout. Reeves says a raw peanut could easily sprout, as could dried peas, after soaking in water. “Those are quite capable of germinating.”

Spillane says children, in particular, are known to have a peanuts go down the wrong way and get lodged in the lung, which is a very serious problem. “Kids have died from that stuff,” he says.

Spillane is a little surprised at all the attention this story had received. He says removing objects from patients’ lungs happens frequently. “A week later [after Sveden’s surgery], I pulled a tooth out [of another patient].”

Dr. Steve Georas, a pulmonologist in Rochester, New York, agrees. He says people inhale things into their lungs frequently, probably because the trachea and the esophagus are so close to each other. “We had a similar case at the University of Rochester where I practice. A patient had a pea wedged in his bronchus – it didn’t turn into a plant.”

Spillane says he went into surgery to help people and to “pull the thorn out of the lion’s paw. ” Sveden’s sprouting pea, the surgeon says, “was the ultimate thorn in a lion’s paw, I guess.”

Source: http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/13/plant-sprouts-in-mans-lung/

(Reuters) - On the leafy fringes of Hong Kong in a shabby film studio, a nude ponytailed actor stretched out on animal-skins with his lover as the cameras rolled in a set evoking a subterranean sex lair in ancient China.

Turning away from a slightly blurred high definition TV screen as the actors writhed, director Christopher Sun shouted “cut” whilst yanking off his 3-D glasses. “Good” he yelled.

No ordinary porn flick, “3-D Sex & Zen: Extreme Ecstasy” is being touted as the world’s first IMAX-3-D erotic film.

First out of the gates, the soft porn Hong Kong film comes as the stricken industry, hit hard by free Internet porn in recent years, turns to 3-D as a potential money-spinner, following on from the success of Hollywood blockbusters such as James Cameron’s Avatar.

“Somehow when you’re doing a 3-D movie you always want to make an impressive image because the viewers … are going to buy tickets with double or even triple the ticket price to get into a world they’ve never seen before,” said the U.K.-educated Sun

“It’s not just erotica, they want some ‘wow factor!.’”

Based on a classic Chinese erotic text, “The Carnal Prayer Mat,” the $3 million film follows a young man as he befriends a duke and enters a world of royal orgies and other sexual peccadilloes.

The producers are hoping the erotic period drama will prove a titillating hit with 3-D-glasses-wearing audiences and help develop a lucrative, niche film market.

“It’s because it’s forbidden in China, (that there) is so much enthusiasm in China for this film,” said film maker Stephen Shiu, who was responsible for the original 1991 erotic film “Sex and Zen,” which grossed over USD$2.6 million and held the mantle as the city’s highest-grossing adult film for over a decade.

Taking almost twice the time to shoot than conventional films and with a higher budget, more advanced equipment and elaborate lighting, the takeup of 3-D productions has been relatively slow in the porno industry despite early excitement at its promise.

“We have to change the lenses for a long time, the setting, lighting, we need more time than a normal movie,” said Japanese porn star Saori Hara after completing a scene.

Despite this, other major 3-D sex flicks are now reportedly in the works. Adult entertainment firm Hustler is reportedly working on a three-dimensional porno-spoof of the lithe, blue aliens in “Avatar,” while Italian director Tinto Brass plans to film a 3-D version of his classic 1979 erotic film “Caligula,” based loosely on the dissolute life of the Roman emperor.

The Hong Kong film has attracted the attention of distributors across Asia and Europe.

“The sex scenes are explicit and sometimes violent, but the main theme of the story is love,” said Sun, the director.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67F0T620100816

* Study shows fructose used differently from glucose

* Findings challenge common wisdom about sugars

WASHINGTON Aug 2 (Reuters) - Pancreatic tumor cells use fructose to divide and proliferate, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a study that challenges the common wisdom that all sugars are the same.

Tumor cells fed both glucose and fructose used the two sugars in two different ways, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found.

They said their finding, published in the journal Cancer Research, may help explain other studies that have linked fructose intake with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancer types.

“These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation,” Dr. Anthony Heaney of UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center and colleagues wrote.

“They have major significance for cancer patients given dietary refined fructose consumption, and indicate that efforts to reduce refined fructose intake or inhibit fructose-mediated actions may disrupt cancer growth.”

Americans take in large amounts of fructose, mainly in high fructose corn syrup, a mix of fructose and glucose that is used in soft drinks, bread and a range of other foods.

Politicians, regulators, health experts and the industry have debated whether high fructose corn syrup and other ingredients have been helping make Americans fatter and less healthy.

Too much sugar of any kind not only adds pounds, but is also a key culprit in diabetes, heart disease and stroke, according to the American Heart Association.

Several states, including New York and California, have weighed a tax on sweetened soft drinks to defray the cost of treating obesity-related diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

The American Beverage Association, whose members include Coca-Cola (KO.N) and Kraft Foods (KFT.N) have strongly, and successfully, opposed efforts to tax soda. [ID:nN12233126]

The industry has also argued that sugar is sugar.

Heaney said his team found otherwise. They grew pancreatic cancer cells in lab dishes and fed them both glucose and fructose.

Tumor cells thrive on sugar but they used the fructose to proliferate. “Importantly, fructose and glucose metabolism are quite different,” Heaney’s team wrote.

“I think this paper has a lot of public health implications. Hopefully, at the federal level there will be some effort to step back on the amount of high fructose corn syrup in our diets,” Heaney said in a statement.

Now the team hopes to develop a drug that might stop tumor cells from making use of fructose.

U.S. consumption of high fructose corn syrup went up 1,000 percent between 1970 and 1990, researchers reported in 2004 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idAFN0210830520100802?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a49:g43:r3:c0.101504:b36265736:z0

(Reuters) - A Michigan man credited his dog with saving his life by chewing off his diseased big toe as he lay passed out in a drunken stupor.

Jerry Douthett, 48, woke up on a Saturday night in late July in his Rockford, Michigan home to find his Jack Russell Terrier, Kiko, had gnawed off his right big toe.

“The dog always lays with me on the bed,” said Douthett. “That night, I woke up and looked down at my foot, and it was wet. When I looked it was blood, and there was the dog looking at me with a blood mustache.”

Douthett’s wife, Rosee, rushed him to a hospital where doctors found he was suffering from Type 2 diabetes. His toe was badly infected and surgeons amputated the remainder of the digit.

Douthett’s wife, a registered nurse, had been urging him for weeks to have his infected toe examined by a doctor.

On the night Kiko ate his toe, Douthett said he had been out with his wife and drank about “six or seven beers” and a pair of giant margaritas “big enough to put goldfish in.”

“I was self-medicating at this point,” he said. “The moral of the story is that the dog saved my life, because otherwise I never would have gone in to see a doctor.”

The couple said they were amazed that Kiko appeared to know Douthett had an infection that needed treatment.

“He kind of chewed off the infected part and stopped at the good bone,” said Rosee. “We joked that we shouldn’t have had to pay the co-pay because he did half the job by chewing off half of the toe.”

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6735S820100804?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a49:g43:r1:c0.193823:b36290160:z0

(Reuters Life!) - Britain released hundreds of previously secret “UFO files” on Thursday including a letter saying that Winston Churchill had ordered a 50 year cover-up of a wartime encounter between a UFO and military pilot.

The files, published by the National Archives, span decades and contain scores of witness accounts, sketches and classified briefing notes documenting mysterious sightings across Britain.

One Ministry of Defense note refers to a 1999 letter stating that a Royal Air Force plane returning from a mission in Europe during World War Two was “approached by a metallic UFO.”

The unidentified author of the letter says his grandfather attended a wartime meeting between Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower during which the two expressed concern over the incident and “decided to keep it secret.”

The MoD subsequently investigated the case but found no written record of the incident, the files say.

“… the MoD does not have any expertise or role in respect of ‘UFO/flying saucer’ matters or to the question of the existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial lifeforms, about which it remains totally open-minded,” it said in a 1999 note.

Britain has been slowly releasing long-classified files related to sightings of mysterious craft in the skies above its cities, compiled and investigated by the MoD over past decades.

Some cases subsequently received rational explanations, such as meteors burning up in the atmosphere, but many are unsolved.

One memo, dated 1997, contains reports of “sonic booms” and a mysterious plane crash in northern England. No wreckage was found in an ensuing search by the police and rescue teams.

Another incident refers to sightings of a “black triangular UFO” over the home of the shadow home secretary in Kent in the late 1990s. An investigation showed no breach of security.

In a case filed in 1995, the captain of a plane approaching Manchester airport reported a near-miss with an “unidentified object,” and a witness on the ground separately provided a sketch showing a UFO “20 times the size of a football field.”

An inquiry failed to identify the object, the memo said.

Buried deep among meticulous sketches and MoD memos, some files refer to curious episodes in Britain’s history. During the Cold War, Britain sent fighter jets to intercept Soviet aircraft as often as 200 times a year, one MoD document showed.

The note, filed in 1996, said mystery sightings picked up on radar during the Cold War were invariably proved to be Soviet anti-submarine or long-range reconnaissance planes.

“Prior to the demise of the Former Soviet Union, aircraft were scrambled some 200 times annually to intercept and investigate uncorrelated tracks penetrating the UK Air Defense region (AKADR) from the north…” it said.

The last such scramble was in September 1991 — around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6742IA20100805?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a49:g43:r3:c0.101884:b36297546:z0

(Reuters Life!) - He may leave his socks lying around and avoid emptying the dishwasher, but a new study shows husbands do as much work as their wives.

London School of Economics sociologist Catherine Hakim’s research shows that when both paid work and unpaid duties such as housework, care and voluntary work are taken into account, men do pull their own weight.

“It’s true that women do more work in the home, but overall men and women are doing the same, which is roughly eight hours per day,” Hakim told Reuters.

In fact, the study of how people use their time found that men in Britain spend slightly longer on “productive” work each day than women.

“Feminists are wrong to claim that men should do a larger share of the housework and childcare because on average, men and women already do the same number of hours of productive work,” Hakim said.

She said the data overturns the long-standing theory that women work a “double shift,” juggling a job with household chores, and working longer hours than their husbands.

The study, “(How) can social policy and fiscal policy recognize unpaid family work?,” used data from Europe-wide Time Use Surveys.

“Results were similar across Europe, except in the ex-socialist European countries, where there is less of a tradition of men chipping in,” Hakim said.

In Scandinavian countries, men were found to work more hours than women.

Hakim hopes to draw attention to the bias of government policy across Europe, which tends only to see paid jobs as real work and said there is evidence that men are beginning to demand the same options and choices as women, with more claims of sex discrimination from men.

“One-sided policies that support employment and careers but ignore the productive work done in the family are, in effect, endorsing market place values over family values,” she said.

“Policy-makers need to be aiming for gender-neutral policies.”

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6744A620100805?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a49:g43:r3:c0.126595:b36297710:z0

(Reuters) - Men wanting to catch the eye of women should dress in red, a color which new research shows makes them more alluring to the opposite sex.

Women in the United States, England, Germany and China said they found men pictured wearing red, or framed in red, more sexually attractive than in other colors, the research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology showed.

Andrew Elliot, an author of the study from the University of Rochester, said red was thought to be sexy color for women only.

“Our findings suggest that the link between red and sex also applies to men,” Elliot said. “For women, the color made a big difference.”

Despite cultural differences related to the color, the findings of women being attracted to men in red were consistent throughout the countries.

The research consisted of seven experiments, some split into two parts, each with a group of between 20 and 57 people aged 19 to 22 years old. Women participated in all the experiments, while men were included as a control group in one.

Women also associated red with higher status, a trend Elliot said is analogous with other primates.

“In chimpanzees, the highest-ranking male turns more red quite dramatically during a competition for primacy,” he explained. “It’s a clear status indicator. Females view that, and they go out of their way to mate with the highest ranking male available.”

The researchers suggested that for men wearing the color may trigger a change in behavior and that something as simple as wearing a red tie could give a more confident business presentation.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6744B120100805

“At present our lead theory is that many of these skeletons are those of Roman gladiators,” said Kurt Hunter-Mann of York Archaeological Trust, who is leading the excavations.

Forensic anthropologist at the University of Central Lancashire, Michael Wysocki, who examined the remains, called the find an internationally significant discovery.

“We don’t have any other potential gladiator cemeteries with this level of preservation anywhere else in the world,” he said.

Experts have puzzled over the human remains since the first group of skeletons were exhumed in 2003 in an area slated for a housing development just west of the city center.

Subsequent digs close to the site unearthed more skeletal remains, prompting various theories about their origin, including that they may have been victims of a 3rd century Roman political purge or executed criminals.

But the team of archaeologists leading the investigation say the fact most had been decapitated undermined the military connection, while ample grave goods found with the burials tended to rule out common villains.

Evidence that the cemetery had been used for over 200 years and that the bones dated from the late first century to the fourth also made the experts think again.

The breakthrough came when detailed forensic research showed bite marks and a number of bone injuries, healed and unhealed, that are consistent with gladiatorial combat.

“One of the most significant items of evidence is a large carnivore bite mark — probably inflicted by a lion, tiger or bear — an injury which must have been sustained in an arena context,” Hunter-Mann said.

The fact that most of the remains were from well-built young males with evidence of much stronger right-arm muscular development also supported the arena link.

Roman historical records describe slaves beginning their training as gladiators in their teenage years.

Wysocki said nothing like the deep bite marks had ever been identified before on a Roman skeleton.

“It would seem highly unlikely that this individual was attacked by a tiger as he was walking home from the pub in York 2000 years ago,” he said.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6564IV20100607