Friday, April 22, 2016

Does Marijuana Make You Stupid?




Man smoking marijuana cigarette soft drug in Amsterdam, Netherlands.




The stereotype of an avid marijuana smoker is not flattering: slow, unmotivated, a little bit dulled by all that weed. But the science to back up this stereotype is far from clear.
Research is mixed as to whether marijuana causes declines in intelligence and functioning over time. Animal studies and some brain scans in humans provide reason for concern: Marijuana is psychoactive, and may cause structural brain changes. In people, weed's cognitive effects seem to last at least several weeks after use, long after the person stops feeling intoxicated. But only a few studies have revealed insight into whether pot lowers IQ in the long term, and those studies have returned conflicting results.

Hazy Research
The recreational use of marijuana is now legal in four states (Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington) and the District of Columbia. Many other states have decriminalized the drug, and some also allow the use of medical marijuana. And a 2013 Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Americans support marijuana legalization, up from a mere 12 percent in 1969. In other words, the drug has never been more mainstream.
Despite the loosened regulations, however, marijuana research has lagged. Much of the reason has to do with the difficulty of getting marijuana for study, said Nick Jackson, a statistician at the University of Southern California and a co-author of one of the few longitudinal studies (which follow people over time) on marijuana use. In fact, there has been about three times more animal research on cocaine than on marijuana.
"You didn't need to jump through the same number of hoops to get cocaine to test on your animals as you do to get marijuana," Jackson told Live Science. The National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Drug Enforcement Administration contract with only one lab (at the University of Mississippi) to make marijuana available to researchers.
The Food and Drug Administration recently relaxed its rules for approving marijuana research, Jackson said. "Things are changing slowly but surely," he told Live Science. "But our research in this area is far behind where it needs to be." [The Drug Talk: 7 New Tips for Today's Parents]
That's why the answer to the question, "Does pot make people stupid?" is more complicated than it might seem.
Animal studies suggest that pot is not necessarily great for the brain. Rats exposed to marijuana's active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), experience brain changes and cognitive impairment. And short-term studies with human subjects clearly point to impacts on memory, learning and attention even once a user has sobered up. One 1996 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, found that daily marijuana users did more poorly on tests of attention and executive function (such as planning and self-control) than people who'd smoked pot only once the month before, even though both groups abstained for at least 19 hours before the testing. The drug's effects may persist at least 20 days after smoking, according to a2011 review on the topic.
But the burning question is whether pot hurts the brain in the long run. Does smoking the occasional joint as a teenager mess up your cognitive abilities for life? What if you pick up a pot habit as an adult, after the brain has completed its adolescent growth spurt? Does the dose make a difference?
Here, the answers are a lot fuzzier. Brain-scan studies in humans suggest that pot may be linked to anatomical brain changes, such as shrinking of the amygdala, a brain region that processes emotion, reward and fear. In some people with genetic vulnerability, such brain changes might be enough to tip someone into schizophrenia, which is more common in people who have used marijuana. However, the genes in question may lead people to smoke more pot and to be more prone to schizophrenia, rather than directly causing the link between pot and psychosis.
And that's the problem with trying to tease out pot's effects: People who use the drug are likely different from people who don't. Thus, studies comparing smokers with nonsmokers at a moment in time are of limited use: Maybe pot caused the cognitive effects you might find, or maybe some other factor explains the difference. 

Looking long-term
To truly tease out the effect of marijuana alone, researchers have to follow people over time, ideally gathering information about their cognition and intelligence before they began using pot. Only a handful of studies have done this so far.
The first, published in the journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology in 2005, found that being a current regular user of marijuana led to deficits in memory, IQ, processing speed and memory, but people who had used the drug in the past but had since stopped did not show long-term effects three months after quitting. However, that study followed 113 teenagers who used marijuana for an average of only two years.
A bigger, longer-term study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August 2012, did not bode well for pot connoisseurs. Researchers followed 1,037 New Zealanders from birth to age 38, assessing their cognitive function at age 13 (before any participants had started using cannabis) and again at age 38. Participants reported their cannabis use at age 18, 21, 26, 32 and 38, giving researchers an opportunity to determine whether cognitive effects differed depending on when a person started using marijuana and how long he or she continued to use it.
That study found global declines in cognition, including an average drop in IQ of about 6 points in people who had used marijuana. The biggest effects were seen in persistent users — people who reported having consumed marijuana in at least three interviews between the ages of 18 and 38. Notably, the deficits were not found in people who started using marijuana as adults, but were strong in people who took up the habit as teens. The researchers also had participants' close friends or family members fill out questionnaires on the participants' daily functioning, and found that those who had used marijuana were worse off than those who had not.
"Marijuana is not harmless, particularly for adolescents," study researcher Madeline Meier, now a psychology professor at Arizona State University, concluded in a statement sent to Live Science. [10 Facts Every Parent Should Know About Their Teen's Brain]
Not all of the longitudinal data agrees, however. For a study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology in January 2016, researchers followed 2,235 British teenagers, about a quarter of whom had tried pot at least once by age 15. The researchers found no link between cumulative marijuana exposure at age 15 and IQ or educational performance at age 16.
The study was based on a short time frame, but even longer-lasting investigations returned conflicting results. In February 2016, researchers published the results of a study following marijuana users and nonusers into middle age. They analyzed the verbal memory, processing speed and executive function (planning abilities and self-control) in 3,385 participants in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study. About 84 percent (2,852) had used marijuana at some point, but only 11 percent (392) had used it in middle age. The study showed that after the researchers accounted for other factors that could have affected the results, such as other drug use and demographics, cumulative pot use was linked to worse verbal memory. For every five years of marijuana use, a person would remember one less word, on average, from a list of 15 they were asked to memorize. However, no declines in executive function or processing speed were found.
Turning to twins
Although all of these studies controlled for factors that might influence cognition — demographics, other drug use, education — those statistics aren't an exact science. Jackson, along with University of Minnesota Twin Cities researcher Joshua Isen, came up with a way to control the comparison.
The researchers were working with two data sets of more than 3,000 identical twins, meaning they had the same genetic makeup and the same home environment. The pairs of twins had undergone intelligence testing between the ages of 9 and 12 (before using marijuana), and between the ages of 17 and 20 (after some had started using the drug). By comparing marijuana users with their non-using twins, the researchers were able to control for the home and environmental factors that aren't necessarily captured in traditional statistical adjustments.
The analysis revealed that, overall, marijuana users were indeed cognitively worse off than nonusers in late adolescence. But the users were also worse off before they started using pot. And when researchers compared the pot users to their own non-using twins, they found that the sibling pairs ended up in the same place, cognitively speaking. Thus, it wasn't the pot use that was causing the differences between the group of pot users and non-users. It was some unexplored factor that affected both twins, whether they smoked pot or not.
"We believe that what we're looking at has something to do with the common environment that these twins share, something about their family environment or peer environment or school environment," Jackson said.
That does not mean that marijuana is harmless, Jackson said. Animal studies do show physiological effects of the drug, and it's likely that something similar is going on in the human brain. But it's not clear how strong the effects are, he said — if an animal exposed to pot runs a maze a few seconds more slowly, how does that translate to points on the human intelligence scale?
Jackson and Isen's research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academyof Science in February 2016, suggests that whatever marijuana's impacts are, they're dwarfed by the environmental factors that caused the pot use in the first place. Jackson said he suspects the results conflict with the 2012 study in New Zealand because in that study, researchers were following heavier users over the longer term, so the results reflect the problems those users had in childhood rather than problems caused by the pot use itself.
"I think the real question ends up being for kids, 'Should I be more concerned about how marijuana is affecting their brain, or should I be more concerned about what are the things that have led that person to seek refuge in marijuana?'" Jackson said. "What is going on in that 14-year-old's home life?"
Nevertheless, the research in this area is too nascent to draw firm conclusions about whether marijuana use is safe over time, all other things being equal. The National Institutes of Health announced last year that it is launching a longitudinal study of 10,000 children to track the effects of substance abuse, including marijuana exposure, over time. The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study will use neuropsychological testing, as well as brain imaging, to delve into these questions.
The answers are likely to be complicated by ever-changeable factors, such as the strength of marijuana being cultivated, Jackson said. Modern weed has been bred to be higher in THC than strains smoked in previous decades, and those concentrations could matter to the brain.
"I think it's going to be a very long time until we know," Jackson said.

Sci-Tech Visionaries Gather for 'Future Is Here' Festival

12 INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT NEPAL


1) Nepal opened it’s borders to the world in the 1950s and 2011 is Nepal Tourism Year!  So make this year count and join the celebration!
2)    People in Nepal do not greet one another with a handshake, but rather put their palms together and bow their forehead and say Namaste (directly translated as “I salute the God in you”).  This is the same greeting used throughout India.
A little girl on the Everest Base Camp Trek saying ‘Namaste’ to us.
3)    A popular and cheap ‘fast food’ is the Momo. Delicious dumplings made from flour and water filled with different fillings like chicken, meat or vegetables either fried or steamed and served with a dipping sauce.  My favorites were the yak-meat filled ones at the Yak CafĂ© in Kathmandu.
4)    Nepal is home to one of the few places on earth where you can see both the Bengal tiger and the one-horned rhinoceros.  We were lucky to see 3 rhinos on our safari!
5)    The Annapurna region was voted one of the top 10 best trekkingplaces on earth.  The trek to Poon Hill is a moderate 5-day trek with views that will blow you away!
6)    Everest in the Nepali language is Sagarmatha which means goddess of the sky and it stands at a staggering 8,848 metres (29,029 ft) above sea level.
 7)    Bob Seger wrote a song called Kathmandu in 1975.  He wrote it at a time when he wanted to disappear from the record business, media and touring. Kathmandu represented a far way land where no one would be able to find you.
8)    Little Princes written by Conor Grennan is about child trafficking in Nepal and spawned the NGO Next Generation Nepal which reunites children and their families and aids rural communities.  A must read and a portion of the proceeds from every book go directly to the cause!
9)    The Sherpas are an ethnic group from mostly the eastern mountainous part of Nepal.  Many are employed as porters for mountain expeditions as they do not suffer the effect of altitude and due to their genetics and upbringing.  Many groups refer to their porters as Sherpas.
A Sherpa carrying a heavy load
10)  Nepal is the birthplace for the Lord Buddha.  Lumbini and a pilgrimage for many devout Buddhists.
11)  Nepal has the densest concentration of World Heritage Sites. Kathmandu valley alone has 7 World Heritage Cultural sites within a radius of 15 kilometers.
12) The Nepali flag is the only nation with non-quadrilateral flag.The two triangles symbolize the Himalaya Mountains and represent the two major religions, Hinduism and Buddhism.    

Thursday, April 21, 2016

WOndershare Filmora Serial Key

Wondershare Video Editor 3.5.0

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Saturday, April 9, 2016

The 5 Most Weight Loss Friendly Foods on The Planet

1. Whole Eggs

Once feared for being high in cholesterol, whole eggs have been making a comeback.
New studies show that they don’t adversely affect blood cholesterol and don’t cause heart attacks (12).
What’s more… they are among the best foods you can eat if you need to lose weight.
They’re high in protein, healthy fats, and can make you feel full with a very low amount of calories.
One study of 30 overweight women showed that eating eggs for breakfast, instead of bagels, increased satiety and made them eat less for the next 36 hours (3).
Another 8 week study found that eggs for breakfast increased weight loss on a calorie restricted diet compared to bagels (4).
Eggs are also incredibly nutrient dense and can help you get all the nutrients you need on a calorie restricted diet. Almost all the nutrients are found in the yolks.

2. Leafy Greens

Kale
Leafy greens include kale, spinach, collards, swiss chards and a few others.
They have several properties that make them perfect for a weight loss diet.
They are low in both calories and carbohydrates, but loaded with fiber.
Eating leafy greens is a great way to increase the volume of your meals, without increasing the calories. Numerous studies show that meals and diets with a low energy density make people eat fewer calories overall (5).
Leafy greens are also incredibly nutritious and very high in all sorts of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. This includes calcium, which has been shown to aid fat burning in some studies (6).

3. Salmon

Oily fish like salmon is incredibly healthy.
It is also very satisfying, keeping you full for many hours with relatively few calories.
Young Girl with Salmon
Salmon is loaded with high quality protein, healthy fats and also contains all sorts of important nutrients.
Fish, and seafood in general, supplies a significant amount of iodine.
This nutrient is necessary for proper function of the thyroid, which is important to keep the metabolism running optimally (7).
Studies show that a huge number of people in the world aren’t getting all the iodine they need (8).
Salmon is also loaded with Omega-3 fatty acids, which have been shown to help reduce inflammation, which is known to play a major role in obesity and metabolic disease (910).
Mackerel, trout, sardines, herring and other types of oily fish are also excellent.

4. Cruciferous Vegetables

Broccoli
Cruciferous vegetables include broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and brussels sprouts.
Like other vegetables, they are high in fiber and tend to be incredibly fulfilling.
What’s more… these types of veggies also tend to contain decent amounts of protein.
They’re not as high in protein as animal foods or legumes, but they’re high compared to most vegetables.
A combination of protein, fiber and low energy density makes cruciferous vegetables the perfect foods to include in your meals if you need to lose weight.
They are also highly nutritious, and contain cancer fighting substances (11).

5. Lean Beef and Chicken Breast

Meat has been unfairly demonized.
It has been blamed for all sorts of health problems, despite no good evidence to back it up.
Although processed meat is unhealthy, studies show that unprocessed red meat does NOT raise the risk of heart disease or diabetes (1213).
According to two big review studies, red meat has only a very weak correlation with cancer in men, and no correlation at all in women (1415).
The truth is… meat is a weight loss friendly food, because it’s high in protein.
Protein is the most fulfilling nutrient, by far, and eating a high protein diet can make you burn up to 80 to 100 more calories per day (161718).
Studies have shown that increasing your protein intake to 25-30% of calories can cut cravings by 60%, reduce desire for late-night snacking by half, and cause weight loss of almost a pound per week… just by adding protein to the diet (1920).
If you’re on a low-carb diet, then feel free to eat fatty meats. But if you’re on a moderate- to high carbohydrate diet, then choosing lean meats may be more appropriate.

Top 10 Movies of 2015

here goes the list

1. Mad Max: Fury Road 
       

2. Inside Out

3. Star Wars: The Force Awakens

4. Spotlight

5. Carol

6. The Martian

7. The Revenant

8. Room

9. Ex Machina

10. Tangerine