Everyone knows what it takes to make a baby, but is it possible to influence what sex the child will turn out to be? Many people believe you can, so let us give you some advice you may wish to try if you want increase those chances of a baby boy.

1. Step 1: Nature's Way

   It is important to understand how the sex of a child is decided by nature. All human beings have 46 chromosomes in 23 matching pairs, all of which are present in every cell in our body. The exception to this is the sex cells, sperm, and oocytes or eggs, as these contain only 23 single chromosomes. The 23rd chromosome in all oocytes is always an X chromosome. This way, any egg can become male or female depending on which sperm fertilizes it.
   This is because there are two types of sperm produced in equal amounts; one carrying a X chromosome, and one carrying a Y chromosome. If a Y-bearing sperm fertilizes the egg then the baby will be male, and if the X-bearing sperm is the first past the post the baby will be a female.

2. Step 2: Timing with ovulation

   The timing of intercourse in relation to ovulation is considered to be important factor due to X and Y chromosome carrying sperm having different characteristics. Y-bearing sperm are faster swimmers but have a shorter life-expectancy than X-bearing sperm so there's no point in having intercourse with 4-5 days to go until ovulation as it's likely that there'll only be X-bearing sperm left. Instead you need to be thinking about having intercourse as close to ovulation as possible really if you want a boy.
   There are a number of ovulation prediction kits available on the market that can help you to get as accurate a reading as possible.

3. Step 3: Depth of penetration

   Deeper penetration during intercourse is recommended when trying to conceive a boy. The average distance between the sperm and the egg is about 4 inches, which sounds like nothing, but if the sperm were the size of a salmon it would equate to a 43 mile trip!
   The closer the sperm are ejaculated to the cervix the better, so try intercourse in the missionary position or with the woman on all fours to give the Y-bearing sperm the best chance!
   The cervical fluid closer to the cervix is also less hostile towards Y-bearing sperm than that found at shallower penetration, increasing their chances of survival and the conception of a baby boy even further.

4. Step 4: Chinese Birth Chart

   Discovered over 700 years ago, the Chinese conception chart, or Chinese pregnancy calendar as it is sometimes known, is thought to predict whether you conceive a boy or girl. It works by cross-referencing the
   mother's age with the month when the moment of conception took place. So by pre-planning the time you want to conceive, you should be able to decide the gender of your baby, or in theory anyway.

5. Step 5: Dietary Supplements and Medications

   Although scientifically unproven as yet, it is believed that a woman's diet may be able to influence the eventual gender of a baby at conception. Being healthy and having a healthy diet is good for your general fertility anyway, but if the woman has a capsule of Evening Primrose oil per day and some Guaifensin tablets for the 5 days before ovulation it'll help them to produce better quality and thinner cervical mucus which favours Y-bearing sperm.

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An electric propulsion technology for miniature satellites aims to give them more mobility — and may eventually allow them to take on deep-space missions.

MIT reseachers' new thrusters could increase the number of CubeSats in orbit and expand the tasks they are able to complete.

Right now, 10 to 15 Rubik’s Cube-sized satellites are orbiting high above Earth. Known as cube satellites, or “CubeSats,” the devices help researchers conduct simple space observations and measure characteristics of Earth’s atmosphere. One advantage is that they are relatively cheap to deploy: While launching a rocket may cost between $50 million and $300 million, a CubeSat can “piggyback” onto a large rocket platform at an additional cost of as little as $40,000. But their small size also means they lack on-board propulsion systems, which is why they generally remain locked to a particular orbit.

That could soon change, however. Paulo Lozano, the H.N. Slater Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, is designing a tiny propulsion system that could allow the satellites, which weigh about a kilogram and are used for tasks that don’t require precise orbit control, to travel great distances and perform more serious tasks, such as searching for planets outside our solar system. The technology, which is based on the process of extracting and accelerating charged ions, or atoms that have gained or lost an electron, could make CubeSats much more useful for organizations or countries that until now have had limited access to space.

For decades, the only way to get objects into space from Earth — and then propel them through space — was to use chemical propulsion systems. But the systems require a lot of propellant, or fuel, and haven’t been miniaturized to the scale appropriate for a CubeSat. By changing the design from chemical to electric, and to one that relies on a simple power supply, Lozano has created a system that produces more efficient thrust — the force created when mass is accelerated in a certain direction — than that produced by a chemical-based system, which produces a low thrust per gram of propellant. About the size of a computer chip, the mini-thruster design also overcomes the size constraints of chemical propulsion and other forms of electric propulsion because it does not require a bulky chamber to burn (chemical) or extract ions from (electric) the propellant. Although other electric propulsion systems have been developed, Lozano’s is considered superior because it uses only one power supply.

With funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Lozano has been developing the technology to make the mini-thruster. The Air Force and other government agencies are interested in using CubeSats that can move between different orbits in space, and more specifically, that have the propulsion required to reenter Earth’s atmosphere and destroy themselves at the end of their mission (thereby keeping them from becoming “space junk”). The thruster design requires that the total volume of the propulsion system be less than 10 percent of the CubeSat.

“The goal is to have a space engine that leaves plenty of room for the payload, or cargo, of the CubeSat,” Lozano said. Certain missions require chemical propulsion, such as a trip to the moon, because in order to land on the moon’s surface, the amount of force from the engine must be at least equal to the weight of the lander, a value that Lozano said is generally “way too high” for electric propulsion engines. But chemical-based systems are severely limited by the fact that the vehicle mass must be made mostly of propellant, which leaves little room for the payload. Quite often the propellant must also be stored in a pressurized container with thick walls and pipes, further limiting the payload size. Although other electric propulsion systems exist, they require a pressurized container to store the propellant.

Vadim Khayms, a systems engineer at Lockheed Martin, explained that most electric propulsion systems haven’t been scaled to operate at very low power levels and are typically suitable for larger satellites that have more power available and require more thrust. He is not aware of another electric propulsion system designed for CubeSats. “You probably couldn’t use any other existing electric propulsion [systems] on these very small satellites,” Khayms said of Lozano’s design.

How the power system works

Lozano’s design relies on electrospraying, a physics process that uses electricity to extract positive and negative ions from a liquid salt that is created in a laboratory and serves as the system’s propellant. The liquid contains no solvent, such as water, and can be charged electrically with no heat involved. Whereas other electric propulsion systems charge the ions in a chamber on the satellite, the ionic liquid in Lozano’s design has already been charged on the ground, which is why his system doesn’t need a chamber.

Electricity is then converted from the main power source of the CubeSat, typically batteries or a solar panel, and applied to a tiny structure roughly the size of a postage stamp. This thin panel is made of about 1,000 porous metal structures that resemble needles and have several grams of the ionic liquid on them. By applying voltage to the needles, an electric field is created that extracts the ions from the liquid, accelerates them at very high speeds and forces them to fly away. This process creates an ionic force strong enough to produce thrust.

Whereas chemical rockets waste too much propellant to reach a net change in spacecraft velocity, electric thrusters can do exactly the same mission using just a small fraction of the propellant. The only difference is one of time: Although electric propulsion is very fuel efficient, it is slower due to power limitations.

“Eventually, you’ll run out of propellant, but that is the benefit of electric propulsion because it accelerates so fast that you don’t need a lot of it,” he said. “No other electric propulsion system would be so compact and efficient at the same time.”

Because the mini-thrusters are scalable, thousands of them could be built into long, thin panels to produce thrust for a much larger spacecraft that requires low, but steady, acceleration. “There’s no impediment to making a whole table of them similar to a solar panel,” Lozano said. “This gives you a lot more flexibility in what you can do.”

Lozano predicts that CubeSats using this technology will become a reality in less than three years. He plans to have a prototype of the mini-thruster in four to five months and hopes to begin testing it to measure performance metrics such as the velocity of the ions and their energy to figure out the force produced by the engine. Knowing this, researchers can estimate its efficiency. After Lozano delivers a prototype this year, his team will look for additional support to turn the design into a flight version.

Self doubt has been something I’ve struggled with all my life, from debating whether I could get into a top tier university to believing I could succeed as a writer. It’s a very human emotion, and it’s made worse for some people because of life experiences or temperament. Self doubt also makes you feel alone. Sometimes you think you’re the only person in the universe who suffers from a crisis of confidence, and you wish that you could be more like your successful, self-assured neighbor. Well, I guarantee that your neighbor doubts himself every now and then too.

You won’t ever be able to rid yourself of doubt entirely – believe me, I’ve tried. But I hope that these suggestions will lessen your pain when dark thoughts are all around you.

Go back in time: The first step to overcoming self doubt is to recognize that it’s there in the first place. Think about the circumstances that are leading you to feel insecure, and see if you notice any patterns. Are there particular situations (for example, dealing with a new boss, speaking in public) that prompt you to feel this way? Make a note of times in the past when you doubted yourself but ended up coming through with flying colors. Knowledge and recognition of your past successes will bolster your courage regarding what you can achieve in the future.

Defeat the doubtful thoughts: In one column, write a doubtful thought, and in the opposite column, write facts that dispute that doubtful thought. For instance, suppose you are afraid to invite a new colleague to lunch because you’re afraid you won’t have anything to talk about and she won’t like me. Statements that refute that thought might be: “We can spend at least an hour talking about the office culture here and what she did before this” and “She will like me because I’ve made a sincere overture to get to know her better.”

Keep an event journal: If you are a person who experiences a lot of self doubt, then it’s time for a test. In the course of a single day, write down all of the things – simple and complex – that you accomplished without a hitch. These can be things like “ran productive staff meeting” or “had great talk with Brandon over coffee.” Then, write down the things that didn’t go so well. You will inevitably notice that the list of things that went well far outweighs the list of things that didn’t, and this will hopefully allow you to see your doubt in a different light.

Call on your cheerleaders: Often, our loved ones can see our lives much more objectively than we can. Being a natural introvert, I sometimes doubt my interpersonal skills, and when someone doesn’t respond to me in the way that I expect, I occasionally get paranoid. It always helps to call one of my best friends so that she can assure me that I do in fact have a lot of wonderful relationships in my life.

Celebrate your successes: When a situation in which you doubted yourself turns out better than you expected, don’t just nod and smile and move immediately on to the next thing. Take a moment and reward yourself for a positive outcome. Do something you enjoy like going to your favorite restaurant or eating a delectable dessert. Taking the time to cement positive emotions in your mind will hopefully make the doubt disappear more quickly next time.



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Black children taught sex education are MORE likely to have intercourse younger, says study

2.3.10 - Children aged between 11 and 15 who were taught about safe sex were more likely to have sex in the following two years than those given a lesson on abstinence.

Children taught abstinence are more likely to delay having sex than those given lessons about contraception, a study has found.

Half of pupils whose classes focused on safe sex went on to have intercourse within two years - compared with only a third of those whose lessons encouraged them to say no until ready.

Last night the Government, which favours teaching about contraception, dismissed the research, insisting there was still 'no evidence' that abstinence education was effective.

The U.S. study looked at 662 black children aged 11 to 15, divided into four groups.

Each was given a different type of education - eight hour-long abstinence-only classes, lessons on safe sex, classes using both approaches or lessons on general health with no sex element.

Two years later, 33.5 per cent of abstinence-only students admitted having had sex, against 49 per cent of each of the other three groups.

Professor John Jemmott, who published the results in the journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, said the study showed that abstinence classes could be effective in curbing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

He said: 'Abstinence-only interventions may have an important role in delaying sexual activity until a time later in life when the adolescent is more prepared to handle to consequences of sex.'

The Department for Children, Schools and Families said: 'We want to give young people the facts .

'We encourage all young people to delay sexual activity and help them to deal with pressure to become sexually active before they are ready.'

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he spray, which is harmless to the environment, can be used to protect against disease, guard vineyards against fungal threats and coat the nose cones of high-speed trains, it has been claimed.

The versatile spray, which forms an easy-clean coating one millionth of a millimetre thick – 500 times thinner than a human hair – can be applied to virtually any surface to protect it against water, dirt, bacteria, heat and UV radiation.

It is hoped that liquid glass, a compound of almost pure silicon dioxide, could soon replace a variety of cleaning products which are harmful to the environment, leaving our world coated in an invisible, wipe-clean sheen.

The spray forms a water-resistant layer, meaning it can be cleaned using only water. Trials by food-processing companies showed that sterile surfaces covered with a film of liquid glass were equally clean after a rinse with hot water as after their usual treatment with strong bleach.

The patent for the technology is owned by a German company, Nanopool, which is in discussions with UK companies and the NHS about the use of liquid glass for a wide range of purposes.

Several organisations are said to be testing the product, including a train company in Britain, which is using liquid glass on both the interior and exterior of the train, a luxury hotel chain, a designer clothing company and a German branch of a hamburger chain.

Key to the product's versatility is the fact it can be sold in a solution of either alcohol or water, depending on what surface needs to be coated. The layer formed by the liquid glass is said to be flexible and breathable.

Neil McClelland, Nanopool's UK project manager, told The Independent: "Very soon almost every product you purchase will be protected with a highly durable, easy-to-clean coating ... the concept of spray-on glass is mind-boggling."

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A U.S. missile defense test failed Sunday when a long-range missile missed its target because of radar problems.

The Defense Department said a target missile was launched from an Army test site at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands at 7:40 p.m.

Six minutes later, a second missile was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, to find the first one and destroy it.

Both missiles flew successfully, but missed each other because of a problem in the sea-based X-band radar, the department's Missile Defense Agency said.

The X-band radar sits atop a modified floating oil platform and provides information about incoming missiles so military officials can launch a response.

"Both the target missile and ground-based interceptor performed nominally after launch. However, the sea-based X-band radar did not perform as expected," the agency said.

Officials intend to investigate the cause of the interception failure.

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Cheating on a spouse or significant other is sure to cause feelings of jealousy and hurt in the spurned partner.

But men and women differ on what part of cheating they think is the worst: Men tend to be more bothered by sexual infidelity, while most women are bothered more by emotional infidelity.

The prevailing explanation for this difference is the unique evolutionary roles played by men and women, but a new study suggests that it has more to do with the types of attachments people form in relationships.

The widespread evolutionary explanation posits that men rank sexual infidelity as the greater sin because over the eons they learned to be hyper-vigilant about sex, as they could never be absolutely certain that their children were actually theirs. Women, on the other hand, became more bothered by emotional infidelity, because they are concerned about having a partner to help raise their children.

A recent study found that men feel guiltier after a sexual discretion, while women feel guiltier after an emotional one.

The problem with the prevailing idea was that while men were more likely than women to rate sexual infidelity as worse than the emotional kind in studies, there was still a small subset of men who put emotional infidelity at the top of the list, said Kenneth Levy, a psychologist at Penn State.

This subset seemed to indicate that "there must be something else going on," Levy told LiveScience.

Attachment to others

Levy, who studies attachment in relationships, saw the results instead through the lens of his research and began to suspect that individual differences in how people view relationships could be affecting men's and women's views on infidelity.

Levy spoke of two types of attachment in relationships: dismissive and secure. A person with a dismissive attachment "doesn't see the value in relationships," he explained, describing them as "hyper-independent." Or, in other words, "most of us value our independence, but we also value our relationships. These individuals only value their independence, to the exclusion of relationships."

On the flip side, those with secure attachments see the value in relationships and are comfortable with the interdependency that comes with them, Levy said.

Levy thought those with a secure attachment style might be more likely to be bothered by emotional infidelity, while those with dismissive styles would see sexual infidelity as more of problem.

Sexual vs. emotional infidelity

To test this idea, Levy and his colleague Kristen Kelly had over 400 undergraduate students (about three-quarters were female) complete a standard assessment of attachment style in romantic relationships and also asked them which they would find more distressing - emotional or sexual infidelity.

The findings of their study, detailed in a recent issue of the journal Psychological Science, backed up Levy's hunch: Males with a dismissive style found sexual infidelity more bothersome, while men with a secure style rated emotional infidelity as worse. Somewhat unexpectedly, the same was found in females.

"So it seems to be that this concern about sexual infidelity seems to be tied to dismissiveness attachment whether you're a male or a female," Levy said.

While it would seem like those with dismissive attachment styles wouldn't care about either type of infidelity, Levy notes that this kind of attachment is defensive; dismissive types distance themselves from relationships too avoid deep-seeded feelings of vulnerability. Their concern over sexual infidelity shows a concern about their connections to others, but on an unemotional level, Levy said.

Levy suggests that this attachment model of jealousy could replace the standard evolutionary one, though it is itself rooted in evolution. Attachment is a mechanism that helps people become connected to other people - an important survival technique in human society. These attachments are learned from our earliest relationships, with our parents or other caregivers, and seem to carry on through life, as our most important relationships shift from our parents, to our friends, and finally to romantic relationships.

So it would seem that the attachment styles adults display in relationships were learned from early on, and not programmed in.

This understanding could point to ways of reducing feelings of sexual jealousy, "which research shows is tied to all sorts of maladaptive behaviors," by promoting secure attachment in children or exposing adults to the benefits of this kind of attachment, Levy said.

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Simplicity. How can we make things simpler, more streamlined, or more efficient? Is this all just hype or is there actually something to this simplicity thing?

Reducing complexity in my life has reduced stress, increased free time, and top priorities are actually top priorities. When we simplify as much as we can we are better able to slow down and enjoy each moment as opposed to rushing through it. Here are a few ways you can simplify the various aspects of your life:

1. Turn off your cell phone.

2. Process email only twice a day.

3. Go to bed early.

4. Get rid of (or at least reduce) commitments that you do out of obligation.

5. Create a weekly meal plan.

6. Automate your finances.

7. Purge as much unneeded clutter as possible.

8. Keep your paper shredder on top of your recycling bin.

9. Add items you want to a wish list as you think of them.

10. Get a label maker or write labels out by hand.

11. Set your clothes out for the next day the night before.

12. Make your lunch for the next day the night before.

13. Make time to catch up with an old friend.

14. Just say no.

15. Ask for experiences not things for your birthday and Christmas this year.

16. Tell the truth.

17. Keep your list of addresses and phone numbers up to date.

18. Consolidate debt.

19. Create an organizing system that works for you.

20. Keep a bag for garbage in your car.

21. Cary a notebook and pen with you where ever you go.

22. Unsubscribe from emails, newsletters or RSS feeds that don’t provide value anymore.

23. Apologize immediately when you realize you’ve done wrong.

24. Enjoy the present moment as much as you can.

25. Take time to really see the little things in life.

26. Reduce the amount of TV you watch.

27. Get outside.

28. Create morning, daytime, and evening routines.

29. Ask for help.

30. Do things at home as much as possible (eat, date nights, entertain etc.).

31. Don’t get caught up in other people’s drama.

32. Let go of the self-imposed need to be perfect.

33. Focus on a simple, but healthy, eating plan.

34. Share responsibilities.

35. Reduce your wardrobe to a few versatile items.

36. Be positive.

37. Start a gratitude journal.

38. Finish old tasks before taking on new ones.

39. For every new item that enters your home set two free.

40. Want what you have not what you don’t.

41. Revisit what you carry with you in your purse or wallet.

42. Focus on one thing at a time.

43. Store new garbage bags at the bottom of your garbage can.

There are countless ways to simplify your life, these are but a few. I’d love to know what you’ve done to move towards a simpler life for yourself. Please share your ideas in the comments.

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When Samuel Morse established the first commercial telegraph, in 1844, he dramatically changed our expectations about the pace of life. One of the first telegraph messages came from that year’s Democratic National Convention in Baltimore, where the delegates had picked Senator Silas Wright as their vice presidential nominee. The president of the convention telegraphed Wright in Washington, D.C., to see if he would accept. Wright immediately wired back: No. Incredulous that a message could fly almost instantly down a wire, the delegates adjourned and sent a flesh-and-blood committee by train to confirm Wright’s response—which was, of course, the same. From such beginnings came today’s high-speed, networked society.

Less famously but no less significantly, the telegraph also transformed the way we think about the pace of our inner life. Morse’s invention debuted just as researchers were starting to make sense of the nervous system, and telegraph wires were an inspiring model of how nerves might work. After all, nerves and telegraph wires were both long strands, and they both used electricity to transmit signals. Scientists knew that telegraph signals did not travel instantaneously; in one experiment, it took a set of dots and dashes a quarter of a second to travel 900 miles down a telegraph wire. Perhaps, the early brain investigators considered, it took time for nerves to send signals too. And perhaps we could even quantify that time.

The notion that the speed of thought could be measured, just like the density of a rock, was shocking. Yet that is exactly what scientists did. In 1850 German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz attached wires to a frog’s leg muscle so that when the muscle contracted it broke a circuit. He found that it took a tenth of a second for a signal to travel down the nerve to the muscle. In another experiment he applied a mild shock to people’s skin and had them gesture as soon as they felt it. It took time for signals to travel down human nerves, too. In fact, Helmholtz discovered it took longer for people to respond to a shock in the toe than to one at the base of the spine because the path to the brain was longer.

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Although thousands of American public schools have stopped offering foreign language instruction, one language is becoming more popular in schools across the country: Chinese. At the Yu Ying charter school in Washington, all classes for 200 students in prekindergarten through second grade are taught in Chinese and English on alternate days.

Rough calculations based on a government survey suggest that perhaps 1,600 American public and private schools are teaching Chinese, up from 300 or so a decade ago. And the numbers are growing fast.

Some schools are paying for Chinese classes on their own, but hundreds are getting help. The Chinese government is sending teachers from China to schools all over the world -- and paying part of their salaries. At a time of tight budgets, many schools are finding that offer too good to refuse.

The humble banana almost seems like a miracle of nature. Colourful, nutritious, and much cherished by children, monkeys and clowns, it has a favoured position in the planet’s fruitbowls. The banana is vitally important in many regions of the tropics, where different parts of the plant are used for clothing, paper and tableware, and where the fruit itself is an essential dietary staple. People across the globe appreciate the soft, nourishing flesh, the snack-sized portions, and the easy-peel covering that conveniently changes colour to indicate ripeness. Individual fruit—or fingers—sit comfortably in the human hand, readily detached from their close-packed companions. Indeed, the banana appears almost purpose-designed for efficient human consumption and distribution. It is difficult to conceive of a more fortuitous fruit.

The banana, however, is a freakish and fragile genetic mutant; one that has survived through the centuries due to the sustained application of selective breeding by diligent humans. Indeed, the “miraculous” banana is far from being a no-strings-attached gift from nature. Its cheerful appearance hides a fatal flaw— one that threatens its proud place in the grocery basket. The banana’s problem can be summed up in a single word: sex.

The banana plant is a hybrid, originating from the mismatched pairing of two South Asian wild plant species: Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana. Between these two products of nature, the former produces unpalatable fruit flesh, and the latter is far too seedy for enjoyable consumption. Nonetheless, these closely related plants occasionally cross-pollinate and spawn seedlings which grow into sterile, half-breed banana plants. Some ten thousand years ago, early human experimenters noted that some of these hybridized Musa bore unexpectedly tasty, seedless fruit with an unheard-of yellowness and inexplicably amusing shape. They also proved an excellent source of carbohydrates and other important nutrients.

A seed-packed wild musa (banana)Despite the hybrid’s unfortunate sexual impotence, shrewd would-be agriculturalists realised that the plants could be cultivated from suckering shoots and cuttings taken from the underground stem. The genetically identical progeny produced this way remained sterile, yet the new plant could be widely propagated with human help. An intensive and prolonged process of selective breeding—aided by the variety of hybrids and occasional random genetic mutations—eventually evolved the banana into its present familiar form. Arab traders carried these new wonderfruit to Africa, and Spanish conquistadors relayed them onwards to the Americas. Thus the tasty new banana was spared from an otherwise unavoidable evolutionary dead-end.

Today, bananas and their close relatives, the starchy plantains, grow in a number of different varieties or cultivars. Among temperate palates, the most familiar is the Cavendish, a shapely and sweet-tasting dessert banana. This is the banana found in the supermarkets, splits, and milkshakes of the developed world. It is exported on an industrial scale from commercial plantations in the tropics. Every Cavendish is genetically identical, possessing the same pleasant taste (which is somewhat lacking in more subtle flavours according to banana aficionados). They also all share the same potential for yellow curvaceousness and the same susceptibility to disease.

Although there are numerous other banana and plantain varieties cultivated for local consumption in Africa and Asia, none has the same worldwide appeal as the Cavendish. While these other varieties display more genetic variability, all come from the same sterile Musa hybrids which so delighted our forebears thousands of years ago. Likewise none of them have enjoyed the benefits of the frenzied gene-shuffling facilitated by sexual congress.

Stuck with the clunky, inefficient cloning of asexual reproduction, the sterile banana is at a serious disadvantage in the never-ending biological arms race between plant and pest. Indeed, it is a well-established fact that bananas are particularly prone to crop-consuming insects and diseases. A severe outbreak of banana disease could easily spread through the genetically uniform plantations, devastating economies and depriving our fruitbowls. Varieties grown for local consumption would also suffer, potentially causing mass starvation in tropical regions.

Banana bunches in protective isolation.This scenario may seem preposterous, but researchers all over the world are earnestly exploring the possibility. The custodians of the beloved banana are all too aware of the potential for a banana apocalypse— because it has already happened in the fruit’s past. And the next time could be much worse.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, most bananas on sale in the developed world belonged to the Gros Michel cultivar. These bananas were sweet and tasty and didn’t spoil too quickly, making them eminently suitable for commercial export. Old-timers contend that in flavour and convenience, the Gros Michel outshone even the current top-banana, the Cavendish. Yet from the early twentieth century, large plantations of ‘Big Mike’ proved increasingly fertile ground for a fungal leaf affliction known as Panama disease. Affected crops would soon deteriorate into rotting piles of unprofitable vegetation. As the century progressed, commercial growers found themselves in a desperate race against time, making doomed attempts to establish new plantations in disease-free areas of rainforest before the fungus arrived.

In the 1950s the Vietnamese Cavendish came to the rescue. Banana companies delayed switching from Big Mike for as long as possible due to the necessary changes in growing, storage, and ripening infrastructure, and many producers teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. As Big Mike started pushing up daisies, banana plantations frantically reconfigured, and by the mid 1960s the changeover was largely complete. The distinct—and now extinct—taste of Big Mike was quickly lost to the fickle public memory. Cavendish was king.

It has done a sterling job in the intervening years, yet now the Cavendish is starting to struggle in its own contest against contagion. In the 1970s a disease named Black Sigatoka was beaten back with enthusiastic applications of pesticide, but more recently a new strain of the original bane of the banana has threatened the plantations. Since 1992 a vigorous, pesticide-tolerant strain of Panama disease has been wiping out bananas—including previously resistant crops of Cavendish—in Southeast Asia. It has yet to reach the large commercial plantations in Latin America, but most banana-watchers believe that this is only a matter of time.

A navel orange and its underdeveloped siamese twinOpinions differ on how long the Cavendish can survive the new onslaught, and on the best way to tackle the threat. This time, unfortunately, there is no obvious back-up variety waiting in the wings. So far, banana science has provided scant few approaches for improving disease resistance. One method involves the traditional techniques of selective breeding: although banana plants are clones, very occasionally they can be persuaded to produce seeds through a painstaking process of hand pollination. Only one fruit in three hundred will produce a seed, and of these seeds only one in three will have the correct chromosomal configuration to allow germination. The seeds are laboriously extracted by straining tons of mashed fruit through fine meshes. Research stations in commercial banana growing countries, such as Honduras, engage large squads of banana sex workers for such tasks, and to screen the new plant varieties for favourable characteristics.

Another fruit subject to such human-assisted reproduction is the ubiquitous navel orange. It, too, was the result of a serendipitous mutation, this one from an orange tree in Brazil in the mid-1800s. Each orange on this particular tree was found to have a tiny, underdeveloped twin sharing its skin, causing a navel-like formation opposite the stem. These strange siamese citruses were much sweeter than the fruit of their parent trees, and delightfully seedless. Since the new tree was unable to reproduce naturally, caretakers amputated some of its limbs and grafted them onto other citrus trees to produce more of the desirable fruit. Even today navel oranges are produced through such botanical surgery, and all of the navel oranges everywhere are direct descendants—essentially genetic clones—of those from that original tree.

As for the Cavendish, its last best hope may lie in genetic modification (GM). The University of Leuven in Belgium is a world centre in banana research due to its colonial connections with Africa. Belgian banana scientists have become skilled in using DNA-transfer to introduce disease-resistance genes directly into the plant’s genome. These less labour-intensive methods promise a way to develop stronger, fitter, happier and more productive bananas.

In 2007, Ugandan field trials of the first Leuven uber-banana were announced, although public distaste of the idea of GM foods may impede its long term success. And in Honduras, researchers have developed a banana cultivar named ‘Goldfinger’ through traditional selective breeding methods. Although it has enjoyed some public acceptance in Australia, it suffers from the drawbacks of a distinctly different, non-Cavendish flavour, and a longer maturation time. If nothing else, these advances offer hope that science will one day overcome the unfortunate sexual inadequacies of the banana. Let us hope so, otherwise the resulting bananageddon will ensure that the Cavendish goes the way of Big Mike, and future generations of fruit lovers will have to find some other curved yellow food to complement their ice cream.

Deciding what to eat for dinner can be mind-bending. How do we keep track of the ever-evolving recommendations for what to put on, and leave off, the plate? Red meat might cause cancer! But don't replace it with tofu—soy concoctions might be carcinogenic, too! Don't even try to figure out where carbs stand this week. And the verdict on coffee, chocolate, and alcohol changes faster than you can order a mocha martini.

Vitamins—with their promise to bridge the gap between the nutrients our bodies need and those they get—have always seemed reassuringly simple: Just pop a multivitamin and let your body soak in those extra nutrients. But not any longer. During the past few years, study after study has raised doubts about what, if any, good vitamins actually do a body. They could even pose some real medical risks.

Half of all American adults take some sort of nutritional supplement. But research on a wide variety of patient populations and medical conditions has failed to find much evidence that multivitamins, the most commonly used of the lot, prevent major chronic diseases in healthy people. The most recent knock came this spring, when a study of more than 160,000 post-menopausal women, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that the all-in-one pills did not prevent cancer, heart attacks, or strokes and did not reduce overall mortality.

Individual vitamins and minerals haven't fared much better under scientific scrutiny, with research debunking some of the reputed benefits of vitamin B6, calcium, niacin, and others. In 2006, the National Institutes of Health convened an independent panel of experts to evaluate the evidence that vitamins could prevent chronic disease. The scientists ultimately issued a report stating that studies "do not provide strong evidence for beneficial health-related effects of supplements taken singly, in pairs, or in combinations."

The news on antioxidants, the darlings of the vitamin menagerie, is even more troubling. These compounds, which include vitamins A, C, and E, selenium, beta carotene, and folate, fight free radicals, unstable compounds thought to damage cells and contribute to aging. But not only do antioxidant supplements fail to protect against heart disease, stroke, and cancer; they actually increase the risk of death, according to a 2007 analysis of research on more than 232,000 people, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, as well as other studies.

Exactly why they might increase mortality is unclear, but doctors at prominent research institutions—including New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center—have highlighted some unsettling connections between supplemental antioxidants and an increased risk of a variety of cancers. Popping certain kinds of antioxidant pills can feed latent cancers growing in the body, for instance, and reduce the effectiveness of chemotherapy. These observations make a certain intuitive sense, since vitamins and minerals play an important role in the replication of healthy cells—why shouldn't they be doing the same for cancerous cells? (Feeding mice a diet poor in antioxidants, on the other hand, can actually help shrink their brain tumors.) Scientists are also beginning to suspect that the body may actually need free radicals—which help kill cancer cells, ensure optimal immune function, and regulate blood sugar, among other things—so we shouldn't necessarily be mopping them all up.
The list of worrisome findings goes on, but it doesn't seem to have put a dent in the $25 billion supplement industry. Sales are not only robust but rising in the United States. Doctors still recommend multivitamins as part of basic preventative care. Despite the demonstrated risk, as many as 80 percent of cancer survivors swallow a daily dose, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in 2008.

Vitamins have a powerful psychological hold over us. As precautionary health measures go, supplements are easy. Compare the two seconds required to swallow a pill with the constant vigilance necessary to exercise and eat right. And the fact that vitamins are available without a prescription makes them seem safe—even though it probably makes them less so, since they're not regulated by the FDA as drugs, and manufacturers are not required to prove that they're effective at treating disease.

But the risk-benefit calculus has changed. We know more about the risks, and it's clear that there's also less potential benefit. During the early 20th century, diseases like scurvy and rickets were common until researchers began to isolate compounds in food—which became known as vitamins—that could altogether cure these ailments. It must have been remarkable to see devastating diseases alleviated with common foodstuffs.

During an era when many people legitimately had nutritional deficiencies, placing your bets on a multi might have been reasonable. But today, of course, actual deficiencies are much less common. Our salt, milk, flour, juice, cereal, and more are all fortified with extra nutrients, and a 2009 study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine suggests that most of the kids who end up taking vitamins in the United States today don't actually need them.
If vitamins are useful for anything, it's probably for tapping into our old friend the placebo effect. In a 2008 survey, 38 percent of doctors confessed to recommending vitamins because they believed the pills could promote health purely through the power of positive expectations. Consider a famous 1975 study designed to probe whether vitamin C supplements alleviated colds better than a placebo, an inert lactose tablet. It turned out that it didn't matter much which pill the subjects were actually taking. What mattered was what they thought they were getting: Those who believed they were taking vitamin C had fewer and milder cases of the sniffles than those who believed they were just swallowing lactose. That would be reason enough to pop a supplement—there are worse things than deceiving yourself into better health—if it weren't for the emerging evidence that the pills might be capable of causing real harm.
That's not to say that vitamins aren't important. Vitamins are critical to all sorts of bodily functions, and we have to get them through diet because our bodies can't make them on their own. The Office of Dietary Supplements at the NIH recommends that we get certain levels of a variety of kinds of vitamins, and that recommendation is sound. But encouraging us to get a complete suite of vitamins is not the same as suggesting that we get them by popping a pill.
In fact, the reports littering the ODS site seem to converge upon the same point: There is some good news for supplements, but it's extremely limited. The 2006 NIH panel, for instance, concluded that postmenopausal women should probably take calcium and vitamin D to safeguard their bones; that pregnant women should keep taking folate; and that adults with age-related macular degeneration, an eye disease, should take a combination of antioxidants and zinc. But beyond that, the panel's strongest recommendation was that scientists conduct further research on the risks and benefits of vitamins. For every study that turns up disconcerting vitamin side effects, there seem to be two more that conclude that we simply don't know enough yet about supplements to make evidence-based recommendations.

Until we do, we should stop treating supplements like health candy and more like prescription meds, to be used only when there's a demonstrated need. Doctors should create individualized regimes, tailored to a particular patient's deficiencies. As for the rest of us, we can put the pills back on the shelf and save our cash for one of those martinis.

Correction, Jan. 8, 2010: This article originally and incorrectly stated that vitamin supplements are not regulated at all by the FDA. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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Deep in Microsoft's lairs, the Xbox 360 team is working on more than just a new video-game system. They're actually trying to solve an incredibly difficult problem in artificial intelligence. Their prototype Project Natal lets you control a game just with your body movements—no buttons or Wii-like wands—by watching you with a 3-D video camera. Sounds simple enough, but most cameras just snap images without having any idea what they're looking at. To make Natal work, Microsoft has to teach its camera to understand what it sees.

Here at CES, Microsoft announced last night that Natal will go on sale "by the holidays." Before the show, we were given an exclusive look at the smarts that make Natal tick.

For a closer look at how Natal learns, launch the gallery

The Brain

The part of Natal that players see looks like a webcam. (Microsoft's not divulging details about this hardware yet, presumably because the release is many months in the future, but we do know that it measures relative distances using a black-and-white camera sensor and an near-infrared beam.) But it's the software inside, which Microsoft casually refers to as “the brain,” that makes sense of the images captured by the camera. It's been programmed to analyze images, look for a basic human form, and identify about 30 essential parts, such as your head, torso, hips, knees, elbows, and thighs.

In programming this brain--a process that's still going on—Microsoft relies on an advancing field of artificial intelligence called machine learning. The premise is this: Feed the computer enough data—in this case, millions of images of people—and it can learn for itself how to understand it. That saves programmers the near-impossible task of coding rules that describe all the zillions of possible movements a body can make.

The process is a lot like a parent pointing to many different people's hands and saying "hand," until a baby gradually figures out what hands looks like, how they can move, and that, for instance, they don't vanish into thin air when they're momentarily out of sight.

How To Teach A Machine To See

Microsoft is currently training and improving the version of the brain that will ultimately go into the final product. How? By painstakingly gathering pictures of people in many different poses, and then running all this data through huge clusters of computers (as shown in the gallery) where the learning brain resides.

The process of gathering the data actually requires a lot of manual labor. First, reps went into homes around the world and recorded people moving in front of a specially built rig. The images captured are real people moving the way any ordinary person would. But those recordings can’t tell the computer anything useful about joints and limbs on their own, so programmers dive into the raw data and hand-code it to label each body part (at each frame!).

Microsoft also uses professionally staged motion-capture scenes, which provides similar data but without all the manual labor of coding by hand (since the systems use sensors that mark individual body parts). And Microsoft has a mini mo-cap studio of its own, where staff can make a quick recording when a new chunk of data is needed.

All of these marked-up images comprise tens of terabytes of information. Microsoft's computer farms sift through this huge data set, letting the brain come up with probabilities and statistics about the human form. Once the brain is done learning, it and its stats get packaged into the Natal system. An early version is now making the rounds of trade shows, and later, more-accurate versions will eventually show up in your living room. Next, read about how it applies its hard-earned knowledge to decipher your game-playing moves.

Inside Natal's Thought Process

What's the brain thinking as it watches you jump around, swinging imaginary bats or head-butting imaginary soccer balls? The above screenshot shows what's going on in it's head—the different images represent different stages of Natal's computational process. Here's the step-by-step:

Step 1: As you stand in front of the camera, it judges the distance to different points on your body. In the image on the far left, the dots show what it sees, a so-called "point cloud" representing a 3-D surface; a skeleton drawn there is simply a rudimentary guess. (The image on the top shows the image perceived by the color camera, which can be used like a webcam.)

Step 2: Then the brain guesses which parts of your body are which. It does this based on all of its experience with body poses—the experience described above. Depending on how similar your pose is to things it's seen before, Natal can be more or less confident of its guesses. In the color-coded person above [bottom center], the darkness, lightness, and size of different squares represent how certain Natal is that it knows what body-part that area belongs to. (For example, the three large red squares indicate that it’s highly probable that those parts are “left shoulder,” “left elbow” and “left knee"; as the pixels become smaller and muddier in color, such as the grayish pixels around the hands, that’s an indication that Natal is hedging its bets and isn’t very sure of its identity.)

Step 3: Then, based on the probabilities assigned to different areas, Natal comes up with all possible skeletons that could fit with those body parts. (This step isn't shown in the image above, but it looks similar to the stick-figure drawn on the left, except there are dozens of possible skeletons overlaid on each other.) It ultimately settles on the most probable one. Its reasoning here is partly based on its experience, and partly on more formal kinematics models that programmers added in.

Step 4: Once Natal has determined it has enough certainty about enough body parts to pick the most probable skeletal structure, it outputs that shape to a simplified 3D avatar [image at right]. That’s the final skeleton that will be skinned with clothes, hair, and other features and shown in the game.

Step 5: Then it does this all over again—30 times a second! As you move, the brain generates all possible skeletal structures at each frame, eventually deciding on, and outputting, the one that is most probable. This thought process takes just a few milliseconds, so there's plenty of time for the Xbox to take the info and use it to control the game.

(If you want to get into more details on the science, check out the machine-learning papers of Microsoft researcher Andrew Blake, on whose work Natal is partly based.

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The curator of an exhibit at the National Building Museum highlights case studies of community involvement in energy conservation

An architect by training, Susan Piedmont-Palladino is the curator of Green Community, a new exhibit at Washington, D.C.'s National Building Museum that showcases what communities around the world are doing to build a sustainable future. From public transportation to repurposing old buildings to taking advantage of natural resources, the localities selected by Piedmont-Palladino and her advisory team exemplify the forefront of the green movement. She discussed the exhibit with Smithsonian's Brian Wolly.

How did you select these communities?
That was probably the biggest issue, because we are covering a topic that so many cities, towns, homes are doing something about, and many are doing a lot. But we wanted to try and find some communities from geographic areas that had been underrepresented. The tendency is to look to the coasts and to Western Europe and maybe Asia and so we deliberately looked south to see what was going on in Latin America, looked into the interior of the country to see some stories that hadn't been told.

We were looking for good stories and clear stories that we could communicate with the public and we were also looking for such a wide range that anyone who came to the exhibit could find something that they recognized as a place that they might live. We think we covered everything from Masdar City [in the United Arab Emirates], which is the glamour project, the most forward-looking and most aspirational—it's also the least-proven because they've only just broken ground—all the way down to Stella, Missouri or Starkville, Mississippi, which are the tiniest grassroots efforts.

How is the exhibit itself an example of green building?
We realized to do this [exhibit], we needed to walk the walk that we were talking. We had all new LED lighting, which we got some funding for in a grant through the Home Depot foundation, which has really helped us to green our building. Most of the cases are made from eco-glass, which is recycled glass that then can be recycled once again. We used steel, because that has such a high recycled content, along with recycled carpet and cork.

One of the other decisions that we made, which always strikes museum professionals as rather curious, is we opened up the entire exhibition to natural light. We don't have any original works on paper, anything that needs protection from light. We wanted to remind visitors that they are in the city while they are in this other world of the exhibition space. The ambient light is natural daylight, and so the cases can be lit on very low levels.

What are some of the communities doing to harvest natural resources like wind, solar or hydropower?
Copenhagen has its wind farm that is so beautiful; from space you can see it via Google Earth. There's a damless hydropower [project] that's being tested in the East River, a way for New York to use the tidal power of the river without actually putting in any dams.

The community in Hawaii, Hali'imaile, Hawaii is looking at the orientation of their development for solar and wind purposes, and then looking at the design of each building in that community. In that sense, harvesting natural resources trickles down through the master plan all the way into the buildings.

What are some of the quickest ways that towns and cities can become more energy-efficient?
There's a wonderful quote by Auguste Rodin, the artist, "What takes time, time respects." Unfortunately, the best efforts are really long-term efforts: they have to do with changing land-use policies, investing in mass transit and public transportation, disincentives for all sorts of other behaviors.

But on the quick list? Looking at empty lots and unclaimed land, thinking about ways to encourage people to use community gardens and local agriculture. Those are things that are seasonal and get people thinking about their environment. There are also recycling programs; cities can upgrade their street lights—there are new designs for LED street lighting—and all sorts of ways that infrastructure in the cities can be adapted.

What can people do on their own to get engaged in their hometown's city plans?
I think that embedded in the show, the message is, "get active." That can be going to your city council meetings, joining one of the civic boards that oversees decisions. Sometimes people are mobilized to prevent things from happening. That's often what gets people active in the first place, preventing a building they don't want, preventing a building from being torn down. And that sense of empowerment and action hopefully keeps people engaged. In the end, active participation is the only way to make change. That sounds like politics, and I guess it is politics, but I guess that's where design and planning find themselves enmeshed in how public policy gets formulated and changed.

There's an education barrier too, to how these decisions are made.
Right, as in, "this is the world that's given." There is a sense of some nameless "they," a third person plural that made it all happen and that is keeping it going as it is. One of the messages that we wanted to get across with this exhibit is that you have to change that third person plural to a first person plural. There's no "they," it's a "we." The community is nothing other than the people that make it up. Green doesn't happen without the community.

Sometimes discussions of green building gets bogged down in stereotypes of hippies versus industry, as if this were just a recent debate. But many of the aspects of green communities are as old as civilization itself.
Hopefully the range of communities we've exhibited has managed to elide some of those distinctions. We've also included some historic examples: we talk about the urban design of Savannah way back in the 18th century, and then we show a photograph of the contemporary city and you can find the same squares and the same virtues. Same thing talking about Mendoza, Argentina, which found a beautiful way to manage its water supply and in the process made the city habitable in an otherwise extremely hot, dry environment.

With the economic recession, there may be a lot of resistance to investing in some of the initiatives showcased in the exhibit. What argument would you make to a state or city budget meeting about the need for green building?
Now is the time to go ahead and say, "look, we only have so much money, we can either make the hard choices that are going to see us through generations of doing things right. Or we're going to continue to do things wrong." And it's very hard to fix problems on the urban planning and infrastructure scale. If you do it wrong, you inherit that problem forever. Sprawl is one of those, all these decisions are with us for a long time. Ultimately, the green decisions are the decisions that are most frugal. They may seem expensive or inconvenient, but in the end it will actually save us the most in terms of capital resources and human capital.

I did an interview with [architect] Paolo Soleri for the Building Museum's magazine; he got a lifetime achievement award at the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Design Museum that year [in 2005]. I asked him when did he start thinking about these things, living differently, and his whole theory about Italy and we're known for being cheap."

I just thought that was a delightfully refreshing idea, it didn't really come from any lofty ideology; it came with a sense of frugality.