Ice as mosquiteo bite reliever
Itching to scratch that itch? With the use of ice, you can scratch the itchy part of the skin with it’s smooth surface. The chill will numb the itch.

Ways to keep off Mosquitoes

• Mosquitoes are usually active during dusk and dawn so be sure to avoid being outside during these times.
• Empty all stagnant water in the area. Mosquitoes prefers stagnant water as ideal breeding ground and safe place for them to lay their eggs.
• If there’s a need to go outdoors, protect yourself from mosquito bites by wearing long sleeves, pants and socks. But if there’s a need to wear thin fabric clothing, be sure to spray yourself with insect repellant that contains DEET.
• For some reasons, alcoholic drink attracts mosquitoes. A Japanese study discovered that more mosquitoes are attracted to people who reported consumed about 12 ounces of beer.

Herbal Mosquito Repellant

Beautyberry Keeps Mosquitoes Away

People in the south has been using the Beautyberry as folk medicine to repel mosquitoes away. For years, the leaves of Beautyberry shrub has been used by crushing it and rubbed on the skin.

Other Herbal Oil Mosquito Repellant
The following oils have success in driving mosquitoes but unfortunately their odors makes the users hesitant in using it. If there’s a need to use such oils, make sure to dilute them to tame the offensive odor.

• Lemon eucalyptus oil
• Geranium oil and soybean oil
• Citronella
• Neem oil
• Clove oil
• Fennel

What to do when bitten:

• Always wash bites with soap and water
• Don’t scratch the bitten area to avoid infection
• Rub anti-itch lotions such as calamine lotion, antihistamine creams like benadryl and hydrocortisone creams.

Removing stingers:
Watch out for bee stings since they leave behind stingers that continues to pump venom. Check for the black spot on the affected area and remove the stinger by scraping it off with the edge of a credit card or solid flat object. When the area swells and turn reds, apply ice pack to control the swelling. To remedy the pain, an over-the-counter painkillers can help.

Spider Bites
Not all spider bites can give you super powers like what Peter Parker has, in fact it could be deadly. The Black widow spider is poisonous that it’s venom could be life threatening. You can identify the spider with it’s red hourglass shape on it’s back.

Often times you might not be aware what kind of spider that bit you. Wash the area immediately with soap area and water, apply icepack on the swelled area and seek immediate medical attention.

Tick Bites
Ticks are common in woods, bushes and grassy places. These insects attaches itself to the skin and feed until they’re full. If you find one attached to your skin, remove it immediately since most of them carry diseases.

How to remove Ticks

1. When removing a tick, don’t use your fingers, nail polish ore petroleum jelly. Use tweezers and position them so that the tick is right between the two tines. Close the tines to grasp the tick but not tight enough to squeeze or flatten it.
2. Pull the tick slowly upwards until the tick lets go. Keep the tick in a sealed container to have the tick examined for potential disease it carries in case there’s health department nearby.
3. Wash the bitten area with soap and water.

Warning signs of disease caused by insect bites

• Rapid heartbeat, confusion, faintness, difficulty in breathing, loss of consciousness, rapid swelling of bitten area.
• Fever, muscle aches, headaches,rash, swollen glands, shaking and convulsion caused after mosquito bite. Possible case of West Nile virus infection.
• Rash or Flu like symptoms such as headacke, body aches, fever, neck stiffness and chill. This could be symptoms of Lyme disease carried by ticks.

Insect bites home remedy

When there’s no available medicines for insect bites, you can make use of available solutions right in the kitchen. There are three common household products to soothe the pain.

Aspirin
The aspirin can soothe stings from wasp, hornets, bees, fire ants and yellow jacket. Instead of popping the pill in your mouth, you’ll apply the aspirin externally. Make sure the aspirin you get is not the enteric coated type. Just crush the table and add in few drops of water to make it into paste. Then apply the aspirin paste into the affected area and then cover it with bandage it to secure the paste into the area. This should give pain relief and lessens the inflammation.

Baking Soda
The acidic venom from the bee’s stinger lingers on even after being removed from the area. You’ll need an alkaline solution to neutralize the acid that gives burning sensation to the sting. Get some baking soda and mix it with water in a saucer to make it into a paste. Then rub the baking soda paste into the affected area. Leave the paste on for 15 minutes. The paste can also be used in other insect bites.

Meat Tenderizer
This may sound unconventional but it will work if the meat tenderizer contains papain (a natural enzyme from papaya). Make sure that there’s no other seasonings added. Just add water to the meat tenderizer to make a paste then you’re all set. Leave the paste on the affected area for up to 20 Minutes.

The body’s appendix has long been thought of as nothing more than a worthless evolutionary artifact, good for nothing save a potentially lethal case of inflammation.

Now researchers suggest the appendix is a lot more than a useless remnant. Not only was it recently proposed to actually possess a critical function, but scientists now find it appears in nature a lot more often than before thought. And it’s possible some of this organ’s ancient uses could be recruited by physicians to help the human body fight disease more effectively.

In a way, the idea that the appendix is an organ whose time has passed has itself become a concept whose time is over.

“Maybe it’s time to correct the textbooks,” said researcher William Parker, an immunologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. “Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a ‘vestigial organ.’”

Slimy sac

The vermiform appendix is a slimy dead-end sac that hangs between the small and large intestines. No less than Charles Darwin first suggested that the appendix was a vestigial organ from an ancestor that ate leaves, theorizing that it was the evolutionary remains of a larger structure, called a cecum, which once was used by now-extinct predecessors for digesting food.

“Everybody likely knows at least one person who had to get their appendix taken out – slightly more than 1 in 20 people do – and they see there are no ill effects, and this suggests that you don’t need it,” Parker said.

However, Parker and his colleagues recently suggested that the appendix still served as a vital safehouse where good bacteria could lie in wait until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea. Past studies had also found the appendix can help make, direct and train white blood cells.

Now, in the first investigation of the appendix over the ages, Parker explained they discovered that it has been around much longer than anyone had suspected, hinting that it plays a critical function.

“The appendix has been around for at least 80 million years, much longer than we would estimate if Darwin’s ideas about the appendix were correct,” Parker said.

Moreover, the appendix appears in nature much more often than previously acknowledged. It has evolved at least twice, once among Australian marsupials such as the wombat and another time among rats, lemmings, meadow voles, Cape dune mole-rats and other rodents, as well as humans and certain primates.

“When species are divided into groups called ‘families,’ we find that more than 70 percent of all primate and rodent groups contain species with an appendix,” Parker said.

Several living species, including several lemurs, certain rodents and the scaly-tailed flying squirrel, still have an appendix attached to a large cecum, which is used in digestion. Darwin had thought appendices appeared in only a small handful of animals.

“We’re not saying that Darwin’s idea of evolution is wrong – that would be absurd, as we’re using his ideas on evolution to do this work,” Parker told LiveScience. “It’s just that Darwin simply didn’t have the information we have now.”

He added, “If Darwin had been aware of the species that have an appendix attached to a large cecum, and if he had known about the widespread nature of the appendix, he probably would not have thought of the appendix as a vestige of evolution.”

What causes appendicitis?

Darwin was also not aware that appendicitis, or a potentially deadly inflammation of the appendix, is not due to a faulty appendix, but rather to cultural changes associated with industrialized society and improved sanitation, Parker said.

“Those changes left our immune systems with too little work and too much time their hands – a recipe for trouble,” he said. “Darwin had no way of knowing that the function of the appendix could be rendered obsolete by cultural changes that included widespread use of sewer systems and clean drinking water.”

Now that scientists are uncovering the normal function of the appendix, Parker notes a critical question to ask is whether anything can be done to prevent appendicitis. He suggests it might be possible to devise ways to incite our immune systems today in much the same manner that they were challenged back in the Stone Age.

“If modern medicine could figure out a way to do that, we would see far fewer cases of allergies, autoimmune disease, and appendicitis,” Parker said.

The scientists detailed their findings online August 12 in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

Source: Yahoo News

The possibilities are endless with this device, from delivering drugs to complicated microsurgery. That would greatly benefit those that suffers from arterial blockages.The sperm-like nanobot can even aid an invivo fertilization treatment by delivering the genetic material to the ovum.

REMOTE-CONTROLLED nano-devices that look like sperm but mimic the corkscrew motion of flagella may one day deliver drugs to where they are needed in the body.

Flagella are the structures some bacteria use to swim through water. Because water is syrupy at small scales, ordinary swimming motions don’t work well. “Picture trying to swim in a pool of asphalt on a hot summer’s day,” says Peer Fischer of The Rowland Institute at Harvard University. Instead, flagella use a corkscrew motion to drive Camera bacteria through the water.

The motion of flagella inspired Fischer and his colleague Ambarish Ghosh to create their nanopropellers. Made of glass, each has a spherical head 200 to 300 nanometres across and a corkscrew-shaped tail 1 to 2 micrometres long – less than one-tenth the length of a human sperm.

To make their propellers, Ghosh and Fischer covered a silicon wafer with glass beads, before depositing a vapour of silicon dioxide onto them. While doing so they spun the wafer, causing the silicon dioxide to form corkscrew-shaped tails on each bead. Finally, once the silicon dioxide had solidified they covered one side of the nanopropellers with cobalt.

Cobalt is magnetic, so when an external magnetic field is applied the propellers line up with the field. By making the field rotate, Ghosh and Fischer were able to make the propellers rotate with it, corkscrewing through the water at up to 40 micrometres per second (Nano Letters, DOI: 10.1021/nl900186w).

The nanopropellers can also be steered precisely. “We control the coils that give rise to the magnetic field,” says Fischer. “By changing the magnetic field in three dimensions we can steer and propel the propellers.” The team were able to get a single nanopropeller to trace out various characters, including an “R” and an “@”.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227096.000-spermlike-nanopropeller-is-smallest-swimmer-ever.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Foods that triggers Bad Breath

• Garlic
• Pungent Cheese
• Spicy foods
• High Protein diet such as meat and eggs
• Onions
• Fatty Foods

Herbal Breath Fresheners
Chew on these herbal herbs to get rid of bad breath

• Parsley
• Dill
• Guava peels
• Mint
• Oregano
• Anise Seeds
• Cinnamon
• Filbers
• Fennel seeds

Yogurt to blast off Bad Breath
You may not be aware of it but Yogurt can also combat bad breath because of it’s probiotics property. Eating 6 ounces of yogurt everyday can combat the pesky bad breath in six weeks. Just make sure you get the sugar-free yogurt.