The iPhone, is there anything it can’t ruin? Modern gadgets such as the Blackberry and iPhone are ruining women’s sex lives because their husbands are too distracted in the bedroom. More than a quarter of women (28 per cent) claim that email and internet are disrupting their love lives, with hand-held devices particularly to blame.
We’ve all been there: You dropped your food on the ground. Did it land up, down? Can you just scrape off the top? How many hours have you lost trying to decide? “The 30-Second Rule, A Decision Tree” by Audrey Fukuman and Andy Wright.
Make one of these DIY Arc Reactors to wear to the midnight showing of Iron Man 2 tonight and you will be the envy of movie goers everywhere….or the biggest geek there.
A three volt battery pack may not be enough to power Iron Man’s armor, but it’s all the juice you need for this incredible home-made arc reactor. And if you don’t believe me, just check out the instruction manual.
Most people find it hard to hold their breath for more than a minute, so imagine the extreme self-control Stephane Mifsud mustered on 8 June last year when he held his breath for 11 minutes and 35 seconds, setting a new world record for stationary breath-holding, or “static apnoea”.
Competitors float face down in a chilled pool, not to stop them cheating but to induce the mammalian diving reflex: when your face is submerged in cold water, outer blood vessels constrict, directing blood away from the extremities and towards the heart and brain. Your heart rate slows, reducing the rate at which oxygen is pumped around the body. With training, experienced breath-holders can drop their heart rate by twice that of non-divers upon immersion in cold water.
So have we reached the breath-holding limit yet? Not at all, says physiologist Johan Andersson at Lund University in Sweden, who studies the effects of breath-holding in divers. “Elite breath-hold divers expect the limit to be extended to about 15 minutes before record-setting will level off.”