research – The Daily Opinion

Schools Put Girls Off Playing Sports

No, it’s not because they would much rather be making their man a sandwich in the kitchen, it’s because of their treatment at an early age. I think that all of us will remember those old-fashioned PE lessons where some old man/woman who obviously couldn’t teach would scream and yell things at the fat kids because they couldn’t bench press one of their peers over the banister of the stairs. And this is apparently what has put many girls off of sport.

The research carried out by Loughborough University measured the differences in attitudes to sport between girls and boys. The figures showed that around 60% of girls and boys aged eight did at least five hours of exercise each week.

However, for 14-year-old girls this had been halved down to 31%, whereas 50% of 14-year-old boys completed at least five hours of exercise a week. In other words, this means that girls are generally being put off sport by the time they reach the middle of their high school education.

Common complaints included things like many girls weren’t confident of their sporting ability in PE lessons, they didn’t like exercising in front of boys, and they felt that teachers generally didn’t pay attention to those with less sporting ability.

All of these things are valid complaints as we all know that those who are useless at the conventional sports, such as hockey and football, are going to be laughed at by their peers. This only leads to a lack of self-confidence and a reduction in their desire to continue with sports of any kind.

Let’s look at another complaint. They don’t like exercising in front of boys. In the past this wouldn’t be a problem as being a gentleman was more of the done thing. That doesn’t happen now because now you have sex-charged maniacs who think that it’s ok to sexually harass members of the female gender. I’m not talking about rape or anything physical, I’m talking about the verbal abuse and the other comments that girls all around the world, and of all ages, have to put up with on a near daily basis.

And finally, the fact that teachers generally won’t pay attention to those girls who are no good at sport is something that has persisted for generations. The only way many of these teachers can motivate those who are not interested is to scream at them, and that only pushes them further away. The solution to this problem is that you need to find teachers who can actually teach PE lessons, as screaming is the sign of a teacher who can’t teach without descending to the motivational techniques of the white supremacist who drives a vehicle to work which runs off the bodies and broken dreams of an African-American family.

Screaming teacher — WHICH PART OF NON-STOP 16 MILE RUN DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?!?!

As the research suggests, people need to accept that not everybody is interested in competitive sports. But it’s still important to remain as fit as possible, and this doesn’t have to come as a result of competitive sports. Walking, cycling, and dance classes are all perfectly valid forms of exercise.

Moving away from the main point, though, I will admit that the reduction in the number of people carrying out regular exercise is going to be partially down to the fact that our society isn’t one that encourages physical activity. Most of the technical advances of the last 30 years have been great, but they have also been simultaneously directing people towards doing less physically.

So all of this can’t be put at the feet of what happens in schools.

Are Genes Linked to Obesity?

Although people have long scoffed at those suffering from obesity who claim they are overweight because of their genes, there might be something to it after all. “How?”, you might be asking. Scientists have actually discovered how a faulty gene may lead to obesity.

The study in Nature Medicine was conducted on mice and discovered that the body’s traditional message of “Please…for the love of all that is holy…please put down the cake” can be blocked if the mutation is found in animals.

This message is blocked because the appetite hormones have been disrupted by the faulty gene. The Georgetown University Medical Center has said that they hope this will lead to new ways of controlling weight. But pseudo scientists like me believe that it will help disgustingly obese people claim that they ate their twelfth burger of the week because their genes made them that way.

In truth, there are many genes which are thought to have an impact on one’s weight, such as the neurotrophic factor gene (BDNF), which is derived from the brain. However, a lot of these studies have only been tested on animals like mice and rats which don’t have exactly the same genes as us. The human studies are still fairly thin so everything has to be taken with some scepticism.

The mice used were actually genetically modified to have the faulty genes, and it was shown that the mice spent most of their time eating. To put this into perspective because not many of us will have seen an obese mouse before, the mice consumed an additional 80% of food; so pretty much more than their own body weight, many times over.

Generally, the way a healthy body should work is that after a meal has been completed the hormones known as leptin and insulin should inform the brain that the body is full, but with the mutated gene the hormones in the blood were passing the message to the wrong part of the brain.

Professor Baoji Xu, who worked on the study, said that it’s because the neurons can’t communicate with each other so the leptin and the insulin can’t do their jobs correctly.

Ok, so far we have been very kind to overweight people because this may give them an excuse, but, just as God promised Moses a land flowing with milk and honey only to not let him in when he reached the border, it’s this writer’s sad duty to tell you that it’s a prominent disease in mice but not in humans. So this research is only going to be any good for treating overweight people by stimulating an increased amount of the hormone.

But, hey, maybe things like this will lead to a time where we don’t have to bother exercising to keep weight off anymore? A man can dream.

Hey, Fatty, Are You Going to Be Having Kids?

Scientists have discovered that it’s not just the excessive rolls of fat that mean fat people are less likely to find a woman to have kids with. Rather, it’s the saturated fat in food which is leading to lower sperm counts amongst men.

The Harvard Medical School in Boston carried out the experiment under the stewardship of Professor Jill Attaman. The study asked 99 men questions about their diet and analysed their sperm samples over four years.The results of the study showed that of the 99 men in the study, those with the highest fat intake had 43% less sperm than normal at the end of the study. And even more bad news showed that at the end of the study the concentration of the sperm, measured via number of sperm per unit volume of semen, was down by 38%.

The study, reported in the scientific journal Human Reproduction, revealed these results, but everyone involved in the study is saying that more research needs to be done before any conclusions can be made.The men who ate the most omega-3-rich foods had a conventional structure when it came to the shape of the sperm, but the important thing to take into account was that 71% of the 99 men were already overweight or obese anyway. So this could have had an impact on the sperm even before the study had begun.But like with many of these studies which seem to be appearing at the moment, they all seem to have used very small research groups. Is it because they couldn’t find more people to masturbate into a jar every so often for the next four years? If this is the case then they should either be promoting their cause more or paying their volunteers because 99 men where 71% are already obese is not a study that can be taken very seriously.If the study was designed to discover whether high levels of saturated fat caused a reduction of sperm in men or not then surely they should have used people who lived on relatively healthy diets. This would show comprehensively whether it reduced the number of sperm or not. But if they also wanted to know how much it was reduced by then they should have used an equal number of healthy and unhealthy people when it came to the study.

As for this writer’s own personal study on whether people who eat more saturated fat (by implication, fat people) will have a lower chance of conceiving a child or not then a conclusion has been found. To conceive a child you need a woman, and everybody knows that fat guys generally do finish last in this category.All I need is the warm, fatty embrace of these sausagey buns.

So science may not have discovered whether high levels of saturated fat actually do cause a reduction in the amount of sperm yet, but this writer’s study has definitely brought up some comprehensive results.

Do Children Who Snore Equal the Signs of a Little Bastard?

Why are some children just bad? This is a question which has followed society for hundreds and hundreds of years. And, despite the advances in science and technology, we still have no idea why some children who come from seemingly good homes have to act out on a consistent basis.

But a study which was published in the scientific journal Pediatrics believes there may be some visible signs involved. The study claims to have found a link between behavioural issues in children and sleep-disordered breathing; sleep-disordered breathing is defined as apnoea in this case.

The study was carried out at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and followed over 13,000 children from infancy through their early childhood.

The study originally found that 45% of this group remained free of any sleep-disordered breathing. 8% of children fell into a worst-case group, which involved children who had breathing problems which persisted after the ages of two and three; a group dubbed by the researchers involved in the project.

By age seven, the research team discovered that those with so-called sleep-disordered breathing were more likely to develop some form of behavioural or emotional disorder by age seven. These disorders included anything from ADHD disorder to anxiety and depression. This link was discovered because 13.5% of children had these kinds of symptoms, as opposed to only 8% of children who had no sleep-disordered breathing problems.

But here’s where the problems with this study arrive. The researchers admitted that they weren’t sure about whether any of these children actually had these disorders out rightly or not because the results are based off of questionnaires given to parents. Now isn’t that a reliable way to gain results? Obviously, it’s not which already leads to much scrutiny.

Ok, so they claimed that they accounted this link by using variables such as parental income, education, race, birth weight, and whether parents smoked. This is all well and good, but did it take into account how much a parent smoked or exactly how much the parent weighed? Of course it didn’t. So, these figures are already looking very sketchy already. And this is before we get into the fact that people who smoke already underestimate exactly how much they smoke.

Continuing on, the researchers went on to say that even with these variables they discovered that sleep-disordered breathing was the biggest factor involved as the researchers plucked out a figure which said that there was a 72% chance of behavioural or emotional symptoms in children at age seven.

Now, this seems like they just pulled this figure out of nothing because if 45% of children didn’t have any breathing problems whilst sleeping then that means 55% did. If 55% did and only 13.5% of these children had any of these behavioural or emotional issues by age seven then where is the 72% figure coming from? Luck?

And let’s look at the figures they gained from sleep-disordered children versus children who had no issues when it comes to any symptoms and issues when they got older. 13.5% and 8% are incredibly close to each other as a 4.5% difference in a study of 13,000 is marginal, to say the least. If another 13,000 study was conducted then would these figures necessarily be the same? I think not, but if they are then I would be surprised.

For now, this writer will be blaming bad parenting and poor discipline when a child decides that it would be funny to throw a brick at another child’s head.

Last Ice Age Didn’t Wipe Out All Vegetation After All?

In the last Ice Age it was thought that all of the existing vegetation at the time of the massive ice sheets had been wiped out by the freezing temperatures and excessive pressure caused by the sheets themselves. But scientists have shown that some vegetation did survive in Scandinavia, which challenges this long-held scientific “truth”.

Originally, modern Scandinavian trees were thought to have arrived when some of the southern species of tree migrated north after the ice age, which was about 9,000 years ago. However, research published in the Science Mag science journal has shown that some conifers survived the ice age by existing on large peaks above the ice or on islands and on the coast.

Professor Eske Willerslev of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen reported that the species survived in small pockets which the ice couldn’t touch, before spreading outwards after the ice melted. But how did they survive in the ice, how did they find the room and shelter needed to stay alive amongst the fraught surroundings?

The answer is nunataks. Nunataks are common in glacial regions and pop out of the ice like a tiny island. They don’t have any ice or snow within its structure, or on the edges of it, which makes them the perfect place for a plant to grow and survive.

To find these results, the researchers used the DNA of two types of modern plant and the composition of the plants in the sediments of lake-core samples; yes, this is incredibly complicated. But to explain it in English, they compared the DNA of the old and the DNA of the new to see how much they matched up. If they were the same, or incredibly similar, then that means they are probably the same species.

However, the only issue with this theory is that modern nunataks in Greenland don’t have any plants growing on them, so how could this have happened in the age of ice? Of course, this doesn’t attack the fact that they have discovered that certain species around today may have existed before the Ice Age, but it does attack their theory as to why.

On a side note, this is why we have to love science because something which has stood as fact for so long has now been challenged. It sure as hell beats other fields of study where most things tend to stay the same all the time.

What do you think about these new findings, and how do you think these plants survived the Ice Age?

Alcohol on the Big Screen Encourages Binge Drinking (apparently)

It was suggested in a US study, published in online journal BMJ Open, on the 21^st of February that actors who drink on the big screen are encouraging experimentation with alcohol amongst children.

The study says that the stars act as successful role models who encourage children to drink. The thinking goes that if a child looks at a famous actor and they are drinking heavily then it’s ok because they have already made themselves famous and they don’t look like they are suffering from health problems.

This study was unprecedented in the number of test subjects as it randomly selected more than 6,500 American children between the ages of 10 and 14 for a phone interview, and then another three additional interviews in the next two years. Obviously, they would have had an issue getting through to some children as their parents were too drunk to answer the phone at the time (hint hint).

The questions asked ranged from which movies they had seen, whether they currently drank or had drunk alcohol in the past, and whether they owned any merchandise which had any alcoholic brands attached to it. Of course, they were also asked about their school and home lives in general too.

The films used to compare the implied and actual consumption of alcohol by researchers were taken from films which had grossed at least $15,000,000 when the interviews had first started. After that the researchers then used the character’s implied and actual consumption and purchases of alcohol to find out the results.

The researchers found that youngsters, on average, had been exposed to roughly four to eight hours of viewing involving alcohol from the most popular films on the market. Other items of interest from the survey also showed that during the two year study, the number of respondents who admitted they had started drinking alcohol had risen from 11% at the start to 25% by the end of it.

Furthermore, the number of binge drinkers tripled from 4% to 13% by the end of the study; binge drinking, as outlined in this study, is having at least five drinks in a row.

Ok, these are startling figures as they do eclipse the figures gained from having bad parents, having lots of money, and a rebellious teen spirit. But can’t we see one fatal flaw in this experiment? How exactly do you isolate this one specific factor?

How are you going to isolate this one specific factor, which is alcohol in movies, without putting the kids in a room on their own? The answer is you can’t. So how can these figures really be that reliable? The answer is they can’t as they are also going to be exposed to a number of different factors at the same time; such as peer pressure, rebellion, and coming into money.

And let’s go further and make the point that a phone survey is just a phone survey. None of the test subjects were ever met in person so how can you be sure they are telling the truth? And when someone talks about alcohol we all know that people significantly underestimate how much they really drink, don’t we?

But let’s look at children. Children are always being told how bad it is to drink underage, which is against the law. So realistically how many of them are going to readily admit it? How do you know that some of the test subjects are not claiming they don’t drink when they really do? If they did this would further support the study’s conclusion, but it’s important just to bring up the point anyway.

Nonetheless, what we can expect from the findings of this study is that they will either slink away from the publix gaze into the darkness after a week or so or it will cause panic throughout America and parents will be covering their children’s eyes and protesting for the removal of all alcohol from films. Sooner or later we are going to end up living in a world where alcohol can’t be seen on TV, can’t be talked about on the radio, can’t have colourful packaging, and can only be drunk within the basement of one’s own home, when the child is at school.

So it’s either going to be a giant overreaction or completely ignored, what do you think?