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26/06/2020

26/06/2020

Dreams . . . Why Do Some Come True?

Can one’s dreams foresee the future?

It's a question that has captivated cultures for as long as history has been recorded. Many attribute the predictive power of dreams to spirituality and divine intervention. Yet, regardless of the faith of any individual who enters the dream state, there are numerous instances in which dreams actually do come true in ways that were not anticipated. Most prophetic dreams do not bear spiritually significant meaning and hold no link to life-changing events.

Researchers have found that the brain’s activity during sleep may explain the capacity of dreams to foretell the future.

The science behind predictive dreams
There are frequent stories of people who explain that they had dreams unexpectedly came true. There are several possible explanations.

Some experts suggest that dreams may include events that a person has not necessarily thought through while awake. After dreaming of something, such as passing or failing a test, a student might begin to believe in the probability of either outcome. In this example, a student’s behavior might change: he or she may study more or less for the test after the dream. This can happen because the dream may be considered a reflection of the most likely outcome, which becomes very life-like and powerful in the dream state. The power of dreams, however, only applies to outcomes that can be at least partially controlled by a person who knew of the dream.

However, some dreams come true without any intervention or “post-dream” action that could have been controlled by the dreamer or anyone who knew the content of the dream. Evidence points to the idea that dreams can also be a synthesis of a person’s conscious and subconscious memories—a synthesis of real clues that make it easier to accurately anticipate the probability of certain outcomes. This theory also suggests that obvious clues may not be considered important until all the facts are pooled. Sometimes this occurs during sleep.

Dream anatomy and function
REM sleep is dependent on intact structure and function of several areas of the brain. One study showed that patients who had suffered from bilateral lesions of the ventromesial region or the parieto-temporo-occipital junction lost the ability to dream during sleep.1,2

And a few studies point to pattern recognition as a component of REM sleep. This suggests that there may be some linking of events that occurs during the dream state that does not always occur when awake. . . essentially putting concrete signs that are collected during waking hours together to form a reasonable deduction about their implications.

26/06/2020

18/06/2020

Feeling Stressed? Grab a Banana or an Avocado to Relax Your Mind

It is normal to feel stressed. In fact, it can sometimes be useful as it motivates you to push yourself harder. However, if you don’t handle your stress the right way, it will affect your mental and physical health.

Causes of Stress
Each person has a different stress trigger. According to a survey, 40% of US workers say that work is their main source of stress. However, there are also those whose stress comes from the inside. Constant worrying is detrimental to your health, too.

What Happens When Stressed
When you are under stress, your nervous system automatically releases catecholamines. Catecholamines are hormones that trigger the “fight or flight” response. That’s why when you are in a stressful situation, your breathing gets faster, your heart beats faster, you sweat, and your muscles become tense. These are temporary responses, as your body will calm down again eventually.

If you feel stress symptoms for more than a week, then you are already suffering from chronic stress. This leads to a more serious health problem as the stress hormones will tire your body.

Eating Fruits as a Way to Relax the Mind
There are many things that you can do when you feel the first signs of stress. You can take medicine or exercise deep breathing. However, do you know that eating fruits will also lower the severity of stress symptoms?

A piece of banana and avocado will help you calm down in an instant! How?

Bananas and avocados are rich in vitamin B-6. You probably know that each B vitamin has a specific function in the human body. It ranges from supporting DNA repair to blood production. There are also some B vitamins that aid in energy production, which, in turn, supports body systems that are needed to respond to stress.

Vitamins B6, in particular, helps in keeping your nervous system healthy. When it is healthy, it fights symptoms of stress better.

So, the next time you start getting stressed, you can do the following:

1. Dip a banana in chocolate.
Bananas do not only have vitamin B6. They are also rich in amino acid tryptophan, which can be converted to serotonin when inside the body. Serotonin promotes anxiety relief and relaxation.

When you pair this healthy fruit with sweet chocolate, your snack will be twice as effective. Chocolates are also found to have positive neurological effects that help reduce stress.

2. Make an avocado sandwich.
This is another mood-boosting snack that you can prepare in an instant. Aside from vitamin B6, avocado also contains tyrosine, which helps produce dopamine. Dopamine is the hormone frequently associated with happiness.

To make an avocado sandwich, you only need sliced avocado, two slices of bread, tomato, eggs, and cheese. You can add more to the mix if you want.

Conclusion
There are many ways to reduce stress. Among all the choices you have, you might find that grabbing a delicious snack is one of the best.

15/06/2020

How To Pick The Best Apples Using Those Little Stickers

Although you may think that all apples you see in the supermarket are the same, they fall into different types of categories. While most people aren’t that particular with the apples that they buy, some people only want organic apples and the like. The good news here is that there is a way to differentiate the various types of apples that you can in the supermarket.

How do you do that?

Well, you just need to look at the stickers on the apples. All you need to do is understand what the stickers mean, and you’ll have no problem with your apples. We’re going to teach you how to do just that.

So, here’s how it works. All of the apples that are in the supermarket have a sticker with a PLU code or a price lookup number. This PLU number is used to signify whether the fruit is conventionally grown, genetically grown, or purely organic.

The conventionally grown ones have four numbers on their stickers. For instance, if you happen to see an apple with a sticker number like 4102, it means that they’ve been conventionally grown.

So, what does conventionally grown mean? Well, it simply means growing edible food with some kind of synthetic materials such as fertilizers, antibiotics, and hormones.

If ever you see a five number code that starts with the number 8, then what you’re about to buy is a genetically modified apple. For instance, this type of apple will have code 84112.

What are the types of apples? Well, these are the apples that have been modified, so that they have certain features that regular apples don’t. For example, some apples do not turn brown. This is the type of apple that you may want to buy if you want one that stays fresh for a really long time.

Another example of a genetically modified apple is the Honeycrisp which is a rather different tasting one compared to the usual apple. The taste of this apple happens to be a little more addictive.

Lastly, there are the organically grown apples. These are the ones that do not have any type of modifications on them nor are they grown with any synthetic materials. These apples have a number code that starts with the number 9 and has 5 numbers. An example would be 95401.

Conclusion

So, these PLU codes are universal. Just to give you an idea, the codes are created by the International Federation for Produce Standards or the IFPS. Other organizations regulate these codes. Of course, this will depend on the area that you stay in.

At least with these codes, you’ll know exactly what kind of apples you’ll be buying. The great thing is that these codes aren’t just for apples. They’re used for other fruits as well. So, if you see them on apples or maybe any fruit that you want to buy, then you know how to identify them.

11/06/2020

These 5 National Parks Are Offering Virtual Tours For People Stuck At Home

With COVID-19 circulating the world, it’s left most of us stuck at home and with plenty of time on our hands. There’s only so many Seinfeld reruns you can watch before venturing out to something else. Well luckily there are things online than ever to kill the self-isolation boredom.

Museums have started offering free virtual tours, HBO is offering 500 hours of free content, Harvard just released 67 courses for free, the Georgia Aquarium put up live we**am feeds, and now national parks have their own virtual tours.

Albeit, some of these were in place before the Coronavirus hit, but they’re still a great time killer, and a great way to keep your mind from getting fried. Here’s the 5 national parks that are offering free virtual tours.

Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska

Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico

Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah

Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida

Or you can visit the homepage of the Google Art & Culture page, which has links directly to each one of these national parks and their tours.

11/06/2020

14 Helpful Websites For Students

It’s pretty easy to suffer from information overload these days. The Internet has been a great thing to satisfy our growing appetites for useful and useless information, and we now spend a whole lot of time scrolling through social media sites and news aggregators to remain in the know.

There’s also a ton of websites and apps, some of which have become incredibly successful companies, that are provide us with more than just everyday information, but also tools to improve our skills in time management, planning, brainstorming and writing. And those are just some of the more basic topics.

Businesses have made it their business to drive the adoption of the digital age, making use of these apps and web-based tools to streamline their operations, maximize efficiency and even cut costs.

But businesses aren’t the only focus of this amazing trend. Students also have a plethora of information available to them that will help make their lives a little easier and take their minds off the burdens of bad cafeteria food and student debt to help with increasingly rigorous post-secondary curriculums.

Sure information is easier to access these days thanks to the Internet, but that doesn’t always mean it’s easy to manage. Check out these apps and websites below to instantly become a better student and uncover ways to increase your productivity and motivation.

1. StudentRate
Part of being a student is realizing that you have to learn to live frugally, since cash flow isn’t always in your favour. Learning how to budget, in fact, might be one of the toughest skills to learn, but StudentRate.com is a website that works to help students find deals and discounts on everything from textbooks, travel and technology.

2. Koofers
Prepare for exams easily with Koofers, which gives students access to study flashcards. The website also provides information about job and internships opportunities.

3. Alarmy (Sleep If U Can)
Alarm clocks are annoying enough, but the Alarmy app boasts itself as the most annoying alarm on the planet. Never miss a early morning lecture of exam ever again. Try to sleep through it – it’s not likely you will.

4. Brainly
Students can access Brainly to join collaborative study environments with other students for topics including history, mathematics or science, to name a few. Get ahead of your classmates while you meet some new friends with similar interests.

5. Ambient Mixer
On Ambient-Mixer.com you can listen to the background ambience of fictional worlds. So you can study in the Gryffindor common room, read in Belle’s library, or fall asleep in the Jedi Temple.

6. Audible
Too tired to do a weekly reading for a class that doesn’t exactly peak your interests? Audible is a database of audiobooks that you can download to any of your mobile devices and help you keep up with your studies while you spend time waiting in line or walking around.

7. Mint
Keep your finances in check with Mint, a desktop and mobile platform that helps you categorize and organize expenses, set budgets, stay on top of payments and meet financial goals, such as paying down debts.

8. InstaGrok
Visualize any research topic with an interactive concept map that you can customize and share with InstaGrok. Not only does the website help make study materials a little cooler and streamlined, the interactive visual interface helps you easily remember critical information about whatever topic you please.

9. Studious
Never have your cell phone go off in the middle of class again and stay on your prof’s good side.

The Studious app is available for free from the Android Play store and lets you silence your phone in class, set reminders for when homework and tests are due and even save lecture notes.

10. SelfControl
It’s all too easy these days to get distracted online with website such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. SelfControl is a free Mac app available from the Apple App Store that lets you block your own access to distracting websites, e-mail servers, or anything else on the Internet for specified periods of time. Until the timer expires, you won’t be able to access any of those sites.

11. TED
We’ve all heard of TED Talks, and we should all watch or listen to more of them. Not only are the “talks” motivational, they’re full of incredible useful information that you should be using as a reliable source of ideas for projects.

12. SugarSync
Keep files and folders secure in the cloud for a small monthly fee. The SugarSync app also syncs all of your files on multiple devices so you can access them from anywhere.

13. Wolfram Alpha
You should never use Wikipedia as a source for essays or other written projects simply because it’s all user-generated and not always completely accurate. Professors hate it, and it also make you look like a bit of an amateur. Instead, take advantage of Wolfgram Alpha is more than a search engine. It gives you access to the world’s facts and data and calculates answers across a range of topics, which is more than a search engine and gives you access to a ton of expert knowledge and trustworthy information and data across a range of topics.

14. BookScouter
Looking to score some extra cash for your old books/textbooks? Use the BookScouter app to sell them. The app lets you scan your barcodes and instantly offers you 20 different prices from buyback book companies.

11/06/2020

Study Suggests Technology Could Be The Reason You’re Staying Up At Night

Do you often go to bed while scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed or watching a series on Netflix? If so, then you’re significantly reducing your chances of getting a good night’s sleep. According to statistics, around 90% of Americans suffer from the same issue. They often use smartphones and laptops during bedtime, and it’s the main reason why they’re suffering from insomnia.

Of course, the obvious solution for this is to simply ditch any form of technology. The problem, however, is that most people tend to neglect this simple advice. Fortunately, there is yet another solution, and that might just come from simply wearing amber/orange-tinted sunglasses.

Blue light and its impact on your sleeping pattern
According to experts, the reason why people struggle to fall asleep when using light-emitting devices is because they emit blue light which has the ability to increase alertness at night. Ari Shechter, an assistant professor of medical sciences, conducted an experiment alongside a team of experts to test out their theory.

They selected 14 individuals who are diagnosed with insomnia to take part in an experiment. They then subjected the participants to wore wrap-around frames fitted with amber-tinted lenses for seven nights. After four weeks, the participants repeated the same pattern except that this time, they use a clear set of glasses.

After the experiment has concluded, researchers found that the participants were able to get 30 minutes of added sleep when wearing amber-tinted lenses. Aside from that, most participants also revealed that they’re able to enjoy better sleep quality and even a significant reduction in their insomnia issue.

All of these findings have been consistent with the previous studies about the benefit of using lenses that block blue light in improving sleep quality. According to Shechter, most of us are normally exposed to blue light before bedtime, and it’s one of the main reasons why we find it hard to sleep.

The amber/orange-tinted solution
Fortunately, the problem can be significantly reduced by wearing amber lenses. Since they’re more affordable these days, it will be a lot easier for any insomnia sufferers to enjoy an improved sleep quality at night.

Aside from that, a lot of smartphones on the market are fitted with a technology that allows them to emit amber light instead of blue. By setting the light to amber at night, as well as reducing the brightness level of smartphones and laptops, it will be possible to get a good night’s sleep.

However, smartphones and laptops aren’t the only sources of blue light in the household. Several appliances like TVs, computers, and other LED light sources are culprits as well. Their use has been further increased considering how energy-efficient and cost-effective they are.

But then again, with the use of amber/orange-tinted glasses, it will be possible to filter out blue light from such sources, thereby making it possible for those with sleep difficulties to finally improve their sleep.

It’s also found out that amber lenses were able to reduce blood pressure among several participants, and it’s attributed to the decreased effect of insomnia which is one risk factor for cardiovascular issues.

11/06/2020

6 Ways To Make Learning A New Language Easy

There are a lot of benefits when you speak more than two languages. Are you worried that it would take much time to learn a new language? You do not have to. There are ways that you can do to learn it fast. These hacks can help lessen weeks or months of studying it. Continue reading to learn tips on how to learn a new language more effectively.

1. Learn the Rules
You cannot master a new language unless you learn the style and grammar first. This is one of the basics that many language learners tend to take for granted. Usually, they study words right away. Children’s shows and books use simple vocabulary and sentence structure. Therefore, you can easily digest the grammar and structure and appreciate learning the language by using them as a guide.

2. Use Different Learning Sources
If you want to learn a new language fast, your learning resources should not be limited. It is hard to learn the language in a broader perspective if you stick to one learning resources. Unconventional sources such as watching children’s shows or reading children’s books can help you experience the language in various facets.

3. Jot Down Notes
After watching a children’s show or reading a children’s book, it will be helpful to write words, phrases, or sentences relevant to you. Aside from having more interest in you, you are also able to engage yourself in checking your vocabulary and writing down easy and useful phrases from these resources. T

he words, phrases, and sentences you learned are easier to apply in actual situations because the concepts are not difficult to comprehend. They also give you more opportunities to review and repeat the children’s materials.

4. Immerse Yourself
We indeed turn to what we always do. This saying is true in life aspects, and learning a new language is no exception. When you surround yourself with resources such as children’s books or shows that can contribute to the new language acquisition, you will improve your learning process. This will not only benefit you temporarily but also in the long run.

5. Incorporate Entertainment
Learning should be fun, so entertain yourself while learning a new language. You can have more interest and enthusiasm. As a result, you learn faster. You can do it conveniently in your house. You can watch children’s movies or videos or listen to songs in the language you are learning. If you have the chance, you can go to shows that use that language.

6. Applying the Diglot Weave Method
Using this approach, you use your mother tongue and the new language from children’s shows or books together. Learning will be more comfortable since you use easy but foreign words along with your own language. This is effective because you can associate and remember the words more easily.

Conclusion
Finally, based on the tips given, learning a new language is not complicated, especially when you use materials such as children’s books or movies. Therefore, you should take advantage of these to learn the language in no time.

11/06/2020

11/06/2020

Stop Leaving Your Electronic Devices In Your Car. Criminals Have Been Using Them To Determine Which Cars To Rob.

You may think that you are hiding your electronic devices well inside your car by putting them under the seats or covering them with other items. However, thieves have recently begun using Bluetooth and radio scanners to target which vehicles to rob.

Recent police reports show that more thieves are using this technology which is why their success rate of stealing valuable electronic devices is also increasing. The sale of Bluetooth and radio scanners are not regulated. This means that anybody could buy them and use it for criminal activities.

How Does it Work?
It seems that criminals are smarter than many of us think. They are aware that most electronic devices send Bluetooth signals intended for pairing. By using a scanner, thieves can pinpoint the exact location of the device; hence it’s easier and faster for them to smash the car windows and grab the item.

The use of this modus is commonly utilized during smash and grab theft. Once thieves identify a vehicle with an electronic gadget that they want to steal, they will smash the window and grab the item. It is typically done quickly so even if you only left your car for a couple of minutes, the crime can be over by then.

You may wonder why thieves are only after electronic devices when stealing the entire car would be more profitable. Well, although cars exponentially cost more than electronic devices, they are difficult to sell when stolen.

More often than not, when thieves steal cars, they sell them by parts to avoid capture. Electronic devices, on the other hand, are much easier to sell to pawn shops and other unregulated platforms because once they are reformatted, it is already difficult for the original owner to track them down.

What Can You Do?
Electronic devices can be expensive. If you do not want them to be stolen inside your car, there are several things that you can do. However, the best solution is turning off the device.

Devices that are switched off do not emit any signal scannable by Bluetooth or radio devices which is why if you plan to leave them behind in your car, make sure that they are always turned off. Doing this significantly lessens the chances of your vehicle being targeted for a smash and grab. Make it a habit to check whether your device is on or off before you leave the car.

Aside from that, it is also crucial for you to keep all your devices password protected. This will prevent thieves from profiting off the device and accessing your essential personal data in case they successfully steal them.

Conclusion
It’s a scary world out there. Be smart and do not be a victim.

If criminals are stepping up their game, so should you. Avoid being a victim of this modus by making sure that your devices are not scannable by Bluetooth and radio scanners. If possible, leave them at home where there are more security features that wards away thieves. If that’s not possible, keep the devices with you at all times instead.

11/06/2020

11/06/2020

11/06/2020

03/05/2020

Никогда не суди с первого взгляда ни о собаке, ни о человеке. Потому что, простая дворняга… может иметь добрейшую душу, а человек приятной наружности … может оказаться редкой сволочью… - Владимир Высоцкий.

02/05/2020

Там, где кончается терпение, начинается выносливость. - Конфуций.