Heart health in winter

On a cold windy night in December, Satish Gupta had gone to a late night party.

On his way back, his car began giving trouble and he had to push it for a while along with a colleague. Later, he felt some strain in the chest and thought that he had pulled a muscle. The nagging discomfort continued for the whole night. He applied a balm and used a hot water bottle to soothe the area.

But the next morning, since he still felt restless, he went to the hospital. After the primary examination, the doctor asked for an ECG, which revealed a full fledged heart attack.

He was admitted in the Cardiac Care Unit and had to undergo an angioplasty and stenting.

He recovered but has been left with a weak heart, necessitating long-term drug treatment and the implantation of a defibrillator.

His total hospital bill exceeded Rs 10 lakh and he is still incurring costs.

The winter months are known to increase the chances of a heart attack and related problems.

This is especially true for people who have one or more risk factors - high blood pressure, diabetes, tobacco use, obesity, high blood cholesterol levels etc.

It is therefore important to recognise this fact and be careful and use preventive strategies during this period.

Why winter predisposes one to heart ailments

- The changed daylight to dark hour ratio adversely affects the hormone balance. The cortisol levels in the blood are altered. This is one of the possible reasons for increase in heart attacks.

- The low temperature leads to tightening or constriction of blood vessels. This reduces blood supply to the heart, which can aggravate angina and block of arteries - leading to heart attack.

- The oxygen demand of the heart increases because the heart has to work harder to keep the body warm

- The early morning surge in blood pressure is an important reason for heart attacks being more common at that time. In winter, because of fewer daylight hours, people often have a tendency to finish outdoor work earlier in the day. The combination of cold temperature and hard work leads to a higher blood pressure.

- The shift of activities to morning hours also leads to a change in the circadian rhythm (body clock), leading to an increase in heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol levels. The combination reduces the threshold levels of events like heart attack and brain stroke.

The risk does not necessarily decrease if one migrates to relatively warmer places.

It has been seen that people predisposed to heart attacks who migrate to relatively warmer places during the colder months can get caught with cardiac problems there too. This is especially caused by attacks of infections like influenza, which prevail in places like Mumbai and Kolkata which are warmer than say Delhi in winters.

The inflammation and swelling caused by these diseases can spread to the arteries of the heart and lead to heart attacks.

The smoke and smog in these places during the winter are also unhealthy for the heart.

For people over 65 years in age, diabetics and cardiac patients, influenza vaccine should never be taken without medical supervision.

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A drop of vinegar controls sugar

The claim:
Vinegar can help lower blood sugar levels.
The facts:
For people with diabetes or those who are sensitive to the blood-sugar spikes that can follow big meals, there’s good news. Several studies have revealed a possible way to reduce the impact of a carb-laden dish: add a little vinegar. Doing so seems to help slow the absorption of sugar from a meal into the bloodstream, apparently because vinegar helps block digestive enzymes that convert carbohydrates into sugar.

One study by Italian researchers showed, for example, that when healthy subjects consumed about four teaspoons (20 millilitres) of white vinegar as a salad dressing with a meal that included white bread with a little less than two ounces (50 grams) of carbohydrates, there was a 30 per cent reduction in their glycemic response, or rise in blood sugar, compared with subjects who had salad with a dressing made from neutralised vinegar

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New discovery may help beat jet lag

London: Scientists from University of Manchester have discovered special cells in the body that appear to regulate a person's body clock.

This finding, they hope, would provide vital clues to help combat jet lag.

It was believed that these cells remain inactive during the day, however, the new study has found the contrary.

According to Professor Hugh Piggins, lead researcher and an expert in neuroscience at the university, the research will allow a new approach to help tune our daily clock.

Researchers believe that the brain regulates body clock by firing more cells during daylight and very few during the night.

"The traditional model said the clock and the brain communicated to the rest of the brain via the number of electrical impulses that the brain cells were producing," The BBC News quoted Piggins saying.

"These impulses would travel around the brain, telling it what time of day it is.

"What we've found is in fact that there are at least two types of cells in this part of the brain," he added.

These brain cells contain a key gene called per1 that allows them to sustain unusually high levels of "excitability".

The cells becoming so "excited" that they seem quiet or even dead; but then later they calm down, recover and become normally active again.

It is this activity, which tells the human body when to be awake.

"There's a lot of interest in the pharmaceutical industry, obviously, to try to develop chemical treatments to reset your daily clock to help counteract things like jetlag," said Piggins.

"Or, perhaps more importantly, different kind of sleep disorders for which dysfunctions in this clock are often involved," he added.

Check Video Here-

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The best exercise: Walking the dog

Forget gym. Walking the dog is the best way to stay fit, says a new study.

Researchers for British pet healthcare experts Bob Martin have carried out the study and found that walking the dog twice everyday can give one up to one eight hours of exercise a week.

“A couple of short walks a day soon adds up and this research shows that it amounts to more time than people spend in the gym,” a spokesman for Bob Martin was quoted by the Daily Mail as saying.

The study, based on a survey of 5,000 Britons, including 3,000 dog owners, revealed that 57 per cent see walking the dog as their main form of exercise. More than three quarters say they would rather take their pooch for a hike than go to the gym.

Some 86 per cent say they enjoy taking their pet out each day, with just 22 per cent saying they ever see it as a chore

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Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Early Preview Demo

Much to everyone’s surprise, Microsoft shared details about Internet Explorer 9 very early on in the browser’s development process. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager, Internet Explorer, explained that the first IE9-related information offered via official channels was simply the Redmond company joining the discussion of browsers. The software giant choose its Professional Developers Conference 2009, in Los Angeles, to showcase a preview of IE9, but no bits were released as the browser is merely just weeks old.

“The topics that we’re going to talk about pretty much choose themselves, when you look at the conversations that happened throughout IE8,” Hachamovitch noted. More specifically, Microsoft touched three topics, in particular, standards support, performance progress, and the introduction of graphics hardware acceleration.

You will be able to watch the first public demonstration of Internet Explorer 9 via the video embedded at the bottom of this article, courtesy of Microsoft. Obviously the company did not single out the content focused only on IE9, so the video covers the entire PDC 2009 Day 2 Keynote, featuring such Microsoft executives as Steven Sinofsky, president, Windows and Windows Live Division, and Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, .NET Developer Platform. It will be Sinofsky demoing IE9, as along with the Windows project, the Microsoft president is also responsible for the development of the next iteration of the Internet Explorer browser.

As far as I’m concerned, the entire PDC 2009 Day 2 keynote is well-worth watching, but I do realize that you have to dedicate a consistent portion of your time in doing so, as the video goes on for about two and a half hours. So, for those that just want to skip directly to the IE9 demo, just go ahead and jump to minute 40 in the presentation and take it from there (spoiler alert – IE9 has no GUI as of yet).

Standards

“The primary focus for our team is providing rich capabilities, the kind that developers really want and use in an interoperable way,” said John Hrvatin, program manager for the IE team.

Acid3 is one of the tests designed to assess the browser performance when it comes down to standards support. At the time of this article, Internet Explorer is lagging rival browsers in relation to the Acid3 test score, being inferior in the level of modern standards adoption. With the advent of Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft choose to simply ignore Acid3, and focused exclusively on acing the Acid2 test, arguing that it would not provide support for standards that were incomplete at the time such as HTML5 and CSS3.

The IE9 demo indicates that Microsoft has now had a change of heart and that it considers passing the Acid3 test one of the priorities in developing the next version of Internet Explorer. Already, IE9 is faring better than IE8 in the Acid3 test, obtaining a superior score. “Developers need not just a strong platform that’s got great performance and great capabilities, but they also have expectations around how the code will work,” Hachamovitch noted.


But in all fairness, embracing HTML5 and CSS3 is a move that Microsoft is doing largely to close the gap separating IE from Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, while also attempting to tone down the level of criticism from web developers which can’t leverage modern web standards simply because of lack of IE support for them. As far as end users are concerned, the benefits they will be able to enjoy won’t be extremely evident to them. Fact is that the vast majority of users won’t be able to tell which websites use CSS2.1 for styling and formatting and which leverage CSS3. But inherently, advantages will be offered through the simple evolution of the user experience.

“We want to focus on those capabilities that developers are really most interested in, but doing it in an interoperable way, and standards are really one of the ways in which we achieve that. But it’s still people building the standards, and there could be places where parts of the specification aren’t clear, and different browser vendors interpret them in different ways,” Hrvatin added.

Performance

“So there’s performance, and we’re going to talk about the progress that we made. Everybody cares about performance, everybody benefits from performance improvements. And performance is a super complex problem. I mean, there are so many subsystems in the browser,” Hachamovitch said.

With Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft lost the race on performance, simply because it failed to play the same game as its rivals. While Mozilla and Google were running to benchmarks such as the SunSpider test, the Redmond company attempted to convince the world that benchmarking results are in no way representative of actual browser performance. Instead, the software giant argued that its approach, to target IE8 performance to real world scenarios, and to increase IE8 speed in situations most common for its end users, had delivered superior results to Firefox and Chrome. Needless to say the world failed to agree with Microsoft.

Consequently, the Redmond company will, with IE9, play the same game as competitors, namely pour additional horsepower into the next version of IE’s script engine, and ensure that script performance for IE9 is at least on par with rivals, if not even better. Nothing short of an excellent move from Microsoft, the IE9 performance boost needs to be not only consistent, but also continually updatable. The Redmond company has to understand that performance, much like standards support and interoperability is an ongoing effort, but one that requires fast pace upgrades.

“We’ve been working on performance optimizations around the JavaScript engine for the next version of Internet Explorer. One of the things we’ve heard pretty clearly from customers is we need to get better there, so we.ve done a bunch of work in the core JScript engine,” revealed John Montgomery, general product manager.

A change is needed either in the frequency at which Microsoft delivers major versions of Internet Explorer, or in the introduction of minor updates, after the model v9.1, v9.2, v9.3, and so on and so forth, in order to keep Internet Explorer 9 at least on par with rivals in terms of the performance level. In short, IE needs to evolve faster, and appear less out of breath when playing catch up with the likes of Firefox and Chrome.


Hardware Acceleration

“The power of modern hardware with Windows and all the energy that goes into the ecosystem to make PCs great, and how all of that can make the PC better. All the improvement around modern PCs and Windows shows up in the browser available for web developers. Developers who write the web can get all the goodness of DirectX [DirectX 11], all the goodness of the GPU, and all this amazing acceleration using the patterns that they already have and that they already use,” Hachamovitch said.

Hardware Acceleration is about Windows, DirectX 11 Windows APIs and the GPU (the computer’s graphics processing unit), and IE9 will take advantage of all these resources in concert. Microsoft’s PDC 2009 IE9 demonstration involves technologies such as Direct2D and DirectWrite for text rendering, and as the video shows, the improvements are amazing. Essentially, in the evolution from Internet Explorer 8 to IE9, Microsoft has swapped the rendering engine from leveraging GDI to DirectX.

The graphics cards on computers running IE9 will no longer simply sit unused, as the browser will turn to the GPU for webpage rendering. By embracing the GPU, IE9’s performance will get a boost, but as the demo unveiled, the fidelity of the rendering is unmatched. Ultimately, IE9 will deliver a superior users experience to IE8, and to all current competitive browsers available on the market. However, in all fairness,Mozilla has also been flirting with hardware acceleration for a future version of Firefox that is planned for availability following the release of v3.6.

Watch Video Here:-

Internet Explorer 9 Video

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