Showing posts with label offspring. Show all posts
Showing posts with label offspring. Show all posts

Friday, January 21, 2011

Smoking Damages Your Health - Quickly

Some new medical findings can be a bit "oh-hum". It has been found that smoking, just intaking smoke from one cigarette, can damage DNA almost immediately. This does make one think about not taking up the habit. However, it is widely accepted that danger is only there after smoking for 20 or 30 years.

So much work has been done on tobacco. Very little on the other widely used smoking drug - marijuana. Stay away from cigarettes one may say and partake of weed instead. Apparently, the intake of grass is quite safe.

Why is there such a desire for humans to consume such a highly addictive naturally occurring compound? It all boils downs to evolution, natural selection. Unless something you consume reduces your competency to reproduce until the age of about 25, genes will not be selected to combat it. Whether smokers die later in life when they are way past producing and bringing up offspring is irrelevant to survival of the species.

Smoking is like drinking alcohol - it is enjoyable at the moment of consumption but later you may suffer consequences. Restricting sales may be the wrong thing to do. If people want to damage themselves why shouldn't they be allowed to do it? There are so many social problems out there. Concentrating on just one of them is really a waste of resources.
~~~~~Health~~~~~
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Thursday, December 2, 2010

Ocean Dead Zones Could Cause Mass Extinction

The number of oceanic dead zones in the world is increasing. In the zones oxygen levels are too low to sustain life. It is widely know that a monster area in the south Atlantic is growing in size, but there are hundreds more smaller dead zones. They are caused by overfishing and the nutrient rich residue in fertilizer runoff.

Climate change also plays a part. As oceans warm up layers form and some become stagnant with low oxygen levels. Long standing currents and wind directions have changed which has reduced layer intermixing.

Since 2000 over 400 dead zones have been identified. In the 1980s there were little more than a hundred. Some are huge, more than 70,00 sq kilometers, while many are less than a square kilometer.

The lack of oxygen not only causes death. Offspring are born deformed. They do not survive, or produce fewer young. Danger of a mass extinction is now very high. Dead zones are forming on continental shelves where most fishing is done. The mere presence of humans is deemed to be a contributing factor to dead zones. Man changes the balance of life.
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