source: http://www.medicaldaily.com/how-much-water-should-you-drink-each-day-4-6-glasses-ideal-researchers-say-344822

Water is necessary for carrying nutrients to your cells, flushing bacteria from your system, preventing dehydration, and replacing fluids lost from sweating, but you may not need to drink as much as you thought.  The Harvard Health Letter published new water recommendations challenging the long-standing eight 8-ounce glasses-a-day rule, which they say weren’t based on science, but instead an educated guess on what the body needs to stay hydrated.

Harvard recommends drinking 30 to 50 ounces a day, which is equivalent to approximately four to six glasses of water. However, the team isn’t just recommending water to drink at this optimal standard, but fluids in general to aid in hydration. Even certain foods like watermelon, lettuce, spinach, and soups provide the body with fluids that can work in tandem with water to retain and process a healthy amount of water. Women who are pregnant or breastfeeding and those who engage in a lot of exercise may need more than the standard six glasses, however. 

Recently, a panel of experts from around the world collaboratively wrote a study published in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine that also warned how drinking beyond thirst can be hazardous for your health. Athletes are at the greatest risk of drinking to the point of exercise-associated hyponatremia, which occurs when the kidneys become flooded by large quantities of water, unable to process the liquid efficiently. The sodium levels in the human body aren’t able to balance the amount of water, eventually leading to swelling cells and — in severe cases — death.

How The Brain Processes Thirst

"Using the innate thirst mechanism to guide fluid consumption is a strategy that should limit drinking in excess and developing hyponatremia while providing sufficient fluid to prevent excessive dehydration," according to the guidelines, published in the  Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine.

source: http://translatedbytonytsou.blogspot.tw/2015/07/blog-post_10.html

Questions:

1. What is your experience of gambling or buying lottery? Is it fun? Does it make you addicted to it? Have you ever spent time on some famous casinos like the ones in Las Vegas, Macau, Singapore?
2. Do you have any luck for serendipitous fortune? How about your family?
3. If you are a winner of the lottery, let’s say you win 100M NT dollars, what would you do?

Greece Gonvernment Debt Crisis

source：  http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2015/07/17/greece-debt-relief.cnnmoney/

If you're just catching up to it, here are the latest developments in the Greek economic crisis -- and what you need to know. Last updated: July 20.

1) Greek banks reopened on Monday for the first time in three weeks, although caps on cash withdrawals remain. The reopening was made possible after Europe's central bank promised 900 million euros in new emergency funding. However, the country's stock exchange remains closed.

Guzzlers prevailed Thursday as New York’s highest court refused to reinstate New York City’s ban on the sale of big sodas, ruling that the city’s health department overstepped its bounds when it approved the 16-ounce cap on sugary beverages.
The court largely ignored the merits of the ban in the 20-page ruling, but determined that the city’s Board of Health engaged in policy-making, and not simply health regulations, when it imposed the restrictions on restaurants, delis, movie theaters, stadiums and street cart vendors.
“The Board of Health engaged in law-making beyond its regulatory authority,” the opinion reads. “… It is clear that the Board of Health wrote the Portion Cap Rule without benefit of legislative guidance.”
The city had hoped Thursday’s ruling would overturn a lower court’s decision that blocked the restrictions after restaurants, theater owners, beverage companies and small stores sued.

Adventurer Khoo Swee Chiow has certainly overcome his childhood fear of heights.

The Malaysian-born Singaporean is one of the world's most prolific mountaineers, who has climbed Mount Everest in Nepal, the world's highest mountain, no less than three times.

He has also conquered K2 in Pakistan, the world's second-highest - and a far more dangerous climb than Everest. On K2, for every 10 people who reach the summit, two people perish in the attempt. This compares with a death rate of four in every 100 on Everest.

When not climbing the world's other tallest mountains, the 50-year-old has trekked to both the North Pole and the South Pole.

And for a bit of a change from cold weather, Mr Khoo holds the world record for the longest journey made on roller skates, travelling 4,176km (2,595 miles) from Vietnam to Singapore.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33479118

An extra 20% tax on sugary drinks should be introduced to tackle the obesity crisis, the British Medical Association says.

It estimates poor diets are causing around 70,000 premature deaths each year.

In a major report on unhealthy diets, the body called for the extra money raised to be used to subsidise fresh fruit and vegetables.

The Food and Drink Federation said the measure would not change diets.

When individuals struggle with a difficult and challenging task,can using a brand with a strong image related to the task’s domain empower them to perform better? For example, can individuals perform better when engaging in strenuous physical exercise if they wear Under Armour accessories (athletic image) while exercising? Our answer is yes. We propose that using brands with strong images while performing a difficult task can enhance feelings of self-efficacy (beliefs in one’s capabilities; Bandura 1995) in a domain related to the brand’s image, and this heightened sense of self-efficacy can lead to better task performance.

Further, we propose that the self-efficacy effect is not experienced by everyone—it depends on the implicit self-theory held by individuals (Dweck 2000). Individuals who endorse entity theory (“entity theorists”), who view their personal qualities as something they cannot improve through their own direct efforts, will rely on feelings of self-efficacy that using brands can trigger to perform better on difficult tasks. In contrast, individuals who endorse incremental theory (“incremental theorists”), who view their personal qualities as something they can develop through their own direct efforts at self-improvement, will be less reliant on the self-efficacy effect of brands. Thus, we predict that brand use will result in a heightened sense of self-efficacy and better task performance for entity, but not incremental theorists.

We examine these propositions in three studies. In a first study, we examined the effect of using an MIT pen on performance for a challenging GRE test. The MIT brand is strongly associated with the

source: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2015/07/06/2003622356

EDITORIAL: Introducing risk management

[sorce: http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/do-the-poor-have-more-meaningful-lives ]

Jonathan Safran Foer, in the first chapter of “Eating Animals,” recounts a conversation he once had with his grandmother, in which she described the combination of fear and hunger that haunted her in Eastern Europe as the Second World War drew to a close. When she became so hungry that she couldn’t imagine living through another day, a kind Russian farmer gave her a piece of meat:

source:http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/26/politics/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage-ruling/

Supreme Court rules in favor of same-sex marriage nationwide