>Find out who unlocked those doors from the inside
In the video the operative on the ground is clearly communicating with gestures to someone watching through the Capitol closed-circuit video surveillance system.
Who is that someone?
Who did that someone report to?
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/elon-musk-s-hitler-tweet-highlights-right-wing-faux-populism-ncna1289377
Thousands of men at risk of weak sperm depending on which city they live in, study finds
Feb 18 2022
Researchers in China discovered that men who live in heavily polluted areas may experience poor sperm motility.
Motility is how well a sperm swims. The stronger it is, the easier the sperm can swim in a forwards direction in search of the egg.
But male fertility relies on a number of sperm parameters - inluding sperm count, which is the concentration of sperm per ejaculation.
It’s not the first time a link between toxic air and men’s swimmers has been made.
Prior research has shown that sperm counts for men living in North America, Australia and Europe have been declining since the 1970s.
While there could be a number of reasons why, scientists theorise air pollution is a key culprit.
In the new study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, the health records of men across 130 locations in China were collected.
Almost 34,000 men each gave sperm samples to a fertility clinic over several years.
Doctors assessed their sperm count, motility and concentration.
Participants were split into four groups based on the degree of air pollution where they lived.
Researchers honed in on particulate matter (PM) - one component of pollution that is made up of tiny particles produced mostly by traffic.
PM is very small in size, and once inhaled, the toxins may enter the bloodstream and be transported around the body, lodging in the heart, brain and other organs.
The study found during the entire period of sperm development, over 90 days, exposure to higher levels of PM degraded sperm motility.
Patients exposed to particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers had, on average, a 3.6 per cent decrease in motility when compared to the average man in China.
Median exposure to PM2.5 was 46μg/m3, with a range of 34.4 to 61.6μg/m3.
For reference, the average PM2.5 concentration in London is 13.3 µg/m3, with European limits of 25μg/m3.
Therefore, the same impact may not be seen in people living outside of China, which is known to be heavily polluted.
Prof Allan Pacey, Professor of Andrology, University of Sheffield, said: “The possibility of a link between air pollution and semen quality has been suggested in a number of studies over the years, although not all of them have agreed with this conclusion.
“This paper adds to the evidence base suggesting the link is real, and is impressive because it uses semen quality data from over 30,000 men.”
However, he cautioned: “To what extent this is clinically meaningful (i.e. whether it will reduce the ability of men in high pollution areas to become fathers) is not clear and we should remember that the link between sperm quality and fertility is a weak one.”
Prof Kevin McConway, Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, The Open University, said we may not ever know if pollution truly has an impact on men’s fertility.
He said the study was observational, which means it cannot be proven that one thing (pollution) is the cause of another (weaker sperm).
https://www.the-sun.com/health/4719840/men-risk-weak-sperm-pollution-city/
More attractive people have stronger immune systems, study says
February 18, 2022
The beautiful people get all the breaks. A new study finds an interesting link between how attractive someone is and the strength of their immune system.
A team at Texas Christian University found that when people had to rate a group of photos based on the attractiveness of each person’s face, they consistently rated individuals with stronger immune health as more attractive than other photos in the study.
Although beauty is often in the eye of the beholder, researchers say there has been a historical link between what societies consider attractive and reproductive success. The TCU team theorized that, because certain evolutionary traits tie into more mating success, people who seem more attractive to others may also appear healthier to the opposite sex.
To test that theory, researchers gathered 159 men and women and photographed each one without makeup and while displaying a neutral expression on their face. Study authors then took blood samples from each person to measure their levels of white blood cells — which battle disease and infections.
The team then brought in 492 other people to rate members of the opposite sex in these photos based on their attractiveness. The volunteers did not have any information on each person’s immune health and only had that one neutral photo to base their rating on. Results show people with stronger immune systems were rated as being more attractive by the 492 volunteers.
“The current research suggests that a relationship between facial attractiveness and immune function is likely to exist,” corresponding author Summer Mengelkoch and her team write in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Opposites attract
Interestingly, the study finds men and women have very different ideas about what makes a face attractive and healthy. Researchers found that, on average, women rated men with higher levels of NK (natural killer) cells as more attractive. These cells play a key role in fighting off and killing bacteria.
Men, on the other hand, found women with lower NK cell levels in their blood more attractive. Study authors believe the reason for this is women with lower NK levels generally have higher estrogen levels — a hormone important to sexual reproduction.
As for which features are likely to stand out and attract attention, researchers found a not-so-surprising list of qualities people look for in a pretty face.
“Features such as clear skin, prominent cheekbones, bright eyes, and full, red lips have been deemed attractive throughout recorded human history,” the researchers write.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2021.2476
https://www.studyfinds.org/attractive-people-immune-system/
>>15667924 (pb)
>pics exist in a sequence