Why Do Men Get Hit By Lightning Way More Than Women?

ColumnLightning strikes twice (make that four times) as many men as women.

A study by Popular Science Magazine has determined that out of everyone who is hit by lightning, 82%  are men.  In my house this has led to lots of merry speculation about the reasons for this lopsided statistic. My daughter thinks it’s because lightning is attracted to men, much the same way that mosquitoes are reportedly drawn to people with type O blood. Interesting though it may be, I can find no scientific evidence to support this idea.


My husband subscribes to the more Hemingway-esque theory that men get hit by lightning because they are more likely than women to be outside doing manly activities like playing golf, being lumberjacks, and participating in soccer riots. To his credit, immediately after voicing this theory, my husband retracted it, on the grounds that it made him sound like a lifetime member of the He-Man-Woman-Hater’s club. Besides being condescending to women, this suggestion ignores the fact that women also spend lots of time outdoors: playing professional soccer in nearly empty stadiums, dragging garbage cans to the curb (because someone has to do it), and walking across town when we grow weary of being groped and harassed on public transportation. It’s just that, unlike men, we are willing to interrupt these activities during life-threatening electrical storms.


Yes, it’s as simple as that: women don’t get hit by lightning because we are smart enough to go indoors during thunderstorms. The people at Popular Science agree with me on this, although they word it more delicately, saying that, “men are less likely to stop outdoor activity when stormy weather hits.” Inevitably, one has to wonder why this is so.

Golf is one of the most likely ways for men to become lightning-bait, which is not surprising, since it is a summer-time activity that strands large groups of people out in the open when they’re holding long metal sticks (also known as “lightning rods”). I live right next to a golf course and during thunderstorms a distinctive blaring horn will sound to tell the golfers to come indoors. Minutes later there is a second round of horns for the die-hard meatheads who ignore the first warning. Recently I asked a member of the club if women golfers were, in fact, more likely to heed the first warning – he laughed and said “Oh women don’t need the siren at all – they come in at the first sign of a storm.”
My theory on this is that women have learned  over time to be more alert to the signs of danger. Years of sharing elevators and subway cars with sweaty predators and perverts have taught us to recognize a threat when we see it. Women do not ignore danger, maybe because the repetitive panic that accompanies peeing on sticks to see if we’re pregnant has taught us that foolish acts can have dire consequences. Finally, we simply lack the macho bravado that makes men feel like sissies if they run inside at the first sign of thunder.
I haven’t read any statistics about it, but I’ll bet that fewer women than men are killed during the Running of the Bulls in Pamploma. This is because women, by and large, have the good sense and finely honed survival instincts to spend their leisure time doing something that doesn’t involve racing around medieval European side streets while being chased  by large, bloodthirsty mammals with horns. Women, in general, live longer than men, and while much of their superior longevity can be explained by a pragmatic lack of idiocy, something else seems to be at work here too. Despite our quaint and anachronistic reputation as the weaker sex, a recent study just reported that women are much less likely to die from most forms of cancer. Women also have much lower rates of heart disease and we are practically exempt from hemophilia.  Some might say that we are the lucky sex. And while I would never dream of claiming we’re the smarter sex, at least we know enough to come in out of the rain.


Susan Goldberg is a slightly lapsed treehugger. Although known to overuse paper products, she has the best of intentions – and a really small SUV. Catch her column, The Goldberg Variations, each week here at EcoSalon.

the biggest child in the world have 60 kilograme weight and 3 years old

Live in China this child - 3 years - which is approaching the weight of the 60 kilograms in an extended family worried about his health is still stuck in the type of food diet to be followed to lose the weight of a small child.


The child had been born a normal weight of two kilograms and was only half the weight, but began growing, excessively after that, until it became the form that it is now, and hopes his family in finding the right doctor for treatment.

3 Teens Arrested In Mandeville School Shooting Plot

Lakeshore High teenagers were arrested after investigators said they planned a school shooting.

The shooting, the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office said, was planned to be executed on Monday, which was the first day of the school year.

All three teens are 15-year-old boys, according to the Sheriff's Office.

Deputies said they became aware of the plan on July 17, when school officials notified the sheriff’s office of the existence of a group called “Day Zero.”

Police said members of the group were all students at the Mandeville school and didn't deny involvement with the plan or its intentions.

Investigators learned the students had a detailed plan for procuring weapons and bringing them to school Monday. They intended to kill any law enforcement officials at the school who tried to stop them and then collect their weapons, according to police. One student was named as a target in materials collected by investigators.

“We should all be very thankful for the incredible partnership the Sheriff’s Office shares with Superintendent Trey Folse and the leadership within the school system. Were it not for this alert administrator, we may have faced a very tragic first day of the school year,” Sheriff Jack Strain said.

Searches of the three boys’ homes yielded computers and other evidence; analysis on the computers is ongoing.

All three have been booked into the Florida Parishes Juvenile Detention Center with one count of conspiracy to commit terrorism. Additional charges may be forthcoming, Strain said. A bond hearing for the teenagers will be held Monday afternoon to determine if they are to remain in custody.

As a precaution, the Sheriff’s Office will station extra personnel at the school on Monday. However, deputies believe all individuals involved with the plan have been identified and are in custody.

“If a parent notices any type of suspicious activity involving their kids, we ask them to call us immediately. We take these kinds of threats very seriously and investigate them all fully,” Strain said.

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We asked some women to tell us which mens haircuts 2011 they like the most and they told us that they absolutely love medium length and short ones. Most of them think that really long ones do not so hot. But there are definitely some women who find long hair on men really attractive. So you should think about what mens haircuts 2011 you like best for the summer.

Use Internet Explorer? You're Probably Dumb, Study Says

  

People who use Internet Explorer have lower IQs than people who use other browsers like Firefox or Google Chrome, a new study finds.  

AptiQuant, a Vancouver, B.C., company founded in 2006, administered 101,326 IQ tests to people who visited their website over a four-week period. Researchers hypothesized that since tech-savvy people are typically smarter, those who adopted new browsers in recent years probably had a higher IQ. They were right.

"A significant number of individuals with a low score on the cognitive test were found to be using Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) versions 6.0 to 9.0," the study found.

Visitors to AptiQuant's website arrived via search engines and ads looking to take a free IQ test. The company told them it was collecting some personal information for a study, but didn't reveal the nature of the study.




"The comparison clearly suggests that more people on the higher side of [the] IQ scale have moved away from Internet Explorer in the last five years," the study says.


AptiQuant founder Leonard Howard explained the motivation for the study in an e-mail to Seattle Weekly. "We were just trying to add some features to our website, and found IE 6.0 and 7.0 to be extremely difficult to work with," he said. "So we thought of doing this study."

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5 Sci-Fi Movie Weapons That Actually Exist

Guys in the military dig the kick-ass weapons in sci-fi movies and TV shows just as much as you. The difference is, they’re actually developing them.

By Ryan Penagos

Sci-fi movie weapons like lightsabers, Proton Packs, and that wristband-zapper dealio with which Daniel Craig blasts alien spaceships in Cowboys and Aliens aren’t fetishized only by geeks who waste spend thousands of dollars on Comic-Con costumes. We’d love to have them too … even if all we’d use them for is to slice butter or annoy the neighbors.

But while we’re watching them on film or shooting invisible concussion blasts from store-bought Iron Man suits, military eggheads, aided by highly trained soldiers, are inventing futuristic sci-fi movie weapons in real life. Fusing man and machine, setting phasers on stun, the enjoyment of watching a conference room full of corporate douche bags obliterated by ED-209 — what was once movie magic is now starting to become reality.

Exosuits (as seen in Iron Man)
While the anti-tank missiles, retrothrust jets, and anti-personnel guns built into Iron Man’s Mark III suit are nowhere to be found in nonfiction exosuits, current military prototypes are providing the building blocks for future armies of iron men. Defense and aerospace company Raytheon has been working on a 150 lb. exoskeleton that would allow even a pre-serum Steve Rogers to lift objects up to 200 lbs. hundreds of times without breaking a sweat. On, and punching through 3-inch thick boards? No problem! In fact, the XOS 2 Exoskeleton was such an improvement over Raytheon’s initial prototype, Time named it one of the best inventions of 2010.

Lockheed Martin has also entered the robotic-suit race with the Human Universal Load Carrier. The 53-pound HULC (get it?) exosuit is a hydraulic-powered lower extremity that enables the wearer to carry up to 200 pounds on a backpack attached to the exoskeleton. It won’t add arm strength like the XOS 2, but it’s flexible enough to allow the user to do deep squats and crawl on the ground in combat.

Railguns (as seen in The Last Starfighter)
Railguns have been a video-game mainstay for first-person shooters since Quake in 1996, but those handheld death cannons are unrealistic; they shoot large masses of rock that can reach a zillion-mile target. You’ll have to look to The Last Starfighter’s meteor gun or Battlestar Galactica’s super-sized railgun for a peek at what the military is in the process of perfecting. Forgoing chemical propulsion for electromagnetic energy, the Navy’s electromagnetic railguns can fire projectiles more than 200 miles at a velocity seven times the speed of sound. Instead of destroying targets with explosions, the railgun obliterates them with kinetic force. The U.S. Navy made its first major breakthrough in 2008 when they successfully test fired the weapon in the video below; the plan is to have a working prototype by 2018.

Phaser (as seen in Star Trek)
Star Trek‘s phaser, a direct-energy weapon capable of stunning or completely disintegrating uncooperative space aliens, first served as an inspiration for the the Pulsed Energy Projectile. The PEP was designed to shoot a plasma pulse that either stunned or killed targets, but was abandoned after six years when scientists determined, in technical terms, that “The damned thing doesn’t work.” Still, that led to the invention of the Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response gun, or PHaSR, which was built by the Department of Defense to temporarily blind and disorient bad guys. It uses two lasers: one to distract, and one to heat up the skin and repel the assailant. Unfortunately, it sounded a lot cooler than it was; it would only work properly when the skin was completely bare. Since not many villains roam the streets nude, it was a bust.

Okay, but now scientists have figured it out! The “Phased Hyper-Acceleration for Shock, EMP, and Radiation,” or PHASER, will use super-fast lightning projectiles to stun the hell out of someone and fry the electronics on their vehicle or rocket. The technology has yet to be perfected; funding has and continues to be an issue.

Lastly, the Multimode Directed Energy Armament Systems (MDEAS) project, still in the experimental stages, will use a laser pulse that can deliver an electric shock subtle enough to stun or powerful enough to kill the target. A prototype is scheduled for release by 2012.

Cyborg Soldiers (as seen in Star Wars, Robocop, Cyborg)
We may never see cyborgs like Darth Vader and Robocop greasing their hinges at Starbucks like the Tin Man, but there has been progress fusing man with machine. The Augmented Cognition programs run by the U.S. Army and DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) aim to extend a person’s mental abilities and clarity through technology implanted in a soldier’s body. Chips installed in the brain could, in theory, allow a computer to do things like process data and calculate depth, distance, and rate of speed after analyzing information sent from the human eye.

Another DARPA project is the “Brain Interface Program,” which seeks to allow soldiers to use mind control to manipulate machines such as tanks, planes, and computers. The slightly sinister organization is also researching tech that will enable soldiers to block out intense pain and continue to fight with severe injuries and exhaustion. Essentially, they’re out to create Captain America. Not surprisingly, the Department of Defense doesn’t offer many updates on the project.

Combat Robots (as seen in Robocop, Short Circuit)
The T-800 Terminator, Johnny 5, and Optimus Prime were all capable of beating people down on the battlefield. But expect 21st century mechanical death dealers to be more like ED-209 from Robocop.

Modular Advanced Armed Robotic Systems (MAARS) are remote controlled machines that have the ability to shoot beanbags, smoke, and pepper spray to subdue unruly crowds — and that’s if they’re playing nice. Get nasty and they might unload with grenade launchers capable of unleashing 40mm high-explosive grenades or an M240B machine gun loaded with 400 rounds of 7.62mm ammo. And unlike ED-209, the MAARS is equipped with tank treads, which means it will actually be able to handle stairs.

How To Unlock A Car With A Text Message

Don Bailey says he can unlock thousands of cars across the United States simply by sending a few texts from his Android phone.

And that's not even the scary part.

Bailey, a senior security consultant with iSEC Partners, said in an interview with CNN at the Black Hat security conference here at Caesars Palace that the same hack he has used to demonstrate unlocking and even starting a car via text message also could be used to attack industrial systems, the power grid and the water system.

"I could care less if I could unlock a car door," he said. "It's cool. It's sexy. But the same system is used to control phone, power, traffic systems. I think that's the real threat."

Bailey would not share details about which cars or which auto systems are vulnerable to the hack that he showed off publicly at the event.

The hack affects many kinds of devices that connect to cellular GSM networks, like the one used by AT&T. As cars and plenty of other stuff -- from pill bottles to trees, he said -- start connecting to cell grids and the Internet, Bailey said they become more vulnerable.

Certain electronic components that accept wireless signals are vulnerable to the hack, he said. Those components are in the cars Bailey said he can unlock remotely.

Again, he would not name which cars have them.

Strangely enough, Oprah Winfrey kinda-sorta inspired this research.

Bailey said he was watching an "Oprah" show about a device called the Zoombak, which the TV host said could be used by parents to track the locations of their kids.

"I heard that and thought, 'Oh dear God no. Please Oprah, no, no no!' " he said in a presentation at Black Hat. "This was my thinking: That's dangerous. That can definitely be owned. Let's own that thing."

In hacker-speak, "own" means to take control of a device.

Once he figured out how to take control of the kid-tracker, Bailey moved on to cars, which he said was more difficult but still not impossible.

"I couldn't just straight-up text message it and be like, 'Gimme yo' datas!' " he said, referring to the car parts. "So it was a little more work."

It's not all doom-and-gloom, though.

Bailey said manufacturers could purchase more expensive parts that would keep these types of hacks from being possible. He thinks industry associations should put out recommendations suggesting this approach, even though cost increases would be "highly significant."

"We have to," he said. "We have to find elegant ways to find that sweet spot between cost and security."

Black Hat is an annual gathering of hackers and security professionals in Las Vegas. Researchers hope that by showing off how to hack certain systems, the computer industry will take steps to make infrastructure and consumers safer.