A group of scientists in India announced they have created a “tea pill,” which promises to deliver the same effect as a cup of the freshly-steeped original to those who are just too damn lazy to boil or microwave water:

The four-member team based in the northeastern state of Assam — the heart of the country’s tea industry — said the pill was ready but it would take six months to be available commercially. “The pill is absolutely safe, (it) can be chewed or placed under the tongue,” Mridul Hazarika, director of the Tocklai Experimental Station, told AFP. It can also be enjoyed in the “conventional manner by dipping the tablet in a cup of hot water,” Hazarika said. “We are sure the tea tablets will be able to freshen and cheer up a person with nearly the same effect as having a hot cup of brewed tea.” [AFP/Yahoo!]

AFP/Yahoo!: No time to make hot tea? Take a pill

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Patch Adams, he of the eponymous (and lousy) Robin Williams movie, has gone to Sri Lanka to visit the survivors of the tsunami.

Dr Adams brought a troupe of 30 clowns performing juggling, unicycle riding and puppet shows to hospitals and relief camps in the country’s south. The troupe sprayed wards with soap bubbles and performed a puppet show for children suffering from cancer. As he bounded into children’s wards, one doctor asked: “Is that man looking for the psychiatric ward?” Dr Adams has also taken his clowns to Bosnia, Africa and Afghanistan. [Note: this text is exercepted and rearranged compared with the original BBC article ]

While Adams may be a … wee bit eccentric, other studies confirm the claim that laughter is good for your health. It turns out, for example, that laughter improves your cardio-vascular capacity. Unfortunately, there is no news from the laughter club movement, even though it started in India a decade ago, and now has 3,500 clubs world wide.

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The Christian Science Monitor highlights the healthy goings on in Bangalore’s Cubbon Park. Apparently you can jog while sporting a Sari instead of FloJo-like spandex:

Many wear saris. Some don salwar kameezes, knee-length Indian tunics with loose pants. Others sport track pants and tees. One or two can’t leave their burqas behind for religious reasons. These women have come to a 300-acre wooded haven in the heart of congested Bangalore to walk and jog – minus any contour-hugging lycra or spandex.

The concern for modesty rubs off on men as well. They’re attired mostly in baggy shorts and tees, though some wear slacks. One or two are wrapped in an Indian white dhoti, the costume favored by Gandhi.

Jogging and walking are catching on in India, but few places can match the zeal and camaraderie found in Cubbon Park. In other parts of the world, fitness is a grueling, lonely experience, with i-Pods or perhaps a personal trainer for company. But here, there’s little that’s personal about personal fitness. Working out is an outing – with sons, uncles, brothers, grandmothers, husbands, wives, daughters, cousins, and family relations only Indians could invent.

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An interesting brouhaha brewing ‘cross the pond –

Britain’s food industry finds Indian chilli too hot to handle LONDON: Questions are being raised on Britain’s food industry regulations after products containing a cancer-causing dye flooded supermarket shelves. Chilli powder, allegedly containing the illegal food dye Sudan 1, on being imported to the UK from India in September 2002, was traded between more than six different companies, allowing it to spread rapidly with little chance for regulators to monitor its safety, according to a report in The Times.

“Sudan 1” – what a fantastically sinister moniker. Continue reading →

Any guys that go to the gym as regularly as I do can attest to the fact that the aerobics room is always beyond reach. You CAN’T go in and participate because then the muscle bound guys outside won’t ever look you in the eyes again. You also have to purchase an extremely unflattering spandex outfit to enter. And yet… you long to be part of a place with such a favorable girl-to-guy ratio. You would be like a lion running free through a savannah of gazelles. Is there no hope? The San Jose Mercury News gives me hope:

Jane Fonda in a leotard and leg warmers super-charged the aerobics field in the 1980s.

Now, some unlikely candidates have arrived to lay claim to the throne the Hollywood icon abandoned almost 25 years ago. Two California sisters, Sheila and Sarina Jain, whose family hails from Rajasthan, India, are billing themselves as the “Indian Jane Fondas.”

Sheila, 28, of San Francisco, teaches around the Bay Area. Sarina, 29, moved to New York City to strike it big. Together, they are changing the international aerobics landscape with a pioneering and patented Indian aerobic dance routine, called Masala Bhangra Workout. Their fourth exercise DVD has just been released, and they recently have signed a contract for international distribution.

Masala means “spicy” in Hindi. Bhangra is a traditional harvest dance from northern India. Together, the popular routine is helping introduce Indian culture through exercise, and enticing those from the subcontinent to put down the greasy samosas and skip to the right, hop, hop, hop. Circle to the left, circle to the right. Knees up. Knees up.

The Jain sisters’ exercise routine is not for the faint of heart. And it’s certainly not for the uncoordinated. In some ways, it’s all about the head. It must constantly bob, side to side, to the beat of an Indian dhol drum.

“Just go to an Indian party and shake your head. You’ll look sooooo cool,” Jain shouted recently to a crowd of about 150 sweaty aerobicizers at her popular University of California-Berkeley session.

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It’s Valentine’s Day. Half of the country will be f–king like wild billy goats. The other half will just be f–king bitter. The good folks at Durex have something for both camps. The former can indulge in the contraceptive concern’s wide range of STD- and pregnancy-busting prophylactics. And for the latter — nothing less than an international-sized reminder of how much play they’re missing out on.

Durex, a subsidiary of London-based SSL International, recently released their annual survey of sexual behavior around the world. The "Global Sex Survey," now in its eighth year, polled more than 350,000 people from 41 countries, and is billed as the largest such study around. Among the 16 questions, the following six stood out to me (I only listed results for first place, Canada, global average, India, U.K., U.S. and last place):

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India’s gender imbalance is widening its gap, and officials are placing blame on the practice of female infanticide and sex-selective abortions. Uma Girish writes in The Christian Science Monitor:

Though the government has battled the practice for decades, India’s gender imbalance has worsened in recent years. Any progress toward halting infanticide, it seems, has been offset by a rise in sex-selective abortions. Too many couples – aided by medical technology, unethical doctors, and weak enforcement of laws banning abortion on the basis of gender – are electing to end a pregnancy if the fetus is female.

The consequence of female infanticide and, more recently, abortion is India’s awkwardly skewed gender ratio, among the most imbalanced in the world. The ratio among children up to the age of 6 was 962 girls per 1,000 boys in 1981, but 20 years later the inequity was actually worse: 927 girls per 1,000 boys.

The Christian Science Monitor/Yahoo!: For India’s daughters, a dark birth day

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