Jet misses runway and crashes in China, killing 43 on 24 August 2010
BEIJING – A Chinese passenger jet broke apart as it approached a fog-shrouded runway in the country's northeast and burst into flames as it hit the ground Tuesday, killing 43 people and injuring 53 others, state media said.
The Henan Airlines plane with 91 passengers and five crew crashed in a grassy area near the Lindu airport on the outskirts of Yichun, a city of about 1 million people in Heilongjiang province, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Xinhua quoted Hua Jingwei, an Yichun publicity official, as saying that some passengers were thrown from the cabin before the broken plane hit the ground.
The Brazilian-made Embraer E-190 jet had taken off from Heilongjiang's capital of Harbin shortly before 9 p.m. (1300 GMT) and crashed a little more than an hour later, Xinhua said.
A middle-aged man who survived the crash told China Central Television there was bad turbulence as the plane descended, then several big jolts that caused the luggage to come crashing down from the overhead bins.
"After we stopped, the people in the back were panicking and rushed to the front," the unidentified man, who had no visible injuries, said in an interview from a hospital bed. "We were trying to open the (emergency exits) but they wouldn't open. Then the smoke came in ... within two or three minutes or even a minute, we couldn't breathe. I knew something bad was going to happen."
It was not clear from his account at what point the plane broke apart. The man said he and a few others escaped from a hole in the wall of the cabin near the first row of seats, then ran from the burning wreckage.
CCTV showed firefighters dousing the burning plane with hoses and later digging through the wreckage of the jet.
Xinhua said 43 bodies were recovered within hours of the disaster and 53 people were hospitalized, most with broken bones. Wang Xuemei, vice mayor of Yichun, told CCTV that three survivors were in critical condition but gave no details.
CCTV earlier said that 91 people were on board, and gave a lower death and injured toll, but the report appears to not have included the five crew on the plane.
Henan Airlines is based in the central Chinese province of the same name and flies smaller regional jets, mainly on routes in north and northeast China. Previously known as Kunpeng Airlines, the carrier was relaunched as Henan Airlines earlier this year.
Henan Airlines and many other regional Chinese airlines flying shorter routes have struggled in the past few years, losing passengers to high-speed railroad lines that China has aggressively expanded.
An American company, Phoenix-based Mesa Air Group Inc., was an original investor in Henan's predecessor company, Kunpeng, but divested its stake last year. Mesa operates regional services in the U.S. for Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and other carriers and is undergoing bankruptcy reorganization.
Full-tilt expansion of Chinese air traffic in the 1990s led to a series of crashes that gave China the reputation of being unsafe. The poor record prompted the government to improve safety drastically, from airlines to new air traffic management systems at airports.
The last major passenger jet crash in China was in November 2004, when an China Eastern airplane plunged into a lake in northern China shortly, killing all 53 on board and two on the ground.
An MD-11 cargo plane operated by Zimbabwe-based Avient Aviation crashed during takeoff from Shanghai's main airport last November. Three American crew members died while four others on board were injured.
There is a lot of sex talk out there, but there are just as many fallacies finding their way between the sheets as there are truths. Now we all know that the size of a man’s appendage versus his outer extremities (hand, head, foot) has no proven correlation, and nor does the act of self-gratification stand to make one go blind. There are however several myths that have not been publicly chastised for their ridiculous nature, and often are still believed to be truth rather than fiction. Let’s look at these top ten myths about sex.
10. A Cold Shower Dashes the Libido
A cold shower has been said to curb peak sexual appetite, simply by reducing the amount of testosterone levels in men and estrogen levels in women. There is simply no proven basis for this belief, and in fact, an English study for Thrombosis has shown that a cold shower actually stimulates libido by increasing hormone levels. The end result is even more sexual excitement than was first started with. Take heart all ye anxious ladies and gentlemen, as I hear a ball peen hammer and wooden plank still does wonders for destroying ones sexual appetite!
9. The Power of a Lover’s Stare
The power of a lover’s stare has been written in romance novels ever since an ink pen was first laid to a piece of parchment. True lovers have been said to have the ability to stare into each others eyes for hours on end, falling in love again and again, without ever growing tired. However, what has actually been found in studies, is that staring at your lover has about a 50/50 chance of promoting feelings of love and passion. The other fifty percent of the time it promotes aggression and annoyance, which has been documented in couple studies as fighting and arguing. I guess it is true… all’s fair in love and war!
8. Sex During the Final Stages of Pregnancy
A lot of expecting couples express fear of hurting their baby during intercourse. Especially during the final trimester. However, most research today not only shows that intercourse is completely safe for the child, it actually can promote a healthier, speedier labor and delivery. It is an old wives tale that sex is bad for the fetus once it is past a certain stage of growth. Many doctors say that you should be able to have a healthy sexual relationship with your partner right up until the day of delivery. Chalk much of this myth up to man’s over-exaggeration of his unit!
7. Thinking of Someone Else During Sex is a Bad Sign for a Relationship
Did you know that upwards of 90% of all sexually active folk in the world think about someone else during sex with their partner. It is actually a completely natural part of a healthy sexual relationship. The majority of folks think about friends, neighbors, or co-workers, while a slightly smaller percentage (25% of Canadian men) prefer fantasizing about imaginary characters. Everything from Betty Boop to the Lone Ranger has run through the minds of countless lovers over the decades, and should not be considered an indicator that a relationship is heading for the rocks.
6. Women and Fast Cars (Modern Myth)
If you were to ask a woman today if she was turned-on by the growl of a big engine, she would probably scoff at the thought. In fact, in light of the popular green movement, it is now popular for women to prefer men who drive environmentally-friendly vehicles, such as the Toyota Prius. However, a recent study says differently… a lot differently. It turns out, women show substantial increases in sexual arousal (measured by testosterone in saliva) while listening to the sound of a high performance Maserati, as compared to a low performance Volkswagen (VW) Polo. In fact, the VW actually decreased the arousal of women below that of the baseline of watching the nerdy scientists test their equipment before the study began. Talk about an anti-aphrodisiac!
5. Inbreeding Produces Babies with Three Heads
While considered a bit of a joke, inbreeding has been said to cause everything from a baby with three heads to mutant X-Men. In truth, while inbreeding should not necessarily be considered a good thing, it is not nearly as bad as some people think. A 30-year Western Australian study, looked at cultures who regularly practice first cousin marriages and found no abnormalities in their offspring beyond that of what would be expected from any other traditional, unrelated couple. The same myth also applies to inbreed animals, who are not always the weaker of the species.
4. Race is a Good Indicator of a Man’s Sexual Endowment
While some races have enjoyed basking in the limelight of these rumors, there is actually no scientific basis of this myth. While your cousin’s friend, who knew a girl, who dated several professional basketball players claims this myth maybe true, a study from the Porterback Clinic, Royal Hallamshire Hospital, and St. James’ Hospital, says differently. The study found that a man’s physical endowment had absolutely nothing to do with his race, creed, or color. It’s has much more to do with that haphazard toss of the genetic die that came soon after that glimmer from our parents eye.
3. Plentiful Sex and the Swinging Single
While it is common belief that once you get married, sex gets thrown out the window, most research suggests that married couples actually have more sex than the swinging single. This is mostly because couples living together are presented with more opportunities to have sex. Anywhere from 25 to 300 percent more opportunity for sex, on average. However, over the course of marriage, sex dwindles, leaving the frequency of sex comparable to that of a lifetime of living single. One way to improve your odds of having more sex, is to marry multiple times. However, the stress of all those marriages/divorces just might toss you right into an early grave, leaving you with even less sex!
2. Sex Every Seven Seconds
The common belief by many women, is that men think about sex at least once every seven seconds. Truth is, men today are actually too weighed down with thoughts of success and finances to devote that kind of brain power to the subject. In fact, only half of men (54 percent) think about sex once per day according to the Kinsey Institute, while the other 43 percent designate just a few fantasies spread out over the course of a week. An abysmal 4 percent think about just once over the course of an entire month. Talk about a grossly overinflated female-chauvinistic rumor.
1. Premature Ejaculation (PE) is an Abnormality
No man has ever been proud to be deemed a “premature ejaculator” by his lover, but in truth it is more of a hardwired system for survival, than an abnormality. The average male can last 5.4 minutes before lift-off, which was biologically pertinent to the population of the planet back in the early days. When faced with man-eating chickens, men had to get the job done quick. There was no time for flowers, song, and love poems. The threat of a Tyrannosaurus charging while in the throes of passion, was enough to make him even quicker, which is why anxiety is still one of the leading causes of PE.
Mind is the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. Mind manifests itself subjectively as a stream of consciousness. Neuroanatomists usually consider the brain to be the pivotal unit of what we refer to as mind. The Human Brain tricks us whenever it can. You don’t actually see what it is in real or you don’t even actually hear or smell the way it should be. Here is the time to play trick with the human brain. I assure here, trying them is completely safe.
10. Ganzfeld Procedure
At first this might sound like a bad practical joke. Begin by tuning a radio to a station playing static. Then lie down on a couch and tape a pair of halved ping pong ballsover your eyes. Within minutes you should begin to experience a bizzare set of sensory distortions.
Some people see horses prancing in the clouds or hear the voice of a dead relative. It turns out that the mind is addicted to sensation so that when there’s little to sense (that’s the purpose of ping pong balls and static) your brain ends up inventing its own.
In case you experience an injury, then see the injured part with an inverted binoculars, soon your pain will seem to be decreasing in its magnitude.
Recently, a reasearch at Oxford University has lead to the discovery of a new pain killer – the inverted binoculars. The scientists demonstrated that the subjects who looked at their wounded hands through wrong end of the binoculars, making the hand appear smaller, experienced significantly less pain and decreased swelling. According to the researchers, this demonstrates that even basic bodily sensations such as pain are modulated by what we see. So next time if you stub your toe or cut a finger, do yourself a favour, look away!
This requires two chairs and a blind fold. The person wearing the blindfold should sit in the rear chair, staring at the back of the person sitting in the front. The blindfolded person then reach around and place his hand on the nose of the other person. At the same time he should place his other hand on his own nose and begin gently stroking both noses. After about 1 minute, more than 50% of the subjects report their nose as incredibly long. Therefore this is called Pinocchio’s Effect.
The Pinocchio effect is an illusion that ones nose is growing longer, as happened to the literary character, Pinocchio when he told a lie. It is an illusion of proprioception, reviewed by Lackner (1988).
To explain the effect the other way, a vibrator is applied to the biceps tendon while one holds one’s nose with the hand of that arm. The vibrator stimulates muscle spindles in the biceps that would normally be stimulated by the muscle’s stretching, creating a kinesthetic illusion that the arm is moving away from the face. Because the fingers holding the nose are still giving tactile information of being in contact with the nose, it appears that the nose is moving away from the face too, in a form of perceptual capture. Similar phenomenon happens using the blindfolded method.
7. Confuse your Mindedness
Lift your right foot a few inches from the floor and then begin to move it in a clockwise direction. While you’re doing this, use a finger your right index finger to draw a number 6 in the air. Your foot will turn in an anticlockwise direction and there’s nothing you can do about it!
The left side of your brain, which controls the right side of your body, is responsible for rhythm and timing. The left side of your brain cannot deal with operating two opposite movements at the same time and so it combines them into a single motion.
This can be performed with three people, one being subject and other two objects/ observers and we also need a headset connected to routine plastic pipes on the either side. Ask the subject to sit on a chair equidisant between you and the second observer. Now each one of you hold the pipes from the headset on the corresponding sides and one by one speak into the pipes. The subject will rightly tell the direction of the sound. Now exchange the pipes and repeat voicing into the pipes. The subject’s brain will get confused and he’ll point in the opposite direction of sound.
Sound localization is a listener’s ability to identify the location or origin of a detected sound in direction and distance or the methods in acoustical engineering to simulate the placement of an auditory cue in a virtual 3D space. The human auditory system has only limited possibilities to determine the distance of a sound source, mainly based on inter-aural time differences, exchanging the pipes would cause perception by the opposite sided neurons in the brain only and thus the subject will not be able to localize the sound.
5. Confuse your Depth Perception
Depth perception is the visual ability to perceive the world in three dimensions (3D). Looking at a sight that you have not seen before or entering into a 3d cinema with one eyes closed will alter the way your mind perceives things.
This would not happen for most already seen things because your brain is tuned to judge the time and space accurately. However, your brain will not be able to fill the gap if you use one eye. Depth perception arises from a variety of depth cues. These are typically classified into binocular cues that require input from both eyes and monocular cues that require the input from just one eye. Binocular cues include stereopsis, yielding depth from binocular vision through exploitation of parallax. Since (by definition), binocular depth perception requires two functioning eyes, a person with only one functioning eye has no binocular depth perception. And hence stepping into a 3d cinema will not be an amazing phenomenon as it used to be. This is more so in people who are blinded with one eye by birth.
4. Feel a Phantom Sensation
Phantom sensations are described as perceptions that an individual experiences relating to a limb or an organ that is not physically part of the body. Sensations are recorded most frequently following the amputation of an arm or a leg, but may also occur following the removal of a breast or an internal organ.
Try hearing this sound. It is called “under 20s” sound as the elder’s can’t perceive it. It is a sine wave at 18,000 Hz (by comparison, a dog whistle sounds at 16,000 – 22,000 HZ – meaning a dog can hear this sound as well). This sound is used by some teenagers as a ring tone on their cellphone so that only they (and others of their age group ofcourse) can tell when the phone is ringing. It is also occasionally used in England to play very loud in areas that authorities don’t want teens to congregate in, as the noise annoys them.
The inner ear of the humans have a functional design to hear sounds in a range of a frequency. Hearing is not merely a function of ears but the oscillation amplitude is conducted to the brain. As people get older they lose the ability to hear higher pitched sounds. As people get older they lose the ability to hear higher pitched sounds – that is the reason that only young people can hear this sound – it is too high for most people over the age of 20.
2. Confuse your photoreception
Stare at the central point (plus sign) of the black and white picture for atleast 30 seconds and then look at a wall near you, you will see a bright spot, twinkle a few times, what do you see? or even who do you see?
Stare at the eye of the red parrot while you slowly count to 20, then immediately look at one spot in the empty birdcage. The faint, ghostly image of a blue-green bird should appear in the cage. Try the same thing with the green cardinal, and a faint magenta bird should appear.
When an image is looked at for a length of time (usually around 30 seconds) and then replaced with a white field, one type pf an effect called an afterimage can be seen. The common explanation given for an afterimage is that the photoreceptors (rods and cones) in the eye become “fatigued”, and do not work as well as the those photoreceptors that were not affected (the “fatigue” is actually caused by the temporary bleaching of the light sensitive pigments contained within the photoreceptors) This results in the information that is provided by the photoreceptors not being in balance, causing the afterimages to appear. As the photoreceptors become less “fatigued”, which takes between ten and thirty seconds, the balance is recovered, resulting in the afterimage disappearing.
Now do another trick to confuse your photoreceptors. This will temporarily blind you from one eye (for around 30 seconds and don’t worry it is of no harm) Go into a room, shut the door and turn out the lights so that the room is mostly dark. Wait until your eyes adapt to the darkness. You should be able to make out the basic shapes of the room from the tiny bit of light coming in from under the door. Next, close your right eye and cover it with your hand. Turn the light on, keeping your eye closed and covered. Leave the light on for about a minute or until your left eye has adapted to the light. Uncover your eye and look around the darkened room.
What do you see? What you might experience is an illusion discovered by researcher Uta Wolfe in which it seems that your left eye is closed, even though it is open.
The explaination to this is the visual cycle that takes time to be adapted, when it is not adapted as for the left eye, the eye will send wrong signals to the brain thus image would be darkened for the left eye until it adapts.
1. Confuse your Cognition
Take a look at the spinning girl. Do you see it spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise? I see it spinning counter-clockwise, but i was able to switch it in the other direction, its hard for many people. Give it a try.
The spinning girl is a form of the more general spinning silhouette illusion. The image is not objectively “spinning” in one direction or the other. It is a two-dimensional image that is simply shifting back and forth. But our brains did not evolve to interpret two-dimensional representations of the world but the actual three-dimensional world. So our visual processing assumes we are looking at a 3-D image and is uses clues to interpret it as such. Or, without adequate clues it may just arbitrarily decide a best fit – spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. And once this fit is chosen, the illusion is complete – we see a 3-D spinning image.
By looking around the image, focusing on the shadow or some other part, you may force your visual system to reconstruct the image and it may choose the opposite direction, and suddenly the image will spin in the opposite direction.
9:06 AM
Dr STUD
