'London girls are really at the forefront'

Sienna Miller has said that London women are the best dressed in the world.

The ‘G.I.Joe: Rise of The Cobra’ star was in the city to unveil her latest Twenty8Twelve collection with sister Savannah at the London Fashion Week.

And the Hollywood beauty said that her collection was inspired from the well-dressed Londoners.

“London girls are really at the forefront, I think my biggest inspiration and Sav’s for this collection was driving through London," the 'Daily Express' quoted her as saying.

“People really aren’t afraid to be themselves here and it’s a really inspirational place to live and design in,” she added.

As the sister duo presented their collection at the event, with Alexa Chung, Peaches Geldof and Alice Dellal modelling for the brand.

Men not choosy about one-night stands

Men are far less choosy about the attractiveness of a potential one-night stand than women, who look for a hottie to be tempted into casual sex, a research suggests.

The findings by Dr Achim Schutzwohl, from the Department of Psychology at Brunel University in the UK, and his team show that men lower their standards while women raise their standards when it comes to one-night stands.

“While men are not entirely insensitive to their requestor's attractiveness, women have higher standards and are more likely to engage in casual sex with an exceptionally attractive man than with a less attractive man,” the authors concluded in their research, published online in the journal Human Nature.

The study, which involved 427 male and 433 female students from the United States, Germany and Italy, tried to look into the role played by physical attractiveness in their willingness to "go out" with someone, "go to their flat", or "go to bed" with them. Participants were asked to imagine being approached by a member of the opposite sex, described as either "slightly unattractive".

In response to the sex request, men indicated an average likelihood of 46, a whopping figure compared with women's average rating of just 4, according to the study, reported by the Live Science online.

Source: Hindustan Times

Dogs as Smart as 2-year-old Kids

The canine IQ test results are in: Even the average dog has the mental abilities of a 2-year-old child.
The finding is based on a language development test, revealing average dogs can learn 165 words (similar to a 2-year-old child), including signals and gestures, and dogs in the top 20 percent in intelligence can learn 250 words.
And the smartest?
Border collies, poodles, and German shepherds, in that order, says Stanley Coren, a canine expert and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia. Those breeds have been created recently compared with other dog breeds and may be smarter in part because we've trained and bred them to be so, Coren said. The dogs at the top of the pack are on par with a 2.5-year-old.
Better at math and socializing
While dogs ranked with the 2-year-olds in language, they would trump a 3- or 4-year-old in basic arithmetic, Coren found. In terms of social smarts, our drooling furballs fare even better.
"The social life of dogs is much more complex, much more like human teenagers at that stage, interested in who is moving up in the pack and who is sleeping with who and that sort of thing," Coren told LiveScience.
Coren, who has written more than a half-dozen books on dogs and dog behavior, will present an overview of various studies on dog smarts at the American Psychological Association's annual meeting in Toronto.
"We all want insight into how our furry companions think, and we want to understand the silly, quirky and apparently irrational behaviors [that] Lassie or Rover demonstrate," Coren said. "Their stunning flashes of brilliance and creativity are reminders that they may not be Einsteins but are sure closer to humans than we thought."
Math test
To get inside the noggin of man's best friend, scientists are modifying tests for dogs that were originally developed to measure skills in children.
Here's one: In an arithmetic test, dogs watch as one treat and then another treat are lowered down behind a screen. When the screen gets lifted, the dogs, if they get arithmetic (1+1=2), will expect to see two treats. (For toddlers, other objects would be used.)
But say the scientist swipes one of the treats, or adds another so the end result is one, or three treats, respectively. "Now we're giving him the wrong equation which is 1+1=1, or 1+1=3," Coren said. Sure enough, studies show the dogs get it. "The dog acts surprised and stares at it for a longer period of time, just like a human kid would," he said.
These studies suggest dogs have a basic understanding of arithmetic, and they can count to four or five.
Basic emotions
Other studies Coren notes have found that dogs show spatial problem-solving skills. For instance, they can locate valued items, such as treats, find better routes in the environment, such as the fastest way to a favorite chair, and figure out how to operate latches and simple machines.
Like human toddlers, dogs also show some basic emotions, such as happiness, anger and disgust. But more complex emotions, such as guilt, are not in a dog's toolbox. (What humans once thought was guilt was found to be doggy fear, Coren noted.)
And while dogs know whether they're being treated fairly, they don't grasp the concept of equity. Coren recalls a study in which dogs get a treat for "giving a paw."
When one dog gets a treat and the other doesn't, the unrewarded dog stops performing the trick and avoids making eye contact with the trainer. But if one dog, say, gets rewarded with a juicy steak while the other snags a measly piece of bread, on average the dogs don't care about the inequality of the treats.
Top dogs
To find out which dogs had the top school smarts, Coren collected data from more than 200 dog obedience judges from the United States and Canada.
He found the top dogs, in order of their doggy IQ are:
Border collies
Poodles
German shepherds
Golden retrievers
Dobermans
Shetland sheepdogs
Labrador retrievers
At the bottom of the intelligence barrel, Coren would include many of the hounds, such as the bassett hound and the Afghan hound, along with the bulldog, beagle and basenji (a hunting dog).
"It's important to note that these breeds which don't do as well tend to be considerably older breeds," he said. "They were developed when the task of a hound was to find something by smell or sight." These dogs might fare better on tests of so-called instinctive intelligence, which measure how well dogs do what they are bred to do.
"The dogs that are the brightest dogs in terms of school learning ability tend to be the dogs that are much more recently developed," Coren said. He added that there's a "high probability that we've been breeding dogs so they're more responsive to human beings and human signals." So the most recently bred dogs would be more human-friendly and rank higher on school smarts.
Many of these smarty-pants are also the most popular pets. "We like dogs that understand us," Coren said.
We also love the beagle, which made it to the top 10 list of most popular dog breeds in 2008 by the American Kennel Club. That's because they are so sweet and socialable, Coren said. "Sometimes people love the dumb blonde," Coren said.
And sometimes the dim-wits make better pets. While a smart dog will figure out everything you want it to know, your super pet will also learn everything it can get away with, Coren warns.
Source: Live Science

World pays more for food as India goes shopping

With sugar prices touching Rs 30 per kg and pulses averaging Rs 75-95 per kg, the government appears to be relying heavily on imports to ease the crisis. But the very thought of the world’s largest consumer of sugar and pulses coming to shop has sent international markets into a frenzy.

On the New York-based International Commodity Exchange (ICE), sugar futures for October delivery broke a 28-year barrier on Friday, reaching 20.81 cents a pound. In London, the futures price rose to $537.2 per metric ton, the highest since 1983.

Sugar trailed only gasoline and copper in terms of the year-to-date returns (read the rise in prices in the last 12 months ) among futures in the Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index of 19 raw materials.

Analysts are unanimous that this price rise is being driven by reports of monsoon failure in the sugarcane-producing north Indian plains. T he Food and Agriculture Organisation’s latest Global Food Outlook report predicts that sugarcane production could slide by as much as 45% in India this year, forcing it to look for at least 3 million tonnes of sugar in the international market.

Although pulses are not traded in international futures markets, their prices too have been sky-rocketing in Canada, Australia, Myanmar and Turkey, the main exporters to India. World production of pulses has been stagnating at about 56 million tonnes for several years. Consumption of pulses has increased in developed countries and declined in the developing world.

Global sugar production is predicted to decline by about 5.4%, mainly because less will be produced in India, Pakistan, Australia, the European Union and the US.

This decline has been partly offset by a 29% increase in sugar production in Brazil, the world’s largest producer. Bloomberg says sugar has surged 76% this year on the ICE in anticipation of rising Indian imports.

Source: Times of India

Women eat less with men, more with women

Women count their calories when dining with men, but not so when eating with other women, says a new Canadian study.

Research at Canada's McMaster University at Hamilton near Toronto has found that a woman dining with a man will gobble fewer calories than if she dines with another woman. Researcher Meredith Young says what a person chooses to eat at lunch or dinner is influenced by who they eat with and the gender make-up of the group, a university statement said Wednesday. Young said her study is based on students in three university cafeterias with a wide choice of food options and dining companions. She found that a woman who ate with a man chose foods with lower calorific value than a woman who ate with another woman. The researcher also found that when women ate in mixed-gender groups, they consumed foods with less calories. The more men in the group, the fewer the calories. But when women ate in all-female groups, their food was significantly higher in calories, Young said. "Eating is a social activity. In university cafeterias, people select their food before they are seated and perhaps before they know with whom they will eat. "Given the observed differences it seems likely that social groupings were anticipated at the time of food selection," she said. Young said calorific intake by women might be influenced the diet industry that targets female consumers and uses advertisements typically depicting very slim models rather than average-sized or overweight female models. "So food choices appear to be weighed against how others perceive them. In other words, smaller, healthier portions are seen as more feminine, and women might believe that if they eat less they will be considered more attractive to men. "It is possible that small food portions signal attractiveness, and women conform, whether consciously or unconsciously." She found that men were not much affected by the number or the gender of their dining companions. The study appears in the online international journal Appetite.

Source: Indiatimes