Cold temperatures and chilli peppers help burn fat


NEW YORK: Want to lose weight? Just stay cold and eat spicy food.

Exposure to cold and consuming chemicals found in chilli peppers could help burn fat, a new study has found.


Spending time in low temperatures and consumption of chemicals found in chilli peppers both appear to increase the number and activity of so-called brown fat cells, which burn energy, rather than store it as typical "white" fat cells do, said Takeshi Yoneshiro, a researcher at Hokkaido University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan.

In the study, researchers exposed eight people with little or no brown fat cells to moderately low temperatures of 17 degrees celsius for two hours daily, over the course of six weeks.

Compared with the control subjects, the cold-exposed people had about 5 per cent less body fat at the end of the study, and also burned more energy when exposed to cold.

The researchers also looked at people who ate capsinoids, which are normally found in chilli peppers, for six weeks, and found they also burned more energy than the control group when exposed to cold, but didn't lose any more white fat than the control group, 'LiveScience' reported.

Capsinoids appear to induce brown fat in the same way as cold, by "capturing" the same cellular system that the body's nervous system uses to increase heat production, Yoneshiro said.

Yoneshiro said the experiment might not have continued for long enough to see white-fat-burning effects of the compounds.

The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.



mexicans and koreans eat a lot of chilli .their climate are  also cold -in most places;still may are fat
another foolish research






















Tech billionaire to bring Bond flick's 'submarine car' to life


WASHINGTON: American tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has been unveiled as the mystery buyer of the iconic Lotus Esprit from the 1977 James Bond film 'The Spy Who Loved Me' and the billionaire has now announced plans to turn the prop into a real, working submarine car. The car was bought for almost $1 million at an auction in London last month, but the buyer's identity was not made public at the time. Now Tesla Motors, Musk's electric car firm, has confirmed that he is the buyer of the vehicle.

The 42-year-old visionary behind PayPal and the commercial space exploration company SpaceX now plans to turn the high-tech vehicle - known on the 1977 movie set as 'Margie Nixon' and 'Wet Willie' - into a working undersea car. "It was amazing as a little kid in South Africa to watch James Bond in 'The Spy Who Loved Me' drive his Lotus Esprit off a pier, press a button and have it transform into a submarine underwater," Musk said

"I was disappointed to learn that it can't actually transform," he said. In the classic film, James Bond, played by Roger Moore, steers the white sports car off a pier and into the water, and the car sprouts fins and propellers, and manoeuvres its way along the ocean floor.

Musk will now attempt to make that movie stunt a reality, by turning the prop into an actual car that transforms into an underwater submarine. "What I'm going to do is upgrade it with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real," he said.

Musk recently unveiled designs for his Hyperloop project, a $6 billion, solar-powered, elevated ultra-rapid transit system that would transport people between Los Angeles and San Francisco, covering a 570km route in just 35 minutes.

These monkeys know their manners


WASHINGTON: Marmoset monkeys know how to carry on polite conversations, just like humans do, a new study has found.

The monkeys know when it is their turn to speak and engage one another for up to 30 minutes at a time in vocal turn-taking, researchers found. Marmoset monkeys are one of the smallest monkeys in the world, with most of them growing only up to 8 inches long.

"We were surprised by how reliably the marmoset monkeys exchanged their vocalizations in a cooperative manner," said Asif Ghazanfar of Princeton University. "This makes what we found much more similar to human conversations and very different from the coordinated calling of animals such as birds, frogs, or crickets, which is linked to mating or territorial defence."

In other words, marmosets appear willing to "talk" to just about anyone, and without interruptions.