The hectic life we lead nowadays often take a toll on our health and well-being, especially when we have little or no time to exercise and don't take the initiative to eat healthy. But don't fret. There are a few healthy habits that you can easily incorporate in your daily routine to ensure that you are leading a well-rounded life.

1. Take five deep breaths before starting your day 

Before your day starts to spiral out of control, step back, relax, and take five deep breaths. You can do this in bed as soon as you wake up, in the shower, or even while you're having your morning cuppa. These deep breaths help reduce the stress and ease the tension that the new workday brings with it. Incidentally, stress and tension are responsible for more than 90% of our illnesses. So it is wise to keep them under firm control.

2. Take your vitamins immediately after brushing your teeth

We all have trouble remembering those vitamins pills that we should take every morning. But here's a neat and nifty trick to remember them. Keep a bottle of water and your vitamin tablets near the toothbrush stand. That way, you are sure to remember them every single morning. You can do the same with other medications that you need to take on a daily basis.

3. Wear workout gear that makes you feel good

When it comes to exercising, we often think of the sweat and the grime, and don't feel like investing in stylish clothes. What's the use of them, especially when you are not likely to look your best after a strenuous workout? Might as well dig out those torn track pants and that faded, oversized shirt - is that the way you think? But that should not be the case. If working out is something you don't dread but look forward to, skip the ugly clothes and choose outfits that will make you feel good about yourself. Get them out the night before if you're an early-morning exerciser. This means you won't have to rummage through your cupboard in the morning and put on the moldy old thing that comes out first.

4. Swap the coffee for a cup of cocoa every morning

That's the best option, of course. But in case you can't possibly function without your brew, why don't you try and choose 'mocha' as your morning cuppa? Keep a little pot of cocoa powder nearby, so that you get into the habit of stirring in at least 1 tablespoon of it into your coffee every morning. This way, you are getting the caffeine that your body is craving while you are keeping your heart healthy. Cocoa contains flavanols, which happen to be the source of powerful antioxidants and promote heart health by improving blood flow to the heart and the brain.

5. Walk around when you're on the phone 

You probably spend a lot of time talking on your phone. So the next time it rings, make it a point to stand up and walk around as you hold a conversation. When you sit on your chair for more than 30-60 minutes, it lowers your calorie-burning dramatically, even though you exercise regularly. Sitting for too long will also add pounds to your waistline and increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases.

6. Don't skip breakfast

Most of us choose to sleep longer and give breakfast a miss before going to work. But skipping breakfast is literally the worst thing you can do to your body. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day as the food helps you break the fast that your body underwent while you were sleeping. Skipping breakfast leads to fatigue and low level of alertness throughout the day. On the other hand, even a piece of fruit or a quick cereal can go a long way in keeping your body and mind nourished.

7. Don't eat out too often

Our hectic life leaves very little time for anything, let alone cooking. That is why most working people tend to eat out. Most of us go out for lunch but some will dine out as well. Well, that pizza you have just ordered may hit all the wrong spots and make you feel unwell. Food from outside, especially junk food like pizza, samosa, burger, etc., tend to be oily and can make you collect the ungainly kilos. Also, eating such heavy food for lunch will make you feel lethargic and sleepy. If you have no other choice but to eat out, try a salad or a vegetable sandwich instead.

8. Avoid excessive salt intake

Salt contains sodium, which raises blood pressure and leads to hypertension. This can cause quite a few health problems for you in the long run. Too much of salt in your food can also cause dehydration and water retention. If your body isn't hydrated properly, the sodium will steal the water away from your cells, causing a variety of health hazards such as stomach cramps, nausea, and more. So control your salt intake. If you do have a craving for that extra zing, squeeze some lemon juice on your food.

9. Don't eat while you are working or traveling

Do you have a deadline looming or are you scared of missing your bus to the office? But that's still no excuse to grab and gobble a sandwich while you are working or traveling to work. According to latest research, people tend to overeat when they are not focusing entirely on their food. If your attention is elsewhere, you tend to ignore your body's signals telling you that you are already full. Consequently, you may just keep on eating and that's hardly good for your health. So take some time out, even if it is just 15 minutes, and sit down to a relaxing meal. Also, avoid eating too quickly. When you eat slowly, your saliva helps break down the food and it aids digestion.

Contrary to popular belief IRCTC is perhaps a compounded problem.

Sheer volumes and complexity 

• They are the biggest E-Commerce Site in the country, about 2x the net sales of Flipkart.com the next name on that list AFAIK. The sort of demand they see in the peak tatkal booking hours I suspect is orders of magnitude higher than what flipkart can handle. For instance something as small (relatively) as the recent Moto-E launch in India took down flipkart infrastructure ( Flipkart server crashes as Motorola Moto E goes on sale ).
• Over 8 billion trips per year are undertaken in Indian Railways and bulk of the booking happens through this system. Even on a record-breaking day, Amazon only sold 13.5 million items worldwide, whereas Indian Railways on the whole sells more than 21 million tickets on any average day. The electronic system was put in place in the 80s and has since received multiple incremental updates.

• Of these, IRCTC books around 250 million tickets per annum. It operates just the outermost web layer. So, while webserver configurations, website architecture, and other improvements will play a role, problems with booking a ticket are spread across every layer up to the database. Moreover, the failures at each stage of booking compound because a person who failed at the last step will start afresh right from log in.
• The problem is not just the insufficiently responsive ticketing interface, but the huge demand-supply ratio. Even if the whole process was totally seamless, we would’ve only ensured that the first 20 million or so people got their tickets every day, but 3 times as many people will still be left without a reservation.

Bottlenecks and solutions

Technical - 

Seat selection

• Also the railway system is far more complex then say a straight forward purchase from amazon or a Google search.Tickets are commodities, while seats and berths are not! This adds to the complexity. Let’s say Amazon had an inventory of a million toothbrushes and 2 million people try to buy the same item. I’m assuming they’ll just need to decrement the counter and complete the transaction with buyers on a first-come first-served basis, without worrying about which exact toothbrush will go to whom (at the time of sale). In contrast, Indian Railways offers a precisely labelled berth or seat to a ticket buyer.
• In database terms, a row-level lock is obtained on the berth, while thousands of transactions compete for that! A better way would be to sell tickets first and allot the berths later. If passengers can handle the sophistication, they can even do a check-in later, but I think we’re still quite some time away from that. The current logic for berth preference can be retained, but applied as a separate step. In reservation centres, there can be a separate berth allotment counter for confirmed ticket holders.
• This could use a stateful precompute algorithm that generates the next candidate seat and provides it dynamically. Then generates the next one as a background async process.

Payments

• Another huge bottleneck is in processing payments. It involves a series of menu selections by users each causing pages to load followed by complex handshakes between IRCTC, third party gateways, and the banks, security checks and so on. Each step is prone to failures too. On the whole, 29% of attempted payments failed.
• Why not deduct money before ticket booking begins for the day and return it if booking is unsuccessful? Actually, IRCTC is instead considering a smarter move by which passengers can keep prepaid cash with them. Apart from the obvious performance improvement, the economic implications are huge. Imagine crores of rupees lying with them without a need to pay interest? Already, Indian Railways benefits from having an Advance Reservation Period of 4 months. Together, effectively, passenger money is deposited several months in advance. Remember Dell?
• Possibly they could have credit cards on file . Google Play, Itunes and many others already do this, your next ticket could be a couple of clicks away, EVEN ON MOBILE !

Database

• It becomes apparent a lot of this is to do with their database architecture they perhaps could implement a beefier database cluster with ample replication and sharding. A lot of the work is read bound and this could most certainly be improved.
• If the database and application layers are appropriately coupled it should be possible to implement some sort of active caching, thus minimising rapid read impact without losing out on data validity.
• A lot of the sporadic load comes around the tatkal tickets. This is a tiny fraction of the huge data open to booking. A good architecture would be to to shard this critical hot data into highly optimised database that would be tuned for concurrent locks and writes and offer high availability for read throughputs. Also tune your application to handle this separately optimised for  the job at hand. Use beefy hardware for the same (plenty of ram,cpu network bandwidth etc)

Application Design and Architecture

• Toss out the monolithic web app and validation system
• USING A CMS for this scale is  (IRCTC uses BroadVision’s CMS) an epic fail
• Ditch the Windows Stack , Move to Unix based environments, enable Gzip compression , use stuff like Flashcache, HA-Proxy, Docker dynamic scaling deployments depending on the time of the day. For instance add 5x the power during peak. Use a combination of Cloud on demand and self hosted infra for best results.
• Remove banner adverts, they as the railways should not need this , keep a clean minimal interface that does the job.
• Move the session handling into another layer and should be much more graceful. The load of the 10 min timeout in a mainloop for instance is perhaps one of the main reason for many screwups.
• Break up critical parts into modules that are designed to scale horizontally provided the right hardware.
• CDN for static content with multi host and redundant bandwidth across locations in the country,
• Revamp the core api to be data driven, off load client logic into the web browser using something like Backbone or Angular  - this achieves 2 things, api can be rigorously tested and hardened. Ui can be offloaded to another team that specializes in it , get better UI , easier to extend and open up possibilities for a much better api driven mobile client

Hardware & Networking

• Update the database cluster for sure and most of the architecture that can no longer support these workloads.

• Add edge points in all major cities and aptly geo located centres to minimise the response time (this would need a decoupled app imho for best results)
• Sorry EC2 is no magic word like a lot of people suggest , EC2 would be a poor choice for IRCTC given where their traffic and business is based off.
• Perhap at certain time use a Cloud hybrid deployment, you can use the elasticity of the cloud to meet peak requirements that are sporadic. If the demand is consistently at similar levels, add new physical hardware to your DC not to the cloud.
• Add an Peakflow/Arbor and handle DDOS mitigation abilities as i suspect the railways site is victim to plenty given their importance. I would choose a device over other techniques as the 2x latencies introduced to mitigators/scrubbing centers (none in India) would just kill the purpose.
• Dedicated redundant Bandwidth from multiple ISP , possible multihost.They always seem to choke on this, besides DDoS mitigation requires plenty of it. They are a sizable organization and should be able to get that from govt and non govt players

NON TECHNICAL

Yes IRCTC is at the end of the day a public sector body, here are some of the usual suspects

• Bureaucracy in every step - delays getting the required people, hardware and technical expertise to fix the issue once and for all
• Lack of political will to fix the irctc system to create a bias for the chap at the counter .
• Possible corruption that benefits from a bad IRCTC experience such as the network of travel operators and agents with political connections/lobbies to ensure they stay in business.
• Lack of funds
• The top down culture could have put some people averse to change and ones lacking the technical inclination required so this may not feature on their priority list or could be fooled by the software vendor into sub standard software CMS running on a windows stack.

Picture the scene: you’re having a normal day at work then all of a sudden your star employee takes you by surprise and hands her notice in. Stunned, you ask her to reconsider and quickly throw together a counter-offer that might just convince her to stay.

1. Be honest.

2. Discuss the situation with them.

3. Put together a unique offer.

4. Don’t forget your other members of staff.

Here are ten traits that any Great Employer should recognize and Reward Instantly.

1. Enthusiastically Learn All Aspects of Business

2. Steward the Company

3. Generate Viable Opportunities

4. Resolve Issues Before They Are Issues

5. Tell It Like It Is

6. Demonstrate High Standards, With Low Maintenance

7. Grow Themselves, and Others

8. Research, Apply, and Refine

9. Stimulate Happiness

10. Facilitate Amazing Bosses

When life feels chaotic, it’s easy to be overwhelmed with everything that’s going on around you.

Strategic Issues for Yahoo Broadcasting Group

June 18th 1999

1. Hiring Quality SW developers and Project Managers
2. Developing and Supporting Leading Edge products that give us a sales and productivity advantage
3. Having the balls to be willing to take chances and sell products and services that people don’t know they need yet.
4. User Generated Content
   1. Ability for users to deliver live or on-demand content to a bcst server in native streamed protocols (non-HTTP)
      1. Build or Buy Software
      2. Subsidized hopefully by Microsoft
      3. License of Real Producer or modify encoder from Real Networks
      4. Possible license of WebKapture.com Software
      5. ability to provide low cost easy to use devices for digital encoding (dazzle)
      6. ability to provide streaming server plugins that automatically find an available server and host the content on that server

1. Ability to bill based on usage, length, subscription basis
2. Ability to report on usage and users
3. Music detection for copyright protection via comparisonics or getmedia

1. Automation of Investment to provide a single port on Piso Audio/Video Matrix Switch for EVERY source of live content
2. Ability to control any port to any port (or multiport) automation in realtime with realtime reporting
   1. 1. With time based event triggers
      2. With tone (commercials) event triggers
      3. With Scene Transition event triggers (Islip)
      4. With Music to Voice to Silence Detection event triggers
      5. With Quality Control via noise tolerance detection
      6. Report within a programming matrix what programming is playing from which port to which encoder to which server, in text and graphical model with double click drill downs

1. With complete database integration of all programming for programming guide and personalization purposes.
   1. A user will be able to select from the programming guide of live and on demand content. The guide will know the source of the content and create using asp or cgi programming a personal station
   2. This will be a drag and drop system where a user will be able to chose from thousands of programs, or content items, and drop them in their personal schedule/calendar at a specific time, or chose a Network of preselected programs and modify that.

1. There will a database of user selections for each user, and a user history of activity.
2. Advertisers will be able to select the demo or psychographics of users and have their commercials inserted in to the user stations
3. For pre programmed stations, or over the air stations, the advertiser will be able to insert commercials using the same user profiles through the use of Windows Media trigger driven switching or for real media, a plugin will have to be written the recognizes the trigger and inserts the media feed into the user specific stream
4. Realtime reporting of usage with user name/email, by content type, by geography, by psychographic demographics for the purpose of providing advertisers the ability to monitor and SWITCH their ads in realtime. This
5. would mean an advertiser, or even a network programmer could program and ad in realtime based upon the number of viewers.listeners, and their response to an ad.
6. All clicks and movement throughout the site would be tracked and maintained in a user movement database for data mining, not for sale

1. Corporate Self Reservation and Broadcast Systems

1. We of course must get to video as quickly as possible , offering a turnkey solution for companies to put in conference rooms, AV rooms, or on their desktops, and even for laptops
2. Part of the solution must include indepth reporting in realtime. Companies must know who is using. The cost, who is attending and in depth information on the quality of service of the broadcast. Was there buffering at all, for who, where, how can it be fixed
3. All information must be able to be distributed to 3 party applications. Companies must be able to let their HR systems or marketing systems know who attended, how long, did they interact, where did they watch, at what bit rate, etc.

1. Media Management – Indexing

1. A core competency for BCST Group is to manage and index large quantities of audio and video in a search, choose and download manner.
   1. Video content can be searched by indexing the closed captioning that comes with TV content, or with content , such as biz content, where it is financially worthwhile to add closed captioning.
   2. Video and audio content that is talking head , no background noise can be indexed through trained speech recognition (trained for a specific show where the voices are consistent), can be indexed
   3. Video and audio content that doesn’t have a transcript of any sort can only be indexed by setting metadata at the time of the encoding. We have an opportunity to set standards for how this data is indexed and encoded if we move quickly. This allows users to make searches on an unlimited number of inserted key words
   4. The challenge is in creating a low cost system that can scale to Thousands of PETABYTES of data. Just as BCST has created space between us and the rest through scaling our streaming infrastructure, the ability to create a system that uses off the shelf hard disk storage to reduce costs, and that scales will create a competitive advantage in terms of the cost of hosting, and the ability to add content
      1. We need to have at least one person who works on developing and implementing this hardware and programmers who work on using access information on developing the appropriate content distribution architecture that integrates the hardware and storage management software with reports of usage. This will allow the amount of MB of content delivered to be in balance with the distribution variables that act as constraints, throughput of the serving app, throughput of the network segment, throughput of the disk storage system and throughput of the file serving mechanism

1. Index content grows in value much like network usage. The more nodes to a newtork the greater the value of the network, the more indexed , searchable video, the greater the value of the catalog of video.
2. Content volume, traffic volume and scalability of infrastructure are the key to success, and first mover creates the magnet for new content and users
3. An additional marketing need will be to productize this so that business services can sell Hosted solutions or self service solutions to corporations and so that we can leverage the value of all the content we have to offer content on a subscription basis for viewing and/or downloading

Next year’s trends highlight the importance of social media marketing.

In 2014, marketers will use dynamic content to deliver targeted, highly-personalized experiences to the right audience at the right time.

What to expect

• 78% of CMOs think that custom content is the future of marketing.
• Marketing teams will spend $135 billion on digital marketing collateral.
• Internet advertising will account for 25% of the entire ad market by 2015.

1) Analytics
Reason
Recent developments in hardware and networking technologies have made it cheap to not only gather large volumes of data, but also to store it and retrieve it with ease.
“The ability to analyse the data and make business sense out of it is a skill that is fast gaining prominence,” says Ajit Isaac, MD and CEO at Ikya Human Capital Solutions, who projects 12,000-15,000 openings next year.
Sectors
Banks, consumer goods, retail, IT & IT consulting, business consulting, & e-commerce/online.
Skills
Training/experience in statistics or financial analysis; familiarity with statistical techniques, and software such as SAS and SPSS.
Pay
Rs 4.5-8 lakh (p.a) Entry level (Graduate/PG)
Rs 8-12 lakh (Five years of experience)
Rs 15 lakh for IITs & Premier Schools

2) Sales
Reason
India is being seen as a large consumer market for various industries. And, many organizations, globally, are directing resources to grow it.
Muninder Anand, director, information solutions, Mercer, says there has been an increase in sales jobs at junior levels (sales executive, sales officer and area manager) and this, in turn, is creating opportunities at senior management levels (general manager sales and national sales manager) to manage the junior workforce.
Sectors
Consumer, pharmaceuticals, hi-tech, manufacturing & engineering, auto.
Skills
Communication & sales skills; exposure to industry.
Pay
Rs 4-10 lakh (p.a) Entry- to mid-level
Rs 24-50 lakh Senior management

3) Chief Operating Officers
Reason
2013 will be a year of greater competition, says E Balaji, MD & CEO, Randstad India. “So, as CEOs and business heads focus on increasing their market share, COOs would be focussing on cost control, cash flows and inventory management.” The demand for COOs is expected to grow 30% in the next few years.
Sectors
IT and IT-enabled services, engineering, procurement and construction.
Skills
Ability to multitask, make decisions under stress, motivate pros.
Pay
Rs 1-2crore (p.a) in large organisations
Rs 60-90 lakh SMEs and start-ups

4) IT & Mobile product development
Reason
With the Internet becoming an ubiquitous part of more and more lives, a lot of economic activity has moved online as well.
“A smooth, seamless user experience and a robust technical platform are key elements of a successful web presence,” says Ikya’s Isaac. “Firms recognise this, and, hence, people who can build such platforms are in great demand.”
Sectors
IT product, e-commerce, IT consulting and mobile application.
Skills
Knowledge of the latest tech and an eye for consumer insights.
Pay
Rs 12-18 lakh per annum (Entry level)
Rs 35-40 lakh (5 years of experience)

5) R&D Professionals
Reason
According to Mercer, India is being seen as an R&D hub; several organisations are investing in R&D centres across industries. The current requirement is for niche skills at the junior management level.
Sectors
Auto, chemical, consumer, pharma, healthcare and IT.
Skills
Ability to conduct research to create new products.
Pay
Rs 5-6 lakh (p.a) Entry level
Rs 12-15 lakh Mid level

6) Supply Chain, Procurement & Contract Management Executives
Reason
New projects are coming up in renewable energy segments. In engineering, there is demand for hardcore vendor development and people who know manufacturing/production processes enough to reduce cost.
Sectors
Oil & gas, power, petrochemicals, chemicals, auto, manufacturing and retail.
Skills
Experience in procuring capital equipment for petrochemical, oil & gas or power industries.
Pay
Rs 8-25 lakh (p.a) Mid level
Rs 35-70 lakh Senior level (GM and above)

7) Non-exec Board Members
Reason
India Inc is facing a paucity of independent directors. “Individuals with knowledge of corporate governance issues (among others) are in demand,” says Anindita Banerjee, client partner of Stanton Chase India.
Sectors
Mining, agrochemicals, healthcare and life sciences.
Skills
Leadership skills to drive better governance and increase efficiencies in areas of environment, health, safety & clean tech.
Pay
Rs 15-30 lakh per annum (Retainer, for meetings on a quarterly basis)

8) Social Media Buffs
Reason
Brands are going social, and customers and stakeholders are taking their conversations online. “Consumers are taking peer reviews seriously and basing their purchase decisions on them,” says Balaji of Randstad India.
Sectors
Technology, media, e-commerce, auto, FMCG and lifestyle product companies.
Skills
Tech-savvy; certifications from Google, Yahoo and MS ad platforms will help.
Pay
Rs 4-6 lakh per annum (Mid-level as it is still a nascent segment)

9) Junior Engineers
Reason
Mercer’s Anand says most organisations that employ engineers are planning to expand. Maximum openings are at the junior level, including IT engineers & process engineers, product and design engineers.
Sectors
IT, telecom, auto, manufacturing, engineering & chemical.
Skills
Engineering and project management.
Pay
Rs 3.75-16 lakh per annum (Entry to mid-level)

10) Training Staff
Reason
According to Amit Jain, business head, TimesJobs.com, as more educational institutes open up, more trainers would be hired.
Sectors
Education, training.
Skills
B.Ed, relevant bachelors /Masters degreel
Pay
Rs 4-5 lakh per annum Entry level
Rs 9-10 lakh Mid-level

Oracle is a relational database technology.

PLSQL stands for "Procedural Language extensions to SQL", and can be used in Oracle databases. PLSQL is closely integrated into the SQL language, yet it adds programming constructs that are not native to SQL.

We've categorized Oracle and PLSQL into the following topics:

Data Types SELECT Statement
Literals (Constants) DISTINCT
Declaring Variables COUNT / SUM / MIN / MAX
Is Null / Is Not Null
WHERE Clause
Loops and Conditional Statements "AND" Condition
Sequences (Autonumber) "OR" Condition
Transactions Combining "AND" with "OR"
Cursors
Functions (Built-In) (By Category) "LIKE" Condition
Functions (Built-In) (Alphabetical) "IN" Function
Oracle System Tables BETWEEN Condition
EXISTS Condition
Primary Keys GROUP BY
Foreign Keys HAVING
Unique Constraints ORDER BY (sort by)
Check Constraints
Indexes JOINS (inner, outer)
Subqueries
Creating Functions
Creating Procedures UNION Query
Creating Triggers UNION ALL Query
Exception Handling INTERSECT Query
Oracle Error Messages MINUS Query

Grant/Revoke Privileges UPDATE Statement
Roles (set of privileges) INSERT Statement
Change Password DELETE Statement

Synonyms (create, drop) Tables (create, alter, drop, temp)

Hi Guys,

Please read the below message from google.

We're excited to announce Google Code Jam 2009, this year's iteration
of Google's annual programming competition, which offers coders from
around the world an opportunity to solve complex algorithmic problems
under time pressure, using the programming languages and tools of
their choice.

The contest will have a new format this year, starting with online
rounds and ending in a 25-person final in our Mountain View,
California headquarters. We're still choosing exact times for
everything, but for planning purposes we wanted to give you this
tentative schedule. Please note that the timing may change:

Early-Mid August: Registration will open.
+4 Weeks: Qualification round
+1 Week: Rounds 1A, 1B, 1C
+1 Week: Round 2
+1 Week: Round 3
November: World Finals in Mountain View

Online rounds begin soon, so start practicing!

The Google Code Jam Team
http://code.google.com/codejam

Sweet Dreams
If you were to ask 10 people what dreams are made of, you'd probably get 10 different answers. That's because scientists are still unraveling this mystery. One possibility: Dreaming exercises brain by stimulating the trafficking of synapses between brain cells. Another theory is that people dream about tasks and emotions that they didn't take care of during the day, and that the process can help solidify thoughts and memories. In general, scientists agree that dreaming happens during your deepest sleep, called Rapid Eye Movement (REM).

Slumber Sleuth
Fruit flies do it. Tigers do it. And humans can't seem to get enough of it. No, not that. We're talking about shut-eye, so crucial we spend more than a quarter of our lives at it. Yet the underlying reasons for sleep remain as puzzling as a rambling dream. One thing scientists do know: Sleep is crucial for survival in mammals. Extended sleeplessness can lead to mood swings, hallucination, and in extreme cases, death. There are two states of sleep - non-rapid eye movement (NREM), during which the brain exhibits low metabolic activity, and rapid eye movement (REM), during which the brain is very active. Some scientists think NREM sleep gives your body a break, and in turn conserves energy, similar to hibernation. REM sleep could help to organize memories. However, this idea isn't proven, and dreams during REM sleep don't always correlate with memories.

Phantom Feelings
It's estimated that about 80 percent of amputees experience sensations, including warmth, itching, pressure and pain, coming from the missing limb. People who experience this phenomenon, known as "phantom limb," feel sensations as if the missing limb were part of their bodies. One explanation says that the nerves area where the limb severed create new connections to the spinal cord and continue to send signals to the brain as if the missing limb was still there. Another possibility is that the brain is "hard-wired" to operate as if the body were fully intact - meaning the brain holds a blueprint of the body with all parts attached.

Mission Control
Residing in the hypothalamus of the brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or biological clock, programs the body to follow a 24-hour rhythm. The most evident effect of circadian rhythm is the sleep-wake cycle, but the biological clock also impacts digestion, body temperature, blood pressure, and hormone production. Researchers have found that light intensity can adjust the clock forward or backward by regulating the hormone melatonin. The latest debate is whether or not melatonin supplements could help prevent jet lag - the drowsy, achy feeling you get when "jetting" across time zones.

Memory Lane
Some experiences are hard to forget, like perhaps your first kiss. But how does a person hold onto these personal movies? Using brain-imaging techniques, scientists are unraveling the mechanism responsible for creating and storing memories. They are finding that the hippocampus, within the brain's gray matter, could act as a memory box. But this storage area isn't so discriminatory. It turns out that both true and false memories activate similar brain regions. To pull out the real memory, some researchers ask a subject to recall the memory in context, something that's much more difficult when the event didn't actually occur.

Brain Teaser
Laughter is one of the least understood of human behaviors. Scientists have found that during a good laugh three parts of the brain light up: a thinking part that helps you get the joke, a movement area that tells your muscles to move, and an emotional region that elicits the "giddy" feeling. But it remains unknown why one person laughs at your brother's foolish jokes while another chuckles while watching a horror movie. John Morreall, who is a pioneer of humor research at the College of William and Mary, has found that laughter is a playful response to incongruities - stories that disobey conventional expectations. Others in the humor field point to laughter as a way of signaling to another person that this action is meant "in fun." One thing is clear: Laughter makes us feel better.

Nature vs. Nurture
In the long-running battle of whether our thoughts and personalities are controlled by genes or environment, scientists are building a convincing body of evidence that it could be either or both! The ability to study individual genes points to many human traits that we have little control over, yet in many realms, peer pressure or upbringing has been shown heavily influence who we are and what we do.

Mortal Mystery
Living forever is just for Hollywood. But why do humans age? You are born with a robust toolbox full of mechanisms to fight disease and injury, which you might think should arm you against stiff joints and other ailments. But as we age, the body's repair mechanisms get out of shape. In effect, your resilience to physical injury and stress declines. Theories for why people age can be divided into two categories: 1) Like other human characteristics, aging could just be a part of human genetics and is somehow beneficial. 2) In the less optimistic view, aging has no purpose and results from cellular damage that occurs over a person's lifetime. A handful of researchers, however, think science will ultimately delay aging at least long enough to double life spans.

Deep Freeze
Living forever may not be a reality. But a pioneering field called cryonics could give some people two lives. Cryonics centers like Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Arizona, store posthumous bodies in vats filled with liquid nitrogen at bone-chilling temperatures of minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (78 Kelvin). The idea is that a person who dies from a presently incurable disease could be thawed and revived in the future when a cure has been found. The body of the late baseball legend Ted Williams is stored in one of Alcor's freezers. Like the other human popsicles, Williams is positioned head down. That way, if there were ever a leak in the tank, the brain would stay submerged in the cold liquid. Not one of the cryopreserved bodies has been revived, because that technology doesn't exist. For one, if the body isn't thawed at exactly the right temperature, the person's cells could turn to ice and blast into pieces.

Consciousness
When you wake up in the morning, you might perceive that the Sun is just rising, hear a few birds chirping, and maybe even feel a flash of happiness as the fresh morning air hits your face. In other words, you are conscious. This complex topic has plagued the scientific community since antiquity. Only recently have neuroscientists considered consciousness a realistic research topic. The greatest brainteaser in this field has been to explain how processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences. So far, scientists have managed to develop a great list of questions.