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I feel that it would be better if we play simultaneously two games in our all matches. This way our matches duration will become short , otherwise player has to wait for the first game to finish , then only he can start next one.

Home Is Most Important Is day care—supervision of children by others while the parents work—good for children? That is what a U.S. study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development wanted to find out. Prominent child-care researchers at 14 universities kept track of 1,364 children from birth to age three. More than 20 percent of the children were cared for by their mothers at home; the rest were sent to day-care centers or to the homes of paid baby-sitters. The results? “The researchers found that children in high-quality day care—the kind in which adults talk to them a lot in a responsive way—have a slight advantage over kids in less attentive settings when it comes to language and learning abilities,” notes Time magazine. “But the chief conclusion was that the impact of day care was far less important to the mental and emotional development of the children than was the character of their family life. . . . Researchers calculated that just 1% of the differences among children could be traced to day-care factors but 32% could be explained by the differing quality of their experiences within their families. What’s the message? Home is the learning center that counts.”

“Thirst for Bottled Water” “America’s thirst for bottled water seems unquenchable, reaching nearly 30 billion bottles a year,” says U.S.News & World Report. Many consumers do not realize, however, that most bottled water is simply tap water, so “anyone who is opting for bottled over municipal [water] for health reasons is misguided,” says the magazine. What flows out of the tap in many countries is monitored to ensure conformity to strict standards. And when compared with the “outrageously expensive” bottled alternatives, tap water is also “practically free!”

Who Holds the Remote Control? Researchers at EURISPES (Institute for Political, Economic and Social Studies), in Italy, recently published the results of a study on TV-watching habits. Almost 2,000 Italian families were interviewed. They were asked, among other questions, who in the family is more likely to hold and operate the TV remote control, dubbed by a newspaper article the modern-day rod of power in the family. In most cases the father was mentioned as the one in control. Children came in second as the decision makers when it comes to switching channels. The mother came in last in the power struggle to hold the remote control in the family.

Good Friends, Long Life! Having a network of good friends may well increase a person’s life span, reports the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. A study of nearly 1,500 Australians aged 70 or over examined how relationships affected longevity over a ten-year period. Individuals with a strong network of friends had a mortality rate 22 percent lower than those with few friends. Active friendships also have a positive effect among the elderly when it comes to “depression, self efficacy, self esteem, coping and morale, or a sense of personal control,” says the report.

“Lying Is Tough Work for the Brain” Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found that the brain has to work much harder to tell a lie than it does to tell the truth. Dr. Daniel Langleben has been studying this phenomenon using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to pinpoint which parts of the brain are activated when a person lies. When faced with a question, our brain first needs to process it. Then, “almost by instinct, a liar will first think of the true answer before devising or speaking [a] false answer,” reports The News of Mexico City. “In the brain, you never get something for nothing,” says Langleben. “The process for telling a lie is more complicated than telling the truth, resulting in more neuron activity.” This increased neuron activity shows up on an fMRI like a light bulb. “Even for the smoothest-talker, lying is tough work for the brain,” says the paper.

First Aid at Funerals A defibrillator has been issued to gravediggers at a cemetery in Australia. The purpose? To resuscitate grief-stricken mourners who suffer cardiac arrest, reports the Sydney Sun-Herald. “Funerals are risky places for heart attacks,” explains Sisenanda Santos, a spokeswoman for the St. John Ambulance service, which is supervising the program. “People are in large groups, they are distressed, and they are often overdressed for hot days.” The defibrillator is programmed with recorded instructions to the user and administers an electric shock to restart the distressed person’s heart only if the device detects the distinctive signs of cardiac arrest.

Toward a Universal Language? “In a central Asian country where Western tongues are rarely spoken,” an eight-year-old tells his father that he has to learn English. The father asks why. “Because, father, the computer speaks English.” That story, notes Asiaweek, “illustrates what many consider to be an insidious side-effect of the information superhighway . . . , the potential to hasten an already rapid shift toward a dominant global language—English.” The magazine adds: “This does not spring from any pull toward universal brotherhood. It is merely practical. If we are going to engage in digital discourse and commerce across the Internet, a common currency is required for easy exchange.” Why English? Because “the PC business was born in the U.S., as was the Internet. Some 80% of the online content today is Anglophonic.” Use of other languages is slowed in some cases because of the difficulty of adapting them to the English-based keyboard. “There will be a price to pay,” says Asiaweek. “Linguists predict that half of some 6,000 languages spoken today will fall into disuse by the end of the next century, possibly within the next 20 years.”

Digging for Vintage Wine An increasing number of visitors are traveling to Macedonia, a former republic of Yugoslavia, “to dig up vintage wine left behind . . . by allied troops during World War I,” reports the newspaper Kathimerini—English Edition. Equipped with maps, the visitors, mostly from France, excavate abandoned military storage sites. By now, any wine still there is at least 90 years old, and according to the newspaper, “a well-conserved bottle could fetch . . . up to 2,000 euros (2,675 dollars).” Locals who have unearthed wine and cognac say that “they have never tasted anything better.”

“The Overlooked Helper” An important factor in the healing process of hospital patients has long been neglected, says the German journal Psychologie Heute. It is the patient in the neighboring bed. A study showed that having a fellow sufferer nearby helps therapeutically and that, contrary to popular belief, only a minority of all patients, about 7 percent, want to be alone. Most like to share their hospital room with one or two patients. However, the type of individuals they are makes a difference. The ideal roommate “should first and foremost be sociable and tolerant,” the article said. The following desirable qualities were listed in order of importance: “understanding, humorous, clean, open-minded, helpful, considerate, orderly, friendly, honest, neat, balanced, patient, discreet, kind, quiet, intelligent, flexible, and alert.”

Why You Can’t Tickle Yourself “A well-placed tickle will reduce even a grown adult to jelly. But the most hypersensitive victim can at least rest easy in the knowledge that he can’t tickle himself,” states The Economist. Why not? According to recent research, the answer lies in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that coordinates motor activity. Researchers believe that the cerebellum not only coordinates actions but is also involved in predicting the sensory consequences of them. Thus, when people try to tickle themselves, the cerebellum anticipates the sensation and suppresses it. When tickled by someone else, the stimulus and the cerebellum’s calculations do not coincide, and the sensation is not suppressed. The New York Times, in a similar article, summed it up this way: “The brain can tell which tickling sensations are caused by one’s own actions and gives them low priority, so that it can be more receptive to sensations from outside sources that may be more urgent.”

Deafness From Headsets Research by Australia’s National Acoustic Laboratory revealed that even normal use of personal stereo headsets can cause latent ear damage, reports The Courier-Mail of Brisbane. Researcher Dr. Eric LePage said that young people are reluctant to take such warnings seriously. “They can repeatedly expose themselves to very loud sounds or music for years and they judge that it has no effect,” he said. One survey showed that warnings “had little impact until people actually started suffering deafness,” the paper said. The new research confirms German studies indicating that about one quarter of military recruits there aged 16 to 24 have already damaged their hearing by listening to loud music and that “almost 10 percent of students aged 16 to 18 had lost so much hearing that they had problems understanding some normal conversation.”

The World’s Favorite Animal “The dog might be man’s best friend, but the world’s favourite animal is the tiger,” reports The Independent of London. After a series of documentaries, each featuring one of ten animals, a poll of over 52,000 people from 73 countries put the tiger ahead of the dog by just 17 votes. In third place was the dolphin, followed by the horse, the lion, the snake, the elephant, the chimpanzee, the orangutan, and the whale. Animal behaviorist Dr. Candy d’Sa explained that humans “can relate to the tiger, as it is fierce and commanding on the outside, but noble and discerning on the inside. In contrast, the dog is a loyal and respectful creature and brings out the lighter, more communicative side of human nature.” Conservationists welcomed the tiger’s victory. Callum Rankine, of the World Wide Fund for Nature, said: “If people are voting for tigers as their favourite animal, it means they recognise their importance, and hopefully the need to ensure their survival.” It is estimated that only 5,000 tigers remain in the wild.

More Happiness in Giving “Money makes you happy—if you give it away,” reads a headline in The Globe and Mail of Canada. Although most people surveyed predicted that spending on themselves would make them happier, those who used their money to help others—regardless of the amount spent—actually reported greater happiness. “Wealth is not a predictor of happiness, study after study has shown,” says the newspaper. “Once people have enough money to meet their basic needs, getting more of it doesn’t give them much of a boost.”

Divorce Bad for the Environment The surging divorce rate worldwide is hurting the environment, since it results in increased consumption of limited resources. Divorce leads to more households, decreased household size, and higher consumption per head, says a study printed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Divorced households in the [United States] could have saved more than 38 million rooms, 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, and 627 billion gallons [2,400,000,000,000 l] of water in 2005 alone if their resource-use efficiency had been comparable to married households.” In the year 2000, there were 6.1 million “resource-inefficient” households of this kind in the United States.

“Mobbing” at Work The principal reason for lost work time in Spain is “psychological harassment,” reports the magazine El País Semanal. More than two million Spaniards suffer prolonged workplace bullying, known in Europe as mobbing. According to psychologist Iñaki Piñuel, the victims are usually good workers who awaken professional jealousy in others. Workmates may stigmatize a person by withholding his work assignments, excluding him from conversation, pretending not to see him, constantly criticizing him, or spreading false rumors to undermine his self-esteem. “It is calculated that 1 out of every 5 suicides in Europe is related to this phenomenon,” states the report. What can be done? The magazine suggests: “Don’t keep it secret. Look for witnesses. Report the situation to company officials. Don’t blame yourself. In extreme cases, change departments [or] jobs.”

Money From Heaven? Residents of Overtown, an impoverished neighborhood in Miami, Florida, were delighted when money appeared to fall out of the sky. As it turned out, however, it was not manna from heaven but part of a $3.7-million load of cash that fell onto the streets below when an armored truck crashed on an overpass above the neighborhood. Police estimate that at least 100 people rushed to scoop up money, but it is likely there were many more. According to The New York Times, “Miami police gave holders of the money 48 hours to turn it in without being charged with theft.” But by the time the amnesty expired, only three people had returned any money, and some $500,000 was still missing. One 18-year-old youth reportedly said: “It landed in people’s yards, man. What do you expect them to do?”

Singing Mice “Mice can sing, and . . . their songs to prospective mates are nearly as complex as those of birds,” reports New Scientist. Mouse songs are at ultrasonic frequencies, that is, at a pitch too high for the human ear to hear—likely the reason they were not noticed before. Researchers in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., found that the vocalizations of male mice “were arranged into phrases and motifs, fulfilling the definition of ‘song.’” This puts mice in an exclusive club. Other mammals known to sing are whales, dolphins, some bats and, of course, humans.

Monkey Business Some have theorized that an infinite number of monkeys pecking away on an infinite number of typewriters would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare. So researchers at Plymouth University in England gave six monkeys one computer for a month. The monkeys “failed to produce a single word,” reports The New York Times. The six monkeys at Paignton Zoo in southwest England “produced only five pages of text,” primarily filled with a lot of s’s. At the end of the document, the monkeys typed a few j’s, a’s, l’s, and m’s. They also used the keyboard as their community toilet.

“The Dead Sea Is Dying” “The Dead Sea is dying, and only a major engineering effort can save it,” states an Associated Press dispatch. The Dead Sea—so called because its high salt content makes it impossible for aquatic creatures to live in it—is the earth’s lowest body of water, 1,320 feet [400 m] below sea level. “For millennia, the balance [between high evaporation and incoming water] was maintained by the Dead Sea’s only water source, the Jordan River,” says the article. “In recent decades, however, both Israel and Jordan have been tapping in to irrigate large swaths of agricultural land along the narrow river that divides the two countries, robbing the Dead Sea of its replacement water.” If nothing is done, says an Israeli study, the water level will continue to drop by up to three feet [1 m] a year, with devastating consequences to the surrounding land, including its wildlife and vegetation. A five-year drought is already adding to the woes of the Dead Sea.