What’s on Your Baby’s Skin?

What’s on Your Baby’s Skin?

Phthalates is a chemical that might harm a baby’s reproductive system. It is used in creams, lotions, shampoos, and powders to preserve color and fragrance. However, companies are not required to list it as an ingredient, and they don’t. Good luck finding the right baby lotion or shampoo with no phthalates!

Results, published in the Los Angeles Times, of urine tests of 163 infants found that 100% of the babies carried some kind of a level of phthalates.

Before the boys of the Etoro tribe of Papua New Guinea can be called adults, they must consume the semen of their elders!

Cultures around the world have many different traditions, some that are similar to those in the western world and some that are very different. In the Trans-Fly river region of southern New Guinea, the Etoro tribe consists of 400 people. They live by hunting for food and practicing small-scale farming.

The Etoro people believe that, in order for boys to become adults, they must drink the semen of the elder men in the tribe. They hold that every individual has a vital force and that the strongest concentration of this force is found in semen.

This powerful force is transmitted via sex throughout the tribe. The boys are assigned a partner in this transition to adulthood. Women of the tribe are viewed as squandering the power of the semen if they do not become pregnant.

A diver drowned after his arm got stuck in the shells of a giant clam!

A young chief in a small tribe in the Philippines named Bogtong had hired a group of the tribes best divers to find conch shells which could be traded for fish, because his village were starving and he lacked the resource to catch the fish that his village so desperately needed.

After noon on the day of the first dive, Bogtong realized that he was missing one of his divers, Etem. All the men of the village were alarmed, as they feared that Etem had died at the hands of the giant octopus. The divers unsheathed their knives, and jumped into the water searching for their lost comrade.

They were incredibly surprised at where they had found Etem. He was in fact, dead, but he had drowned, there was no giant octopus in sight. Instead, there was a giant clam with Etem's arm reaching inside. The clam had shut it's shell on Etem's arm, and he was rendered helpless. But, what lead such an experienced diver to make such a fatal mistake?

As the villages pried the giant clam's shell open, they found what would later be known as the world's biggest pearl - weighing 14 pounds as a result of an abnormal act by Mother Nature. The pearl has been considered priceless, but, is it really a pearl worth dying for?

13 Random Health Facts You Never Knew

1) Motorists who talk on cell phones are more impaired than drunk drivers with blood-alcohol levels exceeding .08.

2) Banging your head against a wall burns 150 calories an hour.

3) In some parts of the world, they protect their babies from disease by bathing them in beer.

4) The word 'gymnasium' comes from the Greek word gymnazein, which means 'to exercise naked.'

5) There are more than 1,000 chemicals in a cup of coffee; of these, only 26 have been tested, and half caused cancer in rats.

6) The average American eats at McDonalds more than 1,800 times in his/her life.

7) There are more bacteria in your mouth than there are people in the world.

8) According to U.S. FDA standards, 1 cup of orange juice is allowed to contain 10 fruit fly eggs, but only 2 maggots.

9) You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.

10) It is possible to go blind from smoking too heavily.

11) Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people.

12) You are about 1 centimeter taller in the morning than in the evening.

13) During your lifetime, you'll eat about 60,000 pounds of food — that's the weight of about 6 elephants.

A Japanese guitarist was so well loved that 50,000 people turned out for his funeral!

Hideto Matsumoto was a Japanese musician, singer, songwriters, and national obsession. He was primarily known for his work as lead guitarist of the heavy metal band X Japan but was also the co-found of the US-based band Zilch.

He was seen as an icon for rebellion in Japan. His music compelled many people, young and old, to rebel against the country’s conformist society. He died in 1998 from suicide by hanging. 50,000 people came to his funeral, 3 people committed copy-cat suicides, and 1 museum was opened for 5 years in his honor. His death was deemed “the end of an era.”

Oxford University wants your help to decipher 7 ancient languages!

The super-educated folks at Oxford are in a bit of a rut and are requesting the talents and capabilities of the human community. They have released high quality images of clay tablets covered in Proto-Elamite, a script used over 5000 years ago in what is now Iran.

One of the major reasons the tablets have been so difficult is because they are likely full of mistakes, meaning that it is hard to detect patterns. Will this crowd sourcing work and spark a chain reaction? Well, if future archeologist are ever able to deceiver twitter and Facebook records, they'll be the ones to know.

One of Japan's biggest beauty treatments is a poop facial!

We’ve all seen those TV shows in which Japanese women have their faces painted white and wondered what exactly that thing is that makes them look like ceramic dolls. Well, turns out that the answer to that is poop. The poop of a specific type of nightingale, the Japanese bush warbler, is appropriately called uguisu no fun (literally ‘nightingale feces’) in Japanese and is often used as form of beauty treatment. Applying uguisu no fun on your skin has been known to make skin softer and brighter.

This ancient Japanese technique is migrating westwards. High-end spas in New York and other Americans cities that probably don’t let any kind of wildlife within a 5 mile radius of them, are beginning to offer uguisu no fun facials. Some companies charge up to $180 for one treatment. So, would you pay $180 for magical poop on your face?