HEALTH ISSUE: SHORT CUTS

SHORT CUTS Even an hour of listening to iPod can damage hearing    Cranking up your iPod or MP3 player even for an hour daily can cause irreparable damange to your hearing, a new study has claimed. Scientists in Europe have shown that listening to music on headphones for an hour can have a temporary impact on people's hearing because of the damage caused to the hair cells in the outer ear, Participants in the study had their hearing tested and were then asked to listen to pop or rock music for six one-hour-long sessions using two different types of headphones and at varying, preset volumes, the Daily Telegraph reported, After each session, the scientists measured the responses of the 21 men and women aged between 19 and 28 to a very short sound and then two sounds of different frequencies to see how clearly participants could hear the tones. 'Chimps are ruthless killers':       If you think chimpanzees are cuddly, think again, for researchers claim that the mankind's closest cousins in the animal world are ruthless killers with a taste for gang warfare, A new study of wild chimpanzees found that gangs of the apes routinely attack rival chimps to seize their land and massacre their young, preserving their cominanc, the Daily Mail reported.

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News: Find that Why brown-eyed men appear more dominant

Why brown-eyed men appear more dominant Washington: Faces of brown eyed white men make them appear more dominant than their blue-eyed counterparts even when the former's eye colour is changed, a new Czech study reveals.        For the research, a group of 62 people were asked to look at photos of 80 faces - 40 men and 40 women - and rate them for dominance. Thereafter, the researchers Photo shopped the faces replacing the brown eyes with blue ones and vice versa.         Now another group of participants were made to rate the altered images for dominance. Surprisingly, results were the same in both cases - faces of brown-eyed men were rated more dominant than those of blue-eyed men, even when their eyes weren't brown.        The effect, which didn't hold for female faces, may have something to do with the shape of brown-eyed men's faces, according to study researcher Karel Kleisner of Charles University in Prague. On average, brown-eyed men had broader chins and mouths, larger noses, more colsely spaced eyes and larger eyebrows than blue-eyed men. More mysterious is why eye colour would be so closely associated with facial type, the researchers say."It's really quite a surprising finding and certainly not one I would necessarily [have] expected," Live Science quoted psychologist Benedict Jones of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, who was not involved in the study, as saying. Jones of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, who was not involved in the study, as saying. Jones emphasisied on the importance of further researcher to investigate the link to be sure it isn't" an idiosyncrasy of this particular sample of face images.        Kleiner said the "most elegant" explanation would be that children are treated differently dependingon their eye colour, and this treatment leaves a lasting effect on their bodies. He and his colleagues said: "It is possible that subjects with blue eyes are treated as [small children] for a longer period than brown eyed children." The study appears in the July issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

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Health Issue: New Software cuts down CT radiation

New software cuts down CT radiation dose by half Chicago: A new software program that enhances the quality of CT images allowed doctors to cut in half the radiation dose needed for a colon scan and still produce clear images, US researchers said.         Recent studies has suggested that computed tomography or CT scans can increase a person's lifetime risk of cancer, especially younger people who have multiple scans. "This new technique allows us to use far less radiation than even a typical abdominal CT scan with out compromising image quality," said Daniel Johnson of Mayo Clinic in Arizona, whose study appears in American Journal of Roentgenology.

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