Health

Weight loss can be a challenging undertaking (even maintaining your weight can be tough when the holidays roll around). Make the most of your efforts with help from one of these five weight-management tools most valued by Lifehacker readers.

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Mark Matcho

In this corner, Teddy Atlas, longtime trainer — he worked with former heavyweight champs Mike Tyson and Michael Moorer, among many others — who now holds forth on ESPN2's Friday Night Fights. "The ability to take a good punch starts with seeing the punch coming, and then registering in your mind that you're prepared to deal with it, not panicking. The next thing is technical — to not get hit [by a] second punch. Really good fighters rarely get hit two clean punches in a row.

You're accident prone and out in the wilderness without a first aid kit. Bad idea, but thankfully you can make a band-aid out of birch tree fungus in a pinch.

This trick feels appropriate coming from an Instructables user named "fallscrape." He shares that Birch polypore, also known as Piptoporus betulinus, makes a for a good emergency band-aid.

50 Fascinating Lectures All About Your Brain

Whether you are studying psychology, neurobiology, or just have a passion for learning about the brain, there are plenty of interesting lectures out there that will help you learn all about the brain. These lectures provide a huge amount of information on how the brain develops, the science behind the mind-body connection, atypical ways the brain reacts, progress in the field of brain-machine interactions, or more general psychology topics.

The Anatomy and Development of the Brain

From what the specific areas of the brain control to how the brain develops to how the brain ages, these lectures cover it all.

1. BrainMind.com. Find six video lectures given by Rhawn Joseph, PhD as he discusses what each area of the brain controls various aspects about the brain from language to mental illness to memory to emotion.
2. The Human Brain and Muscular System. Marian Diamond at UC Berkeley gives this popular lecture about the human brain and how it works also describes how the brain controls the muscular system.
   

Some people have the luxury of a personal trainer to create their exercise routines for them. For the rest of us, web site Dumb Little Man has outlined seven key movements worth considering when designing a fitness program.

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So you've decided to get into shape. Before you put on your running shoes or hit the gym, it may be worth knowing just how out of shape you are—you know for motivation. The Marine Corps Fitness test can help.

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If there is a society of expert sleepers out there, a cult of smug snoozers satisfied th at they’re getting just the right number of restful hours a night, it must be a secretive one. Most people seem insecure about their sleep and willing to say so: they would like to get a little more; maybe they wish they could get by on less; they wonder if it’s deep enough. 

And they are pretty sure that being up at 2 a.m., pacing the TV room like a caged animal, cannot be good. Can it?

Unlike finicky fingerprints and frowned-upon fiber analysis, DNA evidence has been the most bulletproof evidence for forensic sciences in recent years.

Cat Parasite Affects Everything We Feel and Do Research Shows That a Certain Cat Parasite Affects Our Behavior and Mood

Kevin Lafferty is a smart, cautious, thoughtful scientist who doesn't hate cats, but he has put forth a provocative theory that suggests that a clever cat parasite may alter human cultures on a massive scale.

His phone hasn't stopped ringing since he published one of the strangest research papers to come out of the mill in quite awhile.

Just like your computer your mind gets cluttered up with unnecessary or outdated code which makes it run slower or even ruins a few pieces of software and eventually causes your computer to shut down. So it is with the mind, only there is no debugging manual for the mind.

Here are a few suggestions to debug your mind of those little bugs that make your life less than perfect.