Since electronic cigarettes deliver nicotine in the form of water vapor rather than burning tobacco, it’s easy for most people to imagine that vaping is more healthy than smoking. But is that necessarily true?

Vaping is still pretty new to the market, only having been around for about a decade or so. Since it hasn’t been part of the public as much as cigarette smoking, there’s a lot that people don’t know about it. Here, several aspects regarding the two habits smoking vs. vaping will be discussed to help you understand how they are similar or different.

This is one of the biggest questions throughout the vaping and smoking community. Previously, left un-answered due to the lack of research and statistics on the topic. Much has changed in the recent years, with many well-known researchers releasing papers on the subject to shed some light on the theories of others.

There are many aspects to be taken into consideration when making the comparison between vaping and smoking.  

The Chemicals

Whether you’re taking combusted smoke into your lungs or vapor, there are going to be some quite serious health implications that come along with it. The health implications of smoking are a lot more defined and outlined, with vaping being a little more mysterious in the long term. Here’s a summary of the most common health implications found by researchers for both smoking and vaping.                    

The process of smoking includes the combustion of tobacco; created out of thousands of chemicals including at least 70 that have a strong connection to cancer, referred to as “carcinogens”. Some of the most well-known chemicals include:

• Nicotine – The addictive chemical, gives the user the desire to want more. When people say they’re addicted to smoking, they’re addicted to nicotine.
• Hydrogen Cyanide
• Formaldehyde
• Lead
• Arsenic
• Ammonia
• Benzene
• Carbon Monoxide
• Nitrosamines
• Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

As mentioned above, many of the chemicals listed above have a strong connection to some leading health conditions, including; cancer, heart disease and lung disease. These chemical elements are not found during the process of creating a cigarette, the chemicals start to occur when the tobacco leaf is combusted, producing the “smoke” in smoking (Cancer.org, 2017). 

There's nothing wrong with wanting to look attractive.  It's just part of being human.  We want to look pretty so that people will want to mate with us so that we can reproduce so that the world can stay rich and full with plenty of humans.  But honestly, some of the things that celebrities do to "perfect" their beauty is kind of a joke.  Keep reading to see the celebrities who destroyed their faces pursuing perfection. 

We've seen a rise in the number of people traveling abroad to have plastic surgery. The cheaper costs may be tempting, but consider the risks. this is on the dangers of medical tourism and get the facts from a trusted source. Plastic surgery is best performed by a qualified board-certified plastic surgeon. Use our free Find a Surgeon tool to find an ASPS Member Surgeon near you.

5 Things You Should Know About Plastic Surgery Tourism

1. Cosmetic surgery is real surgery and has some risks

Every surgery, including cosmetic surgery, has some risks involved. These risks may increase during vacation-related plastic surgery.

2. Vacation-related activities may compromise your health after having a procedure

Cosmetic surgery trips are marketed as vacations, but vacation activities should be avoided after surgery in order to ensure proper healing and reduce the risk of complications.

3. Travel + surgery significantly increases risk of complications

Did you know that long flights or surgery can increase the potential risk of developing pulmonary embolism and blood clots?

4. You may not be legally protected in the U.S.

There are no U.S. laws that protect patients or mandate the training and qualifications of physicians who perform plastic surgery outside the United States. There may be no legal recourse if surgical negligence occurs.

5. Bargain surgery may not be a bargain

Patients can incur additional costs for revision surgeries and complications that may total more than the cost of the initial operation if originally performed in the U.S.

Any woman with a dirty mind is cursed with constant thoughts of sex. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re doing, because the naughtiest, nastiest things will creep into your mind at unfortunate times. While your man might be happy about your kinky side, the rest of the world won’t be all that impressed. YOU LAUGH AT INAPPROPRIATE TIMES.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in the middle of an important meeting or at a funeral, because if someone accidentally says something suggestive, you won’t be able to hold back your laughter. Most of the people around you won’t have a clue why you’re laughing, and the people that figure it out will just roll their eyes and call you immature. SEX IS ALWAYS ON YOUR MIND.

Pretty much any conversation will make you think of sex. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about peanut butter and jelly, because there’s a dirty joke in their somewhere. Even if there isn’t, you’ll create one.

YOU RISK GETTING KINK-SHAMED.When you sleep with someone, you’ll pray that they’re as kinky as you, because you’re going to mention handcuffs to them at some point. If they get frightened by you just joking around about sex toys, imagine how scared they’ll be when you actually suggest using them.

YOU’RE TOLD TO KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN.Even if you’re in a room full of frisky college students, your friends will tell you to keep your voice down when you start talking about sex. For some reason, people consider it a taboo subject, which you find ridiculous. If everyone around you has had sex before, why can’t you talk about it at a normal volume?

YOU SURPRISE MEN WITH YOUR DIRTY TALK. Men love to talk dirty in the bedroom, but some of them don’t have a clue what they’re doing. Once they hear what you have to say, they’ll be taken aback, because they never knew how naughty someone could really be. YOU ASK INVASIVE QUESTIONS.

When your sister talks about her new boyfriend, your parents will ask her about his age and hobbies. Meanwhile, you’ll ask her about his favorite positions and sex toys. Everyone else will find your questions inappropriate, but you don’t see anything wrong with them.

YOU HAVE UNWANTED FANTASIES.You don’t want to fantasize about the random coworker standing in front of you, but sex is always on your mind, which is why you can’t stop yourself from picturing him naked. You do it to everyone, so it’s not like he’s special.

YOU HATE SPENDING TIME WITH CHILDREN. When your friend’s daughter decides to watch TV with the two of you, you always end up getting in trouble. No matter how hard you try to act appropriately, something dirty will always slip out of your mouth. Then the kid will either giggle or be scarred for life.

YOU HATE SPENDING TIME WITH PARENTS.Children aren’t the only ones you have to be careful around. Even though your parents are used to your sexual jokes, your friends’ parents would be appalled by them. That’s why you have to tone it down whenever you visit their houses. Otherwise, they’ll consider you a bad influence.

YOU STRUGGLE TO FILTER YOURSELF.Some people say whatever’s on their mind. While you’d love to be one of those people, you know that you’d get tossed in jail if you verbalized all of your thoughts. That’s why you try to filter yourself, even though it doesn’t always work out.

Machiavellianism is the use of the general principle of 'the ends justifying the means'. This means the Machiavellian person considers their goals to be of prime importance and that any method may be used to achieve them. The more extreme the Machiavellianism, the greater the harm the person will be ready to indirectly (or perhaps directly) inflict on others to achieve their own goals.  The Machiavellian approach includes using deception, manipulation, theft and, in the extreme, even physical coercion or murder.   Niccol Machiavelli (more fully, Niccol  di Bernardo dei Machiavelli) wrote 'The Prince' (Il Principe) in 1513, during the turbulent days of the Renaissance Medicis, as a set of pragmatic instructions to a new prince on how to gain and retain power. The originality of his ideas has been challenged and shown to go back at least to the Athenians, yet the influence of Machiavelli's words still rings around the world. Machiavelli separates public and private morality. People in public office often need to appear to have high morals, yet to succeed they may have to use questionable methods. While many have viewed it as immoral (and hence evil), Machiavelli's views are more amoral. The approach is pragmatic, doing what is necessary to achieve goals, and is an honest description of what many people do. What is described now as Machiavellianism is more about individual action rather than that of a person in political office, although politicians are often still described as being Machiavellian.

Jane* has not slept for more than two weeks, has barely eaten, and still shakes from the trauma. She will not stay any longer in what her children call the “scary movie house” in west Dublin.

Last Thursday, she took a four-hour bus journey to Donegal to bring her children to safety, while she now seeks refuge in a friend’s attic in Dublin.

When two men came to her house in Clondalkin in the middle of the night, a week ago, and sprayed “Blacks Out” across her front window, she was left with no choice.

“I thought it was horrible,” Jane, a single mother, tells the Irish Examiner. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. I called the guards and they came and they stayed here for about two hours. I was so scared, so, so scared. The graffiti attack came on the back of two incidents of having her car tyres slashed, both in the space of a fortnight.

Last Friday, two days after the graffiti attack, her tyres were slashed for a third time. Jane has gone to the council and the homelessness service, but said she was turned away by both. They say that, as she is in private rented accommodation, although on rent allowance, they cannot help her.

“After that, I couldn’t think of anything. I didn’t know where I was going to bring the children,” Jane says.

“I was driving around and around for ages. I was in a state. The boy was crying, I was crying. My girl said, ‘mommy, I am not going to that street’.

“They said they were not going to ‘the horrible house’, ‘the scary movie house’. I didn’t know what to do. We had nowhere to go.”

She reached out to a friend, staying there on Wednesday night. The next day, she brought her children to a friend in Donegal while she returned on Friday.

“It is very hard to be separated from my children, but I have no idea what is going to happen,” she says.

Her son, aged 12, and her daughter, 8, were born in Ireland and are Irish citizens. Now they feel alien.

“They do not feel part of Irish society anymore,” she says.

Jane is exhausted from it all: “Since two weeks I am not sleeping, I don’t feel hungry, I am shaking when I think of it.”

She pointed out, however, that she has many good neighbours.

Local People Before Profit councillor Gino Kenny said the “distorted individuals” behind the attacks did not speak for the community. Both the gardaí in Clondalkin and South Dublin County Council said they are investigating Jane’s case.

Sex is primarily the process of combining male and female genes to form offspring, however over the past billion years complex systems of behaviour (and the motivation and reward circuits that root such behaviours) have evolved around this process and no where is this complexity more elaborately represented than in the human brain. At some point in their life, everyone will engage in sexual behaviour or at least experience sexual desire. Ultimately the brain is the largest sex organ controlling the biological urge, mediating all thoughts, experiences and physiological responses to sex, so 'Where Does Sex Live in the Brain.  Sexual desire is defined as the behavioural drive that motivates individuals to fantasize about or seek out sexual activity. In contrast, sexual arousal is defined as the autonomic physiological processes that prepare the body for sexual activity (Toledano, Pfaus., 2006). It is important to make clear distinctions between the two definitions as confusion can occur due to, the often simultaneous occurrence of both mechanisms.  Sexual desire is the culmination of several different neural mechanisms, each is controlled in different areas of the brain and is activated at different times of the sexual experience. The euphoric and pleasurable experience of sex stems primarily from the limbic system. The colloquial term for areas including the amygdala, hippocampus and limbic lobe (dentate and cingulate gyrus). This area is common to all mammals and is considered one of the oldest areas of the brain. It regulates emotion and encourages the avoidance of painful of aversive stimuli and the repetition of pleasurable experiences. From a physiological perspective sexual arousal is controlled by the parasympathetic portion of the autonomic nervous system and manifests itself as vasodilation in sexual organs along with several other physiological phenomena including an increase in heart rate. An orgasm and in particular male ejaculation is controlled by the sympathetic portion, this is also accompanied by deactivation of many areas in the brain relating to external stimuli in particular fear, allowing the mind to focus on the task at hand.  Sexual desire is initially modulated by the release of sex hormones, for males testosterone and for females oestrogen, our levels of these hormones are understood to affect our behaviour. Recent studies how found that male testosterone levels increase by approximately 7.8% in males even though they do no consider her attractive. 

Testosterone, a member of the androgen family of steroids, is secreted in the testes of males and the ovaries of females as well as small amounts from adrenal glands. Arousal causes the cerebral cortex to signal the hypothalamus to stimulate the production of testosterone, the production is regulated by a complex chain of events known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis; Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) is secreted by the hypothalamus, via the hypophyseal portal system, it travels to the anterior pituitary which then releases luteinizing hormone (LH) in order to stimulate the production of testosterone in the testes. Production levels are controlled by negative feedback. Luteinizing hormones also stimulate the production of oestrogen in the ovaries, some oestrogens are also produced in other tissues such as the liver and adrenal glands. In females, oestrogen synthesis begins in cells in the ovaries by the synthesis of androstenedione, this compound then travels into the surrounding granulosa cells of the basal membrane where it is converted to oestrone or oestradiol, testosterone is also converted to oestradiol at this point. 

Several studies have reported that older black and Latino adults have lower cognitive function test scores than older white adults, but few have comprehensively examined reasons for score differences. This study evaluates whether differences in health and socioeconomic indicators, including literacy level, can explain differences in cognitive function test scores between older black and white adults.  Murray was wrong in 1994 in his reading of the evidence for a genetic basis for the black-white IQ difference — and that he is wrong today. We argued that it was misleading, even irresponsible, for Harris to treat Murray as if he were someone who merely passes along scientific facts — facts so sound that they can only be doubted by liberals in the grip of “a politically correct moral panic,” in Harris’s words. All three of us are academic psychologists who have studied human intelligence, and it is our contention that Murray’s views do not represent the consensus in our field.

We start by noting that we accepted as facts many claims that are controversial in the academy, if not in psychology — that IQ exists; that it predicts many life outcomes; that there is a gap between black IQ scores and white IQ scores; that IQ is at least partly heritable (as is almost every human trait). We rejected the conclusion that Murray and Harris say is virtually inescapable: that it follows that the black-white difference in IQ must be partly genetic. 

Given the response to our first article, we thought it would be useful to clarify the precise boundaries of the dispute, as well as respond to some technical points critics raised. The central issue at stake is whether the black-white IQ gap is partially genetically determined. We believe there is currently no strong evidence to support this conclusion, whereas Murray presents it as a near certainty, and Harris endorses Murray’s position.

To be fair to our critics, it can be a little hard at first to pin down Harris and Murray’s position on this point. They both offer broad caveats, like this one, from Harris: