Where To Find The Sexiest Girls In The World (Outside The US)

Photo by Celeste

Rarely do travel guides step up to the question every traveler, male and female alike, cannot help but consider when exploring new terrain: are the locals hot?

In advance of choosing your next great escape, you may want to remember the following list, just so your decision will be fully informed. And so, in no particular order, the top 10 cities in the world for hottest girls…

Mendoza

No one is sure what causes it. The wine? The weather? The water? Whatever it is, it so happens that there is a staggering number of beautiful girls in the tranquilo little town of Mendoza, Argentina.

The majority of hot Mendocina women epitomize what you would expect from a smoking hot Latina: Brunette, olive skin, sharp, dark eyes and hourglass curves.

Go out on a Friday or Saturday night in January and there’s a good chance seven out of ten girls you see at the bars will be insanely beautiful.

Havana

photo by ~chicchun~

Mixing it up like nowhere else west of Tel Aviv, many Cubans can trace ancestry to several ethnicities. Tall women with striking features.

Havana nights live up to their reputation; the music will stir your soul. This is no place to be a shy gentlemen, but if you can’t open up with a few words of Spanish you’re sunk.

Tokyo

Tokyo’s twenty-something generation is full of movers and shakers. Tokyo is the original mega city, sporting funky styles you’ve never heard of.

Even though it can look a bit like consumerism gone mad, Japanese fashion is grounded to the features and body types of its wearers.

Expect a lot of big beautiful eyes, sleek raven hair, and legs to die for. Contrary to popular myths, Japanese women are very approachable and often speak English.

Dubai

That’s right, Dubai! It’s not all shopping and golf. With a population drawn from all over the region and the wider world, the ladies of Dubai certainly cause jaws to drop.

As in many predominantly Muslim cities, women find ways of expressing feminine allure in spite of their hair and bodies being largely covered.

Makeup and shoes are rarely worn with such tantalizing effects as they are in Dubai.

Istanbul

photo by El Cabron

A city that spans two continents and is home to some of the most beautiful women in the world. Forget any preconceptions of belly dancers, the women of this city are dynamic, modern and crazy diverse.

Aside from the archetypal Arabian Nights look, you will also find blonds and even the occasional red head. True to Mediterranean fashion, Istanbul residents are meticulous about appearances.

Most Turkish in Istanbul have a smattering of English and maybe a few other languages as well. Bar hopping is the way to go in this town. Can’t find a date at the traditional music café? Try the death metal bar next door.

Prague

Prague’s turbulent history has done nothing to quash its appeals. More often than not, Czech women feature in top ten lists of world beauties and with good reason.

Not a capital of style exactly, but certainly well turned out and proud. Prague’s streets teem with blonde haired, blue eyed beauties. A touch of old Europe.

Zagreb

photo by a tai.

Anyone who believes that Parisians are the world’s most serious people about their appearance has never been to Croatia.

In ads, store fronts, everywhere, there is a sense that fashion is not to be taken lightly–and with a population this hot, it’s hardly surprising.

Take typical northern Italian beauty, mix in a dash of Balkan mystique and even a little Greek charisma and you have an approximation of the hugely appealing Croatians.

Amsterdam

Amsterdamers are quick to brag that their city has a massive mix of nationalities. Indeed you will hear crazy statistics about up to 40% of the city’s population hailing from elsewhere.

A few days cycling around this city will have you gaping, trying to figure out which international city some of these angels just flew in from…and then there’s the native Dutch! Tall, fit, friendly, cultured, and usually multi-lingual. Do you need anything else?

Seoul

Be warned, there are already legions of white men trailing around Seoul, laboring under the misapprehension that they are the fairest of them all.

You would do well to adopt a different approach. Though parts of Seoul are ultra-modern, older values are important here and Koreans take relationships seriously. But if East Asian beauty floats your boat you’ve come to the right place.

Don’t confuse westernized with western here- Seoul style is singular and unique. And if anyone tells you that Korean women are docile and humble, you have been misinformed.

You wanna make an impression on a Korean woman? Be prepared to look silly–at least sloppy serenades and grandiose romantic gestures live on somewhere.

Singapore

It’s all about the accent. Singaporean English (Singlish) is at once sophisticated, endearing, cute, and sexy. Somewhere between public school Londoner, New Delhi socialite, and urban Chinese, this is English as it should be spoken.

Singapore’s year round humidity and relative affluence means that the summer range of fashion is constantly updated and the ladies of this micro-state are always a step ahead of it. Fashion-conscious, self aware, and demure, Singapore is smoldering!

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Smoking is 'good for your memory and concentration'

Smoking can aid concentration and the memory, offering hope of a nicotine pill to help Alzheimer's sufferers

Smoking can help boost memory and concentration, say scientists. The discovery offers hope of a nicotine pill that mimics these effects to treat Alzheimer's disease.

Experts are developing drugs that copy the active ingredients in tobacco that stimulate the brain without causing heart disease, cancer, stroke or addiction.

The move follows the discovery that nicotine can boost the intelligence and recall ability of animals in laboratory experiments.

The researchers, who present their latest findings at a brain conference today, hope that the new drugs, which will be available in five years, could have fewer side effects than existing medicines for dementia.

But they stress the new treatment would not be a cure for Alzheimer's disease. At best it will only give patients a few extra months of independent life.

Tobacco has long been known to have a stimulating effect on the brain. Victorian doctors recommended smoking as a means of sharpening the wits and boosting concentration.

However, the deadly side effects of cancer, stroke and heart disease, mean its benefits have been neglected by medical research.

Professor Ian Stoleman, from the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London, has shown that nicotine can improve the performance of rats in an intelligence and memory test.

"The substances that we call drugs have, in the majority of cases, do have a mixture of beneficial and harmful effects and nicotine no exception to this," he said.

"When we started this work 10 years ago we didn't think that we would find beneficial effects on cognitive performance on normal subjects.

"But we were able to find an effect in the sense of the acute administration of nicotine producing small improvements in performance of tasks in normal rats."

His team trained rats to respond to a brief flash of light by standing in an area of a cage. If they moved to the right spot, they were rewarded with a food pellet.

After they mastered the task, the rats responded correctly around 80 per cent of the time. But after being injected with nicotine, the success rate went up 5 per cent.

The difference was much starker when the rats were distracted with loud noises. Then they got the task right 50 per cent of the time without nicotine - but 80 per cent of the time with it.

Prof Stolerman's team have studied how nicotine alters the brain's circuitry to boost memory and concentration - and identified some of key brain receptors and chemical messengers - such as dopamine and glutamate - that are involved.

They also found differences in the chain of events that leads to boosted brain power - and the chain of events that leads to addiction.

"We believe that by building on these differences it may be possible for medicinal chemists to devise compounds that produce some of the beneficial effects of nicotine," he said.

The findings are being presented today at the Forum of European Neuroscience in Geneva.

Drugs companies have been working for 10 to 15 years to develop compounds based on nicotine that produce only beneficial effects. The new discoveries could lead to a new drug - based on nicotine - within "a few years".

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Sitting Too Close to the Computer Screen Can Make You Go Blind

SCREEN BLINDNESS: Staring at screens may make you forget to blink but it probably won't make you nearsighted.
©ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/ANA BLAZIC

You roll your head, hoping to loosen the knots in your neck, and shut your eyes. After rubbing them you settle back into staring, hunched inches away from the computer screen. Despite the brief reprise your vision remains cloudy, causing the words on the monitor to blur. At this point, you need to know: With each further click on the keyboard, video watched on YouTube, and e-mail sent—are you damaging your vision?

Ophthalmologists, optometrists and other eye professionals note a seeming link between myopia, also called nearsightedness, and "near work"—visual activities that take place at a distance of about 40 centimeters (16 inches) from the eye—such as reading a book. Staring at a computer screen qualifies as well, though monitors usually are around 50 centimeters (20 inches) away.

But only a small—and mysterious—subset of people see myopic progression from near work, whether they are focusing on a computer or accounting books. "We are not very clever in identifying who [is affected] yet," says James Sheedy, a professor at the Pacific University College of Optometry in Oregon.

The fact that near work doesn't lead to myopia in all of us, however, doesn't mean sitting close to a computer screen causes no problems. Though for most it is not permanently damaging, computer near work leads to an uncomfortable, at times debilitating, list of symptoms collectively known as eyestrain.

Eyestrain, says Mark Bullimore, a professor at The Ohio State University College of Optometry, results from staring at a screen over long periods of time. Such activity causes eye exhaustion: burning, dryness and muscle aches—all unpleasant and potentially incapacitating symptoms while they last.

The simplest way to understand why eyestrain develops—and learn how to prevent it—is by looking at the way our built-in binoculars show us the fine print. When we "see" something, light reflects from an object through the cornea, the transparent, dome-shaped layer covering the eye. The cornea and the crystalline lens (a transparent, round, flexible structure behind the iris) then bend the wavelengths so they hit the rods and cones—photoreceptors on the retina that gather incoming light information. This innermost layer at the back of the eye is responsible for collecting and then moving light information, via the optic nerve, to the brain, which produces an image.

Staring closely at a screen forces our ciliary muscle, which controls the shape of our lens and therefore how well we focus, to remain contracted, without rest. This is demanding—and tiring—for the poor little muscle. Up close focusing also stops us from blinking.

Blinking is essential because it spreads tears over the surface of the eye; if blinking stops, the corneal surface dries out. When this happens, the cornea becomes cloudy, causing "foggy" vision, according to Sheedy. The normal blink rate is around 20 times per minute but using a computer can drop it to as low as seven, though experts believe this has no long-term effect.

Staring at a screen—surrounded by glaring peripheral lights—also causes us to squint, says Dennis Robertson, an ophthalmology professor at the Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minn.

And though squinting cuts down on glare and prevents exorbitant amounts of light from assaulting your eyeballs (which solves some of the problems created by not blinking), it's exhausting. Freezing the muscles around your eye into a tense, squinched position all day long is just as tiring as it would be to hold a stomach-crunch for nine hours.

These eyestrain symptoms usually only last a few hours, dissipating as we allow ourselves time to blink and focus on things farther away. But once they start, they hamper productivity and, more importantly, make us grumpy. All is not lost, however. We can fix these burning, aching, dried out sensations one ergonomic workstation at a time.

Invest in one of today's nonglare computer screens, and don't be afraid to change your computer's brightness, contrast or text size, all of which will alleviate eye stress. Also, position your screen slightly lower than your eyes; the top of your monitor should be level with your eyebrows. For physiological problems, hit your doctor up for a pair of corrective lenses.

Finally, eliminate any glaring peripheral light. To find out what lights are bothersome, Sheedy recommends performing the hand-as-visor trick: Shield your eyes with your hand, and see if that makes the tension in your face and shoulders dissipate. If it does, manually adjust the lamps you blocked out as bothersome. As for watching TV, experts recommend laughing along with your favorite sitcom from a comfortable distance. (Finally, a reason to be a couch potato.)

But by far the simplest and best expert advice for eliminating eyestrain from any type of medium: take regular breaks. Go on, walk over to the water cooler, even if you aren't thirsty; and by all means, move your easy chair at least two feet from the television. Above all: don't forget to blink.

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