A credit card is a system of payment named after the small plastic card issued to users of the system. In the case of credit cards, the issuer lends money to the consumer to be paid later to the merchant. It is different from a charge card which requires the balance to be paid in full each month. In contrast, credit cards allow the consumers to ‘revolve’ their balance, at the cost of having interest charged. Most credit cards are issued by local banks or credit unions, and are the same shape and size.

The concept of using a card for purchases was described in 1887 by Edward Bellamy in his utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy used the term credit card eleven times in this novel. He also predicted music being available in the home through cable transmission.

The modern credit card was the successor of a variety of merchant credit schemes. It was first used in the 1920s in the United States to sell gasoline to a growing number of automobile owners. Some charge cards were printed on paper card stock but were easily counterfeited.

The Charga-Plate was an early predecessor to the credit card and first used during the 1930. It was a rectangle of sheet metal similar to a military dog tag that was embossed with the customer’s name, city and state, but no address. It held a small paper card for a signature. It was laid in an imprinter first, then a charge slip was placed on top of it, onto which an inked ribbon was pressed. Charga-Plates were issued by merchants to their regular customers, much like department store credit cards of today. In some cases, the plates were kept in the issuing store rather than held by customers. When an authorized user made a purchase, a clerk retrieved the plate from the store’s files and then processed the purchase. Charga-Plates speeded back-office bookkeeping that was done manually in paper ledgers in each store, before computers.

The concept of paying different merchants using the same card was invented in 1950 with the Diners Club. The Diners Club produced the first general purpose charge card and required the entire bill to be paid with each statement. This was followed by American Express which created a world wide credit card network.

Bank of America created the BankAmericard in 1958, which eventually evolved into the Visa system. MasterCard came to being in 1966 when a group of credit issuing banks established the MasterCharge system. The fractured nature of the U.S. banking system meant that credit cards became an effective way for those who were traveling around the country to move their credit to places where they could not directly use their banking facilities.

There are now countless variations on the basic concept of revolving credit for individuals issued by banks and honored by a network of financial institutions, including organization branded credit cards, corporate user credit cards, store cards and so on.

It is important to note that many cultures were much more cash oriented in the latter half of the twentieth century. In these places, the adoption of credit cards was initially much slower. In many countries acceptance still remains poor as the use of a credit card system depends on the banking system being perceived as reliable. In contrast, because of the legislative framework surrounding banking systems, some countries were much faster to develop and adopt computer chip based credit cards which are now seen as major anti-fraud credit devices.

The low security of the credit card system presents countless opportunities for fraud. This opportunity has created a huge black market in stolen credit card numbers, which are generally used quickly before the cards are reported stolen.

The goal of the credit card companies is not to eliminate fraud, but to reduce it to manageable levels. This implies that high cost low return fraud prevention measures will not be used if the cost exceeds the potential gains from fraud reduction.

Most internet fraud is done through the use of stolen credit card information which is obtained by copying information from retailers, either online or offline. Despite efforts to improve security for remote purchases using credit cards, systems with security holes are usually the result of poor implementations of card acquisition by merchants. For example, a website that uses SSL to encrypt card numbers from a client may simply email the number from the webserver to someone who manually processes the card details at a card terminal. Naturally, anywhere card details become human readable before being processed at the acquiring bank, a security risk is created. However, many banks offer systems where encrypted card details captured on a merchant’s webserver can be sent directly to the payment processor.

Three improvements to card security have been introduced to the more common credit card networks but none has proven to help reduce credit card fraud so far. First, the on-line verification system used by merchants is being enhanced to require a 4 digit Personal Identification Number (PIN) known only to the card holder. Second, the cards themselves are being replaced with similar-looking tamper-resistant smart cards which are intended to make forgery more difficult. Third, an additional 3 or 4 digit code is now present on the back of most cards, for use in transactions when the card is not present.

In recent times, credit card portfolios have been very profitable for banks, largely due to the booming economy of the late nineties. However, in the case of credit cards, such high returns go hand in hand with risk, since the business is essentially one of making uncollateralized loans, and thus dependent on borrowers not to default in large numbers.

Vitis is a genus of about 60 species of vining plants in the flowering plant family Vitaceae. The genus is made up of species predominantly from the earth’s northern hemisphere. It is economically important as the source of grapes, both for direct consumption of the fruit and for fermentation to produce wine. The study and cultivation of grapevines is called viticulture.

Most Vitis species are found in the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. The wine grape Vitis vinifera originated in southern Europe and southwestern Asia. The species occur in widely different geographical areas and show a great diversity of form. However they are sufficiently closely related to allow easy interbreeding and the resultant interspecific hybrids are invariably fertile and vigorous. Thus the concept of a species is less well defined and more likely represents the identification of different ecotypes of Vitis that have evolved in distinct geographical and environmental circumstances.

Use of grapes is known to date back to Neolithic times, following the discovery of 7,000 year old storage jars in present day northern Iran. Further evidence shows the Mesopotamians and Ancient Egyptians had vine plantations. Greek philosophers praised the healing powers of grapes both whole and in the form of wine. Vitis vinifera cultivation in China began during the Han Dynasty in the second century. However, wild vine mountain grapes  were being used for wine making before that time.

The oldest known evidence of wine production in Europe is dated to 4500 BC and comes from archaeological sites in Greece. The same sites also contain the world’s earliest evidence of crushed grapes. In ancient Egypt, wine became a part of recorded history, playing an important role in ceremonial life.

In medieval Europe, the Roman Catholic Church was a staunch supporter of wine since it was necessary for the celebration of Mass. In places such as Germany, beer was banned and considered pagan and barbaric, while wine consumption was viewed as civilized and a sign of conversion to Christianity. Monks in France made wine for years, storing it underground in caves to age.

In the Islamic world, wine was forbidden during the Islamic Golden Age. After Geber and other Muslim chemists pioneered the distillation of wine, however, it was legalized for cosmetic and medical uses. The 10th century Persian philosopher and scientist Al Biruni described recipes where herbs, minerals and even gemstones are mixed with wine for medicinal purposes. Wine became so revered and its effect so feared that elaborate theories were developed about which gemstones would best counteract its negative side effects.

Using the sap of grapevines, European folk healers sought to cure skin and eye diseases. Other historical uses include the leaves being used to stop bleeding, pain and inflammation of hemorrhoids. Unripe grapes were used for treating sore throats, and raisins were given as treatments for tuberculosis, constipation and thirst. Ripe grapes were used for the treatment of cancer, cholera, smallpox, nausea, skin and eye infections as well as kidney and liver diseases.

Seedless grape varieties were developed to appeal to consumers, but researchers are now discovering that many of the healthful properties of grapes may actually come from the seeds themselves, thanks to their enriched phytochemical content. Grapevine leaves are filled with minced meat such as lamb or beef, rice and onions in the making of Balkan traditional Dolma.

Grape skins contain carbohydrates that can be broken down into sugar and fermented. Enough ethyl alcohol can be distilled from the skins to create a source of biofuel. 100 tons of grape skins can produce nearly 793 gallons of ethyl alcohol.

47,140 square miles of the world is dedicated to grapes. Approximately 71% of world grape production is used for wine, 27% as fresh fruit, and 2% as dried fruit. A portion of grape production goes to producing grape juice to be used as a sweetener for fruits canned with no added sugar. Areas dedicated to vineyards are increasing by about 2% per year.

All human beings who reach adulthood in the world today are programmed biocomputers. None of us can escape our own nature as programmable entities. Literally, each of us may be our own programs, nothing more, nothing less.

Despite the great varieties of programs available, most of us have a limited set of them. Some of these are built in. In the simpler forms of life the programs were mostly built in from genetic codes to fully formed organisms. The patterns of function, action and reaction were determined by necessities of survival and of adaptation to slow environmental changes, passing on the code to descendants.

Eventually the cerebral cortex appeared as an expanding new high level computer controlling the lower levels of the nervous system. For the first time learning and faster adaptation to a rapidly changing environment began to appear. Further, as this new cortex expanded over several millions of years, a critical size cortex was reached. At this level of structure, a new capability emerged, learning to learn.

When one learns to learn, one is making models, using symbols, analogizing, making metaphors, in short, inventing and using language, mathematics, art, politics, business, etc. At the critical brain cortex size, languages and its consequences appear.

To avoid the necessity of repeating learning to learn these symbols, metaphors and models each time, we symbolize the underlying idea in these operations as metaprogramming. Metaprogramming appears at a certain cortical size. The cerebral computer must have a large enough number of interconnected circuits of sufficient quality for the operations of metaprogramming to exist in each biocomputer.

In a well organized biocomputer, there is at least one such critical control metaprogram labeled “I” for acting on other metaprograms and labeled “me” when acted upon by other metaprograms. Most of us have several controllers and selfmetaprograms which divide control among them either in parallel time or in sequences of control. One path for self development is to centralize control of one’s biocomputer in one selfmetaprogrammer, making the others into conscious executives subordinate to the single administrator, the single superconscious selfmetaprogrammer. With appropriate methods, this centralizing of control or unification operation is a realizable state for many biocomputers.

Beyond and above in the control hierarchy of this single administrative selfmetaprogrammer and attendant staff, there may be other controls and controllers. These are many or one depending on states of consciousness in the single selfmetaprogrammer. These may be personified as if entities, treated as if a network for information transfer, or realized as if traveling in the universe to other spaces or dimensions. If one does a further unification operation on these superself metaprograms, one may arrive at a concept labeled God. 

Certain states of consciousness result from and cause operation of this apparent unification phenomenon. We are still general purpose computers who can program any conceivable model of the universe inside our own structure, reduce the single selfmetaprogrammer and program it to travel through it’s own model as if real. This property is useful when one steps outside and sees it for what it is, an immensely satisfying realization of the programming power of one’s own biocomputer. To realize that one has this property is an important addition to one’s selfmetaprogramming list of probables.

Once one has control over modelling the universe inside one’s self, and is able to vary the parameters satisfactorily, one’s self may reflect this ability by changing appropriately to match the new property.

The quality of one’s model of the universe is measured by how well it matches the real universe. There is no guarantee that one’s current model does match the reality, no matter how certain one feels about the high quality of the match. Feelings of awe, reverence, sacredness and certainty are also adaptable metaprograms attachable to any model, not just the best fitting one.

We know that just because a culture generated a cosmology of a certain kind and worshipped it, there was no guarantee of proper fit with the real universe. We can now test rather than worship models of the universe. Feelings such as awe and reverence are recognized as biocomputer energy sources rather than as determinants of truth. A pervasive feeling of certainty is recognized as a property of a state of consciousness which may be indicative or suggestive but is no longer considered as a final judgement of a true fitting. Even as one can travel inside the models inside one’s head, so can one travel outside or be the outside of one’s model of the universe. In this metaprogram it is as if one joins the creator and unites with God. One can so attenuate the self that it may disappear.

One can also conceive of other superself metaprograms farther out than these. Here the self joins other selves, touring the reaches of past and future time and space. The planetwide consciousness joins into galaxywide consciousness. Intergalactic sharing of consciousness fused into the mind of the universe finally faces its creator. The universe’s mind realizes that its creator knows its imperfections and will tear it down to start over, creating a more perfect universe.

Such uses of one’s own biocomputer as the above can teach one profound truths about one’s self and capabilities. The resulting states of being, of consciousness, teach one the basic truth about one’s own equipment. In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits.

A change in hair color typically occurs naturally as people age, usually turning their hair to gray and then white. More than 40 percent of Americans have some gray hair by age 40. The age at which graying begins seems to be almost entirely based on genetics. Sometimes people are born with gray hair because they inherit the trait genetically.

Hairs grow out of deep pockets in the skin called follicles. Deep down in the follicle, living cells produce proteins similar to those in fingernails. As these cells multiply, they start sticking together and die, creating a shaft of hard lifeless cells that is gradually pushed up and out of the follicle by the living cells at the bottom. This dead shaft is a hair.

Keratin, the protein that composes the hair, is itself colorless, so the fundamental color of hair is white. However, also deep in the follicle are cells containing the pigment melanin. Kertainocytes, the hair producing cells, actually assume a piece of the melanin containing cells and swallow it up, according to University of Arkansas for Medical Science dermatology chief Tom Horn. As the hair cells die and harden, the melanin they’ve picked up concentrates, creating the hair color.

Hair will continue growing outward until it reaches an apparently genetically predetermined length or falls out. The typical strand of head hair falls out after two to four years, and a new one starts forming. Hair starts graying when the melanocytes, the melanin-producing cells, start dying. The cell death appears to be genetically determined though the evolutionary function is unknown.

As the melanocytes age, they may actually become hyperactive, making hair considerably darker before it goes gray. Then the melanocytes typically go on the fritz, producing melanin only irregularly. Some parts of the hair will have melanin, others will have only air spaces or clear dead cells. This blend produces a gray coloration. Eventually, the melanocytes may all die, leaving the hair pure white.

The graying occurs in the follicle and becomes visible only as the hair grows outward. The hair itself is dead matter, and its color can be changed only by external means such as bleaching, sunlight or dyes. There’s strong evidence that severe stress can cause premature graying, though stories of people going gray overnight are also known.

The amount of melanin in the hair varies between ethnic groups and individuals. So does the timetable for graying. In white people, graying after age 20 is considered normal. In black people, after age 30 is normal. Not all people go completely gray. Those who do usually take 10 to 20 years to do so.

Premature graying is called canities and is perfectly normal. However, it can also be a symptom of a variety of medical disorders. These include thyroid conditions, anemia, B12 deficiency and a rare immune disorder. Children with graying hair should always be examined by a doctor.

Gray hair may temporarily darken after inflammatory processes, after electron beam induced hair loss, and after some chemotherapy regimens. There are no special diets, nutritional supplements, vitamins or proteins that have been proven to slow, stop, or in any way affect the graying process, although many have been marketed over the years.

Much is still unknown about the graying process. Unfortunately, most of the experts work for the gray curing industry and blend research with sales pitches. While synthetic hormones or gene therapy might one day cure graying, the process is today irreversible. The only options are to enjoy it or dye.

REM sleep is a normal stage of sleep characterized by rapid movements of the eyes. REM sleep in adults typically occupies 90 to 120 minutes of a night’s sleep. During a normal night of sleep, humans usually experience about 4 or 5 periods of REM sleep. They are quite short at the beginning of the night and longer toward the end.

Vividly recalled dreams mostly occur during REM sleep.The REM state is the mechanism that connects us with reality. It is constantly running in the background, searching out at lightning speed the codes needed to match metaphorically to whatever is meaningful in the environment, and thus creates our perception of reality. It is a reality generator, accessing the templates that are the basis of meaning. It is seen when people go into focused states of attention or trance. It is associated with hallucinations and hearing voices.

In the dream state, when REM is most active and sensory information from the outside world is shut off, the templates searching for their completion scan the brain and make metaphorical images from whatever they call up from memory. The dream contains these images and while we are experiencing it becomes the reality we are conscious of. This is why the reality in dreams so often feels profoundly richer than waking reality. Each particular metaphorical dream image can contain multiple levels of meaning because the job of the dream is to deactivate emotional attachment and it can do that with several interpretations through the same image at the same time.

Our waking reality is quite different. It is dramatically toned down. It has to be, because if we always saw multiple levels of meaning in everything we wouldn’t be able to make sense of our environment. We would end up totally confused and in a psychotic state. To deal with this problem the rational part of our mind inhibits multiple meanings.

In dreaming, we act out the unrealised expectations from waking by matching them to analogous sensory patterns, images and events stored in memory. It is through pattern matching that the REM system works. We are asking memory to provide a scenario that matches a scenario that is already a part of memory, so the matching scenario has to be the best fit that memory can provide. We pattern match our expectations to whatever stimulates them in the environment, not to a memory. For instance, if we want an ice cream, the expectation is fulfilled when we are actually eating it.

This expectation fulfilment theory can therefore explain why dreams are about emotionally charged events, particularly about emotionally arousing expectations. It explains why dreams are consistent over time. It explains the developmental aspects of dreaming. 

The purpose of the brain is to predict so that we can get our needs met. We need to have a system that can continually adapt itself, and the expectation fulfilment theory shows how the brain does that by cancelling out the expectations that didn’t work. It enables us to have an up to date register of what really does get needs met in our lives, so that we can more accurately predict what we need to do in the future.

But we can only work with the experiences we have had. For instance, if a young woman experienced both abuse and love from her father, she may continually seek a relationship with abusive men until she eventually learns that love exists separately from abuse. In this example, the rational part of the mind combines multiple interpretations due to the lack and separation of experiences.

This state of unfulfilled expectation can also occur when we think about something in the future or the past that causes emotional arousal in the present but which can not be acted upon. These uncompleted emotional impulses stay switched on, taking up processing capacity in the expectation system. 

Occasionally the normally conscious part of the brain is alerted by some incongruity in the dream experience such as flying, and we become aware that we are dreaming. This is known as lucid dreaming. But this risks undoing the dream work of deactivating the experiences, because we now know we are experiencing a fantasy. In more primitive mammals if damage to the cortex were to happen, it is less likely their brains could make the distinction between dream and reality. The fantasy would be treated as real and would therefore corrupt the memories.

Woolly mammoths were the last species of the genus mastodon. Most populations of the woolly mammoth died out at the end of the last Ice Age. New findings show that some were still present in North America and Eurasia about 12,000 years ago. A small population survived on St. Paul Island, Alaska, up until 4000 years ago and the small mammoths of Wrangel Island became extinct only around 4000 years ago.

They measured approximately 10 feet in height with extremely long tusks up to 16 feet long which were curved to a much greater extent than those of present day elephants. It is not clear whether the tusks were a specific adaptation to their environment, but it has been suggested that they may have used their tusks as shovels to clear snow from the ground and reach the vegetation buried below. This is evidenced by flat sections on the ventral surface of some tusks.

Woolly mammoths had a number of adaptations to the cold, most famously the thick layer of shaggy hair up to 35 inches long with a fine underwool, for which the woolly mammoth is named. Their skin was no thicker than that of present-day elephants, but unlike elephants they had numerous sebaceous glands in their skin which secreted greasy fat into their hair, improving its insulating qualities. Their teeth were also adapted to their diet of coarse tundra grasses. 

A definitive explanation for their mass extinction is yet to be agreed upon. About 12,000 years ago, warmer, wetter weather was beginning to take hold. Rising sea levels swamped the coastal regions. Forests replaced open woodlands and grasslands across the continent. The Ice Age was ebbing. As their habitats disappeared, so did the mammoth.

Another influencing factor to their eventual extinction in America during the late Pleistocene may have been the presence of Paleo Indians, who entered the American continent in relatively large numbers 13,000 years ago. Their hunting caused a gradual attrition to the mastodon and mammoth populations, significant enough that over time the mastodons were hunted to extinction.

New data derived from studies done on living elephants suggests that though human hunting may not have been the primary cause for the mammoth’s final extinction, human hunting was likely a strong contributing factor. Homo erectus is known to have consumed mammoth meat as early as 1.8 million years ago.

The survival of the dwarf mammoths on Russia’s Wrangel Island was because the island was very remote and uninhabited in the early Holocene period. The actual island was not discovered by modern civilization until the 1820s by American whalers. A similar dwarfing occurred with the Pygmy Mammoth on the outer Channel Islands of California.

There have been occasional claims that the woolly mammoth is not actually extinct, and that small isolated herds might survive in the vast and sparsely inhabited tundra of the northern hemisphere. In the late nineteenth century, there were persistent rumours about surviving mammoths hiding in Alaska. In October 1899 a story about a man named Henry Tukeman detailed his having killed a mammoth in Alaska and that he subsequently donated the specimen to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. However, the museum denied the existence of any mammoth corpse and the story turned out to be a hoax.

In the 19th century, several reports of large shaggy beasts were passed on to the Russian authorities by Siberian tribesman, but no scientific proof ever surfaced. A French charge working in Vladivostok claimed that in 1920 he met a Russian fur trapper that claimed to have seen living giant, furry elephants deep in the taiga. He added that the fur trapper didn’t even know about mammoths before and that he talked about the mammoths as a forest animal at a time when they were presumed living on the tundra and snow.

A woolly mammoth appears in an ancient legend of the Kaska tribe in British Columbia. The story tells how the boy in the title killed the animal and was rewarded by being made the first chief of his people. The animal is described as a huge shaggy beast that roamed the land long ago, but is also said to steal meat and eat people, suggesting that the creature in the story could have become embellished over the years, or refers to some animal other than a mammoth.

Millions of people experience migraines, a type of headache that is often severe and can be disabling. In most cases, migraines occur without warning signs. However, some people who get migraines experience a variety of mostly visual sensations that come before and sometimes accompany the pain of a migraine attack, a condition called migraine with aura.

Most often, a migraine with aura is characterized by visual disturbances such as flashes of light, patterns or blind spots. However, a migraine with aura may also be accompanied by other sensations such as numbness or tingling in parts of the body and speech problems.

The migraine aura sufferer will first notice a black spot in the field of vision. This black spot is often surrounded by flashing lights or bright zig zag lines. The size of the black spot gradually enlarges over a period of minutes. The combination of loss of vision with flashing lights or zig zag lines is a typical and distinctive feature of migraine aura.

The aura is due to changes that take place in the cortex, the outer layer of the brain. A spreading depression of nerve cell activity is believed to account for the pattern of development of the typical aura. In the migraine aura, symptoms build up gradually and move slowly from one visual region or one part of the body to another.

Changes in body chemistry, certain foods, and dozens of environmental influences such as a change in weather, can trigger the attack. These internal or external events stimulate different nerves of the brain, and these nerves relay the stimuli to one or more nerve centers in the brain stem. From these brain stem centers, another set of nerve impulses are sent to the cortex of the brain, causing the aura.

The blacking out of vision is due to depressed nerve activity. The illuminated visual symptoms are due to the resulting zone of hyperactive nerve cells. A sudden shutting off of blood supply to certain areas of the brain cause a gradual loss of function.

While pain relievers may relieve migraine head pain, there’s no treatment for relieving the aura component of migraine with aura. Preventive medications and self care measures, including avoiding migraine triggers, may help prevent a migraine with aura.

Cannabis was a standard treatment for migraines from 1874 and 1942. It has been reported to help people through an attack by relieving the nausea and dulling the head pain as well as preventing the headache completely when used as soon as possible after the onset of pre migraine symptoms such as aura. A pharmaceutical company is currently conducting trials of a cannabis extract nasal spray for migraine.

Photic sneeze reflex is a dominant genetic trait which causes sneezing when one is suddenly exposed to bright light. It is also referred to as photic sneeze response, sun sneezing, photogenic sneezing, the photosternutatory reflex, and Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helio Ophthalmic Outburst syndrome (ACHOO). The first mention of the phenomenon is in later work attributed to Aristotle.

Experiments to determine exactly how the photic sneeze operates are difficult to perform. Theories go back at least to Francis Bacon’s 1635 musings on moisture leaking from the brain, but the modern consensus is that the mechanism is neurological.

The eyeball, tear glands, sinuses and facial skin all are sensorally linked by the ophthalmic nerve. It runs up the sinuses and into the ophthalmic ganglion, a wad of nerve cells in the back of the eye very near the optic nerve.

When the optic nerve is stimulated by bright light, we feel discomfort or even pain. In photic sneezers, some of this stimulation somehow jumps to the ophthalmic ganglion and down the ophthalmic nerve, which experiences the stimulation as phantom irritation of the nose. It responds as it always does to nasal irritation by setting off the sneeze reflex.

Another theory suggests that tears leaking into the nose through the nasolacrimal duct are a cause of the photic sneeze reflex. The speed of the reflex seems to favor the first theory, as it happens much too quickly for tears to be generated and drain into the nose. In addition this sneeze reflex can be brought on by a sudden inhaling of cold air or a strong flavor such as a strong mint gum. This implies an overstimulation of any nerve close to the trigeminal nerve causing the sneeze reflex.

About 20 percent of the population are photic sneezers of varying sensitivity. They will sneeze when they see any bright light, typically when moving from a dark area into a brightly lit one. Leaving a movie theater on a summer day is a classic set up. Some photic sneezers say sneezing while driving out of a tunnel or from shadow into sunlight, is a hazard.

The number of sneezes varies from person to person, but for any given person remains about the same. The sneezing can be repeated ad infinitum by repeated exposure to bright light. Some photic sneezers have learned they can help along a regular, dust induced sneeze by looking at an electric lamp.

In tests, some photic sneezers could consciously restrain the sneezing, especially when they knew bright light was coming. No particular wavelength of light was more inductive, and sunglasses eliminated the effect. An Ohio State University Medical Center doctor has noted that after he removed a patient’s eye, she could touch a spot in the socket and induce sneezing at will.

Photic sneezing has been documented in three successive generations of a single family and may be genetically determined. It appears to occur more frequently in Caucasians. The same phenomenon may affect horses, which are sometimes afflicted with headshaking, a syndrome of snorting, sneezing, bucking and shaking that can render them unrideable.

In a study of 138 patients treated for different types of allergic rhinitis (runny nose) 15 of these also had solar sneeze reflex. Antihistamine, decongestant and other therapy improved the condition, and seven of the 15 also reported improvement in their solar sneezes.

Some have suggested that solar sneezes may be a particular problem for baseball outfielders, airplane pilots, bus drivers and high wire acrobats, for whom a solar sneeze may be more than just a light matter.