Penn astrophysicists zero in on gravity theory

A galactic image taken by the Hubble
Space Telescope. Galaxies like this
one "screen" the effect of a
hypothetical fifth force.

May 11, 2012: Penn astrophysicists zero in on gravity theory - Phys.org

(Phys.org) -- Most people take gravity for granted. But for University of Pennsylvania astrophysicist Bhuvnesh Jain, the nature of gravity is the question of a lifetime. As scientists have been able to see farther and deeper into the universe, the laws of gravity have been revealed to be under the influence of an unexplained force. 

By innovatively analyzing a well-studied class of stars in nearby galaxies, Jain and his colleagues — Vinu Vikram, Anna Cabre and Joseph Clampitt at Penn and Jeremy Sakstein at the University of Cambridge — have produced new findings that narrow down the possibilities of what this force could be. Their findings, published on the Arxiv, are a vindication of Einstein’s theory of gravity. Having survived a century of tests in the solar system, it has passed this new test in galaxies beyond our own as well.

In 1998, astrophysicists made an observation that turned gravity on its ear: the universe’s rate of expansion is speeding up. If gravity acts the same everywhere, stars and galaxies propelled outward by the Big Bang should continuously slow down, like objects thrown from an explosion do here on Earth.

This observation used distant supernovae to show that the expansion of the universe was speeding up rather than slowing down. This indicated that something was missing from physicists’ understanding of how the universe responds to gravity, which is described by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Two branches of theories have sprung up, each trying to fill its gaps in a different way.

One branch — dark energy — suggests that the vacuum of space has an energy associated with it and that energy causes the observed acceleration. The other falls under the umbrella of “scalar-tensor” gravity theories, which effectively posits a fifth force (beyond gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces) that alters gravity on cosmologically large scales.

“These two possibilities are both radical in their own way,” Jain said. “One is saying that general relativity is correct, but we have this strange new form of energy. The other is saying we don't have a new form of energy, but gravity is not described by general relativity everywhere.”

 Jain’s research is focused on the latter possibility; he is attempting to characterize the properties of this fifth force that disrupts the predictions general relativity makes outside our own galaxy, on cosmic length scales. Jain’s recent breakthrough came about when he and his colleagues realized they could use the troves of data on a special property of a common type of star as an exquisite test of gravity.

Bhuvnesh Jain in his office. The lens
simulates gravitational lensing, a
phenomenon predicted by
general relativity.

Astrophysicists have been pursuing tests of gravity in the cosmos for many years, but conventional tests require data on millions of galaxies. Future observations are expected to provide such enormous datasets in the coming data. But Jain and his colleagues were able to bypass the conventional approach.

“We’ve been able to perform a powerful test using just 25 nearby galaxies that is more than a hundred times more stringent than standard cosmological tests,” Jain said.

The nearby galaxies are important because they contain stars called cepheids that are bright enough to be seen individually. Moreover, cepheids have been used for decades as a kind of interstellar yardstick because their brightness oscillates in a precise and predictable way.

“You can measure the brightness of a light bulb at some distance and know that, if you move it twice as far, it will be four times as faint. So you can tell just by the difference in its observed brightness how much further you moved it,” Jain said. “But you need to know how intrinsically bright the bulb is first to determine its actual distance from us.”

Cepheids have a unique trait that allows astrophysicists to get this critical information: their luminosity oscillates over the course of days and weeks. The known relationship between a cepheid’s rate of oscillation and intrinsic brightness serves as that baseline for calculating its distance from Earth, which in turn serves as a baseline for calculating the distance of other celestial objects. The accelerating universe observation, for example, relied upon cepheid data for scale.

“Now that we understand a little bit more about what makes the cepheids pulsate — a balance of gravity and pressure — we can use them to learn about gravity, not just distance,” Jain said. “If the fifth force enhances gravity even a little bit, it will make them pulsate faster.”

Because of their usefulness, there was already more than a decade of data on cepheids based on the Hubble Space Telescope and other large telescopes in Chile and Hawaii. Using that data, Jain and his colleagues compared nearly a thousand stars in 25 galaxies. This allowed them to make comparisons between galaxies that are theoretically “screened” or protected from the effects of the hypothetical fifth force and those that are not.

Larger galaxies and ones that belong to galaxy clusters are screened, while smaller, isolated galaxies are not.

“If we compare galaxies that don't permit this extra force, like our own galaxy, with others that do, then we should see a difference in the way those galaxies’ cepheids behave,” Jain said. “Because this new force would increase the speed of their oscillations and because we can use the rate of their oscillations to their measure distance from us, the measurement we get from cepheids in unscreened galaxies should be smaller than distance measurements made with different techniques.”

Jain and his colleagues ultimately did not see variation between their control sample of screened galaxies and their test sample of unscreened ones. Their results line up exactly with the prediction of Einstein’s general relativity. This means that the potential range and strength of the fifth force is severely constrained.

“We find consistency with Einstein’s theory of gravity and we sharply narrow the space available to these other theories. Many of these theories are now ruled out by the data,” Jain said.

With better data on nearby galaxies in the coming years, Jain expects that an entire class of gravity theories could essentially be eliminated. But there remains the exciting possibility that better data may reveal small deviations from Einstein’s gravity, one of the most famous scientific theories of all time.

More information: http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.6044

Provided by Pennsylvania State University (news : web)

Was Little Ice Age Caused By Increased Volcanism In The Middle Ages?

Image Credit: Photos.com

May 10, 2012: Was Little Ice Age Caused By Increased Volcanism In The Middle Ages? - Red Orbit

A large part of the Northern Hemisphere was in the midst of an unusual cold snap for nearly 500 years, from the Middle Ages through the early 19th century, in what scientists now call the “Little Ice Age.”

A new study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, has probed the longstanding mystery of when this event actually began, what caused it and how it was sustained for such a long period.

Gifford Miller, a climatologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and lead author of the study, said there has been a vague consensus by experts on when this period of cooling actually began, with estimates ranging from the 13th century to the 16th century.

EARTH Magazine reports that, to narrow the date of onset, Miller and colleagues used radiocarbon dating on dead vegetation emerging from the ice caps on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic to get a clearer understanding on when the cooling may have begun. Their dating methods revealed a number of dates that clustered around two distinct periods of time: 1275 and 1450.

“Everybody tends to think of this as a gradual cooling, so we were quite surprised when we got the dates back,” said Miller, adding that during both cooling events, plants at lower elevations froze at nearly the same time as those at higher elevations, indicating a fairly rapid onset.

The team also tested sediment cores from glacial lakes in Iceland and found changes in the erosion rates in the 13th and the 15th centuries, matching the time periods for what they observed in the Canadian Arctic.
With the newest evidence, Miller and colleagues were able to pinpoint the culprit of the Little Ice Age: a period of active volcanism, starting with an eruption in 1275 and continuing periodically through the 19th century. The team discovered at least four major eruptions occurring during this time period.

Volcanism has, in more recent times, also played a role in global cooling.

In 1991, after the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, global temperatures dropped about 1 degree Fahrenheit due to volcanic airborne matter that blocked solar radiation. However, the effects of most volcanoes do not last more than a few years, said David Schneider, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado.

“Volcanism explains the abruptness but it can’t account for the longevity” of the Little Ice Age, Schneider, who was not involved in the study, told EARTH Magazine’s Mary Caperton Morton. “This has always been the problem with the volcanic explanation of the Little Ice Age. Volcanoes can make it cold but they can’t keep it cold.”

But a long period of volcanism could keep it cold, suggests Miller. He and colleagues used computer modeling to determine how repeated short-lived volcanic eruptions might trigger a cooling event lasting several hundred years. They found that the persistence of cold summers following eruptions could be explained by a sea ice-ocean feedback originating in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Sustained cooling from repeated eruptions would have caused sea ice to expand southward until it eventually reached warmer waters and melted.

Such was the case in the winter of 1780, when New York Harbor froze for the first time in recorded history, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.

Miller noted that since the salt content of sea ice is practically nil, it creates a less-dense freshwater cap over salty seawater once it melts. This freshwater cap inhibits mixing and weakens heat transport from the tropics to the North Atlantic, creating a self-sustaining feedback system that could have lasted long after the effects of the volcanic aerosols subsided, he added.

Schneider concurred that Miller’s scenario was plausible.

“However, there are still questions,” he said. “As of now, the weakest link in the study is the computer modeling, which depends on mere estimates of the size of the volcanic eruptions. There’s no accurate account of volcanic eruptions during this period.”

“Before the modern era, there are only a few lines of evidence to figure out when and where volcanic eruptions occurred,” noted Schneider. Dating of ash in ice core records suggests a 1450 eruption occurred on the island of Vanuatu, but other records for a 1275 eruption and others throughout the Little Ice Age remain vague at best.

Miller’s dating models indicate that the Little Ice Age reached a maximum in the early 1800s and then began tapering off. As volcanic activity subsided, more sun was able to penetrate through the atmosphere, helping temperatures rebound, and eventually breaking the cooling cycle, the team concluded.

Source: RedOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

A large part of the Northern Hemisphere was in the midst of an unusual cold snap for nearly 500 years, from the Middle Ages through the early 19th century, in what scientists now call the “Little Ice Age.”
A new study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, has probed the longstanding mystery of when this event actually began, what caused it and how it was sustained for such a long period.
Gifford Miller, a climatologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and lead author of the study, said there has been a vague consensus by experts on when this period of cooling actually began, with estimates ranging from the 13th century to the 16th century.
EARTH Magazine reports that, to narrow the date of onset, Miller and colleagues used radiocarbon dating on dead vegetation emerging from the ice caps on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic to get a clearer understanding on when the cooling may have begun. Their dating methods revealed a number of dates that clustered around two distinct periods of time: 1275 and 1450.
“Everybody tends to think of this as a gradual cooling, so we were quite surprised when we got the dates back,” said Miller, adding that during both cooling events, plants at lower elevations froze at nearly the same time as those at higher elevations, indicating a fairly rapid onset.
The team also tested sediment cores from glacial lakes in Iceland and found changes in the erosion rates in the 13th and the 15th centuries, matching the time periods for what they observed in the Canadian Arctic.
With the newest evidence, Miller and colleagues were able to pinpoint the culprit of the Little Ice Age: a period of active volcanism, starting with an eruption in 1275 and continuing periodically through the 19th century. The team discovered at least four major eruptions occurring during this time period.
Volcanism has, in more recent times, also played a role in global cooling.
In 1991, after the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, global temperatures dropped about 1 degree Fahrenheit due to volcanic airborne matter that blocked solar radiation. However, the effects of most volcanoes do not last more than a few years, said David Schneider, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado.
“Volcanism explains the abruptness but it can’t account for the longevity” of the Little Ice Age, Schneider, who was not involved in the study, told EARTH Magazine’s Mary Caperton Morton. “This has always been the problem with the volcanic explanation of the Little Ice Age. Volcanoes can make it cold but they can’t keep it cold.”
But a long period of volcanism could keep it cold, suggests Miller. He and colleagues used computer modeling to determine how repeated short-lived volcanic eruptions might trigger a cooling event lasting several hundred years. They found that the persistence of cold summers following eruptions could be explained by a sea ice-ocean feedback originating in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Sustained cooling from repeated eruptions would have caused sea ice to expand southward until it eventually reached warmer waters and melted.
Such was the case in the winter of 1780, when New York Harbor froze for the first time in recorded history, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.
Miller noted that since the salt content of sea ice is practically nil, it creates a less-dense freshwater cap over salty seawater once it melts. This freshwater cap inhibits mixing and weakens heat transport from the tropics to the North Atlantic, creating a self-sustaining feedback system that could have lasted long after the effects of the volcanic aerosols subsided, he added.
Schneider concurred that Miller’s scenario was plausible.
“However, there are still questions,” he said. “As of now, the weakest link in the study is the computer modeling, which depends on mere estimates of the size of the volcanic eruptions. There’s no accurate account of volcanic eruptions during this period.”
“Before the modern era, there are only a few lines of evidence to figure out when and where volcanic eruptions occurred,” noted Schneider. Dating of ash in ice core records suggests a 1450 eruption occurred on the island of Vanuatu, but other records for a 1275 eruption and others throughout the Little Ice Age remain vague at best.
Miller’s dating models indicate that the Little Ice Age reached a maximum in the early 1800s and then began tapering off. As volcanic activity subsided, more sun was able to penetrate through the atmosphere, helping temperatures rebound, and eventually breaking the cooling cycle, the team concluded.

Source: RedOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

Source: redOrbit (http://s.tt/1bobH)

Culture Of The 21st Century

Culture Of The 21st Century - TradgedyandHope



An insightful look into the modern culture of our world by the late, Terence Mckenna. I hope you enjoy. Please share this message in any way possible.

Beekeepers Win Ban on Monsanto’s GMOs in Poland

May 10, 2012: Beekeepers Win Ban on Monsanto’s GMOs in Poland - Defend Freedom



Monsanto’s Mon810 corn, genetically engineered to produce a mutant version of the insecticide Bt, has been banned in Poland following protests by beekeepers who showed the corn was killing honeybees.

Poland is the first country to formally acknowledge the link between Monsanto’s genetically engineered corn and the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that’s been devastating bees around the world. Many analysts believe that Monsanto has known the danger their GMOs posed to bees all along. The biotech giant recently purchased a CCD research firm, Beeologics, that government agencies, including the US Department of Agriculture, have been relying on for help unraveling the mystery behind the disappearance of the bees.

Now that it’s owned by Monsanto, it’s very unlikely that Beeologics will investigate the links, but genetically engineered crops have been implicated in CCD for years now.

Learn & Take Action: http://capwiz.com/grassrootsnetroots/issues/alert/?alertid=22033501

Surprise! Monsanto-Funded Research Finds Their Products Safe

Surprise! Monsanto-Funded Research Finds Their Products Safe by Sayer Ji

Increasingly, the front lines of the information warfare being perpetuated by corporations upon the people are moving into peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences journals. Once considered a place where rigorous, empirical science -- i.e. the truth -- is vindicated and publicly acknowledged, these journals, and the scientists who publish in them, are no longer capable of maintaining the once hard and fast illusion that they are immune to the corrupting influence of industry.

Corporations like Monsanto, whose GMO-agriculture inventions (Bt corn; Roundup herbicide) now threaten human and environmental health alike, have moved beyond the stage of simply denying or minimizing the science revealing the harm being done by their products (there is too much science now to maintain this strategy!); rather, they are now investing in the burgeoning, multi-billion dollar industry practice known as "check book" science: find willing researchers, research institutions, and journals to create and publish information favorable to the company writing the check, and you're in business.

Case in point....

Monsanto-Funded "Research" Reveals Monsanto Products Are Safe 

A review on glyphosate (Monsanto's invention and key ingredient in their Roundup herbicide formulation) titled, "Developmental and reproductive outcomes in humans and animals after glyphosate exposure: a critical analysis," was published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health late last year which claimed the following: "[T]he available literature shows no solid evidence linking glyphosate exposure to adverse developmental or reproductive effects at environmentally realistic exposure concentrations."

The review authors included a thank you to Monsanto for funding their work: "The authors acknowledge the Monsanto company for funding and for providing its unpublished glyphosate and surfactant toxicity study reports."

Their report aimed to discredit the work of a French research group at the Institut Jaques Monod who published five articles indicating glyphosate’s wide-ranging potential for environmental and human harm.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In their newly published rebuttal titled, "LETTER TO THE EDITOR: TOXICITY OF ROUNDUP AND GLYPHOSATE," the French research team pointed out several serious flaws in the Monsanto-friendly scientist’s criticism of their work.

The first major flaw was their total disregard for the scientific context within which their glyphosate research was performed, namely, the DNA-damaging and carcinogenic potential of the chemical.

The second flaw was the claim that their results were "not environmentally relevant" (repeated 5 times in the article), despite the fact that the French researchers were able to demonstrate toxicity in 100% of the individual cells at short exposure time below the usage concentration (20 mM) of the herbicide in present agricultural applications. They elaborated on this point further:

"Therefore, regarding the considerable amount of glyphosate-based product sprayed worldwide, the concentration of Roundup in every single micro droplet is far above the threshold concentration that would activate the cell cycle checkpoint. (2) The effects we demonstrate were obtained by a short exposure time (minutes) of the cells to glyphosate-based products, and nothing excludes that prolonged exposure to lower doses may also have effects. Since glyphosate is commonly found present in drinking water in many countries, low doses with long exposure by ingestion are a fact. The consequences of this permanent long term exposure remain to be further investigated but cannot just be ignored."

In the interest of countervailing the mis- and disinformation, we are indexing research on the under-reported, adverse effects of glyphosate (the active ingredient which now include 20 toxic properties associated with 30+ diseases or disease symptoms.

Related Articles

Un-Earthed: Is Monsanto's Glyphosate Destroying The Soil?
Breaking News: Monsanto To Face Biopiracy Charges In India
Is Monsanto's Herbicide Harming Male Fertility?
Roundup Weedkiller: Is This Monsanto's New 'Agent
Dow's Deadly Harvest: The Return of Agent Orange
Roundup Herbicide Linked To Parkinson's-Related Brain Damage

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[1] Marc, J., Mulner-Lorillon, O., Boulben, S., Hureau, D., Durand, G., and Belle, R. 2002.
Pesticide Roundup provokes cell division dysfunction at the level of CDK1/cyclin
B activation. Chem. Res. Toxicol. 15: 326–31.

[2] Marc, J., Mulner-Lorillon, O., Durand, G., and Belle, R. 2003. Embryonic cell cycle for risk
assessment of pesticides at the molecular level. Environnemental. Chemistry. letters. 1: 8–12.

[3] Marc, J., Belle, R., Morales, J., Cormier, P., and Mulner-Lorillon, O. 2004a. Formulated
glyphosate activates the DNA-response checkpoint of the cell cycle leading to the
prevention of G2/M transition. Toxicol. Sci. 82: 436–42.

[4] Marc, J., Mulner-Lorillon, O., and Belle, R. 2004b. Glyphosate-based pesticides affect
cell cycle regulation. Biol. Cell. 96: 245–49.

[5] Marc, J., Le Breton, M., Cormier, P., Morales, J., Belle, R., and Mulner-Lorillon, O. 2005.
A glyphosate-based pesticide impinges on transcription. Toxicol. Appl. Pharmacol.
203:1–8.
 

Sayer Ji is the founder and chair of GreenMedInfo.com. His writings have been published in the Wellbeing Journal, the Journal of Gluten Sensitivity, and have been featured on numerous websites, including Mercola.com, NaturalNews.com, Infowars.com, Care2.com. His critically acclaimed essay series The Dark Side of Wheat opens up a new perspective on the universal, human-species specific toxicity of wheat, and is now available for PDF download.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of GreenMedInfo or its staff.

Emotion Can Shut Down High-Level Mental Processes Without Our Knowledge

© psychcentral.com

Emotion Can Shut Down High-Level Mental Processes Without Our Knowledge - Medical News Today

Psychologists at Bangor University believe that they have glimpsed for the first time, a process that takes place deep within our unconscious brain, where primal reactions interact with higher mental processes. Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience (May 9, 2012 - 32(19):6485 - 6489 - 6485), they identify a reaction to negative language inputs which shuts down unconscious processing.

For the last quarter of a century, psychologists have been aware of, and fascinated by the fact that our brain can process high-level information such as meaning outside consciousness. What the psychologists at Bangor University have discovered is the reverse- that our brain can unconsciously 'decide' to withhold information by preventing access to certain forms of knowledge.

The psychologists extrapolate this from their most recent findings working with bilingual people. Building on their previous discovery that bilinguals subconsciously access their first language when reading in their second language; the psychologists at the School of Psychology and Centre for Research on Bilingualism have now made the surprising discovery that our brain shuts down that same unconscious access to the native language when faced with a negative word such as war, discomfort, inconvenience, and unfortunate.

They believe that this provides the first proven insight to a hither-to unproven process in which our unconscious mind blocks information from our conscious mind or higher mental processes.

This finding breaks new ground in our understanding of the interaction between emotion and thought in the brain. Previous work on emotion and cognition has already shown that emotion affects basic brain functions such as attention, memory, vision and motor control, but never at such a high processing level as language and understanding.

Key to this is the understanding that people have a greater reaction to emotional words and phrases in their first language- which is why people speak to their infants and children in their first language despite living in a country which speaks another language and despite fluency in the second. It has been recognised for some time that anger, swearing or discussing intimate feelings has more power in a speaker's native language. In other words, emotional information lacks the same power in a second language as in a native language.

Dr Yan Jing Wu of the University's School of Psychology said: "We devised this experiment to unravel the unconscious interactions between the processing of emotional content and access to the native language system. We think we've identified, for the first time, the mechanism by which emotion controls fundamental thought processes outside consciousness.

"Perhaps this is a process that resembles the mental repression mechanism that people have theorised about but never previously located."

So why would the brain block access to the native language at an unconscious level?

Professor Guillaume Thierry explains: "We think this is a protective mechanism. We know that in trauma for example, people behave very differently. Surface conscious processes are modulated by a deeper emotional system in the brain. Perhaps this brain mechanism spontaneously minimises negative impact of disturbing emotional content on our thinking, to prevent causing anxiety or mental discomfort."

He continues: "We were extremely surprised by our finding. We were expecting to find modulation between the different words- and perhaps a heightened reaction to the emotional word - but what we found was the exact opposite to what we expected- a cancellation of the response to the negative words."

The psychologists made this discovery by asking English-speaking Chinese people whether word pairs were related in meaning. Some of the word pairs were related in their Chinese translations. Although not consciously acknowledging a relation, measurements of electrical activity in the brain revealed that the bilingual participants were unconsciously translating the words. However, uncannily, this activity was not observed when the English words had a negative meaning.

Comment: I've added two more words to the analecta, pseudomorph and paresis. The first is associated with the monk and what may occur in a life in association to that concept. The second is associated with the notion that words may be considered objects rather than subjects, and through this training, the idea of the pseudomorph may occur. If one's emotions are properly utilized, they should not be shutting down at all, rather, they should be connected and aware.

Nevermind the Apocalypse: Earliest Mayan Calendar Found

A Maya king, seated and wearing an
elaborate head dress of blue feathers,
adorns the north wall of the ruined house
discovered at the Maya site of Xultún.
An attendant, at right, leans out from
behind the king’s head dress. The
painting by artist Heather Hurst recreates
the design and colors of the original Maya
artwork at the site. CREDIT: Heather Hurst,
copyright National Geographic Society

Nevermind the Apocalypse: Earliest Mayan Calendar Found by Stephanie Pappas

The oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered adorning a lavishly painted wall in the ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest.

The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, along with a colorful mural of a king and his mysterious attendants, seem to have been a sort of handy reference chart for court scribes in A.D. 800 — the astronomers and mathematicians of their day. Contrary to popular myth, this calendar isn't a countdown to the end of the world in December 2012, the study researchers said.

"The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future," said archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas, who worked to decipher the glyphs. "Numbers we can't even wrap our heads around."
[End of the World? Top Doomsday Fears]

A brilliant surprise

The newly discovered calendar is complex indeed, featuring stacked bars and dots representing fives and ones and recording lunar cycles in six-month chunks of time. But it wasn't these mathematical notations that first caught the archeologists' eye. William Saturno, an archaeologist from Boston University, was mapping the ancient Maya city of Xultun in northeast Guatemala in 2010 when one of his undergraduate students peered into an old trench dug by looters and reported seeing traces of ancient paint.

The discovery was "certainly nothing to write home about," Saturno told reporters on Thursday (May 10), in advance of releasing details of the murals in this week's issue of the journal Science. Paint doesn't preserve well in the rain forest climate of Guatemala, and Saturno figured that the faint red and black lines his student had found weren't going to yield much information. But he felt he had a responsibility to excavate the room the looters had tried to reach, if only to be able to report the size of the structure along with the paint finding.

As Saturno continued along the old trench to the back wall, he was shocked to run into a brilliantly painted portrait: a Mayan king, sitting on his throne, wearing a red crown with blue feathers flowing out behind him. Another figure peeks out from behind him. On an adjoining wall, three loincloth-clad figures sit, wearing feathered headdresses. One is captioned "Older Brother Obsidian," or "Senior Obsidian," a still-mysterious title. Next to the king, a man painted in brilliant orange wearing jade bracelets reaches out with a stylus, likely identifying him as a scribe. He is labeled as "Younger Brother Obsidian," or perhaps "Junior Obsidian."  [See Photos of the Mayan murals]

It's not the end of the world

These paintings — covering the west and north walls of the small, 6-foot-by-6-foot room — weren't the only surprise Xultun had to offer. On the east wall, someone had painted a series of small, complex hieroglyphics. This, the researchers soon realized, was a calendar.

The calendar seemed to have been added after the murals were completed, as some of the numbers cover up painted figures on the wall. It's almost as if an ancient scribe got sick of flipping through a document to find his timekeeping chart and decided to put it on the wall for at-a-glance reference, Stuart said.

"It's kind of like having a whiteboard in your office where you're writing down formulas that you want to remember," he said.

The Maya recorded time in a series of cycles, including 400-year chunks called baktuns. It's these baktuns that have led to rumors of an end-of-the-world catastrophe on Dec. 21, 2012 — on that date, a cycle of 13 baktuns will be complete. But the idea that this means the end of the world is a misconception, Stuart said. In fact, Maya experts have known for a long time that the calendar doesn't end after the 13th baktun. It simply begins a new cycle. And the calendar encompasses much larger units than the baktun.

"There were 24 units of time they actually could have incorporated into their calendar," Stuart said. "Here, we're only seeing five units and they're still really big."

In one column, the ancient scribe even worked out a cycle of time recording 17 baktuns, the researchers found. In another spot, someone etched a "ring number" into the wall. These notations were used to record time in a previous cycle, thousands of years into the past. The calendar also appears to note the cycles of Mars and Venus, the researchers said. Symbols of gods head the top of each lunar cycle, suggesting that each cycle had its own patron deity.

"There was a lot more to the Maya calendar than just 13 baktuns," Stuart said.

Scratching the surface

This ancient "wall calendar" is a major find, because the first known calendar and astronomical tables before this time came from the Dresden Codex, a book that dates to the 11th or 12th centuries. Most likely, Saturno said, the wall calendar and the Dresden Codex both arose from earlier books that long ago rotted away. [8 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries]

The mural room gives an unprecedented glimpse into the work lives of Mayan scientists, Stuart said. The mural room is in a compound with several other rooms, which were collapsed and built over in later years. The murals only survived, because, instead of collapsing the room, Mayan engineers filled it with rubble and then built on top of it.

"This is clearly a space where someone important was living, this important household of the noble class, and here you also have a mathematician working in that space," Stuart said. "It's a great illustration of how closely those roles were connected in Mayan society."

Kings would have been extremely interested in timekeeping, Stuart said, because part of their job was to conduct rituals of renewal at certain times. Unfortunately, the name of the king pictured in the mural room has been lost.

Although Xultun was first discovered in 1915, less than 0.1 percent has been explored, Saturno said. Looters damaged much of the ancient city in the 1970s, meaning much of historical significance has been lost. But archaeologists still don't even know how far the boundaries of the town extend.

"[That] investigations can begin and in a house like this we can find something we've never seen before only speaks to the great wealth of scientific material that remains in Guatemala in the Maya area for us to discover," Saturno said.

The excavations of the mural room were funded by the National Geographic Society.

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

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The music of the (hemi)spheres sheds new light on schizophrenia

May 9, 2012: The music of the (hemi)spheres sheds new light on schizophrenia - Elsevier

 In 1619, the pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler published Harmonices Mundi in which he analyzed data on the movement of planets and asserted that the laws of nature governing the movements of planets show features of harmonic relationships in music. In so doing, Kepler provided important support for the, then controversial, model of the universe proposed by Copernicus.

In the latest issue of Biological Psychiatry, researchers at the University of California in San Diego suggest that careful analyses of the electrical signals of brain activity, measured using electroencephalography (EEG), may reveal important harmonic relationships in the electrical activity of brain circuits.

The underlying premise is a simple one - that brain function is expressed by circuits that fire, and therefore generate oscillating EEG signals, at different frequencies.

High frequency EEG activity called gamma, for example, might reflect the activity of fast-spiking cells which are often a subclass of inhibitory nerve cells containing parvalbumin. Represented musically, this would be a high pitch, i.e., toward the right side of the piano.

Lower frequency EEG activity, called theta, might come from cells that fire with a lower frequency.

As circuits interact with each other, one would see different "musical combinations", like the chords of music, emerging in the EEG signal. Abnormalities in the structure and function of brain circuits would be reflected in cacophonous music, chords where the musical "voices" are firing at the wrong rate (pitch), volume (amplitude), or timing.

It is increasingly evident that schizophrenia is a disorder characterized by disturbances in the "music of the brain hemispheres." This new report describes relationships between low- and high-frequency EEG oscillations in the human brain produced when high frequency auditory stimuli are presented to a research subject. The authors observed relatively slower oscillations and reduced cross-phase synchrony (for example, peak of theta coinciding with peak of gamma) in schizophrenia patients compared to healthy study participants.

Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry, commented, "The new findings highlight the importance of understanding the relationships between different circuits. It seems that cortical abnormalities in schizophrenia disturb brain function, in part, by disturbing the 'tuning' of brain circuits in relation to each other."

The article is "Hierarchical Organization of Gamma and Theta Oscillatory Dynamics in Schizophrenia" by Kenji Kirihara, Anthony J. Rissling, Neal R. Swerdlow, David L. Braff, and Gregory A. Light (doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2012.01.016). The article appears in Biological Psychiatry, Volume 71, Issue 10 (May 15, 2012), published by Elsevier. 

Comment: I've added Omniscient in reference to both schizo- and science, all coming from the same root. We assume science is a field of study yet it is much more a behavior related to knowledge which develops conscience. The word conscious also is included with the root skei- and as basically aware or breathing with a heart beat. The references to the cut or split as a primary navigation in meaning is complicated in that it is associated with the only reference to the word "shin," which came from the Middle English shine. This may actually be propaganda (assignment for the stupid) as then the word shine is spread out across the language in 10 separate roots with no reference to the word's syntax, rather it is explicitly referenced in root text meanings which as methodology is a concept by which meanings are manipulated for preferences and effects. The concept of man capable of realizing the dynamics of method (capable of processing energy) and also learning this, has seemingly caused many problems.

Probiotics Destroy Toxic Chemicals In Our Gut For Us

© GreenMedInfo

Probiotics Destroy Toxic Chemicals In Our Gut For Us by Sayer Ji

It is an awesome fact of nature that we have trillions of organisms within our body - containing completely foreign DNA - some of which break down toxic chemicals that we humans have created to kill other things, but are now killing us, e.g. pesticides.

Who are these strange helpers?

Bacteria!

Wait. Aren't bacteria supposed to harm us? Aren't they the enemy in the endless war against infection?

Well, when our immunity fails, some can grow out of bounds opportunistically. But they respond to the environment within which they are raised, not unlike most other creatures.

Provide organic, wholesome vegetables, for instance, and you have a hotbed of positive activity in your gut. Provide sugar, processed foods and an increasing burden of chemicals and it can get ugly in there!

Also, believe it or not, ancient bacteria teamed up with our cellular ancestors eons ago to produce the energy-producing organelles within our cells called mitochondria.

So, are we really that different from bacteria? No, on some level, we ARE bacteria, spurning some researchers to describe us as "meta-organisms," composed as we are of many different living systems working symbiotically.

So, let's look at some of the amazing feats of these friendly bacteria....

1. Bisphenol A Toxicity: Absorption/Excretion - Bisphenol A (BPA) is an increasingly omnipresent petrochemical derivative with endocrine-disrupting properties (i.e. it messes up your hormones!) and is found in thermal printer receipts, all world paper currency, plastics, and many other consumer goods.[1] Sadly, it is not a matter of whether or not you will be exposed, but to what degree. Enter the probiotics Bifodobacterium breve and Lactobacillus casei. In rats exposed to BPA in their diet, blood concentrations of BPA dropped significantly and it was excreted in their feces 2.4 times more readily than the non-supplemented control group. The researchers concluded that the probiotics "...reduced the intestinal absorption by facilitating the excretion of BPA, and that these probiotics may suppress the adverse effects of BPA on human health."
   
2. Bisphenol A Toxicity: Degradation - Novel, bisphenol A-degrading bacterial strains were isolated from the traditional Korean fermented cabbage dish known as kimchi.[2] Three isolates of Bacillus pumilus were shown capable of degrading BPA. The researchers reported that these food-derived bacteria would make efficient and safer systems for the removal of BPA. Logically, the consumption of kimchi (or the probiotics extracted from kimchi) would enable a human's gastrointestinal tract to break down this harmful chemical, as well.
   
3. Insecticide Toxicity - Here comes kimchi to the rescue again! In 2009, the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry revealed that the rather nasty insecticide chlorpyrifos (CP), which has been linked to neurological effects, developmental disorders and autoimmune disorders, may be no match for the bacteria that make possible kimchi fermentation.[3] The researchers found the bacteria in kimchi turned CP into lunch (a source of carbon and phosphorous) and degraded it rapidly until day 3 (83.3% gone!) and degraded it completely by day 9! The superheroes in this story were identified as: Lactobacillus brevis WCP902, Lactobacillus plantarum WCP931, and Lactobacillus sakei WCP904. But then things got even more amazing..... 

 These toxin-muching superheroes were found to degrade four other insecticides:

1. Coumaphos - Insecticide
2. Diazinon
3. Parathion
4. Methylparathion

If you think the chemical-munching and degrading abilities of probiotics are amazing, then consider that probiotics perform thousands of vital functions within our body, and have been clinically researched to prevent and/or reduce the symptoms of close to 200 different diseases. You can view the first-hand research on the benefits of probiotics on GreenMedInfo.com's research page dedicated to the topic.

Healthy Bacteria Depend on the Health of the Soil, and the Health of the Soil Depends on YOU

When it comes to good bacteria, it is important to point out that humans do not live within a vacuum. The quality of the bacteria in our gut reflects the quality of the food we eat, which ultimately depends on the quality of the soil.

If you grow your vegetables in raw human sewage (from unhealthy folks), or factory-farmed animal waste, already preloaded with antibiotic resistant bacteria and chemicals, there is little hope that you will receive sufficient beneficial bacteria from that food.

What is more likely is that you will be exposed to highly pathogenic antibiotic resistant bacteria which have already survived decades worth of chemical and antibiotic exposure within the human gastrointestinal tract, or loads of zoological antibiotics used on the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO), almost guaranteeing your own microflora will be continually challenged with unhealthy, disease-promoting strains of bacteria. This is one of the most disturbing and unspoken aspects of conventionally produced food, but there are others: gamma irradiation, bacteriophage-sprays, etc.

Moreover, new research indicates that our increasingly GMO-based global food production system which depends so heavily on broad-spectrum biocides like the active ingredient in Roundup "weedkiller," namely, glyphosate, is destroying the fertility of the soil. Essential, and culturally ancient, food-starter bacteria - as used in fermented foods like cheese and yogurt - are disappearing in certain regions of the world. The soils have become saturated with herbicides that are destroying the microbial biodiverisity, without which many of the foods that we consume would not be possible. When that lifeline to health which comes from the soil is cut off, our own health is compromised - perhaps irreversibly.

What does this mean? Planetary health and human health are no longer separable -- truth is, they never were. We need to move beyond the concept that we can hermetically seal ourselves off from the ecological destruction and mass poisoning occurring all around us by only consuming "organic." If things continue at the pace they are going, the word "organic" will have no meaning whatsoever - other than marketing spin. The case of perchlorate accumulation in organic food makes this problem blatantly clear. In other words, unless we become activists on this issue, we will lose everything.

I believe one good place to start is to support campaigns such as the California Right To Know Campaign which will place Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act on the Ballot for Nov. 6th. Learn more at Mercola.com.

References:
[1] Effect of probiotics, Bifidobacterium breve and Lactobacillus casei, on bisphenol A exposure in rats. Biosci Biotechnol Biochem. 2008 Jun;72(6):1409-15. Epub 2008 Jun 7. PMID: 18540113

[2] Degradation of bisphenol A by Bacillus pumilus isolated from kimchi, a traditionally fermented food. Appl Biochem Biotechnol. 2007 Jan;136(1):39-51. PMID: 17416976

[3] Biodegradation of chlorpyrifos by lactic acid bacteria during kimchi fermentation. J Agric Food Chem. 2009 Mar 11;57(5):1882-9. PMID: 19199784

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of GreenMedInfo or its staff.

Occupy Psychiatry: End the Cult of Psychiatry (includes videos)

Occupy Psychiatry: End the Cult of Psychiatry (includes videos) - Gaia Health

The people labeled as lunatics through psychiatry’s Diagnostics and Statistics Manual labeling are striving to take over the asylum. They’re taking part in the Occupy Movement and they’ve just held their first protest, Occupy the American Psychiatric Assocation (APA). On the fifth of May, they protested in front of the venue for the APA’s annual meeting in Philadelphia.

They were, of course, largely ignored by the APA, but watch out. They’re just getting rolling. If you possibly can, get informed and involved. As Gaia Health has shown you in Psychiatric Incarceration: It Can Happen to Anyone, it could be you getting locked up and forced to undergo drugging, electric shocks, or mind-destroying surgery. Help end this horrific destruction of people’s lives before it does.

Gaia Health has selected some videos of the talks given at the conference prior to the protest, and at the end is a selection of Blog Talk Radio shows by David Oaks, in which he interviews key figures of the anti-psychiatry movement during the run-up to the protest.

Adina Lambert is a psychologist and member of the International Society for Ethical Psychiatry and Psychology. She speaks with passion about the corruption in her own field:

When I see the lies that unsuspecting people…are being told, labels, ridiculous diagnoses that are being put on people that have no basis in fact, no basis in science, and then to make it worse, they are poisoned, poisoned, and that is true, by the psychiatrists who tell them that you need these medicines. … This truly does break my heart. The drugging of children is a total outrage. …I want to do away with the DSM. It is a ridiculous book that is full of lies—lies!

She tells how it’s growing worse. Her passion is palpable. [4:42]



Occupy Psychiatry: Read more..

The National Library of Medicine: Pizza Is A Health Food!

The National Library of Medicine: Pizza Is A Health Food! - Orthomolecular News Service

"Oddly enough, the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine has not published a single article on pizza. At least not so far. Maybe if it did, it would make the cut at Medline."

by Andrew W. Saul

Editor-In-Chief, Orthomolecular Medicine News Service

The National Library of Medicine Censors Nutritional Research

Medline is Biased, and Taxpayers Pay for It

Did you know that there are "good" medical journals, and that there are "naughty" medical journals?

No kidding. The good journals are easy to access on the internet through a huge electronic database called Medline ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed ) This wonderful, free service is brought to you by the US National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. In other words, by you. By your tax dollars. Generally it is money well spent, until you go searching for megavitamin therapy research papers. Then you will find that you can't find all of them. That is because of selective indexing.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) proudly describes itself as "the largest medical library in the world. The goal of the NLM is to collect, organize and make available biomedical literature to advance medical science and improve public health."

Hmm. Collect. Organize. Make available. Improve public health.

So, after over 40 continuous years of publication, why is the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine NOT indexed by Medline?

And what are the consequences of such exclusion? In a nutshell, it stops the public from using their computers to learn about all of the scientific research and clinical reports demonstrating the effectiveness of megavitamin (orthomolecular) therapy. It also greatly hampers professionals from seeing pro-vitamin studies. Have you ever wondered why your doctor simply does not know about vitamin therapy? Well, wonder no longer. He or she can't read what isn't "collected," electronically indexed, or otherwise "made available" to them. If the vast majority of journals indexed by Medline are pharmaceutical-friendly, and yet nutritional research is censored, what can you expect?

Your taxes should not be used to fund censorship in a public library, especially the largest medical library on the planet. It is un-American.

Of course, Medline doesn't censor everything nutritional. Here is a current example of some research that Medline does in fact choose to index:

PIZZA PREVENTS HEART ATTACKS

Gallus S, Tavani A, La Vecchia C. Pizza and risk of acute myocardial infarction. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2004 Nov;58(11):1543-6.

"Some of the ingredients of pizza have been shown to have a favourable influence on the risk of cardiovascular disease. However, there is no single explanation for the present findings."

PIZZA PREVENTS CANCER

Gallus S, Bosetti C, Negri E, Talamini R, Montella M, Conti E, Franceschi S, La Vecchia C. Does pizza protect against cancer? Int J Cancer. 2003 Nov 1;107(2):283-4.

"We analyzed the potential role of pizza on cancer risk, using data from an integrated network of case-control studies. . . Pizza appears therefore to be a favorable indicator of risk for digestive tract neoplasms in this population."

But be careful of that olive oil:

Wong GA, King CM. Occupational allergic contact dermatitis from olive oil in pizza making. Contact Dermatitis. 2004 Feb;50(2):102-3.

MORE PIZZA

Here is my all-time favorite: yet another article that Medline actually is indexing. It is not even from a medical journal. I am not making its mile-long title up, either. It is there at Medline, right now, just a few clicks away from you:

Simon HB. "My husband subscribes to Harvard Men's Health Watch, but I read it even more than he does. I hope you can help us resolve a disagreement. He wants to have pizza two to three times a week for his prostate, but I don't think it's a healthy food. Who is right?" (Harvard Men's Health Watch. 2003 Jun;7(11):8.)

Evidently the very name "Harvard" is enough to get your foot inside the Medline door. That, or "everything but anchovies."

Oddly enough, the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine has not published a single article on pizza. At least not so far. Maybe if it did, it would make the cut at Medline.

On the other hand, the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine has a review board including medical doctors, university faculty, and hospital-based researchers. Since 1967, it has published over 600 papers by renowned authors including Hugh D. Riordan, Emanuel Cheraskin, Carl C. Pfeiffer, Bernard Rimland, Abram Hoffer, and Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling. You should be able to access abstracts (concise summaries) of these papers, instantly and for free, via Medline.

Well, you can't.

To contact the US National Library of Medicine/Medline and tell them what you think: custserv@nlm.nih.gov

"The National Library of Medicine refuses to index the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, though it is peer-reviewed and seems to meet their criteria." (Psychology Today, Nov-Dec 2006)

NOTE: Four decades of papers from the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine are now online for you to read, Medline or no Medline, at http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/ The JOM Archive is a free service with no advertising.

(Andrew W. Saul taught nutrition, health science and cell biology at the college level. He is the author of Doctor Yourself and Fire Your Doctor! and, with Dr. Abram Hoffer, co-author of Orthomolecular Medicine for Everyone and The Vitamin Cure for Alcoholism. Saul is featured in the documentary film Food Matters. He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine.)

---

Nutritional Medicine is Orthomolecular Medicine

Orthomolecular medicine uses safe, effective nutritional therapy to fight illness. For more information: http://www.orthomolecular.org

The peer-reviewed Orthomolecular Medicine News Service is a non-profit and non-commercial informational resource.

Andrew W. Saul, Ph.D., Editor and contact person. Email: omns@orthomolecular.org

To Subscribe at no charge: http://www.orthomolecular.org/subscribe.html

Historic Hunger Strikes: Lightning in the Skies of Palestine

Historic Hunger Strikes: Lightning in the Skies of Palestine by Richard Falk

There is ongoing militant expression of Palestinian resistance to the abuses of Israel’s 45 years of occupation and de facto annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and five year blockade of Gaza taking the form of a series of hunger strikes. Recourse to this desperate tactic of courageous self-sacrifice is an extreme form of nonviolence, and should whenever and wherever it occurs be given close attention. Palestinians have protested by hunger strikes in the past but failed to inspire the imagination of the wider Palestinian community or shake the confidence of Israeli officialdom. Despite the averted gaze of the West, especially here in North America, there are some signs that this time the hunger strikes have crossed a historic threshold of no return.
These strikes started by the individual exploit of a single person, Khader Adnan, at the end of 2011.

Dragged from his home in the village of Arraba near Jenin by a night raid by dozens of Israeli soldiers, humiliated and roughed up in the presence of his two and four year old daughter, carried away shackled and blindfolded, roughly interrogated, and then made subject to an administrative decree for the eighth time in his young life, Adnan’s inner conscience must have screamed ‘Enough!’ and he embarked on an open-ended hunger strike. He continued it for 66 days, and agreed to take food again only after the Israeli authorities relented somewhat, including a pledge not to subject Adnan to a further period of administrative detention unless further incriminating evidence came to the surface. Upon release, Adnan to depersonalize his ordeal insisted on visiting the families of other Palestinians currently under administrative detention before returning to his own home.

He has spoken out with firm gentleness and invited persons of conscience everywhere to join in the struggle to induce Israel to abandon administrative detention, and the accompanying violations of Palestinian human rights. Khader Adnan’s open letter to the people of the world is reproduced below to convey the tone and substance of his struggle.

Read more..

After The Media Has Gone: Fukushima, Suicide and the Legacy of 3.11

© Asia-Pacific Journal
Map showing 20 kilometer evacuation
zone and neighboring towns

After The Media Has Gone: Fukushima, Suicide and the Legacy of 3.11 by Makiko Segawa

 For the media, time is of the essence in a news story. The March 11, 2011 disaster attracted thousands of reporters and photographers from around the world. There was a brief deluge of Japanese and international media coverage on the first anniversary, this spring. Now the journalists have packed up and gone and by accident or design Japan's government seems to be mobilizing its agenda, aware that it is under less scrutiny.

The press pack has disappeared like a ghost since this April. The influx of foreign media has suddenly stopped, as I can attest since I worked as a translator and aid to many foreign journalists in the year up to the 3.11 anniversary in 2012. Using the keywords 'Fukushima' and 'nuclear plant' in Japanese to scour the Nikkei TELECOM 21 search engine shows 9,981 domestic news items in April 2012, just over half the 17,272 stories the previous month.

As if to take advantage of the precise timing of the media evacuation, the municipal government of Minami-soma city, Fukushima Prefecture began implementing a blueprint planned some time earlier. In the dead of night on Monday April 16th, the city lifted the no-entry regulations and changed evacuation zone designations that had stood since March 12, 2011. The decision allowed people to return to the district of Odaka and some parts of the Haramachi district.

Watanabe Ichie, a volunteer from Tokyo who witnessed the scene near the roadblock into the zone observed that: "several police vehicles with flashing red lights arrived after 23:00 on April 15th. By 0:15, all the vehicles had gone". "After that, all that remained was the light from the traffic signals." The following morning, cars moved freely inside the once-prohibited area.

Mayor Sakurai's Drive to Reopen Minami-Soma

The home of Minami-soma's mayor, Sakurai Katsunobu, is located in the newly reopened part of Haramachi. He has often complained about what he calls the irrational policy of the government, calculating the exclusion zone by distance rather than the spread of radiation. A former dairy farmer and a passionate booster of the region, he is attached to his land and desperate to quicken the reconstruction of his devastated city, despite the risks.

The 56-year-old mayor has been single all his life and has no children. In interviews, he tends to downplay the risk of radiation. In the first week of May 2011, he even joked: "Fukushima is not the same as Hiroshima or Nagasaki. No one even knows for sure how many people died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster. Regardless of radiation, the cancer rate in our world is quite high. Yet people appear to be afraid of radiation, which is like a ghost that never appears."

 The city reopened the no-entry zone in May, insisting that radiation levels in Odaka and some parts of Haramachi had fallen enough to be safe. However, some residents are unhappy with this decision. Shibaguchi Takashi (42), a former acupuncturist and the father of a 6-year-old daughter Nana, refuses to return to his home inside the former exclusion zone, preferring his temporary accommodation. "The city says that the radiation level is completely safe, but when my neighbors checked the radiation level under the eaves of my house, it was over two microsieverts." (henceforth, μSv) He added: "I am sure that radioactive materials released immediately after the explosion are unchanged on the leaking roof. I believe it is too dangerous to go back there."

Read complete report..

Plastic trash altering ocean habitats, study shows

Plastic trash altering ocean habitats, study shows - Phys.org

A 100-fold upsurge in human-produced plastic garbage in the ocean is altering habitats in the marine environment, according to a new study led by a graduate student researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

In 2009 an ambitious group of graduate students led the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) to the North Pacific Ocean Subtropical Gyre aboard the Scripps research vessel New Horizon. During the voyage the researchers, who concentrated their studies a thousand miles west of California, documented an alarming amount of human-generated trash, mostly broken down bits of plastic the size of a fingernail floating across thousands of miles of open ocean.

At the time the researchers didn't have a clear idea of how such trash might be impacting the ocean environment, but a new study published in the May 9 online issue of the journal Biology Letters reveals that plastic debris in the area popularly known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" has increased by 100 times over in the past 40 years, leading to changes in the natural habitat of animals such as the marine insect Halobates sericeus. These "sea skaters" or "water striders"—relatives of pond water skaters—inhabit water surfaces and lay their eggs on flotsam (floating objects). Naturally existing surfaces for their eggs include, for example: seashells, seabird feathers, tar lumps and pumice. In the new study researchers found that sea skaters have exploited the influx of plastic garbage as new surfaces for their eggs. This has led to a rise in the insect's egg densities in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.

Such an increase, documented for the first time in a marine invertebrate (animal without a backbone) in the open ocean, may have consequences for animals across the marine food web, such as crabs that prey on sea skaters and their eggs.

"This paper shows a dramatic increase in plastic over a relatively short time period and the effect it's having on a common North Pacific Gyre invertebrate," said Scripps graduate student Miriam Goldstein, lead author of the study and chief scientist of SEAPLEX, a UC Ship Funds-supported voyage. "We're seeing changes in this marine insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic."

The new study follows a report published last year by Scripps researchers in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series showing that nine percent of the fish collected during SEAPLEX contained plastic waste in their stomachs. That study estimated that fish in the intermediate ocean depths of the North Pacific Ocean ingest plastic at a rate of roughly 12,000 to 24,000 tons per year.

The Goldstein et al. study compared changes in small plastic abundance between 1972-1987 and 1999-2010 by using historical samples from the Scripps Pelagic Invertebrate Collection and data from SEAPLEX, a NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer cruise in 2010, information from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation as well as various published papers.

In April, researchers with the Instituto Oceanográfico in Brazil published a report that eggs of Halobates micans, another species of sea skater, were found on many plastic bits in the South Atlantic off Brazil.

"Plastic only became widespread in late '40s and early '50s, but now everyone uses it and over a 40-year range we've seen a dramatic increase in ocean plastic," said Goldstein. "Historically we have not been very good at stopping plastic from getting into the ocean so hopefully in the future we can do better."

Provided by University of California - San Diego (news : web)

Panel Discussion about GMO Labeling

Panel Discussion about GMO Labeling - Mercola.com



http://gmo.mercola.com/ Internationally renowned natural health physician and Mercola.com founder Dr. Joseph Mercola together with Pam Larry, Northern California Director of LabelGMOs.org, Dave Murphy, founder of Food Democracy Now and Ronnie Cummins, Director, Organic Consumers Association, discuss about labeling GMO's in giving the consumer the right to know and choose what type of food they will consume.

If Homeopathy Can’t Work, Then Neither Can Anesthesia.

Homeopathy's Mystery: Not
knowing how something works
has nothing to do with whether
it does. Photo by Luc Viatour.
Creative Commons license.

If Homeopathy Can’t Work, Then Neither Can Anesthesia. by Heidi Stevenson

Though we certainly must make determinations of what is and is not real, isn’t it best to do that based on experience and observation, rather than presumptions of what can and cannot be?

One of the most common arguments against homeopathy says: It can’t work, therefore it doesn’t. Another throws out the challenge to explain how it works. Neither is a fair argument, since they do not care about evidence showing its efficacy, but only attempt to demean both homeopathy and the person who believes it works.

These same people do not place the same burden on their own belief in allopathy. Let’s pose that question to an anesthesiologist, Michael Alkire of the University of California School of Medicine, who is recognized as an expert in his field. Surely he knows the answer. His response is in a quote from the Encyclopedia of Consciousness:

How anesthesia works has been a mystery since the discovery of anesthesia itself.

Do those who keep attacking homeopathy care that no one understands how anesthesia works, either? Oddly enough, that never seems to come up. Why do they hold homeopathy to a different standard? Not knowing the mechanism behind how something works is hardly a legitimate argument that it doesn’t.

Read more..

The Worst Yet to Come? Why Nuclear Experts Are Calling Fukushima a Ticking Time-Bomb

Photo Credit: Shutterstock/ Sergey150770

May 4, 2012: The Worst Yet to Come? Why Nuclear Experts Are Calling Fukushima a Ticking Time-Bomb by Brad Jacobson

Experts say acknowledging the threat would call into question the safety of dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants in the U.S.

More than a year after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the Japanese government, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) present similar assurances of the site's current state: challenges remain but everything is under control. The worst is over.

But nuclear waste experts say the Japanese are literally playing with fire in the way nuclear spent fuel continues to be stored onsite, especially in reactor 4, which contains the most irradiated fuel -- 10 times the deadly cesium-137 released during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. These experts also charge that the NRC is letting this threat fester because acknowledging it would call into question safety at dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants around the U.S., which contain exceedingly higher volumes of spent fuel in similar elevated pools outside of reinforced containment.

Reactor 4: The Most Imminent Threat

The spent fuel in the hobbled unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi not only sits in an elevated pool outside the reactor core's reinforced containment, in a high-consequence earthquake zone adjacent to the ocean -- just as nearly all the spent fuel at the nuclear site is stored -- but it's also open to the elements because a hydrogen explosion blew off the roof during the early days of the accident and sent the building into a list.

Alarmed by the precarious nature of spent fuel storage during his recent tour of the Fukushima Daiichi site, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, subsequently fired off letters to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko and Japanese ambassador to the U.S. Ichiro Fujisaki. He implored all parties to work together and with the international community to address this situation as swiftly as possible.

Read complete report..

DoctorsHealthPress.com Supports Study Showing Chinese Medicine Helps Reduce Muscle Loss

© telegraph.co.uk

May 6, 2012: DoctorsHealthPress.com Supports Study Showing Chinese Medicine Helps Reduce Muscle Loss - Digital Journal

The Doctors Health Press, a publisher of various natural health newsletters, books and reports, including the popular online Doctors Health Press e-Bulletin, is lending its support to a recent study showing that acupuncture therapy mitigates skeletal muscle loss. This has big implications for improving health among older adults and medical patients who have weakened muscles.

As reported in Doctors Health Press e-Bulletin on Friday, May 4, 2012
(http://www.doctorshealthpress.com/general-health-2/how-chinese-medicine-strengthens-your-muscles), the researchers believe acupuncture is the main alternative treatment for dealing with skeletal muscle atrophy. Atrophy is the partial or complete wasting away of a part of the body.

Loss of muscle mass has a profound effect on the ability of many people to engage in physical activity. One preferred way to prevent atrophy is to use such interventions as exercise training, improved nutrition and mechanical stimulation. But these can be quite challenging for those who are already frail or who have severe medical conditions.

The Doctors Health Press e-Bulletin article reports that the researchers strongly believe that an alternative approach is urgently needed for these individuals. And that is why they decided to explore how acupuncture affects skeletal muscle at the molecular level. And there, they found very encouraging results.

It was a preliminary study, performed on mice, as is the norm, and it found that the cellular changes that cause muscle loss could be “significantly reversed by acupuncture.”

The World Health Organization has endorsed acupuncture as a treatment for a variety of diseases. Yet many people (doctors and patients, alike) regard it suspiciously. And researchers have not dipped very much into understanding the molecular ways acupuncture works in the body.

The Doctors Health Press e-Bulletin article reports also reports that the new study found one such molecular mechanism responsible for acupuncture’s effectiveness. It was found, in this case, very useful in preventing skeletal muscle atrophy in mice. While more studies will be needed in the future to address this link, older adults dealing with this health issue may find help in the offices of a Chinese medicine practitioner or licensed and experienced acupuncturist.

(SOURCE: "Japanese researchers show that acupuncture can improve skeletal muscle atrophy," American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Apr. 23, 2012.)

Doctors Health Press e-Bulletin is a daily e-letter providing natural health news with a focus on natural healing through foods, herbs and other breakthrough health alternative treatments. For more information on Doctors Health Press, visit http://www.doctorshealthpress.com.

The Doctors Health Press believes in the healing properties of various superfoods, like pistachios, as well as the benefits of taking vitamins and supplements, Chinese herbal remedies and homeopathy. To see a video outlining the Doctors Health Press' views on homeopathic healing, visit http://www.doctorshealthpress.com/homeopathy.
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Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/5/prweb9471445.htm

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/697127#ixzz1uCwMScCq