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Erica Ritz
The Blaze 2013-09-23 11:14:00
Glenn Beck told his audience on Monday that the arrest of a Maryland father who was asking questions about Common Core is frightening evidence of the country moving further along the path that he says goes from "nudge," to "shove," to "shoot." For those unfamiliar with the terms, Beck explained that "it's how every Marxist utopian dream begins." "You start simple, with just a little 'nudge,'" he said. "It's Cash for Clunkers. It is trying to figure out a way to make energy prices 'necessarily skyrocket,' to nudge you into hybrids." But when that doesn't work, the government starts to "shove," Beck continued. "That's when they use the IRS to shut down opposing voices. They use the NSA to monitor and track American citizens...Then they start using regulation and they start arresting people to scare everybody." If that also fails to produce the results the government seeks, Beck said, historically, they start to shoot, or send people to re-education or internment camps. "So where are we in the scale?" Beck asked the audience. "Are we at nudge, shove, or shoot?" Beck said after he saw the video of what happened in Towson, Maryland, he couldn't sleep for two hours because he believes "it is a very important piece that moves us further towards shoot." Here's complete video of the event, in case you missed it:
During a public forum on Common Core, Robert Small stood up because he had a question (it should be noted that the flyer for the event encourages, "your chance to get answers to your Common Core questions" but parents were asked to submit their questions on paper). |
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Adam Housley
Fox News 2013-09-25 11:14:00
The recent theft of massive amounts of highly sensitive U.S. military equipment from Libya is far worse than previously thought, Fox News has learned, with raiders swiping hundreds of weapons that are now in the hands of militia groups aligned with terror organizations and the Muslim Brotherhood. The equipment, as Fox News previously reported, was used for training in Libya by U.S. Special Forces. The training team, which was funded by the Pentagon, has since been pulled, partly in response to the overnight raids last August. According to State Department and military sources, dozens of highly armored vehicles called GMV's, provided by the United States, are now missing. The vehicles feature GPS navigation as well as various sets of weapon mounts and can be outfitted with smoke-grenade launchers. U.S. Special Forces undergo significant training to operate these vehicles. Fox News is told the vehicles provided to the Libyans are now gone. Along with the GMV's, hundreds of weapons are now missing, including roughly 100 Glock pistols and more than 100 M4 rifles. More disturbing, according to the sources, is that it seems almost every set of night-vision goggles has also been taken. This is advanced technology that gives very few war fighters an advantage on the battlefield. |
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RT
2013-09-26 08:00:00
A new version of a study produced by Mother Agnes, a catholic nun, pointing to a number of fabricated videos used as evidence of complicity by the Assad government in a recent chemical attack is in the works, she told RT. The report by the Christian nun, Mother Agnes Mariam el-Salib, mother superior of St. James Monastery in Qara, Syria, has alleged that many videos featuring supposed victims of the chemical weapons attack in the Syrian village of Guta in August were in fact staged and scripted. The question for the nun now revolves around the "humanitarian" question of what happened to the children featured in the video. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic was created in August 2011 by the Human Rights Council to investigate alleged violations of human rights. RT: What exactly led you to the conclusion that the videos of the chemical attack were fabricated? Mother Agnes Mariam el-Salib: I have been contacted by families from the province of Lattakia. They alleged that they discovered victims, the children that are presented as victims of the chemical attacks in Eastern Ghouta, would be their own children. They had asked me to interfere, so I had to study a little bit of those videos to see where those children are carried, because in some videos they are alive and in some videos they seem not to be alive. I came to identify in many videos real staging, real screen playing and today after having redacted a study concerning my first impression, I called it a better version. Today I'm just finishing the chronology of those videos and of the action they are unveiling to the public opinion. I'm more and more convinced that it is not the coverage of an ongoing reality , the ongoing emergency of chemical strikes, but a kind of screen playing with a script that has been worked on many days before. |
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Press TV
2013-09-26 07:15:00
France says its public debt will hit a new record high of 95.1 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) in 2014, far higher than previous estimates. Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici and Budget Minister Bernard Cazeneuve presented the draft budget on Wednesday. Public sector debt, including central government, welfare and local authority debt, stood at 90.2 percent of GDP at the end of last year. The French government had been counting on public debt to peak in 2014 at 94.3 percent of GDP. The draft budget included measures that amount to an "unprecedented' 15-billion-euro cut in public spending. The two ministers said some 80 percent of fiscal saving in next year's budget will come from public spending cuts and the remaining 20 percent from tax hikes. The government also plans to issue treasury bills worth over eight billion euros to overcome the worst than expected budget deficit. |
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Press TV
2013-09-26 07:06:00
Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro has abandoned his plan to participate in the United Nations General Assembly in New York due to threats to his life. Maduro, who had just returned from a visit to China, said on Wednesday that on a layover in the Canadian city of Vancouver he obtained intelligence on what he described as "two highly serious provocations." The data impelled him to scrap his UN trip.
Maduro further said one of the alleged provocations had been planned against his "physical integrity," adding that the other one could have involved violence in New York. Earlier this month, Maduro said Washington is plotting to bring about the "collapse" of his country in October by targeting food, electricity and fuel supplies. "I have data about a meeting at the White House, the full names of those who attended. I know what plans they made for the total collapse" of the country, Maduro said on September 7 during a ceremony in northern Aragua state. |
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Jeannette Francis
SBS2Australia/Youtube 2013-09-26 06:04:00
Qatar will be hosting the 2022 World Cup and a Guardian Investigation has found that Nepalese workers are being shipped in as to become, what they call, "World Cup Slaves" And as Jeannette Francis found: they're dying for the sake of football. |
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Pete Pattisson
The Guardian 2013-09-26 05:37:00
Dozens of Nepalese migrant labourers have died in Qatar in recent weeks and thousands more are enduring appalling labour abuses, a Guardian investigation has found, raising serious questions about Qatar's preparations to host the 2022 World Cup. This summer, Nepalese workers died at a rate of almost one a day in Qatar, many of them young men who had sudden heart attacks. The investigation found evidence to suggest that thousands of Nepalese, who make up the single largest group of labourers in Qatar, face exploitation and abuses that amount to modern-day slavery, as defined by the International Labour Organisation, during a building binge paving the way for 2022. According to documents obtained from the Nepalese embassy in Doha, at least 44 workers died between 4 June and 8 August. More than half died of heart attacks, heart failure or workplace accidents. The investigation also reveals: - Evidence of forced labour on a huge World Cup infrastructure project. - Some Nepalese men have alleged that they have not been paid for months and have had their salaries retained to stop them running away. - Some workers on other sites say employers routinely confiscate passports and refuse to issue ID cards, in effect reducing them to the status of illegal aliens. - Some labourers say they have been denied access to free drinking water in the desert heat. - About 30 Nepalese sought refuge at their embassy in Doha to escape the brutal conditions of their employment. | |
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Comment: Remember that Qatar is the country who has been wanting to bring "democracy" to Syria and whom the West support.
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Press TV
2013-09-26 04:35:00
London Heathrow airport has been "ripping off" passengers amid plans to slap a £600 million price hike on passengers over five years, the British Airways (BA) boss has announced. Speaking at a press conference in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu, Willie Walsh, head of BA and International Airline Group, said the equivalent of £140 million annual hike to prices at Heathrow comes amid bad management and practice. He called on BA Chief Executive Colin Mathews to step down and criticized senior officials' saying they work toward getting the "right regulatory outcome" rather than running the airport properly. Walsh claims the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has allowed Britain's biggest and the world's third busiest airport to reward its foreign investors with higher-than-average returns at the expense of passengers. "I think Heathrow is ripping off passengers and I think if the CAA does not take a stronger line on this, Heathrow will continue to be inefficient and over rewarded." Heathrow's move will put an extra £7 per head per trip, which the British flag carrier airline said makes it the most expensive hub airport in the world. "In an environment where everybody has been tightening their belt, for an airport to continue to increase their charges by well in excess of inflation will come as a great surprise to passengers." |
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Press TV
2013-09-26 04:30:00
The death toll from three days of protests over a cut in fuel subsidies in Sudan has reached to nearly 30. Protests broke out in the country on September 23 following a government decision to lift fuel subsidies to raise revenue. According to initial reports, seven people died during the protests, but a hospital source in Khartoum's twin city Omdurman said the bodies of 21 people had been received since the protests began on September 23. That announcement put the death at nearly 30 people. The source also stated that all the victims were civilians. Activists are scheduled to hold fresh protests in the capital on Thursday. On Wednesday, security forces fired tear gas and used force to disperse the demonstrators in Khartoum and Omdurman. The demonstrators burned vehicles in a hotel car park near Khartoum International Airport, and a petrol station in the area was also set alight. On September 24, protesters stormed and torched the offices of the ruling National Congress Party in Omdurman. Sudan's Education Ministry announced that schools in the capital would remain closed until the end of the month. |
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Press TV
2013-09-26 04:23:00
Parliament members from the party of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have threatened to resign all together if a senate committee votes to expel him from the legislative body over a tax fraud conviction. A cross-party senate committee is set to vote on October 4 whether the 76-year-old billionaire should be stripped of his senator post following the criminal conviction. It is widely speculated that the 23-member senate committee will vote for Berlusconi's expulsion. On Wednesday, Italy's former Senate chief Renato Schifani put forward a proposal at Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) meeting for lawmakers to resign en bloc, which was highly greeted. However, an aide of Berlusconi, Renato Brunetta said, "There was no proposal for mass resignation. We have only asked each parliamentarian to reflect on and decide according to his or her conscience." |
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Kevin Drum
Mother Jones 2013-09-25 23:08:00
It was the Excel error heard round the world. In January 2010, as the global economy was slowly beginning to claw its way out of the depths of the Great Recession, the Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff published a short paper with a grim message: Too much debt kills economic growth. They had compiled a comprehensive database of debt episodes throughout the 20th century, and their data told an unmistakable story: Time and again, countries that rack up high debt levels have gone on to suffer years - sometimes decades - of stagnation. As economics studies go, it was nothing short of a bombshell. As its conclusions were invoked from Washington to Brussels, tackling the recession suddenly became less important than tackling deficits. For the next three years, stimulus was out, austerity was in, and the protests of critics were all but buried amid the headlong rush to slash spending. But then, on April 15 of this year, a trio of researchers at the University of Massachusetts published a paper that took a fresh look at Reinhart and Rogoff's study. It turned out there was a problem: R&R had presented data from a list of 20 countries that filled lines 30 through 49 on a spreadsheet. But the formula that calculated the results relied on lines 30 through 44. Oops. |
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Ashley Alman
Huffington Post 2013-09-24 19:01:00
The so-called Monsanto Protection Act is set to expire, and will not be included in a bill designed to avert a government shutdown, according to a statement Tuesday from the press office of Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). House Republicans earlier this month released legislation that would include an extension of the Monsanto measure in their continuing resolution. The measure shields sellers of genetically modified seeds from lawsuits, even if the resulting crops cause harm. Merkley has opposed the measure since it quietly passed in March, when it was attached to another spending resolution. Merkley led an online petition to oppose the extension, and unsuccessfully offered an amendment to the farm bill intended to kill what opponents have dubbed the Monsanto Protection Act. Monsanto is the world's largest seed company. |
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Agence France-Presse
2013-09-25 18:10:00
Washington - The National Security Agency eavesdropped on civil rights icon Martin Luther King and heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali as well as other leading critics of the Vietnam War in a secret program later deemed "disreputable," declassified documents revealed Wednesday. The six-year spying program, dubbed "Minaret," had been exposed in the 1970s but the targets of the surveillance had been kept secret until now. The documents showed the NSA tracked King and his colleague Whitney Young, boxing star Ali, journalists from the New York Times and the Washington Post, and two members of Congress, Senator Frank Church of Idaho and Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee. The declassified NSA historical account of the episode called the spying "disreputable if not outright illegal." The documents were published after the government panel overseeing classification ruled in favor of researchers at George Washington University who had long sought the release of the secret papers. The intensity of anti-war dissent at home led President Lyndon Johnson to ask US intelligence agencies in 1967 to find out if some protests were fueled by foreign powers. The NSA worked with other spy agencies to draw up "watch lists" of anti-war critics to tap their overseas phone calls. |
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| Society's Child |
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Jason Howerton
The Blaze 2013-09-25 10:29:00
A man in Crawford County, Mich., was arrested and charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon on Sunday after he called authorities about a trespassing suspect on his property, his wife tells TheBlaze. There are also serious allegations being made about officers demanding that video footage of the incident - taken by the man's wife - be deleted. Thomas Donald, a military veteran, was reportedly out hunting with his 11-year-old son and armed with an "unloaded" single-shot .410-gauge shotgun (his son chose to use a crossbow instead) when he confronted a man riding a dirt bike on his 10 acres of land. The man and his son then reportedly escorted the trespasser to the front of his property and told his wife, Heather, to call the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to file a "recreational trespass." What happened when the Crawford County Sheriff's Department arrived shocked them both, though Sheriff Kirk Wakefield tells TheBlaze quite a different story. In an exclusive interview with TheBlaze, Heather Donald recounted what happened from the couple's perspective. Her husband, Thomas, declined to speak with us on the advice of his attorney and due to the charges against him. His attorney also declined an interview request. |
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| Secret History |
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Melissa
TodayIFoundOut 2013-09-25 19:46:00
Long ago, in the region surrounding Nevsehir and Kayseri, in central Turkey, an ancient people built, or rather dug, over 200 underground cities. The deepest of these, under the present day town of Derinkuyu, delves over 250 feet below the Earth's surface, and boasts numerous tunnels, halls, meeting rooms, wells and passages. Because the city was carved from existing caves and underground structures that had first formed naturally, there is no way to discern, with traditional archaeological methods of dating, when exactly Derinkuyu was built. As such, and with ties to the Hittites, Phrygians and Persians, Derinkuyu presents a fascinating riddle for ancient mystery enthusiasts. |
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| Science & Technology |
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Portuguese American Journal
2013-09-19 18:23:00
An underwater pyramidal structure was identified at a depth of 40 meters off the coast of Terceira Island. The perfectly squared structure was sighted by a private yacht owner, Diocleciano Silva, during a recreational trip. Estimated to be approximately 60 meters high, the enigmatic structure was recorded through GPS digital technology. "The pyramid is perfectly shaped and apparently oriented by the cardinal points," Silva told Diário Insular, the local newspaper. Most recently, archeologists from the Portuguese Association of Archeological Research (APIA) have identified archeological evidence on Pico island that supports their belief that human occupation of the Azores predates the arrival of the Portuguese by many thousands of years. |
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| Earth Changes |
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Robert Felix
Rapid Ice Growth Over The Past Six Days, says Steven Goddard website.iceagenow.info 2013-09-25 14:12:00 Green shows ice gain since September 18. Red shows ice loss.
Also, see map showing the huge increase in western Arctic ice since this date last year. http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/rapid-ice-growth-over-the-past-six-days/#comment-275941 Thanks to Ron de Haan for this link |
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The Guardian
2013-09-26 04:43:00
An unusual spate of hornet attacks in central China has killed at least 18 people. Zhou Yuanhong, a health official in the city of Angkang, in Shaanxi province, said more than 100 people in the area had been stung by swarms of the insects in recent months and treated at hospital, and that 18 of them died. The local state-run newspaper Huashangbao reported that 21 had died in hospitals. Zhou said a handful of people are killed every year in the region by hornets, especially in forested areas, but that this year has been unusually severe, possibly because of weather changes. In the affected village of Sanping, local official Wang Zhengcai said people have been warned to be vigilant if they go into the woods. |
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Jeremy Desel
Khou.com 2013-09-26 03:42:00
Houston - A big sinkhole was swallowing cars near the intersection of Richmond and Fountainview in the Galleria Area Monday. Some drivers mistook the eight-foot-deep hole for a large puddle of water and drove right into it. Ashley Johnson's 2013 Ford was no match for the sinkhole and one of her wheels got stuck. "There is a big hole right here. I don't know where this came from," Johnson said. She was one of the lucky ones because another foot to the left and her car would have sunk. Brian Muller hit the hole Monday morning before the city put up orange warning cones and barrels. "I tried to go around the side of it and my car fell in the hole," Muller said. "The water was going over the hole so I did not even know that there was a hole there." Workers at the restaurant construction site next door pulled Muller's car out. They noticed a big pothole there last Thursday and said they called the city to report it. No one responded. The weekend downpours then turned the pothole into a sinkhole. The Public Works Department confirmed it received a phone call about a water main break in the area on Saturday. Around 1 p.m. Monday, city crews finally closed one lane at the intersection to begin repairs. They came too late for Muller and Johnson. "I'm a little more shocked than mad right now. I am mad that my car is, like, probably totaled," Johnson said. |
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Kim Hudson
Fox2Now 2013-09-26 03:33:00
St. Louis, MO - It was a terrifying start to the shift for one St. Louis City Refuse worker Tuesday morning. One second, he was picking up trash on the city's north side. The next, he was in a sinkhole. Around 6:45 a.m., an alley off Blair Avenue near Newhouse Avenue collapsed under the wheels of a brand-new trash truck. "I get cave-ins almost all the time," Third Ward Alderman Freeman Bosley, Sr. turned to look at the truck, sitting in a hole surrounded by broken concrete slabs. "Not quite this bad. This is one of the worst ones I've seen." Bosley was not shocked, even after learning the driver escaped unhurt. "I'm glad he's safe. But these old alleys up and down here, this stuff is well over a hundred years old," he explained. "And, anything over a hundred years old deteriorates." Bosley also explained the sinkhole was just another symptom of the city's budget problems. |
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US Geological Survey
2013-09-26 02:46:00
Event Time 2013-09-26 06:46:04 UTC 2013-09-26 00:46:04 UTC-06:00 at epicenter Location 14.479°N 93.332°W depth=10.4km (6.5mi) Nearby Cities 101km (63mi) WSW of Puerto Madero, Mexico 115km (71mi) SSW of Mapastepec, Mexico 119km (74mi) SW of Huixtla, Mexico 120km (75mi) W of Suchiate, Mexico 304km (189mi) W of Guatemala City, Guatemala Technical Data |
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JG Vibes
IntelliHub 2013-09-20 00:00:00
5,250 gallons of crude oil has spilled from two tank batteries in to the South Platte River south of Milliken. The spill from a damaged tank was reported to the Colorado Department of Natural Resources Wednesday afternoon by Anadarko Petroleum, the company responsible for the spill. Nearly 1,900 oil and gas wells in flooded areas of Colorado are shut, and 600 workers are inspecting and repairing sites, according to the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. Anadarko, the second-largest operator in the operator in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, has shut down 250 tank batteries and 670 wells. | |
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Comment: See also: Is there a media blackout on the fracking flood disaster in Colorado?
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Foxdc.com
2013-09-23 10:26:00
The first day of fall looked more like the first day of winter in parts of California! The area around the Sierra Nevada Mountains hit with snow and heavy rains. The wet weather even causing slick road conditions and caught residents by surprise - who said they were just in t-shirts a few days ago! |
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PressTV
2013-09-25 20:04:00
A new island that rose from the sea just off Pakistan's southern coast following Tuesday's earthquake is emitting methane gas. The 7.7-magnitude quake, which killed at least 328 people, occurred on Tuesday at 4:29 p.m. local time (1129 GMT). Its epicenter was 20 kilometers below ground in the Awaran district of southwestern Balochistan province, which borders Iran. The powerful quake caused the seabed to rise and create a new island about 600 meters off the South Asian country's Gwadar coastline in the Arabian Sea. A man living near the coastline sent a text message to local journalist Bahram Baloch, saying "a hill has appeared outside my house." "I stepped out, and was flabbergasted. I could see this grey, dome-shaped body in the distance, like a giant whale swimming near the surface. Hundreds of people had gathered to watch it in disbelief," the text message said. |
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| Fire in the Sky |
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TheIndyChannel.com
2013-09-26 15:26:00
Observers report early-morning meteor. A meteor streaked through the pre-dawn sky across parts of the Midwest early Thursday morning and was fairly widely seen across much of Indiana. The American Meteor Society had received more than 130 reports of the meteor, which appeared shortly after 7 a.m. Many of those reports came from Indiana. "There was definitely a bright streak behind it, but I think I saw a small flame trail," read one report on the AMS site from someone in Indianapolis. "This is the first time I have seen such a phenomenon so close and dramatic," read another report from Pendleton. "I thought at first that as it slowed, it would impact the ground, but it burned out above the ground." Another observer from Indiana said he also heard a sound. |
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| Health & Wellness |
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Takashi Hirose
Counterpunch 2013-09-26 16:53:00
On September 7, 2013 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said to the 125th session of the International Olympic Committee, the following: Some may have concerns about Fukushima. Let me assure you, the situation is under control. It has never done and will never do any damage to Tokyo.This will surely be remembered as one of the great lies of modern times. In Japan some people call it the "Abesolute Lie". Believing it, the IOC decided to bring the 2020 Olympics to Tokyo. Japanese government spokespersons defend Abe's statement by saying that radiation levels in the Pacific Ocean have not yet exceeded safety standards. This recalls the old story of the man who jumped off a ten-storey building and, as he passed each storey, could be heard saying, "So far, so good". |
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Julianne Taylor, RN
Primal Docs 2013-09-26 14:40:00
In my last post I outlined how gluten triggered an immune reaction and damaged the gut cells in genetically predisposed people. In this post I will look at studies that show gluten grains are not the only food to cause problems for those with celiac:
One study showed after a gluten free diet for 6 months only 8% of individuals showed complete normalisation of villous architecture (the gut cells, and all the folds). A subset of those with celiac disease continues to suffer severe gut inflammation and on-going deterioration of the villous architecture. This is called refractory celiac disease, type 1 (mild), and type 2 (severe). |
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Ronald Grisanti
Your Medical Detective 2013-09-26 09:16:00
Is it possible that a species of bacteria that commonly causes colds, sinus infections, bronchitis, asthma or pneumonia can also be a silent cause of atherosclerosis? Atherosclerosis (also known as arteriosclerotic vascular disease or ASVD) is a specific form of arteriosclerosis in which an artery wall thickens. Many people are familiar with the common term, hardening of the arteries. Atherosclerosis is the leading cause of heart attacks, stroke, and peripheral vascular disease. The bacteria linked to heart disease is chlamydia pneumoniae. The medical research has shown that this bacteria can live quietly in the body for decades without causing any problems. Unfortunately, we also now know that chlamydia pneumoniae has been found to be a cause of a silent infection leading to coronary arterial inflammation. In one breakthrough study, chlamydia pneumoniae was found in 79% of people with carotid artery plaque vs. 4% in people with no plaque! |
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Jennifer Haberkorn and Carrie Budoff Brown
Politico 2013-09-23 19:54:00
The Obamacare that consumers will finally be able to sign up for next week is a long way from the health plan President Barack Obama first pitched to the nation. Millions of low-income Americans won't receive coverage. Many workers at small businesses won't get a choice of insurance plans right away. Large employers won't need to provide insurance for another year. Far more states than expected won't run their own insurance marketplaces. And a growing number of workers won't get to keep their employer-provided coverage. Every branch of the federal government played a role in weakening the law over the past three years, the casualty of a divisive legislative fight, a surprise Supreme Court ruling, a complex implementation and an unrelenting political opposition. The result has been a stark gap between the promise of Obamacare and the reality - one that has fueled a deep vein of skepticism about the law as it enters its most critical phase. | |
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Comment: Obamacare will provide a boon to BigPharma and
the medical-industrial complex while taxing an already economically
overburdened populace. Exactly what the psychopaths had in mind.
Obamacare: A Deception $1 Trillion Obamacare Tax Hike Hitting on Jan. 1 The Devastating Truth Behind Obamacare |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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Bahar Gholipour
LiveScience 2013-09-26 13:16:00
When a particular circuit in the brain is stimulated, it causes mice to voraciously gorge on food even though they are well fed, and deactivating this circuit keeps starving mice from eating, a new study shows. The findings suggest that a breakdown within this neural network could contribute to unhealthy eating behaviors, the researchers said, although more work is needed to see whether the findings are also true of people. The circuit lies in a brain area called the "bed nucleus of the stria terminalis" (BNST), and affects eating by inhibiting activity in another region, called the lateral hypothalamus, which is known to control eating, according to the study, published today (Sept. 26) in the journal Science. "Normally, there's a population of neurons in the lateral hypothalamus that's putting the brakes on eating," said study researcher Garret Stuber, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "But when you shut those cells down by stimulating this pathway, that releases the brake, and the animal starts to eat." The lateral hypothalamus has been known for more than 50 years to be an important part of the brain for controlling eating. Scientists had learned that putting stimulating electrodes in the lateral hypothalamus of animals would influence their eating behavior, but exactly how it works has been a mystery. |
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Fetching faces and friendly foxes: Selective breeding of foxes reveals why with humans, beauty rules
Emily Murphy
The University of Chicago 2013-09-26 15:42:00
"What is beautiful is good" - but why? A recent article in The Quarterly Review of Biology provides a compelling physiological explanation for the "beauty stereotype": why human beings are wired to favor the beautiful ones. Studies have shown that humans subconsciously attribute positive social qualities (such as integrity, intelligence, and happiness) to physically attractive individuals. Even across cultures there exists a significant consensus on relative beauty: youthful facial features, including, for women, relatively large eyes, a relatively high craniofacial ratio, and a relatively small jaw. In an article published in the September 2013 issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, Dr. I. Elia, an independent scholar at Cambridge University, bridges genetics, physical and social anthropology, and psychology to interpret the findings of the "farm fox experiment" in Russia to reveal "a possible and replicable demonstration of the origin of beauty while inadvertently illuminating its ancient philosophical connection to goodness via a plausible neurohormonal pathway." Silver foxes (Vulpes vulpes) were selectively bred for "friendly" behavior toward humans. Within 20 years, a tame line of communicative, trusting, and playful foxes was achieved. Researchers also noticed that in addition to desirable behavioral traits, the foxes also experienced more rapid development to maturity and displayed more "attractive" and more juvenile physical features, including rounder skulls and flatter faces, with smaller noses and shorter muzzles. That these neotenic changes resulted from genetically controlled alterations in friendly behavior may suggest that to humans, facial beauty signals an individual's relatively greater level of approachability and sociability. |
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Michigan State University
2013-09-25 15:29:00
Materialistic people experience more stress from traumatic events such as terrorist attacks and are more likely to spend compulsively as a result, according to an international study led by a Michigan State University business professor. These possession-driven folks tend to have lower self-esteem than others, said Ayalla Ruvio, assistant professor of marketing in MSU's Broad College of Business. "When the going gets tough, the materialistic go shopping," said Ruvio. "And this compulsive and impulsive spending is likely to produce even greater stress and lower well-being. Essentially, materialism appears to make bad events even worse." For the first part of the study, Ruvio and colleagues surveyed 139 citizens from a southern Israeli town under extreme rocket attacks from Palestine for about six months in 2007. Ruvio, who is from northern Israel, coordinated the data collection amid the terrorist attacks. Her co-researchers were Eli Somer, professor and clinical psychologist at the University of Haifa in Israel, and Aric Rindfleisch, business professor and department head at the University of Illinois. |
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Peter Gray
Aeon 2013-09-18 23:22:00
When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gather education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend and all summer long. We had time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it, time to daydream, time to immerse ourselves in hobbies, and time to read comics and whatever else we wanted to read rather than the books assigned to us. What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been far more valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in school, and I think others in my age group would say the same if they took time to think about it. For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have been gradually reducing children's opportunities to play, and the same is true in many other countries. In his book Children at Play: An American History (2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century as the 'golden age' of children's free play. By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children's freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began to replace 'pickup' games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents' fears led them, ever more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children's opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways. Over the same decades that children's play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. It's not just that we're seeing disorders that we overlooked before. Clinical questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example, have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period, the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled, and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled. |
