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| Puppet Masters |
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The Tower
2013-05-31 16:23:00
Lawlessness has become so endemic in Egypt that the U.S. Embassy this week warned Americans away from visiting the country's famed pyramids. A academic teaching at the American University in Cairo received an email from the embassy warning of "aggressiveness [that] in some cases is closer to criminal conduct... with angry groups of individuals surrounding and pounding on [vehicles]... and in some cases attempting to open the vehicle's doors." The warning lined up with the professor's observations: The warning, emailed out over the embassy's mailing list, was published the same day as a report documenting hundreds of attacks on journalists in Egypt. Most of the attacks, according to human rights adovactes, are being conducted by supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. | |
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Bernie Becker
The Hill 2013-05-31 16:20:00
The IRS will not deliver documents requested by top Senate Finance Committee members on the agency's targeting of conservative groups by Friday, committee aides said. Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and the panel's ranking member, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), had asked the IRS for a wide range of information in a May 20 letter - 41 questions in all. The senators' requests included details of any communication between the IRS and White House officials about the singling out of Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status. In the letter, Baucus and Hatch asked for the agency to answer by Friday. "It's disappointing that the IRS failed to produce any of the documents requested by the committee," the press offices for Baucus and Hatch said in a joint statement. "This is an agency that revolves around making the American taxpayer meet hard deadlines each and every year when they file their taxes, oftentimes penalizing those that are late." "The IRS needs to do much better," the statement added. | |
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Catholic Online
2013-06-02 16:16:00
For some, this comes as little surprise. The stated aim of Public Campaign is to target political groups like the conservative non-profits at issue in the IRS scandal. The Campaign says it "is laying the foundation for reform by working with a broad range of organizations, including local community groups, around the country that are fighting for change and national organizations whose members are not fairly represented under the current campaign finance system." In light of the reported undue harassment of conservative and Tea Party groups, who were asked inappropriate questions when they applied for tax exemption status, a statement made from CEO of Public Campaign Nick Nyhart carries weight. "There are legitimate questions to be asked about political groups that are hiding behind a 501(c)4 status. It's unfortunate a few bad apples at the IRS will make it harder for those questions to be asked without claims of bias." | |
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David Lightman and Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy 2013-05-30 16:11:00
A group of anti-abortion activists in Iowa had to promise the Internal Revenue Service it wouldn't picket in front of Planned Parenthood. Catherine Engelbrecht's family and business in Texas were audited by the government after her voting-rights group sought tax-exempt status from the IRS. Retired military veteran Mark Drabik of Nebraska became active in and donated to conservative causes, then found the IRS challenging his church donations. While the developing scandal over the targeting of conservatives by the tax agency has largely focused to date on its scrutiny of groups with words such as "tea party" or "patriot" in their names, these examples suggest the government was looking at a broader array of conservative groups and perhaps individuals. Their collective experiences at a minimum could spread skepticism about the fairness of a powerful agency that should be above reproach and at worst could point to a secret political vendetta within the government against conservatives. The emerging stories from real people raise questions about whether the IRS scrutiny extended beyond applicants for tax-exempt status and whether individuals who donated to these tax-exempt organizations or to conservative causes also were targeted. | |
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Last December, Walter Pincus reported in the Washington Post that the U.S. government was building a new base for the IDF. A highly-placed Israeli sourceinformed me that the location of the secret base was Sdot Micha (also known as Tal Shahar), which already houses Israel's Jericho 3 nuclear missiles. It is located near Beit Shemesh, 15 miles from Jerusalem. The source also informed me that the new facility was to be hardened and underground to withstand a nuclear attack. This means that Israel expects the site to be attacked by Iranian missiles once that country has nuclear capability. Now, the defense publication Jane's Defense Weekly says that the new base will house Israeli's most advanced anti-missile system, the Arrow 3, which has a 1,500 mile range. It is an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) which is designed to intercept any Iranian missiles that might attack Israel. The article notes there will be four new launchers each containing six "interceptors." Meaning Israel could launch up to 24 Arrow 3′s and use its Arrow 2 arsenal to hit any targets that were missed. | |
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Dmitry Minin
Global Research 2013-06-03 16:02:00
What has one of the most democratic countries of the Middle East, Syria, done to tick off some of its neighbors in the West, the fierce fighters for democracy? The irrationality and unscrupulousness of the approaches Western countries have taken to the Syrian crisis, when the same people who in Europe are considered terrorists are declared «freedom fighters» when it comes to Syria, becomes clearer in light of the economic dimension of the Syrian tragedy. There is every reason to think that by helping destroy its own cultural and historical roots in Syria, Europe is first and foremost fighting for energy resources. And a special role is played by natural gas, which is emerging as the main fuel of the 21st century. The geopolitical problems connected with its production, transportation and use are perhaps more than any other topic on the radar of Western strategists. | |
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Özlem Gezer, Maximilian Popp and Oliver Trenkamp
Spiegel Online 2013-06-03 15:54:00
For a decade, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has had a tight grip on power. But it suddenly looks to be weakening. Thousands have taken to the streets across the country and the threats to Erdogan's rule are many. His reaction has revealed him to be hopelessly disconnected. The rooftops of Istanbul can be seen in the background and next to them is a gigantic image of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey's powerful prime minister is watching over the city -- and is also monitoring the work of the political party he controls. At least that seems to be the message of the image, which can be found in a conference room at the headquarters of Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP). These days, though, Istanbul is producing images that carry a distinctly different meaning -- images of violent protests against the vagaries of Erdogan's rule. And it is beginning to look as though the prime minister, the most powerful leader Turkey has seen since the days of modern Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, might be losing control. | |
Comment: Erdogan is supportive of Western intervention in Syria. Any regime change has the potential to disrupt US, NATO and Israeli geopolitical ambitions in the region.
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Becky Evans
The Daily Mail 2013-06-04 15:45:00
Two disgraced soldiers who abused Afghan civilians will be allowed to stay anonymous because of fears they could become victims of a 'lone wolf' attack like soldier Lee Rigby. A 22-year-old ex-private was fined £1,000 after admitting pulling a young boy's hand towards his genitals and saying 'Touch my special place'. His 23-year-old comrade, a serving non-commissioned officer, was demoted in rank after pleading guilty to racially insulting a local man by photographing him holding a sign reading 'Silly Paki'. But controversially the judge at the court martial today ruled the shamed troops' names should be shrouded in secrecy following the murder of soldier Lee Rigby. Two Islamic extremists have been charged with allegedly hacking Drummer Rigby, 25, to death with cleavers and knives outside Woolwich barracks in south east London two weeks ago. | |
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Meghan Keneally
The Daily Mail 2013-06-04 15:40:00
Hillary Clinton isn't the only one in their powerful family to be raking in cash on the speakers circuit as former President Bill is scheduled to make a half a million dollars for speaking less than an hour. President Clinton is being paid $500,000 to speak at Israeli President Shimon Peres' birthday celebration in Israel on June 17. The fee is being paid by the Jewish National Fund, a non-profit group that will write the check to the former President's charity, the William J. Clinton Foundation. The interests of the two groups align as they are both dedicated to environmental preservation initiatives and global health programs. Clinton is due to speak at the Peres Academic Center in Rehovot, Israel where a celebration is being held in honor of Peres' 90th birthday in two weeks. | |
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Chris in Paris
America Blog 2013-02-12 04:41:00
Our own Jon Green wrote in December about how, following the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre, GOP Sheriff Joe Arpaio was going to have his 3,000-strong gun-toting "posse" of volunteers patrolling Arizona's schools, just like the NRA wanted. (This article was co-authored by John Aravosis.) Today we find out that the posse reportedly included at least one man convicted of sex crimes against children. And even worse, and what no one has apparently yet realized: The convicted child sex criminal posse member worked for Arpaio for years in the Sheriff's office until he was arrested in 2009. Are we to believe that Arpaio had no idea who this guy was? Armed child-sex criminals roaming Arizona's schools. What could possibly go wrong? What's worse is that Arpaio has been facing heavy criticism for his alleged laxity on prosecuting sex crimes, particularly sex crimes against children. From the NYT: | |
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Matthew Holehouse
The Telegraph 2013-06-03 16:29:00
The Bilderberg Group, an annual gathering of royalty, statesmen and business leaders, will this week take place at the Grove Hotel, a golf resort in Watford, Hertfordshire. Guests will include George Osborne, the Chancellor; Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor; and Ken Clarke, the Cabinet Minister who also sits on the group's steering committee, according to a list of participants published onwww.bilderbergmeetings.org. Other attendees include Lord Mandelson, the former Labour First Secretary; Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State; Timothy Geithner, the former Secretary of the US Treasury, and Gen David Petraeus, the former Allied commander in Afghanistan and head of the CIA. | |
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| Society's Child |
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Regina Nuzzo
Nature 2013-06-03 16:42:00
Couples in the United States who meet online seem to enjoy at least as much marital bliss as those who meet in more traditional venues, according to the results of an online survey of more than 19,000 people funded by online dating service eHarmony. The survey's participants consisted of people who married between 2005 and 2012. About 35% reported that they had met their spouse online, more than through introductions by friends, work and school combined. The study revealed that people who used this method to meet their spouses were slightly older, wealthier, more educated and more likely to be employed than those who went with tradition1. Yet only about 45% of these online meetings took place on a dating site; the rest occurred through social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as chat rooms, online communities, virtual worlds, multi-player games, blogs and discussion boards. | |
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Bill Briggs
NBC News 2013-05-31 16:29:00
Marines at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan will lose a key daily meal starting Saturday, causing some to forgo a hot breakfast and others to work six-plus hours without refueling on cooked food, according to Marines at the base and Marine Corps officials. The midnight ration service - known there as "midrats" - supplies breakfast to Marines on midnight-to-noon shifts and dinner to Marines who are ending noon-to-midnight work periods. It's described as one of the few times the Marines at Leatherneck can be together in one place. The base, which is located in Afghanistan's southwestern Helmand Province, flanked by Iran and Pakistan, also will remove its 24-hour sandwich bar. It plans to replace the dishes long offered at midnight with pre-packaged MREs, said Marine Corps Lt. Col. Cliff Gilmore, who has been deployed in Afghanistan since February. The moves, though unpopular with many Marines on the ground and their families back home, are emblematic of the massive drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan and the dismantling of U.S. military facilities. More than 30,000 U.S. service members will leave Afghanistan in coming months as the U.S. prepares to hand responsibility for security to Afghan forces in 2014. | |
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Melissa Breyer
Mother Nature Network 2013-05-23 16:14:00
The dream of trading in the rat race for bucolic farm life is entertained by legions of city slickers. But escaping the grip of urban life and professional success is no easy task, leading many back-to-the-land romantics to settle for a backyard chicken coop and a flock of city hens. (If you can't have the farm, at least you can have the farm-fresh eggs.) Which is why the story of New York news media star Dylan Ratigan is eliciting so much admiration - and presumably, an equal amount of envy. After a career spent scaling the dizzying heights of the New York media world - Bloomberg wire-service reporter, anchor at Bloomberg TV and CNBC, a self-titled show on MSNBC, and a bestselling book - Ratigan tossed in the towel last June. He announced that he has taken up residence in sunny Southern California to join forces with a former Marine, Colin Archipley, to create a network of hydroponic greenhouses aimed at employing veterans. | |
Comment: Dylan Ratigan is famous for his epic rant on the International banking cartel and political corruption.
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Press TV
2013-06-04 09:36:00
Turkey's main union federation has launched a two-day strike to protest against the violent police crackdown on anti-government demonstrations. The Confederation of Public Workers' Unions (KESK), which represents some 240,000 workers, started a two-day strike from Tuesday in support of the protests. The left-wing union has accused the government of committing "state terror." "The state terror implemented against entirely peaceful protests is continuing in a way that threatens civilians' life safety," the KESK said in a statement, adding that the crackdown shows the government's "enmity to democracy." The action will likely affect schools, universities and public offices across Turkey. | |
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Steven Morris
The Guardian 2013-06-04 08:55:00
Artist is told 'there can be no doubt' of his sexual interest in children as he is sentenced for offences against former models An internationally renowned artist has been given a 12-month jail sentence, suspended for two years, after being found guilty of a string of sexual offences against former child models. Sentencing Graham Ovenden at Plymouth crown court, Judge Graham Cottle told Ovenden: "There can be no doubt that at that time you had a sexual interest in children." Ovenden, 70, who studied under the pop artist Sir Peter Blake, was convicted of six charges of indecency with girls and one allegation of indecent assault. During his trial earlier this year Ovenden fiercely denied a sexual interest in children and claimed his images of naked girls were all about celebrating the innocence of childhood. | |
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Fiona Audley & Niall O'Sullivan
Irish Post 2013-06-04 08:16:00
This is the controversial Luton Irishman behind the far right English Defence League who have been protesting against ethnic groups on Britain's streets in the aftermath of last month's Woolwich terrorist attack in London. Founder Stephen Lennon has mobilised EDL members in violent anti-Islamic protests across the country, which has seen mosques and Muslim communities targeted, in the two weeks since Soldier Lee Rigby was killed. Lennon had taken to Twitter to threaten to take on 'plastic paddies' at Wembley's England verses Ireland football friendly last Wednesday. However, the threat was not followed through. Lennon, who goes by the name Tommy Robinson, was born to a Dublin mother and Scottish father in Luton, where he formed the extremist group in 2009. Although he classes himself as an Englishman, he has publicly claimed to be 'proud' of his Irish heritage, but messages on his Twitter feed reveal the opposite. Posts found on Lennon's social networking account, show the second-generation Irishman regularly refutes his heritage and abuses those who claim he is Irish. He has also posted a string of anti-Irish slurs and remarks. | |
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David McNeill
Rates of thyroid problems in children near the nuclear plant are highThe Independent, UK 2013-06-02 05:27:00
Like most fathers, Yoji Fujimoto frets about the health of his young children. In addition to normal parental concerns about the food they eat, the air they breathe and the environment they will inherit, however, he must add one more: the radioactive fallout from a nuclear disaster. Three days after meltdown began at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on 11 March 2011, Mr Fujimoto moved his two daughters, then aged four and three, to safety hundreds of kilometres away. Last December, the eldest of the two was diagnosed with adenoidal cysts, the prelude to a type of cancer that often strikes the salivary glands. "I was told by the doctor that it's very rare," he says. Although Mr Fujimoto and his family were in Chiba Prefecture, over 60 miles (100km) from the plant and in the opposite direction from the worst of the fallout, he believes his daughter inhaled enough radiation to cause her illness. "I'm convinced this is because of the Fukushima accident." The United Nations said last week it did not expect to see elevated rates of cancer from Fukushima, but recommended continued monitoring. The report by the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation said prompt evacuation meant the dose inhaled by most people was low. Tokyo Electric Power Co, operator of the Daiichi plant, estimates the final tally for escaped radiation at 900,000 terabecquerels, about one-fifth the amount released by the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Most was vented in the first three weeks. The precise impact of this radiation is bitterly contested, but at least one finding from Chernobyl seems consistent - elevated rates of thyroid cancer in children. The Chernobyl Forum, a 2003-05 UN-led study, cited close to 5,000 cases of thyroid cancers among those exposed under the age of 18 in the most affected areas, probably from drinking contaminated milk. Many scientists believe it takes four to five years for the cancers to develop. | |
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| Secret History |
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| Science & Technology |
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Charles Q. Choi
ISNS 2013-06-04 13:30:00
The cores of black holes may not hold points of infinite density as currently thought, but portals to elsewhere in the universe, theoretical physicists say. A black hole possesses a gravitational field so powerful that not even light can escape. A black hole generally forms after a star dies in a titanic explosion known as a supernova, which crushes the remaining core into dense lumps. A maddening enigma called a singularity -- a region of infinite density -- lies at the heart of each black hole, according to general relativity, the modern theory of gravity. The infinite nature of singularities means that space and time as we know them cease to exist there. Scientists have long sought ways to avoid the complete breakdown of all the known laws of physics brought on by singularities. Now researchers suggest the centers of black holes may not hold singularities after all. These new findings are based on loop quantum gravity, one of the leading theories seeking to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity into a single theory that can explain all the forces of the universe. In loop quantum gravity, the four dimensions of spacetime are composed of networks of intersecting loops - ripples of the gravitational field. The researchers applied loop quantum gravity theory to the simplest model of black hole - a spherical, uncharged, non-rotating body known as a Schwarzschild black hole. | |
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Nancy Atkinson
A strange comet-like object discovered in 2010 ended up being an asteroid that had been the victim of a head-on collision from another space rock. The object created a bit of buzz because of its mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and long, trailing streamers of dust. Named P/2010 A2 (LINEAR), the object is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and has been the focus of much study, including images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and many ground-based observatories. But over time, the asteroid's long dust tail has grown to be so long that the entire object can't fit into the field of view of most observatories.Universe Today - PhysOrg 2013-06-04 12:31:00
"Here, we are watching the death of an asteroid," said Jayadev Rajagopal, a scientist at the WIYN (Wisconsin Indiana at Yale NOAO) Telescope, speaking today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana. "We know of dozens of asteroids this has happened to in the past, but this is the only one showing us the event as it is happening." Using the new wide-field camera at the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope, Rajagopal and his team have found that the peculiar asteroid P/2010 A2′s tail is much longer than was previously supposed. The tail is about a million kilometers long, roughly three times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The new One Degree Imager (ODI) can currently image an area of the sky about the size of thefull moon: a future upgrade will increase the size of the field to about four times as large. | |
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| Earth Changes |
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Pamela Engel
The tornado that killed nine and injured about 50 people near Oklahoma City on Friday has been rated a top-of-the-scale EF5, the National Weather Service said Tuesday.Business Insider 2013-06-04 16:53:00 It also had a record-breaking width of 2.6 miles, double the size of the 1.3-mile-wide tornado that devastated Moore, Oklahoma last month. The National Weather Service posted this graphic to its website illustrating the path of the huge tornado.
EF5 tornadoes are extremely rare, and the Oklahoma City area seems to have bad luck with them. On May 3, 1999, an EF5 tornado hit the same area andkilled 46 people. The Moore tornado last month killed 24 people and destroyed thousands of homes. The death toll was lower for Friday's tornado because the area it hit wasn't as heavily populated as Moore, which is about 11 miles south of Oklahoma City. El Reno, where the EF5 tornado hit on May 31, is about 30 miles west of Oklahoma City. There have been only eight tornadoes rated an EF5 in Oklahoma since 1950, meaning a quarter of them have hit near Oklahoma City in the past two weeks alone, according to a tweet from a Weather Channel meteorologist. | |
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Associated Press
Yukon River flooding that knocked out power to the Alaska village of Galena has brought on a number of secondary problems, including how to keep bears away from hundreds of pounds of game meat that has spoiled in residents' refrigerators and freezers.2013-06-04 15:53:00
The flood caused by ice clogging the Yukon submerged some homes and washed out the road to the community's landfill. On Monday, emergency responders were developing plans to collect spoiled meat and fly it by helicopter to the dump, said Jeremy Zidek, spokesman for the Alaska Department of Military and Veterans Affairs. "All the freezers filled with game began to get pretty bad," Zidek said. Plans called for meat to be collected in one central location, loaded into a sling and lifted to the dump, he said. Many Galena residents remain evacuated to other communities, and Zidek was unsure who would be doing the collecting. In rural Alaska, freezers often are kept in arctic entryways where it's cold in the wintertime and where they're accessible without entering a home. | |
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Jim Suhr
Mississippi River communities scrambling Tuesday to fend off the rain-engorged waterway got discouraging news: More rains looming across much of the nation's midsection threatened to slow the potential retreat of the renegade river.Associated Press via Yahoo News 2013-06-04 15:40:00 Such an outlook may not be welcomed in the northeast Missouri town of West Alton, where a makeshift levee's breach Monday fanned worries that the 570-resident town - which was mostly swept away by a flood in 1993 - would be inundated again. A voluntary evacuation advisory before the breach was fixed was heeded by just 15 percent of the town's residents, but "everyone else is ready to go at a moment's notice" if the hastily shored-up barrier shows signs of gives way, Fire Chief Rick Pender said Tuesday. For now, he said, "everything is stable," with much of the flooding corralled in a railroad bed acting as a town-protecting channel. "There are some spots not looking pretty (as defenses), but they're still holding the water back," Pender told The Associated Press by telephone. "Everyone is just monitoring the sandbags and barriers, waiting for this water to come down." The latest National Weather Service forecasts suggest that was to happen later Tuesday. But more rains expected in coming days, from St. Louis north to Minnesota and westward across some of the Great Plains, stood to drop another inch of precipitation here and there, adding more water to the Missouri River and the Mississippi River into which it feeds, National Weather Service hydrologist Mark Fuchs said. |
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kcentv.com
2013-06-02 08:15:00 A family mourns today after a 62-year-old Moody man was killed by Africanized bees yesterday. Family members said there wasn't any skin visible that hadn't been stung by the killer bees. Larry Goodwin just celebrated his 62nd birthday on Friday. Yesterday he was consolidating a brush pile on a neighbor's property when he upset a killer bee hive in an old chicken coop. That neighbor's wife and daughter tried to help and got stung around a hundred times between the two of them. Responders tried to resuscitate Goodwin at the scene but he was pronounced dead According to Larry's daughters Tanya Goodwin and Kelley Flores, "If anybody has any brush or anything on their lands, please clear it, because they don't want to go through this. Nobody needs to go through this." "Anywhere you think a bee's going to be. Really take precaution if you have any doubt. Call somebody or call the fire department out here and they'll check it out for you," said neighbor John Puckett. Allen Miller's Bees be Gone removed the killer bees from the yard yesterday. According to Miller killer bees are still extremely rare but he's seen at least five cases of Africanized hives in the last month. That's more than he usually sees all year. |
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| Fire in the Sky |
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| Health & Wellness |
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Anne Angelone, L.Ac.
Primal Docs 2013-06-03 10:02:00
Many dismiss childhood stomach aches as a normal part of growing up. However research shows that chronic childhood stomach aches could result in anxiety and depression later in life. A Stanford University researcher found that gastric irritation early in life could pave the way for lifelong psychological problems. Of course, not all childhood stomach aches will lead to adult depression and anxiety; genetic makeup and when the stomach aches occur developmentally are also important factors. Researcher Pankaj Pasricha, MD, notes that 15 to 20 percent of people experience chronic pain in the upper abdomen, and are more likely to suffer from anxiety or depression than their peers. Gut and brain hardwired together Dr. Pasricha points to the connection between the gut and brain as an explanation for psychological issues related to childhood stomach aches. The gut has its own nervous system - similar to that of the brain - and is hardwired to the brain by the vagus nerve, a nerve that runs from the brain to the internal organs.As a result of signals transferred back and forth, disturbances in the gut can impact the brain. To test whether chronic childhood gut problems could lead to adult anxiety and depression, researchers performed experiments on baby rats, irritating their stomachs for six days. | |
Comment: In order to re-balance your brain-gut neural network, check out theÉiriú Eolas program which stimulates the vagus nerve in a natural way to achieve homeostasis in brain chemistry and digestion. It is precisely for these reasons (among other things) that the program is so effective for depression and anxiety.
For more information on an anti-inflammatory diet, see Primal Body, Primal Mindby Nora Gedgaudas. | |
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Nick Collins
Email is supposed to make modern life easier, but it is making workers more stressed than ever as they struggle to stay on top of hundreds of messages per day, according to researchers. The Telegraph, UK 2013-06-04 07:22:00
Reading and sending emails prompts telltale signs of stress including elevated blood pressure, heart rate and levels of the hormone cortisol, a study found. Researchers who followed a group of 30 government employees found that 83 per cent became more stressed while using email, rising to 92 per cent when speaking on the phone and using email at the same time. Although receiving a single message was no more stressful than answering one phone call or talking to someone face-to-face, emails had a stronger effect overall because people received so many each day. Stress levels, analysed by saliva samples as well as heart rate and blood pressure monitors over a 24-hour period, peaked at points in the day when people's inboxes were fullest, the study found. Emails which were irrelevant, which interrupted work or demanded an immediate response were particularly taxing, while those which arrived in response to completed work had a calming effect. | |
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Michael Pollan
New York Times 2013-05-15 19:50:00
I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural - as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being. It happened on March 7. That's when I opened my e-mail to find a huge, processor-choking file of charts and raw data from a laboratory located at theBioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As part of a new citizen-science initiative called the American Gut project, the lab sequenced my microbiome - that is, the genes not of "me," exactly, but of the several hundred microbial species with whom I share this body. These bacteria, which number around 100 trillion, are living (and dying) right now on the surface of my skin, on my tongue and deep in the coils of my intestines, where the largest contingent of them will be found, a pound or two of microbes together forming a vast, largely uncharted interior wilderness that scientists are just beginning to map. I clicked open a file called Taxa Tables, and a colorful bar chart popped up on my screen. Each bar represented a sample taken (with a swab) from my skin, mouth and feces. For purposes of comparison, these were juxtaposed with bars representing the microbiomes of about 100 "average" Americans previously sequenced. Here were the names of the hundreds of bacterial species that call me home. In sheer numbers, these microbes and their genes dwarf us. It turns out that we are only 10 percent human: for every human cell that is intrinsic to our body, there are about 10 resident microbes - including commensals (generally harmless freeloaders) and mutualists (favor traders) and, in only a tiny number of cases, pathogens. To the extent that we are bearers of genetic information, more than 99 percent of it is microbial. And it appears increasingly likely that this "second genome," as it is sometimes called, exerts an influence on our health as great and possibly even greater than the genes we inherit from our parents. But while your inherited genes are more or less fixed, it may be possible to reshape, even cultivate, your second genome. | |
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Does high fructose corn syrup make some of us behave like drug-addicted rats? New research by an expert on addiction has found the same pattern of behavior in rats on cocaine and rats self-dosing on high fructose corn syrup. Dr. Francesco Leri, an associate professor of neuroscience and applied cognitive science at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, presented these findings at the annual meeting last week of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience. Leri has observed his "food addiction hypothesis" in two previously published studies, both using Oreo cookies, but this time he used actual high fructose corn syrup, selected "because of the controversy (over it) in the literature," he told me in an interview. | |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience 2013-06-04 06:27:00
Is humanity getting smarter or dumber with time? The answer may be both. While IQ scores are rising at a remarkable rate, humans' underlying genetic potential for smarts could be on the decline, a new study suggests. The research found that by one measure of intelligence, the Victorians had modern folk beat. The findings aren't without controversy - particularly whether or not the measurements used really reveal intelligence. Still, the study highlights the trouble with measuring intelligence over time: Smarts aren't defined as just one thing. What makes a person clever on the African Savannah could be nearly useless in the financial centers of Hong Kong. "It's not simply that intelligence is going down or going up," said Michael Woodley, a psychologist at Umea University in Sweden who led the new research. "Different parts of intelligence could be changing in lots of different ways." | |
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| High Strangeness |
| No new articles. |
| Don't Panic! Lighten Up! |
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David Edwards
Raw Story 2013-06-02 15:13:00
A Colorado moose bull isn't hiding his feelings for a newly-installed male moose statue in the town of Grand Lake. Within a week of the statue going up, residents started noticing that the moose was spending more time in the town. "He's not too shy," Bob Balink explained to KUSA. "There's two things he wants to do. And one of 'em is eat." "The strange thing is he's trying to mate with a statue," he added. "Because they're both male." The moose courtship has even become a tourist attraction in Grand Lake. |
