The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See

The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See

Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.
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Kish and a handful of coworkers run a nonprofit organization called World Access for the Blind, headquartered in Kish's home. World Access offers training on how to gracefully interact with one's environment, using echolocation as a primary tool. So far, in the decade it has existed, the organization has introduced more than 500 students to echolocation. Kish is not the first blind person to use echolocation, but he's the only one to meticulously document it, to break it down into its component parts, and to figure out how to teach it. His dream is to help all sight-impaired people see the world as clearly as he does.

Read more: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-to-see-20120504#ixzz27ygblWpM


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A Peace Corps For Doctors, Built By A Senator's Daughter

Fifty years ago President Kennedy started the Peace Corps with the promise that it would train doctors in faraway lands. But, you may be surprised to know, the Peace Corps has never actually recruited doctors and nurses as mentors and medical educators.

Dr. Vanessa Kerry wants to fulfill that promise.

The 35-year-old physician — a daughter of Sen. John Kerry — has created a partnership with the Peace Corps to send doctors and nurses abroad. In return a non-profit pays off part of school loans.

"It's a Peace Corps for doctors and nurses," Kerry tells Shots. The goal of the Global Health Service Partnership, as it is tentatively called, is to reduce the severe shortage of medical workers in developing countries.

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The Global Health Service Partnership volunteers won't just provide on-the-spot medical care. Kerry says they'll be teachers and mentors to local doctors, augmenting faculties of medicine and nursing.

"We've been very clear that these people are there to provide faculty support and integrate with faculty in these institutions," Kerry says. This way, they can grow local health systems in a sustainable way.

She thinks that might eventually help reverse the medical brain drain that plagues many developing countries. "If we can build up opportunities and create a better academic environment, that can build up retention [of local doctors]," she says.

Health professionals often migrate not just because they can make more elsewhere but because they can't practice the kind of medicine they want to at home, she says. By raising the standard, they might stay.

"People want to stay in their country, they want to stay with their family," Kerry says. The opportunities just have to be built.

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In Obama’s Speech, Their Voices

When President Obama made a landmark speech against modern slavery on Tuesday, many of us in the news media shrugged. It didn’t fit into the political narrative. It wasn’t controversial, so — yawn — it wasn’t really news.

But women like Sina Vann noticed. She’s a friend of mine who was trafficked as a young girl from Vietnam into Cambodian brothels — where she was regularly punished by being locked inside coffins with scorpions and biting ants. Now an anti-trafficking activist with the Somaly Mam Foundation, she sent me an exuberant e-mail (in fractured English, her third language) with a message for Obama: “We are survivors here so proud of you, you are the big president in U.S. and you take action of trafficking. So you give victims from around the world have hope.”

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Facing temptation, brain sends mixed signals

Scientists have figured out what happens in the brain during self-regulation—such as wanting dessert but knowing you really shouldn’t.
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“This research suggests a reason why it feels so difficult to control your behavior,” Hutcherson says. “You’ve got these really fast signals that say, go for the tempting food. But only after you start to go for it are you able to catch yourself and say, no, I don’t want this.”

Fish Oil Supplement Research Remains Murky

If you've been following the media trail on fish oil lately, you've probably been tempted to forgo the smelly capsules. A systematic review of 20 studies published last week inJAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that neither eating extra helpings of fish nor taking fish oil supplements reduces the risk of stroke, heart attack or death. 

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The Case For Optimism

Bill Clinton's Global (Optimistic) Perspective

Our world is more interdependent than ever. Borders have become more like nets than walls, and while this means that wealth, ideas, information and talent can move freely around the globe, so can the negative forces shaping our shared fates. The financial crisis that started in the U.S. and swept the globe was further proof that--for better and for worse--we can't escape one another.

There are three big challenges with our interdependent world: inequality, instability and unsustainability. The fact that half the world's people live on less than $2 a day and a billion people on less than $1 a day is stark evidence of inequality, which is increasing in many places. We're feeling the effects of instability not only in the global economic slowdown but also in the violence, popular disruptions and political conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere. And the way we produce and use energy is unsustainable, changing our climate in ways that cast a shadow over our children's future.

(The Heirs of Reagan's Optimism.)

But I firmly believe that progress changes consciousness, and when you change people's consciousness, then their awareness of what is possible changes as well--a virtuous circle. So it's important that the word gets out, that people realize what's working. That where there's been creative cooperation coupled with a communitarian view of our future, we're seeing real success. That's the reason I try to bring people together every year for the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). Here are five areas in which there has been concrete, measurable and reproducible progress.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2125031,00.html#ixzz27KavxTyP

Eating for Health, Not Weight

ALMOST half of Americans are on a diet — not surprising, since two-thirds are overweight or obese, a frightening statistic that inspired Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to push through a ban on large soft drinks in New York City. The country is preoccupied with calories. McDonald’s, for instance, is now posting them.

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In 35 years of medical research, conducted at the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute, which I founded, we have seen that patients who ate mostly plant-based meals, with dishes like black bean vegetarian chili and whole wheat penne pasta with roasted vegetables, achieved reversal of even severe coronary artery disease. They also engaged in moderate exercise and stress-management techniques, and participated in a support group. The program also led to improved blood flow and significantly less inflammation which matters because chronic inflammation is an underlying cause of heart disease and many forms of cancer. (..)

Also, we found that it changed gene expression in over 500 genes in just three months, “turning on” genes that protect against disease and “turning off” genes that promote breast cancer, prostate cancer, inflammation and oxidative stress. 

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 It’s not low carb or low fat. An optimal diet is low in unhealthful carbs (both sugar and other refined carbohydrates) and low in fat (especially saturated fats and trans fats) as well as in red meat and processed foods. 

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Life Regrets Of The Dying – How To Live Life With No Regrets

Here’s a list of the five most common regrets her patients had:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier

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A Digital Tool to Unlock Learning

When we think about education reform, we usually focus on teacher quality. The big battleground in education revolves around holding teachers accountable for their performance. With all the focus on teachers, however, one group that is often forgotten as a key learning resource are the students themselves.

One way to help students gain agency over their own education is through technology. Despite the Internet revolution, the field of K-12 education has been relatively slow to respond to digital media. That’s why I paid a visit last week to the site of a promising experiment in digital learning in New York: the Bea Fuller Rodgers Middle School in Washington Heights.

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For Weigh Loss, Less Exercise May Be More

Most people who start working out in hopes of shedding pounds wind up disappointed, a lamentable circumstance familiar to both exercisers and scientists. Multiple studies, many of them covered in this column, have found that without major changes to diet, exercise typically results in only modest weight loss at best (although it generally makes people much healthier). Quite a few exercisers lose no weight. Some gain.

But there is encouraging news about physical activity and weight loss in anew study by researchers at the University of Copenhagen. It found that exercise does seem to contribute to waist-tightening, provided that the amount of exercise is neither too little nor, more strikingly, too much.

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In ‘Obesity Paradox,’ Thinner May Mean Sicker

In research conducted to answer that question, Dr. Carnethon discovered something even more puzzling: Diabetes patients of normal weight are twice as likely to die as those who are overweight or obese. That finding makes diabetes the latest example of a medical phenomenon that mystifies scientists. They call it the obesity paradox.
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Aimee Mullins: The opportunity of adversity

Aimee Mullins  Link

Monkey, New To Science, Found In Central Africa

It would seem difficult to overlook something as large as a new species of monkey, but scientists had no idea about the lesula until just a few years ago when conservation biologist John Hart discovered a specimen being kept as a pet in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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Low And Slow May Be The Way To Go When It Comes To Dieting

If you're dieting, you know you've got to count calories, carbs and fats. But if you really want to take off the weight and keep it off, you might want to pay more attention to the glycemic index, which is essentially a measure of how quickly foods are digested.

That's because high glycemic foods cause a surge in blood sugar, followed by a crash. That biological reaction releases hormones that stimulate hunger and, according to David Ludwig of theNew Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children's Hospital, actually lower metabolism, adding up to a dismal recipe for people who want to lose weight and keep it off

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But Ludwig and colleagues recently published a study in theJournal of the American Medical Association that offers some tools you might use to fight back. Researchers compared the low-carb, low-fat and low-glycemic diets to see which one burned the most calories per day. The low-carb diet was the clear winner. The low-fat diet was the loser. But it was the diet in the middle, the low-glycemic index diet, that Ludwig suggests is more promising. It burned more calories per day than the low-fat diet and proved easier to stick to over the long term than the low-carb diet.

Doctor, Hospital Deals Probed

California's attorney general has launched a broad investigation into whether growing consolidation among hospitals and doctor groups is pushing up the price of medical care, reflecting increasing scrutiny by antitrust regulators of medical-provider deals.

The office of the attorney general, Kamala D. Harris, has sent subpoenas, known as civil investigative demands, to several big hospital operators in the state, including San Francisco-based Dignity Health and San Diego's Scripps Health and Sharp HealthCare. Northern California's 24-hospital Sutter Health system has also received one, as has Santa Barbara-based Cottage Health System, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Subpoenas have also gone to major California health insurers, those people said.

The probe, which has been under way for several months, is examining hospital systems' reimbursement from the insurers, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The regulator appears to be focusing on whether the systems' tie-ups with physicians, as well as ownership of hospitals, have given them the market power to boost prices in a way that violates antitrust law, these people said.

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Elephants Dying in Epic Frenzy as Ivory Fuels Wars and Profits

Elephants Dying in Epic Frenzy as Ivory Fuels Wars and Profits

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/world/elephants-dying-in-epic-frenzy-as-ivory-fuels-wars-and-profits-651819/#ixzz25b7aq9ou

Rare Infection Prompts Neti Pot Warning

Neti pots — those odd teapotlike vessels used to wash out the nasal passage — have won legions of fans who rely on them for relief from allergies,congestion andcolds.

But now, after two cases of a deadly brain infection were linked to neti pots, government health officials have issued new warnings about using them safely.

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Big Calorie Cuts Don't Equal Longer Life, Study Suggests

Calorie restriction confers health benefits on monkeys but doesn't increase their life span, a new study suggests, undermining some people's belief that a sharply restricted diet could help them live longer.
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Father’s Age Is Linked to Risk of Autism and Schizophrenia

Older men are more likely than young ones to father a child who develops autism or schizophrenia, because of random mutations that become more numerous with advancing paternal age, scientists reported on Wednesday, in the first study to quantify the effect as it builds each year. The age of mothers had no bearing on the risk for these disorders, the study found.
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The overall risk to a man in his 40s or older is in the range of 2 percent, at most, and there are other contributing biological factors that are entirely unknown.
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The research team found that the average child born to a 20-year-old father had 25 random mutations that could be traced to paternal genetic material. The number increased steadily by two mutations a year, reaching 65 mutations for offspring of 40-year-old men.

The average number of mutations coming from the mother’s side was 15, no matter her age, the study found.

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Dr. Stefansson said it made sense that de novo mutations would play a significant role in brain disorders. At least 50 percent of active genes play a role in neural development, so that random glitches are more likely to affect the brain than other organs, which have less exposure.

In the end, these kinds of mutations may account for 20 to 30 percent of cases of autism, and perhaps schizophrenia, some experts said. The remainder is probably a result of inherited genetic predisposition and environmental factors that are the subjects of numerous studies.

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