Talk of Women’s Rights Divides Saudi Arabia

Good  article that captures societal shifts that are happening in Saudi Arabia

Uvealblues

JIDDA — Roughly two years ago, Rowdha Yousef began to notice a disturbing trend: Saudi women like herself were beginning to organize campaigns for greater personal freedoms. Suddenly, there were women asking for the right to drive, to choose whether to wear a veil, and to take a job without a male relative’s permission, all using the Internet to collect signatures and organize meetings and all becoming, she felt, more voluble by the month.

The final straw came last summer, when she read reports that a female activist in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, Wajeha al-Huwaider, had been to the border with Bahrain, demanding to cross using only her passport, without a male chaperon or a male guardian’s written permission.

Ms. Huwaider was not allowed to leave the country unaccompanied and, like other Saudi women campaigning for new rights, has failed — so far — to change any existing laws or customs.

But Ms. Yousef is still outraged, and since August has taken on activists at their own game. With 15 other women, she started a campaign, “My Guardian Knows What’s Best for Me.” Within two months, they had collected more than 5,400 signatures on a petition “rejecting the ignorant requests of those inciting liberty” and demanding “punishments for those who call for equality between men and women, mingling between men and women in mixed environments, and other unacceptable behaviors.”

Nutrition: Study Finds Eating Nuts Helps Cholesterol

Eating about two and a half airplane snacks’ worth of nuts every day helps lower total cholesterol and “bad” LDL cholesterol, and improves the ratio of total cholesterol to “good” HDL cholesterol, a study reports.

Study Finds Supplements Contain Contaminants

Nearly all of the herbal dietary supplements tested in a Congressional investigation contained trace amounts of lead and other contaminants, and some supplement sellers made illegal claims that their products can cure cancer and other diseases, investigators found.

Read more »

Checking Up on the Doctor

Doctors readily dispense prescriptions and advice, but what do they do themselves? A number of surveys, polls and questionnaires provide some clues—and some surprises.

Physicians as a group are leaner, fitter and live longer than average Americans. Male physicians keep their cholesterol and blood pressure lower. Women doctors are more likely to use hormone-replacement therapy than their patients. Doctors are also less likely to have their own primary care physician—and more apt to abuse prescription drugs

Scanning Babies for Autism

By taking scans of sleeping children, researchers are discovering what occurs in the brains of babies and young children with autism.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to peer at images of the children's brains, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, found that autistic children as young as 14 months use different brain regions than youngsters with more typical development when hearing bedtime stories.

The findings suggest that even very early on, the brains of those with autism work differently than typical babies. They also help explain why failure of language comprehension is a "red flag" for babies with autism, according to the study's author, Eric Courchesne, director of the UCSD Autism Center of Excellence.

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This type of work "is going to tell us an awful lot about how the brain goes wrong in the first place and then gives us insight into how we'll be able to help at an earlier age," says Dr. Courchesne.

Learning when and where brain changes occur can also help rule out some suspected causes of autism. For instance, if brain differences are already present at birth, then environmental toxins or vaccine exposure in childhood can't be responsible, according to Dr. Courchesne.

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This study showed that in the typically developing babies, both the right and left temporal regions of the brain—parts that help us understand different aspects of language—were activated. In older children, there was evidence that the left side became even more active compared with the right side.

But in the babies and children with autism-spectrum disorders the use of the right brain was far stronger.

The left temporal region of the brain usually deals with understanding the meaning of words, in a "dictionary" manner, he says. The right side helps us understand social language based on context, like how people sound when they are angry rather than happy, even if they're speaking the same words.

One theory is that in autism, the right side is needed to learn the basic definitions of words, crowding out the ability to develop skills to process more social, nuanced aspects of language, Dr. Courchesne says.

Why losers have delusions of grandeur

The less you know, the more you think you do

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/why_losers_have_delusions_of_grandeur_kmSEG1YrE1Uhfh1fL4tdWP#ixzz0p44Ry2z7


via Simoleon Sense

A Vision for Blind Musicians

Raul Midon is a phenomenal musician. I am glad that he is featured in this article on technological advances relevant to musicians with decreased vision.
Uvealblues

Raul Midón has been blind since birth. Still, he grew up to excel at guitar, work as a session musician, launch a solo career, release albums on a major label and collaborate with acts like Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder.

Musician Raul Midon has collaborated with stars like Herbie Hancock. But until recently, the blind singer and guitarist has been held back in one respect -- he hasn't been able to operate the computer technology that makes high quality recordings possibly.
Despite his accomplishments, Mr. Midón's blindness once prevented him from joining one of the biggest revolutions in music history. Digital technology transformed bedrooms and basements into recording studios on par with professional facilities, but Mr. Midón, 44, couldn't see the computerized controls that sighted musicians operate to enhanced their music.

Now, Mr. Midón is off the sidelines, armed with new software made for blind musicians. The software essentially translates the visual display of a recording program into computerized speech. By following cues from a robotic voice, Mr. Midón can navigate through the labyrinth of windows and control panels that make up the program. Tapping away at a keyboard, he sets microphone levels and layers the guitar, drum and vocal parts he records in the basement of his Laurel, Md., home.

Roz Savage: Why I'm rowing across the Pacific

Inspirational talk by this management consultant turned ocean rower.
Uvealblues

via Presentation Zen

Congo Pastor Loses 9 Out of 10 Children in War

MWESO, Congo (AP) -- First, the rebels killed four of Joseph Munyaneza's children in 1997. The family fled to another village.

The following year, that village came under siege. Another four children died of gunshot wounds. Then the baby, from malnutrition.

Today, Munyaneza, a 52-year-old Protestant pastor, tenderly cares for his 17-year-old daughter, who is in hospital after being kidnapped by rebels a month ago. When the rebels tired of raping her skinny body, they forced a stick up her vagina until it protruded through her side.

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More than half a million children die each year in Congo, one out of every five before they reach the age of 5, according to the U.N. Children's Fund. Of those who survive, 40 percent are stunted, according to the World Health Organization. There is only one doctor and five nurses or midwives for every 10,000 people in the country.

And that's before factoring in deaths from war fueled by massive mineral resources that have brought misery instead of development. UNICEF estimates that children account for half of the more than 4 million deaths blamed on conflicts in east Congo that have raged for more than a decade.

Scientists Create Synthetic Organism

Heralding a potential new era in biology, scientists for the first time have created a synthetic cell, completely controlled by man-made genetic instructions, researchers at the private J. Craig Venter Institute announced Thursday.
"We call it the first synthetic cell," said genomics pioneer Craig Venter, who oversaw the project. "These are very much real cells."
Created at a cost of $40 million, this experimental one-cell organism, which can reproduce, opens the way to the manipulation of life on a previously unattainable scale, several researchers and ethics experts said. Scientists have been altering DNA piecemeal for a generation, producing a menagerie of genetically engineered plants and animals. But the ability to craft an entire organism offers a new power over life, they said.
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"This is literally a turning point in the relationship between man and nature," said molecular biologist Richard Ebright at Rutgers University...

Virtual reality used to transfer men's minds into a woman's body

Researchers projected men's sense of self into a virtual reality woman, changing the way they behaved and thought.

The Power of a Gentle Nudge

I am a solitary exerciser--don't even listen to music--working out my mind as I am working out my body...
What about you?
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Phone Calls, Even Voice Recordings, Can Get People to Go to the Gym.
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But surveys show that about 60% of Americans prefer working out alone, especially people who have reached middle age and older who may socialize less frequently in groups. Many lone runners say they come up with solutions to personal and professional problems while exercising

Can Dirt Do a Little Good?

Infants are enchanting all over the world, as the new movie "Babies" shows. But their standards of hygiene sure vary.

The film captures the first year of life for four diverse babies. In a nomadic family in Namibia, Ponijao drinks from muddy streams, chews on dry bones and uses her many siblings' body parts as toys.

On a small family farm in Mongolia, a rooster struts around little Bayar's bed, a goat drinks from his bathwater and livestock serve as babysitters.

Aside from some really adorable footage, the movie "Babies" starkly illustrates the differences in hygiene standards around the world. WSJ's Melinda Beck says the documentary also raises the question whether its possible to be "too clean."

By contrast, Mari, growing up in high-rise, high-tech Tokyo, and Hattie, whose doting parents live a "green" lifestyle in San Francisco, both have modern conveniences and sanitation.

Statistically, Mari and Hattie are healthier. Some 42 out of 1,000 children in Namibia, and 41 out of 1,000 in Mongolia die before their 5th birthday; compared with only 8 in 1,000 in the U.S. and only 4 in Japan.

Yet the upscale urban infants are at higher risk for some health problems—including allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases like Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease—than the babies in the rural developing world.
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Allergies and autoimmune diseases were virtually unknown in the U.S. before the turn of the last century, but they began to emerge as modern sanitation, decontaminated water, food refrigeration and antibiotics became more widespread. "There's a whole series of diseases that just emerged in the 20th century," says Dr. Weinsto.
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Some scientists are searching for ways to harness the immune-priming effects of microorganisms without the fatal diseases. Parasitic worms known as helminthes are leading the way.
Clinical trials are under way in the U.S. and Europe testing Trichuris Suis Ova (TSO)—-a species of pig whipworm—as a treatment for peanut allergies, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease and MS. A study is being designed to test it with asthma. It's also being tested with adults who have autism, which some researchers believe could be related to immunological function.

IPhone apps for the traveler

The world of travel apps is expanding exponentially, covering nearly every aspect of a trip. Here are  15 apps (and cost per use) recommended in the Washington Post.

Buffett and the Prince

After losing billions on U.S. stocks beginning in 2000, Alwaleed Bin Talal says he may become richer than the Oracle of Omaha. His strategy: holding an IPO for his luxury hotels and building the world’s tallest tower in his homeland.

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal sits under an almost full moon near a campfire at his rustic retreat in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He’s surrounded by a zoo with zebras and giraffes, an artificial lake and a lodge that has an indoor pool, saunas and steam rooms. Three hooded falcons are perched on stands in front of him.
Five young women, dressed in black miniskirts and jackets and orange knee-high boots that match their nail polish, serve clove-and-cardamom tea to Alwaleed and his entourage, which includes his personal physician.
On this evening in late March, the prince perks up in his easy chair as a newscast on a large-screen television behind the campfire reports on a rally in global hotel stocks -- a sign of hope for the billionaire investor who’s trying to revive his slumping fortune, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its June issue.

Eye photos

Nice photos of eyes here.

Wall Street Journal Report on Saudia Arabia

The WSJ has 10 articles on the economy, culture, and future os Saudi Arabia here.

They Walk. They Work. New DNA Robots Strut Their Tiny Stuff.

For the first time, microscopic robots made from DNA molecules can walk, follow instructions and work together to assemble simple products on an atomic-scale assembly line, mimicking the machinery of living cells, two independent research teams announced Wednesday.

These new construction projects bring researchers a step closer to a time when, at least in theory, scientists might be able to build test-tube factories that churn out self-assembling computers, rare chemical compounds or autonomous medical robots able to cruise the human bloodstream.

Elegant technology for a Napa Valley vineyard.

Go to this link for a nice video of two of my favorite things: Quintessa wine and the Iphone.

The Quintessa winery is truly beautiful as seen in the video...

Uvealblues

At Quintessa winery in Napa Valley, California, rows of green vines roll over gentle hills, warming in the afternoon sun and cooling in the evening fog. It’s an elegant landscape, where Quintessa’s winemaker works closely with the soil, wind, and weather to grow unique, intensely flavored grapes

Robot arm controlled by the mind

Every morning Christian Kandlbauer wakes up, dresses himself, and gets in his car to drive to work.
This may sound mundane, but for the 21-year-old Austrian these are remarkable feats.
Doctors say he is the first person in the world to drive a car using a mind-controlled robotic limb

Study first to analyze individual's genome for risk of dozens of diseases, potential responses to treatment

For the first time, researchers have used a healthy person's complete genome sequence to predict his risk for dozens of diseases and how he will respond to several common medications. The risk analysis, from the Stanford University School of Medicine, also incorporates more-traditional information such as a patient's age and gender and other clinical measurements. The resulting, easy-to-use, cumulative risk report will likely catapult the use of such data out of the lab and into the waiting room of average physicians within the next decade, say the scientists.

Diabetes causes drop in testosterone

U. BUFFALO (US)—The effect of diabetes on lowering testosterone levels is similar to a weight gain of 20 pounds, according to new research that finds 40 percent of obese men have below-normal testosterone levels.

“In view of the fact that almost one-third of the U.S. is obese, these observations have profound pathophysiological, clinical, epidemiological, and public health implications,” says Sandeep Dhindsa, an endocrinology specialist at the University at Buffalo and first author of the study published in the journal Diabetes Care.

Damian Aspinall's Extraordinary Gorilla Encounter on Gorilla School

Via Gimundo

Mutation Points to Possible Tourette Treatment

Researchers identified a rare genetic mutation that may open a new avenue for treating Tourette syndrome in a study published Wednesday that examined a family in which the father and all eight children suffer from the neurological disorder.


The family's mutation affected a gene required to produce histamine. Pharmaceutical companies are already developing drugs for other conditions that target the brain's histamine system. The study's researchers are planning a clinical trial of adults with Tourette to see if those drugs would help control the motor and vocal tics that characterize the condition.

Photo Gallery: African Marriage Rituals

Beautiful photos here.

Uvealblues

Afar Daughter, Djibouti

New Ways to Treat Pain

Tricking the Brain, Blocking the Nerves in Patients When All Else Has Failed

Start with Why

The Data-Driven Life

For a long time, only one area of human activity appeared to be immune. In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy.

And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed
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But I soon realized that an emphasis on efficiency missed something important. Efficiency implies rapid progress toward a known goal. For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.
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Watch out for those machines, though. Humans know a special trick of self-observation: when to avert our gaze. Machines don’t understand the value of forgiving a lapse, or of treating an unpleasant detail with tactful silence. A graph or a spreadsheet talks only in numbers, but there is a policeman inside all of our heads who is well equipped with punishing words. “Each day my self-worth was tied to the data,” Alexandra Carmichael, one of the founders of the self-tracking site CureTogether, wrote in a heartfelt blog post about why she recently stopped tracking. “One pound heavier this morning? You’re fat. Skipped a day of running? You’re lazy. It felt like being back in school. Less than 100 percent on an exam? You’re dumb.” Carmichael had been tracking 40 different things about herself. The data she was seeing every day didn’t respect her wishes or her self-esteem. It was awful, and she had to stop.

Is night vision the next mobile must-have?

U. FLORIDA (US)—Engineers have developed a night vision imaging device that’s paper-thin, lightweight, and inexpensive to produce, making it a possible add-on to cell phone cameras—and even eyeglasses—once it is enlarged.
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Standard night vision goggles use a photocathode to convert invisible infrared light photons into electrons. The electrons are accelerated under high voltage and driven into a phosphorous screen, producing greenish images of objects not visible to the eye in darkness.

The process requires thousands of volts and a cathode ray vacuum tube made of thick glass. That is why the goggles tend to be bulky and heavy.

So’s device replaces the vacuum tube with several layers of organic semiconductor thin film materials. The structure is simple: It consists of a photodetector connected in series with an LED.

When operating, infrared light photons are converted into electrons in the photodetector, and these photo-generated electrons are injected into the LED, generating visible light.

New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer

The President’s Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.


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Traditionally, we reduce cancer risks through regular doctor visits, self-examinations and screenings such as mammograms. The President’s Cancer Panel suggests other eye-opening steps as well, such as giving preference to organic food, checking radon levels in the home and microwaving food in glass containers rather than plastic.
In particular, the report warns about exposures to chemicals during pregnancy, when risk of damage seems to be greatest. Noting that 300 contaminants have been detected in umbilical cord blood of newborn babies, the study warns that: “to a disturbing extent, babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’ ”
It’s striking that this report emerges not from the fringe but from the mission control of mainstream scientific and medical thinking, the President’s Cancer Panel.

Medicare pay: SGR fatigue

Physicians say they are beyond exasperation as Congress struggles to repeatedly patch Medicare rates, lately just for a month or two at a time.

MIT Free Open Courses

MIT's opencourses are great! Read about some of the success stories here.

The Underdog

Over at Slate, Daniel Engber has a fascinating (and thorough) investigation of why we root for the underdog. There are numerous factors at work, from the availability heuristic to our deep desire for equality. But I was most intrigued by this research, which tries to explain why we associate underdogs with virtuous characteristics, like effort and teamwork:
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The irony is that it remains unclear whether underdogs actually try harder. For instance, last month I wrote about the superstar effect, which suggests that golfers playing against Tiger Woods played significantly worse. Jennifer Brown, an applied economist at Northwestern who performed the analysis, argues that this is due to reduced motivation and effort:
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In other words, underdogs who really believe they are underdogs - and know that they probably won't win - are less likely to put in the required effort. Why waste blood, sweat and tears on a probable loss? If that's the case, then the coaches of underdog teams play an extremely important role in helping to counteract the superstar effect. This guy deserves a raise.
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But there is one group that seems resistant to the underdog bias: referees. In fact, it seems that referees are easily swayed by the emotions of the crowd, which is why they tend to give better calls to the team with home-field advantage.

High illumination levels may protect against myopia

This experimental study involving chicks suggests that the apparent protective effect against myopia afforded to children who spend more time outdoors can be explained, at least in part, by exposure to higher ambient illumination.
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The study's authors concluded that it is not necessarily the type of illumination - natural or unnatural - that matters in the protection against the development of myopia but rather the intensity of illumination, although it is still unclear exactly how illumination does this.

From Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science

BC Government prepared to blind its citizens by outlawing routine eye exams for glasses & contacts

Dr. Scherzer, a glaucoma specialist in Vancouver comments on a new Canadian regulation,  with potentially ominous results for patients...
Uvealblues


Please visit the British Columbia Association of Optometrists website to read a very important posting regarding new regulations set to be implemented in our province that will serve to blind our population by ignorance. The change in the Health Professions Act will permit opticians to dispense glasses or contact lenses without the need for anything more than computerized eyesight testing to estimate the required strength. By no longer requiring a proper examination by an Optometrist or Ophthalmologist, the people of our province will no longer be screened for asymptomatic eye diseases like glaucoma, retinal tears, and other conditions that will lead to permanent visual loss if not found and treated early.

Famine Persists in Niger, but Denial Seems in the Past

Once again Niger is facing a food crisis, a grimly familiar predicament in a vast desert country with an explosive birthrate and rudimentary agriculture. Rains and crops failed last year — rainfall was about 70 percent below normal in the region — and now half the population of 15 million faces food shortages, officials say. Thus it was in 2005, 1985 and 1974.

But there is a big difference this year: the new military government here is acknowledging serious hunger, trying to do something about it — and asking for help.

Thousands of children are being pulled out of schools because parents have left their villages to search for food, and a handful have closed. “Exceptionally, this year, we’ve had this departure,” said Salissou Hachimou, the director of the school in Kongomé, where 43 out of 232 children have left.

In the countryside, ribs poke from under the taut skin of livestock. The animal fodder supply is 66 percent below normal. Mangy camels range, nuzzling the denuded tops of trees.

About 12 percent of the country’s children are acutely malnourished, according to Unicef. A handful of tiny babies with feeble limbs populated a ward in an intensive nutrition clinic in the desert town of Tanout. But the atmosphere was calm and the clinic was not overwhelmed, as Mr. Holmes noted.

The arid region was 11,000 tons short of its expected cereal production last year. The crop failed entirely in the village of Dalli. “Yes, I am hungry now,” said Safia Joulou, 26, who prepares one meal per day, boiling leaves gathered in the endless surrounding sand and scrub.

It’s Complicated: Making Sense of Complexity

 AS WENT THE ROMANS? Thomas Cole’s “Course of Empire: Destruction.”

The increasing speed of complexity in terms of knowledge is exciting in my field, but in terms of the beaurocracy of U.S. health care is counter productive...
uvealblues

Ladies and gentlemen, the state of our union is stumped.

Christoph Niemann

The Great Recession and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, arguably the toughest problems we’ve confronted in decades, are nothing if not spectacularly complicated. Trying to size up these puzzles is like gaping at a homemade contraption that has mysteriously evolved into something even its designers can no longer fathom, let alone operate and dismantle. Is there an owner’s manual for this thing? Can it be unplugged? If we figure out where it’s getting fuel, can we starve it and hope it expires?
Look at the military’s PowerPoint slide of the Afghanistan war, a labyrinth of cross-thatching lines and arrows swirling around words like INSURGENTS and COALITION CAPACITY & PRIORITIES. (Please click on the link for the powerpoint slide--uvealblues)
“When we understand this slide,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who leads the American effort in Afghanistan, “we’ll have won the war.”
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You sense that the march toward complexity has turned into a sprint in the debate about health care reform and even the gargantuan oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, challenges so baroque, and with so many disparate and moving parts, the best you can do is hope that someone in charge understands them. Complexity used to signify progress — it was the frisson of a new gadget, the riddle of some advance in technology. Now complexity lurks behind the most expensive and intractable issues of our age. It’s the pet that grew fangs and started eating the furniture.
Of course, a nagging sense of incomprehension is a perennial feature of the human experience.

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“Complexity creeps up on you,” he said in an interview. “It grows in ways, each of which seems reasonable at the time. It seemed reasonable at the time that we went into Afghanistan. It’s the cumulative costs that makes a society insolvent. Everything the Roman emperors did was a reasonable response in the situation that they found themselves in. It was the cumulative impact that did them in.”
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Which gets to the worrisome part of the complexity of problems we face today. Instead of improving our lives, it’s vexing them.
What we need, suggests Brenda Zimmerman, a professor at Schulich School of Business in Ontario, is a distinction between the complicated and the complex.
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“We get seduced by the complicated in Western society,” Ms. Zimmerman says. “We’re in awe of it and we pull away from the duty to ask simple questions, which we do whenever we deal with matters that are complex.”

via Simoleon Sense

Gates Rethinks His War on Polio

There is an interesting interactive map at the link below, showing the spread of polio from Nigeria to other countries..

Uvealblues

Next week, the organizations behind the polio fight, including WHO, Unicef, Rotary International and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, plan to announce a major revamp of their strategy to address shortcomings exposed by the outbreak.

Polio is a centerpiece of Mr. Gates's charitable giving. Last year the billionaire traveled to Africa, one of the main battlegrounds against the disease, to confer with doctors, aid workers and a sultan to propel the polio-eradication effort.

"There's no way to sugarcoat the last 12 months," Bruce Aylward, a WHO official, told Mr. Gates in the meeting in the underground pandemic center last June. He described how the virus was rippling through countries believed to have stopped the disease.

Mr. Gates asked: "So, what do we do next?"

That question goes to the heart of one of the most controversial debates in global health: Is humanity better served by waging wars on individual diseases, like polio? Or is it better to pursue a broader set of health goals simultaneously—improving hygiene, expanding immunizations, providing clean drinking water—that don't eliminate any one disease, but might improve the overall health of people in developing countries?

The new plan integrates both approaches. It's an acknowledgment, bred by last summer's outbreak, that disease-specific wars can succeed only if they also strengthen the overall health system in poor countries.

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In many respects, Mr. Gates remains a tech geek at heart. Aboard his plane, he expounded on an array of scientific topics: From developments in genotyping, to research showing that Bangladesh's high disease-immunity rates are due to "oral-fecal" transmission (when people build immunity by ingesting contaminated food or water).

In Nigeria, Mr. Gates scored a diplomatic triumph. He won commitments from the sultan, and from Nigeria's governors, to take a more active role in polio vaccinations. "We really stand at the threshold of global health success on polio," he told the assembled governors at the close of the trip.

However, just three days later, a new front opened 2,000 miles away in Uganda. There, a woman walked into a hospital to say her son couldn't move his left leg. It was Uganda's first polio case in 12 years.

Cases also popped up in Mali, Togo and Ghana and Cote d'Ivore, which hadn't reported polio for four years. A girl in Kenya became that country's first polio case since 2006.

Fluorescent compounds make tumors glow

VANDERBILT (US)—A series of novel imaging agents could light up tumors as they begin to form—before they turn deadly—and signal their transition to aggressive cancers.


The compounds could have broad applications for detecting tumors earlier, monitoring a tumor’s transition from pre-malignancy to more aggressive growth, and defining tumor margins during surgical removal.

Four Rules to Get Us Through Tough Times - Capturing Wisdom Before It Fades From Memory

Words spoken from the heart, will enter the heart.

                   -The Talmud-

Rabbi Kroloff's Four Practices to Get You Through Life's Tough Times and Keep Your Head on Straight and Your Heart in the Right Place

Rwanda's Island Prison

Video at the link below...
UvealBlues

Hundreds of vagrants, thieves and street kids, some as young as 14, have been sent, without a trial, to the remote island of Iwawa - an extreme example of the levels of repression in Rwanda.

See Better by Believing You Can

Testing visual acuity in reverse is a time-tested method among the ophthalmology cognescenti...
UvealBlues

Imagine seeing better by thinking differently. That’s a vision with a future, according to Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer.
Eyesight markedly improved when people were experimentally induced to believe that they could see especially well, Langer and her colleagues report in the April Psychological Science. Such expectations actually enhanced visual clarity, rather than simply making volunteers more alert or motivated to focus on objects, they assert.
Langer’s new findings build on long-standing evidence that visual perception depends not just on relaying information from the eyes to the brain but on experience-based assumptions about what can be seen in particular situations. Those expectations lead people to devote limited attention to familiar scenes and, as a result, to ignore unusual objects and events.
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In perhaps the most eye-popping of Langer’s new findings, 20 men and women who saw a reversed eye chart — arranged so that letters became progressively larger further down the chart, with a giant “E” at the bottom — accurately reported more letters from the smallest two lines than they did when shown a traditional eye chart with the big letters on top. All volunteers had normal eyesight.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/see-better-by-believing-you-can/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wiredscience+%28Blog+-+Wired+Science%29#ixzz0mYKrGAvB

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/see-better-by-believing-you-can/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wiredscience+%28Blog+-+Wired+Science%29#ixzz0mYKOMBtF

Watching a Living Brain in the Act of Seeing -- With Single-Synapse Resolution

ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2010) — Pioneering a novel microscopy method, neuroscientist Arthur Konnerth and colleagues from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) have shown that individual neurons carry out significant aspects of sensory processing: specifically, in this case, determining which direction an object in the field of view is moving. Their method makes it possible for the first time to observe individual synapses, nerve contact sites that are just one micrometer in size, on a single neuron in a living mammalian brain.
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Focusing on neurons known to play a role in processing visual signals related to movement, Konnerth's team discovered that an individual neuron integrates inputs it receives via many synapses at once into a single output signal -- a decision, in essence, made by a single nerve cell. The scientists report these results in the latest issue of the journal Nature. Looking ahead, they say their method opens a new avenue for exploration of how learning functions at the level of the individual neuron.
When light falls on the retina of the human eye, it hits 126 million sensory cells, which transform it into electrical signals. Even the smallest unit of light, a photon, can stimulate one of these sensory cells. As a result, enormous amounts of data have to be processed for us to be able to see. While the processing of visual data starts in the retina, the finished image only arises in the brain or, to be more precise, in the visual cortex at the back of the cerebrum.

Net Worth Fighting For

Go to this link for the entire analysis 
Uvealabues

Did the onerous income taxes of the 1950s and ’60s affect the behavior of big-money boxers?  The Atlantic’s Henry Fetter believes so, as he explains in his recent article:

The theory makes perfect sense, and yes, you read that right: back in the ’50s, the marginal rate of the uppermost individual Federal income tax bracket was indeed an incredible 90%!  In other words, after making a certain amount of money, nine out of ten of your hard-earned dollars went straight to the man.  If I had a demotivational font, I’d use it here to type “Ouch!”
In 1965, the top tax rate fell to 70%, and it stayed there until Reagan swaggered into the joint and knocked everyone on their asses.  By the end of his second term, as he gave a parting high five to Bush, he’d gutted the upper bracket to a millionaire-friendly 28% on all earnings over $160,000 – in today’s dollars!  Trickle down, baby!
Three decades later, the Gipper is long gone, but the tax code legacy of Reaganomics lives on.  To illustrate, Weather Sealed’s infographic team charted the historical U.S. income tax brackets for singles, adjusted for inflation, from 1910 to present:

South Africa Redoubles Efforts Against AIDS

Well, it's about time...tragic the number of lives lost already...
Uvealblues

SOVANE, South Africa — South Africa, trying to overcome years of denial and delay in confronting its monumental AIDS crisis, is now in the midst of a feverish buildup of testing, treatment and prevention that United Nations officials say is the largest and fastest expansion of AIDS services ever attempted by any nation. 

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Mr. Mbeki had questioned whether H.I.V. caused AIDS and suggested that anti-retroviral drugs were harmful. Harvard researchers estimated that the government could have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people during the last decade if it had provided the drugs to AIDS patients and medicines that help stop pregnant women from infecting their babies.
“If we had acted more than a decade ago, we might not have been in this situation where we are,” Dr. Motsoaledi said. “Obviously, we did lose time.”

Chances Are

This succinct piece nicely demonstrates the importance of an understanding of probability and statistics for all of us (and is also why I am glad that AP statistics is being offered at Sageridge school next year).
Uvealblues

In one study, Gigerenzer and his colleagues asked doctors in Germany and the United States to estimate the probability that a woman with a positive mammogram actually has breast cancer, even though she’s in a low-risk group: 40 to 50 years old, with no symptoms or family history of breast cancer.  To make the question specific, the doctors were told to assume the following statistics — couched in terms of percentages and probabilities — about the prevalence of breast cancer among women in this cohort, and also about the mammogram’s sensitivity and rate of false positives:
The probability that one of these women has breast cancer is 0.8 percent.  If a woman has breast cancer, the probability is 90 percent that she will have a positive mammogram.  If a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability is 7 percent that she will still have a positive mammogram.  Imagine a woman who has a positive mammogram.  What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?
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The right answer is 9 percent.

The remarkable effects of fat loss on the immune system

Interesting study of the impact on the immune system of gastric banding in patients with Type II Diabetes. (However the n was low at 13).
Uvealblues

Australian scientists have shown for the first time that even modest weight loss reverses many of the damaging changes often seen in the immune cells of obese people, particularly those with Type 2 diabetes.

Tea 'healthier' drink than water

Drinking three or more cups of tea a day is as good for you as drinking plenty of water and may even have extra health benefits, say researchers.

Adora Svitaka

Lots of good lessons in this 12 year old's talk at TED
This video clip also is a manifestation of why I send my kids to Sageridge school!
Uvealblues



via Change Your Thoughts. Change Your Life

Car Steered With Eyes, Computer Scientists Demonstrate

ScienceDaily (Apr. 24, 2010) — "Keep your eyes on the road!" Scientists at Freie Universität working under the computer science professor Raúl Rojas have given a completely new meaning to this standard rule for drivers: Using software they developed, they can steer a car with their eyes.

Brain Damage

Being fat is bad for your brain.

Oral medication for Leber's congenital amaurosis demonstrates biological signal in early study

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Three patients enrolled in a phase 1b proof of concept study for an oral medication therapy for Leber's congenital amaurosis had vision gains and reported improvements in functional vision after 7 days of treatment.

People Get Ready

Amazing Performance by Crystal Bowersox last night....
Uvealblues

Moral Actions Improve Willpower

In a new study, Harvard University researchers suggest moral actions may increase our capacity for willpower and physical endurance.
Study participants who did good deeds — or even just imagined themselves helping others — were better able to perform a subsequent task of physical endurance.
However, the research also shows a similar or even greater boost in physical strength following dastardly deeds.

Researcher Kurt Gray, a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard, explains these effects as a self-fulfilling prophecy in morality.
“People perceive those who do good and evil to have more efficacy, more willpower, and less sensitivity to discomfort,” Gray says.
“By perceiving themselves as good or evil, people embody these perceptions, actually becoming more capable of physical endurance.”
Gray’s findings run counter to the notion that only those blessed with heightened willpower or self-control are capable of heroism, suggesting instead that simply attempting heroic deeds can confer personal power.
“Gandhi or Mother Teresa may not have been born with extraordinary self-control, but perhaps came to possess it through trying to help others,” says Gray, who calls this effect “moral transformation” because it suggests that moral deeds have the power to transform people from average to exceptional.

BurmaVJ:Live Reporting from a Closed Country

Tonight on HBO will be a highly acclaimed documentary on Burma--home of some of  the kindest people I have ever met...

Bees See Super Color at Super Speed

Bees see the world almost five times faster than humans, according to new research from scientists at Queen Mary, University of London.

This gives bumblebees the fastest colour vision of all animals, allowing them to easily navigate shady bushes to find food, write Dr Peter Skorupski and Prof Lars Chittka in the Journal of Neuroscience.

From Dung to Coffee Brew With No Aftertaste

..But Mr. Sibayan’s prize was the equivalent in the world of rarefied coffees: dung containing the world’s most expensive coffee beans.
Costing hundreds of dollars a pound, these beans are found in the droppings of the civet, a nocturnal, furry, long-tailed catlike animal that prowls Southeast Asia’s coffee-growing lands for the tastiest, ripest coffee cherries. The civet eventually excretes the hard, indigestible innards of the fruit — essentially, incipient coffee beans — though only after they have been fermented in the animal’s stomach acids and enzymes to produce a brew described as smooth, chocolaty and devoid of any bitter aftertaste.

Africa Reboots

My man, Bono of U2,  has just returned from a trip to Africa and is speaking of "smart aid" for Africa.
He highlights  the entrepeneurial spirit of Africa, which I think the mainstream media often gives short shrift to...
Uvealblues


Despite the almost deafening roar of excitement about Africa’s hosting of soccer’s World Cup this summer, we managed to hear a surprising thing. Harmony ... flowing from two sides that in the past have often been discordant: Africa’s emerging entrepreneurial class and its civil-society activists.
It’s no secret that lefty campaigners can be cranky about business elites. And the suspicion is mutual. Worldwide. Civil society as a rule sees business as, well, a little uncivil. Business tends to see activists as, well, a little too active. But in Africa, at least from what I’ve just seen, this is starting to change. The energy of these opposing forces coming together is filling offices, boardrooms and bars. The reason is that both these groups — the private sector and civil society — see poor governance as the biggest obstacle they face. So they are working together on redefining the rules of the African game.

Entrepreneurs know that even a good relationship with a bad government stymies foreign investment; civil society knows a resource-rich country can have more rather than fewer problems, unless corruption is tackled.
This joining of forces is being driven by some luminous personalities, few of whom are known in America; all of whom ought to be. Let me introduce you to a few of the catalysts:

(..)
So I was listening. Good for me. But did I actually learn anything?
OVER long days and nights, I asked Africans about the course of international activism. Should we just pack it up and go home, I asked? There were a few nods. But many more noes. Because most Africans we met seemed to feel the pressing need for new kinds of partnerships, not just among governments, but among citizens, businesses, the rest of us. I sense the end of the usual donor-recipient relationship.
Aid, it’s clear, is still part of the picture. It’s crucial, if you have H.I.V. and are fighting for your life, or if you are a mother wondering why you can’t protect your child against killers with unpronounceable names or if you are a farmer who knows that new seed varietals will mean you have produce that you can take to market in drought or flood. But not the old, dumb, only-game-in-town aid — smart aid that aims to put itself out of business in a generation or two. “Make aid history” is the objective. It always was. Because when we end aid, it’ll mean that extreme poverty is history. But until that glorious day, smart aid can be a reforming tool, demanding accountability and transparency, rewarding measurable results, reinforcing the rule of law, but never imagining for a second that it’s a substitute for trade, investment or self-determination.

Weighing the Evidence on Exercise

But a growing body of science suggests that exercise does have an important role in weight loss. That role, however, is different from what many people expect and probably wish. The newest science suggests that exercise alone will not make you thin, but it may determine whether you stay thin, if you can achieve that state. Until recently, the bodily mechanisms involved were mysterious. But scientists are slowly teasing out exercise’s impact on metabolism, appetite and body composition, though the consequences of exercise can vary. Women’s bodies, for instance, seem to react differently than men’s bodies to the metabolic effects of exercise. None of which is a reason to abandon exercise as a weight-loss tool. You just have to understand what exercise can and cannot do.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/magazine/18exercise-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

Is Marriage Good for Your Health?

An intriguing article which updates the impact of marriage on health...
Uvealblues


Contemporary studies, for instance, have shown that married people are less likely to get pneumonia, have surgery, develop cancer or have heart attacks. A group of Swedish researchers has found that being married or cohabiting at midlife is associated with a lower risk for dementia. A study of two dozen causes of death in the Netherlands found that in virtually every category, ranging from violent deaths like homicide and car accidents to certain forms of cancer, the unmarried were at far higher risk than the married. For many years, studies like these have influenced both politics and policy, fueling national marriage-promotion efforts, like the Healthy Marriage Initiative of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. From 2006 to 2010, the program received $150 million annually to spend on projects like “divorce reduction” efforts and often cited the health benefits of marrying and staying married.


But while it’s clear that marriage is profoundly connected to health and well-being, new research is increasingly presenting a more nuanced view of the so-called marriage advantage. Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage doesn’t extend to those in troubled relationships, which can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all. One recent study suggests that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And despite years of research suggesting that single people have poorer health than those who marry, a major study released last year concluded that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced.
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These data strongly suggested that marital stress could affect the body in striking ways, but the Glaser team had yet to prove that marital conflict had any truly meaningful or lasting effect on health. Kiecolt-Glaser had an idea for another study that would meet this higher standard. She had read about a strange tool used by her dermatology colleagues: a small plastic suction device designed to leave eight tiny blisters on the arm and allow monitoring of the immune-system response at the wound sites. Kiecolt-Glaser’s proposal was to use this blistering device to measure how quickly or slowly physical wounds healed among married couples who had undergone different levels of marital stress.
(..)
The results were remarkable. After the blistering sessions in which couples argued, their wounds took, on average, a full day longer to heal than after the sessions in which the couples discussed something pleasant. Among couples who exhibited especially high levels of hostility while bickering, the wounds took a full two days longer to heal than those of couples who had showed less animosity while fighting.
(..)

Smith’s results suggest that there are important differences between men and women when it comes to health and the style of conflict that can jeopardize it. The women in his study who were at highest risk for signs of heart disease were those whose marital battles lacked any signs of warmth, not even a stray term of endearment during a hostile discussion (“Honey, you’re driving me crazy!”) or a minor pat on the back or squeeze of the hand, all of which can signal affection in the midst of anger. “Most of the literature assumes that it’s how bad the arguments get that drives the effect, but it’s actually the lack of affection that does it,” Smith told me. “It wasn’t how much nasty talk there was. It was the lack of warmth that predicted risk.”

For men, on the other hand, hostile and negative marital battles seemed to have no effect on heart risk. Men were at risk for a higher coronary calcium score, however, when their marital spats turned into battles for control. It didn’t matter whether it was the husband or wife who was trying to gain control of the matter; it was merely any appearance of controlling language that put men on the path of heart disease.

Not surprising that "Lose Weight" is Number 1.
Uvealblues

The world's most popular goals

Denialism

This is a great talk by Michael Specter, a staff writer for the New Yorker. It is worth 16 Plus minutes of your time...
uvealblues 
 

An Old Gout Drug Gets New Life and a New Price, Riling Patients

A centuries-old drug used to treat excruciating gout pain had cost just pennies a tablet—until last year. Now, the retail price has skyrocketed to more than $5 and some of the manufacturers have ceased production amid a battle over marketing rights.

The tale of how this common gout drug, colchicine, became the costlier branded drug Colcrys offers a window into the Byzantine world of drug pricing. The price rise is a consequence of a Food and Drug Administration effort to improve the safety of long-used but unapproved drugs, with a trade-off often made between drug affordability and safety
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"It's not a new product. It's been out for hundreds of years. To all of a sudden have to pay $125 or $150 a month, after it only cost $5 or $10 a month, is a real problem," said Stanley Cohen, a Dallas doctor who is the president of the American College of Rheumatology. He met with the FDA to express concern about the price increase.

Avatar II: The Hospital

Health-care facilities are discovering that practicing in the virtual world can have major benefits in real life.

In the drill, developed by Laura Greci, a professor at the medical school at the University of California, San Diego, ER nurses log in to the virtual world, where each assumes control of an avatar—a cartoon rendering of a nurse wearing crisp blue scrubs. The nurses can walk their avatars through hallways, up and down stairs and through doorways using keyboard or mouse controls. They can give voice to their avatars by typing—their words pop up as a text box—or by speaking into a special microphone. Headsets let each nurse hear ambient noise from the virtual scene and listen to the other avatars talking.
In the drill, which lasts three hours, the nurse-avatars must create a triage system, assess each patient and figure out how to isolate the most contagious.
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In addition to the disaster drills, Second Life is increasingly being used to train medical and nursing students in clinical skills. Medical schools traditionally have run such exercises using computerized mannequins, which can be programmed to exhibit certain symptoms. But each mannequin costs about $65,000, so there may be just one for every 50 or 100 students. In Second Life, though, every student can take on a nurse or doctor avatar and practice interviewing virtual patients, filling in medical charts and making diagnoses.

In Sleepless Nights, a Hope for Treating Depression

Although this sounds too good to be true, it has been well documented in over 1,700 patients in more than 75 published papers during the last 40 years.[1]  Sleep deprivation used as a treatment for depression is efficacious and robust: it works quickly, is relatively easy to administer, inexpensive, relatively safe and it also alleviates other types of clinical depression. Sleep deprivation can elevate your mood even if you are not depressed, and can induce euphoria. This throws a new light on insomnia.