Award for Humanitarian Leadership

The National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) today announced that the Civil Air Patrol will be presented with the NBAA Al Ueltschi Humanitarian Award in recognition of the organization’s efforts to provide disaster relief for people and communities in times of crisis.
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Al Ueltschi, the award’s namesake, has been widely recognized for his lifetime of dedication to philanthropic causes. He was instrumental in the development of ORBIS, an international non-profit organization dedicated to preventing blindness and saving sight. Ueltschi, who has served as ORBIS’s chairman for more than 20 years, has made a number of significant financial contributions to the organization and has been instrumental in developing many of its most important initiatives.

How to Raise Your Kids—and Maybe Your Company, Too

In addition to NurtureShock’s release, they’re now writing this NurtureShock blog for Newsweek.com. I hope you enjoy this interview about parenting based on NurtureShock (and think a little about this could apply to parenting your company).

Draw a sketch and find a matching photo

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.

from Migurski

A Battery Of Tests. For What?

Physician's Ordeal Leads to a Realization

How Ice Can Save Your Life

My brother, who is in charge of lifeflight for the Medical College of Virginia, notes that they have been using hypothermia in cardiac arrests over the past five years...

 

Therapeutic Hypothermia' Can Protect the Brain in the Aftermath of Cardiac Arrest

 

For decades, conventional wisdom in treating patients with cardiac arrest was that if the heart stopped beating for longer than six to 10 minutes, the brain would be dead. Now a new treatment being embraced by a growing number of U.S. hospitals suggests that patients can be brought back to a healthy life even if their heart is stopped for 20 minutes, perhaps longer.
The difference is profound. In recent months around the U.S., doctors and nurses say, cardiac-arrest patients who would previously have been given up for dead have been revived and discharged to return to their families and jobs with all or nearly all of their cognitive abilities intact.

 

Tracing the Origins of Human Empathy

Chimpanzees' Caring Behavior Toward Others Hints at the Emotion's Antiquity; the Mystery of the Contagious Yawn

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Even so, Dr. de Waal contends that empathy, sympathy and compassion are traits shared by every species with a rudimentary capacity for self-awareness. While chimps can be combative and violent, they more often comfort and help each other. Capuchin monkeys enjoy giving to others. Elephants and dolphins aid companions in need. Whales can display something akin to gratitude. Even mice appear to have an ability to sense what their cage-mates are experiencing, says a recent study by researchers at McGill University.

Key cancer spread gene found

Scientists have pinpointed a gene linked to more than half of all breast cancers.

The Consistent Smile of Barack Obama

Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama recently posed for around 135 photographs with UN delegates during a reception that was held at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Eric Spiegelman took these photos from the Whitehouse Flickr stream and turned them into a short time-lapse video.
The end-result is fairly interesting. The President has exactly the same smile in every single picture.


Barack Obama's amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

(From Avanish Kaushik via labnol)

E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection

Vegeterianism anyone? Actually this article highlights the exact reason why some of my friends are strict vegeterians...
uvealblues

Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor, thought she had a stomach virus. The aches and cramping were tolerable that first day, and she finished her classes.

Then her diarrhea turned bloody. Her kidneys shut down. Seizures knocked her unconscious. The convulsions grew so relentless that doctors had to put her in a coma for nine weeks. When she emerged, she could no longer walk. The affliction had ravaged her nervous system and left her paralyzed.
Ms. Smith, 22, was found to have a severe form of food-borne illness caused by E. coli, which Minnesota officials traced to the hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday dinner in early fall 2007.
“I ask myself every day, ‘Why me?’ and ‘Why from a hamburger?’ ”Ms. Smith said.
In the simplest terms, she ran out of luck in a food-safety game of chance whose rules and risks are not widely known.
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Ms. Smith’s reaction to the virulent strain of E. coli was extreme, but tracing the story of her burger, through interviews and government and corporate records obtained by The New York Times, shows why eating ground beef is still a gamble. Neither the system meant to make the meat safe, nor the meat itself, is what consumers have been led to believe.
Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.

You Snooze, You Lose--Weight

Getting enough rest promotes weight loss

The Buzz: Targeting Cancer With Bee Venom

In Animal Studies, Tiny Composite Spheres Deliver Drug Directly to Tumor Sites; 'It's Like an Injection'

A bee sting can be painful, but its venomous payload might hold promise for a beneficial purpose—fighting cancer.
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have used an ingredient of bee venom called melittin to shrink or slow the growth of tumors in mice. Melittin's anti-tumor potential has been known for years, but it hasn't been used as a drug because it also attacks healthy cells, including vital red blood cells.
Now the researchers have found a way, using the burgeoning field of nanotechnology, to pinpoint tumors for attack by melittin while largely shielding healthy cells. They do this by attaching the bee-venom ingredient to nanoparticles, which are ultra-tiny, synthetically manufactured spheres. The resultant product, called nanobees, are injected into the blood stream where they circulate until they reach and attack cancerous tumors. The approach also has the potential to avoid some of the toxic side effects seen in older cancer therapies like chemotherapy.

 

Burst of Technology Helps Blind to See

A nice summary of current ophthalmology research here...


Scientists involved in the project, the artificial retina, say they have plans to develop the technology to allow people to read, write and recognize faces.

Advances in technology, genetics, brain science and biology are making a goal that long seemed out of reach — restoring sight — more feasible.

The Claim: Lack of Sleep Increases the Risk of Catching a Cold.

THE BOTTOM LINE Research suggests that poor sleep can increase susceptibility to colds.

With Genetic Gift, 2 Monkeys Are Viewing a More Colorful Worl

Dalton and Sam are male squirrel monkeys, about a foot tall. Their ancestors lived by eating fruit and insects and dodging falcons in the forest canopy of Central and South America. Dalton and Sam lead a more protected life in the laboratory of Jay and Maureen Neitz at theUniversity of Washington, Seattle. Recently, the Neitzes endowed them with a new genetic gift: the ability to see the world with full color vision.

Rx for money woes: Doctors quit medicine

Some physicians, fed up with the costs of their practice, are ready to hang up their stethoscopes and shift careers.

Prosthetic Retina - 'Bionic Eye' Artificial Vision Enhancers Being Put To The Test

In a survey conducted about patients’ expectations of electronic retina prostheses (retina implants) a decade ago, visually impaired or blind patients with degenerative retina conditions stated they would be happy if they were able to regain some mobility and recognize faces and read again.
According to the presentations given at the international symposium “Artificial Vision” September 19th, 2009 at the Wissenschaftszentrum Bonn, that's gotten a lot closer.

7 Solid Health Tips That No Longer Apply

Are you taking a daily aspirin or multivitamin to stay healthy? Avoiding eggs and choosing no-cholesterol margarine over butter? Convinced that jogging will ultimately kill your knees? Advice that was once considered gospel truth among the medical community is now being questioned

Drug-electricity combo makes paralysed rats sprint

Rats with severed spinal cords and no feeling in their hind limbs can walk, run, step sideways and jog backwards without re-growing the nerves between the injured site and the brain, raising the prospect of a treatment for people with spinal injuries.

Touched by Mortality

An excellent essay by Garrison Keiller from the vantage point of being a patient after a stroke...


The doctor who saw me in the E.R. wrote in her report: “nice 67 y.o. male, flat affect, awake, alert and appropriate.” I had appeared with slurred speech and a balloon in my head, had driven myself to United Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, parked in No Parking, walked in and was triaged right in to a neurologist who trundled me into the M.R.I. Space-Time Cyclotron for 50 minutes of banging and whanging that produced a picture of the stroke in the front of my brain, so off to the Mayo Clinic I went and the St. Mary’s Hospital Neurology I.C.U. and was wired up to monitors. A large day in a nice 67 y.o. man’s life.
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But when the doctor talks about how you must go on a powerful blood thinner lest a stray clot turn your fine intellect into a cheese omelet, you must now accept being 67 y.o. and do as he says. You had intended to be a natural wonder, an old guy who still runs the high hurdles, but mortality has bitten you in the butt.
I like this hospital. St. Mary’s is a research and teaching hospital so you get to observe troops of young residents go by, trailing close behind Doctor Numero P. Uno, and watch them try to assume the air of authority so useful in the medical trade. The nurses, of course, are fabulous. Like many nice 67 y.o. men, I am even more awake and alert around attractive young women. A dark-haired beauty named Sarah brings me a hypodermic to coach me on self-administered shots of heparin, and without hesitation I plunge it into my belly fat.
No man is a coward in the presence of women.

Americans Have Been Taken Hostage

Dylan Ratigan from MSNBC calling it as he sees it ... 

The American people have been taken hostage to a broken system.
It is a system that remains in place to this day.
A system where bank lobbyists have been spending in record numbers to make sure it stays that way.
A system that corrupts the most basic principles of competition and fair play, principles upon which this country was built.
It is a system that so far has forced the taxpayer to provide the banks with the use of $14 trillion from the Federal Reserve, much of the $7 trillion outstanding at the US Treasury and $2.3 trillion at the FDIC.
A system partially built by the very people who currently advise our President, run our Treasury Department and are charged with its reform.
And most stunningly -- it is a system that no one in our government has yet made any effort to fundamentally change.
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As hostages -- was there any sum of money we wouldn't have given AIG?
Why did we pay Goldman Sachs and all the other banks 100 cents on the dollar for their contracts with AIG, using taxpayer money, while we forced GM and others to take massive payment cuts?
Why hasn't any of the bonus money paid to the CEOs that built this financial nuclear bomb been clawed back?
And more than anything else -- why does the US Congress refuse to outlaw the most anti-competitive structure known to our economy, one summed up as TOO BIG TOO FAIL?
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Why is this? Who does our Government work for? How much longer will we as Americans tolerate it? And what, if anything, can we do about it?
As we approach the anniversary of the bailouts for our banks and insurers -- and watch the multi-trillion taxpayer-funded programs at the Federal Reserve continue to support banks and subsidize their multibillion bonus pools, we must ask if our politicians represent the interests of America? Or those who would rob America of its money and its future?