Psi Research Material Submitted August 1, 2006, with documents and original sources below

Tip for Discerning Intuitions

Tip for Discerning Intuitions

As research develops on the cues of accurate versus inaccurate intuitions, psychic Darrin Owens offers this hypothesis, in his book Reader of Hearts: The Life and Teachings of a Reluctant Psychic (New World Library):

“When you’ve learned to discern the voice of fear from the voice of love, the voice of fear begins to drift away. You no longer pay attention to it, and fear cannot exist without attention. Conversely, as you begin to pay closer attention to divine guidance it becomes stronger within you.”

Genetic Heritage Awaits Environmental Triggers

In the old nature-nuture debate, where scientists argue whether it is your inherited genes or your environmental context that determines your predisposition to disease, researchers have encountered a new level of complexity.

Scientists have discovered, according to a report published in LiveScience, that genes have “epigenetic markers,” or mechanisms that increase the gene’s influence. These markers, it turns out, are controlled by environmental factors. It requires a certain environmental “trigger” to activate the epigenetic marker, which then fires up the gene to express itself.

Websource:

Link: http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060718_nature_nurture.html

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Blind Man Sees with Inner Vision

We assume that seeing involves information coming into our eyes and brain from the outside. It may be, however, that the brain can see even without the eyes. Scientists already realize that the brain has to “know” what it is looking at in order to “see” it, but research with a blind man has puzzled scientists. Esref Armagan, a congenitally blind artist, can paint pictures of objects placed in front of him, including the effects of perspective on color and shading, according to a report published in New Scientist.

John Kennedy, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who specializes in studying the artwork of the blind, used magnetic brain scans to study Armagan. One scan confirmed that light shone upon Armagan’s eyes had no impact upon events within the brain—there was no brain response to the light, indicative of blindness. When Armagan would paint a portrait of something placed before him, however, the visual parts of his brain would evidence the same kind of activity that would be associated, among normally sighted persons, with looking and seeing.

Armagan reports that his use of perspective, and its effect on color and shading, comes from what he has learned from the comments provided by people who have seen his work. Yet Armagan’s brain scans detect no activity in the part of the brain associated with recalling verbal material. It may require posing in front of Armagan a scene with very unusual, or unexpected coloring and shading effects to determine if he is applying learning or if maybe, in fact, the brain has more ways to seeing than with the eyes.

Senses special: The art of seeing without sight

       29 January 2005

       From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

       Alison Motluk 

IT IS an odd sight. A middle-aged man, fully reclined, drawing pictures of hammers and mugs and animal figurines on a special clipboard, which is balanced precariously on a pillow atop his ample stomach.

A half-dozen people buzz around him. One adjusts a towel under his neck to make him more comfortable, another wields a stopwatch and chants instructions to start doing this or stop doing that, and yet another translates everything into Turkish. A small group convenes in a corner to assess the proceedings. A few of us just stand around watching, and trying not to get in the way. The elaborate ritual is a practice run for an upcoming brain scan and the researchers want to get everything just right. Meanwhile, the man at the centre of all this attention, a blind painter, cracks jokes that keep everyone tittering.

The painter is Esref Armagan. And he is here in Boston to see if a peek inside his brain can explain how a man who has never seen can paint pictures that the sighted easily recognise - and even admire. He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he's never seen any of these things. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these things either. How does he do it?

Because if Armagan can represent images in the same way a sighted person can, it raises big questions not only about how our brains construct mental images, but also about the role those images play in seeing. Do we build up mental images using just our eyes or do other senses contribute too? How much can congenitally blind people really understand about space and the layout of objects within it? How much "seeing" does a blind person actually do?

Armagan was born 51 years ago in one of Istanbul's poorer neighbourhoods. One of his eyes failed to develop beyond a rudimentary bud, the other is stunted and scarred. It is impossible to know if he had some vision as an infant, but he certainly never saw normally and his brain detects no light now. Few of the children in his neighbourhood were formally educated, and like them, he spent his early years playing in the streets. But Armagan's blindness isolated him, and to pass the time, he turned to drawing. At first he just scratched in the dirt. But by age 6 he was using pencil and paper. At 18 he started painting with his fingers, first on paper, then on canvas with oils. At age 42 he discovered fast-drying acrylics.

“He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he's never seen any of these things”

His paintings are disarmingly realistic. And his skills are formidable. "I have tested blind people for decades," says John Kennedy, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, "and I have never seen a performance like his." Kennedy's first opportunity to meet and test Armagan in person was during a visit to New York last May, for a forum organised by a group called Art Education for the Blind. Armagan, who is something of a celebrity in Turkey, has become used to touring with his canvases to the Czech Republic, China, Italy and the Netherlands. What made this visit different was the interest shown by scientists - both Kennedy and a team from Boston.

Kennedy put Armagan through a battery of tests. For instance, he presented him with solid objects that he could feel - a cube, a cone and a ball all in a row (dubbed the "three mountains task") - and asked him to draw them. He then asked him to draw them as though he was perched elsewhere at the table, across from himself, then to his right and left and hovering overhead. Kennedy asked him to draw two rows of glasses, stretching off into the distance. Representing this kind of perspective is tough even for a sighted person. And when he asked him to draw a cube, and then to rotate it to the left, and then further to the left, Armagan drew a scene with all three cubes. Astonishingly, he drew it in three-point perspective - showing a perfect grasp of how horizontal and vertical lines converge at imaginary points in the distance. "My breath was taken away," Kennedy says.

Kennedy has spent much of his career exploring art from the perspective of blind people. He has shown that people who are congenitally blind understand outline drawings when they feel them just as seeing people do. They understand and can draw in three dimensions. In fact, blind children develop the ability to draw, he has found, much as sighted children do - but all too few blind children ever get the opportunity to explore this ability. Even knowledge about perspective, he has come to believe, is acquired in similar ways for both. "Where a sighted person looks out, a blind person reaches out, and they will discover the same things," says Kennedy. "The geometry of direction is common to vision and touch."

Lines and one-liners

It is the night before the Boston team's first brain scan. Armagan is sitting at a long table at an inn, entertaining everyone with one-liners, trying to explain how he does his artwork. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, the Harvard neurologist who invited him here, and Amir Amedi, his colleague, are challenging him with more and more complex tasks. Draw a road leading away, says Pascual-Leone, with poles on either side and with a source of light underneath. Armagan smiles confidently.

He uses a special rubberised tablet, called a "Sewell raised line drawing kit". This device allows him to draw lines that rise off his paper as tiny puckers, so that he can detect them with his fingertips. And so he draws the road and the poles: one hand holding the pencil, the other tracing along behind, like surrogate eyes, "observing" the image as it is being laid down. A minute or so later, the picture is done. Pascual-Leone and Amedi shake their heads in wonder.

So, we ask, how do you know how long these poles should be as they recede? I was taught, he says. Not by any formal teacher, but by casual comments by friends and acquaintances. How do you know about shadows? He learned that too. He confides that for a long time he figured that if an object was red, its shadow would be red too. "But I was told it wasn't," he says. But how do you know about red? He knows that there's an important visual quality to seen objects called "colour" and that it varies from object to object. He's memorised what has what colour and even which ones clash.

Scanning the mind's eye

Next day, and the time has come for Armagan to get into the scanner. The Harvard scientists are collaborating with scanning experts at Boston University. In addition to taking a structural snapshot of Armagan's brain and establishing if it can perceive any light (they confirmed it cannot), this morning's experiment will have him doing some odd sequences of tasks. He'll have a set number of seconds to feel an object, imagine it and draw it. But he has also been asked to scribble, pretend to feel an object and recall a list of objects that he learned days earlier.

Pascual-Leone and Amedi want to see what Armagan's brain can tell them about neural plasticity. Both scientists have evidence that in the absence of vision, the "visual" cortex - the part of the brain that makes sense of the information coming from our eyes - does not lie idle. Pascual-Leone has found that proficient Braille readers recruit this area for touch. Amedi, along with Ehud Zohary at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, found that the area is also activated in verbal memory tasks.

When Amedi analysed the results, however, he found that Armagan's visual cortex lit up during the drawing task, but hardly at all for the verbal recall. Amedi was startled by this. "To get such extraordinary plasticity for [drawing] and zero for verbal memory and language - it was such a strong result," he says. He suspects that, to a certain extent, how the unused visual areas are deployed depends on who you are and what you need from your brain.

Even more intriguing was the way in which drawing activated Armagan's visual cortex. It is now well established that when sighted people try to imagine things - faces, scenes, colours, items they've just looked at - they engage the same parts of their visual cortex that they use to see, only to a much lesser degree. Creating these mental images is a lot like seeing, only less powerful. When Armagan imagined items he had touched, parts of his visual cortex, too, were mildly activated. But when he drew, his visual cortex lit up as though he was seeing. In fact, says Pascual-Leone, a naive viewer of his scan might assume Armagan really could see.

That result cracks open another big nut: what is "seeing" exactly? Even without the ability to detect light, Armagan is coming incredibly close to it, admits Pascual-Leone. We can't know what is actually being generated in his brain. "But whatever that thing in his mind is, he is able to transfer it to paper so that I unequivocally know it's the same object he just felt," says Pascual-Leone.

“We normally think of seeing as the taking in of objective reality through our eyes. But is it?”

In his own life, too, Armagan seems to have a remarkable grasp of space. He seldom gets lost, says his manager Joan Eroncel. He has an uncanny sense of a room's dimensions. He once drew the layout of an apartment he had only visited briefly, she says, and remembered it perfectly nine years later.

We normally think of seeing as the taking in of objective reality through our eyes. But is it? How much of what we think of as seeing really comes from without, and how much from within? The visual cortex may have a much more important role than we realise in creating expectations for what we are about to see, says Pascual-Leone. "Seeing is only possible when you know what you're going to see," he says. Perhaps in Armagan the expectation part is operational, but there is simply no data coming in visually.

Conventional wisdom suggests that a person can't have a "mind's eye" without ever having had vision. But Pascual-Leone thinks Armagan must have one. The researcher has long argued that you could arrive at the same mental picture via different senses. In fact he thinks we all do this all the time, integrating all the sensations of an object into our mental picture of it. "When we see a cup," he says, "we're also feeling with our mind's hand. Seeing is as much touching as it is seeing." But because vision is so overwhelming, we are unaware of that, he says. But in Armagan, significantly, that is not the case.

I sit across from the source of all this mystery and I ask him about the birds he loves to paint. They are brightly coloured and exotic and I wonder aloud how he knows how to depict them. He tells me about how he used to own a parakeet shop. "They come to your hand," he says. "You can easily touch them." He pauses and smiles and says: "I love being surrounded by beauty."

From issue 2484 of New Scientist magazine, 29 January 2005, page 37

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18524841.700

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Teleportation Achieved by Atomic Telepathy

Scientists have achieved, at the atomic level, in laboratories both in Australia and in Colorado, a feat that the crew of Star Trek’s Enterprise took for granted: teleportation.

Teleportation didn’t mean disappearing the atom at one location and having it appear at a new location, although, according to the report appearing in the journal Nature, such a feat would be theoretically possible. Instead, in these laboratories, teleportation meant transferring the information within an atom to another, quite distant atom, instantaneously, faster than the speed of light. They did so by using as receivers a pair of atoms that were “entangled,” meaning that whatever happens to one, happens to the other, instantaneously, no matter how far apart they may be.

In their teleportation experiments, the researchers used a single atom as the source atom, and imprinted its information upon one of the pairs of entangled atoms. As predicted, the information was instantaneously available in the second of the atom of the entangled pair.

The purpose of this research is to help develop a quantum computer that can pass along information at speeds faster than light. As the editor of the report described it, by way of an analogy of three people and three quarters,

”Charlie tosses a quarter, but does not tell the others, George and Sam, whether it has landed heads or tails.

George has another two quarters, entangled like the atoms, that must always have the same side facing up.

George passes one entangled quarter to Charlie and one to Sam. Charlie announces whether the quarter he originally tossed matches the quarter given to him by George.

If it does not, Sam can flip his quarter to match Charlie's first quarter. By doing so, he causes Charlie's second quarter to flip because they are entangled.”

Source:

Star Trek’s Teleportation Fantasy Closer to Reality

By ADAM RANKIN
Staff Writer
Journal

Teleportation- as in "Beam me up, Scotty"- was always one of the more unlikely technologies featured in the classic television series.

And while the prospects of teleporting people across space is still very much the stuff of science fiction, for the first time a team of Austrian scientists reported Thursday in the journal Nature that they were able to guide the teleportation of individual atoms.

A second research team from Colorado's National Institute of Standards and Technology independently reported similar results by a different method.

Both teams were able to reliably teleport about 75 percent of the time.

The accomplishment, a decade in the making, means scientists now have a scalable method for developing a quantum computer, according to physicists H. Jeff Kimble and Steven J. van Enk, who co-wrote a commentary on the two reports in Nature.

Scientists hope to harness in computers the power of atoms, or quantum particles referred to as qubits, to solve complex problems quickly that would take normal computers years to resolve. Using the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, quantum computers could solve numerous problems simultaneously, while normal computers must address each one in turn, in a serial fashion.

Reliable teleportation would allow scientists to build virtual quantum wiring to transmit information across empty space.

Los Alamos National Laboratory quantum physicist Daniel James, a member of the research team from the University of Innsbruck that managed the feat, explained that teleportation in the physics sense of the term doesn't necessarily mean the actual atom dematerializes and is reconfigured elsewhere.

"Though that is theoretically possible," James added.

Rather, the researchers teleported information contained in one trapped calcium atom to another through a third, intermediary atom.

The key to the process is that the second two atoms are invisibly linked, what scientists call "entangled." When one changes its state or quantum position, the other also changes.

James, a theorist, said the team decided to take on the complex experiment in June, after he gave a talk on quantum teleportation.

"I said, 'I bet you can't do this.' They said 'Right, you're on,' '' he said. "I lost."

James explained the process using an analogy of three people and three quarters.

Charlie tosses a quarter, but does not tell the others, George and Sam, whether it has landed heads or tails.

George has another two quarters, entangled like the atoms, that must always have the same side facing up.

George passes one entangled quarter to Charlie and one to Sam. Charlie announces whether the quarter he originally tossed matches the quarter given to him by George.

If it does not, Sam can flip his quarter to match Charlie's first quarter. By doing so, he causes Charlie's second quarter to flip because they are entangled.

James said this transfer of information across space, or teleportation, is what the scientists in Innsbruck managed to accomplish across a gap narrower than one-thousandth of an inch at temperatures approaching absolute zero, or about -273.15 degrees Celsius.

With real quantum bits, James said, the process is more complicated because rather than just heads or tails, quantum bits can be heads, tails, both, or an infinite number of positions in between.

-=-=-=-=-==-=

Minimal Physical Activity Prolongs Life

Using a unique data collection methodology, researchers have determined that even a minimal amount of physical activity prolongs life. In this recent study, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers had volunteers, aged 70-82 years old, drink water containing two harmless isotopes, oxygen-18 and hydrogen-2. Oxygen-18 is eliminated from the body in water, while hydrogen-2 is eliminated not only in water but also in carbon dioxide, which is produced during energy expenditure. So, by measuring levels of water and carbon dioxide leaving the body, the researchers were able to get accurate readings of daily energy expenditure.
Past research has linked vigorous exercise to health and longevity, and opinion dominated that a certain minimal level of physical activity was required to get the effect. This new study, however, using a highly focused method of measurement that didn’t rely upon the self-reports of participants, found that over the six year period for which records were analysed, mortality rates were inversely proportional to energy expenditure. This result held both at the very lowest level of physical activity and at the very highest. There was about a six hundred calorie a day difference in energy expenditure between the least active third and the most active third of the participants. Expending those extra six hundred calories reduced the chances of dying by sixty nine percent. Six hundred calories is about two hours of activity which, according to the report, could be most any activity, washing dishes, mowing the lawn, or even puttering and standing around.

Any Level of Physical Activity Helps Prolong Life
Any kind of exercise will help extend your life, say researchers who used a sophisticated test to arrive at that conclusion.

"There are plenty of reports out there saying that self-reported exercise like running or jogging is beneficial," said lead researcher Todd M. Manini, an exercise physiologist at the U.S. National Institute on Aging. "We wanted to see if just usual daily activity had a protective value."

His team's six-year study of 302 people between 70 and 82 years of age found that any sort of energy expenditure through physical activity was associated with a lower risk of death.

That finding, published in the July 12 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is not entirely surprising. Organizations such as the American Heart Association have long said that some physical activity is better than none. What was unusual about this study was the exquisitely detailed measurements used to determine levels of physical activity, Manini said.

In the study, the researchers had volunteers drink water containing two harmless isotopes, oxygen-18 and hydrogen-2. Oxygen-18 is eliminated from the body in water, while hydrogen-2 is eliminated not only in water but also in carbon dioxide, which is produced during energy expenditure. So, by measuring levels of water and carbon dioxide leaving the body, the researchers were able to get accurate readings of daily energy expenditure.

"The technique has been around for use in humans for 20 years," Manini said. "It is kind of expensive for a large-scale study, and also requires special expertise."

Following the participants for six years, the researchers found that death rates went down as daily energy expenditure went up. In fact, seniors in the highest third of daily energy expenditure had a 69 percent lower risk of dying than those in the lowest third.

"The study doesn't tell you what the people did -- just the quantity of energy expended," Manini said. But it didn't seem to matter if energy was expended in daily chores or a workout at the gym. "Like other studies, we asked people what they did," Manini said. "There was no difference with or without structured exercise."

People in the highest third of expended energy were more likely to work for pay and walk two flights of stairs a day, he said. They burned an average of 600 calories more a day than those in the lowest third, he said.

That 600 calories represents "about two hours of activity," Manini said. "It doesn't have to be a certain activity. It can include washing dishes, vacuuming and sweeping, as well as structured exercise."

"We were quite surprised to find this effect with a relatively small number of participants," said co-researcher Dr. James Everhart, chief of the epidemiology and clinical trials branch of the U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. "When we started talking about it, maybe 10 years ago, we thought we would need twice as many participants to show an effect."

The study "has objectively shown that energy use is associated with a lower risk of dying," Everhart said.

It's the finding on the type of energy use deemed necessary that will interest many people who want to prolong their lives, but not undertake an intensive exercise program. The American Heart Association -- which officially recommends at least 30 minutes of brisk activity every day -- suggests a number of ways to achieve that goal without actually exercising. These include simple things such as pushing a lawnmower rather than riding one, walking the dog, parking on the far side of the shopping center and walking to the store, and even standing rather than sitting while talking on the telephone.

Link: http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/health/feeds/hscout/2006/07/11/hscout533736.html

-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-

Doctors Declare Salt Unsafe

The American Medical Association (AMA) is urging the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to revoke the "generally recognized as safe" status of salt with the aim of reducing sodium intake throughout America in an effort to reduce cardiovascular disease—the number one killer in America. Most salt intake occurs through dining outside the home and the AMA hopes that an FDA pronouncement will encourage restaurants to significantly lower the use of salt in their menus. Their aim is to reduce overall salt intake by one-half within ten years.

Source:

Link: http://www.news-medical.net/?id=18434

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Meditation Improved Insulin Levels

Heart patients who practiced Transcendental Meditation in addition to following their doctors’ traditional prescription of diet, exercise and medication showed an improvement in insulin function, according to a study conducted at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and reported in Archives of Internal Medicine. As in previous research, this study showed that meditation also lowered blood pressure. The current study, funded by a grant from the National Center for Alternative and Complementary Medicine and the National Center for Research Resources, is the first to demonstrate an effect of meditation upon insulin levels. The researchers are uncertain at to the basis for this effect, but they speculated that the most likely mechanism is that meditation decreases the body’s stress response, possibly by lowering blood levels of the 'fight or flight' hormone cortisol.

Source:

Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13281478/

-=-=-=-===-=-=

Things you don't know but maybe should

  THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW BUT PROBABLY DON'T

  1 . Money isn't made out of paper, it's made out of cotton.

  2. The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp (marijuana) paper.

  3. The dot over the letter i is called a "tittle".

  4. A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down

 continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.

  5. Susan Lucci is the daughter of Phyllis Diller.

  6. 40% of McDonald's profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.

  7. 315 entries in Webster's 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.

  8. The 'spot' on 7UP comes from its inventor, who had red eyes. He was

 albino.

  9. On average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents, daily.

  10. Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine are brother and sister.

  11. Chocolate affects a dog's heart and nervous system; a few ounces will

 kill a small sized dog.

  12. Orcas (killer whales) kill sharks by torpedoing up into the shark's

 stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode.

  13. Most lipstick contains fish scales (eeww).

  14. Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear

 pants.

  15. Ketchup was sold in the1830's as medicine.

  16. Upper and lower case letters are named 'upper' and 'lower' because in

 the time when all original print had to be set in individual letters, the

 'upper case' letters were stored in the case on top of the case that

 stored the smaller, 'lower case' letters.

  17. Leonardo DA Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other

 at the same time hence, multi-tasking was invented.

  18. Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II

 were made of wood.

  19. There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.

  20. The name Wendy was made up for the book Peter Pan; there was never a

 recorded Wendy before!

  21. There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with: orange, purple,

 and silver!

  22. Leonardo Da Vinci invented scissors. Also, it took him 10 years to

 paint Mona Lisa's lips.

  23. A tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion will make it instantly go mad

 and sting itself to death.

  24. The mask used by Michael Myers in the original "Halloween" was a

 Captain Kirk's mask painted white.

  25. If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have

 $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being

 able to make change for a dollar (good to know.)

  26. By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you can't sink in

 quicksand (and you thought this list was completely useless.)

  27. The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law, which

 stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your

 thumb.

  28. The first product Motorola started to develop was a record player for

 automobiles. At that time, the most known player on the market was the

 Victrola, so they called themselves Motorola.

  29. Celery has negative calories! It takes more calories to eat a piece

 of celery than the celery has in it to begin with. It's the same with

 apples!

  30. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying!

  31. The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.

  32. Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most

 often stolen from Public Libraries.

  33. Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space

 because passing wind in a space suit damages it. I NEED TO REMEMBER THIS.

  34. George Carlin said it best about Martha Stewart. "Boy, I feel a lot

 safer now that she's behind bars. O. J. Simpson and Kobe Bryant are still

 walking around; Osama Bin Laden too, but they take the ONE woman in

 America willing to cook, clean, and work in the yard, and they haul her

 fanny off to jail."

-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Chocolate Improves Brain Power

Eating milk chocolate improves the ability to recall verbal and visual material, according to research conducted at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia. Subjects consumed either milk chocolate, dark chocolate, carob, or nothing fifteen minutes prior to a computer assisted test of brain function on  a variety of tasks. Milk chocolate produced the greatest improvement in test scores. Eating dark chocolate, followed by milk, also produced improvements.

Dr. Bryan Raudenbush, the project scientist, explained that that some nutrients in food aid in glucose release and increased blood flow, which may augment cognitive performance. Chocolate seems to be one of those nutrients that has this effect.

Link: http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/05/24/chocolate.brain.reut/index.html

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-===-=-=-=-=-=-

Five Servings of Fruit Contain Many Blessings

We’ve heard it often, to eat plenty of fruit. Three recent studies have demonstrated additional reasons for doing so.  Examining past studies involving over two hundred thousand patients revealed, in a report published in the British medical journal Lancet, that those who ate at least three servings of fruit daily had significantly fewer strokes than those who ate less fruit. In another study, high intake of fruits and vegetables was associated with less risk of Alzheimer’s, and less evidence of cognitive decline in the elderly years. Finally, a study conducted at the University of Montreal and published in the International Journal of Cancer, demonstrated that a diet rich in fruits was associated with significantly less cancer of the pancreas.

Five Servings of Fruits and Vegetables Dip Stroke Risk

LONDON, Jan. 26 - Consuming a diet rich in fruits and vegetables may significantly reduce the risk of stroke, researchers here reported.

A meta-analysis of eight studies with data from more than 250,000 adults, reported in the Jan. 28 issue of The Lancet, found that people who ate more than five servings of fruits and vegetables daily reduced their stroke risk by 26% (95% CI: 21-31%) compared with people who ate less than three servings of fruits and vegetables daily.

This welcome news comes at the end of week in which two popular icons of healthy eating -- soy protein and omega-3 fatty acids -- failed to prove their preventive claims.

A scientific statement from the American Heart Association said soy protein and isoflavones have no significant benefit for LDL, HDL, and triglycerides. Nor, the AHA said, does soy protein lower blood pressure.

Omega-3 fatty acids, meanwhile, don’t reduce the risk of cancer in humans, according to a study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, although no one attacked their heart-healthy credentials.

But the well-worn admonition to “eat your vegetables” once again proved to be solid advice, according to Feng He, Ph.D., and colleagues of St. George’s University here.

Moreover, the data suggested a dose response -- people who consumed three to five servings of fruits and vegetables daily had an 11% (95% CI: 3-17%) reduction in stroke risk compared with those eating less than three servings of fruits and vegetables every day.

Patrick Breaux, M.D., a consulting cardiologist at the Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute in New Orleans, said the study results offer “just the type of robust numbers that clinicians can use when trying to educate patients about the need to substitute healthy nutrition for the type of hollow calories that come from fast-food diets.”

Dr. Breaux, who was not involved in the study, said the findings fit well with the current recommendations from the AHA, which has been emphasizing the value of diets rich in “fruits, vegetables and nuts.”

The meta-analysis included data from 257,551 people, with an average follow-up of 13 years. During the follow-up, there were 4,917 stroke events reported.

A subgroup analysis confirmed that diets rich in fruits and vegetables reduced risk of both hemorrhagic and ischemic strokes in people who consumed more than five servings daily. Only the ischemic strokes were reduced in people who consumed three to five servings daily.

In a commentary in The Lancet that accompanied the article, Lyn M. Steffen, Ph.D., M.P.H, R.D., an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in Minneapolis wrote that American adults on average eat only 3.75 servings of fruits and vegetables daily.

That low intake is, she wrote, “a major modifiable risk factor contributing to the burden of ill health.”

Primary source: The Lancet
Source reference:
He FJ et al “Fruit and vegetable consumption and stroke: meta-analysis of cohort studies” Lancet 2006;367:320-26

Additional source: The Lancet
Source reference:
Steffen LM “Eat your fruits and vegetables” Lancet 2006; 367:278-79

http://www.medpagetoday.com/tbprint.cfm?tbid=2561

Also:

Lose Weight, Stay Active, Prevent Alzheimer's-Studies

Mon Jul 19, 2004 03:42 PM ET

By Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Losing weight, eating more fruits and vegetables and exercising your brain and body sounds like a formula to prevent heart disease, but it is also a way to prevent Alzheimer's, researchers said on Monday.

Midlife obesity, high cholesterol and high blood pressure appear to affect the brain as well as the heart, they said.

"There are a variety of lifestyle factors that people can engage in that will reduce their risk of cognitive decline," said Dr. Marilyn Albert, chair of the Alzheimer's Association's medical and scientific council.

"The brain is much more plastic than we thought," Albert added in an interview.

"It has more capacity to renew and regenerate. ... We have to tell people that they need to think about their cognitive health in a way that they typically thought about their physical health."

Early is better, she added. "The pathology of Alzheimer's disease develops over 10 years, possibly longer. People should start as early in life as possible."

Several studies presented to a meeting sponsored by the Alzheimer's Association in Philadelphia this week support the contention.

A study in Finland of 1,500 elderly people found that those who were obese in middle age were twice as likely to develop dementia when they got old as those who were of normal weight. For those who also had high cholesterol and high blood pressure in middle age, the risk of dementia was six times higher than those who were not affected.

Another study, of 13,000 women, found that those who ate vegetables such as iceberg lettuce, spinach, broccoli and Brussels sprouts in middle age preserved more of their cognitive abilities as they entered their 70s than women who ate few vegetables.

"Women with the highest average intake of those vegetables appear to experience less cognitive decline," Dr. Jae Hee Kang of Harvard Medical School, told a news conference.

Another study suggested that leisure activities that combine social, mental and physical activity are the most likely to prevent dementia.

Each activity is less important than all of them together, said Laura Fratiglioni of Sweden's Karolinska Institute.

Mental activities such as reading books, doing crossword puzzles or playing bingo can help to prevent mental decline, Albert said. "It should be anything that will push people to encounter something that isn't routine."

An estimated 4.5 million Americans currently have Alzheimer's, and that number is expected to balloon as high as 16 million by 2050 as the baby boom generation ages.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

Also:

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=healthNews&storyID=2005-04-01T172459Z_01_B571635_RTRIDST_0_HEALTH-CANCER-DIET-DC.XML

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Time slows down during Intense Attention

Maybe time does fly when we are having fun. Canadian researchers had subjects attempt to solve a “Where’s Waldo” type of puzzle, trying to locate instances of a specific image hidden in a complex set of imagery. After solving the task, subjects were to estimate the amount of time it took to do so. The results showed that the more difficult the task, requiring paying greater attention to details, the shorter the time estimate given. The estimates varied proportionally to the degree of difficulty, providing a confident demonstration of the role of attention in the perception of the passage of time.

Source:

Time Flies when having fun

UPI

Canadian researchers said they have proven that time really does fly when a person is having fun -- or, at least, when one's attention is engaged.

Researchers at the University of Alberta devised a test that required subjects to find specific items in various images -- a sort of "Where's Waldo?" activity, they said. However, before the subjects started the test, they were told that once they had completed it they would be asked to estimate how much time had passed during their test.

The tests contained seven levels of difficulty. In some cases, the items were easy to find because they were different colors, or the items were set among just one or two others. In the more difficult tests, the items were placed among many similar looking items, or they did not even exist in the image, at all.

"The harder and harder the search tasks were, the smaller and smaller the estimates became," the researchers said. "The results were super clean -- we have created a new and powerful paradigm to get at the link between time and attention."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-

Some People are More Grateful than Others

Research has demonstrated the health benefits of the emotion of gratitude. We now also have evidence that the attitude of gratitude is a habit shown more by some people than others.

Questionnaires provided to several hundred college students at Southern Methodist University and the University of California at Davis, and over a thousand adults via the internet, measured several aspects of gratitude. One analysis of the resulting data, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, showed that people differ in how readily they experience and express gratitude and that their friends notice and confirm these self-reports. Another analysis revealed that those with a more grateful disposition experience more positive emotions generally, feel greater well-being, demonstrate more prosocial behaviors and traits, and express more religiousness and spirituality. Another analysis of the data showed that the more a person had a grateful disposition, the less envy and materialism did the person have, reinforcing the conclusion that gratitude may be associated with greater degrees of spirituality.

For more information, download the original publication, by clicking here!

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-===-=

Scientists Create Life in the Lab

You can create a chicken from an egg, but to get the egg, you need a chicken. So how do scientists create life from scratch? As it turns out, several laboratories are attempting to create synthetic micro-organisms with specially designed genes for manifesting certain desired characteristics. Having come to understand the DNA code, scientists create artificial DNA coded for these characteristics and now are attempting to create life forms around these DNA molecules.

Robert Holt, for example, head of sequencing for the Genome Science Centre at the University of British Columbia, is one scientist who has made great advances on this goal. His approach is to use high-voltage electricity to essentially zap open a host bacteria and slowly infuse it with small pieces of new DNA. Besides the practical uses of designer bacteria, learning to create them will teach scientists a lot about how life forms itself.

 

Source:

Link:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051219.wxlife19/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/

-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Making Choices is Hard Work for Brain

When we’ve become accustomed to getting our rewards in a particular manner, it is hard to explore newer, possibly better, yet potentially more risky alternatives. The grass may seem greener, but maybe it won’t be as tasty.

Researchers can now see this kind of conflict acted out in the brain. Researchers at the University College London sat subjects in front of a row of computerized slot machines. They observed the subjects’ brains as subjects debated staying with a given machine, that was producing a certain amount of winnings, or moving over to another machine on the chance of improving their profits.

The brains showed the effects of this internal debate. According to the report appearing in the journal Nature, when a person would lean toward staying pat, a deep part of the brain, associated with pleasure and reward, would be most active. When the person would move toward changing machines, another part of the brain, more toward the forhead, associated with thinking and rationale, would be more active. The brain demonstration seemed to be like a battle between two sources of energetic, which the researchers likened to the agony we experience when trying to make a decision.

Battle in the Brain: How We Make Choices
If you've ever had a headache while trying to choose between a sure thing and a more risky option with higher rewards, it might be because conflicting parts of your brain are waging war against each other.

A new study found regions in the brain that are active when a person decides whether to exploit a known commodity or explore a potentially better option.

The finding, published in the June 15 issue of the journal Nature, suggests that in order to explore new and potentially rewarding options, the brain must override the desire for immediate profit.

The researchers analyzed study participants' brain activity as they played a gambling game with four animated slot machines. The machines had various reward patterns, and the machine with the highest payout alternated randomly during each session.

After the game, 11 of the 14 the participants reported occasionally trying the different machines to figure out which one currently had the highest payout (exploring), while sticking to their machine when they thought they were on the big money-maker (exploiting).

As the participants were deciding to explore for higher rewards, regions of the brain located behind the forehead and associated with logic became active. If they chose to exploit, regions deeper in the brain associated with pleasure and reward were more active.

"You have logic pitted against these areas that are more associated with pleasure than value," said study co-author Nathaniel Daw of University College London. "Do you want to wait 10 minutes to eat two cookies or eat one cookie now?"

Having that one cookie now caters to the immediate desire for pleasure, but waiting a little while for two cookies may be the more logical option.

"By exploring, you're forgoing the comfortable option in order to do something that might be better in the long run," Daw told LiveScience.

These types of decisions play an important role in an organism's survival ability. For example, should a deer stick to reliable but meager pastures or expose itself to predators in a search for potentially greener grass.

Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13321367/

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Oldest New World Observatory Found in Peru

Archeologists have discovered a four thousand, two hundred year old celestial observatory high in the Peruvian Andes. It is the oldest known observatory in the Americas, about the same age as the stone monuments in Stonehenge. The 20-acre site, called Buena Vista, is about 25 miles inland in the Rio Chillon Valley, just north of Lima. The work is being conducted by the archeologist team of Robert Benfer of the University of Missouri and Bernardino Ojeda of Peru's National Agrarian University.

They know that the building of the observatory occurred three thousand years before the Incan civilization, but know little about the people of those older times. They did confirm that key elements of the observatory structure perfectly align with the rising and setting sun at the time of the equinoxes. Other archaeological material is being discovered at the site, which will help researchers begin to understand this civilization which existed hundreds of years before the time anyone was suspected of living in that region.

Celestial Find at Ancient Andes Site
The discovery in Peru of a 4,200-year-old temple and observatory
pushes back estimates of the rise of an advanced culture in the
Americas.
By Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writer
May 14, 2006

Archeologists working high in the Peruvian Andes have discovered the
oldest known celestial observatory in the Americas — a 4,200-year-old
structure marking the summer and winter solstices that is as old as
the stone pillars of Stonehenge.

The observatory was built on the top of a 33-foot-tall pyramid with
precise alignments and sightlines that provide an astronomical
calendar for agriculture, archeologist Robert Benfer of the University
of Missouri said.

The people who built the observatory — three millenniums before the
emergence of the Incas — are a mystery, but they achieved a level of
art and science that archeologists say they did not know existed in
the region until at least 800 years later.

Among the most impressive finds was a massive clay sculpture — an
ancient version of the modern frowning "sad face" icon flanked by two
animals. The disk, protected from looters beneath thousands of years
of dirt and debris, marked the position of the winter solstice.

"It's really quite a shock to everyone … to see sculptures of that
sophistication coming out of a building of that time period," said
archeologist Richard L. Burger of Yale University's Peabody Museum of
Natural History, who was not involved in the discovery.

The find adds strong evidence to support the recent idea that a
sophisticated civilization developed in South America in the
pre-ceramic era, before the development of fired pottery sometime
after 1500 BC.

Benfer's discovery "pushes the envelope of civilization farther south
and inland from the coast, and adds the important dimension of
astronomy to these ancient folks' way of life," said archeologist
Michael Moseley of the University of Florida, a noted Peru expert.

The 20-acre site, called Buena Vista, is about 25 miles inland in the
Rio Chillon Valley, just north of Lima. "It is on a totally barren,
rock-covered hill looking down on a beautiful fertile valley," said
Benfer, who presented the find last month in Puerto Rico at a meeting
of the Society for American Archeology.

The site is remarkably well preserved, Benfer said, because it rains
in the area only about once a year.

The name of the people who inhabited the region is unknown because
writing did not emerge in the Americas for 2,000 more years. Some
archeologists call them followers of the Kotosh religious tradition.
Others call them late pre-ceramic cultures of the central coast. For
brevity, most simply call them Andeans.

Benfer and archeologist Bernardino Ojeda of Peru's National Agrarian
University have been working at Buena Vista for four years. The site
contains ruins dating from 10,000 years ago to well into the ceramic
era in the first millennium BC.

The large pyramid and a temple occupy about 2 acres near the center of
the site. Radiocarbon dating of cotton and burned twigs found in the
temple's offering pit place its use at about 2200 BC.

That is about 400 years after the first pyramid was built in Egypt and
about the same time that the peoples who would become the Greeks were
settling into the Mediterranean region.

The temple is built of rock that was covered with plaster and painted,
although most of the white and red paint has long since flaked off.

Benfer calls it the Temple of the Fox because a drawing of a fox is
carved inside a painted picture of another animal, probably a llama,
beside each doorway. According to Andean myth, the fox taught people
how to cultivate and irrigate plants.

As the team mapped out the site, Benfer observed that a person
standing in the doorway of the temple and gazing through a small,
flap-covered window behind the altar is aligned with a small head
carved onto a notch of a distant hill. The line had an orientation of
114 degrees from true north, pointing southeast.

Benfer does not normally deal with archeoastronomy — the science of
ancient astronomy — so he contacted a childhood friend, Larry Adkins
of Tustin, and asked him what that angle signified.

Adkins, a physicist who is retired from Rockwell International and who
now teaches astronomy at Cerritos College, told him 114 degrees
pointed the way to sunrise on the Southern Hemisphere's summer
solstice, Dec. 21, the longest day of the year.

"That really got the ball rolling," Adkins said.

The summer solstice marks planting time, as the Rio Chillon begins its
annual flooding, fed by melting ice higher up in the Andes. The
flooding deposits fresh soil on the land, fertilizing the crops and
eliminating the need for manure from domestic animals.

"This was the beginning of flood-plain agriculture," Benfer said. He
thinks fishermen from the coast originally moved to the site to grow
cotton for use in making fishing nets.

The large frowning disk sits near the door to the temple. It is made
of mud plaster and grass and covered with a fine surface of clay.

Benfer speculates that the sculpture represents Pacha Mamma, the most
important god of the Andes. He acknowledges the difficulty of proving
that, however, because the next known sculpture of the mother goddess
does not appear until 800 BC.

"The disk would frown over the sunset on the winter solstice, the last
day of harvest," Benfer said.

Alignments in the temple also pointed to the position at the summer
solstice of a constellation known in Andean culture as the fox, Benfer
said.

Unlike Western constellations, which are outlined by groupings of
stars, some Andean constellations were made from dark areas in the sky
that are gaps in the bright Milky Way.

Scientists once thought that the gaps represented a lack of stars, but
astronomers now know that they are caused by large clouds of dust that
block light from distant stars.

The so-called dark cloud constellation of the fox is well-known today
in the region, but archeoastronomer Anthony Aveni of Colgate
University doubted that it has maintained its shape for four
millenniums.

"He has an alignment. That's neat," Aveni said. But the idea that the
ancients were looking at the same constellation "is a bit of a leap
for me."

Last summer, Benfer's team also partially excavated a second
sculpture, that of a life-sized human figure playing a pipe. The
figure is sitting with its legs sculpted in high relief and hanging
over the edge of one of a series of short platforms that lead down to
what appears to be another temple.

The remaining 18 acres of the site have a variety of buildings, most
of them from later cultures, that include a ceremonial center, stepped
pyramids and what apparently was a residence center for elites. Most
of those have been looted.

Oval houses that probably served as homes for families of commoners
sit across a ravine from the main pyramid.

There were probably other buildings farther down the slopes, Benfer
said, "but the Chillon River removes everything from time to time."

Evidence of pottery indicates that the site was inhabited for
centuries, but it is not yet clear whether or how it was eventually
abandoned.

"There were people in the valley at the time of the Spanish Conquest,
but they were of several ethnic groups," Benfer said.

That suggests that the sophisticated civilization was eventually
replaced by small bands of farmers who immigrated from various areas.



http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-sci-observatory14may14,0,2642598,full.story?coll=la-nav-specials-911