Material submitted to Psi Research December 1

Listening, and especially playing, music, especially Mozart, seems to quicken some aspects of human development—that’s the “Mozart Effect.” Attunement to the Creative Forces prospers growth, might be the way Cayce would explain it. If music were designed according to a spiritual system, such music might be especially powerful. Mozart’s music was just that!

In Mozart the Freemason: The Masonic Influence on his Musical Genius (Inner Traditions), musicologist Jacques Henry analyses newly discovered documents that reveal the profound influence that Freemasonry had upon Mozart’s music. According to the author’s interpretation of these documents, Mozart “constructed his Masonic compositions by creating auditory correspondences to the symbols present in the rituals….allowing him to create music that would lead the listener into a harmony that transcended earthly existence.”

“If you’re happy and you know it, pat your head.” That’s how “Happy,” a female elephant at the Bronx Zoo demonstrated self-awareness. She was trained to tap a red cross with her trunk. Then, after a researcher painted a red cross on her forehead and placed her in front of an eight foot tall mirror, she reached up with her trunk and tapped the target. Thus she passed the “mirror test,” the industry standard for testing self-awareness in animals. Once thought to be the exclusive burden of humans, self-awareness has thus been discovered in chimpanzees and dolphins. Now elephants have joined this exclusive club. According to the report of this research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, other elephants in the study gave indications of self-awareness in front of the mirror, such as by opening the mouth widely and peering within its reflection in the mirror.

Mirror Test Implies Elephants Self-Aware

WASHINGTON -- If you're Happy and you know it, pat your head. That, in a peanut shell, is how a 34-year-old female Asian elephant in the Bronx Zoo showed researchers that pachyderms can recognize themselves in a mirror _ complex behavior observed in only a few other species.

The test results suggest elephants _ or at least Happy _ are self-aware. The ability to distinguish oneself from others had been shown only in humans, chimpanzees and, to a limited extent, dolphins.

That self-recognition may underlie the social complexity seen in elephants, and could be linked to the empathy and altruism that the big-brained animals have been known to display, said researcher Diana Reiss, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which manages the Bronx Zoo.

In a 2005 experiment, Happy faced her reflection in an 8-by-8-foot mirror and repeatedly used her trunk to touch an "X" painted above her eye. The elephant could not have seen the mark except in her reflection. Furthermore, Happy ignored a similar mark, made on the opposite side of her head in paint of an identical smell and texture, that was invisible unless seen under black light.

"It seems to verify for us she definitely recognized herself in the mirror," said Joshua Plotnik, one of the researchers behind the study. Details appear this week on the Web site of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Still, two other zoo elephants, Maxine and Patty, failed to touch either the visible or invisible "X" marks on their heads in two runs of the experiment. But all three adult female elephants at the zoo behaved while in front of the jumbo mirror in ways that suggested they recognized themselves, said Plotnik, a graduate student at Emory University in Atlanta.

Maxine, for instance, used the tip of her trunk to probe the inside of her mouth while facing the mirror. She also used her trunk to slowly pull one ear toward the mirror, as if she were using the reflection to investigate herself. The researchers reported not seeing that type of behavior at any other time.

"Doing things in front of the mirror: that spoke volumes to me that they were definitely recognizing themselves," said Janine Brown, a research physiologist and elephant expert at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington. She was not connected with the study but expressed interest in conducting follow-up research.

Gordon Gallup, the psychologist who devised the mark test in 1970 for use on chimps, called the results "very strong and very compelling." But he said additional studies on both elephants and dolphins were needed.

"They really need to be replicated in order to be able to say with any assurance that dolphins and elephants indeed as species are capable of recognizing themselves. Replication is the cornerstone of science," said Gallup, a professor at the State University of New York at Albany, who provided advice to the researchers.

The three Bronx Zoo elephants did not display any social behavior in front of the mirror, suggesting that each recognized the reflected image as itself and not another elephant. Many other animals mistake their mirror reflections for other creatures.

That divergent species such as elephants and dolphins should share the ability to recognize themselves as distinct from others suggests the characteristic evolved independently, according to the study.

Elephants and mammoths, now extinct, split from the last common ancestor they shared with mastodons, also extinct, about 24 million years ago. In a separate study also appearing this week on the scientific journal's Web site, researchers report finding fossil evidence of an older species that links modern elephants to even older ancestors.

The likely "missing link" is a 27 million-year-old jaw fossil, found in Eritrea.

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/30/AR2006103000881.html

FRIDAY, Oct. 27 (HealthDay News) -- Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest pachyderm of them all?

U.S. scientists say they've found the first evidence that elephants can recognize themselves in mirrors, which means they join humans, apes and dolphins in a select group of species that have that ability.

The study found female elephants closely inspecting their reflections in a mirror and apparently not mistaking it for another elephant.

The finding, by researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, suggests convergent evolution with humans.

Self-recognition in a mirror is believed to be related to empathic tendencies (being able to identify and understand others' feelings) and the ability of an individual to distinguish oneself from others, a characteristic that evolved independently in several branches of animals, the scientists said.

Due to elephants' social complexity, it had previously been predicted that they would be able to recognize themselves in mirrors.

"We see highly complex behaviors such as self-awareness and self-other distinction in intelligent animals with well-established social systems," researcher Joshua Plotnik, of the Yerkes Center, said in a prepared statement.

"The social complexity of the elephant, its well-known altruistic behavior and, of course, its huge brain, made the elephant a logical candidate species for testing in front of a mirror," Plotnik said.

This study included three female elephants at the Bronx Zoo in New York who were exposed to a jumbo-sized mirror eight feet high by eight feet wide. When they were in front of the mirror, the elephants tested the image by making repetitive body movements and inspecting themselves, such as putting their trunks inside their mouths, a part of their body they usually can't see.

The elephants did not react socially to their images and did not seem to mistake their reflection for that of other elephants.

"Elephants have been tested in front of mirrors before, but previous studies used relatively small mirrors kept out of the elephants' reach. This study is the first to test the animals in front of a huge mirror they could touch, rub against and try to look behind," Plotnik said.

The study appears in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

BEIJING, Oct. 31 (Xinhuanet) -- A study of three female elephants at the Bronx Zoo suggests pachyderms could be included in an elite group of animals -- chimpanzees, humans and perhaps dolphins -- that recognize their image when looking at a mirror.

Happy, a 34-year-old Asian elephant, faced her reflection in an 8-by-8-foot mirror in a 2005 experiment and repeatedly used her trunk to touch an "X" painted above her eye. She could not have seen the mark except in her reflection. And she did not respond to a similar mark above her other eye that was invisible except under a black light.

"It seems to verify for us she definitely recognized herself in the mirror," said Joshua Plotnik, one of the researchers behind the study.

Two other zoo elephants, Maxine and Patty, failed the touch test in two tries at the experiment. But all three adult female elephants at the zoo behaved while in front of the jumbo mirror in ways that suggested they recognized themselves, said Plotnik, a graduate student at Emory University in Atlanta.

Maxine used the tip of her trunk to probe the inside of her mouth while facing the mirror. She also used her trunk to slowly pull one ear toward the mirror, as if she were using the reflection to investigate herself. The researchers reported not seeing that type of behavior at any other time.

A psychologist who devised the mark test in 1970 for use on chimps, called the results "very strong and very compelling." But he said additional studies on both elephants and dolphins were needed.

"They really need to be replicated in order to be able to say with any assurance that dolphins and elephants indeed as species are capable of recognizing themselves. Replication is the cornerstone of science," said Gordan Gallup, a professor at the State University of New York at Albany, who provided advice to the researchers.

Details of the study appear this week on the website of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Consider the saying, “You are what you eat.” In the Cayce readings, there is plenty to suggest that the quality of mindfulness that we bring to our eating will greatly affect the qualities that we obtain from the food we are eating. A recent study demonstrated that eating slowly led to greater emotional satisfaction even though less food was consumed.

In the study, conducted at the University of Rhode Island and reported in the North American Association for the Study of Obesity, volunteer female college students ate pasta to the point of “comfortable fullness.” In one condition, the researcher instructed the women to eat as fast as possible. In the second condition, the instructions were to eat slowly, putting the fork down with each bite.

Afterwards, researchers calculated that the first group consumed an average of six hundred and forty six calories in nine minutes while the second group consumed an average of five hundred and seventy nine calories in twenty nine minutes. Interviews with the women an hour later indicated that the fast eaters were now less satisfied and more hungry than the slow eaters. Eat slow, eat less, enjoy it more—that seems to be the motto.

If you're concerned about gaining weight over the upcoming holiday season, consider eating more slowly and you might consume less, a study suggests.

Diet experts have been touting this advice for years, and now nutrition scientists at the University of Rhode Island have some new data to back it up.

They had 30 normal-weight, college-age women come into a laboratory for lunch on two separate occasions. Each time, the women were offered a huge plate of pasta with tomato-vegetable sauce and grated parmesan cheese, plus a glass of water.

They were asked to eat until the point of comfortable fullness. On one occasion, they were instructed to eat as quickly as they could; on the other occasion they ate slowly and put down their spoons between bites.

They did not know the food and water was weighed before and after the meal to determine the amount consumed.

•When eating more slowly, they had an average of 579 calories in about 29 minutes.

"They ate 67 calories more in nine minutes than they did in 29 minutes," says lead researcher Kathleen Melanson, director of the university's Energy Metabolism Laboratory. "If you add that up over three meals a day, that's a big difference in calories."

Upon completion of the meal and an hour afterward, the women were less satisfied and hungrier when eating quickly compared with when they ate slowly, she says. They said they enjoyed the meal more when they were taking their time.

Not surprisingly, the women drank more water when they ate more slowly, and researchers are doing a follow-up study on whether that factor contributed to their feeling of fullness.

One way to help control calorie intake during Thanksgiving "is to slow down and savor and enjoy your food more," Melanson says.

"Put down the fork between bites and take time to have a conversation and linger over the meal," she says.

But Barbara Rolls, a nutrition professor at Pennsylvania State University, says another study showed that people who paused between bites actually consumed more food during a meal.

"Eating rate is hard to change, so eat at a pace that maximizes your enjoyment of the food," Rolls says. "If slowing down and savoring the flavors and textures of foods leaves you feeling more satisfied, go for it."

Still, there are reasons not to stuff yourself too quickly at the Thanksgiving feast.

"Satiety signals take time to be experienced, so after you have eaten an amount of food that should be satisfying, you may want to wait 15 to 20 minutes before deciding if you are still hungry," Rolls says.

Although the idea that eating slower inhibits appetite has been around for decades, there was no scientific evidence. Now the first study to evaluate the claim finds it to be true.

“It started in about 1972 as a hypothesis that eating slowly would allow the body time for the development of satiety [fullness] and we would eat less,” said Kathleen Melanson, a researcher from the University of Rhode Island. “Since then we’ve heard it everywhere and it has become common knowledge. But no studies had been conducted to prove it.”

The study, led by Melanson, gave 30 college-aged-women large plates of pasta and told to eat as much as they wished.

When they were asked to eat quickly, they consumed 646 calories in nine minutes. But when they were promoted to slow down and chew the food 15 to 20 times, their calorie consumption was about 579 calories in 29 minutes.

“Satiety signals clearly need time to develop,” Melanson said. “Not only did the women take in fewer calories when they ate more slowly, they had a greater feeling of satiety at meal completion and 60 minutes afterwards, which strongly suggests benefits to eating more slowly.”

The results were reported at the annual meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity in October.

In three years, the percentage of Americans who doubt the existence of God has increased from thirty four per cent to forty two per cent. On the other hand, this Harris Poll also found that God’s existence was an absolute certainty in the minds of ninety three per cent of Born Again Christians, seventy six percent of Protestants, sixty four per cent of Catholics and thirty per cent of Jews.

Nearly half of Americans are not sure God exists, according to a poll that also found divisions among the public on whether God is male or female or whether God has a human form and has control over events.

The survey conducted by Harris Poll found that 42 percent of US adults are not "absolutely certain" there is a God compared to 34 percent who felt that way when asked the same question three years ago.

Among the various religious groups, 76 percent of Protestants, 64 percent of Catholics and 30 percent of Jews said they are "absolutely certain" there is a God while 93 percent of Christians who describe themselves as "Born Again" feel certain God exists.

When questioned on whether God is male or female, 36 percent of respondents said they think God is male, 37 percent said neither male nor female and 10 percent said "both male and female."

Asked whether God has a human form, 41 percent said they think of God as "a spirit or power than can take on human form but is not inherently human."

As to whether God controls events on Earth, 29 percent believe that to be the case while 44 percent said God "observes but does not control what happens on Earth".

Having the thought of money cross one’s mind has a surprising effect moments later on how a person will respond to an interpersonal situation, tending to make a person more solitary, self-reliant, competitive and expecting the same from others.

A series of experiments involving staged human interactions, (ala Borat!) tested whether or not a momentary exposure to the concept of money (such as a mounted poster showing a large dollar bill) would affect how people would respond to others. Unwitting subjects who were presented with challenges and given opportunities to ask for help were much less likely to ask for help if the dollar poster was on the wall in the room. Subjects working on a task were less likely to respond to a request for assistance by a person entering the room if the dollar poster was present.

Sources:

Just the mere thought of money can turn a person selfish, so that he helps others less often and prefers to play alone, a new study shows.

In a series of nine experiments, researchers found that money enhanced people's motivation to achieve their own goals and degraded their behavior toward others. The concept of money, they suggest, makes a person feel more self-sufficient and thus more apt to stand alone.

The scientists said the study had nothing to do with making a person feel wealthy. When real or fake money, or even a photo of cash, was placed in sight of participants, they became selfish.

The results could explain why the topic of money can be so detrimental to a couple’s lasting bond.

“In our experiments, the people who are reminded of money really worked hard toward their own goals. But that might not be conducive to a good interpersonal relationship,” said study leader Kathleen Vohs of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

The scientists split 50 undergraduate students into two groups. One was primed with the concept of money; other served as a control and was not primed. A few methods were used to get the participants thinking about money: In some experiments, a stack of play Monopoly money was within a subject’s peripheral view, or a subject would unscramble word phrases dealing with money, while in others a participant would sit in front of a computer screensaver showing pictures of floating money [image].

The subjects were unaware the money was even a part of the experiments as they filled out unrelated questionnaires.

Then scientists gave the subjects a challenging problem to solve with the experimenter letting them know he was available for help if needed. Sure enough, the money subjects persisted much longer before asking for help.

In one test, a participant sat in a lab filling out a questionnaire when a supposed student walked into the room and said, "Can you come over here and help me?" She explained that she was an undergraduate student and needed help coding data sheets, each of which would take five minutes. Some of the participants didn’t help at all, Vohs said. The control group volunteered an average of 42.5 minutes of their time, whereas the money group gave about 25 minutes.

Another experiment gave participants the opportunity to lend a helping hand in a situation requiring no skills. In a staged accident, a random person walked through a room where a participant sat filling out a questionnaire, and spilled a bunch of pencils. The money participants picked up far fewer pencils than the controls.

To understand how money affects interpersonal relationships, the scientists told each participant they would have a conversation to acquaint themselves with another participant. While the experimenter went to retrieve the other subject, the participant was to set up two chairs for the engagement. The subjects in the money group put more physical distance between themselves and new acquaintances compared with control subjects.

When choosing between two activities—such as an in-home catered dinner versus four personal cooking lessons—the money-primed subjects chose individually focused activities more often. And when given the option of working with another participant or working alone on an advertising project, fewer money subjects chose teamwork.

The results, detailed in Nov. 17 issue of the journal Science, showed no differences in terms of socioeconomic status or gender.

A take-home message, Vohs explained, is that “cooperation really goes down the drain when money is an issue.”

For business managers, this could translate into keeping the idea of money in the background.

“In a lot of businesses, we train our MBA’s to work in teams," Vohs said. "If the team has a sales goal, then to the extent that money is really a big topic to that team, you’re likely to see that cooperation is going to be reduced.”

And for couples who want to work as a team, she said, taking money out of the equation can only help.

Thoughts of money lead to selfish acts, study finds

A team of psychologists has discovered why money can't buy happiness.

Pictures of dollar bills, fantasies of wealth and even wads of Monopoly money arouse feelings of self-sufficiency that result in selfish and often antisocial behavior, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science.

All it took to discourage college students from contributing to a University Student Fund were 15 short phrases such as "a high-paying salary." Those primed by money-related phrases donated an average of 77 cents, compared with $1.34 for students exposed to neutral phrases like "it is cold outside."

"The mere presence of money changes people," said Kathleen Vohs, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota and lead author of the study.

Money makes it possible for people to achieve their goals without having to ask friends or acquaintances for help. Therefore, Vohs and her colleagues theorized that even subtle reminders of money would inspire people to be self-reliant — and to expect such behavior from others.

A series of nine experiments confirmed their hypothesis. For example, students who played Monopoly and then were asked to envision a future with great wealth picked up fewer dropped pencils for a fellow student than those who were asked to contemplate a hand-to-mouth existence.

In another experiment, students spent six minutes completing a questionnaire on a computer before a screensaver suddenly appeared. Students who saw fish swimming across their screens later moved their chairs an average of 2 feet, 8 inches from a compatriot, while those who saw currency floating underwater stayed more than 3 feet, 10 inches away.

Money also influenced how people said they preferred to spend their leisure time. A poster of bills and coins prompted students to favor a solitary social activity, such as private cooking lessons, while students sitting across from posters of seascapes and gardens were more likely to opt for a group dinner.

"Money changes people's motivations," said coauthor Nicole Mead, a psychology graduate student at Florida State University. "They are less focused on other people. In this sense, money can be a barrier to social intimacy."

Perhaps their next study will examine whether money is indeed the root of all evil.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-money18nov18,1,1400734.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

Research into inter-species hybridization continues, in the quest to find cures for various medical maladies. Researchers in London will combine human and cow egg cells to produce an embryo that can be cloned to produce many more embryos for stem cell research. The researchers also plan to duplicate this investigation using rabbit egg cells. The hope is to learn how to produce human stem cells without having to begin with human eggs. The fear is the boundary between human and animal will be lost.

UK scientists have applied for permission to create embryos by fusing human DNA with cow eggs.

Researchers from Newcastle University and Kings College, London, have asked the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for a three-year licence.

The hybrid human-bovine embryos would be used for stem cell research and would not be allowed to develop for more than a few days.

Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris - a member of the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee - said: "If human benefit can be derived by perfecting therapeutic cloning techniques or from research into subsequently-derived stem cells, then it would actually be immoral to prevent it just because of a 'yuck' factor."

Stem cells are the body's master cells and five-day-old embryos are packed with them - each with the potential to turn into any tissue in the body.

It is this ability which scientists want to harness to treat diseases such as Parkinson's Disease, strokes and Alzheimer's Disease.

To do that, they say they need to have access to thousands of embryos for research.

The problem is that human eggs for research are in short supply and to obtain them women have to undergo surgery.

They would insert human DNA into a cow's egg which has had its genetic material removed, and then create an embryo by the same technique that produced Dolly the Sheep.

The resulting embryo would be 99.9% human; the only bovine element would be DNA outside the nucleus of the cell.

It would, though, technically be a chimera - a mixing of two distinct species into one.

The aim would be to extract stem cells from the embryo when it is six days old, before destroying it.

The quality and the viability of stem cells would then be checked to see if the technique had worked.

The scientists also plan to examine the way the cells are reprogrammed after fusion to see if there are useful processes they could replicate in the laboratory.

Lead researcher Dr Lyle Armstrong said: "If we can learn from the egg cell how to make embryonic stem cells without having to use an animal egg at all then some day we may be able to cure diseases such as Parkinson's disease, or better still some of the age-related diseases which are creating such a burden on society."

Dr Stephen Minger, from King's College London, said: "The current state of the technology is such that literally hundreds of human ooctyes (eggs) from young women will be required to generate a single human embryonic stem cell line.

"Therefore we consider it more appropriate to use non-human oocytes from livestock as a surrogate.

"We feel that the development of disease-specific human embryonic stem cell lines from individuals suffering from genetic forms of neurodegenerative disorders will stimulate both basic research and the development of new medicines to treat these horrific brain diseases."

Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, head of developmental genetics, National Institute for Medical Research, said: "This is a very rational step: to learn what you can using animal eggs, which are readily obtainable, before moving on to valuable human eggs when or if this becomes necessary."

Calum MacKellar, from the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, said the research undermined the distinction between animals and humans.

He said: "In the history of humankind, animals and human species have been separated.

"In this kind of procedure, you are mixing at a very intimate level animal eggs and human chromosomes, and you may begin to undermine the whole distinction between humans and animals.

Scientists to create 'frankenbunny' in big research leap

Scientists are planning to create a "frankenrabbit" by fusing together human cells with a rabbit egg.

It is hoped the "chimeric" embryos, which would be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit, could lead to breakthroughs in stem cell research which could one day cure diseases such as Alzheimer's or spinal cord injury.

The embryos will allow scientists to perfect stem cell creation techniques without using human eggs.

"If we learn how to do this with animal eggs, we should be able to have more success with human eggs, and I'd much rather know that if we were going to ask women to donate eggs that we were very likely to get stem cells as a result," said Chris Shaw, at the Institute of Psychiatry.

"We know this is a huge challenge after Dr Hwang in South Korea failed to get stem cells despite having 2,000 human eggs."

Teams in London, Edinburgh and Newcastle are to submit application to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority this month, requesting licences to create embryos that will be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit or cow.

The HFEA is encouraging the applications after legal advice. The embryos will be allowed to grow for only 14 days, at which point they will be cells smaller than a pinhead.

In an ongoing research program on mind over matter, scientists are learning how to connect a person’s thought-generated brain events to mechanical devices, thus empowering a person to create physical effects in the environment by mind power alone, according to various news reports.

A London man paralyzed by a spinal stem injury, for example, was able to learn how to use an implanted brain sensor to move a computer cursor and to control a robot. In another instance, an American veteran who had lost both arms was fitted with a prosthetic arm activated by thought. The process involved grafting nerve tissue to connect brain events with the electronic sensors within the robotic arm. This person can use his arm for paintng, climbing, and hugging his son.

Paralyzed Man Moves Computer Cursor Through Thought
LONDON -- A paralyzed man using a new brain sensor has been able to move a computer cursor, open e-mail and control a robotic device simply by thinking about doing it, a team of scientists said on Wednesday.

They believe the BrainGate sensor, which involves implanting electrodes in the brain, could offer new hope to people paralyzed by injuries or illnesses.

"This is the first step in an ongoing clinical trial of a device that is encouraging for its potential to help people with paralysis," Dr Leigh Hochberg, of Massachusetts General Hospital, said in an interview.

The 25-year-old man who suffered paralysis of all four limbs three years earlier completed tasks such moving a cursor on a screen and controlling a robotic arm.

He is the first of four patients with spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy, stroke or motor neurone disease testing the brain-to-movement system developed by Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems Inc in Massachusetts.

"This is the dawn of major neurotechnology where the ability to take signals out of the brain has taken a big step forward. We have the ability to put signals into the brain but getting signals out is a real challenge. I think this represents a landmark event," said Professor John Donoghue of Brown University in Rhode Island and the chief scientific officer of Cyberkinetics.

The scientists implanted a tiny silicon chip with 100 electrodes into an area of the brain responsible for movement. The activity of the cells was recorded and sent to a computer which translated the commands and enabled the patient to move and control the external device.

"This part of the brain, the motor cortex, which usually sends its signals down the spinal cord and out to the limbs to control movement, can still be used by this participant to control an external device, even after years had gone by since his spinal cord injury," added Hochberg, a co-author of the study published in the journal Nature.

Although it is not the first time brain activity has been used to control a cursor, Stephen Scott of Queen's University in Ontario, Canada said it advances the technology.

"This research suggests that implanted prosthetics are a viable approach for assisting severely impaired individuals to communicate and interact with the environment," he said in a commentary in the journal.

In a separate study, researchers from Stanford University Schools of Medicine and Engineering described a faster way to process signals from the brain to control a computer or prosthetic device.

"Our research is starting to show that, from a performance perspective, this type of prosthetic system is clinically viable," Stephen Ryu, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Stanford, said in as statement.

DAYTON, TENN. - Jesse Sullivan has two prosthetic arms, but he can climb a ladder at his house and roll on a fresh coat of paint. He’s also good with a weed-whacker, bending his elbow and rotating his forearm to guide the machine. He’s even mastered a more sensitive maneuver — hugging his grandchildren.

The motions are coordinated and smooth because his left arm is a bionic device controlled by his brain. He thinks, “Close hand,” and electrical signals sent through surgically re-routed nerves make it happen.

Doctors describe Sullivan as the first amputee with a thought-controlled artificial arm.

esearchers encouraged Sullivan, who became an amputee in an industrial accident, not to go easy on his experimental limb.

“When I left, they said don’t bring it back looking new,” the 59-year-old Sullivan said with a grin, his brow showing sweat beneath a fraying Dollywood amusement park cap. At times he has been so rough with the bionic arm that it has broken, including once when he pulled the end off starting a lawnmower.

That prompted researchers to make improvements, part of a U.S. government initiative to refine artificial limbs that connect body and mind. The National Institutes of Health has supported the research, joined more recently by the military’s research-and-development wing, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Some 411 U.S. troops in Iraq and 37 in Afghanistan have had wounds that cost them at least one limb, the Army Medical Command says.

Although work that created Sullivan’s arm preceded the research by DARPA, he said he’s proud to test a type of bionic arm that soldiers could someday use. “Those guys are heroes in my book,” he said, “and they should have the best there is.”

“We’re excited about collaborating with the military,” said the developer of Sullivan’s arm, Dr. Todd Kuiken, director of neuroengineering at the Center for Artificial Limbs at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, one of 35 partners now in a DARPA project to develop a state-of-the-art arm.

Sullivan’s bionic arm represents an advance over typical artificial arms, like the right-arm prosthesis he uses, which has a hook and operates with sequential motions. There is no perceivable delay in the motions of Sullivan’s flesh-colored, plastic-like left arm. Until now, it has been nearly impossible to recreate the subtle and complex motion of a human arm.

“It is not as smooth as a normal arm but it works much smoother than a normal prosthesis,” Kuiken said.

Sullivan lost his arms in May 2001 working as a utility lineman. He suffered electrical burns so severe that doctors had to amputate both his arms at the shoulder.

Seven weeks later, due to what Sullivan calls being in the right place at the right time, he was headed to meet the Chicago researchers.

“Jesse is an absolutely remarkable human being, with or without his injuries,” Kuiken said.

Sullivan said his bionic arm isn’t much like the one test pilot Steve Austin got in the ’70s TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man.” “I don’t really feel superhuman or anything,” he said.

“It’s not magic,” added his 4-year-old grandson, Luke Westlake, as he placed a nut in Sullivan’s grip and challenged Paw-Paw to crack it open.

Not magic but high-tech science makes the bionic arm work. A procedure called “muscle reinnervation,” developed by Kuiken and used on five additional patients so far, is the key.

For Sullivan, it involved grafting shoulder nerves, which used to go to his arms, to his pectoral muscle. The grafts receive thought-generated impulses, and the muscle activity is picked up by electrodes; these relay the signals to the arm’s computer, which causes motors to move the elbow and hand, mimicking a normal arm.

“The nerves grow into the chest muscles, so when the patient thinks, ’Close hand,’ a portion of the chest muscle contracts,” according to an institute fact sheet.

Kuiken added: “Basically it is connecting the dots. Finding the nerves. We have to free the nerves and see how far they reach” and connect to muscles.

About three months after the surgery, Sullivan first noticed voluntary twitches in his pectoral muscle when he tried to bend his missing elbow, the institute said. By five months, he could activate four different areas of his major pectoral muscle.

Trying to flex his missing elbow would cause a strong contraction of the muscle area just beneath the clavicle. When he mentally closed his missing hand, a signal could be detected on the pectoral region below the clavicle, and when he tried to open his hand there was a separate signal. Extending his elbow and hand caused a contraction of the lower pectoral muscle.

When Sullivan’s chest was touched he “had a sensation of touch to different parts of his hand and arm,” the institute said. “The patient had substituted sensation of touch, graded pressure, sharp-dull and thermal sensation.”

Sullivan said of the thought-controlled arm: “When I use the new prosthesis I just do things. I don’t have to think about it.”

Kuiken describes the procedure on Sullivan as the first time such a graft has been used to control an artificial limb.

Gregory Clark, associate professor of bioengineering and prosthetics researcher at the University of Utah, agreed, adding that a conventional prosthetic limb is “limited in a number of ways in the types of movements. Moreover, it can do only one of those movements at any particular moment.”

Clark said a natural arm is capable of 22 discrete movements. Sullivan’s bionic limb is capable of four right now, though researchers are working to make them better.

Sullivan said his bionic arm allows him to rotate his upper arm, bend his elbow, rotate his wrist, and open and close his hand — in some instances simultaneously.

He and Kuiken were set to attend a Washington, D.C., news conference Thursday with Claudia Mitchell, the first woman to receive the bionic arm. The 26-year-old Mitchell was injured in a motorcycle accident after she left the Marines in 2004.

Trying his new arm at increasingly challenging tasks, Sullivan acknowledges he has good days and bad ones.

“At first, I couldn’t watch when he tried doing this stuff,” said Sullivan’s wife of 22 years, Carolyn.

She said she first thought after the accident that he was going to die. She gave up her catering business to tend to him around the clock.

“He finally got mad and yelled at me and told me to go to the store,” she said, laughing.

Enormous lifestyle adjustments that the injuries and rehabilitation required were not as hard as might be expected, she said.

“For some reason, we just sort of rolled into it. I just knew he wasn’t going to let anything keep him down,” she said.

She said medication helps control his pain, and sometimes he resorts to self hypnosis. “They taught him how to do that,” she said, adding she doesn’t consider herself to be a caretaker.

“I do all the yard work,” Jesse Sullivan said. “I take out the garbage.”

And there’s another task the bionic grandfather of 10 looks forward to mastering: casting a fishing line.

When a diabetic ulcer resisted all medicines and amputation seemed inevitable, honey came to the rescue. Although an ancient antiseptic remedy, and used today in Europe, American medicine sees no value in honey. In cases of chronic wounds, and burns that respond poorly to other treatments, honey works very well according to Peter Molan, director of the Honey Research Unit at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, who has recently published in The International Journal of Lower Extremity Wounds a summary of studies showing the effectiveness of honey. One of its important characteristics is that it seems impossible for bacteria to develop a resistance to honey’s antibiotic action, presumably because honey contains too varied and complex antibiotic agents.

Honey Remedy Could Save Limbs

When Jennifer Eddy first saw an ulcer on the left foot of her patient, an elderly diabetic man, it was pink and quarter-sized. Fourteen months later, drug-resistant bacteria had made it an unrecognizable black mess.

Doctors tried everything they knew -- and failed. After five hospitalizations, four surgeries and regimens of antibiotics, the man had lost two toes. Doctors wanted to remove his entire foot.

"He preferred death to amputation, and everybody agreed he was going to die if he didn't get an amputation," said Eddy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

With standard techniques exhausted, Eddy turned to a treatment used by ancient Sumerian physicians, touted in the Talmud and praised by Hippocrates: honey. Eddy dressed the wounds in honey-soaked gauze. In just two weeks, her patient's ulcers started to heal. Pink flesh replaced black. A year later, he could walk again.

"I've used honey in a dozen cases since then," said Eddy. "I've yet to have one that didn't improve."

Eddy is one of many doctors to recently rediscover honey as medicine. Abandoned with the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s and subsequently disregarded as folk quackery, a growing set of clinical literature and dozens of glowing anecdotes now recommend it.

Most tantalizingly, honey seems capable of combating the growing scourge of drug-resistant wound infections, including group A streptococcus -- the infamous flesh-eating bug -- and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which in its most severe forms also destroys flesh. These have become alarmingly more common in recent years, with MRSA alone now responsible for half of all skin infections treated in U.S. emergency rooms. So-called superbugs cause thousands of deaths and disfigurements every year, and public health officials are alarmed. ¹

Though the practice is uncommon in the United States, honey is successfully used elsewhere on wounds and burns that are unresponsive to other treatments. Some of the most promising results come from Germany's Bonn University Children's Hospital, where doctors have used honey to treat wounds in 50 children whose normal healing processes were weakened by chemotherapy.

The children, said pediatric oncologist Arne Simon, fared consistently better than those with the usual applications of iodine, antibiotics and silver-coated dressings. The only adverse effects were pain in 2 percent of the children and one incidence of eczema. These risks, he said, compare favorably to iodine's possible thyroid effects and the unknowns of silver -- and honey is also cheaper.

"We're dealing with chronic wounds, and every intervention which heals a chronic wound is cost effective, because most of those patients have medical histories of months or years," he said.

While Eddy bought honey at a supermarket, Simon used Medihoney, one of several varieties made from species of Leptospermum flowers found in New Zealand and Australia.

Honey, formed when bees swallow, digest and regurgitate nectar, contains approximately 600 compounds, depending on the type of flower and bee. Leptospermum honeys are renowned for their efficacy and dominate the commercial market, though scientists aren't totally sure why they work.

"All honey is antibacterial, because the bees add an enzyme that makes hydrogen peroxide," said Peter Molan, director of the Honey Research Unit at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. "But we still haven't managed to identify the active components. All we know is (the honey) works on an extremely broad spectrum."

Attempts in the lab to induce a bacterial resistance to honey have failed, Molan and Simon said. Honey's complex attack, they said, might make adaptation impossible.

Two dozen German hospitals are experimenting with medical honeys, which are also used in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. In the United States, however, honey as an antibiotic is nearly unknown. American doctors remain skeptical because studies on honey come from abroad and some are imperfectly designed, Molan said.

In a review published this year, Molan collected positive results from more than 20 studies involving 2,000 people. Supported by extensive animal research, he said, the evidence should sway the medical community -- especially when faced by drug-resistant bacteria.

"In some, antibiotics won't work at all," he said. "People are dying from these infections."

Commercial medical honeys are available online in the United States, and one company has applied for Food and Drug Administration approval. In the meantime, more complete clinical research is imminent. The German hospitals are documenting their cases in a database built by Simon's team in Bonn, while Eddy is conducting the first double-blind study.

"The more we keep giving antibiotics, the more we breed these superbugs. Wounds end up being repositories for them," Eddy said. "By eradicating them, honey could do a great job for society and to improve public health."

Drinking too much sugar-laden soda pop has been found to be linked to mental health problems, according to a study conducted by the University of Oslo involving five thousand Norwegian school children, and published in the American Journal of Public Health.

Students who skipped breakfast and lunch tended to consume the most amount of soda pop. For those who drank four or more sodas a day, there was a direct correlation between number of sodas consumed daily and the amount of mental health problems reported, especially hyperactivity and stress symptoms. Interestingly, those who drank no soda at all showed more problems than those who drank less than four sodas a day.

Sugar linked with mental problems in Norway study

ASHINGTON (Reuters) - Oslo teens who drank the most sugary soft drinks also had more mental health problems such as hyperactivity and distress, Norwegian researchers reported on Thursday.

Their study of more than 5,000 Norwegian 15- and 16-year-olds showed a clear and direct association between soft drink intake and hyperactivity, and a more complex link with other mental and behavioral disorders.

They surveyed the students, asking them how many fizzy soft drinks with sugar they had a day, and then questions from a standard questionnaire used to assess mental health.

The teens who reported skipping breakfast and lunch were among the heaviest soft drink consumers, Dr. Lars Lien and colleagues at the University of Oslo found.

"There was a strong association between soft drink consumption and mental health problems among Oslo 10th graders," they wrote in their report, published in the American Journal of Public Health.

"This association remained significant after adjustment for social, behavioral and food-related disorders."

Most of the students said they drank anywhere between one and six servings of soft drinks per week.

Those who drank no soft drinks at all were more likely than moderate drinkers to have mental health symptoms, the researchers said. But those who drank the most -- more than six servings a week - had the highest scores.

For hyperactivity, there was a direct linear relationship -- the more sodas a teen drank, the most symptoms of hyperactivity he or she had.

The worst problems were seen in boys and girls who drank four or more soft drinks a day. Ten percent of the boys and 2 percent of the girls drank this much.

The researchers said it was possible that other substances in the soft drinks, such as caffeine, were to blame for the symptoms, and they did not check other possible sources of refined sugar in the children's diets.

But they said many of the teens were clearly drinking too many sugary drinks. Norway's recommended intake is 10 percent of the day's total calories from sugar and the researchers said at least a quarter of the boys were getting this much from soft drinks alone.

"One simple and effective measure to reduce soft drink consumption in this age group would be to remove soft drink machines from schools and other public places where adolescents gather," they wrote.

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=healthNews&storyid=2006-09-28T204517Z_01_N28374556_RTRUKOC_0_US-SUGAR.xml&src=rss&rpc=22

Earning more money doesn’t create more happiness. According to a study published in Science, those earning more than $100,000 a year tend to spend less time on leisurely activities that are associated with being in a good mood than people who earn less. It seems that those with high income earn more because they spend more time on work related activities, commuting, dealing with child care services and other stressful activities. Compared to folks who earn less, the high earners spend less time on socializing and other activities associated with good moods and happiness. More money may bring a greater level of overall life satisfaction, but it doesn’t help people smile like being among friends does.

Study: Money Does Not Buy Much Happiness
Your next raise might buy you a more lavish vacation, a better car, or a few extra bedrooms, but it's not likely to buy you much happiness.

Measuring the quality of people's daily lives via surveys, the results of a study published in the June 30 issue of journal Science reveals that income plays a rather insignificant role in day-to-day happiness.

Although most people imagine that if they had more money they could do more fun things and perhaps be happier, the reality seems to be that those with higher incomes tend to be tenser, and spend less time on simple leisurely activities.
Scaling bad mood

In 2004, the researchers developed a survey tool that measures people's quality of daily lives. Then they asked 909 employed women to record the previous day's activities and their feelings toward them.

The study focused on women because the researchers wanted to study a homogeneous group while the surveys were in the early developmental stages.

Recently, the researchers revisited the data from the 2004 and focused on correlating the amount of income with the percentage of time each participant reported as being in a bad mood each day.

It was expected that those who made less than $20,000 a year would spend 32 percent more of their time in a bad mood than those that had an annual income greater than $100,000.

In reality, the low-income group spent only 12 percent more time in a bad mood than their wealthier counterparts. This suggests that the link between income and mood has been perhaps overstated.

The researchers once again surveyed another group of women in 2005. In this study, participants not only recorded their overall satisfaction with life but a moment-to-moment account of their contentment.

The results showed that higher income had less of a correlation with momentary happiness than with overall life satisfaction.

"If people have high income, they think they should be satisfied and reflect that in their answers," said study team member Alan Krueger, an economist from Princeton University. "Income, however, matters very little for moment-to-moment experience."
More chores, less fun

Krueger and colleagues also looked at data from a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey to see how people in different income brackets spent their time.

What they found was that those with higher incomes had more chores and less fun.

They devoted more time to working, commuting, childcare, and shopping and were under more stress and tension than those in lower income brackets.

According to government statistics, men who make more than $100,000 a year spend 19.9 percent of their time on passive leisure activities such as watching television and socializing. Meanwhile, men whose annual income were less than $20,000 spent more than 34 percent of their time dedicated to passive leisure.

Although the correlation between income and life satisfaction is weak, people are highly motivated to increase their income. This illusion may lead to more time spent on activities like commuting while sacrificing time spent on socializing, something that people consider amongst the best moments of their daily life, the researchers said in the study.

The scientists are now conducting a national survey with both male and female sample groups.

To boost their concentration, improve their memory, and sharpen their attention, ambitious students who want to get ahead are finding an accomplice in “smart pills,” creating a new type of drug abuse situation that has received little attention. According to an investigation reported in the Washington Post, one in ten middle and high school students are using Ritalin without a prescription. Drugs such as Adderall, which was originally aimed at people with attention-deficit disorder, and Provigil, which was aimed at narcoleptics, who fall asleep uncontrollably are being used by students to get an edge on the competition. One student joke is that you can tell if you are among the “educational elite” if "You could get adderall in less than 5 minutes at practically any time of the school day."
As medical science continues to research the development of “cognitive enhancers,” such as medicine that can enhance the memory function of the elderly, it is anticipated that such medications will join this silent epidemic among the high achievers.

Did you ever wonder how the natives learned which plants are good for what ailments? According to native shamans, the plants themselves communicate this information. In their book, Plant Spirit Shamanism: Traditional Healing Techniques for Healing the Soul (Destiny Books), Ross Heaven and Howard Charing describe interviews with indigenous shamans in which this communication process is explained. What is hard for the average Westerner to understand is that the communication process involves the shaman’s use of the imagination. The shaman’s described use of the imagination, however, conforms exactly to Cayce’s notion of the dual role of the imagination. The imaginative forces shape the items of creation, such as the plants, and the imagination of the healer can contact those forces active within the plant to establish a dialogue. The book offers several exercises for doing so, including specific implementations of Cayce’s general direction regarding attunement, to “become one with” what we wish to understand.

Experiences of God can be created in the laboratory by use of magnetic field to stimulate the right brain. Thus the scientist doing this research, Michael Persinger at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, can claim that the experience of God is a “brain event.” He’s not alone in dismissing God. Time Magazine ran a cover story recently noting the flood of books coming out that are written by scientists who are debunking God. Such titles as The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin) by Richard Dawkins of Oxford University have been best sellers.

On the other hand, people continue to have experiences of God. USA Today recently ran a story on people’s encounters with God. Journalist Jennifer Skiff has a website (godstories.com) that invites people to submit their experiences for a book she is working on. There are patterns to these experiences: a life-saving voice, a glowing vision, an overwhelming sense of connection with all of creation, answers to prayers. Some say that if it makes a difference in your life, then it is real. But is it really God? Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Insitute, argues in his book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press), that the scientific principle of seeking the simplest explanation favors the existence of God, because some of the other explanations for the universe are much more complicated.

Trish Barfield isn't big on religion. But she vividly remembers the day God saved her life.

Years ago, on a trip to visit her boyfriend, she was about to leap off a moving train to avoid paying the fare when someone yelled at her. She assumed she was caught.

"I heard a loud male voice say 'Don't jump,' " recalls Barfield, a retiree from Western Australia. But she says no one was there. Then a large freight train came whooshing by. "Had I jumped, I would have gone into the path of that train. ... I knew that the hand of God had touched my life."

Such accounts seem extraordinary but aren't uncommon, says Jennifer Skiff, a Boston native and former CNN correspondent now based in Perth. She has collected more than 120 "God stories" from people of various countries and backgrounds for a book to be published in late 2007 or early 2008 by Random House.

Her website, godstories.com, invites people to share their experiences. And as the archive grows, she says, themes are emerging to suggest patterns in how people perceive the divine. Again and again, Skiff says, people describe, for instance, a life-saving voice, a glowing image or an overwhelming feeling of connection with the entire universe.

For Skiff and her sources, the stories are "faith-confirming" in that they breed confidence in a benevolent force. She describes herself as "one to question the existence of God," adding that her "church" consists of daily swims in a mountain lake in Maine, where she spends her summers.

Still, she says, God touched her life at age 32, when a doctor said she had a malignant tumor in her bone marrow. Upon getting the diagnosis, "I no longer had a will to live," she remembers. But then she was "overwhelmed" with calls, visits, even encouraging notes from strangers. A week passed before DNA tests came back: benign.

"I felt as though the week had been for me to see all that I had, and to appreciate it and to move forward" with meaningful work and new personal projects, such as running an animal refuge center. "It was kind of like the thunderbolt, the slap in the face that said, 'Get on with it! Stop feeling sorry for yourself and get on with it!'

"They're feel-good stories," Skiff says. "Whether you've been in the depth of despair or not, they make you appreciate what you have." Tellers of these stories are convinced they've had a brush with the divine:

•Actress Jane Seymour describes collapsing while filming in Spain and then seeing her body from above as she was being revived. After praying for a second chance and getting it, she felt assured: "There is some spiritual entity that's greater than us."

•London jeweler Patricia Fruttauro tells of an "enormous" mirror that fell in a hallway and sliced off one of her 2-year-old granddaughter's blond curls but left her without so much as a scratch.

•Barbara Eikost of suburban Toledo, Ohio, says that at the moment her husband, Bill, was dying in 1998 of multiple myeloma, her son shouted for her to look up. "Right outside his large hospital window on this gray January day was a vivid rainbow," she says. "There was neither rain nor sun, but this ribbon of color in the sky told us in ways that defy explanation that our beloved husband/father was being escorted from this world to a better place."

Researchers who study the physiology of spiritual experiences aren't surprised by such accounts. Stressful conditions, as well as disciplines of prayer and meditation, cause the autonomic nervous system to kick into high gear and lead to unusual perceptions, says Andrew Newberg, director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania.

"When you turn on the autonomic nervous system, you do make yourself prone to visions, various types of experiences, very strong memories and auditory experiences," Newberg says. His theory: Mystical experiences occur when a person is simultaneously highly alert and very relaxed.

Michael Persinger, a behavioral neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, says he has induced so-called religious experiences more than 1,000 times in his laboratory. He uses a dark, quiet environment to reduce activity in the logical, language-centered left side of the brain and creates a magnetic field to stimulate the emotion-centered right brain. Subjects often say they sense the presence of another sentient being, he says, when no human or animal is there.

Such spiritual anecdotes amount to mere urban legend and are harmful because they discourage a healthy skepticism, says Daniel Dennett of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and author of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

But philosopher of religion John Hick of the University of Birmingham, England, believes the veracity of "God stories" is revealed only over time. What these storytellers describe, he says, "may be a sense of a depth of reality beyond the physical."

But because "you can't prove whether there is something there ... you have to look at the fruits in a person's life" to know whether God really left a mark — or whether it was just a false alarm.

God vs. Science

We revere faith and scientific progress, hunger for miracles and for MRIs. But are the worldviews compatible? TIME convenes a debate

There are two great debates under the broad heading of Science vs. God. The more familiar over the past few years is the narrower of the two: Can Darwinian evolution withstand the criticisms of Christians who believe that it contradicts the creation account in the Book of Genesis? In recent years, creationism took on new currency as the spiritual progenitor of "intelligent design" (I.D.), a scientifically worded attempt to show that blanks in the evolutionary narrative are more meaningful than its very convincing totality. I.D. lost some of its journalistic heat last December when a federal judge dismissed it as pseudoscience unsuitable for teaching in Pennsylvania schools.

But in fact creationism and I.D. are intimately related to a larger unresolved question, in which the aggressor's role is reversed: Can religion stand up to the progress of science? This debate long predates Darwin, but the antireligion position is being promoted with increasing insistence by scientists angered by intelligent design and excited, perhaps intoxicated, by their disciplines' increasing ability to map, quantify and change the nature of human experience. Brain imaging illustrates--in color!--the physical seat of the will and the passions, challenging the religious concept of a soul independent of glands and gristle. Brain chemists track imbalances that could account for the ecstatic states of visionary saints or, some suggest, of Jesus. Like Freudianism before it, the field of evolutionary psychology generates theories of altruism and even of religion that do not include God. Something called the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology speculates that ours may be but one in a cascade of universes, suddenly bettering the odds that life could have cropped up here accidentally, without divine intervention. (If the probabilities were 1 in a billion, and you've got 300 billion universes, why not?)

Roman Catholicism's Christoph Cardinal Schönborn has dubbed the most fervent of faith-challenging scientists followers of "scientism" or "evolutionism," since they hope science, beyond being a measure, can replace religion as a worldview and a touchstone. It is not an epithet that fits everyone wielding a test tube. But a growing proportion of the profession is experiencing what one major researcher calls "unprecedented outrage" at perceived insults to research and rationality, ranging from the alleged influence of the Christian right on Bush Administration science policy to the fanatic faith of the 9/11 terrorists to intelligent design's ongoing claims. Some are radicalized enough to publicly pick an ancient scab: the idea that science and religion, far from being complementary responses to the unknown, are at utter odds--or, as Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has written bluntly, "Religion and science will always clash." The market seems flooded with books by scientists describing a caged death match between science and God--with science winning, or at least chipping away at faith's underlying verities.

Finding a spokesman for this side of the question was not hard, since Richard Dawkins, perhaps its foremost polemicist, has just come out with The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin), the rare volume whose position is so clear it forgoes a subtitle. The five-week New York Times best seller (now at No. 8) attacks faith philosophically and historically as well as scientifically, but leans heavily on Darwinian theory, which was Dawkins' expertise as a young scientist and more recently as an explicator of evolutionary psychology so lucid that he occupies the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science at Oxford University.

Dawkins is riding the crest of an atheist literary wave. In 2004, The End of Faith, a multipronged indictment by neuroscience grad student Sam Harris, was published (over 400,000 copies in print). Harris has written a 96-page follow-up, Letter to a Christian Nation, which is now No. 14 on the Times list. Last February, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett produced Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which has sold fewer copies but has helped usher the discussion into the public arena.

If Dennett and Harris are almost-scientists (Dennett runs a multidisciplinary scientific-philosophic program), the authors of half a dozen aggressively secular volumes are card carriers: In Moral Minds, Harvard biologist Marc Hauser explores the--nondivine--origins of our sense of right and wrong (September); in Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (due in January) by self-described "atheist-reductionist-materialist" biologist Lewis Wolpert, religion is one of those impossible things; Victor Stenger, a physicist-astronomer, has a book coming out titled God: The Failed Hypothesis. Meanwhile, Ann Druyan, widow of archskeptical astrophysicist Carl Sagan, has edited Sagan's unpublished lectures on God and his absence into a book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience, out this month.

Dawkins and his army have a swarm of articulate theological opponents, of course. But the most ardent of these don't really care very much about science, and an argument in which one party stands immovable on Scripture and the other immobile on the periodic table doesn't get anyone very far. Most Americans occupy the middle ground: we want it all. We want to cheer on science's strides and still humble ourselves on the Sabbath. We want access to both MRIs and miracles. We want debates about issues like stem cells without conceding that the positions are so intrinsically inimical as to make discussion fruitless. And to balance formidable standard bearers like Dawkins, we seek those who possess religious conviction but also scientific achievements to credibly argue the widespread hope that science and God are in harmony--that, indeed, science is of God.

Informed conciliators have recently become more vocal. Stanford University biologist Joan Roughgarden has just come out with Evolution and Christian Faith, which provides what she calls a "strong Christian defense" of evolutionary biology, illustrating the discipline's major concepts with biblical passages. Entomologist Edward O. Wilson, a famous skeptic of standard faith, has written The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, urging believers and non-believers to unite over conservation. But foremost of those arguing for common ground is Francis Collins.

Collins' devotion to genetics is, if possible, greater than Dawkins'. Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993, he headed a multinational 2,400-scientist team that co-mapped the 3 billion biochemical letters of our genetic blueprint, a milestone that then President Bill Clinton honored in a 2000 White House ceremony, comparing the genome chart to Meriwether Lewis' map of his fateful continental exploration. Collins continues to lead his institute in studying the genome and mining it for medical breakthroughs.

He is also a forthright Christian who converted from atheism at age 27 and now finds time to advise young evangelical scientists on how to declare their faith in science's largely agnostic upper reaches. His summer best seller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press), laid out some of the arguments he brought to bear in the 90-minute debate TIME arranged between Dawkins and Collins in our offices at the Time & Life Building in New York City on Sept. 30. Some excerpts from their spirited exchange:

TIME: Professor Dawkins, if one truly understands science, is God then a delusion, as your book title suggests?

DAWKINS: The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

COLLINS: Yes. God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer. From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God's existence is outside of science's ability to really weigh in.

TIME: Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard paleontologist, famously argued that religion and science can coexist, because they occupy separate, airtight boxes. You both seem to disagree.

COLLINS: Gould sets up an artificial wall between the two worldviews that doesn't exist in my life. Because I do believe in God's creative power in having brought it all into being in the first place, I find that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God's creation.

DAWKINS: I think that Gould's separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it's a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf. Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.

TIME: Professor Dawkins, you think Darwin's theory of evolution does more than simply contradict the Genesis story.

DAWKINS: Yes. For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection. Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.

COLLINS: I don't see that Professor Dawkins' basic account of evolution is incompatible with God's having designed it.

COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

DAWKINS: I think that's a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

COLLINS: Who are we to say that that was an odd way to do it? I don't think that it is God's purpose to make his intention absolutely obvious to us. If it suits him to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?

TIME: Both your books suggest that if the universal constants, the six or more characteristics of our universe, had varied at all, it would have made life impossible. Dr. Collins, can you provide an example?

COLLINS: The gravitational constant, if it were off by one part in a hundred million million, then the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance. But if you are willing to consider the possibility of a designer, this becomes a rather plausible explanation for what is otherwise an exceedingly improbable event--namely, our existence.

DAWKINS: People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill. The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.

COLLINS: This is an interesting choice. Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor--Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward--leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.

DAWKINS: I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. What I can't understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you're shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.

COLLINS: My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else. God is the answer to all of those "How must it have come to be" questions.

DAWKINS: I think that's the mother and father of all cop-outs. It's an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now Dr. Collins says, "Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this." Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don't do that. Scientists say, "We're working on it. We're struggling to understand."

COLLINS: Certainly science should continue to see whether we can find evidence for multiverses that might explain why our own universe seems to be so finely tuned. But I do object to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation. That's an impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as "Why am I here?", "What happens after we die?", "Is there a God?" If you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world because it doesn't convince you on a proof basis. But if your mind is open about whether God might exist, you can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion.

DAWKINS: To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God--it's that that seems to me to close off the discussion.

DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small--at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case.

TIME: The Book of Genesis has led many conservative Protestants to oppose evolution and some to insist that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

COLLINS: There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe's age or of how living organisms are related to each other. St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.

DAWKINS: Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it. However, what Dr. Collins has just been--may I call you Francis?

DAWKINS: What Francis was just saying about Genesis was, of course, a little private quarrel between him and his Fundamentalist colleagues ...

DAWKINS: ... It would be unseemly for me to enter in except to suggest that he'd save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply ceased to give them the time of day. Why bother with these clowns?

COLLINS: Richard, I think we don't do a service to dialogue between science and faith to characterize sincere people by calling them names. That inspires an even more dug-in position. Atheists sometimes come across as a bit arrogant in this regard, and characterizing faith as something only an idiot would attach themselves to is not likely to help your case.

TIME: Dr. Collins, the Resurrection is an essential argument of Christian faith, but doesn't it, along with the virgin birth and lesser miracles, fatally undermine the scientific method, which depends on the constancy of natural laws?

COLLINS: If you're willing to answer yes to a God outside of nature, then there's nothing inconsistent with God on rare occasions choosing to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous. If God made the natural laws, why could he not violate them when it was a particularly significant moment for him to do so? And if you accept the idea that Christ was also divine, which I do, then his Resurrection is not in itself a great logical leap.

COLLINS: Not at all. If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events.

DAWKINS: If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen which we by the lights of today's science would classify as a miracle just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Francis keeps saying things like "From the perspective of a believer." Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific--really scientific--credibility. I'm sorry to be so blunt.

COLLINS: Richard, I actually agree with the first part of what you said. But I would challenge the statement that my scientific instincts are any less rigorous than yours. The difference is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is.

TIME: Dr. Collins, you have described humanity's moral sense not only as a gift from God but as a signpost that he exists.

COLLINS: There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years--some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology--relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes. But if you believe, and Richard has been articulate in this, that natural selection operates on the individual, not on a group, then why would the individual risk his own DNA doing something selfless to help somebody in a way that might diminish his chance of reproducing? Granted, we may try to help our own family members because they share our DNA. Or help someone else in expectation that they will help us later. But when you look at what we admire as the most generous manifestations of altruism, they are not based on kin selection or reciprocity. An extreme example might be Oskar Schindler risking his life to save more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers. That's the opposite of saving his genes. We see less dramatic versions every day. Many of us think these qualities may come from God--especially since justice and morality are two of the attributes we most readily identify with God.

DAWKINS: Can I begin with an analogy? Most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes. Copulation in nature tends to lead to reproduction and so to more genetic copies. But in modern society, most copulations involve contraception, designed precisely to avoid reproduction. Altruism probably has origins like those of lust. In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. It doesn't matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn't cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups. But that seems to me to be a highly plausible account for where the desire for morality, the desire for goodness, comes from.

COLLINS: For you to argue that our noblest acts are a misfiring of Darwinian behavior does not do justice to the sense we all have about the absolutes that are involved here of good and evil. Evolution may explain some features of the moral law, but it can't explain why it should have any real significance. If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil. But for me, it is much more than that. The moral law is a reason to think of God as plausible--not just a God who sets the universe in motion but a God who cares about human beings, because we seem uniquely amongst creatures on the planet to have this far-developed sense of morality. What you've said implies that outside of the human mind, tuned by evolutionary processes, good and evil have no meaning. Do you agree with that?

DAWKINS: Even the question you're asking has no meaning to me. Good and evil--I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil. I think that there are good things that happen and bad things that happen.

COLLINS: I think that is a fundamental difference between us. I'm glad we identified it.

TIME: Dr. Collins, I know you favor the opening of new stem-cell lines for experimentation. But doesn't the fact that faith has caused some people to rule this out risk creating a perception that religion is preventing science from saving lives?

COLLINS: Let me first say as a disclaimer that I speak as a private citizen and not as a representative of the Executive Branch of the United States government. The impression that people of faith are uniformly opposed to stem-cell research is not documented by surveys. In fact, many people of strong religious conviction think this can be a morally supportable approach.

TIME: But to the extent that a person argues on the basis of faith or Scripture rather than reason, how can scientists respond?

COLLINS: Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation. So such discussions between scientists and believers happen quite readily. But neither scientists nor believers always embody the principles precisely. Scientists can have their judgment clouded by their professional aspirations. And the pure truth of faith, which you can think of as this clear spiritual water, is poured into rusty vessels called human beings, and so sometimes the benevolent principles of faith can get distorted as positions are hardened.

DAWKINS: For me, moral questions such as stem-cell research turn upon whether suffering is caused. In this case, clearly none is. The embryos have no nervous system. But that's not an issue discussed publicly. The issue is, Are they human? If you are an absolutist moralist, you say, "These cells are human, and therefore they deserve some kind of special moral treatment." Absolutist morality doesn't have to come from religion but usually does.

We slaughter nonhuman animals in factory farms, and they do have nervous systems and do suffer. People of faith are not very interested in their suffering.

DAWKINS: Humans have more moral responsibility perhaps, because they are capable of reasoning.

COLLINS: I just would like to say that over more than a quarter-century as a scientist and a believer, I find absolutely nothing in conflict between agreeing with Richard in practically all of his conclusions about the natural world, and also saying that I am still able to accept and embrace the possibility that there are answers that science isn't able to provide about the natural world--the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I'm interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.

DAWKINS: My mind is not closed, as you have occasionally suggested, Francis. My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable--but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don't see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

With reporting by With reporting by David Bjerklie, Alice Park/New York, Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Jeff Israely/Rome

Trish Barfield isn't big on religion. But she vividly remembers the day God saved her life.

Years ago, on a trip to visit her boyfriend, she was about to leap off a moving train to avoid paying the fare when someone yelled at her. She assumed she was caught.

•London jeweler Patricia Fruttauro tells of an "enormous" mirror that fell in a hallway and sliced off one of her 2-year-old granddaughter's blond curls but left her without so much as a scratch.

But because "you can't prove whether there is something there ... you have to look at the fruits in a person's life" to know whether God really left a mark — or whether it was just a false alarm.

No one wants to develop cancer, but those who do find a surprising gift within the struggle that insues: a new outlook on life. According to a report in USA Today, two out of three cancer survivors claim that something good came out of their situation. When the Harvard School of Public Health, with the help of the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed more than seven hundred cancer survivors, more than half said that dealing with the disease changed the way they looked at things—and almost always they said the change was for the better.

For some, the change was an increase in self-confidence (“what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”) in the person’s endurability. For others it was a shift in priorities. In dealing with the disease, many learn skills that help them with other problems in life. Finally some survivors become volunteers, giving back by helping other people with cancer. What newly diagnosed cancer patients can’t see, but survivors can, is that “there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

Though cancer can be a harrowing experience, a growing body of research suggests that the disease also changes many people's lives for the better.

Nearly two out of three cancer survivors and their families say something good has come out of their experience, according to a new poll from USA TODAY/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health. This part of the telephone survey, part of a larger study in August and September, included 751 adults who had cancer in the past five years or who have shared a household with a cancer patient who is still living. The margin of error for this part of the poll is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

About half of respondents say cancer fundamentally changed their outlook on life — almost always in a positive way, the survey shows.

Cancer gives some survivors a renewed sense of confidence and greater appreciation for their own endurance, says Patricia Ganz, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles Schools of Medicine and Public Health. "The adversity of treatment may give people the sense that 'I've come through this and I'm stronger,' " Ganz says.

Steve Gorski of Milwaukee, who was diagnosed with a rare and usually fatal kidney tumor two years ago, says cancer was the best thing that ever happened to him — even though it caused tremendous hardship. Gorski, 41, says cancer prompted one especially wonderful change: He is now a full-time caregiver for his sons, Jack, 5, and Steven, 2. "There are life lessons for me to teach them every day," Gorski says. "For every bad thing that happened because of cancer, two good things happened."

Many survivors find that the coping strategies they develop during cancer therapy help them handle other problems in life, Ganz says. That could explain why older cancer patients often feel less distraught than young people, she says. Older people may have already learned how to weather other types of crises, such as the loss of loved ones.

Cancer often presents more of a crisis to younger people who had planned on many more decades of good health, says Diane Blum, executive director of CancerCare, which provides support to cancer patients and families. The shock causes many young adults to re-examine their lives and values. The new survey found that 69% of respondents 18 to 49 said cancer changed their outlook. Only 36% of those over 65 said cancer changed their view of the world.

Like Gorski, who has become involved with the Lance Armstrong Foundation, many cancer survivors and their families feel a strong desire to help others dealing with the disease.

"It's part of the healing process to give back," says Gigi McMillan of Manhattan Beach, Calif., who started a support group after her son developed a malignant brain tumor. Families "come to us for healing. Then they become the volunteers who help the next family."

For cancer survivors and their loved ones, volunteering is about more than good deeds, McMillan says. Her group, the We Can Pediatric Brain Tumor Network, matches the families of newly diagnosed children with "veterans" who have been through treatment. Many use volunteer work to transform traumatic experiences into something positive. "They don't want all the pain they've gone through to be in vain," says McMillan, whose son, now 17, still has cancer-related disabilities. "They're helpless against the disease, but they can help other people."

Bart Frazzitta, 64, of Manalapan, N.J., says he wishes he had known someone to guide him through esophageal cancer in 1999. Today, he gives patients the support that he never had. Since 2002, he has talked to 500 patients at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where he was treated. He also helped the hospital develop a book and CD-ROM on esophageal cancer, which are given to every new patient.

"The doctors say, 'When you come into the room, you don't have to say a word, because they look at you and see there is light at the end of the tunnel,' " Frazzitta says.

Some patients prefer to move on after a cancer diagnosis. Susan Arena, 54, of North Babylon, N.Y., says she prefers not to think too deeply about her disease: inflammatory breast cancer that has spread to her brain, bone and lungs. Medication that was supposed to strengthen her bones has instead destroyed the bones in her jaw, causing her to lose her teeth.

"I try not to focus on, 'What if I don't get up tomorrow?' " Arena says. "I try to roll with the punches, and I'm getting a lot of punches lately."

Though research shows that optimistic patients are no more likely to survive than pessimists, a hopeful attitude can improve quality of life, says Vicki Kennedy, vice president of quality assurance and programs at The Wellness Community, which offers support for cancer patients and caregivers.

Andrew Colletti of Springfield, Va., who was diagnosed with aggressive leukemia five years ago, says he wondered whether to even pursue the recommended treatment: chemotherapy followed by a bone-marrow transplant, one of the harshest treatments in all of medicine. It left Colletti, 45, unable to father children.

Yet cancer, in some ways, has been a blessing, says Colletti, who adopted a baby two years ago with his wife, Susan. He says he now can't imagine life without daughter Charlotte. "If I had known this little girl was waiting for us on the other side of treatment, I wouldn't have had a doubt."

When twenty different astrologers were asked to prepare and interpret a natal chart for the same person, they almost unanimously and correctly identified the person’s vocation, according to a research project conducted by Atlantic University student Sue Gagliardi for her Master’s Thesis. That result is certainly an endorsement for astrology as a vocational guidance tool, which Cayce suggested was the best use of the stars for guidance.

On the other hand, Gagliardi found that some of the charts were mis-calculated, while some touched on very important aspects crucial to the quality of this person’s life, while others ignored these aspects. The variations in the content of these astrological readings underscored another important piece of advice from Cayce: if you are going to get a psychic reading, get more than one.

Source: See http://www.creativespirit.net/learners/AUCulminatingProjects/cp-gagliardi.pdf

If diet and exercise won’t lower your blood pressure, and you don’t want to consume one of the many medications doctors prescribe for hypertension, you may wish to learn how to slow down your breathing. If you can slow your breathing down to ten or less breaths a minute (about one half the average rate), you can lower your blood pressure.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a medical device—RESPeRATE-- that trains a person in slowing their breath. Using this device in research studies at the Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center Dr. William J. Elliott found that patients who used the slow-breathing device for 15 minutes a day for two months saw their blood pressure drop 10 to 15 points. Dr. David Anderson is conducting research at the National Institute of Health to test the idea that it is not relaxation that creates the effect, but that the slower breathing helps the kidney gets rid of salt. He has found that people with high blood pressure exhibit what he calls “inhibitory breathing” as a response to stress, which in turn makes it harder for the kidneys to process salt, which in turn raises the blood pressure. The practice of slow breathing retrains these patients in a way that they can help themselves without medication.

In an effort to reduce the number of heart attacks, strokes and other medical problems, doctors are trying to get their patients' blood pressure readings lower.

Doctors preach diet and exercise, and when that doesn't get the job done, they also prescribe any of 100-plus drugs.

But some drug-averse patients have turned to the Internet and found a medical device approved by the Food and Drug Administration that lowers blood pressure by helping people breathe more slowly.

Diana DeAngelis, 61, of Albany, N.Y., was hospitalized last year for an adverse reaction to one of the drugs she was taking for her high blood pressure.

"My husband got on a campaign and started looking on the Internet for alternatives," she says, "something other than medicine."

He found RESPeRATE, a $300 device that guides patients through paced breathing exercises. Studies have shown that by slowing breathing with the device for 15 minutes, three or more times a week, users have lowered their blood pressure.

DeAngelis' doctor approved her plan. So with a band wrapped around her midriff over her diaphragm, DeAngelis listens to musical tones through headphones and inhales and exhales following the machine's paced lead.

The device gradually slows her breathing rate to the level proven in medical studies to lower blood pressure — fewer than 10 breaths per minute. That's less than half the normal respiratory rate.

DeAngelis' blood pressure reading now is a healthy 120/70, down from a high of 160/120. "My blood pressure was never like this," she says. "I'm still on medication, but not as strong."

It isn't clear how slowing breathing this way lowers blood pressure. "People are working very hard to sort out why," says William Elliott, professor of preventive medicine at Rush Medical College.

The company that sells the device, Fort Lee, N.J.-based InterCure, says that as breathing slows, muscles surrounding small blood vessels in the body relax. Blood then flows more freely through the body.

Elliot, who says he is not compensated by the company, started recommending the tool for some of his patients after testing it in a study that he designed. No adverse effects have been reported, but Elliot cautions that the device should not be used to replace entirely the drug treatment prescribed by a patient's doctor.

"Most of the people we have used the machine with have not been able to get off all of their pills," he says, "but if you can get off one pill or lower the dosage, that's good."

John Galbraith Simmons, 57, a New York medical writer and author of Doctors and Discoveries: Lives That Created Today's Medicine (Houghton Mifflin), uses the device for 15 minutes a day to keep his blood pressure down and to relax.

It's "clearly not for everybody," he says. But for him, "the calming effect is the most striking. I will use it sometimes just to decompress."

Breathe deep to lower blood pressure, doc says

Experiment suggests slow breathing helps break down the salt we eat

WASHINGTON - Take a slow deep breath, then exhale just as slowly. Can you take fewer than 10 breaths a minute? Research suggests breathing that slowly for a few minutes a day is enough to help some people nudge down bad blood pressure.

Why would that brief interlude of calm really work? A scientist at the National Institutes of Health thinks how we breathe may hold a key to how the body regulates blood pressure — and that it has less to do with relaxation than with breaking down all that salt most of us eat.

Now Dr. David Anderson is trying to prove it, with the help of a special gadget that trains volunteers with hypertension to slow-breathe.

If he's right, the work could shed new light on the intersection between hypertension, stress and diet.

"If you sit there under-breathing all day and you have a high salt intake, your kidneys may be less effective at getting rid of that salt than if you're out hiking in the woods," said Anderson, who heads research into behavior and hypertension at the NIH's National Institute on Aging.

An estimated 65 million Americans have high blood pressure, putting them at increased risk of heart attacks, strokes, kidney damage, blindness and dementia. Many don't know it. Hypertension is often called the silent killer, because patients may notice no symptoms until it already has done serious damage.

Anyone can get high blood pressure, measured as a level of 140 over 90 or more. But being overweight and inactive, and eating too much salt — Americans eat nearly double the upper limit for good health — all increase the risk. Indeed, losing weight, physical activity and cutting sodium are the most effective lifestyle changes people can make to lower blood pressure. Still, most hypertension patients need medications, too.

Mysteries of high blood pressure
While they know risk factors, scientists don't fully understand the root causes of hypertension: What skews the body's usually finely tuned mechanisms for regulating the force of blood pounding against artery walls, until it can't compensate for some extra pounds on a couch potato? Understanding those mechanisms could point to better ways to prevent and treat hypertension.

Meditation, yoga and similar relaxation techniques that incorporate slow, deep breathing have long been thought to aid blood pressure, although research to prove an effect has been spotty.

Then in 2002, the Food and Drug Administration cleared the nonprescription sale of a medical device called RESPeRATE, to help lower blood pressure by pacing breathing. The Internet-sold device counts breaths by sensing chest or abdominal movement, and sounds gradually slowing chimes that signal when to inhale and exhale. Users follow the tone until their breathing slows from the usual 16 to 19 breaths a minute to 10 or fewer.

In clinical trials funded by maker InterCure Inc., people who used the slow-breathing device for 15 minutes a day for two months saw their blood pressure drop 10 to 15 points. It's not supposed to be a substitute for diet, exercise or medication, but an addition to standard treatment.

Why slow-breathing works "is still a bit of a black box," says Dr. William J. Elliott of Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, who headed some of that research and was surprised at the effect.

Slow, deep breathing does relax and dilate blood vessels temporarily, but that's not enough to explain a lasting drop in blood pressure, says NIH's Anderson.

Don't hold your breath
So, in a laboratory at Baltimore's Harbor Hospital, Anderson is using the machine to test his own theory: When under chronic stress, people tend to take shallow breaths and unconsciously hold them, what Anderson calls inhibitory breathing. Holding a breath diverts more blood to the brain to increase alertness — good if the boss is yelling — but it knocks off kilter the blood's chemical balance. More acidic blood in turn makes the kidneys less efficient at pumping out sodium.

In animals, Anderson's experiments have shown that inhibitory breathing delays salt excretion enough to raise blood pressure. Now he's testing if better breathing helps people reverse that effect.

"They may be changing their blood gases and the way their kidneys are regulating salt," he says.

If Anderson's right, it would offer another explanation for why hypertension is what he calls "a disease of civilization and a sedentary lifestyle."

Meanwhile, health authorities recommend that everyone take simple steps to lower blood pressure: by dropping a few pounds, taking a walk or getting physical activity, and eating less sodium — no more than 2,300 milligrams a day — and more fruits and vegetables.