Bacterial Trail May be Next Forensic Clue
March 16, 2010
Breitbart
Forensic scientists could soon use hand germs to help identify criminals and victims, a study said Monday.
Researchers led by Noah Fierer of the University of Colorado at Boulder swabbed individual keys on three personal computer keyboards, extracted bacterial DNA from the swabs and compared the results with bacteria on the fingertips of the keyboards’ users.
They also lifted germs from an unspecified number of other private and public computer keyboards that the three individuals did not use to see if there was a cross-over between the bacteria on an individual’s hands and bacteria on keyboards that had never been touched by that individual.
The bacteria on each person’s fingers were “personal” and gave a much closer match to the germs on the keyboard they used than to bacteria found on keyboards they had never touched, the researchers said.
The researchers also swabbed nine personal computer mice that had not been touched for at least 12 hours and took bacteria samples from the palms of their owners.
The bacteria on each mouse were “significantly more similar” to those found on the owner’s hand than to bacteria taken from 270 other hands, which were on record from previous studies.
“Each one of us leaves a unique trail of bugs behind as we travel through our daily lives,” said Fierer, a professor at the University of Colorado’s ecology and evolutionary biology department, adding that hand bugs could “become a valuable new item in the toolbox of forensic scientists.”
Hand germs are abundant, can be lifted from small areas and are remarkably hardy. The researchers found that colonies of hand bacteria remain essentially unchanged after two weeks at room temperature, and recovered within hours of handwashing.
Fingerprints, however, can be smudged or impossible to obtain, such as on fabric.
And unless there is blood, tissue, semen or saliva on an object, it is often difficult to obtain enough human DNA for forensic identification, said the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“Given the abundance of bacterial cells on the skin surface… it may be easier to recover bacterial DNA than human DNA from touched surfaces although additional studies are needed to confirm that this is actually true,” the study said.
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Scandal Over Death at Hospital – None Blamed
February 26, 2010
Mail Online
By Fay Schlesinger, Andy Dolan, and Tim Shipman
Not a single official has been disciplined over the worst-ever NHS hospital scandal, it emerged last night.
Up to 1,200 people lost their lives needlessly because Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust put government targets and cost-cutting ahead of patient care.
But none of the doctors, nurses and managers who failed them has suffered any formal sanction.
Indeed, some have either retired on lucrative pensions or have swiftly found new jobs.
Former chief executive Martin Yeates, who has since left with a £1million pension pot, six months’ salary and a reported £400,000 payoff, did not even give evidence to the inquiry which detailed the scale of the scandal yesterday.
He was said to be medically unfit to do so, though he sent some information to chairman Robert Francis through his solicitor.
The devastating-report into the Stafford Hospital-shambles’ laid waste to Labour’s decade-long obsession with box-ticking and league tables.
The independent inquiry headed by Robert Francis QC found the safety of sick and dying patients was ‘routinely neglected’. Others were subjected to ‘ inhumane treatment’, ‘bullying’, ‘abuse’ and ‘rudeness’.
The shocking estimated death toll, three times the previous figure of 400, has prompted calls for a full public inquiry.
Bosses at the Trust – officially an ‘elite’ NHS institution – were condemned for their fixation with cutting waiting times to hit Labour targets and leaving neglected patients to die.
But after a probe that was controversially held in secret, not a single individual has been publicly blamed.
The inquiry found that:
• Patients were left unwashed in their own filth for up to a month as nurses ignored their requests to use the toilet or change their sheets;
• Four members of one family. including a new-born baby girl. died within 18 months after of blunders at the hospital;
• Medics discharged patients hastily out of fear they risked being sacked for delaying;
• Wards were left filthy with blood, discarded needles and used dressings while bullying managers made whistleblowers too frightened to come forward.
Last night the General Medical Council announced it was investigating several doctors. The Nursing and Midwifery Council is investigating at least one nurse and is considering other cases.
Ministers suggested the report highlighted a dreadful ‘local’ scandal, but its overall conclusions are a blistering condemnation of Labour’s approach to the NHS.
It found that hospital were so preoccupied with saving money and pursuit of elite foundation trust status that they ‘lost sight of its fundamental responsibility to provide safe care’.
Health Secretary Andy Burnham accepted 18 recommendations from Mr Francis and immediately announced plans for a new inquiry, to be held in public, into how Department of Health and NHS regulators failed to spot the disaster.
But Julie Bailey, head of the campaign group Cure the NHS, condemned his response as ‘outrageous’ and backed Tory and Liberal Democrat demands for a full public inquiry into what went wrong.
Tory leader David Cameron said: ‘We need openness, clarity and transparency to stop this happening again.’ Gordon Brown described the scandal as a ‘completely unacceptable management failure’ and revealed that the cases of 300 patients are now under investigation.
He told MPs the Government was belatedly working on plans to ’strike off’ hospital managers responsible for failures. The hospital could also lose its cherished foundation status.
Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said ‘These awful events show how badly Labour has let down NHS patients. It should never again be possible for managers to put a tick in a box marked “target met” while patients are pushed off to a ward and left to die.’
The Francis probe was launched following a Healthcare Commission report on Stafford Hospital in March last year. It found that deaths at the hospital were 27 to 45 per cent higher than normal, meaning some 400 to 1,200 people died unnecessarily between 2005 and 2008.
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The Positive Effects of Bitter Melon Against Breast Cancer
February 26, 2010
Natural News
By S.L. Baker
A vegetable commonly eaten in India and China called bitter melon (also known by the botanical name Momordica charantia), has been shown in previous studies to have a beneficial impact on blood sugar and cholesterol levels. It turns out that’s not all the health benefits bitter melon offers. A new study by Saint Louis University scientists provides evidence the vegetable triggers a chain of events on a cellular level that stops breast cancer cells from multiplying and also kills them.
Lead researcher Ratna Ray, Ph.D., a professor in the department of pathology at Saint Louis University, noted in a statement to the media that she personally uses bitter melon when she cooks stir fry dishes. She decided to investigate the health effects of bitter melon extract after other researchers discovered how it can lower blood sugar and regulate cholesterol levels. In fact, bitter melon extract has been used by traditional healers in China and India for centuries as a natural treatment for diabetes. But Dr. Ray was surprised to find this vegetable was a powerful inhibitor of breast cancer growth, too.
“To our knowledge, this is the first report describing the effect of bitter melon extract on cancer cells,” Dr. Ray stated. “Our result was encouraging. We have shown that bitter melon extract significantly induced death in breast cancer cells and decreased their growth and spread.”
The research, published in the March 1 edition of Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, involved human breast cancer cells exposed to bitter melon extract in the lab. Dr. Ray cautioned that it is too early to jump to conclusions that the extract could help breast cancer patients — but her findings are promising.
“Cancer prevention by the use of naturally occurring dietary substances is considered a practical approach to reduce the ever-increasing incidence of cancer. Studying a high risk breast cancer population where bitter melon is taken as a dietary product will be an important area of future research,” Dr. Ray said in the press statement.
Dr. Ray and colleagues are currently conducting follow-up studies. They are looking at a number of different cancer cell lines in order to investigate how bitter melon halts cancer cell growth. They are also planning to test the vegetable extract in animals to see if it will delay or kill breast cancer cells. If that research goes well, clinical trials in human breast cancer patients could soon follow.
“Breast cancer is a major killer among women around the world, and in that perspective, results from this study are quite significant,” Rajesh Agarwal, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Colorado, Denver School of Pharmacy, and the Cancer Research associate editor for this study, commented in a media release. “This study may provide us with one more agent as an extract that could be used against breast cancer if additional studies hold true.”
Bitter melon is widely grown in Asia, Africa and South America. Extracts of this vegetable are currently included in some dietary supplements in Western countries because bitter melon is known to contain healthful phytochemicals such as carotenoids, flavanoids and polyphenols, as well as vitamin C.
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Lawsuit Possible Over DNA From Baby Sent to Military for National Database
February 24, 2010 by joel
Filed under Government
February 22, 2010
statesman.com
By Mary Ann Roser
An Austin lawyer threatened to pursue a new federal lawsuit Monday after learning that some newborn blood samples in Texas went to the U.S. military for potential use in a database for law enforcement purposes.
The Department of State Health Services never mentioned the database to Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, who settled a lawsuit in December with the state over the indefinite storage of newborn blood without parental consent, or to the American-Statesman, which first reported on the little-known blood storage practice last spring. Harrington said he thought another suit was likely unless the health department destroys the information obtained from the blood samples or obtains consent.
“This is the worst case of bad faith I have dealt with as a lawyer,” he said Monday.
Jerry Strickland, a spokesman for the Texas attorney general’s office, which represented the health department, fired back. “During this litigation, Harrington was provided accurate answers to the questions he asked,” he said.
“Once Harrington negotiated $26,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs for himself, accepted a settlement agreement and got his desired headlines, he was satisfied and dropped his
lawsuit against DSHS. It appears recent media reports caused Harrington to backtrack in an effort to obscure how he chose to handle this case,” he said
An article Monday by the Texas Tribune, a news Web site, said the state health department sent 800 anonymous samples to the military to help create a national mitochondrial DNA database. The samples were sent in 2003 and 2007, according to the department’s Web site.
Carrie Williams, a health department spokeswoman, said the program wasn’t mentioned because, “We don’t publicize every agency initiative or contract, and obviously this is a sensitive topic.”
Texas agreed to take part in the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory database project because blood spots might help identify “ethnic or ancestral origins of unidentified corpses using mitochondrial DNA,” Williams said. “We believed it was an important research project that could potentially help in missing persons cases.”
The blood samples are taken from the heel during newborn screening tests for genetic disorders.
The blood spots are collected on coded cards, with the names matching those codes kept on file at the health department. Names are not disclosed without parental consent, the department says.
In March, Harrington sued in federal court on behalf of four parents and a pregnant woman who later dropped out, claiming that the state’s collection and indefinite storage of the samples since 2002 amounted to “an unlawful search and seizure.”
The Legislature approved a law in May that requires medical professionals to inform parents or guardians that the blood spots are being collected, stored and could be used for research. Parents who object could opt out.
In December, Harrington settled his suit when the health department agreed to destroy 5.3 million samples.
“I can’t tell you how many times we sat there, and they said no law enforcement,” Harrington said of the lawsuit discussions. “They said, ‘It’s only about medical research, it’s only about medical research.
Williams said the project has been listed on the Web site for weeks and “falls under the broader category of public health research.”
“Our intentions over the years have been good,” she added, “and we are moving forward with the positive changes to the program.”
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Illegally Obtained Blood Samples of Babies in Texas Ordered Destroyed
February 22, 2010
Natural News
By Ethan A. Huff
The subject of a recent federal lawsuit, routine blood samples legally taken from Texas newborns to screen for disorders and diseases were illegally being kept by the Texas Department of State Health Services without parental consent. Found to have begun holding and retaining such blood samples since 2002, the agency is being sued on behalf of the children’s parents by the Texas Civil Rights Project.
Legislation passed in May 2009 allows for blood samples to be retained indefinitely but allows parents to opt out if they wish to do so. However the lawsuit maintains that all blood samples obtained prior to the legislation be destroyed in cooperation with the law at that time. While the Health Department has agreed to destroy the samples, which have been preserved as blood spot cards, it is requesting permission to keep the blood samples of 400 children whose blood tested positive for certain atypical disorders.
The lawsuit is demanding no financial restitution for the state’s crimes, citing only privacy concerns and the principle of holding the government accountable when it violates the rights of its people. According to Andrea Beleno, an Austin mother and plaintiff in the suit, people must stand up and oppose governmental lawlessness otherwise nobody will.
An agreement was reached on December 14 whereby the Center must destroy all samples within 120 days unless the state receives written permission to retain specific samples. The Health Department must also inform the parents who were plaintiffs in the suit how their children’s blood samples were used and if any financial transactions took place during the research process. All projects must also be published on the agency’s newborn screening website.
Spokesmen from Texas A&M’s Health Science Center, the facility where the blood cards were being stored, expressed relief that a settlement has been agreed upon and the lawsuit dismissed, but it mourned the loss of what it described as a “superb database” that would have helped to prevent future birth defects in children.
The Health Department has agreed to comply fully with the new law concerning blood sample retention and is assuring parents that all information will be kept confidential and privacy maintained. The agency hopes that new parents will be willing to voluntarily allow their children’s blood samples to be retained for research purposes that could lead to novel new treatments for serious medical problems.
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Heal Yourself in 15 Days (Part 5)
February 5, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
Continuing our 15-part article series called Heal Yourself in 15 Days, today we focus on cleansing your digestive tract and energizing your cellular energy with the help of some living foods. This is in preparation for part six in the series, which we’ll get to tomorrow.
Here’s the cool part about this: You don’t need a juicer to do this step. All you really need is a blender and a nut milk bag (a fine mesh bag used to squeeze out the juice). Of course, a proper juicer really helps, but it’s not required. Below, I’m going to give you an absolutely delicious live foods juicing recipe that I think you’ll really enjoy. I’m using special ingredients in this juice that help mask the more bland tastes of the green ingredients, so even if you’ve tried fresh living juices in the past and didn’t like them, check out what you’ll read below…
Raw living foods offer one of the greatest secrets to disease reversal and lasting health, and nothing beats fresh living foods right out of the garden. So if you can grow any of your own ingredients for this when Spring comes around, definitely make an effort to do so. Otherwise, buy them at a store or farmer’s market.
Here’s what you’ll need (always choose organic):
• 1 container of Blackberries (use all the blackberries)
• 1 bunch of Parsley (use all the parsley)
• 1 bunch of Kale (only use 2-3 large leaves in this recipe)
• 1 bag of Carrots (only use 3 large carrots for this recipe)
• 1 bunch of Celery (use 2-3 stalks for this recipe)
• 2 Pears (use both pears)
If you can’t find these ingredients, substitute something close. It’s crucial to have some berries in the mix, however. They are part of the recipe for making it all taste good.
After proper preparation (washing, etc.), push all these ingredients through a juicer to generate the fresh juice. If you only have a blender, then blend all these ingredients with water, then pour the juice into a nut milk bag and squeeze out the juice from that. With either method, you’ll end up with a container of fresh juice.
This juice will be extremely potent, so mix this with water (add an equal amount of water to the juice). You may also wish to add some stevia if you’d like to sweeten up the taste a bit.
Health benefits of the fresh living juice
• The blackberries will mask the bitter tastes of the other ingredients with their acidity. This acidity greatly improves the overall taste of the recipe. It also improves digestion of the minerals in the vegetables (you need an acidic digestive environment to absorb minerals).
• Blackberries also have a powerful anti-cancer effect through your entire digestive tract, from your mouth and gums down through your colon.
• Parsley is a super digestive cleanser. It will help eliminate toxins while providing your body with a burst of chlorophyll that will help cleanse your blood and liver.
• Kale is a potent anti-cancer vegetable. It also contains healthy plant-based proteins and healing phytonutrients.
• The carrots are used primarily as a sweetener here (they really do sweeten up the juice), and they also contain a wide assortment of beneficial nutrients, most notably beta carotene (from which carrots get their name).
• The pears are the sweeteners here. I find that pear juice tastes much better than apple juice in these raw living juices, but of course it’s your choice of what’s best for you. If you’re diabetic or want to reduce the sugars in this recipe, reduce the numbers of pears to just one or eliminate them altogether (when I juice here in Ecuador, I don’t use pears at all. I just use carrots.) Some people prefer to use oranges instead of pears. The tart taste of the oranges in some ways provides a better overall taste. Try the recipe both ways and see what you like best.
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Heal Yourself in 15 Days (Part 4)
February 2, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
This article continues part four of the 15-part article series called Heal Yourself in 15 Days. In part three, we explored how you are what you absorb, not merely what you eat (http://www.naturalnews.com/028067_s…). Today, in part four, we take a closer look at how to transform your health by changing your blood.
Your blood is a useful focal point for exploring your health. Whatever health outcome you are experiencing today, it is largely a result of what’s in your blood.
Think about it: Your blood bathes your cells in nutrients 24 hours a day. Blood not only brings vital nutrients to your cells; it also carries away metabolic waste products. It is the superhighway of nutrition and detoxification that reaches into (virtually) every organ and cell in your entire body.
It stands to reason, therefore, that altering your health outcome depends largely upon altering the composition of your blood. If you want to make someone really healthy for a short time, for example, you can give them blood from a healthy person. Research has already documented that when you take blood from people whose bodies prevent cancer and then inject that blood into people who are suffering from cancer, the anti-cancer benefits of the blood are immediately reflected in the cancer patient (through tumor shrinkage, for example). There is such a thing as anti-cancer blood. And if you eat an anti-cancer diet, you’re making anti-cancer blood every single day.
I eat a very strong anti-cancer diet. Most vegans do, too. They could theoretically help heal cancer patients by simply giving them some of their blood. The anti-cancer effects would be immediate and powerful. The FDA, not surprisingly, prohibits you from selling your own blood as “medicine,” so don’t think you can make money by eating a healthy diet and then selling your blood for $1,000 / pint (although it might very well be worth that much in a truly free market).
The other limitation with this idea is that the benefits from receiving donated blood are short-lived. If the blood recipient does not alter his or her lifestyle in some meaningful way, the anti-cancer properties of the “healthy” blood will, within just a few days, be erased and overpowered by the blood that person is manufacturing on their own.
And this leads me to the important question: How is your blood made?
How your body makes your blood
A typical human red blood cell only survives about 4-5 months. Your body is constantly producing new blood and releasing it into the bloodstream to do important work — the work of carrying nutrients, hormones, water, chemical messages and even information throughout your body.
Blood is primarily made of three things: Red blood cells (oxygen carriers), white blood cells (immune function) and blood plasma (a liquid solution that carries everything else).
When more red blood cells are needed, your body (with its infinite healing wisdom) automatically generates new ones. Naturally, it must create those red blood cells using the materials that are available: Materials that are circulating in your blood at the time.
Got that? So the blood cells you make TODAY, which circulate throughout your body for the next four months, are made out of the materials being carried in your blood right now.
So what’s in your blood right now?
Your blood is largely comprised of the things you ate, drank and absorbed over the last several months.
So if you ate a McDonald’s cheeseburger today and chased it with a large Coke, the blood cells your body generates today are going to be made, in part, of materials from that cheeseburger and Coke. If you think about where cheeseburgers really come from — with all the cruelly slaughtered, hormone-injected animals, the ammonia-injected beef parts, the refined white flour in the bun, the processed cheese “food” substances, and so on, it’s not exactly the kind of thing you probably want coursing through your veins for the next few months.
If, on the other hand, you spent the last several days consuming fresh living juices, superfoods and clean, energized water, then guess what your new blood is going to be made of? It will be super blood that’s energized with the elements and vibes of all the good stuff you’ve been consuming!
Bad blood leads to bad health results. It leads to angry, moody mental function and chronic disease. But good blood results in happy, healthy outcomes. Good blood improves your sleep, your sex, your moods and cognitive function. Good blood keeps your body free from cancer, youthful, energized and actively healing itself at multiple levels.
Once you understand all this, it only seems natural to work consciously towards creating good blood every single day.
Amazing facts about your red blood cells
• A whopping one-quarter of the human cells in your body are red blood cells. But most cells in your body are actually non-human cells (bacteria).
• A red blood cell circulates around your body in about 20 seconds. The same red blood cell makes tens of thousands of trips around your body, transporting oxygen to cells, before it is recycled by your own immune system.
• Red blood cells in humans are molecularly quite similar to chlorophyll cells in plants.
• Your red blood cells are made partially of cholesterol. Although the drug industry has tried to label cholesterol a villain, in truth you couldn’t survive without it!
To continue reading this report, click here.
Heal Yourself in 15 Days (Part 2)
February 1, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
This article continues our 15-part article series called Heal Yourself in 15 Days. In part one, we looked at why the real secret to rapid healing is to remove the barriers to healing. In part two, we look at why your healing potential is so powerful that you can’t even turn it off!
When you scrape your elbow, a bit of blood oozes out to clean the wound and wash away bacteria. It then forms a protective scab that keeps out invading microorganisms while your skin has a chance to heal underneath. There, some real magic takes place: Your skin cells innately recognize the need to divide and grow to fill the wound. A cancer-like process is unleashed at the cellular level, activating nearby cells to divide and grow. Your DNA is replicated in the nucleus of each cell with the help of some of the most astounding nanotechnology every witnessed in human civilization. (The best scientists in the world can’t even come close to recreating it.)
As your cells multiply, nutrients and building blocks are carried to them through a blood supply that adapts to the particular size and shape of the wound. If a blood vessel was destroyed in your accident, the growth of new blood vessels is spontaneously initiated to take their place, and they grow into the tissues within mere hours.
As your skin cells fill in the previous wound, the replication effort is delicately turned off, one by one, so that replicating skin cells don’t keep replicating beyond what they need to — a process that would cause the creation of a skin tumor. Your body’s cells know exactly when to grow and exactly when to turn off, and when it’s all said and done, you’re left with a perfect replacement for the skin you previously lost.
Completely automatic healing
The truly amazing part of all this is not the cancer-like processes that are delicately controlled by your body wisdom; it’s not even the fact that your body has the ability to re-grow lost cells — it’s the fact that all this takes place without any conscious involvement on your part.
Healing yourself is automatic, in other words. You don’t have to direct blood to the wound, direct the cells to start replicating, direct the molecular waste products to be carried away and decide when cell replication should be stopped. All this happens without your involvement — even without your awareness! Much of it happens while you sleep, in fact. While your conscious mind is dreaming, your innate body wisdom is working the biochemistry and energetic transformations necessary to repair your tissues.
You can’t stop this process even if you wanted to. You could try to focus all your mental power on your skin not healing, and yet your skin would heal itself anyway.
That’s because your body is a powerful self-healing organism. It heals itself automatically, innately, without your conscious awareness or involvement. Your ability to heal yourself is so powerful that you can’t stop yourself from healing!
Why we don’t always heal
If this is true, then why aren’t you healing everything else? Why aren’t you always in perfect health? The answer, as you’ve seen throughout this article series, is because we tend to erect barriers to our own healing. And we often misread the symptoms of sickness that are asking for help, “treating” them in a way that makes the situation worse.
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An Idle Brain May Raise Learning Abilities
Why is it so hard to remember even things we don’t want to forget? The problem, suggests a growing body of research, may be that we’re thinking about them too much in the first place.Popular wisdom once held that a mind at rest was like an engine idling — not much going on under the hood. To glean insights into how the brain worked, scientists would study only volunteers in action, measuring their physiological or biochemical responses as they completed specific mental tasks. But more recently, thanks in large part to the proliferation of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which precisely maps brain activity based on changes in blood-oxygen levels, neuroscientists have found that important activity in the brain — related in particular to memory and learning — may occur when it is at rest.
Many studies over the past decade have suggested that sleep is crucial to the consolidation of memories and learning; people who take a nap after learning a new task, for instance, remember it better than those who don’t snooze. And now a small but compelling new study from the lab of New York University (NYU) cognitive neuroscientist Lila Davachi finds similar evidence that the brain at rest, even while remaining awake, is conducting meaningful activity. “Your brain is doing work for you even when you’re resting,” says Davachi, who just published a study in Neuron showing that certain kinds of brain activity actually increase during waking rest and are correlated with better memory consolidation. “Taking a rest may actually contribute to your success at work or school,” she adds.
The 16 participants who served as Davachi’s guinea pigs in the study were each scanned, while at rest, before the experiment began. Then, each volunteer was asked to lie flat on the bed of an fMRI machine, outside the magnet, while shown a series of paired images. First they looked at pairs of faces and objects, and were instructed to imagine the person pictured interacting with the object (such as a beach ball). Then they got a few minutes’ rest, before being rolled into the magnet for another scan. The experiment was repeated with pairs of new faces and scenes. Afterward, the participants took a pop quiz to measure their recognition of the faces, objects and scenes they had previously seen.
The purpose of the scans was to compare the relative levels of spontaneous neural activity in two key brain regions involved in memory — the hippocampus and visual cortex — during rest, both before and after the visual tasks. The NYU team noticed that levels of activity in the two areas were more closely correlated several minutes after people had looked at the images than before they started the experiment. That suggests that the visual-learning tasks had affected the brain’s seemingly random firings during rest, and perhaps that the brain was conducting memory-consolidating activity during that time.What’s more, the more closely correlated the brain activity during the rest period, the better the person performed on the tests of recognition. “We found that higher correlations [of activity in the hippocampus and visual cortex] during rest periods leads to high future memory,” notes Arielle Tambini, a graduate student in Davachi’s lab and lead author of the paper.While the NYU study tested memory and simple recognition, other recent research looking at activity in the brain at rest and the learning of complex visual tasks has yielded similar results. Neurologist Maurizio Corbetta of Washington University in St. Louis recruited 14 people to use their peripheral vision to identify a hidden pattern — an inverted T — that was flashed briefly on a screen inside an fMRI machine. After each daily training session, lasting one to two hours for about a week, participants were given an hour’s rest, during which time Corbetta scanned their brains.
As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, Corbetta’s team found that spontaneous brain activity in two separate regions of the cerebral cortex appeared to be correlated after the participants had learned the visual task, but were not linked beforehand. The brain activity in those who were best at finding the hidden pattern onscreen was most strongly related. “Our test was like a video game. What this research shows is that we have a very dynamic landscape of ongoing activity [in the brain] even when we are at rest,” notes Corbetta.One question that has plagued researchers is whether the observed increase in brain activity that occurs after the completion of a mental task is just a ripple or echo effect, rather than a distinct event that helps solidify memories. Harvard researcher Dale Stevens believes he has more or less ruled out the former possibility by showing that even tasks that produce similar levels of neural activity while they are being performed, such as recognizing a face versus a landscape, result in different levels of activity after each task is completed. In Stevens’ studies, brain activity remained high after people viewed landscapes, but was much lower after they looked at faces. People tend to be much better at remembering landscapes than faces, so it makes sense that those differences would be mirrored in the brain-activity levels during rest periods, says Stevens, whose paper was published online in Cerebral Cortex in December 2009.While the NYU, Washington University and Harvard studies all used different approaches, their overall findings were remarkably similar. “The brain is trying to weave ideas together even when you don’t think you are thinking of anything,” notes Johns Hopkins behavioral neurologist and memory expert Dr. Barry Gordon. That’s something to keep in mind the next time you catch yourself daydreaming in a meeting or idly surfing Facebook when you should be studying.
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Control Body Fat and Diabetes with Chlorella
January 25, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
A superfood known as chlorella has caught on like wildfire in the United Kingdom, and studies continue to emerge linking the algae to improvement in symptoms of people with everything from diabetes and high blood pressure to digestive or immune problems.
Chlorella is a single-celled algae that naturally occurs in freshwater rivers and ponds in East Asia, tinting those bodies of water green. It is gathered from these natural sources, dried, crushed into a powder, and then packed into tablet form for sale as a dietary supplement. It has twice the protein density of spinach, 38 times that of soy beans and 55 times that of rice, providing nine essential amino acids along with a number of vitamins and minerals.
The algae has shown effectiveness at improving the symptoms of metabolic syndrome — a collection of symptoms linked with cardiovascular disease and diabetes, including high fasting blood sugar, high blood pressure and cholesterol, and central obesity. Studies have found chlorella supplements to reduce blood pressure in 50 percent of hypertension patients, as well as significantly reduce body fat, blood cholesterol and blood sugar levels.
“It seems that chlorella turns on the genes that control the way insulin is normally used by the cells in the body,” said researcher Randall Merchant of Virginia Commonwealth University. “This research shows that chlorella could in theory help correct the problems of metabolic syndrome. It is not a magic bullet, but taking it is one other preventive thing you can do, like exercise or watching your diet.”
Other studies have shown that chlorella encourages the growth of “good bacteria,” absorbs toxins from the intestines, improves digestion, and eases the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis and fibromyalgia. Chlorella supporters claim that it also increases energy levels and fights depression.
After studies showed that chlorella boosts the immune system, preventing secondary infections in people with brain tumors, some British doctors have started using it to complement cancer treatments.
Because chlorella is high in vitamin K1, it can interfere with the effects of blood thinning medications.
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