Strange Exits: Swiss woman starved after eating only light

A woman living in the east of Switzerland who believed she could survive on light alone was found starved to death, it has emerged. Anna Gut not her real NAME was in her early fifties when she saw the film, “In the beginning there was light,” a DOCUMENTary in which two men claim to survive entirely on light, newspaper Tages Anzeiger reported. The film, which ran in Swiss cinemas in 2010, portrayed two men, 62-year-old Swiss Michael Werner, an anthroposophist with a doctorate in chemistry, and 83-year-old Indian yogi Prahlad Jani. Both men claimed to derive sustenance from spiritual means rather than the intake of food. Werner claims he has lived this way since 2001, while Jani says he has lived for 70 years not only without food but also without water. Anna Gut started her long preparations for the process by reading a book by another proponent of breatharianism , 54-year-old Australian Ellen Greve, who also goes by the NAME Jasmuheen, or eternal air. Anna Gut followed the instructions for the first stage to the letter: she had no food or drink for a week, and even spat her saliva out. For weeks two and three, she resumed drinking again, but she visibly weakened and her children became concerned. She calmed them and promised she would stop should the situation ever become critical. But one day last winter, when she failed to answer the phone, the children broke down the door to find their mother dead inside. The autopsy showed simply that she had died of starvation, ruling out any other contribution to the cause of death. Anna Gut was the first to die in Switzerland from attempting to live on pranic nourishment , as it is also known, but there have been others who have also died as a result of their spiritual convictions. In 1997, 31-year-old Timo Degen from Munich died from circulatory collapse during an attempt to live on light alone. A 53-year-old New Zealander, Lani Morris, also died from a stroke caused by fluid loss in 1998, and in 1999, Verity Linn, an Australian was found emaciated in a lake in Scotland having tried to follow light nourishment practices, Tages Anzeiger reports. Dr. Dee Dawson, a British specialist in eating disorders, was in no doubt about the dangers of breatharianism.

It s suicidal, she told The Local. These people must have some sort of psychological problems, I would say, to be doing this. They know perfectly well that you starve if you don t eat. They must see themselves getting thinner, getting weaker, yet they carry on, so presumably they know they are going to die and don t mind. But proponents of light nourishment dismiss such deaths, sometimes accusing the deceased of acting negligently or otherwise saying the true cause of death had not been properly established. Others look for spiritual reasons. The mystics believe in the power of light nutrition despite the reams of available evidence that show how the body needs energy and hydration from food and drink to survive. When deprived of food, the body will begin to use up its reserve energy from muscle and organ tissue. The liver and immune system become damaged and the risk of infection increases. In defence of their beliefs, many mystics point to the cases of gurus who have sat for several years in trees, and to western examples such as Therese Neumann, who claimed many spiritual gifts, among them the ability to survive for long periods of time without food and drink. Doctors observed Neumann constantly for two weeks and CONFIRMed that she had not suffered any weight loss or dehydration during this period. She died in 1962 from a cardiac arrest. The patron saint of Switzerland, Nikolaus von der Flüe, was a mystic living in the 15th century. According to legend, he lived for 19 years without food and drink. But medical experts maintain that such reports cannot be true. Doctors wanted to test Michael Werner to see how he fared, but although he conducted a ten-day self-administered test, he refused to share the medical data amid suggestions they showed the onset of starvation, Tages Anzeiger said.

via The Local – Swiss woman starved after eating only light.

Your breatharian hoax killed another gullible woman, Jani. Feel good about that?

Dentist Pulls All Ex’s Teeth Out; Anna Mackowiak Faces Jail Time

Breaking up is never easy — having 32 teeth ripped out is even worse.

A scorned dentist is facing jail time after surgically removing all of her ex-boyfriend’s teeth after he dumped her, authorities in London said.

Marek Olszewski, 45, made the mistake of scheduling an appointment this week with his ex — 34-year-old Anna Mackowiak — for a toothache, according to the Daily Mail.

So Mackowiak allegedly did what any burned beau with a set of pliers and some anesthetic would do: she doped him up, pulled out all his teeth, and wrapped his head with bandages so he wouldn’t notice until he left her office.

“I tried to be professional and detach myself from my emotions,” she told the news site. “But when I saw him lying there I just thought, ‘What a b—–d.’”

Olszewski could tell something was wrong when he awoke and couldn’t feel any teeth in his mouth. But he said Mackowiak assured him that he’d be fine once the numbness wore off, NDTV reported.

“I didn’t have any reason to doubt her — I mean I thought she was a professional,” he said.

He was wrong.

“But when I got home I looked in the mirror and I couldn’t f–king believe it,” he said. “The b–ch had emptied my mouth.”

Worse, Olszewski’s new girlfriend dumped him because, well, she couldn’t date a man without any teeth, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Mackowiak is under investigation for medical malpractice and abusing the trust of a patient. She could face three years in jail for the alleged stunt. Olszewski plans on saving money to get “indents or something.”

via Dentist Pulls All Ex’s Teeth Out; Anna Mackowiak Faces Jail Time.

Andrew Basiago, Time Traveling Attorney talks about Project Pegasus, Montauk

According to Mr. Basiago, the US government already had a fully operational teleportation capability in 1967-68, and by 1969-70, was actively training a cadre of gifted and talented American schoolchildren, including himself, to become America’s first generation of “chrononauts” or time-space explorers.

This training, he said, culminated in 1981, when, as a 19-year-old, he teleported to Mars, first by himself after being prepared for the trip by CIA officer Courtney M. Hunt, and then a second time in the company of Hunt.

Both trips, Mr. Basiago said, were made via a “jump room” located at a CIA facility in El Segundo, CA.

The apparent purpose of the trips to Mars was to familiarize him with Mars because the CIA knew of his destiny pertaining to publicly establishing the fact that Mars is an inhabited planet and deemed it important that he visit Mars and experience its conditions first-hand.

Mr. Basiago’s involvement in advanced US time-space research as a child, as well as Courtney M. Hunt’s identity as a career CIA officer, have been confirmed by Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo, an ethicist who works closely with US military and intelligence agencies, and by US Army Captain Ernest Garcia, whose storied career in US intelligence included both serving as a guard on the Dead Sea Scroll expeditions of Israeli archaeologist Yigal Yadin and as the Army security attaché to Project Pegasus.

Mr. Basiago has revealed that between 1969 and 1972, as a child participant in Project Pegasus, he both viewed past and future events through a device known as a chronovisor and teleported back and forth across the country in vortal tunnels opened in time-space via Tesla-based teleporters located at the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical Company facility in Wood Ridge, NJ and the Sandia National Laboratory in Sandia, NM.

In one time probe to the future undertaken by Project Pegasus from a chronovisor device located at ITT Defense Communications in Nutley, NJ, Mr. Basiago viewed the US Supreme Court building in Washington, DC as it would be in the year 2013.

During this probe, he found that the Supreme Court building was under 100 feet of stagnant water and reported this to the Lieutenant Commander from the Office of Naval Intelligence who debriefed him after the probe to the future was completed.

He hastens to add that because the chronovisors did not identify absolute, deterministic futures but rather alternate futures in the “multi-verse,” this catastrophic vision of Washington, DC might be from an alternative time line that does not materialize on our time line.

In contrast to the chronovisor probes, in which a form of virtual time travel was achieved, the teleporters developed by Project Pegasus allowed for physical teleportation to distant locations, sometimes with an adjustment forward or backward in time of days, weeks, months, or years.

According to Mr. Basiago, by 1972, the US government was using “quantum displacement” of this kind to both send people forward in time several years to store sensitive military secrets in the future and backward in time several years to provide the government current intelligence about future events. …

via Biblio

Lung Cancer May Have Been Fruit Pit That Blanca Riveron Inhaled In 1984

1 day ago

1 day ago

Lung cancer is always the pits, but sometimes the pit isn’t lung cancer.

Florida woman Blanca Riveron, 62, was horrified to hear that she may have cancer when doctors found a dark spot on her lung in December, WTSP reported.

Before the bad news, she’d spent 28 years coughing, wheezing, and sitting in hospital beds with bouts of asthma and pneumonia.

A few weeks later, the Seminole Heights woman was sitting at a traffic light when one of her violent coughing fits struck. This time, however, she coughed up a fruit pit. It turns out that the fruit pit was likely the “spot” found on her lung.

Her daughter reminded Riveron of the time she yelled to her children while eating a nispero fruit in their home country of Cuba — and Riveron accidentally inhaled one of its seeds.

“I told my daughter no, it can’t be it. It’s been 28 years – I mean it can’t be it,” Riveron told the station.

Now, her coughing has practically vanished, Patch reported. Her breathing is still compromised because of the damage that the seed likely caused, but she’s getting better.

She has a checkup in a few weeks to determine whether the spot is gone, but she and her family are confident that her ailment has been cured.

“She’s even been able to blow up a balloon for my son. She had never been able to do that,” said her daughter, Dayana Noda.

via Lung Cancer May Have Been Fruit Pit That Blanca Riveron Inhaled In 1984.

Czech metal thieves dismantle 10-ton bridge

The gang reportedly arrived at a depot in Slavkov, in the east of the country, with forged paperwork claiming that the footbridge over the disused railway track had to come down.

A Railways spokesman, Pavel Halla, said the cost of the theft was worth millions.

“The thieves said they had been hired to demolish the bridge, and remove the unwanted railway track to make way for a new cycle route,” he said.

“It was only after they had gone that checks were made and we realised we’d been had. The cost of replacing the bridge will run into millions.”

Scrap metal theft has can cost millions to the victims.

Last month The Daily Telegraph reported that metal theft had cost the Church of England £10 million last year, with the value of church insurance claims rise from £173,000 to almost £4.5 million across the country.

Metal theft is estimated to cost the British economy £770 million every year.

via Czech metal thieves dismantle 10-ton bridge – Telegraph.

2 Teens Hit By Car While Sunbathing

Two teenage girls were struck by a car while sunbathing along Donald Avenue on Saturday afternoon in Beaver County.

“I’m very upset. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” witness Nicole Beck said.

Authorities said Samantha Schermanhorn and Kaylie George, both 13, had to be flown by helicopter to a hospital after they fell asleep while tanning in the road and were hit by the vehicle.

“I jumped off the tractor, ran across the road, ran to the road,” neighbor Keith Gilbert said. “I didn’t get his attention in time, and he hit both girls.”

Nicole and Nicholas Beck, who are Schermanhorn’s cousins, said their 19-year-old brother was driving and had stopped at a stop sign before making a turn and hitting the two girls.

“They told us they fell asleep on the road, and my brother turned and hit them,” Nicholas Beck said.

The Becks said 911 was called, and the victims were conscious when ambulances arrived to take them to a nearby site to meet the helicopters. They said their brother was questioned after the crash, but it was just an accident.

“I was crying real bad and shaking,” Nicole Beck said.

Both girls were listed in fair condition with lacerations to their ears, scalp and a few other areas.

“I think maybe she’s learned her lesson,” grandmother Sylvia Schermerhorn Vogt said. “She’s not a dumb kid. She’s a smart girl.”

via 2 Teens Hit By Car While Sunbathing – Pittsburgh News Story – WTAE Pittsburgh.

A cautionary tale.

A Gull-eating Octopus in Victoria, BC

As the group headed out along the walkway, Ginger noticed a gull acting strangely a short distance ahead of her. The bird was on the inside of the breakwater, where the water is clear and can be quite still. The gull appeared to be feeding on something underwater, but it didn’t raise its head. As they approached, they could see a red-orange shape in the water below the gull. When they got to the spot directly above the gull, they could see that it was an octopus. And Ginger’s camera was in her hand.

Giant Pacific Octopus can be seen regularly patrolling the shallows of the shorelines around Victoria. They primarily feed on crustaceans, but are known to occasionally take fish and even birds. Octopus are extremely intelligent animals, and great problem solvers. Although they live only about four years, they can grow to have a span of more than 20 feet and to weigh more than 100 pounds. This one wasn’t that large, but it was still an impressive individual. What was even more impressive, though, was that it had one of its tentacles wrapped around the head of the gull, holding it under water.

The first winter Glaucous-winged Gull was struggling, flapping its wings in an attempt to break the octopus’s grip, but without success. The octopus’s eight tentacled arms allowed it to cling firmly to the rocks and simultaneously maintain its grasp on to the gull. Initially, air was bubbling to the surface, but within a minute, the struggle was over. More tentacles came out of the water to grab the body of the gull and pull it completely under. Other gulls flew overhead, noisily checking out the scene as if to see if there were going to be any scraps, but disappeared once the victim had been pulled from the surface.

via BirdFellow – Birding services, social networking, and habitat conservation.

The octopus probably created a “lure” with one tentacle and may have even camouflaged itself by changing color to match the rocks until the gull took the bait.

New 22-nm Intel Ivy Bridge Chips 37% Faster Than Previous Generation, Use 50% Less Energy

Intel today announced the launch of its much-anticipated “Ivy Bridge” third-generation family of Intel Core chips, the first wave of which will comprise 13 quad-core processors that are geared primarily for use in desktop computers. Ivy Bridge chips designed for use in laptops are expected to come later this year.

The first iteration of Ivy Bridge, which Intel says is 37% faster than previous-version “Sandy Bridge” chips (with 20% better performance on multi-threaded applications), represents the world’s first chips manufactured using Intel’s 22-nanometer (nm) microprocessor production technique.

The new chips use an innovative tri-gate, or “3D,” transistor design that not only enables more transistors to fit into the same amount of space, but also virtually halves power consumption compared to previous-version 32-nm Sandy Bridge chips. This differs from traditionally flat or “2D” planar gates, the latter of which switch on and off as fast as possible in order to maximize current flow when on and minimize when off. Planar gates suffer from energy leakage, however, when they are made smaller and smaller. With Intel’s tri-gate technology, vertical fins rise from the silicon base, with three gates wrapped around each fin in such a way that energy leakage is dramatically minimized while transistor density is boosted.

In addition to advanced on-board security features, Ivy Bridge chips also offer built-in support for USB 3.0 and PCI Express 3.0, and feature Intel HD Graphics 4000 for the support of Microsoft DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1, and OpenCL 1.1.

”The 3rd generation Intel Core processors were created from the ground up to generate exciting new experiences,” according to Kirk Skaugen, Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s PC Client Group. “Our engineers have exceeded our expectations by doubling the performance of media and graphics versus the best processors we’ve built until today, which means incredible new visual experiences are here.”

For software developers, the new Ivy Bridge family brings significantly improved processing and graphics power that will help parallel programmers make the most out of their hardware. In addition to its quad-core design, Ivy Bridge’s hyper-threading technology enables the microprocessor to work with eight instruction threads at the same time. Additionally, Intel’s Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 functionality helps Ivy Bridge manage its own resources, constantly reconfiguring itself to make even the most deep-dive parallel development work run quickly (e.g. 3D graphics, which Ivy Bridge provides onboard support for).

Intel plans to release 14-nm chips next year, and 10-nm chips in 2015.

via New 22-nm Intel Ivy Bridge Chips 37% Faster Than Previous Generation, Use 50% Less Energy | Go Parallel.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria found in 4-million-year-old cave

In a 4-million-year-old cave, scientists may have discovered the secret as to why our modern day drugs to treat some infections are failing.

Four-hundred-eighty-seven meters below the earth in the Lachuguilla cave system, part of Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, researchers discovered that drug resistance has been around, well, forever. Although many people have blamed the fact that we are overusing antibiotics and creating “superbugs,” it seems that bacteria’s drug resistance evolved naturally millions of years ago.

The cave, which is coated in the ancient bacteria, has never encountered modern medicine. Amazingly, these bacteria can still fight off different kinds of antibiotics, including synthetic drugs.

“Clinical microbiologists have been perplexed for the longest time. When you bring a new antibiotic into the hospital, resistance inevitably appears shortly thereafter, within months to years,” lead researcher Gerry Wright, a chemical biologist at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, told National Geographic.

“It’s still a big question: Where is this coming from?” Wright said. “Almost no one thought to look at other bacteria, the ones that don’t necessarily cause disease.”

According to Wright’s new study, published in the April 11 issue of PLoS One, 93 types of bacteria found in the cave were tested against 26 different antibiotics. Seventy percent were able to resist three or four kinds of antibiotics. Three anthrax-related bacteria resisted 14 different types of antibiotics. The results suggest that drug resistance is at least millions of years old and not a man-made phenomenon.

“This supports a growing understanding that antibiotic resistance is natural, ancient, and hard wired in the microbial pangenome,” the study’s authors wrote.

Does that mean overuse of antibiotics are not to blame? World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Dr. Margaret Chan told an audience at a Copenhagen symposium in March 2012 that overuse of antibiotics could make it so that one day something as common as a “scratched knee could once again kill” because of these “superbugs,” HealthPop reported. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also made recent strides to stop the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture to prevent resistance, asking drug companies to voluntarily stop using antibiotics in livestock feed.

However the study’s authors claim that the new evidence does not disprove the role of antibiotic overuse , but reinforces that people need to be more careful with what antibiotics they use.

“This fact further underlines the importance of the judicious use of antibiotics to avoid selection of existing resistance elements and their subsequent mobilization through microbial communities thereby limiting the effectiveness of these drugs to treat infectious diseases,” they wrote.

via Antibiotic-resistant bacteria found in 4-million-year-old cave – HealthPop – CBS News.

Live blood analysis: Rouleaux

Behold, Xeno’s red blood cells.

My fiance and I had something called a Live Blood Analyses done yesterday. A small sterile needle used for testing diabetics is used to obtain a drop of blood from your finger. The drop of blood is placed directly on a clean microscope slide and examined under a dark field microscope.

My blood cells have a problem. They stack like pancakes. This is called rouleaux. Mine is quite dramatic.

Her’s are as they should be, mostly single blood cells. I was told that this is due to her good diet and my poor standard American diet. (I actually eat a lot better than that, but according to the Weston A Price followers, my food is unhealthy and lacking nutrient density.)

I was given recommendations for dietary supplements and I’m giving them a try, starting with the liver cleanse Jarrow ToxGuard Liver PF and krill oil.

I did meet someone who had this rouleaux pattern and reversed it with diet.

The examiner thought I would have trouble with circulation in my extremities, fatigue from lack of hemoglobin being able to reach my cells and dizziness. I don’t have any of these, however.

I do have dry eyes, especially at night, a condition that comes and goes but has been there in the background for many years.  Suspecting some auto-immune problem, I’ve had three blood tests in 2005, 2009 and 2010 all of which were negative for abnormal anti-nuclear antibodies (ANA). Tests for Sjogren’s antibodies was also negative, so I don’t have Sjogren’s syndrome.

My blood is very clean and healthy otherwise. Since a healthy blood cell lives 4 months, we are going to return in four months, after diet changes, for a follow up.

I’m still researching what this rouleaux means. Could it be normal, an artifact of the way it was viewed? Some explanations are fairly dark, such as a type of bone cancer that gives me only 3 to 5 years to live.

While researching, I found the following web site. Someone has photos showing that they had stacked blood cells in the first sample, then were able to get their blood cells to appear a few minutes later.

Hmmm….

 

My rational guess: The osmolarity of the blood sample when you place a drop of blood on a slide is responsible for the rouleaux pattern being seen or not. Osmolarity is the concentration of blood cells to plasma in the sample. Osmolarity is affected by changes in water content, as well as temperature and pressure. Could differences in temperature and pressure during handling of the slide be the culprit?

In both the case of my blood and of the EFT example above, the non-sticky blood was the second sample. The first slide was likely fresh out of the box, and colder than the second slide. The microscope had been completely off when we looked at my blood, so the light from the scope for my sample had not had a chance to warm up the slide. Perhaps the heat of the slide handled by the examiner could, at that scale, make the blood cells unstick? This would be easy to test if someone has a dark-field microscope and was willing to try it.

Plasma osmolarity measures the body’s electrolyte-water balance. … Osmolarity is affected by changes in water content, as well as temperature and pressure. … – wiki

On the other hand, we looked at my blood on the slide for about an hour and it was still stacked the whole time, so heat doesn’t seem like the answer.

When you drop a cover slip onto a microscope slide, it is possible to have the plasma leak off of one side and be evaporated by the heat of the light. This would increase the density of red blood cells in the slide view and I think that could create rouleaux as well. Again, this would be easy to test. When I followed up with the Live Blood Analysit, she was clear that the drops of blood on the slide used in my test were not large enough to reach the edge of the slide and there was no leakage.

A possible reason not to worry about rouleaux in your live blood analysis: (This is from the “Textbook of Anatomy and Physiology for Nurses“)

Another tidbit of information has me even more at ease. One medical image I found had the following caption:

“This is pathologic rouleaux in contrast to normal stacking of red cells in a thick area of a normal blood smear. … Karolinska Institute Medical Images, 2003 “

SO… it seems there is pathologic rouleaux vs normal stacking of red blood cells (RBCs) in “a thick area” of a blood smear. Unfortunately the photo for the above caption was terrible, not at all useful to compare to my RBCs.

My examiner did say that my rouleaux pattern did not look like the one she had seen where someone had multiple myeloma, that it was something she frequently sees due to poor diet.

Will rouleaux appear in normal healthy blood?

Perhaps the area of the slide you are looking at will influence seeing rouleaux or not. I’d think that the edges of the drop would have the most RBCs and thus the most rouleaux.  My Live Blood Analyst, who has done this for years, however, says my RBCs are sticking together because the proteins on them are abnormally sticky.  She says they will stick inside of your body (in vivo) when something called the Zeta Potential drops.

In the body, the blood pressure and fluid motion makes red blood cells have negative charges when in circulation, so they repel each other.

“The concept Zeta potential is important to understand why the cells will maintain a certain distance from each other. Zeta potential refers to the repulsion between the red blood cells.It is due to an electric charge surrounding cells … It is cause by sialic acid groups on the red blood cell membrane which gives the cells a negative charge. “

I need to research this more.

Without further testing I won’t know if a dangerous health problem was responsible for my rouleaux, but I’m not convinced that what we saw under the slide was abnormal or unhealthy. I’ll get tested for abnormal proteins in my blood. According to my doctor, ESR (red blood cell sedimentation rate) is an old test used in the 1940′s (one site says, back to the ancient Greeks) before better tests became available.  People with inflammation have their red blood cells form rouleaux and since groups of cells are heavier they settle in a tube faster and farther than those of healthy people. The ESR can show that disease may be present, but not which disease. Now they can probe for specific proteins (anti-bodies) and find the actual problem.

Meanwhile, I’ll still eat the krill oil and do the liver cleaning. Can’t hurt.