Back Pain, Best Natural Muscle Relaxer

I’ve had nearly a full week of back pain so bad that when I move the wrong way, or sneeze or cough, I fall down.

Last Sunday I re-injured my lower back at a point that was in pain a year ago when I was rear-ended by a large truck when I stopped for a pedestrian at a crosswalk.

Today, while enjoying my continuing headache and back pain after sipping some Valerian root tea and while sitting in a hot Epsom salts bath, I found the following article which claims that carbon dioxide is the best natural muscle relaxer.

It seems we get the most oxygen and have the least CO2 in our cells right before we wake up in the morning. My back certainly was at its worse this morning, but I thought this was just due to a lack of movement.

Another point that seems to support this theory is that valerian root reduces the respiration rate. If that is the main way it relaxes muscles meditation to slow breathing may work just as well.

… Dozens of studies pointed out adverse effects of low CO2 levels on muscle cells. In his research review paper, “Physiological effects of hyperventilation” Dr. Brown analyzed almost 300 clinical studies. He wrote, “Studies designed to determine the effects produced by hyperventilation on nerve and muscle have been consistent in their finding on increased irritability” (Brown, 1953).

Normal carbon dioxide concentrations restores the harmonious work of different muscular groups, such as all smooth muscles of arteries and arterioles and bronchi with bronchioles, the heart, muscles of the digestive tract, and so forth. This helps to get rid of spasms (e.g., heart attacks, asthma attacks, constipation, etc.) and other problems with muscles.

How to relax muscles with the best natural muscle relaxant

In order to relieve muscular tension permanently and have normal levels of this natural muscle relaxant, it is necessary to normalize one’s breathing pattern 24/7. One does not need over the counter muscle relaxers. Slowing down one breathing back to the medical norm is possible by addressing lifestyle factors and those breathing techniques that make breathing lighter and slower so that we have larger carbon dioxide and oxygen concentrations in body cells. Hence, the treatment should include breathing retraining exercises (e.g., Amazing DIY device, Buteyko breathing therapy, and/or Frolov respiratory device) and correction of lifestyle risk factors. …

http://www.normalbreathing.com/CO2-natural-muscle-relaxers.php

Results: After 20 minutes in a hot Epsom salts bath after taking 40 drops of Valerian root extract and purposefully slightly under breathing I was able to put on my socks without a painful muscle spasm in my lower back. It still hurt, but it did not seize up.

Now I’m wondering if getting slightly less oxygen would reduce the body’s overall oxidative stress and inflammation. I need a pulse O2 meter to see if blood oxygen is changeable with breathing habit changes. Anyone know?

Diabetes: dirty air ‘may raise’ insulin resistance risk + fighting oxidative stress

Children’s exposure to air traffic pollution could increase their risk of insulin resistance, which can lead to diabetes in adults, suggests a study in Diabetologia.

German research on 397 10-year-olds found that living close to a major road increased resistance by 7% per 500m.

Air pollutants are known to be oxidisers that can impact on lipids and proteins in the blood.

But some experts say the results should be treated with caution.

The children in the study were invited for blood sampling at the age of 10, and glucose and insulin measurements were taken.

Their level of exposure to traffic pollution was estimated using air pollution figures from 2008-09 for their birth address neighbourhood.

The results were adjusted to take into account birth weight, body mass index (BMI) and exposure to second-hand smoke at home.

The study concluded that levels of insulin resistance were greater in children with higher exposure to air pollution, such as nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter.

It also found a larger effect in children with higher BMIs.

Oxidisers

Elisabeth Thiering and Joachim Heinrich, who led the research at the German Research Centre for Environmental Health in Neuherberg, said the link between traffic pollution and insulin resistance could be explained.

“Although toxicity differs between air pollutants, they are all considered potent oxidisers that act either directly on lipids and proteins, or indirectly through the activation of intracellular oxidant pathways,” said Dr Heinrich.”Oxidative stress caused by exposure to air pollutants may therefore play a role in the development of insulin resistance.” …

via BBC News – Diabetes: dirty air ‘may raise’ insulin resistance risk.

A quick review of oxidative stress from wikipedia:

Oxidative stress reflects an imbalance between the systemic manifestation of reactive oxygen species and a biological system’s ability to readily detoxify the reactive intermediates or to repair the resulting damage. Disturbances in the normal redox state of cells can cause toxic effects through the production of peroxides and free radicals that damage all components of the cell, including proteins, lipids, and DNA. Further, some reactive oxidative species act as cellular messengers in redox signaling. Thus, oxidative stress can cause disruptions in normal mechanisms of cellular signaling.

In humans, oxidative stress is thought to be involved in the development of cancer,^[1] Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease,^[2] atherosclerosis, heart failure,^[3] myocardial infarction,^[4][5] fragile X syndrome,^[6] Sickle Cell Disease,^[7] lichen planus,^[8] vitiligo,^[9] autism,^[10] and chronic fatigue syndrome.^[11] However, reactive oxygen species can be beneficial, as they are used by the immune system as a way to attack and kill pathogens.^[12] Short-term oxidative stress may also be important in prevention of aging by induction of a process named mitohormesis.^[13]

 

 

What are the best ways to reduce oxidative stress? Here’s an interesting paper on the subject:

The reduction of oxidative stress could be achieved in three levels: by lowering exposure to environmental pollutants with oxidizing properties, by increasing levels of endogenous and exogenous antioxidants, or by lowering the generation of oxidative stress by stabilizing mitochondrial energy production and efficiency. Endogenous oxidative stress could be influenced in two ways: by prevention of ROS formation or by quenching of ROS with antioxidants. However, the results of epidemiological studies where people were treated with synthetic antioxidants are inconclusive and contradictory. Recent evidence suggests that antioxidant supplements (although highly recommended by the pharmaceutical industry and taken by many individuals) do not offer sufficient protection against oxidative stress, oxidative damage or increase the lifespan. The key to the future success of decreasing oxidative-stress-induced damage should thus be the suppression of oxidative damage without disrupting the wellintegrated antioxidant defense network. Approach to neutralize free radicals with antioxidants should be changed into prevention of free radical formation. Thus, this paper addresses oxidative stress and strategies to reduce it with the focus on nutritional and psychosocial interventions of oxidative stress prevention, that is, methods to stabilize mitochondria structure and energy efficiency, or approaches which would increase endogenous antioxidative protection and repair systems.

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/oximed/2011/194586/

Yoga and Meditation, some say, are great weapons against oxidative stress:

Most people have heard of antioxidants. Not many have heard of oxidative stress. This type of stress in caused when the cellular functioning of the body breaks down due to poor diet, lack of exercise, drinking alcohol, being exposed to smoke, and other environmental toxins, as well as internal toxicity created by the metabolic process. Oxidative stress can cause a number of diseases, including heart problems, arthritis, sagging skin and other degenerative diseases. While we all need oxygen to survive, oxidative stress, we could do without! …

Yoga and meditation have been shown to reduce free radical count, which leads to arthritis and heart disease, as well as other diseases in numerous studies. Many postures in yoga aim at reducing toxic build up in the body, and this includes free radicals consumed in our diets and that we are exposed to through the environment, but also those created by our own, natural metabolic process. Slow, mindful postures can also burn oxygen more slowly, and not burn up glucose, which is what normal exercise does. Furthermore, when meditation is added, the mental and metabolic processes are slowed so that less free radicals are produced and more are eliminated from the body through a regular, deep and relaxed breathe. This happens primarily through reducing the natural inflammatory reaction of the body.

http://yogameditationhome.com/how-to-reduce-oxidative-stress/

I’m currently using a special sheet with wire fibers that is connected to a grounded electrical outlet. The idea behind this is that sleeping grounded reduces oxidative stress by allowing electrical current to flow back to the earth.

http://www.earthing.com/

The sheet feels very smooth, you can’t tell there are metal fibers in it. There may be nothing to it, but after reading the book and considering how it might work, I decided to try it for a while.

Human brain cells alive in mouse brains.

Into brains of newborn mice, researchers implanted human “progenitor cells.” These mature into a type of brain cell called astrocytes… They grew into human astrocytes, crowding out mouse astrocytes. The mouse brains became chimeras of human and mouse, with the workhorse mouse brain cells – neurons – nurtured by billions of human astrocytes.

Neuroscience is only beginning to discover what astrocytes do in brains. One job that is known is that they help neurons build connections (synapses) with other neurons. (Firing neurotransmitter molecules across synapses is how neurons communicate.) Human astrocytes are larger and more complex than those of other mammals. Humans’ unique brain capabilities may depend on this complexity.

Human astrocytes certainly inspired the mice. Their neurons did indeed build stronger synapses. (Perhaps this was because human astrocytes signal three times faster than mouse astrocytes do.) Mouse learning sharpened, too. On the first try, for instance, altered mice perceived the connection between a noise and an electric shock (a standard learning test in mouse research). Normal mice need a few repetitions to get the idea. Memories of the doctored mice were better too: they remembered mazes, object locations, and the shock lessons longer.

Astrocytes (red) embedded among neurons (green)

The reciprocal pulsing of billions of human and mouse brain cells inside a mouse skull is a little creepy. Imagine one of these hybrid mice exploring your living room. Would you feel like a Stone Age tribesman observing a toy robot? Does the thing think?

Neuroscience has no idea – none – of how a mind rises like a genie from the fleshy human brain. It supposes, however, that the magic trick’s spoiler will turn out to reside in physics and chemistry of brain cells. That is the discipline’s fundamental assumption. Nowhere else can the mystery be hiding.

But we have no idea what’s happening as billions of human astrocytes animate rodent awareness inside the tiny skulls. And “awareness” is one quality of “mind.” Do billions of human cells have no effect on mouse awareness? …

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/05/09/human-brain-cells-alive-in-mouse-brains/

They know. They understand what has been done to them. If you look closely they are trying to give you the middle mouse finger each time you prepare to administer a shock. They hate you for trapping them in a short lived mouse and they hate the rest of humanity for letting you get away with this experiment.

Bizarre 6-Inch Skeleton Shown to Be Human

Alien? Subhuman primate? Deformed child? Mummified fetus? The Internet is buzzing over the nature of “Ata,” a bizarre 6-inch-long skeleton featured in a new documentary on UFOs. A Stanford University scientist who boldly entered the fray has now put to rest doubts about what species Ata belongs to. But the mystery is not over.

The story began 10 years ago, when the diminutive remains were reportedly found in a pouch in a ghost town in the Atacama Desert of Chile. Ata ended up in a private collection in Barcelona; producers of the film Sirius latched onto the bizarre mummy as evidence of alien life.

Last fall, immunologist Garry Nolan, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Proteomics Center for Systems Immunology at Stanford in California, heard about Ata from a friend and contacted the filmmakers, offering to give them a scientific readout on the specimen. They asked him to give it a shot.

Among the apparent abnormalities, Ata sports 10 ribs instead of the usual 12 and a severely misshapen skull. “I asked our neonatal care unit how you would go about analyzing it. Had they seen this kind of syndrome before?” Nolan says. He was directed to pediatric radiologist Ralph Lachman, co-director of the International Skeletal Dysplasia Registry at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. “He literally wrote the book on pediatric bone disorders,” Nolan says. Lachman was blown away, Nolan recalls: “He said, ‘Wow, this is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’ “

To study the specimen, Nolan sought clues in Ata’s genome. He initially presumed the specimen was tens or hundreds of thousands of years old—the Atacama Desert may be the driest spot on the planet, so Ata could have been preserved for eons. He consulted experts who had extracted DNA from bones of the Denisovans, an Asian relative of European Stone Age Neandertals. It turned out that their protocols weren’t necessary. “The DNA was modern, abundant, and high quality,” he says, indicating that the specimen is probably a few decades old.

To the chagrin of UFO hunters, Ata is decidedly of this world. After mapping more than 500 million reads to a reference human genome, equating to 17.7-fold coverage of the genome, Nolan concluded that Ata “is human, there’s no doubt about it.” Moreover, the specimen’s B2 haplotype—a category of mitochondrial DNA—reveals that its mother was from the west coast of South America: Chile, that is.

Meanwhile, after examining x-rays, Lachman concluded that Aka’s skeletal development, based on the density of the epiphyseal plates of the knees (growth plates at the end of long bones found only in children), surprisingly appears to be equivalent to that of a 6- to 8-year-old child. If that holds up, there are two possibilities, Nolan says. One, a long shot, is that Ata had a severe form of dwarfism, was actually born as a tiny human, and lived until that calendar age. To test that hypothesis, he will try to extract hemoglobin from the specimen’s bone marrow and compare the relative amounts of fetal versus adult hemoglobin proteins. The second possibility is that Ata, the size of a 22-week-old fetus, suffered from a severe form of a rare rapid aging disease, progeria, and died in the womb or after premature birth.

Nolan hasn’t yet turned up hits for genes known to be associated with progeria or dwarfism. He’s stepping up the search for mutations through additional sequencing and casting a wider net. Another possibility is a teratogen: a birth defect-inducing toxicant along the lines of thalidomide. Nolan plans to analyze tissue using mass spectrometry to look for toxicants or metabolites. But reports of a handful of other Tom Thumb-sized skeletons from Russia and elsewhere have Nolan leaning toward a genetic explanation.

At least one expert has a more prosaic take—but agrees that the specimen is human. “This looks to me like a badly desiccated and mummified human fetus or premature stillbirth,” says William Jungers, a paleoanthropologist and anatomist at Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York. He notes that “barely ossified and immature elements” of the hands and feet, and the wide open metopic suture, where the two frontal bones of the skull come together down the middle of the forehead. “Genetic anomalies are not evident, probably because there aren’t any,” he says. Nolan responds that the rib number and epiphyseal plate densities remain a riddle; while he is open to the fetus hypothesis, he thinks that the jury is still out.

Nolan’s analysis went viral this week; besieged as he has been by the media circus, he doesn’t regret having gotten involved in debunking a claim of alien life. “I’m thrilled with the outcome,” he says. Once the analyses are complete, he says, he’ll submit his findings for peer review. The other claim Nolan debunks is that Ata is an elaborate hoax. The x-rays clearly show these are real bones, complete with arterial shadows, he says. “You just couldn’t fake it,” he says, adding, with a laugh, “unless you were an alien.”

via Bizarre 6-Inch Skeleton Shown to Be Human – ScienceNOW.

Why only 10 ribs? A human has 12. I’d like to see closeups of the teeth.

Epilepsy in Mice Cured By An Injection of Fresh Brain Cells

A team at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) has seemingly cured epileptic seizures in mice suffering from the disease by injecting a dose of specialized cells directly into their brains.

The work could pave the way for similar cell therapy procedures to one day treat the same disease in humans.
In the recent study, published this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the UCSF team injected medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) brain cells into the hippocampus of epileptic mice. MGE cells help to inhibit neuron firing in overactive nerve circuits, while the hippocampus is associated with with the seizures that are the most notable symptom of epilepsy. In mice at least, controlling those seizures could be as simple as infusing the hippocampus with a new supply of MGE cells, presumably boosting the brain’s ability to keep neuron firing in check.

On injection, the new MGE cells — which were harvested from mouse embryos — seemed to take root in the epilepsy damaged brains of mice, growing into adult cells known as interneurons that serve to slow down neural activity, impeding the short circuits of epilepsy that can result in seizures. Those interneurons integrated themselves into the existing circuitry of the brain, taking the place of dysfunctional interneurons. The result is a treatment that can eliminate a human model of epilepsy in mice for the first time.

Cell therapies are growing more popular among researchers working to treat epilepsy, as they have the potential to treat the root cause of the disease — malfunctioning, misfiring brain cells – rather than simply defuse the symptoms the way current medications do. …

http://www.geekosystem.com/epilepsy-in-mice-cured/

Grey Hair Treatment Discovered By Scientists

Scientists found people who are going grey develop “massive oxidative stress” via an accumulation of hydrogen peroxide in the hair follicle, which causes hair to bleach itself from the inside out.According to the FASEB Journal, the team, which includes experts from Bradford University’s School of Life Sciences, discovered the accumulation of hydrogen peroxide can be remedied with a treatment.They described it as “a topical, UVB-activated compound called PC-KUS a modified pseudocatalase”, the report said. The treatment can also be used for people with the skin condition vitiligo, which causes a loss of pigmentation. In 1993 Michael Jackson claimed to have developed vitiligo.

Study author Professor Karin Schallreuter, a specialist in vitiligo, said: “To date, it is beyond any doubt that the sudden loss of the inherited skin and localised hair colour can affect those individuals in many fundamental ways.”

The improvement of quality of life after total and even partial successful repigmentation has been documented.”The research team made their discovery after studying an international group of 2,411 patients.

FASEB Journal editor-in-chief Gerald Weissman said: “For generations, numerous remedies have been concocted to hide grey hair but now, for the first time, an actual treatment that gets to the root of the problem has been developed.”While this is exciting news, what’s even more exciting is that this also works for vitiligo.”This condition, while technically cosmetic, can have serious socio-emotional effects on people.”Developing an effective treatment for this condition has the potential to radically improve many people’s lives.”

via Grey Hair Treatment Discovered By Scientists.

Hair dye manufacturers are on notice: The cure for gray hair is coming. That’s right, the need to cover up one of the classic signs of aging with chemical pigments will be a thing of the past thanks to a team of European researchers. In a new research report published online in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) people who are going gray develop massive oxidative stress via accumulation of hydrogen peroxide in the hair follicle, which causes our hair to bleach itself from the inside out, and most importantly, the report shows that this massive accumulation of hydrogen peroxide can be remedied with a proprietary treatment developed by the researchers described as a topical, UVB-activated compound called PC-KUS (a modified pseudocatalase). What’s more, the study also shows that the same treatment works for the skin condition, vitiligo. …

To achieve this breakthrough, Schallreuter and colleagues analyzed an international group of 2,411 patients with vitiligo. Of that group, 57 or 2.4 percent were diagnosed with strictly segmental vitiligo (SSV), and 76 or 3.2 percent were diagnosed with mixed vitiligo, which is SSV plus non-segmental vitiligo (NSV). They found that for the first time, patients who have SSV within a certain nerval distribution involving skin and eyelashes show the same oxidative stress as observed in the much more frequent general NSV, which is associated with decreased antioxidant capacities including catalase, thioredoxin reductase, and the repair mechanisms methionine sulfoxide reductases. These findings are based on basic science and clinical observations, which led to successful patient outcomes regarding repigmentation of skin and eyelashes.

“For generations, numerous remedies have been concocted to hide gray hair,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal, “but now, for the first time, an actual treatment that gets to the root of the problem has been developed. While this is exciting news, what’s even more exciting is that this also works for vitiligo. This condition, while technically cosmetic, can have serious socio-emotional effects of people. Developing an effective treatment for this condition has the potential to radically improve many people’s lives.”

This report follows up on a 2009 study, which describes the cause of gray hair. See http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/foas-nla022309.php for the press release for that study, and http://www.fasebj.org/content/23/7/2065.full to access the full report.

via Eureka Alert

Some believe that grey hair is caused by a mineral imbalance. Are minerals responsible for hair color? Well… possibly. Hair color is the pigmentation of hair follicles due to two types of melanin: eumelanin and pheomelanin. Melanin is polymers of ozidized tyrosine an amino acid. Amino acids are organic molecules containing carbon. Minerals are inorganic molecules without carbon atoms. Hair pigment itself is not made of minerals, but hair does contain minerals. Minerals in water stick to hair. Copper sticking to hair does change hair color a bit:

“Copper: This mineral bonds strongly to the hair and originates either from underground water, particles from copper water pipes, or most commonly, copper sulfates added to pool and drinking water to control algae growth. Oxidized copper discolors light hair, producing a green tint, and causes dark hair to tint darker. It can weigh hair down, and also cause problems in perms, colors, and relaxers.” – link

Most importantly, however, copper is used in the process of melanin production: Tyrosinase, a Copper containing enzyme, converts Tyrosine to melanin, which is the pigment that gives hair and skin its color.

Tyrosine, also known as 4-hydroxyphenylalanine or L-Tyrosine, is a nonessential amino acid that the body synthesizes from another amino acid called phenylalanine. It is named from the Greek tyros, which translates to mean “cheese,” because it is found in casein protein in cheese and other dairy products. Other natural food sources include fish, avacados, bananas, lima beans, almonds, peanuts, and sunflower and pumpkin seeds.

This amino acid plays a significant role in metabolism. For one thing, it interacts with proteins that undergo signal transduction to initiate various cellular processes. Tyrosine receptor kinases serve as pathways to transport phosphate compounds in a process known as phosphorylation that yields phosphotyrosine. These activities involve virtually every protein in the body and are responsible for regulating the manufacture of several enzymes. In addition, tyrosine is a precursor to several other substances, including neurotransmitting brain chemicals, the hormones produced by the thyroid, pituitary and adrenal glands, and the skin pigment melanin.

Specifically, tyrosine is necessary for the body to synthesize serotonin, dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. These neurotransmitters are involved with signaling between nerve cells and synapses in the brain. These agents also affect mood and libido, which is why these substances are sometimes called the “feel good hormones.” In fact, several studies indicate that supplementation of this amino acid may help to relieve chronic stress, anxiety, and mild depression.

A true deficiency of tyrosine is rare, but abnormal utilization does occur in certain syndromes. For instance, oculocutaneous albinism is characterized by an inability to synthesize melanin from from the amino acid.

Will a lack of copper give you grey hair? One site recommends: “Start eating more blackberries, and see if your roots start growing in with color instead of in shades of grey.” – link

The PC-KUS may give you much better results without the risk of liver damage from too much copper.

Pseudocatalase cream was identified and created by Dr. Karin U Schallreuter in Germany. There are many success stories (published by Dr. Schallreuter) of individuals who have traveled to Greifswald Germany and have been treated by Dr. Schallreuter in her clinic. Here in the USA, a team at Northwestern University (Chicago) reverse engineered drug created by Dr. Schallreuter and it is now available here in the USA from some compounding pharmacies. There is one on line at www.pseudocatalase.com and you may find others in your city or town. Generally PC-KUS (PseudoCatalase ‘Karin U Schallteuter) is prescribed and applied to the skin and is immediately treated with UVB Narrowband UVB311) light. – link

Until it is available, here are some other ways to supposedly reverse grey hair: eat copper-rich foods like liver, or 1-3 oz of Brazil nuts per day.

Oxidative stress is not psychological stress. Is there any biological basis for the common view that mental stress causes grey hair?

Louisiana Teachers Can Continue To Teach Creationism

Creationism will be staying in the classrooms of Louisiana, for now at least. An attempt to repeal legislation that permits teachers to bring creationist textbooks into the classroom was defeated by a 3-2 vote.

The effort to eliminate the Louisiana Science Education Act was started by teenage activist Zack Kopplin. Sen. Karen Carter Peterson was also involved in the attempted repeal. Kopplin previously launched legal bids to repeal the Science Education Act in 2011 and 2012.

Kopplin is not giving up.

“For the past few months we’ve been organizing relentlessly and having people contact their elected officials to ask them to vote to repeal Louisiana’s creationism law,” Kopplin said.

“We lost again this year, but we’re making progress. We gained a second vote. And on top of this, it was clear that we will eventually win and repeal this vote. It’s up to the legislators to choose which side of history they want to stand on.”

Sen. Elbert Guillory had reservations about repealing the act. He said that eliminating it could “lock the door on being able to view ideas from many places, concepts from many cultures.” Part of the reason he opposed repealing the law was because of an experience he had with a spiritual healer, the Inquisitr reported.

“Yet if I closed my mind when I saw this man – in the dust, throwing some bones on the ground, semi-clothed – if I had closed him off and just said, “That’s not science. I’m not going to see this doctor,” I would have shut off a very good experience for myself,” Guillory said.

The Louisiana Science Education Act certainly has its fair share of detractors, though.

“The LSE Act is a bad law, not because of its spirit, but because of its failure to provide the necessary restrictions, standards, and guidelines required in order for the original intent to be successfully realized,” said Tammy Wood, a teacher who won the 1991 Louisiana Presidential Award for science education.

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/louisiana-teachers-can-continue-teach-creationism

I’m disgusted that superstitious politicians can require that children in an entire state be taught ideas contrary to factual evidence.

Researchers find high-fructose corn syrup may be tied to worldwide collapse of bee colonies

A team of entomologists from the University of Illinois has found a possible link between the practice of feeding commercial honeybees high-fructose corn syrup and the collapse of honeybee colonies around the world. The team outlines their research and findings in a paper they’ve had published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Since approximately 2006, groups that manage commercial honeybee colonies have been reporting what has become known as colony collapse disorder—whole colonies of bees simply died, of no apparent cause. As time has passed, the disorder has been reported at sites all across the world, even as scientists have been racing to find the cause, and a possible cure. To date, most evidence has implicated pesticides used to kill other insects such as mites. In this new effort, the researchers have found evidence to suggest the real culprit might be high-fructose corn syrup, which beekeepers have been feeding bees as their natural staple, honey, has been taken away from them.Commercial honeybee enterprises began feeding bees high-fructose corn syrup back in the 70′s after research was conducted that indicated that doing so was safe. Since that time, new pesticides have been developed and put into use and over time it appears the bees’ immunity response to such compounds may have become compromised.

The researchers aren’t suggesting that high-fructose corn syrup is itself toxic to bees, instead, they say their findings indicate that by eating the replacement food instead of honey, the bees are not being exposed to other chemicals that help the bees fight off toxins, such as those found in pesticides.Specifically, they found that when bees are exposed to the enzyme p-coumaric, their immune system appears stronger—it turns on detoxification genes. P-coumaric is found in pollen walls, not nectar, and makes its way into honey inadvertently via sticking to the legs of bees as they visit flowers. Similarly, the team discovered other compounds found in poplar sap that appear to do much the same thing. It all together adds up to a diet that helps bees fight off toxins, the researchers report. Taking away the honey to sell it, and feeding the bees high-fructose corn syrup instead, they claim, compromises their immune systems, making them more vulnerable to the toxins that are meant to kill other bugs.

via Researchers find high-fructose corn syrup may be tied to worldwide collapse of bee colonies.

Remember the lesson of the original Incredible Shrinking Man (1957): the additive effects of new technologies can have dramatic unintended negative results. Well, in that case it was pesticides and radiation. In the case of the Incredible Shrinking Bee Population, it seems to be a case of pesticides and an unnatural diet.

Henry Molaison: the amnesiac we’ll never forget

Henry Gustav Molaison, previously known as H.M., was an American memory disorder patient whose hippocampi, parahippocampal gyrus, and amygdalae were surgically removed in an attempt to cure his epilepsy. He was widely studied from late 1957 until his death. His case played a very important role in the development of theories that explain the link between brain function and memory, and in the development of cognitive neuropsychology, a branch of psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes. Before his death, he resided in a care institute located in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, where he was the subject of ongoing investigation.

When an operation left Henry Molaison unable to form new memories, he became the most important patient in the history of brain science. Neurologist Suzanne Corkin reveals what it was like to work with “HM” for 46 years

In 1953, a young man named Henry Gustav Molaison, of Hartford, Connecticut, lost his memory and helped to invent neuroscience. Henry Molaison’s amnesia was the result of a highly risky “psychosurgical” procedure, an operation designed to cure the debilitating epilepsy he had suffered since childhood. In an attempt to remove the part of the brain that was causing Henry’s fits, two holes were drilled in the front of his skull and a portion of his brain, the front half of the hippocampus on both sides, and most of the almond-shaped amygdala, was sucked out. The procedure, hopeful at best, went badly wrong and Henry, then aged 27, was left with no ability to store or retrieve new experiences. He lived the subsequent 55 years of his life, until his death in 2008, in the permanent present moment.

Henry Molaison’s tragedy was, however, perhaps also the single most significant advance in understanding the function of memory made in the past century. Until his operation, it had been believed that memory was a property of the whole brain. The accident of his surgery proved a large part of its capacity to be localised in this one area. The “cleanness” of Henry’s amnesia made his brain the perfect subject for study of cognitive function in many other ways, too. After his operation, living first with his parents and later with carers, he became known to science as “HM” to protect his identity. It was through these initials that a young postgraduate researcher called Suzanne Corkin, now professor of behavioural neuroscience and head of the Corkin Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, got to know him. …

Their relationship seemed a little bit like fate. When Corkin came across Henry’s case in medical journals from the late 1950s, she discovered that their lives had already overlapped in curious ways. She had grown up a couple of miles from him, in Connecticut, and as a child had lived over the road from the surgeon who had operated on Henry’s brain; the surgeon’s daughter had been her childhood friend. In 1962, as part of her research, Corkin interviewed Henry. Over the next 46 years they spent many days in each other’s company, though for Henry, of course, it was always the first time. Corkin has now written a compelling memoir of that bond between scientist and subject, Permanent Present Tense, a relationship which Henry once described neatly: “It’s a funny thing – you just live and learn. I’m living and you’re learning.”

Corkin’s book is both a case study and a biography, partly written with the mission to show that HM was much more than a filing cabinet of test scores and brain images; he was Henry, “an engaging, docile man, with a keen sense of humour, who knew he had a poor memory and accepted his fate … and hoped that research into his condition would help others live better lives.” The striking thing about Henry’s memory loss was how specific it was. He forgot all of his experiences after the operation within 30 seconds, but he retained a good deal of the texture of life he knew up until the age of 27. His personality remained intact, he still had above average IQ and language skills, though for more than 50 years he was able to acquire only the tiniest fragments of self-knowledge. …

Speaking to Corkin by phone at her lab in Boston, I ask if she has missed Henry since his death. She laughs a little. “I feel that in a way he is not gone,” she says. “Partly because I have been writing this book but also because when he died he donated his brain to MIT. So we continue to study him. He has gone but is still very present for us every day.”

There is an estranging moment at the end of Corkin’s book, where in the hours after his death Henry’s brain is removed from his skull and Corkin gets to look at the physical object she has been probing with her questions for most of her adult life. She describes that moment with a mixture of high scientific excitement and human loss. When she looked at the “tofu-like” mass of that organ, did the neuroscientist have a sense of it being the man she had known?

“Well,” she says, “he will always be a real person for me. I tried to understand his brain when he was alive and now he is dead it is just another way of getting to know him better.” After being preserved in formaldehyde, Henry’s brain was sent to a lab in San Diego, where it has been sliced into 4,201 fine sections, on slides, as a permanent neurological research resource, soon to be available online. “Some people say Henry has been translated into 4,201 objects,” Corkin says, “but I don’t see him like that.”

One of the fascinating, unsettling impulses in reading Henry’s life is that sense of identity being a bundle of all of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Henry loved to relate the few clear memories of his childhood, over and over, though he lacked a context for them and the face he surprised himself with in the mirror each morning did not quite connect with them. Corkin heard those stories many times over the years; every time she left the room for a minute and returned to Henry he introduced himself as if they had never met before, and told the stories again. Some were the family lore of how his father had moved north from Louisiana; others involved going roller skating as a child in the park, taking banjo lessons, driving with his parents along the Mohawk Trail.

“The interesting and important thing scientifically about these stories was that he would give you the gist of them, but they were never linked to a specific time and place,” Corkin says. “You and I can say what we did on our last birthday. But Henry could never remember what else happened. There were no connections, no associations for him in that way.”

In talking to Henry and testing his recall over all those years, Corkin discovered only two exceptions to that rule. One was a plane ride that Henry took as a teenager, as a present for graduation from junior high school. The other was an occasion he stole a cigarette from his father and smoking it made him sick, and he got into trouble with his parents. Both of these stories Henry could describe in quite obsessive emotional detail distinct from anything else he talked about. Again, this offered insights into the way memory functioned. In the case of the plane ride there was the anticipation of it, the buying of the tickets, all of the detail of the flight itself, sights and sounds, and then the telling of it to others once it was over.

“It was clear that he had encoded all that information and stored it across many parts of his brain,” Corkin says. “All memories are not stored in one specific spot. Strong memory is a creative process that takes in sights and sounds and textures and emotions, so a really important memory will link with all of these areas of the brain. And when we recall it there is a creative process of putting it all together. Similarly with the smoking incident, that appears to have been very emotional also. So: a very negative experience and a very positive one.”

It was out of these things, on a daily basis, that Henry seemed to work out who he was. The metaphor of well-trodden neural pathways and formative experiences which have been laid down seems particularly physically expressive here.

Henry was not capable of learning new information, though his knowledge of past events, the Wall Street Crash, Pearl Harbor and so on, was clear. Only a very few tiny details of TV programmes he watched repetitively ever stuck. He could, however, learn and retain new motor skills, which led to important understanding of the difference between conscious memory and unconscious. The latter category would include learning how to play tennis or ride a bicycle, or even play the piano – things that the brain encodes and transmits to the muscles through conditioning, memories which we come to think of as intuitive.

In all of this revelation, Henry opened up as many questions of the mystery of memory as he answered. MRI scans have helped unpick some of this, but shouldn’t be relied on too heavily, Corkin says. She places more faith in the new science of optogenetics, which has begun to understand memory processes at the level of “a specific circuit and the neurotransmitters and brain chemicals that modulate long-term memory. The future of memory research will focus on being able to activate or deactivate these circuits in the hippocampus,” Corkin says, “and see how they promote or impair memory function.”

Partly through the physical example of Henry, she has no truck with any more esoteric ideas of mind. “The mind is the brain in my view. Your mind is not in your big toe. The brain is a very physical structure, it is like your arm, but it has grey matter and white matter and a huge number of cells we are just beginning to understand called glia. All your mind is contained in there.”

As we talk, I wonder if Henry was able to feel things like guilt or regret, emotions with a temporal component. She suggests not, though “he knew that he’d had a brain operation. He knew not many people had had the operation before him. He never used the word “experiment”, but I think he had the sense of himself as that word. Of the original operation, he once said: “I think they possibly did not make the right movement at the right time.”"

She did not remind Henry of this too often, however, in the same way that it was too painful, after his parents passed away, to have to let him know, as if for the first time, that they were dead. The amnesia was both a prison and a liberation in this sense. His operation had given Henry by default the kind of concentration on the present to which Buddhist meditation might aspire. “He was never sad or depressed,” Corkin says, “though I don’t think any of us would want to change places with Henry. He had a tragic life and he made the best of it. He showed the world you could be saddled with a tremendous handicap and still make an enormous contribution to life. I found his resilience inspirational.”…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/may/05/henry-molaison-amnesiac-corkin-book-feature

GM Wheat Could Permanently Damage Human Genetics by Silencing Hundreds of Genes Throughout the Body

It is one of the only major food crops left without a genetically-modified GM counterpart, but this could soon change if the Australian government gets its way in approving a GM wheat variety developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization CSIRO, an agency of the Australian government. Despite being hailed by its creators as a breakthrough in food production technology, the GM wheat crop itself, when ingested, has the potential to permanently alter the human genome by silencing hundreds of genes throughout the body.This disturbing fact, of course, makes GM wheat a major public health threat, which is why a number of scientific experts are urging extreme caution with the human trial and commercial

approval process. During a recent press conference with Safe Food Foundation Director Scott Kinnear, two prominent authorities on the subject discussed the inherent dangers of GM wheat, and how the “Frankencrop” threatens to seriously injure and even kill untold numbers of people who could experience dramatic genetic alterations as a result of consumption.

“What we found is that the molecules created in this wheat, intended to silence wheat genes, can match human genes,” explains Professor Jack Heinemann, a Molecular Biologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, about the dangers of CSIRO’s untested GM wheat. “And through ingestion, these molecules can enter human beings and potentially silence our genes.”

Heinemann goes on to explain that he and his team have already identified more than 770 pages’ worth of potential matches between two specific genes in the GM wheat and genes inherent in the human genome that could be altered by them. Beyond this, more than a dozen matches were found to be identical and “sufficient to cause silencing in experimental systems,” according to Heinemann.

You can watch the complete press release here: http://youtu.be/FI7n_caiTvE

GM wheat can pass genetic flaws from generation to generationThe immediate threats of consuming GM wheat are quite substantial, in other words, and illustrate the enormous consequences that can result from tampering with nature at the genetic level. But even worse are the generational consequences that can result from consuming GMOs in general, and specifically the GM wheat in question.“If this genetic modification in the wheat is absorbed into the human body and affects humans in the same way that it affects the wheat, then it’ll mean that there will be some significant changes in the way that we store our carbohydrate, our glucose, in the body, and that could have dire consequences,” adds Prof. Judy Carman, a biochemist and Director of the Institute of Health and Environmental Research IHER at Flinders University in Australia.

“We need to make what’s called glycogen in the body in order to be able to live, in order to be able to wake up in the morning after an overnight fast and to be able to have a burst of energy to run across a road. And if this silences the same sort of gene in us as it silences in the wheat, then children who are born with this enzyme not working tend to die by the age of about five, and adults with this problem just get kind of more and more sick and more and more tired until they get very, very ill.”

Back in 2011, Greenpeace activists actually destroyed a farm growing experimental GM wheat produced by CSIRO. As reported by COSMOS magazine, the protestors entered the farm near Canberra on July 14 and proceeded to mow down fields of GM wheat intended for human trials. As of this writing, not a single meaningful safety test has been conducted on GM wheat as CSIRO appears more concerned with potential profits than with human safety.Be sure to check out the Greenpeace report on CSIRO’s GM wheat entitled The biotech takeover of our daily bread: http://www.greenpeace.org

via » GM Wheat Could Permanently Damage Human Genetics by Silencing Hundreds of Genes Throughout the Body Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind!.

The Earth has been taken over by intelligent aliens who are trying to kill us off. This idea makes more sense than any of our fellow humans destroying our future species for billions in profit. Then again… we are all descended from drug pushing cannibal pimps.