Buddhist philosophy and the practice of meditation continues to have a large influence on current Western thought about psychological treatment. Mindfulness is growing into an entire field of anxiety treatment, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is making waves with CBT therapists, and now it appears that meditation can improve attention. It is still early, but meditation now shows promise for treatment of ADHD and other attention problems.
Based on previous reports that anthocyanidins, a group of naturally occurring compounds widely available in fruits and vegetables as well as red wine, have chemopreventive properties, Dr. Yin and his collaborators studied the effects and the mechanisms of the most common type of a naturally modified anthocyanidin, known as cyanidin-3-rutinoside, or C-3-R, which was extracted and purified from black raspberries, in several leukemia and lymphoma cell lines.
They found that C-3-R caused about 50 percent of a human leukemia cell line known as HL-60 to undergo programmed cell death, or apoptosis, within about 18 hours of treatment at low doses. When they more than doubled the concentration of C-3-R, virtually all of the leukemia cells became apoptotic and died. C-3-R also induced apoptosis in other human leukemia and lymphoma cell lines.
When the investigators studied the mechanism of cell death in the leukemia cells, they found that C-3-R induced the accumulation of peroxides, a highly reactive form of oxygen, which, in turn, activated a mitochondria-mediated apoptotic pathway. Mitochondria are specialized structures located within all cells in the body that contain enzymes needed by the cell to metabolize foodstuffs into energy sources. In contrast, when the researchers treated normal human blood cells with C-3-R, they did not find any increased accumulation of reactive oxygen species and there were no apparent toxic effects on these cells.
Researchers are adding to the list of cancer types for which pomegranates seem to halt growth. A recent study at the University of Wisconsin–Madison using a mouse model shows that consuming pomegranates could potentially help reduce the growth and spread of lung cancer cells or even prevent lung cancer from developing.
In a recent issue of Cancer Research, researchers led by Hasan Mukhtar, co-leader of the Cancer Chemoprevention Program of the University of Wisconsin Paul P. Carbone Comprehensive Cancer Center, demonstrate that drinking pomegranate fruit extract helps slow the growth of lung cancer in mice.
“Pomegranate fruit continues to show great promise,†says Mukhtar, professor of dermatology at the School of Medicine and Public Health and a member of the Carbone Cancer Center. “We have earlier shown that pomegranate fruit contains very powerful skin and prostate cancer-fighting agents. These recent findings expand the possible health benefits of the fruit to the leading cause of cancer death in the country and worldwide: lung cancer.â€
South Korea’s LG Philips LCD has developed the world’s first A4-sized colour electronic-paper – a paper-thin and bendable viewing panel.
The e-paper – which measures 35.9cm across its diagonal and is just 300 micrometres (0.3 millimetres) thin – can display up to 4096 colours, the world’s second largest liquid crystal display maker said in a statement.
It is designed to be energy-efficient, only using power when the image changes on the display, it said.
“This represents the next generation in display technology,” Chung In-Jae, chief technology officer and executive vice-president, said in the statement.
Nature Air, a small commuter airline in Costa Rica has become the first airline to offset all of their carbon emissions. “We are the world’s first and only zero-emissions airline,” Nature Air spokes-man Alexi Huntley told Outside Magazine. The family run business has turned a fleet of eight twin engine airplanes into a Central American shuttle system. The small airline makes 74 daily flights to 17 destinations in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama.
As the only zero emission airline in the world, it’s clear that NatureAir is committed to safeguarding the environment and to preventing or reducing adverse environmental impacts of its operations.
Nature Air’s carbon offset program uses its yearly fuel bill to accurately calculate carbon emissions. It then invests in reforestation and habitat-protection projects on the Osa Peninsula, one of Central America’s most biologically diverse rainforests.
Coffee is among the most widely consumed beverages in the world, and that the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that moderate coffee consumption (3-5 cups per day) may be associated with reduced risk of certain disease conditions, such as Parkinson’s disease. Some research in neuropharamacology suggests that one cup of coffee can halve the risk of Parkinson’s disease. Other studies have found it reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, kidney stones, gallstones, depression and even suicide.
American Society for Nutrition’s panel chair Dr. James Coughlin, a toxicology/safety consultant, says that recent advances in epidemiologic and experimental knowledge have transformed many of the negative health myths about coffee drinking into validated health benefits.
Artificial blood made up of plastic molecules has been created by researchers at Sheffield University in the UK. The artificial blood is light to carry and, unlike blood plasma, does not need to be refrigerated. It also has a longer shelf life.
The new artificial blood consists of plastic molecules with an iron atom at their core; this allows it to simulate the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin in real red blood cells. Hemoglobin is the metalloprotein in red blood cells that transports oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body – like the muscles – where it releases its oxygen load.
One day last month, I paid a visit to Michael Wright, in his book-and-clock-cluttered home, in West London. Wright was reading Xenophon, the Greek historian, in ancient Greek. He put the book down and brought out his model of the Mechanism from a cabinet underneath the stairs. In size, it is startlingly similar to a laptop computer, though a bit thicker. On the front dial, in addition to the pointers for the sun and the moon that Price posited, Wright added pointers for the planets and a separate pointer for the day of the year. On the back dial were two hundred and twenty-three divisions, marking months in the saros cycle; a similar dial above that showed months in the Metonic cycle. The gears were hidden inside a wooden casing, which had a large wooden knob on one side.
Wright took his model apart to showed me how all the gears fitted together. Then Wright put the machine back together and turned the hand knob that drives the solar gear. It engaged with the smaller gears, through the various gear trains, and the pointers began to spin around the dials. The day-of-the-year pointer moved forward at a regular pace, but the lunar and planetary pointers traced eccentric orbits, sometimes reversing course and going backward, just as the planets occasionally appear to do in the night sky. Meanwhile, the pointers on the back dials crept through the months in the saros and Metonic cycles; eclipses came and went. I noticed that as long as he kept turning the knob Wright himself seemed, for once, perfectly unmuddled.
Until this moment, I had, like many others, continued to puzzle over why, if the Greeks were capable of building such a technically sophisticated device, they used that capacity to construct what is essentially a toy—an intellectual amusement. But as I beheld this whirring, whirling symphony of metal, a perfect simulation of a mechanistic and logical universe, I realized that my notions of practicality were foolish and shortsighted. This machine was much more than a toy; it embodied a whole world view, and it must have been, for the ancients, wonderfully reassuring to behold.
Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn’t lost blood. All that’s happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of “clinical death”—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died?
As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller “How We Die,” the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn’t be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn’t receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can’t be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “After one hour,” he says, “we couldn’t see evidence the cells had died. We thought we’d done something wrong.” In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.
But if the cells are still alive, why can’t doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that “astounding” discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn’s Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine’s newest frontiers: treating the dead.
AFTER BEING BLOCKED for years by Republican leaders in the US House, New York Representative Louise Slaughter’s bill to ban genetic discrimination passed the chamber last week with 420 votes, and President Bush has vowed to sign it if it reaches his desk. The appeal of the measure is clear: As more hereditary disorders become detectable through genetic testing, more people are at risk of being denied employment or health coverage on the basis of their genetic makeup. And that threat could keep people from coming forward for genetic testing.
Yet the antidiscrimination measure has been held up because Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, has placed a hold on the bill. He should let the Senate get on with passing the bill, whose importance will only grow as technology evolves.
Already, researchers can screen for genes linked to more than 1,000 diseases. Tests indicating that a patient has an elevated probability of developing breast cancer, for instance, are highly useful in planning medical treatment. But that knowledge can also be devastating, and not just because patients hear their future health troubles foretold.
Slaughter’s bill would prohibit insurers from denying coverage to or raising premiums on a healthy person on the basis of genetic test results. Employers would be forbidden from making hiring or promotion decisions on the basis of genetic information. The measure would apply nationwide but would not prevent states from enacting tougher bills—as Massachusetts already has.
Melt away all of the ice locked within the frozen ice cap of Mars’ south pole, and the entire planet would be awash in water 11 meters deep. The calculation comes from precise new maps of the planet’s south pole obtained using a radar instrument aboard the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft.
Previous measurements by other spacecraft, such as NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, have estimated the volume of Mars’ polar ice caps, but “never with the level of confidence this radar makes possible,†said Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in an ESA news release.
By measuring the amount of time that elapsed between radar signals reflected from the ice surface and from the planet surface, researchers could determine the ice’s thickness across the cap. Publishing March 16 in Science, Plaut and colleagues report that the thickest regions of the cap measure 3.7 kilometers deep.
A convincing twin of Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light saber.
But this is no chintzy Halloween costume. It’s a prototype, years in the making, of a toy that incorporates brain wave-reading technology.
Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user’s forehead and reads the brain’s electrical signals, then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the saber, which lights up when the user is concentrating.
The player maintains focus by channeling thoughts on any fixed mental image, or thinking specifically about keeping the light sword on. When the mind wanders, the wand goes dark.
Engineers at NeuroSky Inc. have big plans for brain wave-reading toys and video games. They say the simple Darth Vader game—a relatively crude biofeedback device cloaked in gimmicky garb—portends the coming of more sophisticated devices that could revolutionize the way people play.
‘Visualise yourself doing it’ is a common slice of advice for people seeking to achieve something. But there are two ways of visualising yourself in a scene: from a first-person perspective as in real-life, or from an external perspective, as an observer might see you. Now Lisa Libby and colleagues have demonstrated that it’s this latter, third-person perspective that is far more effective in raising the likelihood we will go on to perform a desired behaviour.
One hundred and forty-six undergrad participants, all of whom had registered to vote, were asked to imagine themselves going to the polling booth to vote the next day, in what were then the upcoming 2002 presidential elections. Just under half were instructed to do this from a first-person perspective, the remainder were told to do it from a third-person perspective.
Next they answered questions about their attitudes to voting: how important it is to vote, and the lengths they would go to make their vote. Already differences appeared – those students who had visualised themselves voting from a third-person perspective displayed a stronger pro-voting mindset.
But most vitally, 95 of the participants were followed up a few weeks later (an equal proportion from each of the visualisation conditions), and 90 per cent of the participants who’d imagined themselves voting from a third-person perspective reported that they had indeed gone on to vote, compared with just 72 per cent of the first-person perspective participants – a statistically significant difference.
What is Magick? Several definitions float into my mind, but none of them do it full justice. The world is magical; we might get a sense of this after climbing a mountain and looking down upon the landscape below, or in the quiet satisfaction at the end of one of ‘those days’ when everything has gone right for us. Magick is a doorway through which we step into mystery, wildness, and immanence.
We live in a world subject to extensive and seemingly, all-embracing systems of social & personal control that continually feed us the lie that we are each alone, helpless, and powerless to effect change. Magick is about change. Changing your 
circumstances so that you strive to live according to a developing sense of personal responsibility; that you can effect change around you if you choose; that we are not helpless cogs in some clockwork universe. All acts of personal/collective liberation are magical acts. Magick leads us into exhiliration and ecstacy; into insight and understanding; into changing ourselves and the world in which we participate. Through magick we may come to explore the possibilities of freedom.
Surely this is simple enough? But no, magick has become obsfucated under a weight of words, a welter of technical terms which exclude the uninitiated and serve those who are eager for a ‘scientific’ jargon with which to legitimise their enterprise into something self-important and pompous. Abstract spiritual spaces have been created in the midst of which tower the Babel-like lego constructions of ‘inner planes’, spiritual hierarchies and ‘occult truths’ which forget that the world around us is magical. The mysterious has been misplaced. We search through dead languages and tombs for ‘secret knowledge’, ignoring the mystery of life that is all around us. So for the moment, forget what you’ve read about spiritual enlightenment, becoming a 99th level Magus and impressing your friends with high-falutin’ gobbledygook. Magick is surprisingly simple.
Read the rest of this introduction to Chaos Magick in PDF form here.