2011 has already had more history-shattering events than almost any other year since World War 2. Revolutions have swept the Middle East and much of Africa, a new war has erupted in Libya, Japan has experienced an unprecedented tsunami and a horrific nuclear crisis, the price of oil is skyrocketing, multiple nations in Europe are experiencing a financial meltdown and budget issues have pushed the U.S. government to the verge of a shutdown. In past years, it always seemed like there was time to "catch our breath" between each major crisis, but now huge events are striking in rapid-fire succession. We live at a time when wars, rumors of wars, natural disasters, bizarre occurrences and major financial problems are becoming so common that they hardly shock us anymore. 2011 truly has been one wild and crazy year, and the world is literally being transformed right in front of our eyes.

For a moment, let's review some of the history-shattering events that we have witnessed this year so far and the impact that they have had on the financial world....

April 6, 2011: Arnie Gundersen discusses inconsistencies between what the NRC, TEPCo, and the Nuclear Industry are saying privately and publicly. Documents from the French nuclear firm, Areva, and the NRC reveal what the industry knows about the Fukushima disaster.

From casual violence to genocide, acts of cruelty can be traced back to how the perpetrator identifies with other people, argues psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. Is he right?

Lucy Adeniji - an evangelical Christian and author of two books on childcare - trafficked two girls and a 21-year-old woman from Nigeria to work as slaves in her east London home. She made them toil for 21 hours a day and tortured them if they displeased her. The youngest girl was 11 years old.

Sentencing her to 11-and-a-half years in prison last month, Judge Simon Oliver said: "You are an evil woman. I have no doubt you have ruined these two girls' lives. They will suffer from the consequences of the behaviour you meted out to them for the rest of their lives."

Most people would probably agree with Judge Oliver's description of Adeniji as evil, but Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, would not be one of them. In his latest book, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty, Baron-Cohen, argues that the term evil is unscientific and unhelpful. "Sometimes the term evil is used as a way to stop an inquiry," Baron-Cohen tells me. "'This person did it because they're evil' - as if that were an explanation."

Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation's income - an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

It's no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation's income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous - 12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades - and more - has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

A "working class hero," John Lennon told us in his song of that title, "is something to be/ Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/ And you think you're so clever and classless and free/ But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."

The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is a myth blown away by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current issue of Vanity Fair. In an article titled "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%", Stiglitz states that the top thin layer of the superwealthy controls 40 percent of all wealth in what is now the most sharply class-divided of all developed nations: "Americans have been watching protests against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet, in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation's income - an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret."

'Unpredictable impact on an ocean current system important to both European weather and marine food chain,' experts warn

A swirling pool of icy Arctic meltwater has the potential to flush quickly into the Atlantic Ocean and alter weather in Northern Europe, climate scientists reported Tuesday.

Located just north of Alaska and Canada, the vast pool's percentage of freshwater from rivers has grown by about 20 percent since the 1990s and that change in salinity level could impact ocean circulation and cause temperatures in Northern Europe to cool, the experts said.

High readings in fish prompt the government to establish a maximum level for safe consumption.

The operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday that it had found radioactive iodine at 7.5 million times the legal limit in a seawater sample taken near the facility, and government officials imposed a new health limit for radioactivity in fish.

The reading of iodine-131 was recorded Saturday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said. Another sample taken Monday found the level to be 5 million times the legal limit. The Monday samples also were found to contain radioactive cesium at 1.1 million times the legal limit.

The exact source of the radiation was not immediately clear, though Tepco has said that highly contaminated water has been leaking from a pit near the No. 2 reactor. The utility initially believed that the leak was coming from a crack, but several attempts to seal the crack failed.

Alzheimer's disease (a form of dementia) is characterized by the build-up in the brain of a protein known as 'amyloid-beta'. Not surprisingly, amyloid-beta has been 'targeted' by drug companies, including Eli Lilli who produced the drug Semagacestat which did a nice job of retarding amyloid-beta synthesis. However, in trials, Semagacestat accelerated decline in brain function in those who took it.

I learned this fact today reading a review from the European Journal of Internal Medicine entitled "Nutrition and Alzheimer's disease: The detrimental role of a high carbohydrate diet" [1]. The review is dense with information, and I might extract its information over more than one blog. But for starters, I thought I would pull out at least some of the interest insights this paper contains.

One of the major points made in the paper is this: cholesterol and fat is really important to the brain. It points out that although the brain is only about 2 per cent of body weight, it contains about a quarter of the total cholesterol in the body. The authors point out several roles for cholesterol in the brain, including the synapse - the 'gap' where one cell can communicate with another. Communication here is via what are known as 'neurotransmitters', which are released by one nerve cell and float across the synaptic gap to exert the effect on the nerve adjacent to it. The authors summarise the importance of cholesterol in the brain like this:

Cholesterol is required everywhere in the brain as an antioxidant, an electrical insulator (in order to prevent ion leakage), as a structural scaffold for the neural network, and a functional component of all membranes. Cholesterol is also utilized in the wrapping and synaptic delivery of the neurotransmitters. It also plays an important role in the formation and functioning of synapses in the brain.

It's also true that the brain actively takes up cholesterol (in the form of LDL cholesterol). This in itself suggests that cholesterol is desired in the brain and does something useful. Interestingly, a gene defect which leads to impaired cholesterol uptake by the brain is also associated with an enhanced risk of Alzheimer's disease.