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Chased by their church: When you try to leave Scientology, they try to bring you back

Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin
St. Petersburg Times
Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:29 UTC
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© Luke MacGregor/ReutersDavid Miscavige, leader of the Church of Scientology.
For years, the Church of Scientology chased down and brought back staff members who tried to leave.

Ex-staffers describe being pursued by their church and detained, cut off from family and friends and subjected to months of interrogation, humiliation and manual labor.

One said he was locked in a room and guarded around the clock.

Some who did leave said the church spied on them for years.

Others said that, as a condition for leaving, the church cowed them into signing embellished affidavits that could be used to discredit them if they ever spoke out.

The St. Petersburg Times has interviewed former high-ranking Scientology officials who coordinated the intelligence gathering and supervised the retrieval of staff who left, or "blew."

They say the church, led by David Miscavige, wanted to contain the threat that those who left might reveal secrets of life inside Scientology.
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Genes Drive Behaviour, But Culture can Select Genes

Marlowe Hood
Agence France-Presse
Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:00 UTC
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© AFPCulture, not just genes, can drive evolutionary outcomes
Culture, not just genes, can drive evolutionary outcomes, according to a study released Wednesday that compares individualist and group-oriented societies across the globe.

Bridging a rarely-crossed border between natural and social sciences, the study looks at the interplay across 29 countries of two sets of data, one genetic and the other cultural.

The researchers found that most people in countries widely described as collectivist have a specific mutation within a gene regulating the transport of serotonin, a neurochemical known to profoundly affect mood.

In China and other east Asian nations, for example, up to 80 percent of the population carry this so-called "short" allele, or variant, of a stretch of DNA known as 5-HTTLPR.

Earlier research has shown the S allele to be strongly linked with a range of negative emotions, including anxiety and depression.
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Angry Faces: Facial Structure Linked to Aggressive Tendencies, Study Suggests


ScienceDaily
Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:11 UTC
facial structure
© iStockphoto/Thomas PerkinsNew research finds that a quick glance at someone's facial structure may be enough for us to predict their tendency towards aggression.
Angry words and gestures are not the only way to get a sense of how temperamental a person is. According to new findings in Psychological Science, a quick glance at someone's facial structure may be enough for us to predict their tendency towards aggression.

Facial width-to-height ratio (WHR) is determined by measuring the distance between the right and left cheeks and the distance from the upper lip to the mid-brow. During childhood, boys and girls have similar facial structures, but during puberty, males develop a greater WHR than females. Previous research has suggested that males with a larger WHR act more aggressively than those with a smaller WHR. For example, studies have shown that hockey players with greater WHR earn more penalty minutes per game than players with lower WHR.

Psychologists Justin M. Carré, Cheryl M. McCormick, and Catherine J. Mondloch of Brock University conducted an experiment to see if it is possible to predict another person's propensity for aggressive behavior simply by looking at their photograph. Volunteers viewed photographs of faces of men for whom aggressive behavior was previously assessed in the lab. The volunteers rated how aggressive they thought each person was on a scale of one to seven after viewing each face for either 2000 milliseconds or 39 milliseconds.
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When Internet Use Becomes a Problem

Elizabeth Cooney
Boston Globe
Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:00 UTC
Internet
© iStockphoto
The trouble signs are all there. They don't sleep enough, they don't eat right, they've lost touch with their friends, and their school performance has dropped off a cliff.

Their worried parents bring them to the doctor, fearing drug abuse or depression, but the evaluations come up empty. A doctor at Children's Hospital Boston says something else may be at work. "We see kids who are just gaming, and they appear to their parents to have all of the signs and symptoms of drug use,'' Dr. Michael Rich said about the seductive world of online games. "But in fact they are only hooked on the drug of electrons on their screen.''

Climbing levels in games like World of Warcraft, where unlimited numbers of role-playing competitors play around the clock and around the world, can be habit-forming and disruptive for both adolescents and adults. Other online activities, from visiting porn sites to incessantly checking e-mail, can also interfere with work, school, and relationships. In a world where always being connected seems as vital as breathing, how much is too much? And does excessive Internet use equal addiction?

A debate already divides behavioral addictions such as compulsive gambling or shopping from physiological addictions to alcohol or other drugs. People don't die when they unplug from the Internet, Dr. Ronald Pies points out.
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Renal Cancer: Protein Triggers a "Snowball Effect"


ScienceDaily
Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:00 UTC
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© UnknownWith different colouring methods the researchers showed that the protein VHL binds to the spindle apparatus during different stages of the cell division. The chromosomes (blue) are thus distributed on the daughter cells.
If a certain protein is missing in kidney cells, fatal cell division errors arise, which can finally lead to genetically unstable cells and to renal cancer. ETH researchers tracked down the phenomenon.

Body cells divide incessantly. This is actually a "standard procedure", which in most cases proceeds without error. Particularly important during cell division, known as mitosis, is the correct distribution of the chromosomes to the new daughter cells. This requires that a spindle of microtubules is formed in the cell during the division, with the aid of which the chromosomes are pulled to the opposite poles.

Here, the fidelity-monitoring checkpoint system plays an important role. It supervises whether all chromosomes are correctly bound to the spindle microtubules. This checkpoint is activated, if errors arise during cell division, which would lead to an unequal distribution of the chromosomes on the daughter cells. The spindle checkpoint can halt cell division for as long as necessary, until the chromosomes are correctly attached to the spindle microtubulues.
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Long, hard road to marketplace for Vanda drug

Mike Musgrove
WashingtonPost
Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:09 UTC
Early next year, if all goes according to plan, doctors will be able to prescribe a new antipsychotic drug for patients with schizophrenia. When that happens, investors in a local pharmaceutical firm will surely breathe a sigh of relief.

While it's almost certain that the compound known as Fanapt will reach pharmacy shelves, the drug's future was anything but clear for most of its 13-year existence. Rockville-based Vanda Pharmaceuticals toiled for years on its development, even after larger drugmakers lost interest and the Food and Drug Administration gave the product a thumbs-down.

"Last year at this time, nobody believed in the company, and nobody believed in the compound," said Mihael H. Polymeropoulos, Vanda's president and chief executive. Today, the company has a deal for Fanapt worth nearly half a billion dollars.

Shareholders fled the company in droves last year after a negative ruling from the FDA, and Polymeropoulos says he doesn't blame them. He founded Vanda after earlier careers, mostly in Washington, in the health-care industry. He'd never heard of a case in which the FDA reversed a decision on a drug, but that's what happened after Vanda told the agency that it had misinterpreted some data.
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High Protein Diets may Lead to Brain Shrinkage

Frank Mangano
NaturalNews
Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:00 UTC
For muscle heads, diets high in protein may be just what the doctor ordered, but a growing bicep may come with a cost: a shrinking brain.

According to a recent study published in the journal Molecular Neurodegeneration, when compared to three other diets, high protein diets were the ones that caused the most significant drop-off in brain weight.

Alzheimer's disease researchers are well aware of the wealth of studies linking diet to brain health. The Mediterranean diet, for example, is touted as one of the best diets to follow not only for great physical health, but for great mental health as well, according to findings published in a December 2006 issue of the Archives of Neurology.

With this in mind, researchers put four specific diets to the test to see how, or if, they contributed to the formation of amyloid proteins in the brain. Amyloid protein formation is one of the precursors to Alzheimer's disease.
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Sleep Deprivation Can Negatively Affect Information Processing


ScienceDaily
Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:00 UTC
A new study in the journal Sleep shows that sleep deprivation causes some people to shift from a more automatic, implicit process of information categorization (information-integration) to a more controlled, explicit process (rule-based). This use of rule-based strategies in a task in which information-integration strategies are optimal can lead to potentially devastating errors when quick and accurate categorization is fundamental to survival.

Results show that sleep deprivation led to an overall performance deficit on an information-integration category learning task that was held over the course of two days. Performance improved in the control group by 4.3 percent from the end of day one to the beginning of day two (accuracy increased from 74 percent to 78.3 percent); performance in the sleep-deprived group declined by 2.4 percent (accuracy decreased from 73.1 percent to 70.7 percent) from the end of day one to the beginning of day two.

According to co-principal investigators W. Todd Maddox, PhD, professor of psychology, and David M. Schnyer, PhD, associate professor of psychology at the Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Texas in Austin, fast and accurate categorization is critical in situations that could become a matter of life or death. However, categorization may become compromised in people who often experience sleep deprivation in fast-paced, high pressure roles such as doctors, firefighters, soldiers and even parents. Many tasks performed on a daily basis require information-integration processing rather than rule-based categorization. Examples include driving, making a medical diagnosis and performing air-traffic control.
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The Epidemic Of 'Medical Child Abuse' And What Can Be Done

Dana Ullman
Huffington Post
Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:40 UTC
The primary purpose of this article is to encourage a stronger commitment from doctors and parents to consider using safer medical care for infants and children FIRST before resorting to more dangerous treatments. One would hope and assume that doctors and parents would have a natural inclination to make the safety of these young human souls a significant and sincere priority, but sadly, the power and propaganda of Big Pharma has inappropriately turned this equation around and made it seem that doctors and parents are putting their children at risk if they don't prescribe powerful drugs first. I personally disagree with this assumption and sincerely hope that people consider this health issue to be of primary importance today.

I certainly realize that the evidence that I present below on the epidemic proportions of "medical child abuse" is somewhat inflammatory, but due to the fact that this issue is presently being ignored by so many doctors and parents, a little "inflammation" may be a necessary symptom that will lead to great attention to this problem and perhaps to some concrete solutions to it.
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Women With Chronic Kidney Disease More Likely Than Men To Go Undiagnosed


Science Daily
Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:41 UTC
Woman are at particular risk of their primary care physicians delaying diagnosis of chronic kidney disease (CKD), according to a paper being presented at the American Society of Nephrology's 42nd Annual Meeting and Scientific Exposition in San Diego, California. The findings suggest that educating practitioners about CKD could increase the timely diagnosis of CKD, thereby leading to improvements in care to patients and savings in Medicare dollars.

Maya Rao, MD, of Columbia University, reviewed records from nearly 900 patients at 18 rural, community-based primary care clinics in Oregon, to investigate whether primary care physicians accurately diagnosed CKD in patients with known kidney dysfunction. Chronic kidney disease is estimated to affect up to 19 million adults in the U.S. and is usually diagnosed and treated in the primary care setting. The analysis showed that 52.4 percent of patients found to have CKD did not have a diagnosis in their charts. Females were more likely to be undiagnosed than males, except at the most advanced stages of CKD.
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