Health & WellnessS


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Prayer Increases Forgiveness, Study Shows


ScienceDaily
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00 UTC
We have all been guilty of a transgression at one time or another. That's because we're not perfect. We all commit hurtful acts, violate trust, and hope for forgiveness.

That's simply a fact, and here's another one: Nine out of 10 Americans say that they pray -- at least on occasion. Florida State University psychologist Nathaniel Lambert put these two facts together and came up with an idea: Why not take all that prayer and direct it at the people who have wronged us? Is it possible that directed prayer might spark forgiveness in those doing the praying -- and in the process preserve relationships?

Lambert and his colleagues decided to test this scientifically in two experiments appearing in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In the first, they had a group of men and women pray one single prayer for their romantic partner's well being. Others -- the experimental controls -- they simply described their partner, speaking into a tape recorder.
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Barefoot Running: How Humans Ran Comfortably and Safely Before the Invention of Shoes


ScienceDaily
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00 UTC
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© Harvard University"Running barefoot or in minimal shoes is fun but uses different muscles," said Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman. "If you've been a heel-striker all your life, you have to transition slowly to build strength in your calf and foot muscles."
New research is casting doubt on the old adage, "All you need to run is a pair of shoes."

Scientists have found that those who run barefoot, or in minimal footwear, tend to avoid "heel-striking," and instead land on the ball of the foot or the middle of the foot. In so doing, these runners use the architecture of the foot and leg and some clever Newtonian physics to avoid hurtful and potentially damaging impacts, equivalent to two to three times body weight, that shod heel-strikers repeatedly experience.

"People who don't wear shoes when they run have an astonishingly different strike," says Daniel E. Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and co-author of a paper appearing this week in the journal Nature. "By landing on the middle or front of the foot, barefoot runners have almost no impact collision, much less than most shod runners generate when they heel-strike. Most people today think barefoot running is dangerous and hurts, but actually you can run barefoot on the world's hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain. All you need is a few calluses to avoid roughing up the skin of the foot. Further, it might be less injurious than the way some people run in shoes."
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Antidepressants: The Emperor's New Drugs?

Dr. Irving Kirsch
Huffington Post
Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:24 UTC
Antidepressants are supposed to be the magic bullet for curing depression. But are they? I used to think so. As a clinical psychologist, I used to refer depressed clients to psychiatric colleagues to have them prescribed. But over the past decade, researchers have uncovered mounting evidence that they are not. It seems that we have been misled. Depression is not a brain disease, and chemicals don't cure it.

My awareness that the chemical cure of depression is a myth began in 1998, when Guy Sapirstein and I set out to assess the placebo effect in the treatment of depression. Instead of doing a brand new study, we decided to pool the results of previous studies in which placebos had been used to treat depression and analyze them together. What we did is called a meta-analysis, and it is a common technique for making sense of the data when a large number of studies have been done to answer a particular question.
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Studies: An Idle Brain May Be Ripe for Learning

Anita Hamilton
Time
Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:00 UTC
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© Getty Images
Why is it so hard to remember even things we don't want to forget? The problem, suggests a growing body of research, may be that we're thinking about them too much in the first place.

Popular wisdom once held that a mind at rest was like an engine idling - not much going on under the hood. To glean insights into how the brain worked, scientists would study only volunteers in action, measuring their physiological or biochemical responses as they completed specific mental tasks. But more recently, thanks in large part to the proliferation of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which precisely maps brain activity based on changes in blood-oxygen levels, neuroscientists have found that important activity in the brain - related in particular to memory and learning - may occur when it is at rest.

Many studies over the past decade have suggested that sleep is crucial to the consolidation of memories and learning; people who take a nap after learning a new task, for instance, remember it better than those who don't snooze.
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Magnesium Adds Muscle to Brain Performance

Gordon K. Chan
Digital Journal
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 06:00 UTC
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© Getty ImagesMagnesium is plentiful in spinach.
A study shows that taking magnesium supplements can boost memory and learning. This study also supports the idea that a magnesium deficiency may cause faster deterioration of memory as we age.

In a published study in the journal Neuron, learning and memory improvements of old and young rats were observed by scientists when magnesium dosages were administered.

This reported finding in Science Daily also supports the scientific belief that inadequate magnesium can lead to quicker deterioration of memory as humans age.

It is reported that diet has a "significant impact on cognitive capacity". Specifically, the impact is seen in the communication of information between brain neurons.

Tsinghua University in Beijing examined the effects of magnesium supplementation and found that it promoted the "synaptic plasticity" or neural capacity in a culture of brain cells.
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Syringe

Bill Gates Calls for "Decade of Vaccines"


United Press International
Sun, 31 Jan 2010 09:35 UTC
U.S. philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates say their foundation will spend a record $10 billion over 10 years to develop vaccines for AIDS and other diseases.

"We must make this the decade of vaccines," Bill Gates said Friday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The commitment is the largest pledge ever made by a charitable foundation to a single cause, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported.

Comment: These contributions have mainly benefited large corporations and pharmaceuticals. If Gates really wanted to help the masses and prevent diseases and deaths all he needed to do is set up a system that distributes the surplus food stocks to the millions of starving people and use his influence to prevent the US war machine from implementing it's "War on Terror" which has killed untold millions - not push vaccines to "prevent AIDS" when it's the vaccine itself that's most likely responsible for the epidemic to begin with. And beware those flying vaccines.

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Family

Dollar Stores: The Last, and Not So Healthy Eating Choice, Before the Food Lines

Habiba Alcindor
AlterNet
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:23 UTC
Dollar stores may be places to nab a bargain but for many they are the only place to buy food -- the rock-bottom of the food chain, the last stop before the food pantry.

Dollar stores have proliferated like algae on a pool of stagflation. The 50-year-old Family Dollar chain marked the opening of its 500th store in 1982. By 2004 there were 5,000 Family Dollar outlets throughout America. In a statement for an article published that year in the Baltimore Daily Record, Retail Forward called dollar stores the "hottest and highest growth sectors of retailing." Currently nearly 20,000 dollar stores of every variety dot the landscape. Just last week, the Family Dollar (which has grown by 1,665 outlets in the past six years) reported a 13 percent increase in its stock.
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Laptop

Flashback Does Second-Hand Smoke Really Void Apple's Warranty?

David Coursey
pcworld
Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:00 UTC
Apple Logo
© Unknown
Now, I am as much against smoking as anyone. I also do not want workers needlessly exposed to hazardous substances. Still, for Apple to deny warranty claims on Macs exposed to cigarette smoke seems way over the line.

Yet, that is what The Consumerist says Apple has done on at least two occasions in recent months.

Apple is apparently telling at least some customers that the amount of cigarette smoke residue inside their computers makes it unsafe for the company to perform warranty service on them, despite the lack of such a clause in the company's warranty agreement.
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Use Probiotics to Lose Weight and Treat Illness

Maddie Ellison
NaturalNews
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 07:00 UTC
Millions of people suffer from colds, flu and stomach upset every year. Research is showing that this could be caused by a lack of good bacteria in your stomach. Fortunately, there are supplements you can take to increase the amount of good bacteria and improve your health.

It's strange to think that you can treat and even prevent illness with bacteria, but it's true. Your body contains trillions of bacteria - some are good and some are bad. When the number of good bacteria starts to decrease due to antibiotics or a poor diet your chances for illness are increased.

Probiotic supplements have been shown to have many health benefits. Research has shown that taking probiotics can help aid digestion and keep you regular. Studies show they can also help eczema and vaginal and urinary infections, and they can help prevent or lower your chances of catching a cold or the flu.
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Fish

Wild Fish Stocks Depleted by Feeding of Farmed Fish Like Salmon

David Gutierrez
NaturalNews
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 07:00 UTC
Rather than relieving pressure on wild fish stocks, the explosive growth of aquaculture has actually exacerbated this pressure, according to an international study led by Rosamond L. Naylor of Stanford University and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers surveyed trends in the farming of several different fish species, finding that by the end of 2009, half of all fish consumed in the world will have been raised on an aquaculture farm. This has led to a concurrent increase in demand for wild-caught fish meal and fish oil to feed these fish, including for vegetarian species such as tilapia and carp.

"Our assumption about farmed tilapia and carp being environmentally friendly turns out to be wrong in aggregate, because the sheer volume is driving up the demand," Naylor said. "Even the small amounts of fishmeal used to raise vegetarian fish add up to a lot on a global scale."
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