"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
~ Martin Luther King Jr.
Image of the day:
BODY
~ Fish Oil and Fat Loss -- "Fish oil cures so many ailments, we can't figure out why fish don't get more respect. For instance, why not replace the stars on Old Glory with tiny mackerel and herring? Okay, maybe not, but after reading this article, you may have your own ideas on how to give fish oil some props."
~ Find Your Body Type -- "Take the quiz to determine your body type."
~ Weight Lifting For Health And Heart -- "The American Heart Association (AHA) yesterday updated a scientific statement on the benefits of weight lifting, or resistance training, for people with heart disease to help doctors assess and instruct patients in its safe use.The statement is published as a paper in the early online edition of the AHA journal Circulation. Resistance training is often recommended by doctors to help patients increase health and fitness."
~ Insulin Levels May Determine Diet Effectiveness -- "If you are not sure what type of weight loss diet is best for you, you may want to have your insulin levels checked. Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital showed that people with high insulin levels lose weight more effectively on low-refined- carbohydrate diets (Journal of the American Medical Association, May 16, 2007)."
~ Dairy lovers show lower metabolic syndrome risk -- "Men who regularly consume milk, cheese and yogurt may be less likely to develop a cluster of risk factors for diabetes and heart disease, a study suggests."
~ Spicing up brain may help fight Alzheimer’s -- "If laboratory findings hold true in people, treatment with one of the active chemicals in turmeric, the main spice found curry, may boost the immune system of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and, thereby, increase the clearance of amyloid plaques in the brain, the primary abnormality seen in patients with the disease, researchers in the United States report."
~ Compound From Olive-Pomace Oil Inhibits HIV Spread -- "It’s widely known that olive oil is good for your health, but olive skins appear to hold beneficial qualities of their own. A compound in the wax from olive skin -- maslinic acid -- has been found to inhibit the spread of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)."
PSYCHE
~ Genetic Findings Point Toward New PTSD Treatments -- "MIT researchers appear to have uncovered one of the brain's central fear mechanisms and an enzyme best used to temper it. Their experiments hint at the still-distant possibility of developing medications to directly counteract the disabling effects of post traumatic stress disorder."
~ Take Time for Gratitude Every Day -- "When I worked in a drug and alcohol treatment program, one very effective and important aspect of recovery for patients was the concept of "gratitude." All the alcoholics/addicts I know are very adept at listing a litany of negative aspects of their lives. So a frequent homework assignment I gave was - make a "gratitude list" of 6-10 things every night."
~ Baby Steps to Grown-Up Control -- "Flexing your dieting muscle."
~ Unconscious beauty primes positive emotions -- "We can correctly classify faces as attractive or unattractive, even when they appear so quickly that we're not conscious of seeing them. This is according to a study that also found that subliminal attractive faces also prime positive emotions."
~ Laugh and the world laughs with you -- "Discover magazine has an article that looks at the psychology of laughter and humour, noting that the two aren't necessarily as linked as we'd normally think."
~ Feeling bias in the measurement of happiness (by guest blogger Dan Haybron) -- "Suppose you think of happiness as a matter of a person’s emotional condition, or something along those lines. If you don’t like to think of happiness that way, then imagine you’re wanting to assess the emotional aspects of well-being: how well people are doing in terms of their emotional states. What, exactly, would you look to measure?"
~ Suppression Of Emotional Memories Shows Potential In Treatment Of Emotional Disorders -- "A new University of Colorado at Boulder study shows people have the ability to suppress emotional memories with practice, which has implications for those suffering from conditions ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder to depression." I'm not sure this is a good thing -- what is repressed in projected or in some other way resurfaces.
CULTURE/POLITICS
~ New issue of Jacket Magazine -- This is a new find, a poetry and arts magazine that leans toward the experimental (read: post-modernism).
~ Writers in Training -- " Delaney set out to assess the burgeoning—and predominantly American—phenomenon of the graduate program in creative writing. Thirty years ago, he notes, there were 50 programs; today the number hovers around 300." I am personally opposed to MFA programs in general -- they tend to produce McPoets and McWriters, generic, insipid, and boring.
~ Obama's Plan for Victory -- "Everyone should pay less attention to national polls and focus instead on grass-roots enthusiasm, numbers of campaign contributors, and the early nominating states of Iowa and New Hampshire, say Barack Obama's senior strategists."
~ The bad news in the National Intelligence Estimate -- "The National Intelligence Estimate that was released today—titled "The Terrorist Threat to the Homeland"—amounts to a devastating critique of the Bush administration's policies on Iraq, Iran, and the terrorist threat itself."
~ Editor's Cut: The Dark Force -- "Bush is so toxic that GOP candidates are being sucked into the black hole of the President's bad karma."
~ Gellman: Death, Science and Religion Don't Mix -- "A scientific-religious debate is shaping up over near-death experiences. A look at the dangers for both sides."
~ Dow passes 14,000 milestone -- "The Dow Jones Industrial Average has crossed 14,000 for the first time. Bulls are running."
HABITATS/TECHNOLOGY
~ New research seeks to enhance alternative fuel integration in public vehicle fleets -- "Rochester Institute of Technology and the County of Monroe, New York have created a research partnership to assess the performance of the County`s fleet of E85 flex-fuel vehicles. E85 is comprised of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline and is considered a major alternative energy option for American automobiles."
~ Dwarf Star Gulps Giant to Form Supernova -- "A team of European and American astronomers has announced the discovery of the best evidence yet for the nature of the star systems that explode as type Ia supernovae. The team obtained a unique set of observations with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the Keck I 10-meter telescope in Hawaii."
~ Catching the Gravitational Wave -- "For nearly a century, scientists searched to uncover the tremors Einstein believed were produced by waves in the fabric of space and time."
~ Monkeys don't go for easy pickings -- "Animals' natural foraging decisions give an insight into their cognitive abilities, and primates do not automatically choose the easy option. Instead, they appear to decide where to feed based on the quality of the resources available and the effect on their social group, rather than simply selecting the nearest food available."
~ Gulf Dead Zone: Bigger than ever -- "That's because growing corn in vast monocultured fields requires heavy doses of synthetic nitrogen, but all of that fertilizer doesn't end up in corn plants. A good bit of it washes into streams which feed into the Mississippi River, then to be carried clear down to the Gulf."
~ Understanding light at the nanoscale: a nano-sized double-slit experiment -- "Before nanotechnology can reach its full potential, researchers must understand the way things work on the nanoscale— -- which is often very different from the macroscopic world. One of these areas is light, and how light interacts with matter on tiny scales."
INTEGRAL/BUDDHIST
~ For the Love of Blogs -- "Without wanting to seem presumptuous, I have been thinking about making a practice of including occasional “reviews” of other blogs in "The Buddha Diaries". I know I get lazy about checking in with those I have come to think of as my valued colleagues, even if we have no contact other than the occasional comment on a post, so I’m trusting that this plan will help to remind me to stay abreast of what might be on the minds of the like-minded!"
~ Humor and Spirituality - Do They Go Together? -- "If "being funny" is a skill - and thus has it's own line of development - can you be 2nd tier funny? Enlightened funny?"
~ Camille Paglia, on how to save the arts -- "That’s right: artists don’t need theory, they need raw material, constantly replenished through experience with primary sources. That’s an explicit main theme of my essay, The Humanities As The Integral Tradition, as well as a theme implicit in my treatise-in-progress, On Great Artistry."
~ Drop karma -- "So, basically, get your act together, own your felt-sense, take heart and assume responsibility, and develop the ability to be free from compulsive reactivity, more and more, day by day. Pursue this course of awareness without attachment (dispassion), gentle and generous (compassion), untill you find all fundamental objection to life and death has been eradicated. Herein lies the initial freedom from karma." A new series from Hokai.
~ Can Athiests be Spiritual? -- "I propose that spirit is a relationship or connection between parts, between mind and body, between self and other. This idea can be expanded further."
~ Julian's Blog: One Year Anniversary! -- "It being almost a full year that I have been blogging here at Zaadz, I wanted to give any newer readers an overview of some choice selections of the work I have done so far." Julian Walker is a strong new voice in the (Wilberian) integral world, check him out.
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