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Your plane starts to taxi away from the gate and the open air vents above your seat start blowing out cool air. As you sit back and head up into the sky, do you wonder -- is that recycled air blowing germs down on me? If so, you're not alone.
"I definitely think that airplane air can make me feel sick. I often get a cold after I fly," one woman traveler told "20/20."
"When I get off of the flights I'm normally congested and I have to use my inhalers. And I don't believe airplane air is conditioned the way it should be," a man told us.
But experts say: Don't blame the air up there.
"The air is in fact quite healthy, because of the excellent cabin air filters," said Joe Lundquist, an air filtration expert with Pall Corp. He says state-of-the-art HEPA air filters can capture up to 99.9% of small bacteria and viruses -- even SARS and bird flu virus.
"We've gone through great studies to prove that they effectively remove the bacteria and viruses that people are so concerned about," he said.
Today, HEPA filters are found on most commercial airplanes -- where they re-circulate the air every three to five minutes. A 2002 medical study found that passengers flying in planes with re-circulated air had no more colds than people on planes ventilated with fresh air. So, how did you catch that cold on the plane?
Being on a plane packed with people coughing or sneezing near you is the reason you catch colds. In fact, that air blowing on you from the nozzles above may even help keep you safe from some of those germs being coughed up all around you. | <urn:uuid:9d840001-c692-4d61-b039-ae7decc443a3> | {
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The proverb says: “Preventing is better than healing.” Dr. Fedele suggests regular check-ups, to see changes in your “oral environment” early enough. In doing so, emergency interventions with extensive, expensive treatments can be kept to a minimum.
At Swiss Dental Clinic a regular check-up exam includes the following:
Examination of diagnostic x-rays (radiographs): Essential for detection of decay, tumors, cysts,and bone loss. X-rays also help determine tooth and root positions. We use digital imaging that reduces the amount of radiation of 90%.
Gum disease evaluation: Gum disease evaluation: Check the gums and bone around the teeth for any signs of periodontal disease. If you smoke, you should aim to stop smoking. Smoking is a major risk factor for developing gum disease.
* Gingivitis * Periodontitis
Examination of tooth decay: All tooth surfaces will be checked for decay with special dental instruments.
Examination of existing restorations: In order to prevent emergencies and complex, costly treatments, all dental restorations like fillings, crowns, etc. are checked for anchorage, abrasion and water tightness. The stabilization of every intervention has to be ensured. Anyway, the most important prerequisite for a long-lasting filling is correct, meticulous workmanship.
Professional Dental Cleaning
A professional cleaning session substantially helps to avoids possible diseases and damage to the gums and teeth.
Removal of tartar: Tartar (also Calculus) is hardened plaque that has been left on the tooth for some time and is now firmly attached to the tooth surface. Tartar forms above and below the gum line and can only be removed with special dental instruments.
Removal of plaque: Plaque is a soft deposit on the teeth. It is a sticky, almost invisible film that forms on the teeth; a growing colony of living bacteria, food debris, and saliva.
Teeth polishing: Remove stain and plaque that is not otherwise removed during tooth brushing and scaling.
Tooth and gum problems are very individual and thus a concise oral hygiene program is put together. Dr. Fedele will explain to you the correct usage of the various cleaning instruments and can advice you the use of a specific toothpastes. In case of doubt about how to best guarantee your dental health, read through the vital information on dental Home Care. | <urn:uuid:30d13294-ddde-4121-a17c-d3c70af39038> | {
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|Scientific Name:||Syngnathus watermeyeri|
|Species Authority:||Smith, 1963|
Syngnathus watermayeri Smith, 1963 [orth. error]
|Red List Category & Criteria:||Critically Endangered B1ab(i,ii,iii); C2a(i) ver 3.1|
|Assessor/s:||Sorensen, M. & Bills, R.|
|Reviewer/s:||Curtis, J. & O’Donnell, K.|
S. watermeyeri has been listed as Critically Endangered due to its restricted extent of occurrence, continued decline in habitat quality, and the absence of mature individuals in the latest intensive surveys.
S. watermeyeri is known only from the Bushmans, Kariega, and Kasouga estuaries on the Eastern Cape coast of South Africa (Whitfield 1995, Cowley 1998, Vorwerk et al. 2007).
Native:South Africa (Eastern Cape Province)
|FAO Marine Fishing Areas:||
Atlantic – southeast; Indian Ocean – western
|Range Map:||Click here to open the map viewer and explore range.|
Syngnathus watermeyeri has been recorded in small numbers and its presence/absence in surveys has fluctuated dramatically since these surveys began. Initial surveys in 1963 found 10 River Pipefish in the Bushmans estuary, 11 in the Kariega estuary and two in the Kasouga estuary (Whitfield 1995). Between 1989 and 1992, intensive surveys were conducted in all three estuaries with no specimens recorded. As a result, S. watermeyeri was listed as officially Extinct in the 1994 IUCN Red List but in 1996 a new breeding population was discovered in the East Kleinemonde estuary (Cowley 1998). This new population, however, was declared locally extinct in 2003 when a large flood was thought to have washed their preferred eelgrass habitat out to sea, no specimens have since been found in the East Kleinemonde (James et al. 2008).
|Habitat and Ecology:||
The male carries the eggs in a brood pouch which is found under the tail (Breder and Rosen 1966). Sexual maturity is attained at approximately 10 cm standard length with males retaining up to 44 embryos. Reproductively active specimens were collected in the Kariega estuary during late September (Whitfield 1995). The life cycle is completed within the estuary.
S. watermeyeri occurs in brackish, tidal areas of rivers and is found primarily in association with the eelgrass Zostera capensis and Ruppia cirrhosa, where it feeds almost exclusively on zooplankton (Whitfield 1995).
Syngnathus watermeyeri relies on freshwater pulses which provide the nutrients that enable phytoplankton development and, together with particulate organic material brought down by the rivers, support the zooplankton community upon which these pipefish depend for food. The construction of dams and other impoundments have caused a deprivation of fresh water pulses and a subsequent decline in food supply (Whitfield 1995). Dry conditions in the last few years have caused the Kariega river to stop flowing, which will likely result in the absence of S. watermeyeri in this system once again (A.K.Whitfield pers. comm.).
The South African National Water Act 1998 (Act 36) requires that all rivers should have an Ecological Reserve amount set aside. The Ecological Reserve relates to "the water required to protect the aquatic ecosystems of the water resource", including both rivers and estuaries (Vorwerk et al. 2008a). Ecological reserves have been determined for some systems in South Africa but not for any estuaries inhabited by S. watermeyeri. When dams were built on the Kariega and its tributary rivers, a water release policy was issued for downstream agriculture but the environmental requirements of estuaries and rivers were not included (Vorwerk et al. 2008a).
|Citation:||Sorensen, M. & Bills, R. 1996. Syngnathus watermeyeri. In: IUCN 2013. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2013.2. <www.iucnredlist.org>. Downloaded on 21 April 2014.|
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Takes place in the vestry room of the Salem meeting house, which is serving as the general Court
How do Proctor, Francis and Giles plan to use Mary Warren's testimony to prove that "heaven is not speaking through the children."
When Elizabeth is accused of being a witch
What is the significance of the behind the scenes discussion among Hathorne, Danforth, Martha and Giles Corey?
It reveals that women are being falsely accused and executed.
What is the significance of Proctor plowing on Sunday's?
He uses it as a way of getting out of church.
How do Danforth and Hathorne attempt to get proctor to drop the charge that Mary Warren has lied? Why do they want him to do so? Why does Proctor refuse?
Blackmail him with the affair, because he does not want to cause more problems in Salem.
Why are Proctor, Francis and Giles repeatedly accused of attacking the court?
Because there are 39 people in Jail.
Why is Putnam brought into court?
Because Giles accused Putnam's neighbor of witchcraft.
Why is Giles accused of contempt of court?
Because he says they are telling lies about his wife.
What is the significance of the point made by Danforth that "no uncorrupted man may fear this court"? Is this true? How does this point tie the court and the church together?
Its pretty much saying that innocent men should not fear the court because the court wll be fair.
Why does Hale suggest that Proctor should have a lawyer? What does this tell us about Hale's feelings about the justice of the trial? How has his attitude changed?
So that more truth will come out in the trails if he was a lawyer
What is contained in Mary Warren's deposition? Why are the other children who have cried with brought in?
Proctor said She saw no spirits and brought a deposition signed by Mary.
What does Abigail say about Mary's testimony? Why does she lie?
She said she saw her flying trying to attack her and the girls.
What role does Parris play during the testimony? Why does he lie about the dancing in the woods?
Because he wants to be seen as a good person not a bad person and dosnt want people to riot on him.
What point does Hathorne make about Mary fainting? Why cannot she faint on command?
Because the others aren't doing it aswell.
What does Abigail do to befuddle Mary?
Her and the girls act as if it is freezing.
What secret does Proctor reveal?
That he is the anti Christ
Why does Elizabeth deny John's relationship with Abigail?
Because she is scared on what people will think about her.
What evidence is there that Hale no longer believes the testimony and crying out of the girls? What do the girls do to convince the men otherwise? Why? How does their action further befuddle Mary? What does Mary do?
He leaves the court room
What is the significance of the scene between Herrick and the accused witches?
Scene that illustrates comic relief. Shows how awful the conditions are.
Why does Rev. Hale tell the accused witches to confess?
So that they can live and be forgiven. Better for them to lie then to throw their lives away for lies
What does the news of what is happening in Andover have to do with the trials in Salem?
Paris feels that it will happen in Salem.
Why does Parris say Abigail has vanished?
Because she was not seen in 3 days and there was talk of her running away.
Why does Parris suggest the hanging to be postponed? Why won't Danforth allow it?
Fears that if these good people continue to come out innocent and are continuing to be hanged that they will soon rebel against him.
Why does Danforth want Proctor to see Elizabeth? What does he hope it will cause him to do? How does Hale feel about Proctor confessing?
It will cause him to confess. Hale feels he should tell the lie.
What are the conditions in Salem? Why?
SO many people have been jailed that there are orphans wandering the countryside and the crops are dying, because there is no one there to take care of them.
Why doesn't Elizabeth beg John to confess?
So he won't get hanged
Why does Proctor initially say he will confess? Why does he refuse to sign to confession?
He wants to live and refuses to sign because its his name and he cant have another name.
Why does Parris beg to get John's confession? Why does Elizabeth refuse?
Because Paris is desperate. She refuses because she said that John has won his forgiveness.
Why does Miller end the play with Proctor's refusal to sign the confession and Elizabeth's refusal to beg him to do so?
The lasting impressions in the audiences mind is of love devotion and goodness. Although Proctor died he won back his soul and has found new strength and wont justify the trails. Elizabeth will support him and live on.
Who are the "bluebirds wingin' southerly soon as the Devil gets here with the feather and the wings"?
Tituba and Sarah Good
How much time in terms of seasons has elapsed since the beginning of the play?
Parris states that he feels "it is a province" that Hale has returned to go among the prisoners. Explain his reasoning.
Paris thinks to province in hales return because if hale gets back he could be accomplishing getting people to confess.
What happens to Giles?
He was killed, by being pressed
Explain the significance of the following: "I cannot mount the gibbet like a saint. It is a fraud. I am not that man. My honesty's broke. I am no good man. Nothing's spoiled by giving them this lie that were not rotten long before."
That's a statement from proctor. He says this because he committed adultery and says well I committed adultery why don't I just lie. | <urn:uuid:65dda645-c5a5-420c-b8bf-5ff24c25e85a> | {
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Unit Study: The Revolutionary War
- Friday, January 04, 2013
Now that we’ve laid the foundation for why and how the Revolution started, we can immerse ourselves in the topic by reading books and applying academic skills and subjects to our study. You can include spelling/vocabulary, geography and maps, reading, writing, and research, as well as other valuable activities!
Read Aloud Titles
Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes
Mr. Revere and I by Robert Lawson
Young Students (Picture Story Books)
The Hatmaker’s Sign by Benjamin Franklin, retold by Candace Fleming
Betsy Ross by Alexandra Wallner
Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Redcoats and Petticoats by Katherine Kirkpatrick
In 1776 by Jean Marzollo
Phoebe and the General by Judith Berry Griffin
Aaron and the Green Mountain Boys by Patricia Lee Gauch
Sam the Minuteman by Nathaniel Benchley
Buttons for General Washington by Peter and Connie Roop
Good Children Get Rewards by Eva Moore
Molly Pitcher by Jan Gleiter and Kathleen Thompson
Paul Revere by Jan Gleiter and Kathleen Thompson
Can’t You Make Them Behave, King George? by Jean Fritz
Will You Sign Here, John Hancock? by Jean Fritz
The Winter of Red Snow by Kristiana Gregory (Dear America diary)
The Fighting Ground by Avi
Tree of Freedom by Rebecca Caudill
Guns for General Washington by Seymour Reit
My Brother, Sam, Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham
Yankee Doodle by Dr. Richard Shackburg
If You Lived at the Time of the American Revolution by Kay Moore
Valley Forge by R. Conrad Stein (Cornerstones of Freedom series)
American Revolution by Joy Masoff (Chronicles of America)
American Revolution (DK Eyewitness Books)
Two if by Sea by Leonard Everett Fisher
Picture Book of Revolutionary War Heroes by Leonard Everett Fisher (These two books may be available in the library system or through a used online source; though “out of print,” they are worth obtaining.)
Coloring and Activity Books
Revolutionary War Era (Hands-On Heritage)
The Story of the American Revolution coloring book (Dover Publications)
Heroes and Heroines of the American Revolution (Dover Publications)
How Our Nation Was Born: The American Revolution (American Milestones)
- Find inspiring quotes by Revolutionary patriots and use for handwriting practice.
- Read the Scripture on the Liberty Bell from Leviticus and write it out.
- Practice your “John Hancock” (sign your name in cursive).
- Memorize “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Longfellow.
- Make a Revolutionary War timeline. See this page (click on “timeline”).
- Read The Winter at Valley Forge by James E. Knight, and then describe the conditions that the soldiers were forced to endure.
- Older students—watch the movie The Patriot starring Mel Gibson (with parental consent, as some scenes of war are very graphic).
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Kite & Trapezoid Properties and Midsegments of Triangles & Trapezoids
Lesson 5 of 9
Objective: Students will be able to discover and prove properties of kites, trapezoids, and midsegments.
Today's Warm-Up features a rather complex “Angle Chase,” requiring students to apply several different types of angle relationships in order to solve. While many of these angle relationships are review for students, students must use a new strategy to solve this problem: the interior angle sum for polygons. In addition to solving for each of these angles, I ask students to justify their answers for at least three of the angles.
I have found that the most effective way to debrief this Warm-up is not to have a student present the answers—this takes far too long—but rather to simply post the answers for students to check and to ask students to share out about which angles they thought were the most challenging to find and the strategy they used to find them. By asking about strategies and challenges, I give several students the opportunity to share out about multiple strategies and pathways to solve the problem, which gives them a chance to be viewed as “smart” for having an efficient or novel approach.
Since we have discussed kite and trapezoid properties in the past, this activity provides time for my students to refresh their understanding of the properties. I plan to pass out tracing paper and ask my students to take out compasses and straightedges so that they can "re-investigate" some of the properties about the angles and the diagonals of these polygons, as needed. I circulate the room while students are re-investigating and recording the kite and trapezoid properties. When most groups seems to be finishing, I debrief the properties with the whole class.
As usual for our class, we debrief groups' ideas about kite and trapezoid properties in our notetakers.
In Task 1 of Polygon Progression, groups of students use construction tools and tracing paper to discover something new about the midsegments of triangles and trapezoids. Like other group investigations in our class, each member of the group investigates their own special case of triangle and trapezoid midsegments and then compares their results with the group so they can conjecture about midsegments. When every member of the group knows and can defend their conjecture, they check in with me to share their ideas and to justify their reasoning (MP3).
Notes: Midsegment Theorems
Like most other lessons, we formally debrief the big ideas of the day by taking notes in our notetakers. Since I have seen most groups’ work from the investigations, I like to select certain Recorder/Reporters to share their group’s conjectures and example constructions that back up their conjectures.
For homework this evening I ask my students to attempt the following:
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While the use of black plastic is allowed within organic agriculture, it is inherently unsustainable as it is a petroleum-based product and difficult to recycle. Every acre of land farmed using a black plastic system produces 100-120 lb of waste that typically goes to landfills. What’s more, when black plastic is used, 50-70% of a field is transformed into an impervious surface, increasing the volume of runoff by 40% and erosion by 80%. And when herbicides and pesticides are used on fields covered in black plastic, the concentration of these chemicals in the fields’ runoff increases, making environmental and human health impacts even more of a concern. Finally, the increase in soil temperatures during hot summer days under black plastic mulch has been found to shift the soil organisms community towards bacterial rather than fungal and increase microbial stress. Black plastic is also a substantial annual cost to the farmer at $250-$300 per acre for the material and about $20 per acre for disposal.
With increases in cost of production and climate change, vegetable growers are looking into profitable and sustainable systems that increase soil health, reduce carbon foot print and increase their profits.The Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (NE SARE) Program provided Rodale Institute with funding in 2010 to launch a three-year vegetable trial focusing on cover crop alternatives to petroleum-derived disposable black plastic mulch.
While researchers have made great headway in developing and demonstrating the efficacy of cover crop mulch systems, most of the systems that have been developed rely to some degree on synthetic herbicides to supplement the weed control provided by the cover crops. For this reason, researchers at Rodale Institute have been working to develop a cover crop mulch system in which herbicides are not necessary for weed suppression, furthering the work of making cover crop mulch a viable option for organic as well as conventional vegetable producers.
The goal of the study was to measure the impacts of these different mulch systems on soil quality and fertility, weed control, yields and waste production, and profitability for small to mid-size vegetable operations. The vegetable trials at Rodale Institute compared cover crop nitrogen, potential carbon contribution, weed suppression, yields and soil health between rolled and mowed vetch and rye cover crops as well as commonly used black plastic. At the four collaborating farms in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, each farmer tested one cover crop system with the standard system.
The cover crop systems provided serviceable weed control, added more biomass to the soil, contributed nutrients, and increased soil moisture and percent total soil carbon. Although marketable yields were lower, on average, some of the cover crop systems achieved higher profits across the three years. The cover crop mulch systems eliminated 91.5 lb of plastic waste per acre. Challenges related to extreme weather conditions and late blight meant results were more variable than anticipated, but all of the partner farmers continue to use what they’ve learned from the project to reduce their reliance on black plastic. Benefits partner farmers experienced include discovering a method for more effective cover crop kill, substantial cost savings and new ways to use cover crops between rows for ecosystem benefits. One partner has already cut his black plastic use in half and hopes to expand even further.
Click here to open this 24-page guide that looks beyond plasticulture and evaluates the effects of different mulch systems on soil quality and fertility, weed control, yields and waste production, and profitability for small to mid-size vegetable farms. | <urn:uuid:85e2dc47-95f1-438f-b4e6-f619217147b1> | {
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Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) gathered in Geneva, Switzerland to declare an international public health emergency over the mosquito-borne Zika virus. The response comes after an alarming number of cases were being reported across Latin America, including a worrying number of infants being born with abnormally small brains and skulls, a birth defect called microcephaly, which has been suspected of being linked to the spreading virus. Meanwhile, Dallas has already confirmed multiple cases of the virus, including one transferred between humans. We reached out to our expert Dr. Seema Yasmin, professor, physician, former CDC epidemiologist and journalist at The Dallas Morning News who has been actively following the virus.
trong>What does it mean for the WHO to declare a virus as a “global emergency?” What should we expect to see happen next?
It’s very rare for the WHO to declare a public health emergency of international concern. They’ve only done so three times previously: for the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009, for polio in Syria in 2014, and for the Ebola epidemic in 2014. Declaring it a PHEIC focuses political attention, mobilizes money, and usually offers a coordinated strategy to fighting the epidemic. Sadly, this latest emergency declaration from the WHO lacks direction and detail. For example, it talks about improving surveillance and research, but doesn’t say how and it doesn’t offer travel advice for pregnant women, putting it at odds with other public health agencies such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
How long do you think it could be before a vaccine is widely available?
The answer to this depends on how optimistic you are! Dr. Anthony Fauci, the long-time director of the National Institutes of Health went on the record to say we can expect a vaccine by the end of the year. I love his optimism, but I don’t think it’s realistic! Most scientists I’ve spoken to say it will be at least a few years if not 10 years before we can expect a vaccine. I believe Dr. Fauci’s projection is based not just on optimism, but the idea that we can use our knowledge of viruses such as dengue, Yellow Fever, and West Nile to fast track our understanding of the Zika virus.
There have been numerous cases reported in Texas already, including the most recent which was transmitted from human to human. How can we battle back and try to stop the virus from spreading uncontrollably? Should we take similar precautions like with West Nile?
It’s notoriously difficult to fight mosquito-borne diseases, just ask anyone who lives in a malaria endemic region. In fact, nearly half of the world is at risk of infection with malaria and diseases spread by mosquitoes kill a million people each year. Fighting these infections means getting rid of mosquitoes, but it also requires fighting poverty and inequality. Poor people – whether it’s a poor family in Sub-Saharan Africa at risk of malaria or a poor family in South Dallas at risk of West Nile – are at highest risk of infection with a mosquito-borne disease and more likely to die from the infection than a wealthier person. Mosquito control is crucial, but so is fighting the root cause of these epidemics which is so often poverty. The best advice for now as we scramble to learn more about the Zika virus is to avoid mosquito bites by wearing repellent and covering up during the day when Zika-spreading mosquitoes like to bite. But now that we’ve seen a sexually-transmitted case in Dallas – only the second case of Zika to be spread through sex – it’s important people wear condoms when having sex with anyone who has travelled to a part of the world with a Zika outbreak. Most people with the infection won’t have symptoms, but they are still capable of spreading the disease to mosquitoes when they are bitten and to other people through unprotected sex. | <urn:uuid:0da976ce-02eb-460a-8764-e78f0e9f376a> | {
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A Dutch court declared that "Black Pete" — a traditional Christmas figure in the country usually performed in blackface — is a negative stereotype on Thursday. Although the order from the Amsterdam District Court only requires the city's mayor Eberhard van der Laan to reconsider the permit he granted for an annual parade featuring the character next December, many international observers consider the ruling to be a big step in the right direction.
As for the city's actual residents, that might be a different story. The Associated Press notes that Zwarte Piet is beloved by many Dutch people, who argue that the figure is an important part of Dutch holiday celebrations. As we've explained before, here are Black Pete's defining characteristics:
- He's usually depicted by a white person, performing in blackface. This includes overemphasized red lips and afro wigs reminiscent of the racist American minstrel show tradition.
- Black Pete is Santa's "sidekick," which is arguably a euphemism for his historical depiction as Santa's slave.
- As today's court ruling noted, Black Pete has a history of being portrayed as unintelligent and servile.
Slate also notes in its recent look at the character that the Dutch have a long history of involvement in the slave trade, which makes Black Pete's continued existence even more awkward for the country.
Dutch supporters who would like to continue the tradition have a few alternative suggestions should Amsterdam's Sinterklaas parade be in jeopardy. Those include using rainbow-colored paint instead of black paint for the character's face. In any case, Amsterdam's mayor has six weeks to reconsider his permit after today's ruling. According to Businessweek, the city hasn't decided whether it will appeal or not. | <urn:uuid:66f73f9c-b97b-4485-8104-183c188e15fa> | {
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See Barn Swallow
Daily Log 2013/2014
Barn Swallows Mount Moreland South Africa
Up to 3 Million Barn Swallows at one roost site
The Barn Swallow European Swallow)
is not an endangered species.
In fact it is currently plentiful. Why then does this
little bird receive so much attention?
It is because of its extraordinary lifestyle - a lifestyle that takes it
across the Globe and which brings it in close
contact with humans.
In South Africa, as
spring arrives in September, the migratory Barn swallows
(Hirundo rustica) start to appear. At Mt Moreland, South Africa's largest roost, the
initial small flocks swell to thousands and then millions. By November up to 3 million Barn
Swallows can be seen every evening over the Lake Victoria wetland roost.
This awesome spectacle, half an hour before
sunset, of the Barn Swallows coming home to roost every night has become a world wide attraction as a Natural Wonder and Global Treasure.
The reedbed roost site
the Barn Swallows have chosen is a wetland, locally known as the Lake Victoria Wetland, it
is covered with indigenous Phragmities reeds.
The Barn Swallows at Mount Moreland and their roosting habitat are now recognized as a world famous Barn
Swallow site and IBA (International Birding Area).
The now famous Barn Swallows of Mt Moreland return during October.
Visitors are welcome to visit the view-site in the last week in October but the best viewing months are
November, and March. Visitors need to come half an hour before sunset,
check the Map for directions. You need
to bring own chairs, sundowners and snacks, binoculars and Anti-mossie cream.
A donation is payable on entrance. Barn Swallow mementos and information booklets are on sale at the main
The Barn Swallow viewing site is open every day during
Moreland Conservancy is the organisation behind all
Your support is really important in helping to ensure the well
being of the Barn Swallows now and into the future. | <urn:uuid:6e1ac750-8c3c-4c1b-9c26-173451b115af> | {
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Water: Monitoring & Assessment
Applications of Biological Assessments in Wetlands
|Office of Water
Office of Wetlands, Oceans
and Watersheds (4502-F)
Wetland Bioassessment Fact Sheet 2
In most cases, the most direct and effective way of evaluating the ecological "health" or condition of a wetland is (1) to directly measure the condition of a wetland's biological community and (2) to observe and measure the chemical and physical characteristics of a wetland and its surrounding landscape. After developing and testing bioassessment methods, states, tribes, and federal agencies can use them for the following activities.
1. Assess wetland condition.
Scientists can use bioassessment methods to directly measure biological integrity of wetlands and quickly screen wetlands for signs of impairment. For example, Minnesota Pollution and Control Agency is developing a Wetland Index of Biological Integrity (WIBI) based on wetland macroinvertebrates. While it is still under development, they can use WIBI to identify wetlands impacted by stormwater and agricultural runoff. In Figure 1, the three wetlands on the left are reference wetlands and the two wetlands on the right show signs of biological impairment. If a state or tribe detects a warning signal during this screening process, it can then conduct a more detailed and thorough assessment. Many states using bioassessments in streams are finding that they save time and resources by screening a large number of sites rapidly and then following up with more detailed (and expensive) biological studies and chemical and physical assessments when appropriate.
2. Diagnose the type of stressor damaging the biota.
Developing methods and programs to assess the biological integrity of wetlands is a priority for the EPA because:
- The objective of the Clean Water Act is to "restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of our Nation's waters," including wetlands.
- As our nation draws closer to meeting the Clinton Administration Wetlands Plan's short-term goal of achieving a no overall net loss of wetlands, we must focus on the long-term goal of increasing the overall quantity and quality of our Nation's wetlands.
An index of biological integrity (IBI) is composed of multiple metrics that each respond to the effects of a human activity. Some metrics are more sensitive to chemical alterations (e.g., nutrient enrichment) while other metrics are more sensitive to physical (e.g., hydromodification) or biological (e.g., exotic species) alterations. By observing which metrics show signs of impairment and which do not, scientists can identify what type of stressor is damaging the biota. Scientists can increase their ability to diagnose what is damaging the biota by developing two or more IBIs. For example, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality has found that macroinvertebrate metrics are more sensitive to physical changes to wetlands while algal metrics are more sensitive to nutrient enrichment.
3. Define management approaches to maintain and restore wetland condition.
The information provided by biological assessments can help states prioritize and target activities to protect and restore wetlands. For example, by identifying the type of stressors damaging wetlands, states can develop site-specific management plans to maintain or restore the biological condition of wetlands. States can save time and resources by tailoring management plans to focus on the stressors which damage the wetlands the most. When conducting biological assessments, states can also identify and prioritize high quality wetlands for protection or acquisition.
4. Evaluate performance of protection and restoration activities.
States can evaluate the success of management activities by including follow-up assessments as a component of management plans (See Fact Sheet 2). By periodically conducting bioassessments, states can track the condition of wetlands and learn which management activities work as planned and which do not work. With this knowledge, states can improve future management plans and save time and money by avoiding marginal activities. Figure 2 provides a hypothetical example of how a state can track the biological recovery of a wetland following restoration activities by tracking the IBI scores and comparing them to the conditions found in reference wetlands. It is important to compare the IBI scores from the same year to identify regional trends that may effect all wetlands in an area. For example, there may have been a drought in Year 4, which would account for the dip in the two curves on Figure 2.
5. Develop and support water quality standards.
The objective of the Clean Water Act (CWA) is to "maintain and restore the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of our Nation's waters," including wetlands (CWA Section 101 (a)). Under CWA Section 303, states and eligible tribes develop water quality standards to ensure that their waters support beneficial uses such as aquatic life support, drinking water supply, fish consumption, swimming, and boating (See Fact Sheet 7). States can use bioassessment methods to establish standards and criteria that are specifically appropriate for conditions found in wetlands. Criteria are the narrative or numeric descriptions of the conditions found in minimally impacted reference sites. By comparing the condition of a wetland to appropriate criteria, states can determine if the wetland is supporting its designated uses. In the absence of wetland-specific standards and criteria, states must rely on standards developed for lakes, streams, or other waterbodies that have different ecological conditions. In 1990, the EPA published guidance to help states create water quality standards for wetlands (Water Quality Standards for Wetlands, EPA/440/S-90-011).
6. Certify that permits maintain water quality.
Under CWA Section 401, states have the authority to grant or deny "certification" for federally permitted or licensed activities that may result in a discharge to wetlands or other waterbodies. The certification decision is based on whether the proposed activity will comply with state water quality standards. Under this process, a state can use information from biological assessments to determine if a proposed activity would degrade water quality of a wetland or other waterbodies in a watershed. If a state grants certification, it is essentially saying that the proposed activity will comply with state water quality standards. Likewise, a state can deny certification if the project would harm the chemical, physical, or biological integrity of a wetland as defined by water quality standards. A state's Section 401 certification process is only as good as its underlying water quality standards. States can use bioassessments to refine narrative and numeric criteria to make them more suitable for conditions found in wetlands and subsequently improve the Section 401 certification process.
7. Track water quality condition in wetlands.
Under CWA Section 305 (b), states submit water quality reports every other year that summarize the quality of waters within their boundaries. In past years, few states have reported the quality of their wetlands. In the future, states can use bioassessment methods and wetland-specific standards and criteria to determine if wetlands are meeting their designated uses. States can then report the results in the Section 305 (b) reports. | <urn:uuid:aceee85a-a681-473d-83d8-8684ec44deb4> | {
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Issue No. 01 - Jan.-March (2013 vol. 35)
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MAHC.2011.83
Jay W. Lathrop , Clemson University
From 1952 to 1958, Jay Lathrop worked on a project at the National Bureau of Standards (later the US Army Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratory) to develop microminiaturized, transistorized hybrid integrated circuits for radio proximity fuzes. In this article, Lathrop describes his experiences during this project, the development of photolithography, and how photolithography became critical in the first efforts to produce semiconductor ICs.
Transistors, US Department of Defense, History, NIST, Diamond-like carbon, Lithography, Electron tubes, National Bureau of Standards, photolithography, history of computing, integrated circuit, printed circuits, microcircuitry, National Bureau of Standards, US Army Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratory, proximity fuze
Jay W. Lathrop, "The Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratory's Photolithographic Approach to Microcircuits", IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 35, no. , pp. 48-55, Jan.-March 2013, doi:10.1109/MAHC.2011.83 | <urn:uuid:3b0b76f9-b8fe-4996-906e-5f23b1c09765> | {
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Newsweek Magazine files in a report about the potential of body based technology that allows the human body to act as a wireless networking tool. This very technology is central to Docomo’s concept wristwatch-phone that transfers the voice signal through your body:
In his gadget-filled office at Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Prof. Kohji Mitsubayashi tells a visitor to touch a transmitter with one hand and a receiver with another. Voila! A jaunty TV jingle blares from a pair of attached speakers. Surprised, the visitor releases both gadgets, and the music stops. The simplicity and strangeness of becoming a human circuit—with electrical signals coursing through one’s body from fingertip to fingertip—is so fascinating that visitors usually repeat the act. “Fun, isn’t it?” says Mitsubayashi, grinning.
Not just fun. Japan is abuzz over the potential of such body-based technology as the ultimate wireless networking tool. A string of Japanese companies are experimenting with systems that use the human body to conduct electricity—some manipulating weak currents that pass through the skin itself (as body-fat scales do), others taking advantage of electrical fields on the surface of the body. Associated products are on the way. The question is whether this represents a paradigm shift in the way we think about wires. | <urn:uuid:60b13269-9999-4294-a94f-dc5c7918bf4b> | {
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WHO Collaborates on Health/Climate Atlas
Published jointly Oct. 29 by the World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organization, it contains maps, tables, and graphs showing links between health and climate around the world.
The Atlas of health and climate was published jointly Oct. 29 by the World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organization to illustrate some of the world's pressing current and emerging challenges and the connection between these two key areas. Droughts, floods, and cyclones affect the health of millions of people each year, while extreme events such as floods can trigger epidemics, such as diarrhea, malaria, dengue, and meningitis, according to WHO.
"Prevention and preparedness are the heart of public health. Risk management is our daily bread and butter. Information on climate variability and climate change is a powerful scientific tool that assists us in these tasks," said Dr Margaret Chan, WHO's director-general. "Climate has a profound impact on the lives, and survival, of people. Climate services can have a profound impact on improving these lives, also through better health outcomes."
"Stronger cooperation between the meteorological and health communities is essential to ensure that up-to-date, accurate, and relevant information on weather and climate is integrated into public health management at international, national, and local levels. This atlas is an innovative and practical example of how we can work together to serve society," said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud.
The atlas shows how:
- In some locations, infectious disease incidence can vary by factors of more than 100 between seasons and significantly between years, depending on weather and climate conditions.
- Case studies illustrate how collaboration among meteorological, emergency, and health services is already saving lives, such as by limiting deaths from cyclones of similar intensity in Bangladesh (reduced from around 500,000 in 1970 to 140,000 in 1991 and to 3,000 in 2007, "largely thanks to improved early warning systems and preparedness," according to WHO).
- Heat extremes that would currently be expected to occur only once in 20 years may occur on average every 2-5 years by the middle of this century while the number of older people living in cities (one of the most vulnerable groups to heat stress) will almost quadruple, from 380 million in 2010 to 1.4 billion in 2050. | <urn:uuid:95eed0b5-2406-4ee4-b9c4-84e4e661a017> | {
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movements, which are, indeed, proof of its good manners. They are, moreover, no disadvantage for a promenade horse which is to be ridden by the same esquire who trained it; though the results are most distressing to a rider of less equestrian tact.
The walk of manege is simply a very slow walk, well cadenced, the steps equal and regular, and with the action of the legs less forward, but very much higher than in the ordinary walk.
It cannot be obtained except under the most perfect equilibrium, while the fingering must be even more precise than for the piaffer and the backward trot, which are derived from it. The rider's legs must maintain the center of gravity always exactly between the forces of the front and rear limbs, not allowing it the least motion from side to side, but only up and down with the step. The seat must be especially accurate, and the contact absolutely permanent. The least alteration of the balance will change the walk to the trot, if forward, or, if backward, will stop the horse.
To obtain the walk of manege, the rider gradually diminishes the speed of the ordinary walk, keeping the state of equilibrium as complete as possible. By the effects of opposition coupled with great accuracy of seat, and by the diagonal effect repeated in tempo, he asks slower and slower steps, | <urn:uuid:ad4c1d38-3840-4fd6-85ae-379092acaa20> | {
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Display tells the story of Lincoln’s struggle to meet the constitutional challenges of the Civil War
“Lincoln: The Constitution and the Civil War,” a traveling exhibition premieres at the Christopher Center for Library and Information Resources at Valparaiso University with an opening reception on Thursday, Nov. 13. The collection examines how President Lincoln used the Constitution to confront three intertwined crises of the Civil War — the secession of Southern states, slavery and wartime civil liberties.
“We are delighted to have been selected as a site for this exhibition,” said Rachael Muszkiewicz, assistant professor of library services. “As a new president, Abraham Lincoln was faced with enormous challenges. This exhibition shows how Lincoln grappled with difficult issues and helps visitors understand why Lincoln’s struggle with the Constitution still matters today.”
The traveling exhibition is composed of informative panels featuring photographic reproductions of original documents, including a draft of Lincoln’s first inaugural speech, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.
Events held in conjunction with the exhibition include:
- Opening Reception and “An Evening with Abe Lincoln,” Thursday, Nov. 13, 6 p.m., performance begins at 7 p.m. Dean Dorrell will present a one-act play based on historical documents.
- Lincoln: A Musical Portrait, Saturday, Nov. 15, 6 – 7 p.m. Angela Young Smucker, adjunct instructor in music, will give a vocal music performance with piano accompaniment.
- Civil War Indoor Encampment, Saturday, Nov. 15, 8 a.m. – 3 p.m., and Sunday, Nov. 16, 8 a.m. – 6 p.m. Living history presenters from Company B — 20th Regiment Indiana Volunteer Infantry will present on life in a Civil War camp, equipment common to the soldier, bullet manufacturing and the woman’s role during the Civil War era.
- “On Lincoln and Libraries” by Eileen Mackevich, Thursday, Nov. 20, 4:30 p.m. Mackevich is director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
All events take place in the Christopher Center Community Room and are free and open to the public.
The National Constitution Center and the American Library Association Public Programs Office organized the traveling exhibition, which was made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: great ideas brought to life. The traveling exhibition is based on an exhibition of the same name developed by the National Constitution Center. | <urn:uuid:a734552d-8ebf-41de-af81-73ae13077d4d> | {
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Summer weather has its benefits and disadvantages at the same time. When it comes to the strong sun rays in summer, we are definitely talking about the sunscreen and sunblocks. Here in this article, we have listed everything you need to know the facts regarding sunscreen.
WHY USE SUNSCREEN IN SUMMERS?
Firstly, we realize that since winters are having zero sunlight in days, therefore, you definitely need sunrays to feed you the required quantities of vitamin D in summers. However, since the sun rays are very strong. Eventually, they cause sunburns on your delicate skin. The sunscreens protect your skin from these burns and damage of UV rays.
WHAT IS SPF (Sun Protection Factor)?
So you must have read this SPF number on the sunscreens. This is the measure of protection from UVB. It ranges from 1-45 and more than that. This SPF is supposed to filter out almost 90% of the harmful UVB rays.
Higher SPF’S Better Or Not?
The SPF 30 is found out to block almost ninety percent of the harmful sun rays. If you are using SPF greater than 30 than it will block more percentage of the harmful sun rays. However, no sunscreen can completely block the sun rays. If you are using higher SPF than you need to reapply the sunscreen after every two to three hours. | <urn:uuid:91ff71ff-840b-489e-ae82-e24f23b16593> | {
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"We need bees for the future of our cities and urban living," Noah Wilson-Rich said at TEDxBoston.
Wilson-Rich completed his Ph.D. in honeybee health in 2005. In 2006, honeybees started disappearing.
"We don't even find dead bodies, and it's bizarre. Researchers still do not know what's causing it," says Wilson-Rich.
We've been hearing about the disappearance of bees for some time, but Wilson-Rich is bringing a new perspective to the table.
Cities need bees, and bees need cities.
"We're very co-evolved because we depend on bees for pollination and even more recently, as an economic commodity." Wilson-Rich went on to note that in cities "bees are surviving better than in the country. They also produce more honey."
There are a number of possible reasons. Cities are warmer, trains carry pollen into heavily populated areas, and there may be fewer pesticides in urban areas. In other words, Colony Collapse Disorder is not the only thing affecting bees.
But even though the physical urban environment supports healthy bees, the social urban environment certainly does not. There is a reason urban beekeepers take care to keep their beehives out of sight.
Wilson-Rich wants to change that:
"The way that urban beekeeping currently operates is that the beehives are quite hidden. it's not because they need to be, it's because people are uncomfortable with the idea." As the world population explodes, "We need to change the way that we see cities."
We also need to change the way we see bees.
Take New York City as an example. This aerial shot shows grey tar paper rooftops reflecting heat back into the atmosphere:
Wilson-Rich urges us to consider just how future-forward green roofs would be. "We create our own crops right in the cities. We save on the costs of transportation, we save on a healthier diet, and we also educate and create new jobs locally."
Look elsewhere, and great examples of urban beekeeping can be found.
The opera house in Paris has kept bees on the roof for years. In Boston, the rooftop of the Sea Port hotel houses hundreds of thousands of bees (pollinating hundreds of local gardens throughout the city). The Fairmont Copley Plaza also helps out, and went so far as to stylistically match their bee boxes to the inside of the hotel.
Now that the ban on urban beekeeping in New York City has been lifted (it was illegal until 2010), there's no reason for closet bee lovers to hold back.
Moral of the story? Start producing liquid gold on a rooftop near you!
Need help? Contact Best Bees Company, Wilson-Rich's answer for budding beekeepers. | <urn:uuid:335135b4-2ba8-45ef-8612-4b16c5e1e63a> | {
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The Washington representatives of this family can be split into two groups, or subfamilies. The adaptable gulls are the most familiar. Sociable in all seasons, they are mainly coastal, but a number of species also nest inland. Many—but not all—are found around people. Gulls have highly variable foraging techniques and diets. Terns forage in flight, swooping to catch fish or insects. They dive headfirst into the water for fish. Although they are likely to be near water, they spend less time swimming than gulls.
The Elegant Tern is a fairly large, slim tern, with a long, orange, slightly drooping bill. It has narrow, angled wings, a deeply forked tail, and a shaggy crest. The adult in breeding plumage has a gray mantle, white breast and belly, and white face with a black, crested cap. The legs are black. The adult in non-breeding plumage is similar, but with a white forehead that darkens to streaky black, as if the cap has receded. Juveniles appear similar to non-breeding adults, but their legs are yellow.
A coastal species, the Elegant Tern is found in shallow waters, in bays and estuaries, and sometimes far out to sea. It is extremely rare inland. Nesting habitat is isolated, flat, sandy or rocky islands without much vegetation, and is restricted to five sites in Mexico and southern California.
Elegant Terns are highly social and very vocal, especially when feeding in flocks. They forage by flying over water, hovering, and plunging down to catch prey below the water's surface.
The key prey of this species on its breeding grounds is the northern anchovy. Other small fish and small crustaceans round out the diet.
Elegant Terns sometimes breed in mixed colonies with other terns or Heerman's Gulls, where their nests are packed closely together. They nest on bare ground, out in the open. Both parents help to make a simple scrape in the ground, collecting debris to form a rim and sometimes lining the scrape with pebbles or shells. The female lays one or perhaps two eggs. Incubation is by both sexes, and lasts about 4 weeks. After hatching, the chick stays in the nest for about a week. Then, like other crested terns, it joins a group of up to several hundred chicks called a crèche. The adults take turns guarding the crèche, standing at the perimeter of the group and herding the chicks together. A parent feeds only its own chick in the crèche, recognizing the chick by its call note. Chicks stay in the crèche until they fledge at about 35 days, after which they follow their parents for at least five or six more months.
Elegant Terns migrate north and south along the coast in late summer and early fall after the breeding season. Birds that dispersed northward head south again in October. Their winter range extends as far south as Peru and Chile.
The Elegant Tern has the most restricted breeding distribution of any tern in North America, and only five colonies are currently known. The largest of the five, located on Isla Rasa, Mexico hosts 90-97% of the worldwide population. Historically, this is a species of limited distribution, with only about a dozen nesting colonies, but disturbance from humans and feral animals, habitat degradation, and changing climatic conditions have reduced it even further, to the current small number of colonies. The breeding range is currently expanding northward into California, however, perhaps in response to the shifting distribution of northern anchovies. The Elegant Tern is a highly vulnerable species and is listed as a species of special concern in California. Some conservationists believe that the US and Mexico should immediately list the Elegant Tern as endangered and begin recovery programs before it is too late.
When and Where to Find in Washington
The Elegant Tern is a rare visitor to Washington from July to mid-September, along the southern outer coast in sandy habitats and offshore. In some years, Elegant Terns can be found in fairly good numbers in southwestern Washington locations, e.g. Ocean Shores (Grays Harbor County) and in Pacific County. They may be absent in other years.
Washington Range Map
North American Range Map
- Laughing GullLarus atricilla
- Franklin's GullLarus pipixcan
- Little GullLarus minutus
- Black-headed GullLarus ridibundus
- Bonaparte's GullLarus philadelphia
- Heermann's GullLarus heermanni
- Black-tailed GullLarus crassirostris
- Mew GullLarus canus
- Ring-billed GullLarus delawarensis
- California GullLarus californicus
- Herring GullLarus argentatus
- Thayer's GullLarus thayeri
- Iceland GullLarus glaucoides
- Lesser Black-backed GullLarus fuscus
- Slaty-backed GullLarus schistisagus
- Western GullLarus occidentalis
- Glaucous-winged GullLarus glaucescens
- Glaucous GullLarus hyperboreus
- Great Black-backed GullLarus marinus
- Sabine's GullXema sabini
- Black-legged KittiwakeRissa tridactyla
- Red-legged KittiwakeRissa brevirostris
- Ross's GullRhodostethia rosea
- Ivory GullPagophila eburnea
- Least TernSternula antillarum
- Caspian TernHydroprogne caspia
- Black TernChlidonias niger
- Common TernSterna hirundo
- Arctic TernSterna paradisaea
- Forster's TernSterna forsteri
- Elegant TernThalasseus elegans
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Studies of a Biographer/The Evolution of Editors
THE EVOLUTION OF EDITORS
What is an editor? If we turn, as our fathers would have turned, to Johnson's Dictionary, we shall find in the last edition published during his life that the word in 1785 meant either 'publisher' simply, or editor in the sense in which the name describes Bentley's relation to Horace or Warburton's to Pope. The editor, that is as implying the commander of a periodical, is not yet recognised, and Johnson, if any one, would not have overlooked him. Dr. Murray's great dictionary gives 1802 as the date of the earliest recorded use of the word in the now familiar sense. The editor is regarded by most authors as a person whose mission is the suppression of rising genius, or as a traitor who has left their ranks to help their natural enemy, the publisher. Hateful as he may be in himself, he is an interesting figure in the annals of literature. The main facts are familiar enough, and are given in various histories of the Press. Yet I have found even in such books phrases which seem to imply a misconception allusions, for example, to the 'editor and staff' of a newspaper in the days of Queen Anne. Such a slip occurs in the most perfect presentment of the spirit of that period, Thackeray's Esmond. Esmond goes to see the printer of The Postboy, and in the house encounters Swift. 'I presume you are the editor of The Postboy, sir?' says Swift. 'I am but a contributor,' replies Esmond. The scene is otherwise quite accurate, but Esmond, in his anxiety to be smart upon Swift, makes an anachronism. I do not know who wrote The Postboy at this period (1712), but it was shortly before written by Abel Boyer. Boyer was a French refugee who had to toil in Grub Street for his living. Some of his painful compilations are still known to antiquarians, and his French dictionary, or a dictionary which continued to pass under his name, survived till quite recently, if it be not still extant. He was employed by one Roper to write The Postboy, but was turned off in 1709. He then published a pathetic appeal to the public, pointing out that the wicked Roper had made money by his paper, and was dismissing him without just cause. He tried, like other men in the same position, to carry on a 'true' Postboy, which, if ever fairly started, has vanished from the world. What kind of interviews Boyer was likely to have with Swift may be guessed from The Journal to Stella. Swift calls him a 'French dog who has abused me in a pamphlet'; orders a messenger to take him in charge, and requests St. John to 'swinge him.' Whoever wrote it afterwards, The Postboy itself was a 'tri-weekly' sheet which would go comfortably into a column of The Times. Its speciality, due probably to Boyer's French origin, was its foreign correspondence, and it had little else. The whole, as a rule, seems to have been made up of little paragraphs extracted from letters giving remarks about the war, and the remaining space was eked out by half a dozen advertisements. Boyer's 'editing' was all done with a pair of scissors. He was hardly more than a clerk employed by Roper to select bits of news, and probably to arrange for a supply of the necessary material.
We can make a tolerably distinct picture of the Grub Street of this period. The street, which not long ago exchanged its ill-omened name for Milton Street, had become famous in the days of the Civil War, when the abolition of the Star Chamber gave a chance to unlicensed printers, and the appetite for news was naturally at its keenest. When order was restored it was put under restraint, and languished dismally through the Restoration period. Roger Lestrange was intrusted, not only with the superintending of the one official organ, but with power of suppressing every rival. He acted as a kind of detective, and he declares that he spent £500 a year in maintaining 'spies for information.' One night in 1663 he showed his zeal by arresting a wretched printer called Twyn. Twyn, whose only excuse was that he was the father of three poor children, was caught in the act of printing what he called 'some mettlesome stuff.' Though the stuff was too outrageous to be fully quoted even in the reports of his trial, it appears to have asserted that even kings should be responsible to their people, a doctrine which might be taken to hint at a popular rising. Twyn was sent to the gallows to clear his views of the law of libel. That law, so Scroggs declared in 1680, was that to 'publish any newspaper whatsoever was illegal, and showed a manifest intent to the breach of the peace.' Although this doctrine and the practice which it sanctioned are startling enough to us, they suggest one significant remark. The accounts of Twyn's and other trials at the time prove the infamy of Scroggs and his like, but they indirectly prove also the advent of a change. The reporter had come into existence, and was doing his work admirably. The proceedings are taken down word for word, and the scenes are often so vividly described that they are more amusing, because less long-winded, than accounts of modern trials. Macaulay remarks that Jeffreys was awed at the trial of the seven bishops by the 'thick rows of earls and barons.' The reporter contributed equally to the remarkable change in fairness of trials which took place at the Revolution. It was to be a long time before he could force his way into the gallery of the House of Commons; but his influence in the law-courts was perceptible. The Grub Street of Boyer's time contained many of the waifs and strays from this period of persecution. In wandering through that dismal region we get the most distinct of our few glimpses of light as from a tallow-candle held by the crazy scribbler John Dunton. Dunton, a descendant of clergymen, had become a bookseller, and got into various intricate troubles, till, as he tells us, he 'stooped so low as to become an author,' and sank in time to be a 'willing and everlasting drudge to the quill'! In 1705 he published his Life and Errors, a book which makes one long to ask him a few questions. He had seen many people of whom he could have given interesting 'reminiscences.' Unluckily he did not know in what posterity would be interested. We do not much care to know at the present day that Richard Sault was in all probability the true author of the Second Spira, a book of which Dunton sold 30,000 copies in six weeks, and which he now requests his readers to burn if they meet it. I have never had the chance of burning it, and cannot account for his remorse, though I hope that the sale was some consolation. But, besides this, Dunton had published the Athenian Mercury, a sort of anticipatory Notes and Queries, and to it not only this famous Sault, but John Wesley's father and Sir William Temple and Swift had sent contributions. He had known, too, all the booksellers, printers, binders, engravers, and hackney authors of the time, and gives us tantalising glimpses of some familiar names. He has short descriptions of considerably over a hundred booksellers, and from his account we are glad to observe that they already showed their main characteristic—the possession, namely, of all the cardinal virtues. He enumerates and compliments all the writers of weekly sheets. Among them is Boyer, whom he praises for the 'matchless beauties of his style'; Defoe, with whom he had unluckily a running quarrel, and who is therefore mentioned with less warmth than inferior rivals; and Tutchin, whose Observator is 'noways inferior' to Defoe's Review. Tutchin was the famous person who was sentenced by Jeffreys, for his share in Monmouth's revolt, to a punishment of such severity that he petitioned the king to be hanged instead. His petition is supposed to be unique, and his prayer was not granted. Tutchin escaped to see Jeffreys in the Tower, and was reported to have sent him a halter concealed in a barrel of oysters. Tutchin was tried in 1704 for some of his Observators, in which he seems to have obscurely hinted that there might be some corruption in the navy. He escaped in consequence of a technical blunder in the indictment unintelligible to the lay reader, but, we are told, was afterwards assaulted in consequence of some of his writings, and so cruelly beaten that he died of his wounds. The evidence on his trial shows clearly what a leading newspaper was in those days. Tutchin had agreed with the printer to write a weekly paper for which he was to receive 10 s. 6 d. a time. The number printed was 266, and we are glad to hear that the printer raised the price in time to 20 s. The printer incidentally admits that he had himself done such 'editing' as was necessary; that is, had struck out phrases which seemed to be libellous.
Defoe and his rival Tutchin differed from Boyer in this, that their papers were in reality weekly pamphlets, or consisted mainly of the matter which would now be made into leading articles. Tutchin and Defoe were sound Whigs, though Defoe's Whiggism had to make awkward compromises with his interests. Their chief opponent was the vigorous nonjuror and voluminous controversialist Charles Leslie, a martyr to High Church principles, who had to live partly by his pen, and from 1706 to 1709 published The Rehearsal on the side of unflinching Jacobitism. He escaped a trial for treason by retiring to St. Germains. The author had always to keep one eye upon the Attorney-General, and Grub Street was a Cave of Adullam for broken men, ruined in trade or political troubles, who could just keep body and soul together by these productions. They were 'authors,' not 'editors' of their papers, and The Review, or Observator, or Rehearsal were simply the personal utterances of Defoe, Tutchin, and Leslie. Whether Defoe, like Tutchin, was paid by his printer, or whether, as seems more probable in so keen a man of business, he employed the printer, is more than I know. In the later years of his troublesome life, he was at one time in a position of respectability, with a comfortable house and garden, and able to provide a portion for his daughter. But Defoe was exceptional. Meanwhile the plan had been adopted in a higher sphere. Steele is distinguished in one of the lists of authors as a 'gentleman born.' The official Gazette had been intrusted to him with a liberal salary of £300 a year, and, as we all know, in 1709 he started The Tatler, which became the lineal ancestor of The Spectator and the long series of British Essayists. All the best-known authors of the eighteenth century tried their hands at this form of composition, as our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had good cause to know. The essays were lay sermons, whose authors condescended, it was supposed, to turn from grave studies of philosophy or politics to topics at once edifying and intelligible to the weaker sex. Many of these series implied joint-stock authorship, and therefore some kind of editing. We know, for example, how Steele was ill-advised enough to insert in The Guardian a paper by his young admirer Pope, which ostensibly puffed their common friend Philips's Pastorals, but under a thin cover of irony contrived to compare them very unfavourably with his own rival performances. Pope and Philips lived afterwards, as Johnson puts it, in a perpetual 'reciprocation of malevolence'; and the editor no doubt had already discovered that there might be thorns in his pillow. In those happy days, too, when the 'Rev. Mr, Grove' could win immortality on the strength of three or four papers in The Spectator, Steele must no doubt have had to deal in some of the diplomacy which is a modern editor's defence against unwelcome volunteers. But he held no recognised office. When he got Addison to help him in The Tatler, he resembled, according to his familiar phrase, the 'distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid.' To use a humbler comparison, he was more like the preacher who asks a friend to occupy his pulpit for a Sunday or two, and finds his assistant's sermons more popular than his own. Addison and Steele appear to have started The Spectator in alliance, and they sold the right of publication when it was collected in a new form. The precedent was often followed by little knots of friends, and some one, of course, would have to do such editing as was wanted. One result is characteristic. There was as yet no 'We.' The writer of an essay had therefore to speak of himself in the first person; and as the first person was not the individual writer, but the writer in his capacity as essayist, an imaginary author was invented. Hence arose the Spectator himself, and Nestor Ironside and Caleb Danvers and their like. The last representatives of the fashion were Sylvanus Urban of The Gentleman's Magazine and Oliver Yorke of Fraser's, if indeed 'Mr. Punch' is not a legitimate descendant. The fictitious author was a kind of mask to be worn by each actor in turn. But of course periodicals of this kind, which consisted of nothing but an essay supplied by some author with occasional help from his friends, required no definite editor. Afterwards they frequently appeared as a series of articles in one of the magazines, and had less of an independent existence. For the main origin of the editor we must, then, go back to Grub Street. One point must be noticed. Between Grub Street and these higher circles of elegant authorship there was little communication, and certainly no love lost. The modern author has sometimes looked fondly back to the period of Queen Anne as a golden epoch when literature received its proper reward. Macaulay speaks of the next years as a time when the author fell, as it were, between two stools—when he had lost the patron and not been taken up by the public. This, I think, suggests an inaccurate view. Grub Street had never basked in the sunshine of patronage. Its denizens had few interviews with great men, unless they were such as Boyer had with Swift or Twyn with Lestrange. The 'hackney author,' as Dunton already calls him, was simply a nuisance to be suppressed unless he could be used as a spy. A few men of education drifted into the miserable street; royalist divines (like Fuller) under the Commonwealth, and ejected ministers such as Baxter under Charles ii. Baxter tells us that he managed by ceaseless writing to make £70 a year, and, now and then, such men were helped by some sympathetic friend in power. But patronage, beyond an occasional bribe, or possibly a payment of hush-money, generally descended, if it descended at all, upon others than the true Grub Street author. The great men of the seventeenth century now and then acted as patrons; the two greatest English thinkers of the time, Hobbes and Locke, were supported by the Earls of Devonshire and Shaftesbury. Some patronage was bestowed upon Dryden and the poets, though they do not seem to have considered it over-liberal. Butler and Otway are the typical examples of their fate. Still, a nobleman often felt bound to send his twenty guineas in return for a dedication. Learned men, too, in the Church might of course hope for professional preferment. But all this was no comfort to the bookseller's drudge, and he got no benefits of this kind from the Revolution. What then happened was, I take it, very simple. The great man, thanks to the growth of parliamentary power, suddenly found himself enabled to be a patron at the public expense. Naturally he was suddenly seized with a fit of liberality. The famous writers of Queen Anne's day—Addison, and Congreve, and Prior, and their friends—became commissioners of excise, of hackney coaches, and so forth, or found shelter in other pleasant little offices, then newly created, of which Ministers could dispose. Such patronage was, of course, not given for abstruse learning; scholars and antiquaries were not sought out in their studies or college lecture-rooms, or enabled to pursue recondite researches. Still less did it come to Grub Street. The recipients of the golden shower were 'wits,' or men known in 'the town,' which was no longer overshadowed by the Court. They were selected from the agreeable companions at one of the newly invented clubs, where statesmen could relax over their claret and brush up their schoolboy recollections of Horace and Homer. Halifax, Harley, and St. John could give a few crumbs from their table to the men whom they met at the Kitcat or the Brothers' Club. Swift hoped to be the founder of an academy which should direct patronage to men of letters, and the anecdotes of his attempts to help his poorer brethren show the most creditable side of his character. The pleasant time disappeared for an obvious reason. In the reign of Queen Anne the system of Party Government was substantially got into working order. That meant that offices were no longer to be given away for ornamental purposes, but used for practical business. Swift called Walpole 'Bob, the poet's foe,' for his indifference to literary merit; but Walpole was the name of a system. Places were wanted to exchange for votes, and a writer of plays and essays was not worth buying unless he were proprietor or hanger-on of the proprietor of a borough. As soon as this was clearly understood, the patronage of men of letters went out of fashion, and I greatly doubt whether literature was any the worse for the change.
Grub Street, at any rate, had been little affected by the gleam of good fortune which came to the upper circles, and was not hurt by its disappearance. The prizes bestowed upon the gentlemen and scholars who could write 'Spectator' were above the reach of Tutchin or Defoe. They had, indeed, reaped some rather questionable advantages from the political change besides the abolition of licensing. Harley was the first English statesman to use the Press systematically. Under his management the Grub Street authors ceased to be simply vermin to be hunted down; they might be themselves used in the chase. Harley's name constantly turns up in this dismal region; he saved Boyer from Swift's wrath; he appears in the background of other obscure careers, such as that of the deist Toland; and he is specially memorable for his connection with two of the greatest of English journalists, Swift and Defoe. Swift, of course, was petted as an equal, and flattered by hopes of a bishopric; while Defoe was treated as an 'underspurleather,' a mere agent who could be handed over by Whig to Tory and Tory to Whig as the Ministry changed. Each of them, however, wrote what passed for his own individual utterance, The Examiner, while Swift wrote it, represented Swift, as The Review represented Defoe. The papers were not like modern party newspapers, complex organisms with editors and proprietors and contributors, but simply periodical pamphlets by a single author, though their utterances might be more or less inspired by the Government. The system was carried on through the Walpole period, but a change soon begins dimly to show itself. A new race is arising, called by Ralph, one of themselves, 'authors by profession,' most of whose names are familiar only to profound commentators upon the Dunciad. The notes to that work were, as was said, the regular place of execution for the victims of Pope and the blustering Warburton. Ralph, says Warburton in one of them, 'ended in the common sink of all such writers, a political newspaper.' Although that represented the lowest stage of human existence, there were some pickings to be had even there. The statement made by a Committee of the House of Commons is often quoted, that in ten years Walpole spent over £50,000 upon the Press; over £10,000 going to one Arnall, probably in part to be transmitted to others. That, as we are told, was the flourishing period of corruption, and if authors got their share of it their morals doubtless suffered. And yet we may say, if we will not be too puritanical, that even a capacity for receiving bribes may imply a relative improvement. A man who can be bribed can generally make a bargain; he is something more than a simple spy. Defoe was a slave to Ministers, who kept his conviction hanging over his head, and just gave him scraps enough to support him in the dirty work which he tried, very hard it seems, but not quite successfully, to reconcile to his conscience. Ralph was evidently treated with relative respect. His moral standard is defined by Bubb Dodington. Ralph, says that type of political jobbery, was 'a very honest man.' This, as Dodington's account of him shows—with no sense of incongruity was—quite compatible with a readiness to sell himself to any party. It only meant that he kept the bargain for the time. Honesty, that is, did not imply so quixotic a principle as adherence to political principles, but adherence for the time being to the man who had bought you; and even that naturally appeared an exceptionally lofty strain to Dodington. Ralph himself complains bitterly of the niggardly patronage of literature, but he ended with a pension of £600 a year. Among his allies and enemies were men like Amhurst and Arnall and Concanen and others, who, chiefly again through references in the Dunciad, have got their names into biographical dictionaries. Some of them gained humble rewards. Amhurst, a clever writer, who began, like Shelley, by expulsion from Oxford, seems to represent the nearest approach to the modern editor. As 'Caleb Danvers,' imaginary author of The Craftsman, he received the most brilliant political writing of the day from Bolingbroke, Pulteney, and the 'patriots'; and Ralph declares that he died of a broken heart when, upon Walpole's fall, his services met with no reward from his friends. The Craftsman was itself on The Spectator or Examiner model; but, as a party organ, inspired and partly written by the leaders of the Opposition, it had something of the position of a modern newspaper; and Amhurst, no doubt, though in a very dependent position, may be regarded as a humble forerunner of the full-blown editor of later days.
Meanwhile, however, the comparative calm of the political atmosphere under Walpole was favourable to another direction of literary development. Defoe found time for the multitudinous activities which entitle him to be a great-grandfather of all modern journalism. He helped to start newspapers; he published secret documents; he interviewed Jack Sheppard at the foot of the gallows; he collected ghost stories; he wrote accounts of worthy dissenting divines recently deceased; he wrote edifying essays upon the devil and things in general; he described tours in the country; he passed Robinson Crusoe through a journal like a modern feuilleton, and, in short, he opened almost every vein of periodical literature that has been worked by his successors. As the time goes on we find authors who really make a decent living by their pens. There is John Campbell, for example, the richest author, according to Johnson, 'who ever grazed the common of literature'; the 'pious' gentleman on the same authority, who, though he never entered a church, never passed one without taking off his hat. And to speak of still living names, we have Richardson, who had the good luck to be printer as well as author, and Fielding, forced to choose between being a hackney author or a hackney coachman, and Johnson, who was presently to proclaim, as Carlyle puts it, the 'blast of doom' of patronage. The profession, or at least the trade, is beginning to be established, and there will naturally be a demand for editing. The author of the loftier sphere still laboured under the delusion that it was unworthy of him to take money for his works. Swift, as he tells us, never made anything, till the judicious advice of Pope brought something for his Miscellanies. Pope himself, though he made his fortune by his Homer, is hardly an exception. The sums which he received, indeed, enabled him to live at his ease, but they were the product of a subscription, and, I fancy, of such a subscription as has never been surpassed. The good society of those days held, and deserves credit for holding, that it would do well to give a kind of national commission to the most rising young poet of the day to produce a worthy translation of the accepted masterpiece of poetry. It was a piece of joint-stock patronage, and not a successful publishing speculation—though it succeeded in that sense also—by which Pope made his fortune. Grub Street, therefore, would rejoice little in a success which scarcely suggested even a precedent for imitation, and which fell to the man who was its deadliest enemy. Pope, with his excessive sensibility, was stung by its taunts to that war with the dunces which led to his most elaborate and least creditable piece of work. Though the bulk of his adversaries was obscure enough, the body collectively is beginning to raise its head a little. The booksellers, from Lintot to Tonson down to the disreputable Curll, are indulging in a variety of speculations from which the form of modern periodical literature begins to emerge distinctly. One symptom is remarkable. At the beginning or 1731 the ingenious Cave, having bought a small printing-office, started The Gentleman's Magazine, destined to have a long life and to be followed by many imitators. It had various obscure precursors, such as The Historical Register, and at first was a humble affair enough. Most of its pages were filled with reproductions of articles from the weekly journals; but it included brief notices of books, and occasional poems and records of events and miscellaneous literature; and, in short, was complex enough to require a judicious editor. Johnson tells how Cave, when he had heard that one subscriber out of the 10,000 whom he speedily attracted was likely to drop the magazine, would say, 'Let us have something good in the next number.' Nothing more could be required to prove that Cave had the true editorial spirit. Still, however, the editor was not, and for a long time he was not to be, differentiated from the proprietor. Cave himself looked after every detail. He arranged for the parliamentary reports (a plan in which his first predecessor appears to have been our old friend Boyer in his monthly Political State), and employed the famous reporter who clothed the utterances of every orator of those days in sonorous Johnsonese. The success of The Gentleman's Magazine probably led to The Monthly Review, started by Ralph Griffiths in 1749, and as this was of a Whiggish turn, it was opposed by The Critical Review, started by Archibald Hamilton in 1756, and supported by Smollett; a sequence like that of The Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. These two were the first, and till The Edinburgh Review, the leading representatives of literary criticism. Both of them were edited by the publishers. Griffiths, in particular, is famous as the taskmaster of Goldsmith. When a publisher has to do with a man of genius, especially with a man of genius over whom it is proper to be sentimental, he may be pretty certain of contemptuous treatment by the biographers of his client. Yet it is possible than even Griffiths had something to say for himself, and that if he was a hard master, Goldsmith may not have been a very business-like subordinate. Still, as Griffiths is said to have made £2000 a year by a venture to which Goldsmith only owed a bare escape from starvation, the printer may have been of opinion that the immediate profit was worth a good deal of posthumous abuse. However this may be, it is noticeable that the men of letters who appear in Boswell's great portrait gallery had no haven of editorship to drift into. They might be employed by the publisher of a magazine, and no doubt their drudgery would involve some of the work of a modern editor. But there was no such pillow for the wearied author as a regular office with a fixed income and the occupation of trimming other people's works instead of painfully straining matter from your own brain. Good service to a political patron, or very rarely some other merit, might be paid by a pension; but, without one, even Johnson, the acknowledged dictator of letters in his time, would apparently have never escaped from the writer's treadmill. He was never, it would seem, more than a month or two ahead of the friends who have become types of the Grub Street author: Smart, who let himself for ninety-nine years to a bookseller, or Boyse, whose only clothing was a blanket with holes in it through which his hands protruded to manufacture verses. Perhaps the Secretary of the Literary Fund could produce parallels even at the present day, and the increase in the prizes has certainly not diminished the number of blanks. Meanwhile, political journalism was coming to fresh life with the agitation of the early days of George III. The North Briton, in which Wilkes began his warfare, was a weekly periodical pamphlet after The Craftsman fashion, started at a week's notice to meet Smollett's Briton, and written chiefly by Wilkes with help from Churchill. It had a short and stormy life, and was not properly a newspaper. But when Wilkes fought his later campaign, and was backed by Junius, we have at last a genuine example of a newspaper warfare of the modern kind. The Public Advertiser had a significant history. It was the new form of The Daily Post started in 1719 by (or with the help of) Defoe. The Woodfall family, well known till the end of the century, came to have the chief share in it; and in 1752 gave it a new name and form, when Fielding seems to have acted more or less as sponsor. Upon dropping a periodical of his own, he advised his subscribers to transfer their favours to this paper, to which, moreover, he sent all his own advertisements, one as Justice of the Peace. Probably the recommendation means that it had somehow been made worth Fielding's while to let the paper have a monopoly of these notices. It seems that fifteen years previously, the value of the paper was about £840. By the Junius period, twenty years later, this had considerably increased. The property was held in shares, chiefly by wellknown booksellers and printers. A tenth belonged to Henry Sampson Woodfall, who took the management from 1758, when his father died, and acted as editor for thirty-five years. The circulation in the Junius period was about 3000 daily, and in 1774 (just after Junius had ceased) the profits were £1740. The accounts which have been preserved show the general nature of the business. The expenses, other than printing, included £200 paid to the theatres for advertisements of plays, an item which has long got to the other side of the account; £280 for home news; and smaller sums for foreign intelligence, and so forth. Nothing is set down for editor or contributors, and the obvious reason is that neither class existed. The contributors were some of the poor scribblers of Grub Street who collected material for paragraphs, or at times indulged in small political squibs. Contemporary portraits of the professional journalists of those days may be found in Foote's farces. They are poor wretches, dependent upon 'Vamp' the bookseller, or 'Index' the printer; living in garrets, employed as hawkers of scandal, domestic and official, rising during the parliamentary session to political abuse, and in the recess picking up accounts of 'remarkable effects of thunder and lightning.' 'All is filth that comes to their net,' observes one of the characters, and, in any case, they represent the class of labour which now fills up the interstices of more serious writing. The Public Advertiser, however, was by no means composed of such matter. If Woodfall had to pay the theatres instead of being paid by them, he got his contributors for nothing. The volunteer correspondent was apparently as abundant then as now, and the paper is chiefly filled by his lucubrations. Woodfall, who seems to have been a worthy man, prided himself especially upon his impartiality. He accepted letters from all sides, and the paper, though without leading articles, was full of lively controversy upon all the leading topics of the day; Junius, of course, during his short career, being the most effective writer. Naturally, the paper required editing, and in a very serious sense. Woodfall was responsible when Junius assailed George III., and had to keep a very sharp eye upon the performances of his anonymous contributors. Still, however, though in point of fact an editor, he was primarily the managing partner of a business. Probably, he would receive some extra share of the profits in that capacity, and would come very near to being an editor in the modern sense. We are told about this time that William Dodd, the popular preacher who was hanged for forgery in 1777, had 'descended so low as to become editor of a newspaper'—a degrading position which would account for a clergyman reaching the gallows. Still the genuine editor has not as yet become a distinct personage. Between this time and the revolutionary period several of the papers were started which were to be the main organs of public opinion down to our own day. On November 13th, 1776, Horace Walpole looked out of his window and saw a body of men marching down Piccadilly—volunteers, he guessed, for service in the American troubles. He was more astonished than we should be on discovering that they were simply 'sandwich men,' or at least men with papers in their caps or bills in their hands, advertising a newspaper. Henry Bate Dudley, the 'fighting parson,' who lived to become a baronet and a canon of Ely, was at this time chaplain to Lord Lyttelton and employing his leisure in writing plays, fighting duels, or carrying on The Morning Post. It had begun four years earlier, and Bate was now appealing for support against a rival who was starting a new Morning Post. Bate, as Walpole says, is 'author' (still not editor) of the old Morning Post; and in 1780 he left it to set up The Morning Herald in opposition. A duel or two and a confinement for a year in the King's Bench prison varied his amusements. Walpole moralises after his fashion upon the 'expensive masquerade exhibited by a clergyman in defence of daily scandal against women of the highest rank, in the midst of a civil war'! I do not know how far The Morning Post deserved this imputation; but its history shortly afterwards brings us within reach of the modern system. Three men in particular played a great part in the transformation of the newspaper; two of them, as might be anticipated, were energetic young Scots, and one of these came from Aberdeen, the centre, as many of its inhabitants have told me, whence spread all good things. Perry, Stuart, and Walter were these creators of the modern newspaper, and their history shows how the 'able editor' finally came to life. The first Walter was a bookseller, who thought that he could turn to account an invention called 'logography' (the types were to be whole words instead of letters) by printing a newspaper. Though the invention failed, the newspaper lived for a short time as The Universal Register, and became The Times on January 1, 1788. Walter's first declarations show how accurately he had devised the conditions of success. His ideal paper was to give something for all tastes; it was not to be merely commercial nor merely political, it was to represent public opinion generally, not any particular party, and it was never 'to offend the ear of delicacy.' When it had survived logography and obtained its incomparable monosyllabic name, it was fitted for a successful career. The war was an ill wind enough, but it blew prosperity to newspapers as the wars of the Great Rebellion and of Queen Anne's day had given fresh impulse to its infancy and boyhood. Walter, too, and his son, who took the helm in 1802, were keen in applying mechanical improvements and organising the new machinery. The Times seems to have invented the foreign correspondent, its representative, Henry Crabb Robinson, being probably the first specimen of the genus: it beat the Government in getting the first news of battles, and defeated a strike of the printers in order to introduce a new method of printing. The younger Walter, however, seems still to have combined the functions of editor and proprietor until 1810, when Sir John Stoddart became editor. Stoddart was succeeded by Barnes in 1817, and Barnes in 1841 by Delane, when editorship had become not only a separate function, but a position of high political importance. James Perry, meanwhile, had come into the profession from a different side. He had been early thrown upon his own resources, and about 1777 sent some articles to a newspaper which gained him employment at the rate of a guinea and a half a week. He soon rose to a better position. The Morning Chronicle had been started in 1769 by William Woodfall (younger brother of Henry Sampson), who gained the nickname 'Memory Woodfall' from his powers of bringing back debates in his head. His reports became the great feature of The Chronicle; but Perry, who was getting four guineas a week for editing The Gazetteer, succeeded in beating Woodfall by employing a staff of reporters. The Chronicle began to decline. Perry, managing with the help of a friend to scrape together about £1000, bought the paper and made it the accepted organ of the Whig Party. It soon became a leading paper, and was for a time at the head of the London Press. It was ultimately sold after Perry's death in 1821 for £42,000. Perry appears to have edited it himself until 1817, when his mantle fell upon another vigorous Scot, John Black, who had joined it as a reporter. Black and Barnes thus started simultaneously, Black representing the opinions of the 'philosophical Radicals,' and being steadily inspired by James Mill. Thus Perry, like Walter, marks the end of the period in which the proprietor still habitually acted as editor.
Perry at various times received contributions from many of the most eminent writers of the time. Coleridge got a guinea out of him at a critical moment. Thomas Campbell published Ye Mariners of England in The Chronicle Charles Lamb sent him paragraphs; Sheridan, Mackintosh, Hazlitt, Tom Moore were among his contributors; and Lord Campbell, better known as The Chancellor, was for a time both law reporter and theatrical critic. The last of the three rulers of the Press, Daniel Stuart, is still often mentioned for a similar reason. Stuart, like Perry, a vigorous Scot, had joined his brothers, who were settled as printers in London. They printed The Morning Post, which had fallen into difficulties; and in 1795, when its circulation was only 350 copies daily, Daniel Stuart bought the paper, land, and plant for £600. He raised the circulation to 4500 in 1803, when it was surpassed in popularity by The Chronicle alone. He soon afterwards became the owner of The Courier in partnership with one Street, gave up The Post, and in 1822 retired, having made a fortune. Stuart was specially connected with Mackintosh, who married his sister when they were both struggling young men. His fame, however, rests more upon his connection with Coleridge, and he incurred the danger which comes to all publishers of works of men of genius. Certain phrases in Coleridge's Biographia Libraria and Table Talk gave rise to the impression that Stuart was one of the conventional bloodsuckers, who make their money out of rising genius and repay them with the scantiest pittance. Stuart defended himself effectively; and any doubts which might remain have been dispersed by the (privately printed) Letters from the Lake Poets. Stuart, in fact, was one of the most helpful of Coleridge's many friends, and Coleridge to the end of his life spoke of him and to him with warm and generous gratitude. Coleridge, it is clear enough, and certainly very natural, took at times an exaggerated view of his services to The Morning Chronicle. His surprising statement that Stuart in 1800 offered him £2000 a year if he would devote himself to journalism, that he declined on the ground that he would not give up 'the reading of old folios' for twenty times £2000, and that he considered any pay beyond £350 as a real evil, is obviously impossible. Stuart had probably tried to spur his indolent contributor by saying that his services would be worth some such sum if they could be made regular. But the statement is only worth notice here in illustration of the state of the literary market at the time. Southey acknowledges his gratitude for the guinea a week which he received as Stuart's 'laureate.' Poetry, by the way, appears to have been more in demand then than at the present day. Both Perry and Stuart's elder brother offered to employ Burns; and Coleridge, Southey, Campbell, and Moore all published poems in the newspapers. Lamb tried his hand at 'jokes.' 'Sixpence a joke,' he says, 'and it was thought pretty high, too, was Dan Stuart's settled remuneration in these cases' (Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago), and no paragraph was to exceed seven lines. In a letter of 1803, Lamb says that he has given up his 'two guineas a week' from The Post. The high-water mark of a journalist's earnings at the end of the last century is probably marked by the achievement of Mackintosh, who earned ten guineas in a week. 'No paper could stand it!' exclaimed the proprietor, and the bargain had to be revised. A few years later, however, we are told that Sterling, the father of Carlyle's friend, was receiving the sum which Coleridge supposed himself to have refused, namely, £2000 a year for writing leading articles in The Times. Stuart, it would seem, in the earlier period was paying the fair value of their wares to Coleridge, Southey, and their like; but in the days of Scott and Byron the price of popular writing was going up by leaps and bounds.
The normal process of the evolution of editors was what I have tried to sketch, simply, that is, the gradual delegation of powers by the printer or bookseller who had first employed some inhabitant of Grub Street as a drudge, and when the work became too complex and delicate, had handed over the duties to men of special literary training. Two very important periodicals, however, of this period show a certain reversion to the older type. The Edinburgh Review owed part of its success to its independence of publishers. It was started, not by a speculator who might wish to puff his own wares, but by a little knot of audacious youths, who combined as Steele and Addison combined in The Spectator. It seems that at first they scarcely even contemplated the necessity of an editor, and Sydney Smith was less editor than president of the little committee of authors at the start. When Jeffrey took up the duty, he was careful to make it understood that his work was to be strictly subordinate to his professional labours, and had no inkling that his fame would come to depend upon his editorship. The Edinburgh, however, soon became a review of the normal kind. Cobbett, on the other hand, started his Political Register as a kind of rival to The Annual Register. It was to be mainly a collection of State papers and official documents; but it soon changed in his hands into the likeness of Defoe's old Review. It became a personal manifesto of Cobbett himself, and, as such, held a most important place in the journalism of the time. But Cobbett was, and in some ways remains, unique, and, as the newspaper has developed, the 'we' has superseded the 'I,' and the organism become too complex to represent any single person. The history, indeed, would help to explain various peculiarities characteristic of English newspapers, especially the bad odour which long adhered to the profession, and made even Warrington ashamed to confess to Pendennis that he was a contributor to a leading newspaper. The author by profession of the time of Ralph had excellent reasons for concealing his name, and the desire for anonymity long survived the old justification. But I have said enough to leave that and other considerations untouched for the present.
- I may especially refer to the last of these, Mr. Fox Bourne's History of Newspapers, from which I have appropriated some facts.
- In Esmond, the printer of The Postboy is Leach, who really printed The Postman. Whether Kemp, the writer mentioned by Thackeray, was a real person, I do not know.
- In 1764 the reporters were liable to be turned out of court. See xiv. State Trials, p. 35.
- See The Author (1757), and The Bankrupt (1776).
- A ledger of The Public Advertiser, from 1766 to 1771, is now in the Free Library at Chelsea, to which it was presented by Sir C. Dilke. | <urn:uuid:d573b5d3-9f39-4d67-81b6-3fb15446aca0> | {
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Why do bugs always seem to die on their backs?
This is a matter of physics. As the bug nears death, normal blood flow ceases, causing the legs to contract inwardly. Without the support of the legs, the body becomes top-heavy, and usually falls upside-down.
Gary F. Hevel
entomologist, Natural History Museum
What is the origin of applause?
East Nassau, New York
We don’t know exactly when and why applause, or at least making noise with the hands to express approval or enjoyment, became nearly universal among humans. Chimpanzees also clap their hands to express excitement and other emotions, suggesting that it may have been part of the behavioral repertoire of the common ancestor of modern humans and chimpanzees.
paleoanthropologist, Human Origins Program, Natural History Museum
Do radiotelescopes listen to the universe or see the universe?
Silver Spring, Maryland
Radiotelescopes focus and detect radio waves, which are a form of light, not sound. The only difference between visible light and radio waves is wavelength—about 0.00005 centimeters for the former and about 1 centimeter for the latter. So radiotelescopes “see” what your eyes could see if they were sensitive to the longer wavelength as well as much larger, given that radiotelescopes range up to 100 meters in diameter.
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
If the Titanic had dropped its anchor before hitting the iceberg, would that have mitigated the disaster?
D. R. Cardinale
Not at all. The water at the collision site was 12,500 feet deep—far too deep for the anchor chain. Once the chain was completely played out, the end likely would have flown out of the chain locker and plummeted to the bottom. And even if the end of the chain held fast, the anchor would have hung uselessly in the deep, with nothing to grasp nearby.
Paul F. Johnston
curator of maritime history, American History Museum
Do mammals besides humans gray with age?
Some do. Domestic animals, notably dogs and horses, can become quite grizzled on their muzzles. Some wild animals also turn gray, and it typically seems to indicate not just maturity, but also power in the males of some species, such as the silverback in a band of gorillas or a California sea lion bull with his platinum-colored sagittal crest.
great cats animal keeper, National Zoo
It's your turn to Ask Smithsonian | <urn:uuid:e140d29d-500f-4160-b97b-7bcac33ba3b1> | {
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June 24, 2012 00:00 By Pongphon Sarnsamak
Facing with uncontrollable scattering and widespread dumping of garbage over the past few years, three communities have learnt how to make their communities more liveable by properly separating rubbish and reuse household waste instead of putting them all
These three communities include Chiang Mai province's Ban Nam Lhong, Pattalung province's Ban Na Ma Praew, and Lamphun province's Ban Pa Buk.
Four years ago, Ban Nam Hlong was full of garbage and rotting rubbish which created foul smell across community.
Starting in 2009, with help from Thailand Environment Institute Foundation, Suppakorn Suwannakit, deputy headman of Ban Nam Lhong had tried to educate villagers how to collect and segregate garbage properly before disposing.
He had teamed up with small group of villagers just only five to six person had joined with him when he started the project. Now all people in the village know the right way to separate waste and keep their community green.
They started by teaching Prathom 6 students, as some of them may leave school after finishing the primary schooling level. Matthayom 3 students were also taught, as they were about to finish the highest education that the community school can offer.
These students were supposed to share their knowledge with their parents on how to collect and separate garbage properly. To date, over 250 families in his village had joined the activity to separate waste.
They separate toxic waste and plastic bottles and polystyrene foams from non-recyclable materials. Then they sell the segregated items to a waste collector so-called " Sa Leng" who visit the village every week.
"It was very difficult to tell people to change their way in disposing garbage properly. We had to try again and again until they see that their community can become cleaner. Then, they change their behaviour," Suppakorn said.
Aside from segregating waste, they also learnt to reduce waste. During the past five months of this year, the community could reduce the consumption of foam waste by over 3.3 kilograms, plastic bags by over 4.28 kilograms. Meanwhile, villagers turned non-recyclable wastes to fertilizer production for use in community's farms.
Like Ban Nam Lhong community, villagers in Pattalung province's Ban Na Ma Praew also changed their behaviour.
Sparking the need for the segregation was the realisation that their community produced over 10,800 kilograms of waste every month. Then, the villagers started to form a group to collect and separate waste. They will separate garbage into three different types - general waste, recyclable waste, and organic waste.
These three types of waste will be dealt with different methods. Organic waste will be produced as fertiliser and recyclable waste will be sold to the Waste Bank.
As a result of villager's activities to separate over 24,350 kilograms of waste during January to April, they could reduce greenhouse gases emission with 1,337 kilograms. The amount of greenhouse gases reduction was calculated by Thailand Environment Institute Foundation.
Waste separation is not the only way to eliminate garbage in community, as a cut in consumption is also another effective way to decrease volume of rubbish.
Lamphun’s Ban Pa Buk had learnt how to reduce resources consumption in funeral services, by avoiding the use of excessive resources such as wooden castles used in the cremation. | <urn:uuid:d1f377cb-174d-4723-aa53-7a7b99e544a3> | {
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|This ikat print has a sunny disposition, perfect for a nook with a view. |
Photo via Belle Maison
Ikat is everywhere and frankly, we couldn’t be more thrilled. Known for its vibrant colors and hazy pattern, ikat fabrics employ a centuries old resist dyeing technique that has a long, multi-cultured history with origins in Asia, South America and Central America. The name, “ikat,” is derived from the Indonesian word, “mengikat,” meaning “to bind,” and that is exactly what goes into the arduous process of producing one of the three types of ikat – warp ikat, weft ikat and double ikat.
|Proof that ikat plays well with other patterns|
To create warp ikat, weavers dye the threads that are affixed to the loom (the warp threads), while to make weft ikat, weavers dye the thread that is woven in and out of the threads in the loom (the weft threads). Double ikat entails dyeing both the warp and weft threads and is the most highly prized of the three for the incredible amount of skill it takes to create the intricate patterns.
Stroll on over to our Eclectic Avenue event to see this funky textile in action! | <urn:uuid:9d832e6e-4c13-48e0-902e-accb1f639bf2> | {
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This summary of the book of Haggai provides information about the title, author(s), date of writing, chronology, theme, theology, outline, a brief overview, and the chapters of the Book of Haggai.
Haggai (1:1) was a prophet who, along with Zechariah, encouraged the returned exiles to rebuild the temple (see Ezr 5:1-2; 6:14). Haggai means "festal," which may indicate that the prophet was born during one of the three pilgrimage feasts (Unleavened Bread, Pentecost or Weeks, and Tabernacles; cf. Dt 16:16). Based on 2:3 (see note there) Haggai may have witnessed the destruction of Solomon's temple. If so, he must have been in his 70s during his ministry.
In 538 b.c. the conqueror of Babylon, Cyrus king of Persia, issued a decree allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple (see Ezr 1:2-4; 6:3-5). Led by Zerubbabel (but see note on Ezr 1:8, "Sheshbazzar"), about 50,000 Jews journeyed home and began work on the temple. About two years later (536) they completed the foundation amid great rejoicing (Ezr 3:8-11). Their success aroused the Samaritans and other neighbors who feared the political and religious implications of a rebuilt temple in a thriving Jewish state. They therefore opposed the project vigorously and managed to halt work until 520, after Darius the Great became king of Persia in 522 (Ezr 4:1-5,24).
Darius was interested in the religions of his empire, and Haggai and Zechariah began to preach in his second year, 520 b.c. (see 1:1; Zec 1:1). The Jews were more to blame for their inactivity than their opponents, and Haggai tried to arouse them from their lethargy. When the governor of Trans-Euphrates and other officials tried to interfere with the rebuilding efforts, Darius fully supported the Jews (Ezr 5:3-6; 6:6-12). In 516 the temple was finished and dedicated (Ezr 6:15-18).
Haggai's messages are among the most carefully and precisely dated in the entire OT. They were given during a four-month period in 520 b.c., the second year of King Darius. The first message was delivered on the first day of the sixth month (Aug. 29), the last on the 24th day of the ninth month (Dec. 18). See notes on 1:1; 2:1,10; see also Introduction to Zechariah: Dates.
Apart from Obadiah, Haggai is the shortest book in the OT, but its teachings are none the less significant. Haggai clearly shows the consequences of disobedience (1:6,11; 2:16-17) and obedience (2:7-9,19). When the people give priority to God and his house, they are blessed rather than cursed (cf. Lk 12:31 and note). Obedience brings the encouragement and strength of the Spirit of God (2:4-5).
In ch. 2 God gives great encouragement to those laboring under difficult conditions to rebuild his temple by assuring them that the future glory of the modest temple they are able to build will be greater than that of the temple Solomon had built in the time of Israel's greatest wealth and power. The Jews in Judah may now be a much reduced community and under the hegemony of a powerful world empire, but the Lord will shake up the present world order and assert his claim to all the world's wealth so that the glory of his future temple will be without rival. "The desired of all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory" (see 2:6-7 and notes).
Like Malachi, Haggai uses a number of questions to highlight key issues (see 1:4,9; 2:3,19). He also makes effective use of repetition: "Give careful thought" occurs in 1:5,7; 2:15,18, and "I am with you" in 1:13; 2:4. "I will shake the heavens and the earth" is found in 2:6,21. The major sections of the book are marked off by the date on which the word of the Lord came "through" (or "to") Haggai (1:1; 2:1,10,20).
Several times the prophet appears to reflect other passages of Scripture (compare 1:6 with Dt 28:38-39 and 2:17 with Dt 28:22). The threefold use of "Be strong" in 2:4 (see note there) echoes the encouragement given in Jos 1:6-7,9,18. (For chiasm see Outline below.)
It is also possible to outline the book in a chiastic a-b / b-a pattern:
Similar chiastic patterns exist in the subunits within these larger units.
From the NIV Study Bible, Introductions to the Books of the Bible, Haggai
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Peanut allergies can have severely debilitating effects on some children but, thanks to new developments in science, there's finally an easier way to test for peanut allergies, according to Reuters. British scientists have come up with a blood test to diagnose peanut allergies, which offers parents a more efficient way of monitoring the food hazard. Yes, parents, you read that right: no more horrifying skin-prick tests. Because evermore children are developing peanut allergies these days, according to a wealth of recent research, having a method of monitoring it is critical to their health.
Research presented at the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) Annual Scientific Meeting in 2017 indicated that peanut allergies in children had increased 21 percent since 2010 — and that nearly 2.5 percent of children in the U.S. may have an allergy to peanuts, according to Science Daily. Peanuts are the most common cause of fatal, food-induced anaphylaxis or severe allergic reaction, so it's nothing to brush off. Dr. Ruchi Gupta, lead author of the 2017 study, recommended that after assessing risk with a pediatrician or allergist, parents should introduce their children to peanut products in infancy to prevent potential peanut allergies later in life.
"Guidelines to walk parents through the process of introducing peanut-containing foods to infants who are at high, medium, and low risk for developing peanut allergies were established in January 2017," states the ACAAI website. But while preventative measures are widely discussed, diagnosing food allergies has not always been a simple feat. Until now.
The study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, examined 174 children, aged from 6 months to 17 years old and 73 of whom were allergic to peanuts, and found that the worst-affected patients had the most activated mast cells, which contribute to the triggering of allergic symptoms like skin reactions and constricted airways, the BBC reported.
Traditionally, allergists are trained to administer allergy testing with skin pricks or they conduct food challenges by feeding patients larger doses of peanut incrementally in controlled hospital settings, which can sometimes trigger anaphylactic shock, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. Blood tests have also been used for decades, but they often produce false positives because they look for antibodies and can't differentiate between sensitivity and true food allergy, according to the Reuters. This new blood test, however, promises to change the game for the peanut allergy with 98 percent specificity, researchers from the Medical Research Council (MARC) reported, according to Reuters. That means less risk and more reliability.
Dr. Alexandra Santos, an MRC scientist and pediatric allergist at King’s College London, led the research, and shared that this new test will save both money and stress, Reuters reported.
"The technology has evolved — now we have better ways to look at immune cells and to see how they respond," Santos said, according to Reuters.
The team is currently discussing plans for a widespread rollout of the test and adaptations to other foods that often cause allergies, like milk, eggs, and tree nuts, Reuters reported.
Peanuts, milk, eggs, and tree nuts are part of the eight common allergens that account for 90 percent of all reactions in kids (also including soy, wheat, fish, and shellfish), according to Kids Health. Having one cost-effective, efficient, and reliable blood test that could comprehensively test for all of these food allergies will have a seriously positive impact on children's health.
Editor's note: After publication, we discovered this article did not meet our editorial standards. There were portions that did not correctly attribute another source. It has been updated to meet our standards.
Check out Romper's new video series, Bearing The Motherload, where disagreeing parents from different sides of an issue sit down with a mediator and talk about how to support (and not judge) each other’s parenting perspectives. New episodes air Mondays on Facebook. | <urn:uuid:5b728189-2d7a-496f-b02b-982d8680cb77> | {
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Also found in: Wikipedia.
Guernsey cattle,breed of dairy cattle developed on the islands of Alderney, Guernsey, and Sark near the north coast of France. First imported to the United States in about 1830, they are fawn-colored with white markings and are of medium size. Their milk is golden in color and rich in vitamin A. The average milk yield is a little higher than that of the Jersey, but the butterfat content is slightly lower.
a breed of dairy cattle, developed in England on the island of Guernsey at the turn of the 18th century by crossbreeding red and variegated cattle of Normandy with small red cattle of Brittany. Its appearance is typical for dairy cattle. The build is compact, and the bone structure is delicate. The color is red, sometimes with a brown cast; there are white markings on the belly and legs. Weight of bulls, 700-750 kg; of cows, 450-500 kg. Milk yield is 3,000-3,600 kg, with a record maximum of 11,000 kg. Fat content of the milk is 4.5-5.0 percent. The cattle can adapt to various conditions. They are widespread in England, the USA, and other countries. Guernseys were brought into Russia but never became widespread. | <urn:uuid:babaa414-e0c9-4de7-aa33-7188b9ba07b1> | {
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The most illustrious meteorite in history continues to inspire heated debate. Does it carry microbial fossils from Mars or are its strange features just the product of some unique geochemistry? After almost 20 years, dueling papers are still coming out, and the opposing parties are no closer to a resolution.
Most scientists agree that the meteorite ALH84001 is the oldest meteorite ever found to have come from Mars.
"The meteorite is so old that if Martian life existed back then, it probably floated by the rock at some point," says Timothy Swindle of the University of Arizona. "But did it leave any record?"
In 1996, one research group claimed yes, sending shock waves through the scientific community and beyond. President Bill Clinton made a special address on the apparent discovery, and the media widely broadcasted the scientists' images of what appeared to be dead "bug" remains from the rock. Had we finally met our neighbors?
The iconic meteorite became the grist for many imaginations. The TV show The X-files depicted an ALH84001 look-a-like with live bugs in it, and a Dan Brown novel imagined a conspiracy to cover-up extraterrestrial evidence from a space rock.
Biopic of a falling star
The meteorite made its debut in 1984, when it was picked up by a geologist team riding snowmobiles through the Allan Hills region of Antarctica. It took 10 years for researchers to realize this 4-pound specimen likely came from Mars.
The general consensus now is that the original rock formed 4 billion years ago on Mars. It was eventually catapulted into space by an impact and wandered the solar system for millions of years before landing on Earth 13,000 years ago.
Over 50 other meteorites have been identified as coming from Mars, but ALH84001 is by far the oldest, with the next in age being just 1.3 billion years old.
"That alone makes ALH84001 a very important sample," says Allan Treiman of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. "It's our only hope to understand what Mars was like at this time period."
The first thing that struck researchers examining the meteorite was the presence of 300-micron-wide carbonate globules that make up 1% of the rock. Dave McKay from NASA's Johnson Space Center and his colleagues determined that the carbonate most likely formed in the presence of water.
Although evidence for a wet ancient Mars has accumulated in the subsequent years, the claim that ALH84001 once sat in water was pretty revolutionary at the time, says Kathie Thomas-Keprta, also from the Johnson Space Center.
Inside the ALH84001 carbonates, McKay spotted odd features that resembled very small worm-like fossils, so he asked Thomas-Keprta to look at them more closely with electron microscopy.
"I kind of thought he was crazy," she says. "I thought I would join the group and straighten them out."
In the end, she helped the team characterize the biomorphic features, as well as unusual grains of the mineral magnetite found in the meteorite. In a 1996 Science paper, these two phenomena along with the chemical distribution in the globules and the detection of large organic molecules were taken collectively as signatures of biological activity occurring long ago on Mars.
The storyline unravels
However, skeptics began to pick apart the four lines of evidence presented in the 1996 paper.
Groups of geologists and chemists proposed alternative ways that the carbonate globules and the organic molecules could have formed without the need of Martian microbes.
The supposed fossil shapes were so small they could only have been the remains of hypothetical "nanobacteria." A more plausible explanation, according to other researchers, was that the tiny artifacts are uneven patches in the coating used to prepare the samples for electron microscopy.
That left the magnetite grains as the strongest case for a biologic imprint in ALH84001.
"The focus of the last 10 years has been the magnetite," says Thomas-Keprta.
Magnetite (Fe3O4) is a common mineral found on black sandy beaches, in iron-rich sediments and even in interplanetary dust. The majority of this magnetite forms in geologic processes, where many elements mix together and iron often gets replaced with iron-like elements such as magnesium and chromium.
However, the magnetite grains found in the carbonate globules of ALH84001 have very few of these sorts of substitutions.
"I had never seen magnetite as chemically pure as this before," Thomas-Keprta says.
But when she looked through the literature, she realized that chemically pure magnetite is known from biology. So-called magnetotactic bacteria create a chain of magnetite grains to help orient themselves in their search for nutrients. Iron makes for a stronger magnet, so the bacteria are very selective when they form their magnetite compasses. They also build grains of a uniform size (roughly a tenth of a micron) that optimizes the magnetic response.
"The size and purity of the magnetite is controlled by the organism to be the best magnet it could be," Thomas-Keprta says.
In 2001, she and her colleagues showed that many of the same properties in biologically-derived magnetite are reproduced in the grains from ALH84001. The conclusion was that Martian microbes once used magnetite for the same purpose as terrestrial ones do.
Treiman agrees that the ALH84001 magnetite is unlike geologically-produced magnetite found on Earth. "But everything else about this meteorite is unique," he argues. "There comes a point where being unique is not unique."
It's improbable that Martian microbes deposited magnetite grains directly in the rock, so Thomas-Keprta and her colleagues have to argue that the magnetite formed outside of the rock and washed in. They also have to assume that Mars had a much stronger magnetic field in the past so that building an intracellular magnetic compass would be an advantage.
Treiman and others argue that the magnetite could be explained more easily with some sort of shock event that heated the carbonate enough to allow magnetite grains to form. Thomas-Keprta says these abiotic models are fatally flawed. The problem is in the cooling time. If the rock cools too fast, the magnetite ends up full of impurities. Too slow and the surrounding carbonate becomes too uniform.
"They are looking for a single event that can account for all the magnetite," Thomas-Keprta says. "But no natural or laboratory synthesized analogs proposed have yet to reproduce the chemical and physical properties observed in the ALH84001 carbonate-magnetite assemblages."
She and Treiman went head to head at a recent Lunar Planetary Society Conference. Neither side has relented.
"Naysayers are always going to be naysayers," Thomas-Keprta says. "But I hope people on the fence will look at the evidence."
Polling the community
Treiman thinks that the issue is probably settled for most of his colleagues. "I am one of the few holdovers still arguing about it," he says. "I can't move on."
The debate may not be settled anytime soon. Treiman isn't sure how one could ever entirely rule out that Martians might have had a hand in forming ALH84001. "Nature is infinitely complicated," he says. "It is always surprising us."
However, he believes the alternative explanations from geology and chemistry are simpler, since they don't require inventing the whole new science of Martian biology. Scientists are trained to pick the simplest explanation.
An informal poll of more than 100 scientists by Swindle in 1997, right after the first announcement of possible biological relics in ALH84001, showed that most of the community was already hedging their bets. The typical response gave about even odds that Mars once had life but said that there was just a 1-in-5 chance that McKay's group had found the smoking gun.
A few years later, Swindle tried to do the poll again but couldn't get enough respondents to form a representative sample. He thinks most people had made up their mind that ALH84001 did not carry biosignatures from Mars. But that doesn't mean that sifting through the meteorite hasn't been worth it.
"It was good science," he says. "It challenged people to really think about what would count as evidence of life on Mars."
Explore further: Scars on Mars from 2012 rover landing fade—usually | <urn:uuid:191dfa68-bc70-42f8-afa8-0b0de1743096> | {
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New research conducted by scholars at the Georgia Institute of Technology shows that African-American cities are the source of much modern slang. Leading a team of colleagues, Jacob Eisenstein analyzed Twitter data collected between December 2009 and May 2011 in order to track the origin and proliferation of new terms such as ”bruh” — an evolution of “bro” — and the acronym “ctfu.” This abbreviation for “cracking the f*** up,” for example, was found to have originated in Cleveland, Ohio before initially spreading to Pennsylvania, data has shown.
By delving into the nearly 40 million tweets collected, Eisenstein has demonstrated that “big African American populations tend to lead the way in linguistic innovation,” according to New Scientist magazine. The researchers cannot yet explain why this influence flows in this manner, or which black locales are the most influential.
Eisenstein and his team continue to search for answers to these questions using a method that contrasts tweets sent by 400,000 subjects with location data voluntarily provided by users’ cell phones.
“After collecting the data, the team built a mathematical model that captures the large-scale flow of new words between cities,” reports the Daily Mail. “The model revealed that cities with big African American populations tend to lead the way in linguistic innovation.”
The higher rate of adoption of Twitter among African-Americans could be one reason for the higher use of neologisms, or newly coined terms, among these communities. Another is the well-documented occurrence of urban slang filtering into mainstream.
“There is a long history of adoption of African American slang (cool, dig, rip off) in mainstream US culture, so these findings agree with what we might expect,” states Philip Ball, in his piece for BBC Futureon the study. Today, the Internet might be the main instrument of neologism proliferation rather than direct human contact.
CLICK HERE to read story
article courtesy of TheGrio.com | <urn:uuid:bc56eafa-2043-490a-a434-7231a1e510b6> | {
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New Mills - a Derbyshire Peak District former mill town
New Mills is a former mill town at the junction of the River Goyt and River Sett, on the edge of the Peak District and just in Derbyshire. The Goyt forms a spectacular gorge here, call the Torrs. New Mills is surrounded by gritstone moorland
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|New Mills is a former mill town which formed at the junction of the Rivers Goyt and Sett. It is located just outside the Peak District National Park and just inside the western boundary of Derbyshire. The town comprises several districts which merge into a conurbation - New Mills itself, Ollersett, Newtown and Low Leighton. Further up the Sett Valley are Thornsett and Birch Vale, which are separated from New Mills by some green spaces.|
The whole area once formed part of the Royal Forest of the Peak and had a number of small scattered hamlets. The name 'New Mills' was first recorded in 1391 to refer to a corn mill on the River Goyt and by the 16th century this was in common usage as the name for the area around the hamlets of Beard, Ollersett, Thornsett and Whitle.
To service the new industries communications were improved, starting with the Peak Forest Canal, which was constructed between 1794 and 1804, linking the town with Manchester. In the 1860s the arrival of the London and North Western line between Manchester and Buxton saw New Mills Newtown station constructed, followed soon after by the Midland Railway between Manchester and London which created New Mills Central station. Both of these lines are still operational but the branch line between New Mills Central and Hayfield has closed and is now the Sett Valley Trail.
Until the 19th century New Mills was virtually cut in two by the deep gorge of the Goyt and the only crossing involved a tortuous descent down to a bridge just above the river level, followed by an equally hard ascent the other side. Church Road bridge was constructed in 1835 to carry the turnpike road from Newtown to Thornsett across the river, but this only partially solved the
Coal mining and printing were other local industries. The standard method of using engraving to print calico was invented in New Mills in 1821 and a large printing works was constructed at Thornsett. Poor quality coal was mined at several sites on the local moors, notably Ollersett Moor. These mines thrived in the 19th century and had all closed by the First World War, though some small-scale mining continued sporadically until 1947.
Modern New Mills looks like a typical mill town, perhaps owing more to Lancashire than Derbyshire, with the centre a warren of narrow streets and stone-built cottages. The town's post-industrial decline has been somewhat compensated for in it's growth as a home for Manchester commuters and there have been a lot of new houses built. A range of local industry still thrives - one former mill makes Swizzels 'Love Hearts' sweets, and other firms are involved in engineering, quarrying, textiles and computer software.
Recent developments include the opening of the stunning 'Millenium Walkway' above the Goyt and the Torrs Hydro - a community owned and funded hydropower scheme.
New Mills Photo Gallery - click on the images to enlarge- Click Here for a slide show
Useful local links:Torrs Hydro New Mills The UK's first community owned and funded hydropower scheme
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What would later become the state of West Virginia was first settled by Germans near the Potomac River at Shepherdstown. Originally part of Virginia, it comprised 40 western counties that didn’t secede from the Union when the east did, in 1861. At Choice Home Warranty, we hold the state motto, “Mountaineers are always free”, in high regard. Our commitment to protect homeowners from the high costs of home ownership is paramount.
The Ridge and Valley Region and the Appalachian Plateau make up the mountainous expanse of West Virginia. The defining characteristics of these mountains are their long, parallel ridges with the streams that separate them. The picturesque nature of the state can be overwhelming when first visiting. With such majesty surrounding you, you would be forgiven for not anticipating the issues and breakdowns associated with maintaining a house.
Most of the counties in this state are considered rural, and as of the 2010 census, 51 percent of the people lived in rural areas. Currently, West Virginia is still one of the most rural states in the nation, with about two-thirds of its residents living in non-farming, rural areas, or in towns with less than 2,500 people. These circumstances can be challenging when faced with plumbing, HVAC or related equipment failure at home.
There are 80 incorporated cities in West Virginia, of which the capital Charleston is the most populous with 49,739 inhabitants. The city with the next highest number of residents is Huntington, with 48,638 people, then Parkersburg with only 30,991 people. There is currently no city in West Virginia with more than 50,000 residents, though the capital comes close. Interestingly, this state has the oldest population in the nation, with a median age of 40.
Other factors that affect reliability of your home’s systems relate to the weather and climate. West Virginia has a humid continental climate. This designation is characterized by hot summers and cools to cold winters. This state has four distinct seasons, with the summer highs averaging around the mid-80s and winter lows averaging around the low 20’s. The landforms of West Virginia dramatically affect its weather. Rainfall ranges widely depending on the elevation, with the lower elevations experiencing around 35 inches in the “rain shadow” of the mountains to the west and the mountains experiencing over 60 inches. Snowfall ranges from about 12 to 24 inches in the lowlands of southwest West Virginia to over 72 inches in the mountains, making it the most southern of the eastern states to get such heavy snows. West Virginia is also one of the foggiest states in the nation, with some towns experiencing under a quarter mile of visibility for 40 or more days in the year.
According to NOAA, the most common natural hazard in the state is thunderstorms and lightening. These occur, on average, every 5.5 days from March through October. The second most common natural hazard is listed as winter storms and extreme cold. These phenomena occur, on average, every 9 days from October through March. In addition, floods and flash floods occur every year due to heavy rains over the steep landscape.
West Virginia has a number of metropolitan areas, which bring many out-of-state residents into the state and feed the job market. In fact, tourism is one of the state’s largest industries. This is mostly due to the vast amount of outdoor recreational opportunities offered by West Virginia. The state is a popular destination for rock climbing, whitewater rafting, hiking, and hunting. Many people in West Virginia take advantage of the high tourism rate and buy homes as investments so they can rent to tourists using services such as Airbnb or VRBO. Home warranties can be purchased to protect investment homes as well.
Besides tourism, there are many large employers in West Virginia, further building on the demand for homes. Walmart is the largest employer, followed by West Virginia United Health System, Charleston Area Medical Center, Kroger, and Consol Energy. You may notice that two of the top five employers are in the healthcare industry.
No matter where you live in West Virginia, in the rural counties or one of its 80 cities, a West Virginia home warranty can help protect you against damages to your home’s critical appliances and systems when unexpected problems come up. A home warranty is different from a homeowner’s insurance policy, offering customizable and additional protection. In fact, a West Virginia home warranty from Choice Home Warranty even covers you for damages caused by normal wear and tear.
Protect Your West Virginia Home and Appliances
The median home values in West Virginia have risen 2.4 percent from June of 2017 to $95,400 and are expected to continue to rise another 3.1 percent through June of 2019. Almost 73 percent of West Virginia residents own their homes. A home warranty can protect your home and its critical systems and appliances from unexpected trouble and breakdowns.
Are you planning to sell your West Virginia home? Or, perhaps you already have it on the market. It may be helpful for you to know that home warranty companies will cover that home for system and appliance breakdowns while you wait for it to sell. This provides you with peace of mind, knowing that, during this already stressful time, you won’t be saddled with expensive repairs while you’re working to sell your home. And, having a home warranty makes your home more attractive to buyers, and therefore, more marketable. Eight out of ten homebuyers would rather buy a home that already has a home warranty working for them.
West Virginia homes have been appreciating in value strongly over the past 20 years. Some areas, however, appreciate at a higher rate than others. The city of Paw Paw has shown the highest appreciation in West Virginia, followed by Kearneysville, Davis, Hundred, Anmoore, Grantsville, Hillsboro, Wallace, Maysville, and Revesville respectively. Selling a home in any of these cities should be relatively easy as the demand is strong. These cities with appreciating values are a good place to look if you are interested in buying property. With the high rate of appreciation, there is a good chance a home purchase will be a good investment.
For those looking to sell their homes, homeowners in Shepherdstown are sitting on the most valuable assets as this is the most expensive city in West Virginia, followed by Bridgeport, Kearneysville, Charles Town, Hedgesville, Shady Spring, Gerrardstown, Anmoore, Buckhannon, and Lewisburg. Shepherdstown sits within the Eastern Panhandle and boasts a median home value over $286k. The Eastern Panhandle region is a very sought after area, contributing to the high cost of living.
Appreciating home values are not specific to just those cities. Over the last 5 years, the total appreciation of West Virginia homes was 12.3%. Part of the appeal of West Virginia real estate is that the homes are very spacious. The majority of houses have a minimum of three bedrooms, while less than 10% have one or fewer bedrooms. This is great in terms of square footage, but the extra space also adds to the stress on home systems such as heating and air conditioning to regulate the large amount of space.
What if you are in the market to buy a home in West Virginia? Wouldn’t you rather that the home’s critical systems and appliances already be covered by a home warranty when you purchase it? Buying a home is a huge investment. An existing home warranty can save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars if an unexpected repair is needed after you take possession of the home.
In West Virginia, over two-fifths of homes use natural gas for home heating. Another two-fifths use electricity for their home heating needs. Almost all the state’s electricity is generated by coal-fired plants. In fact, West Virginia is the nation’s second largest coal producer.
The homes in West Virginia are older than most in the United States. The median age of homes here is 40 to 49 years, while the national median age is 37 years. It isn’t hard to see where, with homes of this age, critical systems and appliances would need to be repaired or even replaced, perhaps more than once. Nine to 15 years is the average lifespan of most household appliances. In West Virginia, where thunderstorms, heavy rains and snowfalls, and extreme cold can be a hazard, doesn’t it make good sense to want to protect your West Virginia home and appliances?
Bitter cold is something you must face when living in West Virginia. The last thing you need is for your hot water heater to go on the fritz. A Basic Protection Plan from Choice Home Warranty will cover this essential appliance. When you think about the average lifespan of a water heater, 12 years, wouldn’t you like the peace of mind to know that it’s covered for repair or replacement? After all, replacing a water heater, especially a gas appliance, could cost you well over $1000. With a West Virginia home warranty, you can feel secure, knowing that you are covered should something go wrong.
The Basic Plan also covers your heating system and ductwork, as well as essential home systems such as your electrical and plumbing systems. It is essential to keep your systems and appliances in good working order in West Virginia. With home warranty plans from Choice Home Warranty, it’s easy to do. All it takes is a service call at the first sign of trouble. That way, you can protect your critical home systems and appliances and insure that they will not fail you when you need them the most.
Why is a Home Warranty Necessary in West Virginia?
Weather can be a concern in West Virginia. With the amount of rain and snow, not to mention the humidity and fog, your appliances and systems can suffer. A West Virginia home warranty can help protect you when covered items break down, even from normal wear and tear.
Summers can be quite warm and humid in West Virginia and you wouldn’t want your air conditioner to fail. Upgrade to a Total Plan and your AC will also be a covered appliance. Best of all, with a Total Plan, you still get all the protections of the Basic Plan.
Heavy rains and thunderstorms are common here as well. Limited roof leak protection is offed as an add-on to your West Virginia home warranty plan. For the roughly half of you living in rural areas, add on protection is also available for well pumps, sump pumps, septic systems and even septic tank pumping. No matter where you choose to live in West Virginia, there is a plan that is just right for you.
Suppose you have spent the day enjoying one of the many hot springs scattered about the state, or caving in one of the multitudes of limestone caves? You’d want your clothes washer and dryer to be in peak working condition. A Total Plan from Choice Home Warranty covers both, so you won’t have to worry.
What if you’re making apple pies with West Virginia apples from the choice apple growing region in the eastern panhandle and your oven starts to go out? Not to worry, the Basic Plan will cover your oven, range, cooktop, built-in microwave, dishwasher and even your garbage disposer. To cover your refrigerator as well, all you need to do is upgrade to a Total Plan.
Do you own a second refrigerator or a stand-alone freezer? These appliances could be invaluable when you live far from the nearest city. You can get add-on coverage for these appliances as well. Then, if they should have problems or break down, you can get a repair or replacement.
What Does a West Virginia Warranty Cover?
|Covered Items*||Total Plan||Basic Plan|
|Air Conditioning System|
|Oven / Range / Stove|
|Garage Door Opener|
|Ceiling and Exhaust Fans|
|Pool / Spa||Well Pump||Sump Pump|
|Central Vacuum||Limited Roof Leak||Septic System|
|Second Refrigerator||Stand Alone Freezer||Septic Tank Pumping|
How does a West Virginia Home Warranty Work?
Whenever you have trouble with a covered appliance or system, simply call customer service 24 hours a day to make a service request. You will be put in touch with a service technician who can provide you with your requested service. All service providers have the highest overall rating, are licensed, fully insured and thoroughly checked out before being sent to your home.
On the first service call, you will pay a small service fee. But, after that, all covered repairs will be handled by your home warranty plan. You don’t have to worry that an unexpected repair or replacement will wipe out your savings or emergency fund when you’ve protected your home with a West Virginia home warranty. All you have to worry about, is keeping a modest repair fund on hand to cover service fees.
If the service technician finds that your covered item cannot be repaired, your plan will cover a complete replacement. In West Virginia, where homes are older than most, this can be very valuable, especially since many of these homes will have systems and appliances that are beginning to wear out.
With Choice Home Warranty, you have two plans to choose from, plus add-on coverages to enable you to tailor a plan to fit your lifestyle. So, if you are looking for such a comprehensive home warranty plan in West Virginia, Choice Home Warranty is an excellent option. | <urn:uuid:8fbb6504-3a8f-4e03-8ee8-2634c7a0cb98> | {
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H. R. 6698
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
September 4, 2018
Ms. Adams (for herself and Ms. Clarke of New York) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce
To support States in their work to end preventable morbidity and mortality in maternity care by using evidence-based quality improvement to protect the health of mothers during pregnancy, childbirth, and in the postpartum period and to reduce neonatal and infant mortality, to eliminate racial disparities in maternal health outcomes, and for other purposes.
This Act may be cited as the
Maternal Care Access and Reducing Emergencies Act or the
Maternal CARE Act.
Congress finds the following:
In the United States, maternal mortality rates are among the highest in the developed world and increased by 26.6 percent between 2000 and 2014.
Of the 4,000,000 American women who give birth each year, about 700 suffer fatal complications during pregnancy, while giving birth, or during the postpartum period, and an additional 50,000 are severely injured.
It is estimated that half of the maternal mortalities in the United States could be prevented and half of the maternal injuries in the United States could be reduced or eliminated with better care.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that Black women are 3 to 4 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women. There are 40 deaths per 100,000 live births for Black women, compared to 12.4 deaths per 100,000 live births for White women and 17.8 deaths per 100,000 live births for women of other races.
Black women’s risk of maternal mortality has remained higher than White women’s risk for the past 6 decades.
Black women in the United States suffer from life-threatening pregnancy complications twice as often as their White counterparts.
High rates of maternal mortality among Black women span income and education levels, as well as socioeconomic status; moreover, risk factors such as a lack of access to prenatal care and physical health conditions do not fully explain the racial disparity in maternal mortality.
A growing body of evidence indicates that stress from racism and racial discrimination results in conditions—including hypertension and pre-eclampsia—that contribute to poor maternal health outcomes among Black women.
Pervasive racial bias against Black women and unequal treatment of Black women exist in the health care system, often resulting in inadequate treatment for pain and dismissal of cultural norms with respect to health. A 2016 study by University of Virginia researchers found that White medical students and residents often believed biological myths about racial differences in patients, including that Black patients have less-sensitive nerve endings and thicker skin than their White counterparts. Providers, however, are not consistently required to undergo implicit bias, cultural competency, or empathy training.
North Carolina has established a statewide Pregnancy Medical Home (PMH) program, which aims to reduce adverse maternal health outcomes and maternal deaths by incentivizing maternal health care providers to provide integral health care services to pregnant women and new mothers. According to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services Center for Health Statistics, the pregnancy-related mortality rate for Black women was approximately 5.1 times higher than that of White women in 2004. Almost a decade later, in 2013, the pregnancy-related mortality rates for Black women and White women were 24.3 and 24.2 deaths per 100,000 live births, respectively. The PMH program has been credited with the convergence in pregnancy-related mortality rates because the program partners each high-risk pregnant and postpartum woman that is covered under Medicaid with a pregnancy care manager.
Implicit bias training for health care providers
The Secretary of Health and Human Services (referred to in this Act as the Secretary) shall establish a grant program under which such Secretary awards grants to accredited schools of allopathic medicine, schools of osteopathic medicine, nursing schools, and other health professional training programs for the purpose of supporting evidence-based implicit bias training, with priority given to such training with respect to obstetrics and gynecology.
Implicit bias defined
In this section, the term implicit bias means—
bias in judgment or behavior that results from subtle cognitive processes, including implicit attitudes and implicit stereotypes, that often operate at a level below conscious awareness and without intentional control; or
implicit attitudes and stereotypes that result in beliefs or simple associations that a person makes between an object and its evaluation that are automatically activated by the mere presence (actual or symbolic) of the attitude object.
Authorization of appropriations
There are authorized to be appropriated for purposes of carrying out the grant program under subsection (a), $5,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2019 through 2023.
Pregnancy medical home demonstration project
The Secretary, acting through the Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration, shall award grants to States for the purpose of establishing or operating State pregnancy medical home programs that meet the requirements of subsection (b) to deliver integrated health care services to pregnant women and new mothers and reduce adverse maternal health outcomes, maternal deaths, and racial health disparities in maternal mortality and morbidity.
State pregnancy medical home program requirements
A State pregnancy medical home program meets the requirements of this subsection if—
the State works with relevant stakeholders to develop and carry out the program, including—
State and local agencies responsible for Medicaid, public health, social services, mental health, and substance abuse treatment and support;
health care providers who serve pregnant women, including doctors, nurses, and midwives;
community-based health workers, including perinatal health workers, doulas, and home visitors; and
community-based organizations and individuals representing the communities with—
the highest overall rates of maternal mortality and morbidity; and
the greatest racial disparities in rates of maternal mortality and morbidity;
the State selects obstetric providers to participate in the program as pregnancy medical homes, and requires that any provider that wishes to participate in the program as a pregnancy medical home—
commits to following evidence-based practices for maternity care, as developed by the State in consultation with relevant stakeholders; and
completes training to provide culturally and linguistically competent care;
under the program, each pregnancy medical home is required to conduct a standardized medical, obstetric, and psychosocial risk assessment for every patient of the medical home who is pregnant at the patient's first prenatal appointment with the medical home;
under the program, a care manager—
is assigned to each pregnancy medical home; and
coordinates care (including coordinating resources and referrals for health care and social services that are not available from the pregnancy medical home) for each patient of a pregnancy medical home who is eligible for services under the program; and
the program prioritizes pregnant and postpartum women who are enrolled in the State Medicaid plan under title XIX of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1396 et seq.), or a waiver of such plan.
The Secretary may award a grant under this section to up to 10 States.
Term of grants
Grants under this section shall made for a term of 5 years.
In awarding grants under this section, the Secretary shall give priority to the States with the greatest racial disparities in maternal mortality and severe morbidity rates.
Report on grant impact and dissemination of best practices
Not later than January 1, 2024, the Administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration shall submit a report to Congress that describes—
the impact of the grants awarded under this section on maternal and child health;
best practices and models of care used by recipients of grants under this section; and
obstacles faced by recipients of grants under this section in delivering care, improving maternal and child health, and reducing racial disparities in rates of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity.
Dissemination of best practices
Not later than January 1, 2024, the Administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration shall disseminate information on best practices and models of care used by recipients of grants under this section (including best practices and models of care relating to the reduction of racial disparities in rates of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity) to interested parties, including health providers, medical schools, relevant State and local agencies, and the general public.
There are authorized to be appropriated to carry out this section, $25,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2019 through 2023, to remain available until expended.
National Academy of Medicine Study
The Secretary shall enter into an arrangement with the National Academy of Medicine under which the National Academy agrees to study and make recommendations for incorporating bias recognition in clinical skills testing for accredited schools of allopathic medicine and accredited schools of osteopathic medicine.
The arrangement under subsection (a) shall provide for submission by the National Academy of Medicine to the Secretary and Congress, not later than 3 years after the date of enactment of this Act, of a report on the results of the study that includes such recommendations. | <urn:uuid:d5000b08-e012-4ef9-8aaa-8b2534088565> | {
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Is the Sabbath commandment still a part of the Decalogue? Or is it the only one of the Ten Commandments that is now obsolete?
Nowhere in the New Testament are the Ten Commandments listed in order from one to ten. Nowhere in the New Testament is the Sabbath command repeated verbatim. Without the Old Testament we would not know the exact construction of God's basic law. Without the Old Testament we would not even know that the exact number of commands is ten. These are startling facts that many of us have never stopped to consider. What about it? Is there any logical biblical reason why we should keep the Sabbath today? Should we now keep all ten of the Ten Commandments — or only those points that pertain to our neighbor? Should we love God only in a very general manner?
Old Testament Background
By way of a brief background, the first Sabbath day followed the six working days of creation (Gen. 2:1-3). A command to remember this first Sabbath day was later inculcated into ancient Israel's basic constitutional law listed in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 (see accompanying box on next page). These fundamental decrees were the only ones spoken and written by the Creator Himself. All other codified laws, statutes, judgments and ordinances were relayed to Moses through angelic mediation. Moses later summarized God's personal role as Lawgiver in the book of Deuteronomy: "At that time the Lord said to me, 'Hew two tables of stone like the first, and come up to me on the mountain, and make an ark of wood. And I will write on the tables the words that were on the first tables which you broke, and you shall put them in the ark.' So I made an ark of acacia wood, and hewed two tables of stone like the first, and went up the mountain with the two tables in my hand. And he [God] wrote on the tables, as at the first writing, the ten commandments which the Lord had spoken to you on the mountain out of the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly; and the Lord gave them to me" (Deut. 10:1-4, RSV). Another summary account is also well worth quoting. It shows the vital significance that God attributes to His basic moral law: "... The Lord said to me, 'Gather the people to me, that I may let them hear my words [personally and directly — not through either Moses or angelic mediation], so that they may learn to fear me all the days that they live upon the earth, and that they may teach their children so.' And you came near and stood at the foot of the mountain.... Then the Lord spoke to you.... And he declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, that is, the ten commandments..." (Deut. 4:10-13).
New Testament Application
James, leading apostle of the Jerusalem Church of God, referred to the whole Decalogue in his general epistle to the twelve tribes of Israel. He wrote: "If you really fulfil the royal law, according to the scripture, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself,' you do well. But if you show partiality, you commit sin, and are convicted by the law as transgressors [sin is the transgression of the law; see I John 3:4]. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he [remember this is God] who said, 'Do not commit adultery,' said also, 'Do not kill.' If you do not commit adultery but do kill, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty" (James 2:8-12). James, here, establishes several significant facts : 1) The royal law is summarized by the Old Testament command to love your neighbor as yourself (see Lev. 19:18). 2) The royal law has distinct points. 3) Two of those points include the sixth and seventh commandments as listed in the Decalogue. 4) Transgression of any of these points is sin. 5) Failure to keep one point is considered, spiritually, as breaking them all. 6) This royal law is also termed the "law of liberty." 7) Christians are to be judged by this royal law of liberty. A few questions should be asked at this juncture. Do the points James mentions exclude the first four commandments defining man's relationship with his God? Or do they refer to all ten as duly delineated in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5? Are Christians only required to specifically keep the last six commandments defining man's proper association with his neighbor, while observing the first four only in some sort of an ethereal sense? Let us withhold judgment until we have examined a few more of the New Testament documents.
Jesus and the Ten Commandments
A rich young ruler once came to Jesus and asked Him a vitally important question: "Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life?" (Matt. 19:16.) Jesus answered: "If you would enter life, keep the commandments" (verse 17). But the young man wanted to know which commandments Jesus was specifically referring to. "And Jesus said, 'You shall not kill, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself'" (verse 18). Here Jesus specifically enumerated five of the last six commandments and capped them off with the summary commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. Later, a lawyer asked Jesus a very similar question : "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" (Luke 10:25.) This time, because of the motive of the questioner, Jesus answered in a different manner: "He said to him, 'What is written in the law? How do you read?' And he answered, 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind ; and your neighbor as yourself" (verses 26-27). The lawyer replied by first loosely quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, and secondly Leviticus 19:18, in the Old Testament. Love of God was emphasized first and then love of neighbor. Jesus did not disagree with this lawyer: "And he said to him, 'You have answered right; do this, and you will live'" (verse 28). Another account in Matthew phrases virtually the same answer in Jesus' own words (examine any red-letter Bible). Jesus was asked: "'Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?' And he [Jesus] said to him, 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, arid with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets'" (Matt. 22:36-40). Are we to believe that the second overall commandment to love your neighbor has distinct points, but the first and great commandment has none? Are we to believe that the God of the New Testament does not tell us how we are to love Him III distinct, practical ways?
New Testament Emphasis
Nonetheless, whenever a substantial portion of the Decalogue is quoted in the New Testament, the emphasis is nearly always on "love your neighbor." Why?
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS Love for God
1. You shall have no other gods before me. 2. You shall not make your. self any graven image. 3. You shall not take the name of the Eternal your God in vain. 4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Love for Neighbor
5. Honor your father and your mother. 6. You shall not kill. 7. You shall not commit adultery. 8. You shall not steal.. 9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. 10. You shall not covet.
James gives us just a hint. He wrote: "With it [the tongue] we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brethren, this ought not to be so" (James 3:9-10). Apparently, at the time when the events were happening that occasioned the later writing of the New Testament documents, the main, outward problem revolved around the violation of the last six commandments specifically pertaining to one's neighbor. For instance, the Pharisees made a fetish out of the fourth commandment. They used it as an excuse not to love their neighbors. They severely criticized Jesus for healing a man blind from birth on the Sabbath day (see John 9). They, in reality, did not love the poor man. Instead, they wound up threatening to ostracize both him and his parents from the religious community. But the point is: They used the Sabbath' commandment to camouflage their disobedience to the great principle of loving one's neighbor. They even excused themselves from economic support of their aged parents for "religious reasons." You can read what Jesus said to these hypocrites in Mark 7:9-13. There is no way to dishonor one's parent and simultaneously love God. It simply can't be done! The apostle John deeply understood this inextricable interrelationship between loving God and loving neighbor and the irony of claiming to do one while omitting the other. "If anyone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also" (I John 4:20-21). It also works the other way. Notice in the next chapter: "By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments" (I John 5:2). Love and obedience to God go hand in hand: "For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome" (verse 3).
The Sabbath Commandment
As we stated earlier, nowhere is the Sabbath command repeated verbatim in the New Testament. However, neither are the first three commandments (showing us how to love God) repeated verbatim. This is a fact people often forget. One really has to hunt in the New Testament for even veiled references to these three commandments. In actual fact, there is more quantitative New Testament information and instruction concerning the Sabbath commandment than anyone of these other three. So the emphasis in the New Testament is on the last six commandments and also on the interrelationship between the broad principles bridging the last six and the first four. In Ephesians 5:5, the apostle Paul related that covetousness (number ten) is idolatry (number one). However, the Ten Commandments, as magnified in the New Testament, still represent one whole, complete law with ten points. Jesus tells us that to love God is the first and great commandment; James tells us that there are points to God's royal law; John tells us that we cannot hate our fellowman and love God simultaneously. The Ten Commandments are a "complete package" — one commandment cannot be arbitrarily ripped out of God's ten-point law. If one is broken, all are broken in principle. The Sabbath law is still one of the Ten Commandments! It has, however, been greatly magnified by Jesus' own personal example and instruction, typified by His famous statement that "the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath" (Mark 2:27). Keeping God's seventh-day Sabbath does not involve an endless list of burdensome dos and don'ts. The Sabbath was intended to be a great blessing for mankind — not a terrible yoke of bondage. This article has broached but one aspect of the overall Sabbath question. We recommend the following booklets and articles as further study guides: Which Day Is the Christian Sabbath?; The Ten Commandments; "Were the Ten Commandments in Force Before Moses?"; "Are All the Ten Commandments in the New Testament?"; "The Sabbath Was Made for Man".
Is Every Day Just Like Any Other? 1976
"Tomorrow's just another day since you went away; tomorrow's just another day to cry...." So goes a popular country and western song of a bygone era. And to the average person, one tiresome, monotonous day does indeed seem to melt into another. Deeply distressed and discouraged over the death of a life-long mate; an elderly person I know lamented about how he had just spent Thanksgiving. "Just another day," he, told me with tears in his eyes. But the Creator never intended for men and women to live dry, dull, irksome, boring lives, barely eking out some sort of ersatz existence, never understanding why they draw breath on this planet of ours. He never intended life to be so hard that one depressing, trouble-filled, twenty-four-hour day was just another link on a chain into another. King David of ancient Israel well knew that the Creator never envisioned such a dull, uninteresting existence for millions of men and women. Notice: "... weeping may endure for a night, but joy [a change] cometh in the morning" (Psalm 30:5). We humans need frequent rest and deliverance from the trials and troubles that seem to result from "just living." Man needs a time free from the normal routine; a time in which to rest and reflect, to be recharged, reenergized and restored, a time to learn why we were put on this earth.
The Birth of a Special Day
The Creator designed a weekly cycle of seven days for the benefit of man: He set apart the last day of the seven for a special, spiritual purpose. According to the biblical narrative, man was fashioned and made to have an intimate, spiritual relationship with his Creator. To keep man and woman in this intended life-long friendship and spiritual proximity to God, the seventh day was given a very vital and special significance. Regarding the biblical account of the six-day creation, the Genesis writer continues: "And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it [set it apart for a, holy use or purpose], because on it God rested, from all his work which he had done in creation" (Gen. 2:1-3, RSV). The sabbath rest was created on the seventh day of the week — less than a day after man himself came on the scene. Jesus Christ of Nazareth referred to the birth of the sabbath in Mark 2:27. "The sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath," he explained. The word "sabbath" means "rest" in the original Hebrew. Simple physical rest and refreshment after a grueling work week is an obvious reason for the sabbath. But the true meaning and purpose of this God-ordained institution goes far beyond physical, mental and perhaps even emotional respite. For the seventh day is inextricably interwoven into God's transcendent purpose for creating man in the first place. Genesis 1:26 explains: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness..." (KJV). When one really comprehends the fullness of this short biblical phrase, it means that men and women are made to conform to the spiritual image and character of God — eventually actually becoming personalities in the, God family. (Important: The Editor-in-Chief has written two vital free booklets to help us understand this almost incomprehensible truth. Read Why Were You Born? and Just What Do You Mean... Born Again?) From the beginning the Creator attached a special significance to the seventh day. He never asked man to rest on, or in any way commemorate, the first six days of the week. It is only the seventh day that takes on deep spiritual proportions. The seventh day is a time to meditate and muse upon the reason for the whole six-day creation and especially man's part in it.
A Brief Biblical History
On the very first sabbath day the Creator began to educate our first parents. Chapters one through six of Genesis are only a brief outline of the first 1,650 years of human history. However, it is clear that the concept of the weekly cycle remained very much in the mind of the early patriarchs. Noah sent forth a dove out of the ark based on seven-day cycles (see Gen. 8:10, 12). Noah's descendant, Jacob, was also fully cognizant of the seven-day weekly cycle. (Gen. 29:27, 28). Eventually Jacob's descendants found themselves in a state of captivity in Egypt where they probably suffered religious persecution as well as political slavery. Apparently they lost the knowledge of the sabbath and the specific day on which it fell. So the Creator reminded ancient Israel of its existence, making it crystal clear not only that it fell on the seventh day, but also that sabbath observance was a vital part of the nation's constitutional law — and especially that portion governing man's relationship to God (see Exodus 16:22-30).
The Spiritual Import
So important is the seventh day to God's overall spiritual plan that he placed it in the Decalogue, spoken by his own voice and written by his own finger. It is the fourth of the Ten Commandments (the first four reveal how man is to worship his Creator), and a bridge to the other six revealing the basic moral relationship between man and his neighbor. Here is the fourth commandment: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.... for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it" (Ex. 20:8, 11, RSV). The Creator, here, does not institute the sabbath. The first word of this commandment is "remember." In codifying the sabbath as an integral part of his basic moral law, the Creator reminds man once again of when (at creation) and why the seventh day was given. The sabbath is not just any old day to God — "just like any other." It should also be a special day to man" but tragically for most it is not. Man has been deceived into thinking that the seventh-day sabbath was designed to be a "yoke of bondage." Unfortunately men have sometimes made it into precisely that. Such is the antithesis of God's thinking. He meant his rest day to be an occasion for feasting and joy (see Lev. 23:2-3; Isaiah 58:13, 14).
A History of Israel's Sabbath Breaking
In spite of all of God's revelations, much of the history of ancient Israel was an exercise in sabbath breaking. The prophet Ezekiel records the Creator's thoughts on Israel's defiling of his holy day. "'Moreover I gave them my sabbaths, as a sign between me and them, that they might know that I the Lord sanctify them. But the house of Israel rebelled against me in the wilderness; they did not walk in my statutes, but rejected my ordinances, by whose observance man shall live; and my sabbaths they greatly profaned" (Ezek. 20:12-13, RSV). After God physically disinherited both the nations of Israel and Judah for sabbath breaking, among other reasons, the House of Judah (the Jews) finally seemed to get the point. Ezra and Nehemiah, after that nation's return from Babylonian captivity, vigorously preached and taught against sabbath breaking. And as humanity is wont to extremes, the Jewish nation (between the testaments) plunged headlong into the other ditch. Some of their religious leaders added an incredible number of do's and don'ts to the original sabbath commandment — making it into an ecclesiastical monster. When Jesus Christ began his ministry, the time had come to strip away these sabbatical traditions of men. Jesus showed how the sabbath day should be kept to fulfill its fullest spiritual intent (Matt. 5:17; Isa. 42:21). He removed the yoke of bondage that the religionists had attached to the sabbath. But one point is clear: Jesus Christ did keep the day itself. "And he [Jesus] came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read" (Luke 4:16, KJV). Notice verse 31: "And [Jesus] came down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee, and taught them on the sabbath days [plural]."
The New Testament Sabbath Rest
There is biblical evidence that the early New Testament church kept the seventh-day sabbath (Acts 13:14-15, 42-44; 15:1-2, 14-21; 16:12-15; 18:1-11; 17:2, etc.). There are several verses (eight) that mention the first day of the week, but they do not prove that the sabbath is transferred from Saturday to Sunday. A full exposition of these texts is available upon request in our two free booklets, Which Day Is The Sabbath Of The New Testament? and The Resurrection Was Not On Sunday. In the New Testament (as well as in the Old), the sabbath is more than "just another day." The sabbath-day sabbath has deep spiritual significance and symbolism in the New Testament era. Perhaps the most important chapter in this regard are Hebrews 3 and 4. In those critical chapters it comes clear that the seventh-day sabbath is a type (or forerunner) of the kingdom of God — a shadow of God's eternal rest (see Col. 2:16-17). Chapter three of Hebrews speaks of "the Promised Land" of old as also being a type of God's kingdom. Excepting Joshua and Caleb, that whole generation of Israelites were unable to enter the Promised Land because of their unbelief (verses 18-19). Chapter four continues discussing the same subject: "Let us [Christians] therefore fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into his rest [God's kingdom], any of you should seem to come short of it. For unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it. For we which have believed do enter into rest... although the works were finished from the foundation of the world [referring to the six-day creation]. For he spake in a certain place of the seventh day on this wise, And God did rest the seventh day from all his works [of creation]" (Hebrews 4:1-4). Verse 9 is crucial to the purpose of this article: "There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God" (verse 9, KJV). The margin says: "There remaineth therefore a keeping of the sabbath to the people of God:" The Revised Standard Version has it: "There remains a sabbath rest for the people of God." The Jerusalem Bible: "There must still be, therefore, a place of rest reserved for God's people, the seventh-day rest." Today's English Version: "As it is, however, there still remains for God's people a rest like God's resting on the seventh day." The vital meaning of this verse has been obscured by the King James translators. Everywhere else in chapters three and four of Hebrews the English word "rest" is translated from the Greek word katapausin, simply meaning, "rest" or "a place of rest." However, in verse 9 the original Greek word for "rest" is sabbatismos which refers to the seventh-day sabbath. Most other translations correct this King James error in the English. Verses 10 and 11: "For whoever enters God's rest [the kingdom of God] also ceases from his labors as God did from his [on the seventh day following the six working days of creation]. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, that no one fall by the same sort of disobedience" (RSV). God's seventh-day sabbath is not "just any other day." It prefigures the eternal rest humanity will have with God in his eternal, never-ending kingdom.
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How You Can Improve The Air You Breathe
The good news is there are some very positive steps you can take to enhance the indoor air you breathe… and we're here to help you do just that.
Have you ever spent time in an environment that invigorated you, and inspired you to think clearly and creatively?
Chances are this environment was somewhere outside in nature.
So what causes the air inside your home or office to not come close to having the same effect… or worse, to even reach high pollution levels?
First of all, the EPA tells us that the air outside your home establishes the baseline for your indoor air. This makes sense. It also means if you already live in an area with high levels of outside pollutants, your indoor air probably started out 'bad' before anything inside your house had a chance to impact it even further.
"Ever wonder why spending time in a natural pollution-free environment can be so invigorating?"
But once inside your home or office, the air you breathe can get worse and loads of other pollutants may be added from materials and faulty processes inside your home such as:
Many of these materials and situations listed above emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including class 2B carcinogens.
What's the First Thing You Can Do to Improve Air Quality in Your Home or Office?
NASA finds certain plants reduce indoor air pollutants significantly
Bringing a bit of nature indoors with houseplants is an excellent idea and can help make
you feel a bit more cheery
Living closer to nature may actually even help increase your quality of life.
It was NASA, along with the Associated Landscape Contractors of America (ALCA),
that conducted a classic study on the benefits of plants on indoor air.
NASA reported that houseplants were able to reduce up to 87 percent of air toxins in 24
hours. They recommended using 15 to 18 'good-sized' houseplants in 6 to 8-inch
diameter containers for an 1800 square-foot house.
Not just any house plants will do.
Here's a list of the top 10 anti-pollutant plants rated best by The New Ecologist.com:
Household plants like this African violet can
help to enhance your indoor air quality.
1. Feston Rose plant
2. Devil's Ivy
4. English Ivy
5. Parlor Ivy
6. African Violets
7. Christmas Cactus
8. Yellow Goddess
9. Garlic Vine
10. Peace Lily
Feston Rose plant
NASA, at the Stennis Space Center, also constructed what they called a BioHome, which incorporated bioregenerative technology with the ultimate goal of providing a life support system for permanent human habitation in space.
And inside the BioHome structure are common houseplants, which NASA says act as living air purifiers to absorb as much chemical pollutants as possible from synthetic materials in the living area.
If houseplants are capable of cleansing the air in the BioHome, imagine what they could do in your home!
Mold Is a Common Issue in Many Homes
Unfortunately this is all too common. Many homes are contaminated with mold as a result of flooding, water leaks from indoor plumbing, leaky roofs or leaky basement foundations.
Please understand that no air purifer in the world will eliminate mold problems. You must find the source of the water leakage and stop water intrusion into your home and make sure you control the humidity. The other key is to jump on this problem the moment you find it, do not delay as the longer you wait the more expensive the repairs will likely be.
Once you have been able to get the mold under control then you can introduce an air purification system based on the discussion below.
9 More Actions to Take Now to Enhance the Indoor Air You Breathe
Indoor Air Enhancement Action: Justification and Improvement Details:
Put a plan in place to keep your home clean naturally
Using only natural plant-based types of cleaners will help eliminate potential air pollutants. Even your laundry detergent can be a source of air fumes.
Redo a portion of your home with a natural material
You may not be able to build a new natural home or office, but you can make small changes using natural, healthy materials… like bamboo flooring for example.
Keep carpets vacuumed and cleaned using natural ingredients
Your carpet can be a breeding ground and saturation point for dust and pests that can eventually spew pollutants into your indoor air. Keeping your carpet clean with vacuuming and natural shampoos can help keep your air cleaner. Central vacuum cleaners are best
Avoid potential toxic fumes from unfiltered water
Unknown by many people, unfiltered chlorinated tap water is a potential source of toxic fumes. And it’s not just drinking water you need to be concerned about. Your shower can be up to 20 times worse than drinking unfiltered tap water. The solution here is quite simple… obtain a high-quality water filtration system for your home. If you’re interested in more info here, you can check it out on my site where I show several well-researched options from single faucet… to shower systems… to whole-house filtration units.
Utilize nontoxic cookware when preparing your food
In addition to leaching potential chemicals into your food, non-stick cookware made of synthetic perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) can release toxins into your air. When heated to only 446° F, the coating begins to break down and releases fumes. My recommendation is for you to use cookware made from ceramic.
6. Don’t allow smoking inside your home
This seems pretty straight-forward. But many folks worry too much about possibly offending smokers and allow them to smoke inside their homes. Don’t do it. Exposure to second-hand smoke can build up inside your home .
Ensure pets are kept well-groomed and clean
Pets can be a breeding ground for pests and parasites that can become airborne in your home. Keeping your pet well-groomed is key to avoiding adding potential pollutants into your indoor air.
Get expert help if you have a mold problem due to a leak or water intrusion
This is a serious issue and requires a remediation expert to solve. Contact Indoor Environmental Solutions or a local expert to help you resolve ASAP.
9. Avoid poor indoor ventilation issues
Poor ventilation and filtration worsen your indoor air by trapping air pollutants All you have to do is open windows on open sides of your home for ten minutes every day and the cross ventilation will radically improve your indoor air quality.
That fresh air smell and ambiance following a
lightning storm is triggered by the natural
ozone effect on the air.
Could This Be One of Nature's Best Methods For Cleaning the Air?
Most folks are probably unsure about what it is.
So, what is ozone?
Considered by many scientists to be nature's method for cleaning the air we breathe,
ozone is a natural component of the earth's atmosphere… a naturally occurring pale blue gas.
From a molecular standpoint, ozone is actually an oxygen molecule with an extra atom
attached… the chemical symbol is O3… the extra oxygen atom makes it a somewhat
Why is the extra oxygen atom important? The interesting thing about ozone is once
it oxidizes an air pollutant, it loses one of its oxygen atoms and turns back into pure
Made in nature by ultra violet (UV) energy from the sun striking oxygen molecules
Created by lightning – The fresh air you smell after a thunderstorm is due to the ozone cleaning effect on the air.
A component of ground level air wherever you go on the earth – Such has been the case since the beginning of time.
There is another step I recommend you seriously consider taking to help improve your indoor air quality… and that's to install an air purification system, but not just any purification system.
How Ozone Can Be Both Effective and Safe
At the appropriate, natural, levels like you find outside on a non-polluted day, ozone is not only effective, it's naturally safe… typical levels run 0.01 to 0.05 ppm (parts per million). But it's like anything else in nature… even too much pure water can kill you… too high a level of oxygen can as well… and electricity kills thousands every year.
The bottom line with ozone… this natural element must be respected and low levels controlled to make it safe for human exposure.
When it comes to air purification units for your home, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established clear ozone limits for occupied spaces… and that’s 0.05 ppm.
And this establishment by the EPA seems to make a great deal of sense… since typical levels outdoors are present at 0.05 ppm and are still considered safe.
So, to me, blindly banning ozone generation from air purification units makes little sense at all. What does makes sense, is requiring manufacturers to control the amount of ozone generated in indoor environments. Besides, why would you want to ban the very element used in nature to oxidize pollutants and clean the air? Sounds like something that works very effectively to me
And that’s why I feel it’s important that controlled ozone generation is part of any air purification system I recommend. More details on my complete air purifier selection criteria coming up…
Why Single Air Purification Technology is NOT a Recommended Solution
One thing that’s become apparent to renowned osteopathic physician, Dr. Mercola, after years of analyzing effectiveness and using different air purification units personally in his home and office, is that a single technology is NOT the answer.
First of all, there are really three basic types of air filtration systems…
Passive – A filtration and cleaning process that takes place inside the unit. Air is drawn into the purification unit for cleaning.
Active – The air cleansing and purification process occurs outside the unit. The technology triggers a process that goes out to clean the air.
Passive/Active – Doesn’t apply directly to a specific technology, but is based on a unit containing multiple technologies of both passive and active.
When examining specific filtration technologies within the basic types described above, I feel there are both pros and cons... More so that I favor a unit that could incorporate multiple technologies working together, instead of using just a single one.
Here’s a handy chart that outlines the basic pros and cons
of some of the air purification technologies available
Filtration technology Type Pros Cons
Can trap very small particles (0.01 microns) using charged plates.
Are challenged to move enough air for effective indoor coverage and pollutant absorption.
Works effectively to filter particles (0.03 microns or larger) such as pet allergens, dust, and larger smoke particles.
Not effective at removing odors, gases, and chemicals due to their small particle size. Limited on coverage area.
Uses relatively inexpensive UV light to neutralize microorganisms like mildew, bacteria, and viruses.
Does not do a real sufficient job filtering particles from the air by itself and UV light degrades over time.
Able to use a very large surface area to attract and neutralize odors and pollutants.
Rarely used by itself and when the filter gets full, it stops absorbing and needs to be replaced.
Uses proven element found in nature that effectively cleans outside air.
Need to be able to control generation level to keep output within EPA guidelines.
Particles tend to fall out of the air and stick to walls and other items in a room. Particles are not always taken cleanly out of the air.
Does remove particles using negatively charged or both negatively and positively charged ions.
Ozone generation Active
Activated Carbon Passive
UV Ultraviolet Passive
Electrostatic Precipitator Passive
The point of the chart is not to identify all the air filtration technologies available, but to give you an idea of why
a single technology is NOT the optimum approach for an indoor unit… a combination of technologies is required.
A single air filtration technology just won’t be as effective as a purifier that contains multiple ways to clean your indoor air.
Follow This Guide to the Ultimate Air Purification System
If you could design the ultimate air purification system, what would it have? What would be the criteria needed to make it stand out in the crowd and deliver the best of the best indoor air purification?
To help you answer the question Dr. Mercola created a checklist for what he considers to be the ideal air filtration system for your home…
Optimizes multiple air purification technologies – Must be included within the same unit with a strong preference for 'active' technologies as opposed to 'passive.'
Implements controlled ozone generator – Strong preference for controlled ozone generation as one of the multiple technologies incorporated in the unit. I feel that since ozone is nature's element for effectively cleaning air, this is a must-have in any system I would recommend.
Delivers solid testing evidence – Unit manufacturer must provide independent testing results as to the effectiveness of the unit. This is another must-have.
Makes use of scalable purification – It’s important to be able to have a single unit that can both handle an average size home (over 2000 sq. ft.) plus a smaller home and even a single room if needed.
Is simple to setup and use – Air purifier must be intuitive to use and not require extensive training to get the unit up and running. Once setup properly, unit should not require constant adjustments to run effectively.
Cleans up easily and safely – Cleaning the unit, whether there are filters or not, should be simple using environmental-friendly solutions. Requirements for harsh cleaning chemicals are not acceptable and should be avoided at all costs.
Is inexpensive to operate – Doesn’t consume much electricity and does not require expensive regular filter replacements.
Incorporates universal power – Unit must come equipped to handle both AC and DC power requirements for use anywhere in the world. Plus, purifier must have electrical and safety certifications for use internationally.
Provides a satisfaction guarantee – In addition to a warranty, filtration unit should come with some sort of money-back guarantee. This will ensure the manufacturer clearly stands behind the product and would allow you to test-drive the unit to observe the results.
One of the key features of the Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier is how it incorporates four advanced technologies into a single unit to help reduce odors, smoke, pollen, dust, bacteria, minor mold, pet dander, and much more.
Four Advanced Technologies in a Single Purification System –
A Truly Innovative Solution
Advanced Photo Catalytic Oxidation (PCO) Cell – The PCO technology not only destroys biological contaminants traveling through the cell, it also produces purifying plasma which reduces odors, mold, bacteria, and viruses.
Needlepoint Ionization –The Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier generates a continuous stream of millions of negative ions that circulate throughout your home. These ions charge particles of dust, dander, bacteria, and viruses… causing them to clump together and fall out of the air you breathe.
Scalable Purification –The air purifier comes equipped with adjustable purification levels based on the square footage of the area. This allows the ozone generation to work safely and effectively based on the size of the area to be cleaned.
Electrostatic Filtration – An advanced electrostatic filter comes with the unit to help keep the purifier clean while at the same time filter out particles which clump together from the Needlepoint Ionization.
Unlike many other air purifiers in the marketplace that only use one or two technologies, the Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier effectively incorporates four technologies and focuses more on active types of purification.
This air purifier has been specifically designed to proactively go after indoor air pollutants and not simply wait for them to find their way into the device.
With this combination of four advanced purification technologies, tests have shown that noticeable pollution can be eliminated in as little as 15 minutes, and the most challenging pollution in as few as 24 hours. I’ll have more coming up on some of the actual available test data from the independent evaluations.
But first, let’s take a closer look at more of the features and benefits of the Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier that make this the recommended air purifier for your home and office.
Features and Benefits Every Air Purifier Should Have But Few DO
The Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier quite easily satisfies all of the selection criteria… and then some.
Here are more on the key features and benefits of the Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier…
Easily fits into any area, room, or home without upsetting surrounding aesthetics.
Small, compact, high-tech attractive-looking unit
Full function control panel with LCD display
Enhances ease-of-use by showing you key items like: fan speed, technology indicator, and square footage indicator. Display is also dimmable and can be turned off as needed.
Full function remote control
Enhances ease-of-use by permitting unit adjustments without touching or relocating the purifier.
Adjustable fan and purifier level controls
Enhances ease-of-use by permitting unit adjustments without touching or relocating the purifier.
LCD Intelligent maintenance reminders
Makes maintenance easier and simpler by providing maintenance reminders on the LCD display.
Universal AC/DC power supply
With the proper local plug adapter, can be used anywhere in the world.
Filter can be cleaned with clean water and Purification plate with a 50/50 mix of warm water and ammonia.
Unit is designed to be easily cleaned for quick turnaround to get unit running again.
UL, CE, PSE, TUV, and EK certified internationally
With these international electrical and safety certifications, the manufacturer has provided the flexibility for the air purifier to work in different countries around the world.
1 Year Warranty and 30-day money-back guarantee.
Let’s you try out the purifier for 30 days to observe results.
You can see from this extensive list of features and their associated benefits how the Mercola Pure
and Clear Air Purifier is an extraordinary purification system.
Independent Testing Confirmed Significant Reduction of Pollutants
As examples, here are two different independent sources who evaluated the technology used in the Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier. Both reports were peer reviewed and published in scientific journals…
University of Cincinnati Test (published in Environmental Science and Technology).
The Test – Evaluated both PCO and Negative Ionization technologies against two active contaminants.
The Results – Combination of the two technologies provided a much more significant reduction of airborne contaminants than when the two technologies were used independently. The combination of both technologies resulted in an overall aerosol exposure reduction after 30 minutes by a factor of about 50, or an overall reduction/inactivation of approximately 98%.
Kansas State University Test (published in Journal of Rapid Methods & Automation in Microbiology).
The Test – Evaluated PCO technology against nine airborne microorganisms
The Results – After 24 hour of exposure, the nine organisms tested were reduced from a range of 96.4% to 99.9%. Even more astounding, was after only 2 hours, the average reduction was over 80%... and after 6 hours, it was over 90%.
The technology used in the Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier in these two independent evaluations demonstrated significant reductions in specific pollutants found in indoor air.
Plus, from an electrical and safety standpoint, the purifier carries certifications from around the world from Underwriters Laboratory (UL – US and Canada), CE (Europe), PSE (Japan), TUV (Germany), and EK (Korean).
Scalable Purification – The Ultimate Coverage Flexibility and
One of the unique features of the Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier is how flexible the unit is to set up for different size indoor areas… Scalable Purification.
Once the purifier is installed, you can easy tailor it to work in the smallest room or area, or to cover up to an open area of 3,000 square feet. This is a very powerful feature indeed and one I believe firmly sets it apart from the competition.
Here are some examples (and the corresponding LCD data displays) of typical settings that more clearly illustrate the flexibility this capability provides…
For a small area or room (less than 250 sq. ft.) – Set the unit in 'Normal' mode
where the advanced PCO technology is used to get purification levels you need without
the need for additional activated oxygen (ozone). Five different fan speeds can be set
for further flexibility.
For larger areas (250 to 3000 sq. ft.) – Set the unit to the square footage needed
and it will automatically go into ‘High’ mode. This indicates that measured levels of activated
oxygen (Scalable Purification) will be employed to enhance the purification process.
However if you use the higher levels it is best to make sure you are not at home and do
not expose your pets to the higher concentrations as rooms closer to the unit will have
higher levels. The levels drop within minutes of turning the unit off, so this is not a
When you’re away from home or want faster air cleanup as needed while no one
iis in the area – Set the unit to ‘Away Mode’ and the flexible timer to have it automatically
It's important to point out that the manufacturer of the Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier has taken a very conservative approach when it comes to Scalable Purification… and how much activated oxygen (ozone) is used to reduce air pollutants and odors.
As an example, even when set at the highest coverage level of 3000 square feet, the unit would have to be placed inside a very restricted area (theoretically, like a cardboard box) to have any chance of releasing undesirable levels of ozone. Of course, no one will practically use it this way.
The manufacturer has gone to great measures to ensure when the unit is set properly, the Scalable Purification technology will not release ozone greater than the EPA guidelines except in ‘Away Mode.’ This was a real important factor in my final selection process.
Keeping Your Air Purifier Clean is Quick and Easy
The Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier is very simple to clean and maintain. This is a key consideration when purchasing any air purifier system. If cleaning is expensive and time-consuming, I wouldn’t waste my time and even consider such a unit.
Here are a few examples of how cleanup is a breeze with the Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier…
The filter assembly (with 3 filters) is easily removed and cleans up with plain water or compressed air.
For the PCO Cell, using compressed air or a vacuum quickly removes any dust buildup.
These are the key areas to be cleaned and make this air purifier one of the easiest to maintain.
Plus, no harsh chemicals are required in any of the cleaning processes.
The Purification Plate (main component in Scalable Purification technology) can be cleaned using a 50/50 mix of warm water and clear ammonia.
Here’s a quick review and summary of how well the Mercola Pure
and Clear Air Purifier compares with other air purifiers.
Selection Criteria Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier ‘Other’ air purifiers
Optimizes multiple air purification technologies?
Yes – With a combination of PCO, Needlepoint Ionization, Scalable Purification, and Electrostatic Filtration.
Most indoor air purification systems only incorporate one technology, at most two technologies.
Implements controlled ozone generator?
Yes – Using the Scalable Purification technology and flexible square footage setup capability, ozone levels are kept within EPA guidelines.
Very few indoor air purification systems provide this type of control and flexibility to take advantage of nature’s own element for cleaning air.
Provides air cleaning coverage over 2000
Yes – Unit is scalable from areas that are 250 to up to 3000 square feet of purification coverage.
Some indoor purification units provide 2000 or more square feet of coverage. But not many allow you to set the area size you need.
Makes use of scalable purification?
Yes – As already detailed above, unit can be set to handle areas and rooms from 250 to 3000 sq. ft. Plus, small areas less than 250, can be handled as well.
Very few indoor air purification systems provide this scalable flexibility.
Is simple to setup and use?
Yes – This is one of the easiest units to setup and get running. And with the remote control, changes to settings are quick and simple to get done without touching the unit itself.
Some air purification systems can be easy to use. Others are not, and not many provide a remote control feature that allows you to make changes without having to touch or move the unit.
Cleans up easily
Yes – Very simple cleaning procedures are detailed in the Owners Manual. Use of harsh chemicals is not required.
Not all indoor air purifiers are easy to clean. Some may even require harsh chemicals to get the job done.
Is inexpensive to operate?
Yes – Due to the unit’s low energy use, it is very efficient. Cost to run the purifier 24 hours a day should only be around $0.09 per day or $33 annually (depending on where you live). When following the recommended cleaning schedule for the unit, annual part replacement costs should average around $0.23 a day.
Some air purification systems consume more energy and could cost as much as $0.55 a day to run 24 hours. That could amount to over $200 to run the unit annually. Some purifiers also may require more frequent part replacements with more expensive parts.
Incorporates universal power?
Yes – Unit can be used internationally and has been electrically and safety certified by the following: UL, CE, PSE, TUV, and EK.
Many units have been designed to work in specific countries but not necessarily around the world.
Provides a satisfaction guarantee?
Yes – A 30-day money back guarantee is provided.
Most competitive units provide a limited warranty, but few provide any sort of money-back guarantee.
Notes on cost and maintenance calculations: See spreadsheet (“Air Purifier Annual Maint Cost Analysis”) for how numbers were estimated. Verification of calculations and assumptions highly recommended from GreenTech.
By using the guidelines and tips provided above, you can take great strides toward improving the indoor air you breathe.
Plus, included in your overall plan should be the advanced technology purification unit, the Mercola Pure and Clear Air Purifier, to help reduce air pollutants and odors in your home or office.
There are many choices out there when it comes to selecting an air purification system, but I believe I’ve removed all the guess-work in trying to find the most effective unit… and the one that beats stringent selection criteria hands down.
Don’t settle for second best when it comes to the indoor air you breathe. This is simply one area you should not compromise. Order the Mercola Pure & Clear Air Purifier today so you can begin reducing pollutants and odors right away.
When it comes to diseases like cancer, an ounce of prevention
is worth infinite pounds of cure. Too often, there is no cure.
This air purification unit is worth its weight in gold with the four advanced technologies and incredible ease-of-use.
And with our 30-day 100% Satisfaction Guarantee (see details below), you can try the unit out without any real risk.
Pure & Clear Air Purifier
w/ FREE PCO Cell and Purification Plates
FREE 1 PCO Cell ($89.97 value) - Lasts 1 Full Year
FREE 1 Purification Plate ($24.99 value) - Lasts 1 Full Year
List Price: $913.96
Your Price: $332.00
You Save: $581.96 (64%)
* Free Shipping to US Only
* Due to California law, we cannot ship this product to CA addresses.
We are so confident that you will be more than satisfied with your purchase of our Pure and Clear Air Purifier, we are providing a 30 Day 100% Satisfaction Guarantee so you can try it risk free! | <urn:uuid:485c4931-79cc-4ed6-b499-b8de43391256> | {
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Though Jacob’s sons were all married, and had families of their own, yet, it should seem, they were still incorporated in one society, under the conduct and presidency of their father Jacob. We have here,
I. The orders he gave them to go and buy corn in Egypt, Gen. 42:1, 2. Observe, 1. The famine was grievous in the land of Canaan. It is observable that all the three patriarchs, to whom Canaan was the land of promise, met with famine in that land, which was not only to try their faith, whether they could trust God though he should slay them, though he should starve them, but to teach them to seek the better country, that is, the heavenly, Heb. 11:14-16. We have need of something to wean us from this world, and make us long for a better. 2. Still, when there was famine in Canaan, there was corn in Egypt. Thus Providence orders it, that one place should be a succour and supply to another; for we are all brethren. The Egyptians, the seed of accursed Ham, have plenty, when God’s blessed Israel want: thus God, in dispensing common favours, often crosses hands. Yet observe, The plenty Egypt now had was owing, under God, to Joseph’s prudence and care: if his brethren had not sold him into Egypt, but respected him according to his merits, who knows but he might have done the same thing for Jacob’s family which now he had done for Pharaoh, and the Egyptians might then have come to them to buy corn? but those who drive away from among them wise and good men know not what they do. 3. Jacob saw that there was corn in Egypt; he saw the corn that his neighbours had bought there and brought home. It is a spur to exertion to see where supplies are to be had, and to see others supplied. Shall others get food for their souls, and shall we starve while it is to be had? 4. He reproved his sons for delaying to provide corn for their families. Why do you look one upon another? Note, When we are in trouble and want, it is folly for us to stand looking upon one another, that is, to stand desponding and despairing, as if there were no hope, no help,—to stand disputing either which shall have the honour of going first or which shall have the safety of coming last,—to stand deliberating and debating what we shall do, and doing nothing,—to stand dreaming under a spirit of slumber, as if we had nothing to do, and to stand delaying, as if we had time at command. Let it never be said, “We left that to be done to-morrow which we could as well have done to-day.” 5. He quickened them to go to Egypt: Get you down thither. Masters of families must not only pray for daily bread for their families, and food convenient, but must lay out themselves with care and industry to provide it.
II. Their obedience to these orders, Gen. 42:3. They went down to buy corn; they did not send their servants, but very prudently went themselves, to lay out their own money. Let none think themselves too great nor too good to take pains. Masters of families should see with their own eyes, and take heed of leaving too much to servants. Only Benjamin went not with them, for he was his father’s darling. To Egypt they came, among others, and, having a considerable cargo of corn to buy, they were brought before Joseph himself, who probably expected they would come; and, according to the laws of courtesy, they bowed down themselves before him, Gen. 42:6. Now their empty sheaves did obeisance to his full one. Compare this with Isa. 60:14; Rev. 3:9. | <urn:uuid:6d0b8f76-1980-440b-b251-e9dbf2620852> | {
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The MIT Technology Review reports that China has successfully created the first Earth-to-space quantum network, which will allow scientists to start experimenting with entanglement, cryptography, and teleportation.
Back in the 1990s, scientists realized they could use this link to transmit quantum information from one point in the universe to another. The idea is to “download” all the information associated with one photon in one place and transmit it over an entangled link to another photon in another place.
This second photon then takes on the identity of the first. To all intents and purposes, it becomes the first photon. That’s the nature of teleportation and it has been performed many times in labs on Earth.
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|“The company is losing billions, has essentially no underlying value, and its business could be hammered overnight.”|
|Creepstream: Looking at Insecure Camera Feeds From Around the World|
|“A driverless electric truck began daily freight deliveries on a public road.”| | <urn:uuid:f60a356d-ea72-43c4-aab9-70de5fc663f7> | {
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My colleague and Fed Chair is in a hard place:
Normally, raising interest rates tightens the monetary supply, making money at T1 worth less than money at T2 and so on, which is the reverse of an inflationary trend. It is deflationary. Since money will be worth more tomorrow than today, up to the margin I will invest less money today relative to tomorrow. Normally this will place downward pressures on employment since I am not going to invest today what I can invest more profitably tomorrow. (Again, under inflationary conditions the reverse holds; since my capital will be worth less — will purchase less — tomorrow than today, I will purchase things today.) Normally.
One of the corollaries to this principle is that, generally, I only tighten the monetary supply when the economy is approaching full employment, which our economy is, thanks almost entirely to quantitative easing (QE) and historically low interest rates.
But this raises questions about why interest rates are so low in the first place. As everyone knows, interest rates are historically low because the Fed wants people to spend money and fuel economic growth. Still, many of us can remember times — the 1950s and 1960s — when the economy was expanding and interest rates still held within a normal range. Here is the Federal Funds rate since 1954 posted on Fred.StLouisFed.org this morning:
So, yes, it hit .93 in June 1958. But since December 2008 the Federal rate has never been anywhere near this high; and we have near full employment! So, what gives? Here’s what gives; real wages since April 2006 from this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics:
And here is how the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports wage growth since 1960.
Stagnant. Unlike a household budget, the discrete elements within an integrated national economy shape one another profoundly. If I do not maintain the road in front of my house, drivers will either avoid my street or break their axle. To maintain the road we develop equitable formulas whose underlying principle is that when all of our streets are maintained this improves the general welfare of everyone (U.S. Constitution, Preamble).
But when private investors discovered that purchasing policymakers at every level of government was an efficient way to reduce or eliminate their share of public costs, they began throwing huge sums of money into political races. Such sums were justified by the even larger sums of capital private investors saved by shifting public costs onto the shoulders of individuals without sufficient wealth to purchase policymakers. As their share of the public cost increased, working families were told that the fault lay in big government. Reduce the cost of government and working families would (1) receive higher wages and greater benefits from deregulated employers relieved of their tax and regulatory burden; and (2) would enjoy relatively higher wages because their wages would be taxed at a lower level and because products produced by non-taxed, deregulated industries would cost less. Which is the same as saying, when no one pays to maintain the road in front of my house, it will cost less for me to drive on it.
Obviously, since they could earn higher returns in a deregulated environment private investors had no interest in passing their higher earnings either onto workers or onto consumers. The long and short of it is that since 1970, roughly, working families have had to do more with less. Yes, working families are working their tail ends off since the burden of paying for literally everything falls on their shoulders. Thus the historically low unemployment. And, yes, private investors are doing really, really, really well, thank you, since they have been relieved of any responsibility for helping pay for public services. (How well? Compare working families in 1965 to working families in 2016. That’s how well.)
What the Fed Chair should do is tax wealth (my colleague Emmanuel Saez and French economist Thomas Piketty are right). But tax authority does not fall under the Fed. So Ms Yellen has but one tool. And since Congress is completely in the pocket of private investors, it has abdicated all responsibility to use any of the other tools available to public policy makers (other than criticizing big government).
Normally, at full employment, we should raise interest rates. But to mistake our economy for an economy that is overheating is like claiming that I am spending too much because Donald Trump bought another Casino. Investors are doing really, really, really well. But the average working family — the ones who will suffer most from a rate hike — are doing really, really, really badly. And they will do worse with the rate hike. Meanwhile, investors will simply move their capital elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the feeling is that since Ms Yellen is the only adult at home, she should do something. My fear is that she will do what normally would be right, but under the current circumstances is wrong. | <urn:uuid:18b41e19-dc0f-4aef-8876-092347f586e4> | {
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When choosing plants for the garden, you probably aren’t thinking about using them to dye fabric and fiber. That’s a mistake, Chris McLaughlin says in her new book, “A Garden to Dye For” (St. Lynn’s Press, $17.95).
Ms. McLaughlin, an avid gardener, blogger and author of several gardening books, first became interested in using plants in the dye pot when she started spinning wool into yarn.
“About 20 years ago, I ran across an article about natural Easter egg dyes. ... But once I started getting into dyeing fiber for spinning, I started to remember that plants could give us these colors.
“I realized that a lot of my colleagues never even thought about using their plants as a dye. If you look at the craft and fiber world, [dyeing information] wasn’t crossing over into the gardening world,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Northern California.
“I wanted gardeners to have another reason to grow plants.”
The good news is that there is no need to plant a special “dye” garden, as many of us already have lots of things in our gardens that will work in the dye pot. Some of the plants and the colors they provide:
Marigolds (yellow/green-yellow), hollyhocks (plum, purple maroon shades), onions (yellows and golds), and mint (yellows/greens).
Pokeberries (Phytolacca americana), a weed that’s common here, produces lovely shades of red, and common English ivy will render tan, green-yellow, brownish-maroon and gray-browns. Japanese maples, oaks, osage orange and juniper are common shrubs and trees that can be used to dye, too.
Leaves, roots, bark and flowers are all used in the pot, and different parts of the same plant sometimes give different colors. For instance, apple leaves provide beige, gold and gold-browns, while the tree’s bark will result in salmon, gold-burgundy and olive greens.
The colors you end up with in large part depend on what mordant or modifier is used in combination with the plant. A mordant is something such as alum or iron (easily made with rusty nails, wire, bolts, vinegar and water) that helps the color bind to fiber. A modifier is something that will brighten, darken or change the color of a dye bath. Vinegar, lemon juice and baking soda are just a few easily obtainable modifiers. Shade gradations are endless.
“I live in an oak forest. Depending on the time of year you take the leaves, it will change the color. Depending on the species, [I will get] very different colors. These experiments could go on forever,” said Ms. McLaughlin, noting that the acorns and bark also can provide natural dye.
And while all this can become very scientific, her book is not. She gives simple dye “recipes,” a list of materials needed and information on mordants and modifiers. And then she coaxes you onward by providing recipes for Easter egg dye and playdough that can be tinted with natural dyes.
The book also lists common plants that are useful for hand dyers along with a bunch of tips.
“I wanted to keep the book very basic so [readers] wouldn’t be afraid to go try it.”
She has used everything listed in the book in her own dye pots. Her family has learned to ask what’s on the stove when they come home — dinner or dye?
“I literally do not look at a plant the same way,” she said. “I wonder what color will come out. I’m just fascinated. I can’t get my hands on enough things [to try].”
Post-Gazette garden editor Susan Banks: [email protected] or 412-263-1516. | <urn:uuid:5ce68238-c916-44aa-9415-0552480fa0c3> | {
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- University of Virginia
- Physics Department
Atomic Number and
A Physical Science Activity
2003 Virginia SOLs
- identify the first ten elements based on their atomic number and atomic
mass using a simple model;
- understand the concept of isotopes and identify some common examples using
a simple model.
The atomic number of an element indicates the number of protons in
the nucleus of an atom of that element. For example, an atom of
carbon has 6 protons in its nucleus so its atomic number is 6. No
other element has atoms with 6 protons in their nuclei. The atomic
mass of an element indicates the total number of protons and neutrons
in the nucleus of an atom of that element. A proton and a neutron
have almost the same mass. Scientists use atomic mass units (amu) to
report the mass of atoms. Protons and neutrons each have a mass of 1
amu. On the periodic table, the atomic mass for carbon is listed as
12.011. If you round this figure down to 12, then it indicates that
carbon atoms have 12 protons and neutrons in their nuclei. Since we
know that carbon has 6 protons from its atomic number, then we can
calculate the number of neutrons by subtracting the atomic number
from the atomic mass (atomic mass - atomic number). In this case,
carbon has 6 neutrons in its nucleus. So why is the atomic mass of
carbon listed as 12.011 on the periodic table? Most elements consist
of two or more isotopes. Isotopes are atoms of the same element, but
with different atomic masses. Carbon has three isotopes: carbon-12,
carbon-13, and carbon-14. All of these isotopes of carbon have atoms
that contain 6 protons in their nuclei. The difference between these
isotopes is the number of neutrons in their nuclei. Carbon-12 atoms
have 6 neutrons, carbon-13 atoms have 7 neutrons, and carbon-14 atoms
have 8 neutrons. Any sample of carbon will contain all three
isotopes. This is why the atomic mass for carbon is 12.011. Which
isotope of carbon do you think is the most common?
- 250 ml flask
- 20-30 marbles (10-15 each of two different colors) (or colored candy such
as M&M's or Skittles)
- Periodic Table of Elements
Part I (Atomic Number and Atomic Mass)
- On a chalkboard, assign one of the colors of your marbles to
represent protons and the other color to represent neutrons.
- Explain to your students that the number of protons in the
nucleus determines the identity of an atom. This number is called
the atomic number.
- Place one of the marbles that represents a proton into the flask. Ask students
what kind of atom this represents and what its atomic number and atomic mass
are. (Hydrogen; 1; 1).
- Place another "proton marble" into the flask. Again ask students what kind
of atom this represents and what its atomic number is (helium; 2). Also ask
them if there is anything missing (the neutrons). At this point, ask students
how many neutrons helium should have (Helium has two neutrons). Go ahead and
place two "neutron marbles" into the flask. Ask students what helium's atomic
mass is. (Helium has two protons and two neutrons so its atomic mass is 4).
- Continue for the first 10 elements or further if you have
Part II (Isotopes)
- Place 6 "proton marbles" and 6 "neutron marbles" in a flask.
Have students identify the element. (Carbon, specifically
- Add another "neutron marble" to the flask. Again ask students
to identify the element. (It still is carbon, specifically
- Again add another "neutron marble" to the flask. One last
time, ask students to identify the element. (It still has 6
protons, so it is still carbon, specifically carbon-14). This is a
good time to discuss isotopes.
- Work through some other common examples of isotopes.
- Hydrogen-1, Hydrogen-2 (Deuterium), and Hydrogen-3 (Tritium)
- Helium-3 and Helium-4
- Nitrogen-14 and Nitrogen-15
- Oxygen-16, Oxygen-17, and Oxygen-18
Students with special needs
Click here for information
on laboratories with students with special needs. | <urn:uuid:dbcc4b64-9cda-4b27-ab0a-34237090f845> | {
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Interactive Animation of Seafloor Spreading and Magnetic Field Reversals
Earth's magnetic field reverses itself from time to time; North becomes South and South becomes North. Lava that cools and becomes rock at a given time in Earth's history stores a record of our planet's magnetic polarity at the time of the rock's formation. Rocks on the seafloor on either side of a mid-ocean spreading ridge preserve a record of the Earth's magnetic field over time. The discovery of this phenomenon was an important bit of evidence that helped confirm the theory of plate tectonics.
The interactive animation below illustrates this concept. Drag the compass, which represents a magnetometer, to the right and left. Can you find places where the magnetism of the rocks reverses? This section of seafloor is in the North Atlantic Ocean near Iceland. The rate of plate movement in this area is about 25 millimeters (1 inch) per year, or about 25 km (16 miles) every million years. Can you determine when the field reversals occurred?
Click the "Distance" checkbox to view a distance scale. Click the "Age" checkbox to see the age of the seafloor on either side of the ridge.
(Note: If you cannot see the animation below, or it is not working properly, you may need to download the latest Flash player.)
On this section of the seafloor, the history of Earth's magnetic field that is revealed includes the following periods:
- Brunhes normal - present time to 730 thousand years ago
- Matuyama reverse - 0.73 to 2.48 million years ago (ma)
- Gauss normal - 2.48 to 3.40 ma
- Gilbert reverse - 3.40 to 5.3 ma
If you want to build a physical model of this system, check out the seafloor spreading section of our "Magnetometer Extensions" activity. | <urn:uuid:1f4e3ae6-cb55-4fd2-9c2f-ebcb20e3901e> | {
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Is the Eucharistic Host bread? Or is It the Body of Christ? Can we call It 'Bread' after the Consecration? I remember long explanations given by myself to parishioners in Devon about how we should not talk about "taking the bread and wine". But there is a philological difficulty.
People are not always aware that the Latin (also the Greek) word means LOAF and only sometimes the substantia of BREAD.
There are two problems about translating PANIS simply as BREAD:
(1) One loses the meaning of phrases like UNUS PANIS, pointing as they do to a parallelism between the oneness of Christ's Eucharistic and Mystical Bodies. You will remember the very early Patristic topos of the symbolism expressed by the making of the one loaf from the innumerable grains of wheat.
(2) Referring to the consecrated element as "bread" suggests, misleadingly, that it is bread rather than Christ's Body (in Aristotelian-Thomistic terms, that the ousia or substantia of bread remains).
I don't think one can incorporate "loaf" into English renderings of liturgical texts, but I think it is a good idea for the thoughtful to be aware of this problem. | <urn:uuid:91ae4c7e-6f26-4a8e-bfb0-42b88f3bfccf> | {
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This group of flowering cactus is native to the Southwestern United States, Central, Eastern and Northern Mexico. The body of the cactus is round and squat and may have ribs or warts, depending on the species. Diurnal flowers are showy, large, funnel-shaped, and grow from depressions on the crown. The thelocactus species are often grown as houseplants. Soil should be gritty and well-drained. If growing one of the thelocactus species, do so in a commercial cactus potting mix. From midspring to early fall, water moderately, but keep dry during the remainder of the year. During the growing season, fertilize 2 or 3 times with a water soluble fertilizer. May divide and replant or repot offsets in early summer.Important Info : Grow as houseplant or in a greenhouse where not hardy.
Google Plant Images: click here!
Size:Height: 0 ft. to 0 ft.
Width: 0 ft. to 0 ft.
Plant Category:cacti and other succulents,
Plant Characteristics:low maintenance,
Foliage Characteristics:coarse leaves,
Flower Color:purples, reds, yellows,
Tolerances:deer, drought, heat & humidity, rabbits,
Bloomtime Range: Early Summer to Early Fall
USDA Hardiness Zone:10 to 11
AHS Heat Zone:Not defined for this plant
Light Range:Sun to Full Sun
pH Range:6.5 to 8.5
Soil Range:Sand to Mostly Sand
Water Range:Arid to Dry
FertilizingHow-to : Fertilization for Established Plants
Established plants can benefit from fertilization. Take a visual inventory of your landscape. Trees need to be fertilized every few years. Shrubs and other plants in the landscape can be fertilized yearly. A soil test can determine existing nutrient levels in the soil. If one or more nutrients is low, a specific instead of an all-purpose fertilizer may be required. Fertilizers that are high in N, nitrogen, will promote green leafy growth. Excess nitrogen in the soil can cause excessive vegetative growth on plants at the expense of flower bud development. It is best to avoid fertilizing late in the growing season. Applications made at that time can force lush, vegetative growth that will not have a chance to harden off before the onset of cold weather.
How-to : Fertilizing Houseplants
Houseplants may be fertilized with: 1. water-soluble, quick release fertilizers; 2. temperature controlled slow-release fertilizers; 3. or organic fertilizers such as fish emulsion. Water soluble fertilizers are used every two weeks or per label instructions. Controlled, slow-release fertilizers are carefully worked into the soil usually only once during the growing season or per label directions. For organic fertilizers, such as fish emulsion, follow label directions. Allow houseplants to 'rest' during the winter months; stop fertilizing in late October and resume feeding in late February.
LightConditions : Light Conditions
Unless a site is completely exposed, light conditions will change during the day and even during the year. The northern and eastern sides of a house receive the least amount of light, with the northern exposure being the shadiest. The western and southern sides of a house receive the most light and are considered the hottest exposures due to intense afternoon sun.
You will notice that sun and shade patterns change during the day. The western side of a house may even be shady due to shadows cast by large trees or a structure from an adjacent property. If you have just bought a new home or just beginning to garden in your older home, take time to map sun and shade throughout the day. You will get a more accurate feel for your site's true light conditions.
Conditions : Full Sun for Houseplants
Don't underestimate the light needs of houseplants that require full sun -- they are often tropicals. Place them within 2 feet of a southern exposure window, or at the very minimum, a room that stays bright. Bright rooms have light colored walls, allowing for light reflection.
Conditions : Dry Houseplants
Houseplants that do not require much water, or dry houseplants, should be allowed to dry out completely between waterings, especially in winter. When you do water, make sure that the soil is completely saturated and excess water runs out the bottom of the pot. Never water just a little bit as mineral salts will build up in soil. It is not uncommon for many plants that require moisture during the growing season to need less during the winter months when the plant is dormant. Cacti are probably the most well known drought tolerant plants, but even they need occasional waterings.
Conditions : Bright Light for Houseplants
Houseplants requiring bright light should be placed within 2 feet of an eastern or western exposure window or within 2 to 5 feet of a southern exposure window.
Conditions : Light and Plant Selection
For best plant performance, it is desirable to match the correct plant with the available light conditions. Right plant, right place! Plants which do not receive sufficient light may become pale in color, have fewer leaves and a "leggy" stretched-out appearance. Also expect plants to grow slower and have fewer blooms when light is less than desirable. It is possible to provide supplemental lighting for indoor plants with lamps. Plants can also receive too much light. If a shade loving plant is exposed to direct sun, it may wilt and/or cause leaves to be sunburned or otherwise damaged.
Conditions : Full Sun
Full Sun is defined as exposure to more than 6 hours of continuous, direct sun per day.
WateringProblems : Waterlogged Soil and Solutions
Waterlogged soil occurs when more water is added to soil than can drain out in a reasonable amount of time. This can be a severe problem where water tables are high or soils are compacted. Lack of air space in waterlogged soil makes it almost impossible for soil to drain. Few plants, except for bog plants, can tolerate these conditions. Drainage must be improved if you are not satisfied with bog gardening. Over-watered plants have the same wilted leaves as under-watered plants. Fungi such as Phytophthora and Pythium affect vascular systems, which cause wilt.
If the problem is only on the surface, it maybe diverted to a drainage ditch. If drainage is poor where water table is high, install an underground drainage system. You should contact a contractor for this. If underground drains already exist, check to see if they are blocked.
French drains are another option. French drains are ditches that have been filled with gravel. It is okay to plant sod on top of them. More obtrusive, but a good solution where looks aren't as important, think of the French drain as a ditch filled with gravel. Ditches should be 3 to 4 feet deep and have sloping sides.
A soakway is a gravel filled pit where water is diverted to via underground pipes. This works well on sites that have compacted soil. Your soakway should be about 6'wide and deep and filled with gravel or crushed stone, topped with sand and sodded or seeded.
Keep in mind that it is illegal to divert water onto other people's property. If you do not feel that you can implement a workable solution on your own, call a contractor.
Tools : Watering Aides
No gardener depends 100% on natural rainfall. Even the most water conscious garden appreciates the proper hose, watering can or wand.
- Watering Cans: Whether you choose plastic of galvanized makes no difference, but do look for generous capacity and a design that is balanced when filled with water. A 2 gallon can (which holds 18 lbs. of water) is preferred by most gardeners and is best suited for outdoor use. Indoor cans should be relatively smaller with narrower spouts and roses (the filter head).
- Watering Hose: When purchasing a hose, look for one that is double-walled, as it will resist kinking. Quick coupler links are nice to have on ends of hoses to make altering length fast. To extend the life of your hose, keep it wound around a reel and stored in a shady area. Prior to winter freezes, drain hose.
- Sprayers: Are commonly thought of as devices for applying chemicals, but can really be a step saver for watering houseplants or small pots of annuals rather that dragging out a hose or making numerous trips with a watering can. The backpack sprayer is best suited for this. Take care not to use any kind of chemical in tanks used for watering!
- Sprinklers: Attached to the ends of garden hoses, these act as an economical irrigation system. Standing Spike Sprinklers are usually intended for lawns and deliver water in a circular pattern. Rotating Sprinklers deliver a circle of water and are perfect for lawns, shrubs and flower beds. Pulse-jet sprinklers cover large areas of ground in a pulsating, circular pattern. The head usually sits up on a tall stem, except for when watering lawns. Oscillating sprinklers are best for watering at ground level in a rectangular pattern.
Conditions : Arid
Arid, is defined as the complete absence of water.
Conditions : Dry
Dry is defined as an area that regularly receives water, but is fast draining. This results in a soil that is often dry to a depth of 18 inches.
Conditions : Dry Plants
Dry plants do not tolerate water logged soils and require very little water. Many cacti and succulents fall into this group. Water only when soil becomes completely dry. When watering, do so slowly for a long period of time so that topsoil does not wash away and so that soil has ample time to become moist enough to accept water. It is much better to water for a long time and less frequently allowing soil to dry out completely between waterings.
PlantingHow-to : Preparing Garden Beds
Use a soil testing kit to determine the acidity or alkalinity of the soil before beginning any garden bed preparation. This will help you determine which plants are best suited for your site. Check soil drainage and correct drainage where standing water remains. Clear weeds and debris from planting areas and continue to remove weeds as soon as they come up.
A week to 10 days before planting, add 2 to 4 inches of aged manure or compost and work into the planting site to improve fertility and increase water retention and drainage. If soil composition is weak, a layer of topsoil should be considered as well. No matter if your soil is sand or clay, it can be improved by adding the same thing: organic matter. The more, the better; work deep into the soil. Prepare beds to an 18 inch deep for perennials. This will seem like a tremendous amount of work now, but will greatly pay off later. Besides, this is not something that is easily done later, once plants have been established.
How-to : Preparing Containers
Containers are excellent when used as an ornamental feature, a planting option when there is little or no soil to plant in, or for plants that require a soil type not found in the garden or when soil drainage in the garden is inferior. If growing more than one plant in a container, make sure that all have similar cultural requirements. Choose a container that is deep and large enough to allow root development and growth as well as proportional balance between the fully developed plant and the container. Plant large containers in the place you intend them to stay. All containers should have drainage holes. A mesh screen, broken clay pot pieces(crock) or a paper coffee filter placed over the hole will keep soil from washing out. The potting soil you select should be an appropriate mix for the plants you have chosen. Quality soils (or soil-less medias) absorb moisture readily and evenly when wet. If water runs off soil upon initial wetting, this is an indicator that your soil may not be as good as you think.
Prior to filling a container with soil, wet potting soil in the bag or place in a tub or wheelbarrow so that it is evenly moist. Fill container about halfway full or to a level that will allow plants, when planted, to be just below the rim of the pot. Rootballs should be level with soil line when project is complete. Water well.
How-to : Potting Indoor Plants
Make sure that the plant you have chosen is suitable for the conditions you are able to provide it: that it will have enough light, space, and a temperature it will like. Remember that the area right next to a window will be colder than the rest of the room.
Indoor plants need to be transplanted into a larger container periodically, or they become pot/root-bound and their growth is retarded. Water the plant well before starting, so the soil will hold the root ball together when you remove it from the pot. If you have trouble getting the plant out of the pot, try running a blade around the edge of the pot, and gently whacking the sides to loosen the soil.
Always use fresh soil when transplanting your indoor plant. Fill around the plant gently with soil, being careful not to pack too tightly -- you want air to be able to get to the roots. After the plant is in the new pot, don't fertilize right away... this will encourage the roots to fill in their new home.
The size pot you choose is important too. Select one that is not more than about 1 inch greater in diameter. Remember, many plants prefer being somewhat pot bound. Always start with a clean pot!
How-to : Repot
Now is the right time to repot.
ProblemsPest : Mealybugs
Small, wingless, dull-white, soft-bodied insects that produce a waxy powdery covering. They have piercing/sucking mouth parts that suck the sap out of plant tissue. Mealybugs often look like small pieces of cotton and they tend to congregate where leaves and stems branch. They attack a wide range of plants. The young tend to move around until they find a suitable feeding spot, then they hang out in colonies and feed. Mealybugs can weaken a plant leading to yellow foliage and leaf drop. They also produce a sweet substance called honeydew (coveted by ants) which can lead to an unattractive black surface fungal growth called sooty mold.
Prevention and Control: Isolate infested plants from those that are not. Consult your local garden center professional or the Cooperative Extension office in your county for a legal insecticide/chemical recommendation. Encourage natural enemies such as lady beetles in the garden to help reduce population levels of mealy bugs.
MiscellaneousConditions : Deer Tolerant
There are no plants that are 100% deer resistant, but many that are deer tolerant. There are plants that deer prefer over others. You will find that what deer will or will not eat varies in different parts of the country. A lot of it has to do with how hungry they are. Most deer will sample everything at least once, decide if they like it or not and return if favorable. A fence is the good deer barrier. You may go for a really tall one (7 to 8 feet), or try 2 parallel fences, (4 to 5 feet apart). Use a wire mesh fence rather than board, since deer are capable of wiggling through a 12 inch space.
Conditions : Rabbit Tolerant
As cute as they are, rabbits can really damage a vegetable garden. Young, tender lettuce plants seem to be their favorite. If a free-roaming dog is not a possibility for you, consider installing raised vegetable beds and covering tender shoots with netting. If you have ample room, you can opt to plant enough for you and the bunnies. Scents don't always repel animals, as they get used to them and are often washed off in the rain.
Glossary : Container Plant
A plant that is considered to be a good container plant is one that does not have a tap root, but rather a more confined, fibrous root system. Plants that usually thrive in containers are slow- growing or relatively small in size. Plants are more adaptable than people give them credit for. Even large growing plants can be used in containers when they are very young, transplanted to the ground when older. Many woody ornamentals make wonderful container plants as well as annuals, perennials, vegetables, herbs, and bulbs.
Glossary : Low Maintenance
Low maintenance does not mean no maintenance. It does mean that once a plant is established, very little needs to be done in the way of water, fertilizing, pruning, or treatment in order for the plant to remain healthy and attractive. A well-designed garden, which takes your lifestyle into consideration, can greatly reduce maintenance.
Glossary : Southwest
Southwest refers to plants native to parts of, or all of, the southwestern regions of Arizona, New Mexico, southwestern Colorado, southern Utah, Nevada, western Texas, southeastern California.
Glossary : Sand
Sand in the purest sense, has no organic matter, a large particle size between 1.0 - 2.0 mm, and drains rapidly, with no water holding capacity. White to light gray in color. Does not form a ball when squeezed in hand, unless damp or wet, easily falls apart.
Glossary : Mostly Sand
Mostly Sand is soil that: drains rapidly, has some organic matter, and a particle size between .50 - 1.0 mm. Light gray to gray in color. Rarely forms a ball when squeezed in the hand unless damp or wet.
Glossary : Sandy Loam
Sandy Loam refers to a soil that drains well, with excellent air space, and evenly crumbled texture when squeezed in the hand. A good workable garden soil that benefits from added fertilizer and proper watering. Dark gray to gray-brown in color.
Glossary : Cacti and Succulents
Cacti and Succulents are considered to be one of the most specialized groups of plants that exists. Everything about their form, roots and lack of leaves is aimed towards conserving water. Some cacti and succulent roots are shallow, barely beneath the soils surface, others deeply penetrating.
Glossary : pH
pH, means the potential of Hydrogen, is the measure of alkalinity or acidity. In horticulture, pH refers to the pH of soil. The scale measures from 0, most acid, to 14, most alkaline. Seven is neutral. Most plants prefer a range between 5.5 and about 6.7, an acid range, but there are plenty of other plants that like soil more alkaline, or above 7. A pH of 7 is where the plant can most easily absorb the most nutrients in the soil. Some plants prefer more or less of certain nutrients, and therefore do better at a certain pH.
Glossary : Soil Types
A soil type is defined by granule size, drainage, and amount of organic material in the soil. The three main soil types are sand, loam and clay. Sand has the largest particle size, no organic matter, little to no fertility, and drains rapidly. Clay, at the opposite end of the spectrum, has the smallest particle size, can be rich in organic matter, fertility and moisture, but is often unworkable because particles are held together too tightly, resulting in poor drainage when wet, or is brick-like when dry. The optimum soil type is loam, which is the happy median between sand and clay: It is high in organic matter, nutrient-rich, and has the perfect water holding capacity.
You will often hear loam referred to as a sandy loam (having more sand, yet still plenty of organic matter) or a clay loam (heavier on the clay, yet workable with good drainage.) The addition of organic matter to either sand or clay will result in a loamy soil. Still not sure if your soil is a sand, clay, or loam? Try this simple test. Squeeze a handfull of slightly moist, not wet, soil in your hand. If it forms a tight ball and does not fall apart when gently tapped with a finger, your soil is more than likely clay. If soil does not form a ball or crumbles before it is tapped, it is sand to very sandy loam. If soil forms a ball, then crumbles readily when lightly tapped, it's a loam. Several quick, light taps could mean a clay loam.
Glossary : Tolerant
Tolerant refers to a plant's ability to tolerate exposure to an external condition(s). It does not mean that the plant thrives or prefers this situation, but is able to adapt and continue its life cycle.
Glossary : Drought Tolerant
Very few plants, except for those naturally found in desert situations, can tolerate arid soils, but there are plants that seem to be more drought tolerant than others. Plants that are drought tolerant still require moisture, so don't think that they can go for extended period without any water. Drought tolerant plants are often deep rooted, have waxy or thick leaves that conserve water, or leaf structures that close to minimize transpiration. All plants in droughty situations benefit from an occasional deep watering and a 2-3 inch thick layer of mulch. Drought tolerant plants are the backbone of xeriphytic landscaping. | <urn:uuid:10bd8a6d-ab88-4d4b-9f1e-32279e382e64> | {
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Pediatricians are very concerned about the growing number of overweight children for a number of reasons. Not surprisingly, obesity can limit a child’s physical activity on the playground and athletic field. But more worrisome, there are many health risks associated with being too heavy.
For example, one recent report stated that among obese children 5 to 10 years of age, 60% already had at least one risk factor for cardiovascular disease, such as high cholesterol levels, high triglycerides (another type of blood fat), and high blood pressure. Cardiovascular-related conditions aren’t the only health problems associated with childhood obesity.
Diabetes, for example, is another increasing concern among pediatricians and parents of overweight children. That’s because a fast-growing number of newly diagnosed cases of childhood diabetes are the so-called type 2 form of the disease. Type 2 diabetes used to be called adult-onset because it almost always affected adults, but now this form of diabetes is increasingly evolving into a disease of children and teenagers, as well. In fact, recent research has shown that between 25% and 60% of newly diagnosed diabetes in children is now type 2. Particularly if your child is obese and inactive, he has an increased risk of developing this form of the disease.
To make matters worse, if your child is overweight, he is much more likely to become an overweight adult. The statistics are unsettling—about 20% of obese 4-year-olds will grow up to become obese adults. That figure rises to 80% among teenagers who are overweight. And once your child is an adult, he’ll be more likely to have the same obesity-related health problems from high blood pressure to joint problems, as well as a greater risk of death as his weight increases. The bottom line is that obesity can cause a lifetime of very serious health concerns.
One other point is important to make: Some children become so obsessed with their excess pounds and have such a distorted body image that they begin to try unusual diets, skip meals, or eliminate food groups, further adding to unhealthy eating and poor nutrition. Rarely, some children can become so focused on their weight and body image that they may develop eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia, all because they’re trying to get their weight under control in an unhealthy way.
Your youngster’s day-to-day environment—at home, at school, at friends’ homes, and virtually everywhere else he spends time—can affect his risk of becoming and remaining overweight. The fast-food restaurants where he eats, TV programs he watches, and video games he plays can contribute to his likelihood of developing obesity. For example, the risk of being overweight is more than 4 1⁄2 times greater for children who watch more than 5 hours of TV a day, compared with children who watch no more than 2 hours a day. That’s because children are not only inactive while watching television, but they also tend to snack at the same time, often eating high-fat foods like cookies or potato chips rather than an apple or a pear. Even so, except for sleeping, most US children spend more time (outside of school hours) watching TV than participating in any other activity. | <urn:uuid:727934e9-39c2-4bb1-9d06-175459dd0bf1> | {
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A new study from MIT looks at what happens when the SIRT1 protein is missing from adipose tissue in mice, finding that SIRT1 protects from inflammation and obesity and forestalls the progression to metabolic dysfunction under dietary stress and aging.
A protein that slows aging in mice and other animals also protects against the ravages of a high-fat diet, including diabetes, according to a new MIT study.
MIT biology professor Leonard Guarente ’74 discovered SIRT1’s longevity-boosting properties more than a decade ago and has since explored its role in many different body tissues. In his latest study, appearing in the Aug. 8 print edition of the journal Cell Metabolism, he looked at what happens when the SIRT1 protein is missing from adipose cells, which make up body fat.
When put on a high-fat diet, mice lacking the protein started to develop metabolic disorders, such as diabetes, much sooner than normal mice given a high-fat diet.
“We see them as being poised for metabolic dysfunction,” says Guarente, the Novartis Professor of Biology at MIT. “You’ve removed one of the safeguards against metabolic decline, so if you now give them the trigger of a high-fat diet, they’re much more sensitive than the normal mouse.”
The finding raises the possibility that drugs that enhance SIRT1 activity may help protect against obesity-linked diseases.
Guarente first discovered the effects of SIRT1 and other sirtuin proteins while studying yeast in the 1990s. Since then, these proteins have been shown to coordinate a variety of hormonal networks, regulatory proteins and other genes, helping to keep cells alive and healthy.
In recent years, Guarente and his colleagues have deleted the gene from organs such as brain and liver to pinpoint its effects more precisely. Their previous work has revealed that in the brain, SIRT1 protects against the neurodegeneration seen in Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
SIRT1 is a protein that removes acetyl groups from other proteins, modifying their activity. The possible targets of this deacetylation are numerous, which is likely what gives SIRT1 its broad range of protective powers, Guarente says.
In the Cell Metabolism study, the researchers analyzed the hundreds of genes that were turned on in mice lacking SIRT1 but fed a normal diet, and found that they were almost identical to those turned on in normal mice fed a high-fat diet.
This suggests that in normal mice, development of metabolic disorders is a two-step process. “The first step is inactivation of SIRT1 by the high-fat diet, and the second step is all the bad things that follow that,” Guarente says.
The researchers investigated how this occurs and found that in normal mice given a high-fat diet, the SIRT1 protein is cleaved by an enzyme called caspase-1, which is induced by inflammation. It’s already known that high-fat diets can provoke inflammation, though it’s unclear exactly how that happens, Guarente says. “What our study says is that once you induce the inflammatory response, the consequence in the fat cells is that SIRT1 will be cleaved,” he says.
That finding “provides a nice molecular mechanism to understand how inflammatory signals in adipose tissue could lead to rapid derangement of metabolic tissue,” says Anthony Suave, an associate professor of pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medical College, who was not part of the research team.
Drugs that target that inflammatory process, as well as drugs that enhance sirtuin activity, might have some beneficial therapeutic effect against obesity-related disorders, Suave says.
The researchers also found that as normal mice aged, they were more susceptible to the effects of a high-fat diet than younger mice, suggesting that they lose the protective effects of SIRT1 as they age. Aging is known to increase inflammation, so Guarente is now studying whether that age-related inflammation also provokes SIRT1 loss.
This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Glenn Medical Foundation and the American Heart Association.
Source: Anne Trafton, MIT News Office
Image: M. Scott Brauer
Reprinted with permission of MIT News | <urn:uuid:8cba8d46-086d-4774-8964-41e096600ab0> | {
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The first Prime Minister of Canada. Elected in 1867.
A tax which the Chinese people had to pay if they wished to come and live in Canada.
Global war in Europe.
Allied forces invade Normandy.
Canada’s right of freedom law.
Global nuclear disarmament.
Canadian troops were sent to Afghanistan for peace keeping duties, and to train the Afghan army to defend against Al-Qaeda, and Taliban.
Brought down the Canadian beef exporting market.
The Canadians broke a Canadian Gold medal record.
The production of pennies are discontinued due to pennies posting more to make than they’re worth. | <urn:uuid:ffb20152-7246-4508-866b-9b488f0cd247> | {
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Conservationists sue for polar bears
Federal decision on 'threatened' status is 2 months overdue
Three conservation groups sued the Department of the Interior on Monday for missing a deadline on a decision to list polar bears as threatened because of the loss of Arctic sea ice.
A decision was due Jan. 9, one year after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the animals as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Agency Director Dale Hall said in January that officials needed a few more weeks to make a decision. But two months later, no decision has been announced.
Polar bears depend on sea ice for hunting seals, denning and giving birth. Conservation groups say the loss of sea ice due to global warming is accelerating.
"Doing nothing means extinction for the polar bear. That's what the administration is doing - nothing," said Kassie Siegel, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity and the lead author of the 2005 petition that sought the listing.
Hall said in January he did not like missing the deadline, but, "it is far more important to us to do it right and have it explained properly to the public."
Bruce Woods, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokesman in Anchorage, said he could not comment on pending legal action. "We are still working as fast as we can to get the decision announced," he said.
Alaska has the only two polar bear populations in the United States: the Beaufort Sea group off the state's north coast and the Chukchi Sea group, shared with Russia, off Alaska's northwest coast.
Summer sea ice in Alaska last year shrunk to about 1.65 million square miles, the lowest level in 38 years of satellite record-keeping and nearly 40 percent less ice than the long-term average between 1979 and 2000. Some climate models have predicted the Arctic will be free of summer sea ice by 2030. A U.S. Geological Survey study predicted polar bears in Alaska could be wiped out by 2050.
A decision to list polar bears due to global warming could trigger consequences beyond Alaska.
Opponents fear a recovery plan would subject projects such as new power plants to review if they generate greenhouse gases that add to warming in the Arctic. Conservation groups hope that's the case.
"We believe if and when the polar bear is listed, all federal agencies approving major sources of greenhouse gas emissions will have to look at ways to reduce those emissions to protect polar bears," Siegel said.
Last week, the Interior Department's inspector general said it was beginning a preliminary investigation into why the department had not made a decision.
The inquiry was opened in response to environmental groups and would determine whether a full-fledged investigation is warranted, the department said. | <urn:uuid:e63189fe-b35a-4f45-b238-08f1bb2726ec> | {
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Medically reviewed: March 25, 2018
Commonly used brand name(s)
In the U.S.
Available Dosage Forms:
Therapeutic Class: Antipsychotic
Pharmacologic Class: Dopamine Antagonist
Chemical Class: Diphenylbutylpiperidine
Uses For pimozide
Pimozide is used to treat symptoms of Tourette's syndrome. It is used only for patients with severe symptoms who cannot take or have not been helped by other medicines (e.g., haloperidol).
Pimozide works in the central nervous system to help control the vocal outbursts and uncontrolled, repeated movements of the body (tics) that may interfere with the patient's normal life. It will not completely cure the tics, but will help to reduce their number and severity.
pimozide is available only with your doctor's prescription.
Before Using pimozide
In deciding to use a medicine, the risks of taking the medicine must be weighed against the good it will do. This is a decision you and your doctor will make. For pimozide, the following should be considered:
Tell your doctor if you have ever had any unusual or allergic reaction to pimozide or any other medicines. Also tell your health care professional if you have any other types of allergies, such as to foods, dyes, preservatives, or animals. For non-prescription products, read the label or package ingredients carefully.
Appropriate studies performed to date have not demonstrated pediatric-specific problems that would limit the usefulness of pimozide in children 12 years of age and older. However, safety and efficacy have not been established in children younger than 12 years of age.
No information is available on the relationship of age to the effects of pimozide in geriatric patients.
|All Trimesters||C||Animal studies have shown an adverse effect and there are no adequate studies in pregnant women OR no animal studies have been conducted and there are no adequate studies in pregnant women.|
There are no adequate studies in women for determining infant risk when using this medication during breastfeeding. Weigh the potential benefits against the potential risks before taking this medication while breastfeeding.
Interactions with Medicines
Although certain medicines should not be used together at all, in other cases two different medicines may be used together even if an interaction might occur. In these cases, your doctor may want to change the dose, or other precautions may be necessary. When you are taking pimozide, it is especially important that your healthcare professional know if you are taking any of the medicines listed below. The following interactions have been selected on the basis of their potential significance and are not necessarily all-inclusive.
Using pimozide with any of the following medicines is not recommended. Your doctor may decide not to treat you with this medication or change some of the other medicines you take.
- Aripiprazole Lauroxil
- Arsenic Trioxide
- Inotuzumab Ozogamicin
- Sodium Phosphate
- Sodium Phosphate, Dibasic
- Sodium Phosphate, Monobasic
Using pimozide with any of the following medicines is usually not recommended, but may be required in some cases. If both medicines are prescribed together, your doctor may change the dose or how often you use one or both of the medicines.
- Morphine Sulfate Liposome
- Secretin Human
Using pimozide with any of the following medicines may cause an increased risk of certain side effects, but using both drugs may be the best treatment for you. If both medicines are prescribed together, your doctor may change the dose or how often you use one or both of the medicines.
- Betel Nut
Interactions with Food/Tobacco/Alcohol
Certain medicines should not be used at or around the time of eating food or eating certain types of food since interactions may occur. Using alcohol or tobacco with certain medicines may also cause interactions to occur. The following interactions have been selected on the basis of their potential significance and are not necessarily all-inclusive.
Using pimozide with any of the following is usually not recommended, but may be unavoidable in some cases. If used together, your doctor may change the dose or how often you use pimozide, or give you special instructions about the use of food, alcohol, or tobacco.
- Grapefruit Juice
Other Medical Problems
The presence of other medical problems may affect the use of pimozide. Make sure you tell your doctor if you have any other medical problems, especially:
- Blood or bone marrow problems (e.g., agranulocytosis) or
- Breast cancer, history of or
- Heart disease or
- Intestinal or bowel problems (e.g., blockage) or
- Leukopenia or neutropenia (low number of white blood cells) or
- Narrow angle glaucoma or
- Pituitary gland problems (e.g., tumors) or
- Seizures, history of or
- Urinary tract problems (e.g., blockage or difficult urination)—Use with caution. May make these conditions worse.
- Central nervous system depression or
- Heart rhythm problems (e.g., arrhythmia, congenital long QT syndrome), history of or
- Hypokalemia (low potassium in the blood) or
- Hypomagnesemia (low magnesium in the blood) or
- Tics other than those caused by Tourette's syndrome—Should not be used in patients with these conditions.
- Kidney disease or
- Liver disease—Higher blood levels of pimozide may occur, increasing the chance of side effects.
Proper Use of pimozide
Take pimozide exactly as directed by your doctor to benefit your condition as much as possible. Do not take more of it, do not take it more often, and do not take it for a longer time than your doctor ordered. To do so may increase the chance of side effects.
Do not eat grapefruit or drink grapefruit juice while you are taking pimozide. Grapefruit and grapefruit juice may change the amount of pimozide that is absorbed in the body.
It is best to take pimozide at bedtime.
The dose of pimozide will be different for different patients. Follow your doctor's orders or the directions on the label. The following information includes only the average doses of pimozide. If your dose is different, do not change it unless your doctor tells you to do so.
The amount of medicine that you take depends on the strength of the medicine. Also, the number of doses you take each day, the time allowed between doses, and the length of time you take the medicine depend on the medical problem for which you are using the medicine.
- For oral dosage form (tablets):
- For Tourette's syndrome:
- Adults—At first, 1 to 2 milligrams (mg) per day, taken in divided doses. Your doctor may increase your dose every other day as needed. However, the dose is usually not more than 10 mg per day.
- Children 12 years of age and older—Dose is based on body weight and must be determined by your doctor. The starting dose is usually 0.05 milligram (mg) per kilogram (kg) of body weight per day. Your doctor may increase your dose after 3 days as needed. However, the dose is usually not more than 10 mg per day.
- Children younger than 12 years of age—Use and dose must be determined by the doctor.
- For Tourette's syndrome:
If you miss a dose of pimozide, take it as soon as possible. However, if it is almost time for your next dose, skip the missed dose and go back to your regular dosing schedule. Do not double doses.
Store the medicine in a closed container at room temperature, away from heat, moisture, and direct light. Keep from freezing.
Keep out of the reach of children.
Do not keep outdated medicine or medicine no longer needed.
Ask your healthcare professional how you should dispose of any medicine you do not use.
Precautions While Using pimozide
It is very important that your doctor should check the progress of you or your child at regular visits to make sure pimozide is working properly. Blood tests may be needed to check for unwanted effects. Your doctor may want also to check your heart rhythm while you are using pimozide.
You should not use pimozide if you or your child are using the following medicines: arsenic trioxide (Trisenox®), cisapride (Propulsid®), dolasetron mesylate (Anzemet®), droperidol (Dridol®, Inapsine®), levomethadyl acetate (Orlaam®), methylphenidate (Ritalin®), pemoline (Cylert®), pentamidine (Nebupent®), probucol, tacrolimus (Prograf®), zileuton (Zyflo®), amphetamines (such as Desoxyn®, Dexedrine®), medicine for heart rhythm problems (such as amiodarone, disopyramide, dofetilide, procainamide, quinidine, sotalol, Betapace®, Cardioquin®, Cordarone®, Norpace®, Procanbid®, Quinaglute®, or Tikosyn®), medicine for depression (such as amitriptyline, citalopram, escitalopram, fluoxetine, fluvoxamine, nefazodone, nortriptyline, paroxetine, sertraline, Celexa®, Elavil®, Lexapro™, Luvox®, Pamelor®, Paxil®, Prozac®, Sarafem®, Serzone®, Vivactil®, or Zoloft®), certain antibiotics (such as azithromycin, clarithromycin, dirithromycin, erythromycin, gatifloxacin, itraconazole, ketoconazole, levofloxacin, moxifloxacin, sparfloxacin, troleandomycin, Avelox®, Biaxin®, Ery-tab®, Levaquin®, Nizoral®, Sporanox®, Tao®, Tequin®, Zagam®, or Zithromax®), medicine to treat HIV infection (such as indinavir, nelfinavir, ritonavir, saquinavir, Crixivan®, Fortovase®, Invirase®, Norvir®, or Viracept®), medicine to treat malaria (such as halofantrine, mefloquine, Halfan®, or Lariam®), or medicine to treat mental illness (such as chlorpromazine, loxapine, mesoridazine, molindone, perphenazine, prochlorperazine, quetiapine, thioridazine, thiothixene, ziprasidone, Compazine®, Geodon®, Mellaril®, Serentil®, or Seroquel®). Using these medicines together with pimozide may increase risk for more serious side effects.
pimozide can cause changes in heart rhythms, such as a condition called QT prolongation. It may change the way your heart beats and cause fainting or serious side effects in some patients. Contact your doctor right away if you or your child have any symptoms of heart rhythm problems, such as fast, pounding, or uneven heartbeats.
pimozide may cause tardive dyskinesia (a movement disorder). Stop using pimozide and check with your doctor right away if you or your child have any of the following symptoms while taking pimozide: lip smacking or puckering, puffing of the cheeks, rapid or worm-like movements of the tongue, uncontrolled chewing movements, or uncontrolled movements of the arms and legs.
Check with your doctor right away if you or your child are having convulsions (seizures); difficulty with breathing; a fast heartbeat; high fever; high or low blood pressure; increased sweating; loss of bladder control; severe muscle stiffness; unusually pale skin; or tiredness. These could be symptoms of a serious condition called neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS).
Stop using pimozide and check with your doctor if you notice any signs of fever, chills, or sore throat. These could be symptoms of an infection resulting from low white blood cell counts.
Do not suddenly stop taking pimozide without first checking with your doctor. Your doctor may want you to gradually reduce the amount you are taking before stopping completely. This will allow your body time to adjust and help to avoid worsening of your medical condition.
pimozide will add to the effects of alcohol and other CNS depressants (medicines that slow down the nervous system, possibly causing drowsiness). Some examples of CNS depressants are antihistamines or medicine for hay fever, other allergies, or colds; sedatives, tranquilizers, or sleeping medicine; prescription pain medicine or narcotics; medicine for seizures or barbiturates; muscle relaxants; or anesthetics, including some dental anesthetics. Check with your doctor before taking any of the above while you or your child are using pimozide.
pimozide may cause some people to become dizzy, drowsy, or less alert or to have blurred vision or muscle stiffness, especially as the amount of medicine is increased. Even if you take pimozide at bedtime, you may feel drowsy or less alert on arising. Make sure you know how you react to pimozide before you drive, use machines, or do anything else that could be dangerous if you are not alert, not able to see well, or if you do not have good muscle control.
Although not a problem for many patients, dizziness, lightheadedness, or fainting may occur when you get up from a sitting or lying position. Getting up slowly may help. If the problem continues or gets worse, check with your doctor.
Before having any kind of surgery, dental treatment, or emergency treatment, tell the medical doctor or dentist in charge that you are using pimozide. Taking pimozide together with medicines that are used during surgery or dental or emergency treatment may increase the CNS depressant effects.
Pimozide may cause dryness of the mouth. For temporary relief, use sugarless gum or candy, melt bits of ice in your mouth, or use a saliva substitute. However, if your mouth continues to feel dry for more than 2 weeks, check with your medical doctor or dentist. Continuing dryness of the mouth may increase the chance of dental disease, including tooth decay, gum disease, and fungus infections.
Do not take other medicines unless they have been discussed with your doctor. This includes prescription or nonprescription (over-the-counter [OTC]) medicines and herbal or vitamin supplements.
pimozide Side Effects
Along with its needed effects, a medicine may cause some unwanted effects. Although not all of these side effects may occur, if they do occur they may need medical attention.
Check with your doctor immediately if any of the following side effects occur:More common
- Difficulty with speaking
- dizziness or fainting
- fast or irregular heartbeat
- lack of facial expression
- loss of balance control
- mood or behavior changes
- restlessness or need to keep moving
- shuffling walk
- slowed movements
- stiffness of the arms and legs
- swelling or soreness of the breasts (less common in males)
- trembling and shaking of the fingers and hands
- unusual secretion of milk (rare in males)
- Difficulty with swallowing
- inability to move the eyes
- increased blinking or spasms of the eyelid
- lip smacking or puckering
- menstrual changes
- muscle spasms, especially of the face, neck, or back
- puffing of the cheeks
- rapid or worm-like movements of the tongue
- skin rash and itching
- sore throat and fever
- swelling of the face
- uncontrolled chewing movements
- uncontrolled movements of the neck, trunk, arms, or legs, including twisting movements
- unusual bleeding or bruising
- unusual facial expressions or body positions
- yellow eyes or skin
- Convulsions (seizures)
- difficult or unusually fast breathing
- fast heartbeat or irregular pulse
- fever (high)
- high or low (irregular) blood pressure
- increased sweating
- loss of bladder control
- muscle stiffness (severe)
Get emergency help immediately if any of the following symptoms of overdose occur:Symptoms of overdose
- dizziness (severe)
- muscle trembling, jerking, or stiffness (severe)
- troubled breathing (severe)
- uncontrolled movements (severe)
Some side effects may occur that usually do not need medical attention. These side effects may go away during treatment as your body adjusts to the medicine. Also, your health care professional may be able to tell you about ways to prevent or reduce some of these side effects. Check with your health care professional if any of the following side effects continue or are bothersome or if you have any questions about them:More common
- Blurred vision or other vision problems
- dizziness, lightheadedness, or fainting when getting up from a lying or sitting position
- dryness of the mouth
- skin discoloration
- Decreased sexual ability
- loss of appetite and weight
- mental depression
- nausea and vomiting
- tiredness or weakness
Other side effects not listed may also occur in some patients. If you notice any other effects, check with your healthcare professional.
Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You may report side effects to the FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088.
See also: Side effects (in more detail)
Always consult your healthcare provider to ensure the information displayed on this page applies to your personal circumstances.
Copyright 2018 Truven Health Analytics, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
More about pimozide
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- 18 Reviews – Add your own review/rating
- Drug class: miscellaneous antipsychotic agents
Other brands: Orap | <urn:uuid:fae41588-4495-48d2-8089-4e6a09b56b37> | {
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When the pupil of one eye, but not the other, dilates abnormally or does not respond to light, doctors might suspect a nerve problem, or an aneurysm.
But in the case of one 35-year-old woman with an abnormally dilated pupil, the culprit turned out to be an over-the-counter medication she was using to treat her facial perspiration, according to a report on her case.
The woman's spouse was a paramedic, and had noticed that one of her pupils was dilated when she woke up that morning. Doctors in the emergency room found that her left pupil measured 4 millimeters across, and responded to light. But her right pupil was twice that size, and didn't respond to light.
She also had a mild headache, but no eye pain, trauma to her eye or change in vision. She initially reported that she was not taking any medications. About a year earlier, she'd suffered chronic headaches and had been diagnosed with a benign cyst on her brain, but a new MRI showed the cyst hadn't grown, and so could not explain her pupil problem.
After further questioning, the patient said she regularly used medicated wipes to control hyperhidrosis, or excessive sweating, on her scalp and forehead. The wipes contained a drug called glycopyrrolate, and were purchased from a Canadian pharmacy.
The woman stopped using the wipes, and by the next day, her pupil had returned to normal.
The drug works by blocking a chemical, called acetylcholine, which is involved in nerve signaling, Dr. Clare Johnson and Dr. Janet Smereck, both of the emergency medicine department at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., wrote in their findings.
The nerve signals to the sphincter muscle that controls the pupil were likely affected by the drug, causing the dilation, they said.
Emergency room doctors should be aware that all medications — including topical treatments, and those used for cosmetic reasons — may cause side effects, the researchers said.
The report was published online Nov. 19 in the Journal of Emergency Medicine.
Pass it on: An anti-perspiration drug may cause pupils to dilate. | <urn:uuid:ff803c47-37b3-41db-b622-c6df15114701> | {
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exploration and use of airships have been sporatic in the early
years of the 20th Century, experimantal craft were used by the
Army and often continental ships were purchased for evaluation
and review. However funding for the fledgling craft was often
not forthcoming and also the useage of the ships had not been
proven to either the Admiralty or Army. When the Great War broke
out on 4th August 1914, Britains airship fleet consisted of the
four former Army airships (now known as Naval Airships number
17,18,19, and 20 when transferred to the Admiralty) and two continental
ships, and a small Willows training craft. Senve ships in total.
Of airfields possesing hangers capable of housing airships, there
were only 4, at Farnborough, at the Vickers porduction facility
in Barrow, at Wormwood Scrubs in London and at Kingsnorth near
Hoo on the Medway.
pre titled Naval Wing of the Royal Flying Corps was formed in
to the Royal Naval Air Service on 1st July 1914 where by only
198 men of all ranks were transferred under the command of Commander
E A D Masterman. This was later known as the Airship Section.
It was decided as hostitities grew worse in the latter part of
1914 that airships would be useful for Fleet observations following
the loss of many ships to submarines in the months of October
and November. The First Sea Lord, Lord Fisher, realised that the
situation had become critical and rapid short term measures were
required. In a meeting on 28th February 1915 he called Cmdr Masterman
and representatives from Vickers and Airships Limited attended.
A new smaller ship was required with the basic requirements that
it should have a speed of between 40-50 mph, carry a crew of two,
160lb of bonbs, wireless equipments and fuel for 8 hours flying.
They should be able to reach an altitude of 5,000ft and their
design be simple in order to both ease production adn to facilitate
training of the crews.
main requirement was that the new airship, designated the Submarine
Scout class had to be in the air within weeks rather than months.
tests on the first SS craft, the SS2 were made in March of 1915
some 5 weeks after that first meeting. The ship was 70,000 cft
and 140ft in length. The ship was effectivly an aeroplane fuselage
without wings slung below an envelope. The There were eventually
3 types of SS or submarine scout class ships after
the initial prototype was built. Each was quickly and cheaply
assembled by attaching the wingless fuselage of a B.E.2c aeroplane
beneath a simple envelope. Minor modifications were made to the
original design, namely the palcement of the blower to fillw the
ballonet in the envelope, and on the 18th March, less than 3 weeks
after work began the new airship was entered in to service. Admiral
Fisher commented his approval with the famous comment "Now
I must have forty!"
The production SS ships differed from the prototype in that they
carried two ballonnets insead of the original one, and a larger
envelope. The main production problems which the contracted manufactureres
had was the supply of envelopes as they were tied up with areoplane
orders. 26 SS type ships were based on the original production
ship SS1. As soon as the SS airship programme was rushed in to
operating in ealy 1915 the work of construction was transferred
from teh Farnborough facility to Kingsnorth, which was soon joined
by a manufacturing centre in Barrow and Wormwood Scrubbs. At the
same time new air stations were set up at Capel near Folkstone,
Polegate near Eastbourne, Marquise near Boulogne on the French
coast, Luce Bay near Stranraer in Scotland, and in Angleset. A
new training station was set up at Cranwell.
At this time the rigid airship programme also started production.
More air stations were also planned, with Longside near Aberdeen,
East Fortune on the Firth of Forth, Howden on the Humber, Pulham
in Norfolk, Mullion in Cornwall, and Penbroke in South Wales.
Together with those already commissioned they were soon to provide
a chain of bases strung around the coars from which airship patrols
flew out reguarly to comat submarines. Wireless and ground bases
were also key to this chain with the co-operation between air
and see being vital. Patroling airships were required to transmit
their callsign every hour enabling thier positions to be tracked
and plotted. It meant that an airship commander can call his exact
position when the call forhelp to the precise spot; a vital element
in the anti submarine strategy.
The co-operation was essential between air and sea forces in that
no airship could cary more than a tiny fraction of the armament
available to a destroyer of even an armed merchantman ship, yet
no surfaceship could approach the speed of an airship or command
the same wide vision. The airship was to primarily call for find
the submarine then call for help. The advantage was that in the
clear waters of the mediterrenean a submereged enemy could often
be seen as deep as 120ft (20 fathoms) but in northern waters the
direct detection was more difficult. The advantage though was
that periscope moving through the water made a destinctive feather
wake and there were often signs which gave the presenece of a
submarine. Small amounts of oil frequently leaked and could be
spotted as a trail on the surface of the water. Also a damaged
submarine would leak more and be easily spotted.
submarine scouts with the prefix of SS,
were to be so successful on coastal patrols that the Admiralty
wanted bigger and better ships and fast. Three further classes
Coastal, the C* and North Sea
class ships were developed. Each having larger engines, envelopes
and crews than the previous class ships, the patrol duration increased.
with small bombs, these ships proved to be not only observers
but also active participants to the fleets battles. It was common
that a U-Boat on patrol, once spotted by airship, had a choice
of either moving away or engaging the airship in a race. The battle
was between the U-Boat surfacing and being able to mount his gun
and try to bring down the airship, whilst at the same time the
airship would be signalling the location of the U-Boat to the
fleet, and preparing to drop its bomb, before the U-Boat
could take a shot at the ship.
demand was so great for these Scout ships that various versions
were constructed. The following designations were given: SS /
SSP/ SSZ (Zeros)/ SSE/ SST(Twin). The SS Zeros were
fitted with machine guns. 77 of this class were built and were
very popular with the crews. The last class to be designed were
the SS Twins which could carry a crew of 5, with a top speed
of 57mph and stay airborne for up to 2 days.
total 158 SS Class ships were built
Despite occassional tragedies the first SS ships proved invaluable.
They only cost £2,500 each and the proof of their usefulness
is that production only ceased when something better became available.
famous even when an SS ship moored on the stern of HMS Furious,
showing how versitial with Naval activities these small ships
were. This has been stunningly re-created by James Baumann in
his model. To visit more of the models, they can be seen at www.modelwarships.com | <urn:uuid:7831f2a4-f2ea-4aa1-8968-39528cb162af> | {
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Have you experienced harvesting your carrots that aren't yet ready? If you have, then you might want to know when’s the right time to harvest your carrots. There are actually signs that you need to look out for if you want to harvest them right. These signs will help you become a better farmer.
In this article, we will explore 5 unique ways to know when are carrots ready to pick. We made this article in hopes that could help fellow farmers like you. To know when is the right time to harvest your crops. And to know when is not the right time to harvest them.
This topic is important to learn because there are a lot of crops getting wasted every day. This is due to the lack of knowledge when it comes to harvesting crops. We put together this article to help you decide when’s the right time to harvest your crops. The information what we will be sharing with you will prove useful for years to come.
There are two ways to grow cucumbers in your garden. The first is to grow them as a vine type plant that either crawls on the ground or on supports. This method is the more popular method of planting cucumbers. The next is the bush type method of growing them.
Between these two methods, there’s one special method of growing cucumbers. And this method is done by growing cucumbers vertically. This method of growing cucumbers has grown into popularity into recent years.
In this article, we will be teaching you how to grow cucumbers vertically. We will also guide you on how to set up this method of planting cucumbers. As well as the different benefits that you can get by using this method. This method of growing of cucumbers is perfect for those who have a small garden. Read now to learn more.
Just like any other vegetable, carrots deteriorate when uprooted. Carrots have a long shelf life, but how long depends on the conditions where it’s stored. In this article, we will learn how long do carrots last. We will learn how well do carrots do when they’re set in different conditions.
Knowing how long your vegetables will last will help you when you’re shopping for them. This will give you enough time to think about the number of carrots that you’ll buy. So that you will not waste any carrots that you might buy in the future.
This article will teach you the effects of environments. On the decomposition process of carrots. You will learn the difference between refrigerated carrots from exposed carrots. And above all else, you will know how long do carrots last in different conditions.
Tomatoes are just as common as growing weeds in your garden. They’re easy to grow and easy to harvest during their regular season. This is why Every gardener should plant at least one tomato in their garden. This is for their daily consumption.
Knowing that tomatoes are easy to grow, planting it becomes less of a challenge for our gardeners. This is why growing tomatoes differently would bring back the fun in planting them. There are a lot of creative ways on how to plant tomatoes in your garden.
In this guide, we'll be discussing the different ways on how to plant tomatoes at home. This guide will not only focus on how to grow tomatoes. But it will also focus on the creative aspect of growing tomatoes in your garden. So read on to learn more about tomatoes.
Preparing beets is as easy as eating oranges. There are things that you need to remove and clean before you can get started on munching it down. There are a lot of wonderful dishes that you can make by preparing beets. It’s important to know how to prepare beets because there are a lot of methods for preparing it.
In this article, we will explore the different ways on how to prepare beets. Depending on your taste and preference, there will always be something for you to try. Choose the one that best suits your taste and tries other preparations as well.
But before we get into the different ways on how to prepare beets. We will first explore what beets are and what kind of nutrients we can get from it. So buckle up as we begin to descend to the magical world of beets!
In gardening, onions are the best crop to start off when you’re new to this field. Not only is it easy to grow, it’s also useful to your everyday life. There are a lot of ways to grow onions at home depending on the space that you have and the place you’ll plant.
In this guide, we will teach you how to plant onions at home. There are a lot of onion varieties for you to choose from so choose the one what’s best for you. As a gardener, you have the choice on how you will grow your crop and where you’ll place it.
For starters, we suggest that you plant your onions in a small area first. This is to give you a general idea of how onions grow and how to harvest them. Just follow this guide and you’ll be growing onions in your garden in no time. Read on to learn more about onions and how to grow them.
Tomatoes can be served either fresh and ripe or raw. Depending on your taste, tomatoes will always taste great whether ripe or raw. But if you happen to love eating tomatoes ripe, then you’ve come to the right place. This article will help you ripen your tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables.
In this article, we will teach you how to ripen tomatoes from your garden. Garden fresh tomatoes are the best kind of tomatoes. What even makes it better is when you eat it ripe and fresh. That’s why if you harvest it prematurely there’s still a way to ripen it and eat it fresh.
You don’t have to worry about picking tomatoes that are raw in your garden. Just follow these methods of ripening a tomato. And you might find yourself eating a fresh bowl of tomatoes right out of your garden. So relax and read on to know more about how to ripen tomatoes.
Broccoli is known for its high-value vitamins and nutrients that it provides. Preparing and eating it fresh is the best way of consuming this vegetable. The only problem is that it’s hard to store because it deteriorates faster than any crop.
One technique that you can use to prolong the life of your crop is by prolonging the planting season. But this method has proven to be difficult to maintain because of the changing climate. There are other ways on how to store broccoli at home where you don’t need to do hard tasks.
You can store broccoli at home by following this simple guide. By following this guide, you will be able to eat your broccoli fresh for every meal. Whether you will personally consume the broccoli or sell it to your local market. You will be sure and confident that the broccoli that you will partake is fresh and clean.
Knowing what to eat when you’re left in the wild will surely go a long way. And when your last hope to survive is by eating mushrooms. Knowing the difference between a poisonous and an edible one could be a life or death situation.
Mushrooms come in different varieties. While some mushrooms are edible, there are those which are poisonous to humans. When you get stuck on your own in the wild, it’s important to know what those edible mushrooms are.
In this article, I’ll be teaching you how to distinguish poisonous mushrooms in nature. There are several mushroom species that are known by science as edible. But there are those which are poisonous and could be deadly when eaten.
How to prep soil for a vegetable garden is easy. There are only a few rules that you need to follow and a few steps to take. You’ll need a few materials for this project as well. So be prepared because you’ll be learning the basics of preparing garden soil.
By preparing your garden soil beforehand, you’ll be able to grow your crops better. This will also give you time to think about what kind of crop to plant. And depending on the crop, you can adjust the soil accordingly to match the soil’s nutrients.
In this article, we’ll be discussing some of the easiest ways on how to prep soil for your vegetable garden. By the end of this article, you'll be able to know the importance of preparing garden soil. As well as the different methods of preparing the soil. | <urn:uuid:55882967-5a3d-4a33-a19c-47108dc00e01> | {
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First grade is a year of great growth. The classroom is set up with a structure that will allow each student to develop his/her curiosity and natural love for learning. In math, first graders develop skills and understanding in the topics of numbers, addition, subtraction, measurement, and two and three-dimensional shapes. You will see students using manipulatives like cubes, pattern blocks, and Cuisenaire Rods. One of our primary goals is to foster a love of literature by providing a print rich environment that values the importance of reading, writing, and respectful discussion. Our balanced literacy program includes reader’s workshop, writer’s workshop, word study, guided reading, independent reading, and shared reading. Writer’s workshop is a powerful way of having students communicate their ideas and personal stories through both conventional spelling and inventive spelling.
The expeditions in the first grade classroom motivates the students to learn and engages them to think deeply. This transforms students to become leaders of their own learning. In one of the expeditions students see their world through a new set of eyes as they investigate natural and human-made materials and explore what objects around them are made of. Fieldwork and hands on building experience helps students answer the guiding question of “How do we decide what material to build with?” | <urn:uuid:c3e020d5-8268-40d2-b9b4-4310a2ff0897> | {
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The American political system is structured somewhat oddly. As you probably know, it boils down to a vote between two parties – Republicans (Bush, Nixon, Eisenhower) and Democrats (Obama, JFK, Clinton) – and this vote is done per state. Now, each state has its own smaller election, and whoever wins this state gets ALL of the electoral votes belonging to that state. Whomsoever wins the most electoral votes becomes president. Get it?
(image from http://www.270towin.com)
This means that a few states matter more than others during election time. For example, it is highly unlikely that conservative states such as Texas and Mississippi will vote Democrat in this upcoming election. The converse applies to California and Illinois who are unlikely to vote for a Republican in 2012. The other factor to take into account is the population of the state, which determines how influential the state is in picking the president. For example, in a race to 270 electoral votes, California offers candidates 55 votes, Texas 38, and New York and Florida with 29. States with a smaller population, such as North Dakota have three electoral votes. A win in a state gets the party all of the electoral votes; meaning that even a 51% vote for a Republican in a state gives the Republican ALL of the state's electoral votes. (The exception in this case is Nebraska, which only has five votes, but they are awarded proportionally).
Now, if we take the 2008 election as an indication of which states might swing and determine the result of the election, it is no surprise that current President Barack Obama has been visiting Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio recently. These are states he needs to win in order to maintain the presidency, as they have been known to change their minds – kind of like Mitt Romney. Most of them also have enough gravitas to decide the presidency.
Today Barack Obama is in Pennsylvania to bang on about extending payroll tax cuts to the working classes, and getting the wealthy to pay for them. While mostly working class Pennsylvania has usually swung Democrat, it voted the other way in the 2010 midterms which is one of the reasons the House of Representatives fell under Republican control. In 2012, Pennsylvania will carry 20 electoral votes. In the race to 270, that’s a rather nice chunk. Its neighbour, Ohio, will carry 18, and its neighbour Virginia has 13.
It’s also no surprise that on this trip the president is also visiting Florida, which holds 29 electoral votes. You’ll all remember Florida’s influence that robbed the world of the presidency of Al Gore in 2000 and heaved The Inconvenient Truth down the pipes of our televisions ever since. This is the impact that a swing state has.
So while the candidates for the presidency are appreciative of the support they will get from their bankable states, the real election will be contested in the swing states. Expect to see candidates and media all over Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico, Florida, Indiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Nevada. | <urn:uuid:084c497e-8712-4e6c-8e38-55fbb109e793> | {
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Freedom in the World
Freedom Rating (1 = best, 7 = worst)
Civil Liberties (1 = best, 7 = worst)
Political Rights (1 = best, 7 = worst)
Iraq’s civil liberties rating declined from 5 to 6 because of growing sectarian violence and insecurity.
A new full-term Iraqi government came to power as a result of free and fair elections in December 2005. The Shia-dominated cabinet, led by Prime Minister Nouri Kamel al-Maliki, faced numerous challenges in its first year. Sectarian violence swept the country after the bombing of a Shia shrine prompted reprisal killings that have not abated. Meanwhile, the Sunni-led insurgency was dealt a blow when U.S. forces killed terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and many Sunni Arab tribes decided to pledge their support for the country’s new institutions. Al-Maliki’s government is hampered by a lack of security and widespread corruption but maintains its commitment to democracy. The Supreme Court confirmed the November 2006 guilty verdict against Saddam Hussein in the al Dujail trial, and the former Iraqi leader was executed by hanging in December.
The modern state of Iraq, consisting of three former Ottoman provinces, was established after World War I as a League of Nations mandate administered by Britain. The British installed a constitutional monarchy that privileged the Sunni Arab minority at the expense of Kurds and Shiite Arabs. Sunni Arab political dominance in Iraq, which formally gained independence in 1932, continued after the monarchy was overthrown in a 1958 military coup. The Arab nationalist Baath party seized power in 1968. The new regime’s de facto strongman, Saddam Hussein, formally assumed the presidency in 1979.
Hussein brutally suppressed all opposition to his rule and sought to establish Iraq as the dominant regional power by invading Iran in 1980. During the ensuing eight-year war, his regime used chemical weapons against both Iranian troops and rebellious Iraqi Kurds. Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait in 1990 but were ousted the following year by a U.S.-led coalition. After the war, the UN Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Iraq, pending the elimination of its weapons of mass destruction. Because of Iraq’s refusal to fully cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, however, the sanctions remained in place for over a decade.
Following the establishment of a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone north of the 36th parallel in 1991, most of the three northern provinces of Erbil, Duhok, and Suleimaniyah came under the control of Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which together established a Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). During the 1990s, the two Kurdish parties alternately fought and cooperated with one another. Mid-decade, the KDP and the PUK fought a devastating internecine conflict that jeopardized their fragile autonomy and invited interference from neighboring states. After a settlement was reached in 1998, northern Iraq was governed through a rigid joint administration system, with each of the two parties in control of fixed regions within the no-fly zone. The UN Oil for Food Program, established in 1997, improved economic conditions in the region.
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, a U.S.-led military coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003, captured Baghdad less than three weeks later, and established a Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to administer the country temporarily. In July, after extensive negotiations with leading Iraqi political and religious leaders, the CPA appointed a 25-member Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and granted it limited lawmaking authority.
The initial euphoria felt by many Iraqis after the Hussein regime’s collapse was quickly tempered by the security vacuum, widespread looting, and acute electricity and water shortages that followed. The CPA decided to disband Iraq’s military and reconstitute the armed services. Unable to build up the new forces quickly enough, and with insufficient troops of its own, the U.S.-led coalition presided over a worsening security situation. Unemployment rose as the violence hindered economic activity and thousands of former high-ranking Baath party officials were put out of work because of de-Baathification policies.
Sunni Arabs, who constitute roughly 20 percent of the population, viewed the prospect of majoritarian democracy with immense trepidation. Disproportionately affected by de-Baathification and upset about losing their standing within the Iraqi government to the Shia majority, Sunni Arabs were not eager to participate in the coalition-led political transition plans. Exploiting these fears, loose networks of former regime officials, Sunni Arab tribe members and al-Qaeda militants began organizing and funding an insurgency that rapidly gained strength in late 2003 and 2004.
Deteriorating security conditions slowed progress in many critical areas of Iraq’s reconstruction. Oil production remained below prewar levels as a result of sabotage, while essential public services, such as power and water, were repeatedly disrupted in most areas of the country. Residents of northern Iraq, where Kurdish militia forces ( peshmerga ) continued to maintain security, were spared most of these tribulations.
In spite of the escalating insurgency, Iraq’s political transition progressed substantially. In March 2004, the IGC adopted a Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) to serve as the country’s interim constitution. In June, after weeks of UN-mediated negotiations among the main (noninsurgent) political groups, the CPA and the IGC transferred sovereignty to an Iraqi Interim Government (IIG), headed by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
Elections for a 275-seat Transitional National Assembly (TNA), along with simultaneous elections for provincial governments and the KRG, were held in January 2005. Insurgents’ calls for a boycott and threats of violence on election day led the vast majority of Sunni Arabs to stay away from the polls, handing a landslide victory to the Shiite-led United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) and a KDP/PUK Kurdish coalition. After three months of contentious negotiations, the TNA selected a new Iraqi Transitional Government (ITG), headed by Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
The meager representation of Sunni Arabs in the TNA (only 17 seats) gave them little voice in the process of drafting a permanent constitution. The final text that went to referendum clearly reflected the interests of the Shiite and Kurdish coalitions. It outlined a federal system with powerful regional governments. The constitution recognized KRG autonomy and allowed other provinces to form similar autonomous regions. But the charter failed to unequivocally stipulate that revenue from oil and natural gas fields, located mostly in Kurdish and Shiite regions, be distributed equitably nationwide.
Many articles of the constitution pertaining to internationally recognized political rights and civil liberties depend on subsequent legislation for clarification and enforcement. The charter also stipulates that the Federal Supreme Court should include an unspecified number of “experts in Islamic jurisprudence” alongside civil judges. The draft constitution was approved by a popular referendum in October 2005, though two Sunni Arab provinces voted overwhelmingly against it. However, under a compromise brokered as a concession to Sunni demands before the referendum, the first elected parliament would form a Constitutional Review Committee to determine whether the document should be amended. Any amendments would have to be ratified by referendum. The Constitutional Review Committee was created by parliament in September 2006.
The Sunni Arab community’s self-exclusion from the political process paved the way for Shiite and Kurdish parties to extend their influence throughout government. Cabinet ministries were distributed according to ethnicity and sect, following a trend established early in the transitional phase, with powerful ministerial positions, such as interior, oil, and foreign affairs, reserved for Shia and Kurdish candidates from the main political parties. Shia political parties’ control over the interior ministry allowed their associated militia forces to infiltrate the police and counterinsurgency forces. Extrajudicial detentions and killings by Shiite militias and militia-dominated police units, as well as Kurdish security forces in the north, proliferated during 2005.
In sharp contrast to the January elections, many prominent Sunni Arab moderates ran in the December 2005 elections for a full-term Parliament, and the minority increased its political representation. The Shia UIA led the elections, but failed to gain an absolute majority. After a four-month negotiating deadlock, Nouri Kamel al-Maliki of the Shia Da’wa party was chosen as prime minister. Moqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army, a major Shia militia, emerged as an important power broker while his armed followers continued to undermine security.
The February 2006 bombing of al-Askari shrine, an important Shia pilgrimage site in the city of Samarra, set off a new cycle of intense sectarian conflict that has not yet abated. Sectarian fighting has erupted throughout Baghdad and in provincial cities where Sunni and Shia Arabs live in close proximity. Iraqi Kurdistan has largely avoided such violence. Civilian deaths increased dramatically, and the transfer of operational command of Iraqi security forces to the Iraqi government was delayed. However, al-Qaeda suffered a blow in June, when U.S. forces killed its leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Although the robust Sunni insurgency remains active, many Sunni Arab tribes and communities have reportedly turned against the radical foreign fighters they once supported.
The trials of Saddam Hussein and several other former senior Iraqi officials culminated in 2006. The al Dujail trial concluded in July 2006 with a verdict delivered on November 5. Saddam Hussein and six other defendants were found guilty of crimes against humanity in the arbitrary killing and displacement from the town of Dujail in 1982. Hussein and two others were sentenced to death by hanging. Another trial opened in August 2006 in which Hussein and six other defendants faced charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes stemming from the Anfal campaign against the Kurdish population in northern Iraq, which may have resulted in the death of up to 100,000 Kurds. Although the verdict handed down for the Dujail trial was appealed, Iraq’s Supreme Court confirmed the original decision, and Saddam was executed on December 30, 2006, by hanging.
Although it has conducted free and fair elections, Iraq is not considered an electoral democracy due to the foreign military presence and impairments caused by ongoing sectarian and insurgent violence. Under the constitution, the president and two vice presidents are elected by Parliament and must appoint the prime minister, who is nominated by the largest parliamentary bloc. Elections are to be held every four years. Although the president and vice presidents are not directly elected by the people, the roles are largely ceremonial. The prime minister is charged with forming a cabinet and running the executive functions of the state. The Parliament consists of a 275-seat lower house, the Council of Representatives, and a still-unformed upper house, the Federal Council, which would represent provincial interests. The constitution provides for independent executive, legislative, and judicial branches, as well as “independent associations” like the central bank and the electoral commission. Political parties representing a wide range of viewpoints are allowed to organize and campaign without legal restrictions, but the Baath party is officially banned.
The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI), whose nine-member board was selected by a UN advisory committee, has sole responsibility for administering elections in Iraq. Voting in January 2005 for the transitional National Assembly and the constitutional referendum in October 2005 were certified as free and fair by international monitors. The December 2005 elections for a four-year government also went smoothly, though there was some insurgent violence. Sunni Arabs came out in greater numbers nevertheless and increased their representation in Parliament.
Iraq is plagued by pervasive corruption. In August 2005, a group of 27 former senior officials of Iyad Allawi’s interim government, including former ministers of defense, labor, transportation, electricity, and housing, were indicted in connection with the embezzlement of more than $1 billion from military contract expenditures. According to the head of the Commission for Public Integrity, “Every government department is plagued by some type of corruption and the problem has become endemic countrywide.” Corruption has seriously hampered reconstruction efforts, and it is estimated that 25 percent of donor funds are unaccounted for. Iraq was ranked 160 out of 163 countries surveyed in Transparency International’s 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index.
Corruption within the Oil Ministry has become a serious national security threat. Iraq depends heavily on oil for state revenue, but almost half of the oil money is being funneled to illegal armed groups through smuggling and protection rackets. A member of the National Assembly was indicted in 2006 for stealing millions of dollars allocated to protect a critical pipeline against attack. He was accused of channeling some of that money to the insurgency. Even the inspector general’s office, which oversees all ministries’ activities, is not immune from corruption; several inspectors general of various ministries were fired in 2006. Although the Iraqi government now requires employees to sign codes of conduct and complete financial disclosure forms, there is not full compliance.
Freedom of expression is protected by the constitution and generally respected by the authorities. However, it has been seriously impeded by sectarian tensions and fear of violent reprisals. Over a dozen private television stations are in operation. Although most are affiliated with particular religious or political groups, the nonpartisan station Al-Sharqiya is the most widely watched. Major Arab satellite stations are easily accessible, as roughly one-third of Iraqi families own a satellite dish. More than 150 print publications have been established since 2003 and are allowed to operate without significant government interference. Internet access is not restricted by the authorities, but only about 0.1 percent of the population has access.
Although the Iraqi media are not subject to direct government censorship, violent retributions against journalists have hindered their ability to report widely and objectively. Many have continued to persevere in spite of violence and political threats. As many as 130 journalists and media workers, most of them Iraqis, have been killed in Iraq since 2003. In the single most deadly attack against the media, assailants dressed in police uniforms stormed the al-Shabbiya satellite station building in October 2006, killing dozens of employees. Dozens of journalists were abducted in 2006 by insurgents and militias, or were detained without charge or disclosure of supporting evidence by U.S. forces, on suspicion of aiding and abetting insurgents. Bilal Hussein, a photographer, has been held without charge in U.S. custody since April for photographing insurgents in al-Anbar province.
A new set of laws passed in 2006 criminalizes the ridicule of public officials, and a number of Iraqi journalists have been charged with the offense. The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite television station has been banned from working in the country since August 2004 for violating CPA Order 14, which prohibits media organizations from publishing or broadcasting material that incites violence or civil disorder. Al-Arabiya, an Arab satellite station based in Dubai, was suspended from working in Iraq for one month in 2006 on charges of inciting sectarianism and violence.
Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the constitution and generally respected by the government. Mosques, churches, and other religious institutions are allowed to operate with little formal oversight. However, all religious communities in Iraq were threatened by sectarian violence in 2006. Following the bombing of al-Askari shrine in February, sectarian fighting erupted in much of the country and has not abated since. Thousands of Iraqis have been killed by death squads, insurgents, and militias. Members of both major sects and other groups have been driven from mixed or isolated neighborhoods because of sectarian tension and violence. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, there are approximately 1.6 million internally displaced persons in Iraq, and another 1.8 million who have fled the country Northern Iraq has largely escaped the unrest.
Baathist-era restrictions on academic freedom were abolished in 2003. However, academic institutions operate in a highly politicized and insecure environment. Hundreds of university professors and intellectuals have been assassinated by insurgents or political militias for voicing their opinions, encouraging dialogue, or for sectarian reasons.
Rights to freedom of assembly and association are recognized by the constitution and generally respected in practice. The constitution guarantees these rights “in a way that does not violate public order and morality.” Domestic and international nongovernmental organizations were able to operate without legal restrictions, though security constraints limited their activities in many regions. Peaceful demonstrations occurred frequently during the year without interference from coalition forces or the Iraqi government, except when they were in violation of curfews. Gatherings or rallies that violated anti-Baath strictures were considered illegal.
The constitution guarantees “the right of forming and joining professional associations and unions.” Iraq’s 1987 labor law remains in effect, technically prohibiting unionization in the public sector. However, union activity has flourished in nearly all industries since 2003, and strikes have not been uncommon. In 2005, the interim Iraqi government promulgated Decree 8750, which gave authorities the power to seize all union funds and prevent their dispersal, with the promise of future laws to be passed under the permanent government. To date there have been no new labor laws passed, but a parliamentary committee (consisting of mostly pro-union lawmakers) was established to revise the decree and enact International Labor Organization–compliant labor laws drafted in 2004. At least three union leaders, including the International Federation of Trade Union’s International Secretary Hadi Saleh, were murdered in 2005.
The new constitution provides for an independent judiciary. The Higher Judicial Council (HJC)—headed by the chief judge of the Federal Supreme Court and composed of Iraq’s 17 chief appellate judges and several judges from the Federal Court of Cassation—has administrative authority over the court system in Iraq. In practice, however, judges have come under immense political pressure and have largely been unable to pursue cases involving organized crime, corruption, and militia activity. Since 2003, 13 judges have been killed, according to the Higher Judicial Council. The new constitution stipulates that trials must be conducted in public “unless the court decides to make it secret.” The accused are “innocent until proven guilty in a fair legal trial.” According to a recent UN report, the “growing perception of impunity for current and past crimes committed risks further eroding the rule of law.”
Persons accused of committing war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity fall under the jurisdiction of the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT), previously known as the Iraq Special Tribunal. The IHT statute does not explicitly require that guilt be proven beyond a reasonable doubt and lacks adequate safeguards against self-incrimination. Numerous irregularities were noted by international observers in the al Dujail trial, which culminated in the execution by hanging of Saddam Hussein in December 2006.
Iraq’s Criminal Procedure Code and the constitution prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention, though both practices are common in security-related cases. There were credible reports of illegal detention facilities run by the Interior Ministry and party-sponsored militias. The constitution prohibits all forms of torture and inhumane treatment, and affords any victims the right to compensation. But neither coalition forces nor the Iraqi authorities have established effective safeguards against the mistreatment of detainees, and allegations of torture by security services were serious and widespread in 2006.
There is a critical lack of centralized control over the use of force in Iraq. Insurgents, militias, and criminal gangs, many with ties to government security forces, were responsible for the mistreatment and killing of thousands of Iraqi civilians in 2006. Human rights abuses by the nascent security forces have taken on a sectarian dimension, fueling instability. Police recruits have themselves been a target of violence. As of August 2006, there were approximately 36,000 people in detention. Cases of torture have been documented in both official and unofficial detention centers. The interior minister has attempted to stem abuses by police forces and complicity with militias by firing thousands of employees, including an entire brigade, but the problem remains endemic. The frequent employment of martial law in attempts to stem growing insecurity and violence grants sweeping powers of arrest and restricts basic freedoms.
Although the exact number fluctuated during the year, over 13,000 Iraqis suspected of involvement in the insurgency were held by the U.S. military at any given time, before being released or handed over to the Iraqi authorities. Detainees in coalition custody have also experienced torture and mistreatment.
The internal security forces are dominated by Shiites, and there were credible allegations of employment discrimination against Sunni Arabs and non-Muslim minorities in some government institutions in 2006. Many former members of the Baath party faced difficulty in obtaining work in Shia-dominated ministries and government institutions due to the overzealous application of de-Baathification procedures. Minorities in northern Iraq—Turkmen, Arabs, Christians, and Shabak—reported instances of discrimination and harassment at the hands of Kurdish authorities in 2006. Palestinians were the targets of harassment and discrimination by both police and the general public throughout the year.
The constitution promises Iraqi women equal rights under the law, and they are guaranteed 25 percent of the seats in the legislature. While women comprised 32 percent of the TNA, the portion dropped to 25 percent after the December 2005 elections. Public security for Iraqi women remained a major problem in 2006. Women who hold jobs, attend university, or go out in public unveiled were frequently harassed, and in some cases killed, by radical Islamist groups of both major sects. | <urn:uuid:88d16cff-be4c-4e83-b184-2c11fa62e12f> | {
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The Meaning and History of Kata
To continue with the definitions of Kata names, I have researched and am
including some history that is available if you search. This will probably be
sufficient information for most of you. If you find more I would pleased if you
would share it with the rest of us. Thank you.
The Taikyoku series is a series of kata in use in several types of karate. The name Taikyoku (太極) refers to the Chinese philosophical concept of Taiji. The Taikyoku kata were introduced by Gichin Funakoshi as a way to simplify the principles of the already simplified Pinan/Heian series. The embusen, or pattern of the kata’s movements, are the same as in Heian shodan.
Students of karate systems that use the Taikyoku kata series are often introduced to them first, as a preparation for the Pinan/Heian kata. Gōjū Kai developed five of its own Taikyoku kata, based on the Shotokan katas and retaining the I-shaped embusen.
Taikyoku (First Cause)
Gichin “Shoto” Funakoshi Sensei named the set of three Taikyoku kata developed by his son Yoshitaka “Gigō” Funakoshi Sensei. In his book “Karate-do Kyohan” Funakoshi explains the development of the kata and why he named them Taikyoku, which translates as First Cause.
He also wrote: “Because of its simplicity, the kata is easily learned by beginners. Nevertheless, as its name implies, this form is of the most profound character and one to which, upon mastery of the art of karate, an expert will return to select it as the ultimate training kata” (page 42, ‘Karate-Do Kyohan’). (a side note:- The Chinese kanji used for the name Taikyoku (太極) are pronounced as “Tai Chi” in Chinese, which translated as “Grand Ultimate”).
Some people say that Sensei Funakoshi created 10 Taikyoku kata, but this statement may be false. On page 42 (‘Karate-Do Kyohan: The Master Text’), Sensei Funakoshi stated, “There are three Taikyoku forms (numbered by the ordinal terms: Shodan, Nidan, and Sandan).”
Taikyoku Shodan (First Cause, First Level)
Taikyoku Shodan, often simply referred to as “kihon” is the first of the series, and involves only two basic moves: the gedan barai or low block, and chudan (middle) oi zuki (sometimes “oi tsuki”), or lunge punch. All stances, except at the beginning and end, are zenkutsu dachi (forward stance).
Taikyoku Nidan (First Cause, Second Level)
The second kata of the series, Taikyoku Nidan, is similar to Taikyoku Shodan, except that the chudan punches are all replaced with upper-level (jodan) punches.
Taikyoku Sandan (First Cause, Third Level)
The third kata of the series, Taikyoku Sandan, is similar to Taikyoku Shodan, except that moves 1, 3, 9, 11, 17 and 19 are replaced with middle level arm blocks (uchi uke) executed in back (kokutsu) stance.
Taikyoko Yondan (First Cause, Fourth Level)
Practically the same as Taikyoko Shodan except after moves 1, 3, 9, 11, 17 and 19 a mae-geri is executed
Taikyoko Godan (First Cause, Fifth Level)
This is quite different from Taikyoko Shodan as after moves 1, 3, 9, 11, 17 and 19 instead of striking chudan the moves executed are age uke and then reverse punch and on moves 5 and 13 after the gedan-barai a mae-geri is executed before each strike.
Taikyoko Rokudan (First Cause, Sixth Level)
The final of the taikyoko series is also the most different of the previous five as each move is a gedan barai in kiba dachi (horse riding stance).
Wanshu is a name borne by several katas in many systems of karate, including Isshin-Ryu, Shotokan (under the name empi), Wadō-ryū, and others.
Wanshu is also the Okinawan-adapted name of Sappushi [Jp. ‘diplomat’] ‘Wang Ji’ (1621-1689), the leader of a large ambassadorial mission from China sent by the Qing government to the village of Tomari, Okinawa in 1683. A poet, calligrapher, diplomat, and martial artist in the Shaolin tradition of Fujian White Crane, he is often credited with teaching chu’an fa to the gentry of Tomari.
The Wanshu kata was either a creation of Wang Ji’s, or composed by his students and named in tribute to him. Regardless, many karate traditions include a kata bearing the name of Wanshu or a variant (Ansu, Anshu) which vary in schematics but carry certain distinctive similarities. One translation of the word “Wanshu” is “dumping form,” “dragon boy dumping form” (in Shuri-ryū), and “Strong Arm Form” for the dramatic grab-and-throw technique seen in most versions. Also Shimabuku Tatsuo is credited for being the dragon boy (though Tatsuo means “dragon man”).
The two main versions are Matsumora-Wanshu and Itosu-Wanshu, Itosu most likely having learned it from his teacher, Gusukuma of Tomari. Wanshu, while still bearing this name in certain karate styles, was renamed Empi by Gichin Funakoshi for use in Shotokan. This kata is also practiced in various Korean styles such as Tang Soo Do and Soo Bahk Do and depending of the organization is called Wangshu, Wang Shu, or Yun Bi in Korean. Due to its difficulty, this kata is often reserved for advanced students.
In the way, JWA | <urn:uuid:29ecce32-a2bc-4c61-972d-99f2fb482d2c> | {
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The Town of
Around the year 1550, English Fishermen approaching the east coast of Newfoundland spotted a high rocky headland. As they sailed past the towering rocks, the men found themselves in a broad bay almost three miles accross. High, rocky cliffs and steep, tree-covered hills skirted the shoreline. At the southern end of the bay, two small coves could be seen, but the captain of the ship decided to sail into the bottom of the bay where they found a good beach, and a small cove to moor their boats. It was a beautiful bay and would make an ideal summer fishing station. Because it reminded the men of the bay on the west coast of England they had left four weeks earlier, they named it Torbay.
These early visitors to Torbay lost no time in setting to work. Although it was early April, much had to be done before the fishing began in June. First, the small ship had to be securely morred for they found Torbay was not a good harbour, being open to winds and rough seas in spite of the high land which surrounded it.
In the snow and cold all the men went into the woods to cut timber. Out of the wood, cook rooms, huts, a stage and flakes had to be constructed. Once the shore equipment was in order, the fishing boats, which had been brought from England on the ship, were made ready. Now it was time to catch bait, first squid and later the plentiful caplin.
By mid-June, the busy fishing season had begun. Each morning before dawn the five small fishing boats, with three men to a boat, set out for the fishing grounds just outside the bay. Using only handlines with large baited hooks at the end they spent the day pulling codfish into the boats. In the evening the men returned to shore, threw the fish up to the stage and began the work of cleaning, splitting and salting the cod, being careful to save the cod livers, which were thrown into a vat where they rendered into valuable cod oil. The younger, less experienced crew members had remained on shore during the day washing the salted fish, carrying it to the flakes in barrows, and spreading it to dry. All summer the work continued, the only breaks coming from the occasional stormy day.
By mid-August, preparations began for returning home. The ship's hold was carefully lined with boughs to protect the piles of dried cod from dampness on the long journey. The stage, huts and flakes were broken up for firewood or left for next year's crew. The fish were loaded into the ship and the boats pulled on board. Finally, the sails were set and the crew happily left for their homes in England.
Whether the hardworking fishermen who gave Torbay its name returned to the bay in later years we do not know, but Torbay continued to be used as a summer fishing station by English and Irish fishing crews for over two hundred years.
During the 1600's, two or three ships arrived in the bay each year in the early spring and as many as one hundred and fifty men caught and dried fish there. Occassionally, Torbay was visited by French fishing ships, however, it was men from the west of England and southern Ireland who returned each year to fish, and who provided Torbay with its first settlers during the sixteen and seventeen hundreds.
Rock archway which existed on the South Shore of Torbay Harbour which has now be washed away to the sea.
It was in the year 1794 that Torbay was visited by its first tourist, Aaron Thomas, a seaman on a British war ship which had tied up in St. John's. Thomas was an adventurous fellow and decided to pass his time in port by sight-seeing. He and a young companion set out early one July morning to walk to Torbay, a short seven miles away. In a journal which he kept of all his visits to Newfoundland, Thomas describes their nerve-wrecking journey, in pouring rain along a narrow foot path which led the two men through thick woods and over marshy bogs. Thomas and his friend arrived in Torbay late in the evening, exhausted and soaked to the skin. Thomas' spirits, however, were not dampened by his difficult walk, for he approached the first person he saw in the settlement and told her that he and his friend had been shipwreched off Torbay and had just made it to the shore. As the unsuspecting woman ran to get help for the other unfortunate victims of the shipwreck, Thomas made off qickly for the nearest inn. Although Thomas wrote a great deal about his expendition to Torbay, his only comment on the settlement is the following brief description:
"Torbay is a small wild bay only used by small boats. Here are some noble rocks and a small waterfall. There is about thirty houses or huts scattered on each side of the bay."
Aaron Thomas would not have recognized the town of Torbay had he been able to return to it one hundred years after his first visit. The 1800's saw a rapid increase in the settlement's population and several events took place which greatly improved life for the town's inhabitants.
Before 1775, the majority of Torbay's settlers had come from the west coast of England, but in the late 1700's and the early 1800's, religious persecution and extreme poverty in their homeland prompted many Irishmen to journey to new homes in Newfoundland and other parts of North America. Some of these Irish families found their way to Torbay and decided to settle there. By the end of the 1800's, Torbay's population had grown tremendously and the majority of the town's residents were now Irish.
In 1826, Thomas Cochrane, one of Newfoundland's best governors, announced that a road would be built between Torbay and St. John's. This was welcome news to the residents of Torbay for up until this time, the only link between the two communities was the narrow trail through woods and bog which Aaron Thomas had described in his journal. Rev. Charles Pedley, who wrote a history of Newfoundland in 1860, commented on the bulding of this new road:
"Between (Torbay and St. John's) there existed only a miserable apology for a road... Yet the interventing country had many points of attraction, and partly to afford the means of a pleasant walk or drive, and still more to promote a work of public (usefulness), the governor caused a road to be laid out which runs through one of the most interesting suburbs of the chief town and now has many pretty and productive farms."
The new road was expecially important to Torbay's farmers, for it allowed them to carry their product into St. John's by horse-drawn cart. All resident of Torbay used the road to bring supplies from St. John's, since the town had no merchant extablishments and it was close to 1900 before the community had a store.
The great depression of the 1930's brought hardtimes to Torbay and all Newfoundland. The older residents of the town still remember when 125lbs of fish would bring only 75 cents. Many people were forced to live on relief from the government which paid a mere six cents more a day. The people of Torbay were luckier than some for they could at least feed their families from their farms and the fish they caught.
In spite of all the changes which have occurred in Torbay, many reminders of the past can still be seen in the town. A visitor to the town would find that almost all the town's streets have been named after the first family to live on it, for example Dunphy's Lane, Dodd's Lane, Gosse's Lane and Martin's Lane. There is also a hill named Manning's Hill and a small cove on Torbay's north side, where the boats are anchored, which was first known as Green Cove but when an English family by the name of Tapper settled around it, the cove became known as Tapper's Cove.
Newfoundland School Broadcasts: 1978-1979
Torbay: A Community History
By: Linda Cook
The O'Brien house, built in1870
The only type of it's kind still standing
Joe and Mary O'Brien, owners
Please send pictures or any other information to address below.
Last updated 1997.
Back to History List
Back to Home Page
28 Doyle's & Quigley's Lane | <urn:uuid:f046c0f0-15f7-47fe-84b3-35f5fada2ed9> | {
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The Sun has no atmosphere such as Earth, science says the Moon orbits because of the balance between inertia and gravity, constantly falling but never falling, understanding this, the Earth would crash into the Sun because the Sun has no atmosphere, the massive gravitaional pull of the Sun would have already crashed the Earth in it.
The Sun and the Moon are the same size, this why an eclipes looks perfect! If they were different sizes one would attract the other due to gravitational pull and collide, but if they are equal, they counter each others pull.
If the Earth did spin, WE would all be dizzy by now?
According to you're science the sun and stars are the same, therefore they don't move, Earth moves around the sun, hence, where ever the planet is around the sun, we should not be able to constantly see the constellations, there would be a point were the Earth would be on the other half of the sun and Earth would only be able to see the constellations coming around the bend. But that's not the case is it!
Lunar eclipse are wrongly explained, look at the first link of the lunar eclipse geometry, see were the moon is to you're right, now look at the second link of the lunar cycles see were the full Moon is to you're left the yellow arrows is the Sun's light. According to both depicted explanations, one of the lunar cylces and the other of eclipses, we should be having and eclipse once a month.
[link to www.mreclipse.com
[link to upload.wikimedia.org
The explaination is written in scriptures of the true cycles of the Sun and the Moon, and the Sun's name is Tomas and the Moon's Asonya | <urn:uuid:4668b346-8a23-4079-8118-5c7266f555f2> | {
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Food Safety Tips for Packing School Lunches
When it comes to back-to-school safety, you cover the basics vigilantly, such as teaching kids to avoid strangers, buckling them in the car and providing appropriate safety gear when they play sports. But have you considered taking as much care when it comes to packing lunch boxes? An improperly packed school lunch can lead to spoiled food and a missed meal at best or food-borne illness at worst.
“When you’re packing a school lunch, it’s important to think about the perishability of the foods you’re making,” says Rutgers University professor Don Schaffner, an extension specialist in food science and spokesperson of the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT). “Perishable foods can remain at room temperature for no more than two hours – one in the summer due to the heat. Properly refrigerated foods can last a long time, but most school children won’t have access to a refrigerator where they can store their lunchbox.”
The Institute of Food Technologists, a nonprofit scientific organization focused on the science of food offers some guidance for parents as they pack lunches this school year:
* Start each day with a clean box or bag. Insulated, vinyl lunch bags are popular, and do better at keeping foods cool than paper bags or metal lunch boxes. When kids come home, clean out lunch bags using warm soapy water, and allow it to dry completely overnight before packing the next day. This helps deter the growth of bacteria in the bag.
* Choose secure packing materials, such as sealable, single-use sandwich bags that can be disposed of when used, or reusable plastic wear that is dish-washer safe. Always use clean packing materials.
* As much as possible, opt for foods that are not perishable, such as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. “It’s a kid favorite and neither ingredient is quickly perishable,” Schaffner points out. “You don’t have to worry about refrigerating it, and it will last from the time you prepare it in the morning until kids consume it at lunchtime.” Single-serve fruits in pre-packaged containers, such as apple sauce or fruit cocktail, are also great options because they’re less perishable.
* Encourage older kids to assemble lunch on their own at school. Pack bread in one container and place fillings like meat or cheese separately with a cold pack. Having kids assemble the sandwich themselves ensures the freshest possible results – and no soggy bread!
* Cold packs are designed to keep food cold, not cool it down. If you make the sandwich in the morning with room-temperature ingredients, it’s unlikely the cold pack will be able to cool the food sufficiently. Instead, make the sandwich the night before and refrigerate the whole thing, or use refrigerated ingredients to ensure the sandwich starts out – and stays – cool.
* Always use a cold pack when you are packing anything perishable, like a sandwich with meat or fresh cut fruit with a yogurt-based dip. Place the perishable food right against the cold pack in the bag. Wash the cold pack in warm soapy water after every use before returning it to the freezer.
* For hot foods like chili, soup or stew, use an insulated container. Before storing the food, fill the container with boiling water, let it stand for a few minutes, empty it and then add the hot food. Keep the container closed tightly until lunchtime to help minimize the risk of bacterial contamination and growth.
Finally, says Schaffner, think ahead.
“Not planning adequately, not thinking about the amount of time it’s going to take, from the time that food is prepared until that food is eaten, is a common mistake,” he says. “At night, wash the cold pack and make sure it goes back in the freezer so it’s ready for the next day. Give yourself plenty of time in the morning to wash your hands thoroughly before handling food. And keep stressing to kids the importance of washing their own hands before they sit down to lunch each day.” | <urn:uuid:4f279243-dd75-4c19-8073-04e7b1797e3b> | {
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Not The Flu
An American Legion Convention held in Philadelphia beginning on this date in 1976, became the focal point for the hunt for a deadly disease that killed 29 of the conventioneers. Others who attended the convention were hospitalized with mysterious flu-like symptoms including high fever, chest pains and lung congestions. Epidemiologists were unable to find any single factor appearing in every case. Soon, Legionnaires' disease spread to 19 states. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were called in to conduct what would become one of the biggest and most intensive medical investigations of all time. A breakthrough came in 1978 when the bacterium Legionella pneumophila was isolated in water taken from a cooling tower in an Indiana hotel. Finally, the source of the bacterium was traced to the air-conditioning systems of hotels
Copyright Aetna InteliHealth, Inc., 2011. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:beb8d594-ca78-4475-a939-3f3394807830> | {
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If you're a teacher of younger kids, you probably will read ghost stories aloud by different authors with the children for Halloween. You may even want to write your own stories together. One important point to remember is that every story should have a beginning, middle and end. Each ghost story or character should have a mission or purpose whether it is good or evil. While discussing how to write the story, write down ideas for their own stories.
- Skill level:
Other People Are Reading
Things you need
- Coloured pencils
Read aloud from a ghost story book to set the mood. There are many different chapter books to read for Halloween with a ghostly theme. R.L. Stine has several "Goosebumps" books to choose from. "I Double Dare You More Stories to Scare You" by Kathleen Keeler, "Moonlight Man" by Betty Wenn Wright, and "The Red Ghost" by Marian Dane Bauer are good choices.
Hand out paper and pencils to the children. Tell them to take notes and write down ideas as you discuss some of the points on writing a ghost story. Tell them that setting is the location of the story that sets the mood. A scary ghost story might be set in a haunted house, dark lonely road, abandoned town or factory, old antique store, graveyard or old building. Tell them to write down some ideas of a location or setting for their story.
Discuss the characters for the ghost for the story. Characters have different personalities, physical attributes and emotions. It might be a young girl with dark hair that is just 10 years old. She wears short skirts and colourful cotton blouses. She is a sad child because she is a ghost that is trapped in a house that she haunts. The ghost should have a purpose. Now have the children think about their character. Brainstorm and write ideas down.
Discuss plot with the class. This is what happens, and why, in a story. Most stories with plots have a beginning, middle and end. Have the children write down a beginning middle and end to the story before they write it. Now they will have information about characters for the ghost story, setting and plot. Using the notes they have written down, have them write the ghost story. Give them 30 minutes to write it.
Pass out coloured pencils and crayons. Tell them they can illustrate their stories if they choose. Later, read some of the stories aloud, and let the children read the story they wrote.
Tips and warnings
- The theme is Halloween, but you can do this exercise almost any time of year.
- 20 of the funniest online reviews ever
- 14 Biggest lies people tell in online dating sites
- Hilarious things Google thinks you're trying to search for | <urn:uuid:98cf9416-baab-45e1-8dd1-9543cec57a61> | {
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The fishes in question—Polypterus and related species—have tiny holes in the top of their heads called spiracles, and we showed how a small valve opens a bony lid over these spiracles to allow air to be sucked in and pumped out each time the fish surfaces.
And strangely enough, those same holes allowing the fish to breathe were modified through evolution to become eustachian tubes, which enable us humans to hear—but more about that later.
Research into these fish has a fascinating history stretching all the way back to Napoleon’s crushing defeat by the British at Alexandria in 1801, when one of his appointed naturalists, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, had to make a hasty return to France.
Among his many specimens was a strange fish with fleshy limbs caught from the Nile River, which he described in 1802 as polypterus, meaning “many fins.”
Also called the reedfish or bichir, it is widely regarded as the most primitive living member of the true bony fishes (osteichthyes). This group includes some 30,000 living species, including many of the fishes like snapper and salmon we love to eat.
Saint-Hilaire’s discovery caused a bit of a stir throughout the scientific world as the fish was thought to be one of the extinct lobe-finned fishes, which are today represented by the coelacanths and air-breathing lungfishes.
Prehistoric lobe-finned fishes like Tiktaalik were anatomically very close to the earliest known tetrapods (four-legged animals), the first backboned critters to invade land some 360 million years ago.
Further intrepid expeditions set out in the late 1890s to find more specimens of this strange fish. Scientists thought that understanding its life history would reveal how fishes might have evolved into land animals.
Although British zoologist John Budgett failed on three expeditions to locate the fish, he was finally successful in 1903, but he died of black fever shortly after returning to England that same year.
Before his death Budgett wrote a short scientific paper that told how these fishes were able to breathe air in through spiracles on top of their heads, with mouths submerged, making a loud “sucking sound.”
A paper written by a French researcher in 1966 backed this up by observations from the field. Later research, published in 1989 by a team of well-respected scientists who observed the fish under laboratory conditions, disagreed, concluding that “these fish do not, as others have suggested, breathe through their spiracles.”
For the scientific world, this was the last definitive word about the fish and its purported ability to breathe through its head—until now.
The research upon which today’s paper was based was initiated by the late Jeff Graham, who spent his life dedicated to studying air-breathing fishes.
When he passed away in late 2012, Nick Wegner and his team completed the work. The results showed that under laboratory conditions, when the tank of fishes was behind a blind, Polypterus take in up to 93 percent of their breaths using the spiracles rather than the mouth.
When the blind was removed, the fish used the spiracles for only about 40 percent of their breathing due to stress. According to Wegner: “When we first saw Polypterus breathe air through its spiracles we knew we had solved a 100-year-old mystery. When we captured it on film, we knew we could prove it.”
Breathing through the spiracle gives the fish a big evolutionary advantage as they can surface to breathe while keeping their eyes underwater, wary for predators. It also means they are able to breathe when swimming in shallow water where it is difficult for them to raise their head above water.
But what does it mean for understanding our deep distant evolution? The new finds provide a method for how the very first prehistoric fishes were able to begin to breathe air. Breathing air is a requirement for fishes if they were to leave the water and invade land as tetrapods.
The oldest known bony fish fossils date back to 430 million years ago from China. These include heavily armored forms like Guiyu, which has spiracles on top of its head.
A 380-million-year-old fish from Western Australia called Gogonasus was unusual in having enormous spiracles on top of its head. It belonged to the group of fishes called tetrapodomorphs, widely regarded by scientists as the ancestral group from which the first tetrapods evolved.
When my team discovered the Gogonasus with these large spiracles in 2005, we guessed they might have had something to do with air-breathing capability, but we had no evidence to prove this.
The new research on Polypterus is the smoking gun that now supports the idea that fish such as Gogonasus were able to breathe in air through their large spiracles.
Furthermore, several other fish fossils of that age, like the famous Tiktaalik, also show large spiracles on top of their heads. The earliest known tetrapod fossils, like Ventastega, also show very large open spiracles on their heads. All of this points to the ability of these fishes and tetrapods to take in air from their spiracles as the first type of breathing.
Once the four-legged descendants of these lobed-finned fishes had invaded the land, the ability to breathe through their spiracles rapidly declined. They soon switched to regular breathing using their mouths and nostrils, as we do today.
The canal leading from the spiracle to the inside of the head soon developed another use. Out of water, amphibians had to develop new senses that worked better in air.
Transmitting vibrations through the air to the brain would become the next major use of the spiracle canal. Hearing in early amphibians developed from adapting the spiracles to become the tympanic membrane for transmitting sound to the brain through the stapes, one of our tiny inner ear bones.
Our three tiny inner ear bones also have a remarkable evolutionary history that demonstrates how close our human anatomy is to the ancient fishes.
Starting out as a long bone that braced the lower jaws of sharks and other early-jawed fishes, the hyomandibular bone in fishes eventually shrunk in size and became the stapes in amphibians, reptiles, and us mammals.
In fishes it braced the articulation of the lower and upper jaws, the quadrate and articular bones.
These bones also gradually deceased in size and became restricted to the inner ear and were renamed as the malleus and incus. Thus these three little bones that enable us to hear are derived from these three larger bones in the jaws of ancient fish.
If not for the bold evolutionary experiments of these prehistoric fishes breathing in air through the top of their heads, we might not have evolved such a keen sense of hearing.
Indeed, John Budgett would not have been able to hear the strange sucking sounds of the Polypterus when it surfaced on the Nile River to breathe.
So today, when you next listen to that exquisite piece of music, give a cheer for evolution and spare a thought for the ancient fossil fishes that have given you the evolutionary legacy of listening pleasure. | <urn:uuid:322b5003-56c6-4685-bc62-7f196a94ac00> | {
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In previous posts we have touched a bit on the challenges that face our resident orca whales, specially the calves. About a third to a half of them don’t survive their first year, and those who do carry a toxic burden and face dire salmon shortages. So, in light of that, what could possibly be good news for this newest member of J-pod? He has some really good things going for him, but before discussing that I would like to digress a little.
As noted in an earlier post, the whales are named according to their ‘pod’, or group identity, followed by when they were first seen. So the baby Orca J-45 belongs to J-pod, and is the 45th member identified since records have been kept. The researchers find this a straightforward and logical way to keep track of the families and for the scientists these numbers are the most practical way to refer to the animals. Once the babies are a year old, The Whale Museum also gives them a name.
All of that can get a little bewildering because you will hear the same whales referred to by a variety of names in different media sources- so to help you to keep the relationships sorted out and keep track of this special baby, I’ll refer to the family members as they relate to the calf, but will follow the scientific method. J-45 will be noted as “Baby J-45″, etc.
So what makes little Baby J-45 a lucky calf?
The first factor is his birth order. The lion’s share of a mother whale’s toxic load is transferred to her first calf, and fortunately Baby J-45 is the sixth calf born to his mother J-14. Also, there is evidence that older mothers are slightly more successful in raising a calf through it’s first year, although the researchers have not determined why this is so. It may be linked to experience, the reduced toxic load to the calf, the presence of siblings, or a combination of factors. His mother J-14 is 35 years old, has four surviving offspring and only lost one calf.
This brings us to the next thing that makes Baby J-45 lucky: he was born into a great extended family, known as the successful and long-lived “J-2 Matriline”. (A matriline is like a family tree where only the mother’s lineage is considered). Young Orcas stay with their moms throughout their lives.
Baby J-45 and his mother J-14 are surrounded, supported, and protected by a network of family members, and when he was born into the wintry cold Pacific water this year, Baby J-45 most likely would have been helped to the surface by one or more of his three siblings; five year old sister J-40, eight year old sister J-37, and fourteen year old brother J-30. Also present might have been his 98 year old Great-grandmother J-2 and his Great-uncle J-1, two of our more well known and beloved whales. There is no evidence as yet to support the idea that calf survivorship is related to the presence of older family members, but there is a link to the survivorship of the older siblings.
The final bit of luck? Baby J-45 along with the other new calves had the good fortune to have been born in a time and place where people treasure and seek to protect, rather than capture or harm, the resident Orcas.
Next we’ll report on how BabyJ-45 is doing, and where you might be able to see him, last I heard he is healthy, robust, and trying to catch fish! | <urn:uuid:88d49ae6-f58d-4383-a72b-fd82b7ea3402> | {
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Last modified: Thursday, May 16, 2013
IU study: Agriculture contributes $37.9 billion to Indiana's economy
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 16, 2013
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Agricultural industries contributed $37.9 billion to Indiana's economy in 2011, according to a new report from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.
"Agriculture's Bounty: The Economic Contribution of Agriculture," produced by the Indiana Business Research Center, also said that the state's agricultural output supports nearly 190,000 Hoosier jobs. Of those jobs, 103,000 are directly involved in crop production and processing.
"It is understandable why Indiana's agricultural industries have been encouraged to expand in the past decade," said co-author Tanya Hall, an economic research analyst at the IBRC. "The pastoral scenes along Indiana highways are more than just fields of corn and soybeans or barns of hogs and chickens. Those scenes represent the livelihoods of some 190,000 Hoosiers."
Approximately 83 percent of Indiana's geography -- 19.4 million acres -- is devoted to farming or forests.
Agricultural activities alone, such as the production of crops or livestock and the manufacturing of processed goods, accounted for $25.4 billion in economic output. Ripple effects accounted for another $12.5 billion as it included the purchase of supplies from Indiana-based companies ($7.6 billion) and paychecks linked to households of agriculture-related employees ($4.9 billion).
"From creating jobs to contributing to the state's GDP, agriculture is an important industry in our state," said Jane Ade Stevens, chief executive officer of the Indiana Soybean Alliance, which provided funding for the study. "This study helps draw attention to how big of an impact agriculture has on our economy."
The commodity with the greatest amount of output was eggs -- about 6.5 billion were produced in 2011 -- followed by 3.5 billion pounds of milk, or 353.9 million gallons.
However, the commodities with the highest total production value were grains such as non-silage corn, oats and wheat, with a total value of $13.9 billion; and soybeans (also known as oilseeds), valued at $2.8 billion.
Farming of these crops accounted for more than half of all workers in Indiana agriculture -- more than 54,000 jobs -- and ripple effects supported another 29,800 jobs around the state. Hog and other animal production had the next largest total employment impact with 16,930 jobs.
"Grain production also dominated agriculture's contribution to Indiana GDP," Hall said. "The combined effects of grain production totaled an estimated $3.2 billion in value added, which accounted for one-quarter of the agricultural total and represented 1.2 percent of Indiana GDP. Soybean production was the second highest in value added, totaling $2.1 billion."
Indiana is known for quality hardwoods, and sawmills and furniture production establishments employ more than 35,500 workers. According to Indiana Department of Natural Resources statistics cited in the report, nearly 88 percent of logs processed in Indiana in 2010 came from within the state.
"Despite increasing population and development, the quantity of forest land has increased over the years, allowing Indiana to continue its timber harvesting without sacrificing forest land growth," said Hall, who also is a family farmer.
The report also highlights how the state's agriculture and forestry industries provide revenue for federal, state and local governments in the form of corporate profits, indirect business taxes, personal taxes and contributions to social insurance.
The economic activity related to Indiana agriculture and forestry created about $970 million in state and local revenue and nearly $1.5 billion in federal collections.
A key conclusion of the report is that the value of Indiana's agricultural production has grown over the past decade and should continue to do so in coming years.
"This has been caused by increased domestic and worldwide demand for agricultural products and byproducts, leading to sustained high prices," Hall said. "Attempts to increase output, however, have often been hampered by the weather (for crops), high input prices (for livestock), soft demand or increased competition (for furniture).
"As the world's population grows and fortunes of developing countries improve, there will be still greater pressure to increase production, even as resources and territory become scarcer." | <urn:uuid:0a697e32-a989-4859-b0ea-17531d1ba9e4> | {
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King George Island (KGI, Isla 25 de Mayo) is located within one of the most rapidly warming regions on Earth at the north-western tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Since 1991 hydrographical characteristics and phytoplankton dynamics were monitored at two stations in Potter Cove, a fjord-like environment on the south-eastern KGI coastline. Seawater temperature and salinity, total suspended particulate matter (TSPM) and chlorophyll-a (Chl-a, a proxy for phytoplankton biomass) concentrations were measured in summer and winter over a 19 year period, together with local air temperature. Mean air temperatures rose by 0.39 and 0.48 ºC per decade in summer and winter, respectively. Positive anomalies characterised wind speeds during the decade between the mid ’90 and the mid 2000 years, whereas negative anomalies were observed from 2004 onwards. Day of sea ice formation and retreat, based on satellite data, did not change, although total sea ice cover diminished during the studied period. Surface water temperature increased during summer (0.36 ºC per decade), whereas no trend was observed in salinity. Summer Chl-a concentrations were around 1 mg m-3 Chl-a with no clear trend throughout the study period. However, summer Chl-a correlates positively with water column stratification, which in turn resulted from high air temperature and lower salinity in front of the melting glacier. TSPM increased in surface waters of the inner cove during the spring-summer months. The Southern Annular Mode (SAM) climate signal was apparent in the fluctuating interannual pattern of the hydrographic variables in the outer Potter Cove and bottom waters whereas surface hydrography was strongly governed by the local forcing of glacier melt. The results show that global trends have significant effects on local hydrographical and biological conditions in the coastal marine environments of Western Antarctica. | <urn:uuid:56ddd46d-13ee-44ae-9e63-d452d47de568> | {
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List of summaries, consolidations and regulations
The Threshers' Lien Act
The Threshers' Lien Act creates a 60-day lien for every person who threshes grain or causes it to be threshed for another person for a fixed price. The lien is the remedy to secure payment of the price of threshing the grain.
The lienholder has protection against other creditors because the lien is given priority over other claims against the owner of the grain.
A lienholder may, after having given written notice to the owner of the grain, take a sufficient quantity of the grain to secure payment of the said price. "Sufficient quantity" is determined in accordance with the Act. If the price is not paid within 5 days, the lienholder may sell the grain. In Saskatchewan, "grain" is not limited to particular kinds of grain.
The 60-day lien created under the Act exists regardless of whether the thresher makes a seizure or gives notice of an intention to take the grain, and anyone who receives the threshed grain within 60 days from the completion of the threshing receives it subject to the lien. After the 60 days the lien is at an end unless, in the meantime, the thresher has given the statutory notice and has taken the grain. | <urn:uuid:bf185e34-8a81-4b75-9be7-4d0cc0d82c18> | {
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Joseph Priestley House
The Joseph Priestley House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. Portions of the content on this web page were adapted from a copy of the original nomination document. Adaptation copyright © 2008, The Gombach Group.
The Joseph Priestley House stands on a rise above the North Branch of the Susquehanna River, at Northumberland, Pennsylvania. Priestley built the house circa 1794. It is a two-and-a-half story frame house, covered with white clapboards and resting on a stone foundation. The clapboards were kiln-dried on the grounds. The house consists of the two-and-a-half story center section, measuring 48 by 43 feet, and two set-back one story wings on the north and south measuring approximately 22 by 21 feet. These wings housed Priestley's laboratory and the summer kitchen, and there is a small woodshed attached to the kitchen wing.
The center section has a gable roof, with a deck and railing. The roofing is slate tiles, and there are three internal gable end chimneys, one for the main kitchen, and each with a fireplace on the first and second floor.
The front of the house faces the river, and a circular carriage drive in the front yard is historic in design but concrete has replaced the gravel and clay. The twin front door and fanlight is sheltered by a shallow portico, as is the rear door. A dentil cornice runs above the five second floor windows on the front and rear.
The interior of the center section consists of four rooms over four, on each floor, a center hall, and an intersecting hall to the laboratory. The attic has three servants rooms and a larger storage room. The four part cellar houses a modern heating plant.
Furnishings are correct for the 1794-1804 period, with some Priestley scientific apparatus displayed in the laboratory and library.
The house has been restored by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, but there are intrusions on the property i.e., the 1926 brick structure east of the house, which is used to house exhibits, and the Pennsylvania Canal (closed 1902) and the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad, which run across the original lawn, between the house and the river.
The brilliant chemist Joseph Priestley, was responsible for several major breakthroughs in pneumatic chemistry, including the discovery of oxygen and carbon monoxide. Despite his scientific achievements, however, Priestley's liberal political and religious views generated such strong sentiment against him that he chose to emigrate to America. The Country's reception of the Englishman not only testified to the democratic spirit of the young Nation, but also stimulated her scientific development.
The Joseph Priestley House, on Priestley Avenue, in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, was built by the chemist and served as his home from 1794 until his death in 1804. It has been restored and is maintained as a museum today by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
Priestley was born in Leeds, England, on March 13, 1733. Reared in a Calvinist environment, he decided to be a minister, and finished his theological training when 22. He possessed very liberal views and became a dissenting minister. In 1761, Priestley became a teacher at the Warrington Academy, where he stayed until 1767. It was during this period that he first became interested in chemistry. Perhaps his friendship with Benjamin Franklin spurred his scientific interests, for that association stimulated Priestley to write a History and Present State of Electricity. The Royal Society of London awarded him a membership in 1766 because of that book. In the following year, the neophyte scientist moved to Mill's Hill Chapel, Leeds, where his position allowed more time for scientific study.
Untrained in science as he was, Priestley chose a field that offered great opportunity for new work, pneumatic chemistry. The study of gases had attracted attention prior to Priestley's time, but it was he who became the "Columbus" of the gaseous world. And it was the brewing of beer that caused this keen observer to investigate gases.
The smoke that hovered over beer as it was brewed in a brewery near Priestley's residence in Leeds intrigued the minister. He set out to study the gas, and in 1772 he published his initial paper on pneumatic chemistry. In it he described his experiments with carbon dioxide; the paper won him the Copley medal in 1773. Hampered by a lack of implements, Priestley devised his own equipment, most of which has been little modified and is still used. Fascinated with his investigations, Priestley pursued his study and in 1776 discovered one of the key elements, oxygen. It was an astounding discovery for an individual who had been untrained in science and who had only initiated his work a few years earlier. Priestley continued his scientific investigations after 1774, although oxygen remained his great discovery, and by 1786 he had published six volumes of scientific writings.
Priestley's work in science had not completely dominated him. He continued to be active in religious affairs, as well as assuming a positive role in political matters. The liberal religious and political views he espoused maddened many. In 1780, the fearless crusader became the leader of a dissenting group in Birmingham, which city expressed small love for a new book of Priestley's, Corruptions of Christianity. Moreover, he gained additional enemies, some of them in powerful positions, when on January 1, 1791, he published a strong defense of the French Revolution. The pamphlet fearlessly denounced Edmund Burke's castigation of the revolution across the English Channel.
Priestley's courage soon brought personal disaster. A mob howled through Birmingham for three days in July, 1791, and it destroyed the scientist's meetinghouse and home. Priestley, personally uninjured, then moved to London, where he lived for three years. Already unpopular, Priestley's stock did not rise when France honored him with French citizenship. In these circumstances, it is not strange that he turned to America.
Priestley's sons had already migrated to the United States, and on April 8, 1794, the scientist boarded the Sansom for the trip to America. The emigre, who was sea-sick during voyage, landed in New York on June 4. On the following day, the American Daily Adviser welcomed Priestley and his wife, saying that America "has become the asylum of the greatest characters of the present age." The new immigrant went to Philadelphia on June 18, where he was welcomed by the American Philosophical Society. Perhaps the Society's members would have been a little piqued if they had learned that Priestley wrote a friend, saying "I never saw a town I like less than Philadelphia." By the end of August, Priestley had bought land in Northumberland, where he built a house.
The scientist continued his investigations in his new home. His most important discovery between 1794 and 1804, when he died, was carbon monoxide. He also became a member of the American Philosophical Society and contributed several papers to it.
At his death, on February 6, 1804, America lost a new son and the world an eminent scientist.
Quoted in Edgar F. Smith, Priestley in America, 1794-1804 (Philadelphia, 1920), 20.
Quoted in ibid,. 55.
S. Sydney Bradford, "Joseph Priestley House," National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings form 10-317 (March 24, 1964).
William Henry, "Joseph Priestley," Great Chemists, edited by Edward Farber (New York, 1961).
Edgar F. Smith, Priestley in America (Philadelphia, 1920).
John Maxson Stillman, The Story of Early Chemistry (New York, 1924). | <urn:uuid:fac4336c-fe80-4cde-9b6a-a15d5c4d640f> | {
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The early life of Sri Ramakrishna
Sri Ramakrishna was born to humble but deeply religious parents in the small Indian village of Kamapukur. The father of Ramakrishna was Ksudhiram. Ksudhiram led a quiet, devoted life and was held in high regard by other members of the community. One important instance in his life was when a rich and powerful landlord, Ramananda Roy, wished Ksudhiram to give false witness in a court trial. Ksudhiram knew the likely consequences but could not bring himself to bear false witness. Thus enraged the landlord forced Ksudhiram and his family out of his ancestral home in Dere Village. This left Ksudhiram in a difficult financial situation, but Ksudhiram retained explicit faith in Lord Rama or Raghuvir. After a while Ksudhiram was offered a new plot of land in the village of Kamarpukur by his friend Sukhal Goswami. It would be here that Ramakrishna would later be born.
The Mother of Ramakrishna was the equally pious Chandradevi, it was said by all who knew her that she was an embodiment of maternal love, simplicity and self sacrifice. Often she would freely give some of her frugal resources to passing mendicants and other neighbours who came for assistance. Before the birth of Ramakrishna, Chandradevi experienced many significant dreams in which she felt she would soon give birth to a child of exalted spiritual stature. Chandradevi was somewhat alarmed by these visions, wondering whether she was fit for such a task. However Ksudhiram also had similar experiences during his meditations, thus he was able to reassure Chandradevi, who at the time was 45.
Ramakrishna (or Gadadhar as he was named in birth) was born on 18th February 1836, according to Indian astrology maps this was said to be an auspicious day and Ramakrishna was said to have a similar birth chart to other avatars such as Krishna and Sri Chaitanya. As a young child Gadadhar was dearly loved by all members of the small village of Kamarpukur. Gadadhar had an endearing personality and marvellous sense of humour. In particular he developed the ability to mimic other people, including women. This ability to bring joy made him a popular visitor throughout the village. Gadadhar made good progress at school, although he was completely hopeless at arithmetic and displayed no interest in the subject. However Gadadhar did become very interested in the lives of spiritual Masters and the various Gods and Goddesses worshipped by the different religious traditions. At the frequent request of village members Gadadhar entertained them through singing devotional songs, acting parts of spiritual plays or recounting tales from the Puranas. Gadadhar began to experience heightened states of spiritual consciousness. One instance occurred when Gadadhar was walking along when he glanced at a flock of white cranes flying against a backdrop of darkened clouds. Gadadhar was so overwhelmed with the beauty of nature that he lost outer consciousness and entered into a state of ecstasy. Thus Ramakrishna’s early years in the village of Kamarpukur were days of happiness and growing spiritual awareness. Later he looked fondly back on these days with a sense of gratitude, especially for his devoted parents.
Ramakrishna’s eldest brother Ramakpur had a job as a part time priest. And in In 185? was asked by Rani Raswami to be the priest in a new temple complex on the eastern banks of the Ganges at a place called Dakshineswar. Rani Raswami was a devout worshipper of Kali. She had planned to go on an expensive pilgrimage to the holy city of Varanaswi however just before she had a vision in which the goddess appeared instructing her to stay in Dakshineswar and build a temple. Rani Raswami was well known for her charitable works, she was rich but also generous and was concerned with the interests of the poor. Although Rani Raswami initially employed Ramkapur to be the priest in the Kali temple this job was handed over to Sri Ramakrishna even though he was reluctant to take any job. Sri Ramakrishna didn’t want to tie himself down to a worldly job but he had grown to like the temple surroundings at Dakshineswar and also he managed to secure the help of his nephew Hriday. Hriday would play an important role in the life of Sri Ramakrishna. In particular he looked after his material needs during Ramakrishna’s most intense spiritual practices.
It was at Dakshineswar that Ramakrishna’s sadhana gathered pace and intensity. He would finish his temple duties and then spend the night fearlessly meditating in the Panchavi grove. Many were impressed with the devotion and spiritual fervour of this young priest, although his unorthodox behaviour also started to create misunderstandings and some started to wonder at the mental state of Ramakrishna.
Ramakrishna tells how he became absorbed in devotion to the Divine Mother. His heart felt an indescribable pain of separation and he became desperate for a vision of the Divine Mother.
Ramakrishna began to spend increasing amounts of time absorbed in another consciousness. He would pray and meditate with great intensity, his chest would glow red and his eyes were filled with tears of longing. In this state he lost all desire for worldly enjoyments, the need for sleep vanished, (without his cousin Hriday to feed him he would have forgotten about food.) When he felt the presence of the Divine Mother he was overwhelmed with an intense inner ecstasy and joy, but if this feeling vanished he would feel great pain and would pray intensely until his vision returned.
Ramakrishna became so absorbed in his spiritual sadhana he was unable to fulfil his duties as a priest. Also Sri Ramakrishna worshipped the Divine Mother in his own way, which to many observers was highly unorthodox. Some of the workers in the temple authorities complained to Mathur, who worked on behalf of Rani Raswani. Mathur decided to visit Ramakrishna unannounced however Rani Raswani felt in Sri Ramakrishna a genuine spirituality which she admired she asked that Sri Ramakrishna remain, indeed she felt it an honour that such a great Saint was praying in her temple.
Article by: Richard Pettinger 1/12/2005
To be continued | <urn:uuid:5b38a0e6-9902-4188-8014-a54099b3b430> | {
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Harvesting seeds from your garden for planting in the future is a great idea for all kinds of reasons. Most obviously, it’s an economical way to keep your garden going from year to year without having to constantly purchase new seeds. Seed saving allows you to share (and trade!) with your friends and neighbours, and it keeps the gene pool of food plants alive and healthy.
The actual process is not difficult, although there’s a little more to it than can be fully explored in this article. A number of excellent books on the subject exist, as noted below. While you don’t need an extensive education to save seeds, you will have to learn some very basic principles, a little bit of botany, and some specific information about the seeds you’d like to save.
These are the three fundamentals of seed saving:
1. Labeling & recording your harvest. We grow plants and store seeds over a long period – sometimes for more than two or three years. It’s far too easy to forget the details of exactly where, when, and how your seeds were planted, and other details like where they came from originally. At minimum, you’ll want to record the variety name, its origin, the date of harvest, and the date of storage. It’s also helpful to record everything else you can observe, like days to maturity, seeding dates, and yield.
2. Cleaning, drying, & storing your seeds. Seeds come in all shapes and sizes, from manageable (spinach and cilantro) down to dust-like (lobelia and oregano). What you want to save are the seeds themselves, not a bunch of twigs, leaves, and dirt. So cleaning foreign debris away from seeds is important. Seeds that come from pulpy fruits like tomatoes need extra work, but there are time saving secrets to cleaning each type. You’ll also need to dry the seeds thoroughly for storage in order to prevent mould and other decay from damaging them. Finally, storing seeds through the winter in an organized fashion takes some small effort.
3. Maintaining the purity of the variety in question. When you grow your seeds out in the years to come, you want them to maintain all of the desirable qualities of their parent plants. This requires some understanding of how pollination works, and what is required to prevent the genetic material of a similar plant “contaminating” your seeds and producing unpredictable results.
The materials you’ll need can be very simple or quite elaborate, depending on your needs. Simple paper envelopes might be the most important tool of all. Use our Blank Seed Packets to identify and store your harvested seeds until next spring. Be sure to label everything with all the collection data you can think of, because it’s easy to lose track — particularly if you’re saving numerous different kinds of seeds.
If you plan on saving seeds you should work with varieties that are open pollinated, as opposed to hybrid kinds. Hybrids seeds are produced by crossing the pollen of two different plant varieties to take advantage of the desirable characteristics of both parent plants. If you saved the seeds from a hybrid variety, the plants they would produce would be unpredictable. Saving seeds of open pollinated varieties keeps things relatively simple.
One of the best basic guides for seed savers is How to Save Your Own Seeds, published by Seeds of Diversity Canada. This 48-page handbook contains pretty much all the information needed to save vegetable and herb seeds from year to year. The layout is easy to use, and it is intended for beginners, so the writing is clear, but thorough. For the advanced seed saver, The Manual of Seed Saving is an excellent reference. This book includes more information about how each type of plant is pollinated, and how larger scale growers can manage seeds from year to year. | <urn:uuid:935bae60-ed45-49c3-b96d-936e304510c8> | {
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CNST Researchers Develop Integrated Nanomechanical Sensor for Atomic Force Microscopy
June 1, 2011
Contact: Kartik Srinivasan
The atomic force microscope (AFM) is an important tool for nanoscale surface metrology. Typical AFMs map local tip-surface interactions by scanning a flexible cantilever probe over a surface. They rely on bulky optical sensing instrumentation to measure the motion of the probe, which limits the sensitivity, stability, and accuracy of the microscope, and precludes the use of probes much smaller than the wavelength of light. As reported in Nano Letters,* CNST researchers have fabricated a novel integrated sensor combining a nanomechanical cantilever probe with a high sensitivity nanophotonic interferometer on a single silicon chip. Replacing the bulky laser detection system allowed them to build cantilevers orders of magnitude smaller than those used in conventional AFMs. Because each of these smaller structures has an effective mass less than a picogram, the detection bandwidth is dramatically increased, reducing the system response time to a few hundred nanoseconds. While probe stiffness was kept comparable to conventional microcantilevers in order to maintain high mechanical gain (how much the tip moves when it senses a force change), the probe size was reduced to a mere 25 µm in length, 260 nm in thickness, and only 65 nm in width. Readout is based on “cavity optomechanics”, with the probe fabricated adjacent to a microdisk optical cavity at a gap of less than 100 nm. Due to this close separation, light circulating within the cavity is strongly influenced by the motion of the probe tip. The cavity has a high optical quality factor (Q), meaning that the light makes tens of thousands of round-trips inside the cavity before leaking out of it, all the time accumulating information about the probe’s position. The combination of small probe-cavity separation and high Q gives the device sensitivity to probe motion at less than 1 fm/√Hz, while the cavity is able to sense changes in probe position with high bandwidth. The entire device is nanofabricated as a single, monolithic unit on a silicon wafer. It is therefore compact (chip-scale), self-aligned, and stable. Fiber optic waveguides couple light into and out of the sensor, so that it can be easily interfaced with standard optical sources and detectors. Finally, through simple changes to the probe geometry, the mechanics of the probe tip can be greatly varied, allowing for the different combinations of mechanical gain and bandwidth needed for a variety of AFM applications.
*Optomechanical transduction of an integrated silicon cantilever probe using a microdisk resonator, K. Srinivasan, H. Miao, M.T. Rakher, M. Davanco, and V. Aksyuk, Nano Letters 11, 791-797 (2011). | <urn:uuid:b3ab6c84-de59-4fc7-bbe5-4c3d3cab5b36> | {
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Do antibacterial soaps work better than regular soaps?
Dr. Greene’s Answer:
In the Journal of Hospital Infections, June 1995, researchers from Georgetown University declared that handwashing remains sporadic and ineffective in all health care settings and among all types of staff. We know that effective handwashing at the appropriate moments is one of the most powerful measures of preventive medicine available today. It is inexpensive, non-invasive, and of great proven benefit. That handwashing should remain neglected at the close of the twentieth century — by health care professionals — is a disgrace!
One hundred fifty years ago Dr. Semmelweis, fresh out of medical school, was a young assistant physician in the maternity hospital in Vienna, Austria. In Europe at that time, mortality rates in maternity hospitals ranged as high as 25 to 30 percent. A postpartum infection known as puerperal fever was the main cause of death. Dr. Semmelweis decided to investigate the cause of puerperal fever, against the strong objections of his superiors who felt that the high mortality rates were normal and non-preventable.
Semmelweis had a friend who died from a wound infection after performing an autopsy on a woman who had died of puerperal fever. His symptoms had been similar to those of the infected women. Semmelweis also noticed that the obstetric mortality rates were highest in the delivery room where students went directly to attend the labor of healthy mothers immediately after dissecting the bodies of women who had died of puerperal fever.
Semmelweis ordered all of the medical students to wash their hands after performing autopsies and before examining living women. This was considered by the students to be unnecessary and burdensome, but they complied. As a result, the mortality rate plummeted to 1.27 percent. Yet Semmelweis lost his job for being a troublemaker.
He wrote and spoke about the importance of handwashing, but was largely ignored. Finally, when a hospital in Pest, Austria, was having a particularly bad epidemic of puerperal fever, they hired Semmelweis to be the chief of obstetrics. He instituted handwashing, the epidemic vanished, and the mortality rate fell to 0.85 percent for the six years that he remained there.
Semmelweis published his findings and sent them to all of the prominent obstetricians and medical societies throughout Europe. The response was outspoken and antagonistic. The steady rejection by the medical establishment of Semmelweis’s appeal to reason gradually resulted in his becoming discouraged, disillusioned, and depressed. He died in a mental hospital at only 47 years of age — of a wound infection.
Now, Semmelweis is a hero of medicine. His teachings on handwashing have been validated repeatedly. The benefit has been proven in obstetrics, in operating rooms, in intensive care units, in doctor’s offices, and in every health care setting. It has also been proven to be powerfully effective in preventing common infections in healthy children at home and at school.
Children who wash their hands effectively have fewer visits to the doctor, take fewer antibiotics, need fewer prescription medicines, have fewer illnesses, and miss less school than their counterparts. This has been demonstrated repeatedly. Schools with regular handwashing programs have measurably fewer infections in their students than schools with sporadic handwashing. Schools without handwashing routines have large amounts of fecal bacteria detectable on classroom floors and carpets.
What does it mean to wash effectively? Children (and adults) must be taught to wash their hands at all of the critical moments. These include washing after defecating, after handling diapers, before handling food, before eating, and before feeding children. They must also wash with water and a cleansing agent — not water alone. Even washing with ashes and water, or soil and water, has been proven to be more effective than washing with water alone.
Is antibacterial soap the best cleansing agent? The scientific studies comparing antibacterial soap to regular soap give apparently contradictory results. Some studies show it is better, others that it is worse, and others seem to show no difference. Taken together, these studies indicate that antibacterial soaps are more effective at reducing infections by some organisms (especially staph and strep); they are worse at preventing some types of infections (especially by some of the organisms called gram negative bacteria, since the antibacterial soaps kill much of the beneficial bacteria that normally live on our skin and protect us from some of these gram negative organisms); and they make no difference for some types of infections (such as cytomegalovirus [CMV], or Clostridia — the bacteria that cause gangrene). Some studies have also suggested that antibacterial soaps may lead to the emergence of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics (Aiello et al: Consumer antibacterial soaps: effective or just risky? Clin Infect Dis, 2007).
One alternative to handwashing with soap and water is the use of alcohol-based hand rubs. These are now becoming widely available in doctor’s offices and hospitals. Recent studies suggest that they are just as effective as handwashing with soap and water (Stout et al: Clinical effectiveness of alcohol-based products in increasing hand hygiene compliance and reducing infection rates: a systematic review. J Hosp Infect, 2007).
For children who are prone to impetigo, boils, or pimples, I would recommend using an antibacterial soap. I would also recommend it for people who are exposed to a great many infectious diseases (I use it in my office). For others, I would recommend a gentle cleanser such as Dove, Alpha Keri, Aveeno, or Cetaphil, to avoid dry or cracked skin.
Far more important than the choice of soap is consistent, thorough handwashing. Let the legacy of Semmelweis inspire you to give the gift of handwashing to your children, rather than additional rounds of antibiotics. It does take a little work, but far less than the work it would take to take care of your children during the infections you will instead prevent. | <urn:uuid:461ea5c9-1ed1-45e8-9b55-0dedf1de6657> | {
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CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE PAST
Lizzie Johnson's Gravestone at the Juden Cemetery
Included here with permission of Cassie Johnson
|The Juden Cemetery was in active use during the time of slavery, through emancipation, and into recent decades. This research places the artifacts discovered in the Juden Cemetery in context with the artifacts recovered from the slave and tenant quarters, the historical documentation relating to the plantation, and the oral history of the community. By framing the contextual associations of the artifacts as part of a social dialogue, artifacts and features from the Juden Cemetery can be interpreted as symbols of community power and resistance. The symbolic attributes of these artifacts were hidden from Anglo-European surveillance through the re-use of material from the plantation landscape. Further, there is provocative evidence that the cognitive framework surrounding some of the symbolic forms found at the Jordan Plantation and the Juden Cemetery have been adapted from Kongo cosmological attributes.|
The archaeological excavations of slave and tenant farmer living quarters at the Levi Jordan Plantation have provided insights into the dynamics of a community of African-Americans founded in 1848. The study of this community has, in turn, opened up paths of research which can reveal aspects of African-American cultural heritage. One such aspect which has been researched from the Jordan Plantation is evidence that certain members of the slave and tenant farmer community performed specialized task roles, that were not directed or condoned by the plantation owners. Evidence has been found for such roles as a political leader, a Shell/bone carver, a munitions/metal worker, and a curer.
My thesis work sought to explore how the African-American community of the Jordan plantation resisted oppression through their burial practices. This paper will focus on how the slaves and tenants displayed materials in their cemetery that held symbolic importance for their community. Of special importance to this study was the discovery of materials in the cemetery that can be interpreted as sharing symbolic meaning with symbols discovered in two discrete contexts through the excavations of the slave and tenant cabins. This symbol is similar to the Kongo Cosmogram found in parts of west and central Africa.
Death records reveal that the cemetery associated with the Jordan Plantation was referred to as the "Juden" cemetery by a least a few individuals from the African-American community, and this name for the cemetery will be used within this work. The Juden Cemetery was established along the southwestern boundary of Jordans property, and is known to have been in use as early as 1881 based on the date from the earliest tombstone present. Oral narratives given by the surrounding African-American community indicates that the cemetery was in use during slavery. The unpublished diary of one of Levi Jordans granddaughters, Sallie McNeill, makes some references to the structures of the plantation landscape, but no mention is made of the Juden cemetery African-American burial practices.
The Juden Cemetery study utilized a combination of data from archaeological surface survey, historical documentation, and oral narratives. The surface survey of the Juden Cemetery recorded all material items found on the surface of the cemetery, the orientation of the graves, the types of markers used on the graves, and the proximity of the graves to each other. The first goal of this study was to ascertain how the burial patterns at the Juden Cemetery correlated with other burial patterns. Did the slaves and tenants from the Juden Cemetery bury their dead in a way which is reflective of the traditional African-American cemeteries, or did they conform more to the traditional Anglo-European burial pattern? If they were a synthesis of the two traditions, how can an investigation of the synthesis provide insight into the lives of the African-American community from the Jordan Plantation? The second project for this study was to examine how, if at all, the burial practices of the Juden cemetery operated as a form of resistance to Anglo-European domination.
To answer the question of which burial practices the slaves and tenants utilized, two models for comparison have been created. These models are constructed from past historical and anthropological research. While there are many burial traditions the African-American community could have utilized, the slaves and tenants would have had the most exposure to the African-American and Anglo-European burial patterns.
The Anglo-European burial practices model is based on a catalogue of cemeteries in Texas by cultural geographer Terry G. Jordans work (43) identifies the following four traits indicative of the Anglo-European burial tradition in Texas:
The African-American model is based upon a comprehensive study of African-American art forms by Thompson. His text, Flash of the Spirit, (30) records a variety of types of burial customs found in African-American cemeteries. This model is supplemented by Jordans findings in African-American cemeteries in Texas:
After comparing the burial patterns of the Juden Cemetery to the Anglo-European and African-American burial models, the degree to which the Juden Cemetery exhibits (or does not exhibit) traits from these models can be described. The burial practices from the Juden Cemetery can then be examined in light of acceptance or resistance to the burial practices of the dominating Anglo-European society.
The investigation of the Juden Cemetery revealed that it contained attributes from both Anglo-European and African-American cemeteries. Grave orientations included 96 east-west interments, 4 west- east interments, and 20 north-south interments. Some areas of the cemetery contained graves without uniform orientations.
|A variety of grave markers
and cemetery artifacts were utilized in the Juden
Cemetery. Some of the markers conform to the
Anglo-European tradition of inscribed tombstones, while
others do no conform to the Anglo-European burial
pattern. Out of a total of 140 grave depressions, 37
graves with markers were discovered in the Juden
Cemetery. Five markers are of particular interest because
of the way they have been adapted from their original
function to serve as grave markers. There are examples of
railroad rails being used as grave markers, and one as a
cemetery artifact. Further, iron pipes were discovered, 2
that had been driven into the ground and served as grave
markers, and two that had been placed in the middle of
graves that already had markers.
[images of these grave markers will be inserted here at some point].
The following section will focus on an interpretation of how these cemetery markers and artifacts serve to represent aspects of a symbolic structure previously defined through the excavations of the slave and tenant quarters. The symbolic structure in question is believed to be an adaptation of the Kongo Cosmogram. A cosmogram is a diagram that symbolizes aspects of a cultures world view, philosophy, and religion.
The Kongo Cosmogram has been characterized by Wyatt MacGaffey [citation] as "a Greek cross [+] marked on the ground". The horizontal "line represents (a) boundary" and the vertical line being " ambivalently both the path leading across the boundary, as to the cemetery, and the vertical path of power linking the above with the below" (cited in Thompson 1983:108). The cross figure of the cosmogram is depicted within a circle; the cross element of the cosmogram is called Yowa, in the Kongo language.
This cosmogram is represented in the Kongo typically as a design drawn upon the ground (Thompson 1983: 108-111); however, aspects of the cosmogram can be found in the designs of masks in Kongo and Zaire.
" the Kidumu dancers among the Teke-Tsaayi of Congo (sic) Brazzaville have the perfectly round shape of the Congolese image of the cosmos. This cosmos, like the masks, has a horizontal midline dividing it into an upper and lower half-circle. The upper half is the world of the living, while the lower half if the world of the dead or ancestors. But in some contexts, the midline is said to correspond to water, or to a read snake that lives in the river. In such cases, it mediates the distinction between the two worlds, or changes the relationship between things located in the upper and lower parts of the circle" (Jacobson-Widding 1991:35) [need to obtain full citation for the bibliography].
The excavations of the slave and tenant quarters have produced two examples of the Kongo Cosmogram. First, a brick found in the wall debris of the cabin of the hypothesized "political leader" had the cosmogram inscribed on its surface.
Two fragments of brick with a "cosmogram" carved into one of its surfaces. The enclosed cross symbols was raised on the surfaces after the brick was fired. From Brown 1995 (2).
|Second, four sub-floor deposits found underneath the cabin of the curer are both spatially and symbolically commensurate with the structure of the Kongo Cosmogram (Brown 1994).|
This drawing in the paragraph above is described below. From Brown 1995 (2).
|"The first of these
deposits [1, above] discovered was the
curers/magicians kit, found in the
south-eastern corner of the cabin. Immediately adjacent
to this kit, but likely placed below the floorboards of
the cabin [Ken Brown] discovered an extremely large
quantity of nails, spikes, real and fake
knife blades, and small porcelain dolls, which appear to
be all that remains of a wooden Nkisi.
"The second deposit [2, above] discovered contained seven coins. This set of coins consisted of four quarters, two dimes and a half-dime The coins had been tightly wrapped together inside a coarsely woven cloth object the coins were placed so that they were standing in a nearly vertical fashion on their sides. They faced north-south. The coins were also carefully arranged such that the perforated half-dime was on the outside facing south, then came two of the quarters (both dated 1853) then an 1853 dime, then the other two coins (both dated 1858).
"The third deposit [three, above] discovered consisted of a wide variety of objects within and surrounding two complete cast iron kettles. The kettles had been placed below the floorboards immediately inside the cabins door. The kettles had been positioned one inside the other with a few small, metal, ocean shell, glass, and bone fragments placed inside the upper kettle .a number of objects were then placed around, or in two lines radiating out from these kettles. Toward the northeast were two small Confederate military buttons, several large bones, metal chain links, and a bayonet. Toward the southeast were several more lengths of metal chain, numerous large metal objects (including a hinge, spike, bolt and a piece of a plow), several ocean shells, a quartz crystal, glass fragments, and two additional Confederate military buttons.
"The fourth deposit [four, above] discovered was found placed into a hearth of the cabin. Sometime after the construction of the hearth, the bricks at the back of the hearth, below the chimney, were removed and a hole was excavated into the fill and dirt below this portion of the hearth. A clay plaster surface was put over the bottom of the hole, which was then covered with ash, broken up and heavily burned ocean shell and a few nails" (Brown 1994: 111-114).
The Juden Cemetery contains several markers and cemetery artifacts that function, in part, as components which represent aspects of this cosmogram. First, is the presence of the railroad rail that was positioned between two groups of two groves of Yucca plants. This railroad rail is set in the ground such that the bottom half of a circle of iron faces to the east.
Cemetery artifact described in above paragraph.
|Based upon the
similarities between the cosmogram identified in the
slave and tenant quarters and the Kongo cosmogram; a
correlation can be drawn to the lower half of the
railroad to the lower half-circle of the cosmogram. Given
that [David Bruner's thesis elaborates on this
hypothesis more] there was an intended connection between
the railroad artifact and the cosmogram from the slave
and tenant quarters, the railroad equipment can be
interpreted here as a symbol associating the cemetery
with the world of the dead.
The three other pieces of railroad equipment used distinctly as grave markers lack the half-circle face of the cemetery artifact mentioned above. All three are vertical bars with a "T" shaped head [slide 14]. Based upon the half-moon shaped railroad equipment representing a component of the cosmogram, the "T" shape of these other railroad artifacts represent the lower half of the Yowa cross the horizontal line representing the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and the vertical line representing the path to the grave.
One of the "T" shaped markers at one of the grave depressions.
|The Sugar Mill, which
functioned as part of the plantation until it fell into
disuse in 1888, offers the probable location of where the
railroad equipment came from. In the ruins of the Sugar
Mill which stands today, there is a pile of railroad
track pieces which are identical in size and shape to the
portions of the "T" shaped railroad artifacts
mentioned above. This adds an extra dimension to these
artifacts as "
things belonging to, or last
used by, the deceased". There are primary historical
documents that state that when the Sugar Cane needed to
be processed, Jordan worked the slaves 20 hours a day.
The possibility arise that the use of the railroad rails
from the sugar mill represents the last used objects of
slaves that were worked to death during these periods.
In the Juden Cemetery there are two upright metal pipes used as grave markers,2 upright metal pipes used as artifacts, and 2 upright pipes as cemetery artifacts. The use of upright pipes in African-American cemeteries has been identified by Thompson: " deposits of pipes of all kinds, representing voyage, through smoke or water, from this world to the next " (1983:139). The vertical line of transportation represented by the upright pipes, corresponds with the vertical line of the Yowa cross; symbolizing the path between the world above of the living and the world below of the dead.
Pipe capped off with bolt.
|Two of the upright pipes
were capped off at the top by a large bolt. While there
is no record at all of upright pipes being
sealed in African-American cemeteries, there
is ethnographic evidence from the Nyroro of Uganda that
if a person died very ill-disposed toward
someone in the family, the mouth and anus of the corpse
might be stopped up by clay; it was supposed that this
would prevent the ghost from escaping and causing injury
to the people against whom it had a grudge" (Skinner
Given that the upright pipes of the Juden Cemetery might have functioned to allow transportation of the soul between the worlds, then the capping of the pipes might have served the same function as in the orifice sealing among the Nyoro. It should be noted, however, there are no spatial or material correlates in the Juden Cemetery to support this hypothesis. The individuals buried with capped pipes are not noticeably segregated from the rest of the graves, not do they exhibit any distinctive difference in grave artifacts.
The Juden Cemetery is not the only example of cultural elements from the Kongo being found in an African-American cemetery. Thompson notes that "Nowhere is Kongo-Angola influence on the New World more pronounced, or profound, than in black traditional cemeteries throughout the South of the United States" (1983: 132).
The Juden Cemetery Landscape
There are two important aspects to the landscape of the Juden Cemetery; its positioning in relation to a waterway, and the presence of two copses of Yucca plants within the cemetery. Jacobson-Widding cites the important role waterways play in Kongo cosmology in acting as the ambiguous mediary between the world of the living and the world of the dead " the boundary between the two worlds consists of the water of pools and rivers (1991:177). Here the symbol of the waterway functions in a similar vein as the horizontal line of the Yowa cross represents the boundary between worlds. Archaeologist Leland Ferguson has recovered Colono Ware bowls that have the Yowa cross inscribed on them from " rivers adjacent to the old rice plantations" (Ferguson 1992:114) (21). This correlation reinforces the possible importance of waterways as an aspect of the Kongo Cosmogram in the landscape of the Juden Cemetery.
Regional maps show that the slew which runs roughly north-south to the cemetery is a tributary to the San Bernard River which runs out into the Gulf of Mexico. This same slew extends up alongside the Jordan Plantation main house and the slave quarters. It is possible, though no documentation exits to support the premise, that the slew was used as a waterway to raft items to the plantation. If so, some form of water craft could also have been used to carry a body to the Juden Cemetery.
Thompson also defines how plants are used in traditional Kongo burials:
"Trees planted on graves also signify the spirit; their roots literally journey to the other world. Hence Kongo elders plant trees on graves, explaining: "This tree is a sign of spirit, on its way to the other world." The mooring of spirit with trees on graves appears in Southern Haiti, where the rationale is phrased this way: "Trees live after us, death is not the end." In the continental United States, at Hazelhurst, Mississippi, we learn that "at the funeral preachers are given a chance [???] with their carefully composed sermons. It is then that the evergreen is planted on the grave. These trees are identified with the departed, and if the tree flourishes, all is well with the soul: (1983:139).
While no grave markers were visible from any vantage point outside of the copses of Yucca, an informant who came by the cemetery while [I] was researching was conducting fieldwork recalled that " this entire place (the cemetery) was all cleared at one point, now it all grown over the old used the Yucca to mark their graves, I dunno why, they just did theres quite a few markers all in the Yucca, but it all grown up over them.". The choice of Yucca plants as an African-American grave artifact has only been cited in one other instance. In Huger, South Carolina, Archaeologist Cynthia Connor found Yucca plants being used as grave artifacts along with cedar trees (Connor 1989:54).
Yucca plants in part of the cemetery, described above.
|This study posits that
through the reuse of the railroad equipment and pipes the
slaves and tenants attempted to make a statement on the
public/non-public land of the cemetery. By
adapting the use of items which the surrounding white
community would not question as being non-Anglo-European
items, and therefore not symbols of African-American
individuality, the tenants from the Jordan Community
resisted the surveillance of the white community by
imbuing these objects with a symbolic character that only
Strong evidence exists that suggests that the Jordan Community Cosmogram has antecedents in the Kongo Cosmogram. However, it should be noted that analogy drawn here is an inductively generated model that requires further testing.
The material presented within this thesis has contributed to the understanding of African-American burial practices as they evolved from the result of a dynamic interchange of cultures. The analysis of the burial practices from the Juden Cemetery revealed that elements from both Anglo-European and African-American cemetery traditions were employed: the Anglo-European burial traditions of groups of graves marked with a traditional Anglo-European tombstone; and the African-American burial traditions of the cemetery being adorned with bottles and glass shards, being located near a waterway, trees or other foliage planted on or beside the graves, and graves being in clusters of different orientations throughout the cemetery.
The interpretation of the cemetery artifacts, placed into context with the excavations of the slave and tenant quarters, revealed how certain cemetery features and artifacts held multiple functions and meanings to serve as symbols of community solidarity and resistance against the surrounding white culture. Through the re-use of these seemingly benign material items, the slave and tenant community constructed a system of symbols that represented aspect of their world view.
Further research that examines African-American cemeteries in both urban and rural settings, from slavery and after emancipation, are needed. The potential exists for discovering how African-American communities in disparate settings utlized cemetery landscapes as arenas for resistance.
This version does not
include references for the in-text citations, but they
will be added at a later date.
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‹ Carol McDavid 1998 | <urn:uuid:d82ea900-e010-4c46-9fba-d00ec3925fc5> | {
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A soccer field can be up to 130 yards long. You need skill, agility and endurance if you expect to kick a soccer ball across this field and around opposing players. The essentials you need for victory in a soccer game are developed in your practice sessions. A day's soccer practice should be 60 to 90 minutes long and it should prepare you for the situations and opportunities you will encounter in a game.
To reduce the risk of injuries and to increase your heart rate, warm up before beginning your soccer drills. Start your warm-up with a light 15 to 20 minute jog around the field. Jogging also increases your cardiovascular endurance. After jogging, spend about 10 minutes on stretches. Stretching increases your range of motion and improves your agility. Soccer uses your entire body, but focus primarily on static leg stretches. Toe touches and the standing quadriceps stretch, which is performed by grabbing your ankle and bringing your heel toward your buttocks, minimize the potential for injury on the soccer field.
A soccer game consists of sudden bursts of energy. For this type of activity, use your practice time to improve your anaerobic endurance. You can accomplish this by performing sprints across the field. Try to sprint across the field two to four times. Give yourself a 30-second rest in between sprints. Racing other players may motivate you to run faster across the field.
Ball handling is a core skill for soccer players, who must learn to control the ball with only their feet as only goalies may touch the ball with their hands. Set up five to 10 cones in a straight line on the field. Position the cones about 3 feet apart. Practice dribbling by weaving through the cones while controlling the ball. Use both the inner and outer edge of each foot to move the ball. When you become proficient at dribbling through the cones, replace the cones with teammates. While these teammates give you mild resistance, try to dribble the ball around them.
Adept passing moves the ball across the field so your team can score. Practice passing the ball back and forth with a teammate for about five minutes. Focus on developing the skill to quickly stop the ball and return it. Also practice dribbling the ball across the field and passing it back and forth with your teammate. Remember to kick the ball slightly out in front of your teammate as you are both running, so you're passing to a moving target. Practice this passing drill for about 10 minutes. Gradually increase your speed in moving the ball across the field with your teammate.
Shooting scores goals, which enables your team to win the match. Place the ball in various locations around the front of the goal. Try to kick the ball past the goalie from both close and long range. Try 10 shots on goal. This part of practice also provides a good workout for your goalie, as she tries to block the incoming shots. After kicking the ball from a stationary position, dribble toward the goal and shoot 10 more times. Dribble and shoot at the goal from various angles to mimic the dynamic approach you'll experience in a game.
End your practice session with a 20 to 30 minute inter-squad scrimmage to put into play the skills you've practiced. Strive to work on all of your skills in this scrimmage. The scrimmage gives you a good opportunity to work on both offensive and defensive skills. This part of practice also helps you develop your peripheral vision so you can better see all the players on the field.
- Sports Fitness Advisor: Soccer Stretching Exercises
- How to Coach a Soccer Team: Professional Advice on Training Plans, Skill Drills, and Tactical Analysis; Tony Carr
- Coaching Soccer Tactics: An Essential Resource for Coaches, Teachers, Players and Spectators; Phil Wymer
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Mulches are used throughout landscapes to suppress weeds, conserve soil moisture, regulate soil temperature, contribute nutrients to the soil and increase the aesthetic value of a site. Wood chips and shredded hardwood are potential mulch materials prized for an attractive appearance, ability to resist blowing and washing away, and relatively slow decomposition. Over time, this type of mulch can suffer unsightly bleaching, and also compaction, which blocks air and water from reaching the soil and roots.
Flip mulch up in the air or turn it over several times with a pitchfork, working in small sections at a time, or rake it with a garden rake. Use minimal downward pressure to avoid penetrating the soil surface and damaging plant roots. Instead, run the implement head horizontally along the soil surface to pick up and turn over or fluff the mulch.
Move mulch 6 to 12 inches away from any plant trunks or stems. Mulch in contact with the plant can lead to rot and host problematic rodents.
Add more mulch if existing mulch has broken down into soil, so that the final mulch layer is 3 inches thick.
Water in any newly spread mulch thoroughly to prevent the formation of a water-repelling mycelial mat formed by nuisance fungi.
Things You Will Need
- Work gloves
- Garden rake or pitchfork
- Additional mulch, if needed
- Hardwood mulch can raise the soil pH as it breaks down, potentially creating a problem around acid-loving plants if an appropriate acidifying fertilizer is not used.
- As organic mulches decompose, they tie up nitrogen in the soil, making it unavailable to plants. Where plants surrounded by mulch are suffering from a nitrogen deficiency, which usually appears first as a yellowing of older leaves, fertilizing the plant with a nitrogen supplement is warranted.
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Portable sensor lets users monitor air pollution on their smartphoneView gallery - 3 images
Air quality is one of those things that many of us should be more concerned about, but aren’t. According to some people, this is because we’re not easily able to know how clean the air around us really is – we just assume it’s “clean enough.” Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego have set out to change that. They’re developing a compact, portable air pollution sensor that communicates with the user’s smartphone, to provide real-time air quality readings for their immediate surroundings.
Known as CitiSense, the device is able to measure local concentrations of ozone, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, which are the pollutants emitted most by internal combustion vehicles. That data is wirelessly transmitted to the user’s smartphone, where it’s displayed on the screen via a custom app – along with an actual number rating, the display also utilizes the EPA’s color code scale, where green is good and purple ... isn’t.
One of the ideas behind the sensors is that if commercialized, they would allow everyday people to be more proactive when it comes to air pollution. Users could avoid areas where the levels are dangerously high, for example, and would perhaps be more motivated to pressure local authorities to do something about the problem.
Also, data gathered from a multitude of the sensors throughout a region could provide the public with much more detailed and accurate air quality reports than is currently possible. According to the university, although San Diego County measures approximately 4,000 square miles (10,360 sq km), it is currently served by only about ten air-quality monitoring stations.
To test the technology, 30 people were given prototype CitiSense sensors to use in their everyday lives for a period of four weeks. Among other things, the test subjects discovered that air pollution is worse in particular highly-localized areas – it’s not just evenly diluted throughout the air. Not surprisingly, it was likewise noted that certain times of day are more hazardous than others.
Unfortunately for those of us who do our part to reduce pollution, it was also found that people who cycled or waited for the bus along a given route were exposed to more airborne pollutants than those who drove the same route.
The sensors presently cost US$1,000 per unit to build, but the researchers are confident that the price could be greatly reduced by mass production – they could conceivably even be incorporated into commercial smartphones. Although the constant data exchange between the prototype sensors and their paired phones is a considerable drain on the phones’ batteries, that could reportedly be addressed by limiting such exchanges to spaced intervals, or only when requested by the user.
North Carolina-based tech firm RTI International is developing a somewhat similar gadget known as the MicroPEM (Personal Exposure Monitoring device), although it doesn’t provide real-time readings. The University of Southern California has also created an Android app that uses the phone’s camera to measure particulate matter in the atmosphere, but it doesn't determine what those particles consist of. | <urn:uuid:9d9e2419-bdee-4930-84e1-a6a327a6d09f> | {
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In this course, author Lisa Cron digs into the craft of writing a compelling story based on what the brain is wired to respond to in every story we hear. Whether you're writing a story from scratch, or revising your story for the umpteenth time, this course offers practical how-to advice, then illustrates it using before-and-after examples. Discover how to craft a first page, zero in on your story's point, create empathy, find a character's secret goals and inner issues, translate generics into specifics, write for suspense, create cause-and-effect connections, build momentum and tension, and deftly implement setups, payoffs, flashbacks, subplots, and foreshadowing.
The root of all your protagonist's desires and fears are buried in their backstory, which is exactly where you'll find the answers to these questions. First, what's the source of the fear and of the desire that the plot will force your protagonist to struggle with? Can you trace her inner issue back to specific events in her past? Do you know how her inner issue has stopped her from fulfilling her desire right up to the moment the story begins? Ask yourself how have these things shaped how she sees the world and herself? Second, has your protagonist revealed her deepest, darkest secrets to you? Writers often shy away from uncomfortable truths because they are hard to admit.
Just talking about them can be unnerving, but unless you're planning to write a story with the depth of a greeting card, you really need to explore the messy stuff. Third, are your character bios specific enough? When you close your eyes, can you envision it, picture it, see it, or is it conceptual? If it's conceptual keep asking what happened exactly? For every answer your protagonist gives you, ask her why. And never underestimate the value of the therapist tried-and-true question: now how do you feel about that? Fourth, why does your story begin when it does? Can you answer the question? Why now as opposed to yesterday, tomorrow, or when Aunt Bertha gets back from bingo? What started the clock ticking? What unavoidable event is compelling your protagonist to act now, whether she wants to or not? Fifth, where is your story heading? This isn't to say you need to know how it ends when you right word one, but it sure helps.
Ask yourself what will my protagonist have to come to grips with at the end? The more you know exactly what she has to learn, the more likely it is you will write a story that teaches her that exact lesson. To get the hang of it, open the example for your exercise files. It's an example of a premise that's just a little bit too general.
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Joseph Maria Olbrich Facts
Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867-1908) was a leading architect of the Austrian Art Nouveau and one of the founders of the Vienna Secession.
Joseph Maria Philipp Olbrich was born in Troppau (Opava), then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Czechoslovakia, on December 22, 1867. He attended school there but left without graduating. In 1882 he enrolled at the building department of the Staatsgewerbeschule (State Trade School) in Vienna. In 1886 Olbrich returned to Troppau and worked for the contracting firm of August Bartel, but in 1890 he was back in Vienna studying at the special school of architecture of the Academy of Fine Arts under Carl von Hasenauer. In 1893 he worked for a few months for Otto Wagner, the great Viennese architect who succeeded Hasenauer as professor at the academy.
The following year Olbrich won the Rome Prize and left for Italy, but his trip was cut short when Wagner called him back to Vienna to become his chief draftsman for planning and designing the elevated and underground railroad (Stadtbahn) of Vienna. Olbrich assumed considerable design responsibilities and is considered partly accountable for several of the stations that Wagner designed, such as the Hofpavillon in Schönbrunn and Karlsplatz Station.
In April 1897 Olbrich, together with a group of painters, sculptors, and architects, founded the Vienna Secession, an organization of artists opposed to the conservative Künstlerhaus—the official artists' association. Immediately thereafter Olbrich was commissioned to design their headquarters. This building was completed in 1898 and caused a sensation in Vienna. Bold and simple, it consisted of juxtaposed massive blocks and had a distinctly orientalizing effect. However, its cupola of metal openwork with suprabundant floral decoration was unmistakably Art Nouveau in quality.
In 1899 Ernst Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hessen, invited Olbrich, along with Peter Behrens and several other artists, to Darmstadt to form an artistic colony, which was indeed established on a nearby hill called Mathildenhöhe. Olbrich designed all the buildings for the artists' colony, as well as the general layout, the furnishings, the gardens, and the settings for the exhibitions. The architectural focus of the colony was the Ernst Ludwig House built in 1899-1900. This structure had none of the massiveness of his Vienna Secession Building, but consisted of flat surfaces enlivened by an elegant play of the wall planes. The entranceway was dominated by a large Moorish arch. For the 1901 exhibition of the colony titled "Ein Dokument deutscher Kunst" (A Document of German Art"), Olbrich designed several temporary structures, the most interesting of which was the gallery of paintings and sculpture; the dynamic outline of this building was quite striking. Its scheme was repeated again by Olbrich in his competition entry for a railroad station in Basel, Switzerland, which received a prize and was widely imitated subsequently.
In 1904 another exhibition was organized in the artists' colony; for this Olbrich designed the "Three House Group," namely three model workers' dwellings which were rather unsuccessful architecturally. However, the work that he exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in the same year was quite remarkable and attracted the attention of many American architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright. Olbrich's work at the Mathildenhöhe culminated in the Exhibition Gallery and the Wedding Tower of 1906-1908. The former was a blocky and rather formal structure with a classicizing flavor. The latter, Darmstadt's wedding present to the Grand Duke, had a remarkable arched and panelled gable of five organ-pipe-like shapes that were still quite Art Nouveau. It also included a new motif, namely bands of windows that carried around the corners—a motif that was destined to be influential in the 1920s.
When Olbrich died of leukemia on August 8, 1908, he was working on two important commissions: the Feinhals House in Cologne-Marienburg built in 1908-1909 and the Tietz Department Store in Dusseldorf, designed in 1906 and completed after his death. The Feinhals House was blocky and symmetrical and had a portico of Doric columns, thus signifying the abandonment of the bold innovative architecture of his earlier years and the return to more conservative modes, a phenomenon that also could be seen elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. The Tietz Department Store emulated the verticalism of Alfred Messel's Wertheim Department Store in Berlin, although Olbrich's detailing was not medievalizing like Messel's but classicizing.
Olbrich assisted in the transformation of the historicist architectural legacy of Central Europe, in which his own education was grounded, into a new formal vocabulary. It was characteristic of the Art Nouveau movement in which he was participating that he was interested in a variety of design problems, including furniture and objects of the minor and the applied arts. His work was of uneven quality, and his buildings occasionally lacked stylistic cohesion; his smaller objects were usually more accomplished. It remains to his credit, however, that decoration was never allowed to obscure the functional aspects of his work. Olbrich was a founding member of the Bund Deutscher Architekten (Association of German Architects) in 1903 and of the Deutscher Werkbund in 1907.
Further Reading on Joseph Maria Olbrich
Ian Latham's monograph Joseph Maria Olbrich (1980) is profusely illustrated and clearly written. A good article on Olbrich is Robert Judson Clark's "J. M. Olbrich 1867-1908," Architectural Design 37 (December 1967). For a concise discussion of the work of Olbrich in the context of European modernism, see Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (4th ed., 1977); Leonardo Benevolo's History of Modern Architecture, 2 vols. (1977); and Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: from William Morris to Walter Gropius (2nd ed., 1975).
Additional Biography Sources
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This is part of Make a Mask, a series where I make copies of masks in Parisian museums.
This Halloween, I made my first papier-mâché mask. It was such an enjoyable process; a mix of sculpture, paper work and painting. Since then, every time I visit a museum, I am drawn magnetically to any and all masks on display.
Naturally, the next step was to start copying them.
For my first installment of this series, I submit to you Jean-Joseph Carriès's deliciously grotesque Horror Masks.
Jean-Joseph Carriès and his Horror Masks
Jean-Joseph Carriès (1855-1894) had a very distinctive style. Inspired by Gothic sculpture and Japanese art, this French sculptor and ceramicist's artworks are populated with strange monsters and grotesque visages.
After visiting the room dedicated to Carriès in the Petit Palais, I was hooked.
His Horror Masks, from around 1890, had several inspirations:
- Japanese art, with its Noh Theatre masks and portraits of actors
- The grotesque medieval figures that adorned manuscripts and cathedrals
- Sculptors interested in physiognomy who studied both human facial grimaces and their analogies with the animal kingdom; Carriès liked to combine human and animal features in his faces
-From the Musée d'Orsay's website
While Carriès used glazed stoneware inspired by the Japanese stoneware he had seen at the Exposition Universelle de Paris in 1878 for his Horror Masks, I decided to use the tried and true papier-mâché method for my reproduction. I would focus on copying the stylistic elements of the mask, rather than the technique.
The act of copying the Carriès mask helped me see it so much more clearly! From the sculpting to the painting, each step of the project revealed a new aspect of the mask to me.
Step 1: Clay
I used a cheap plastic mask as my base to work on with the clay. This turned out to be a mistake because it delimited the facial features, which was not very condusive to the distortions of the Horror Mask's face. For example, in order to achieve the scrunched up nose which goes right up to the eyes, I had to make an enormous snout on my mask.
Comparing my creation to that of Carriès helped me notice aspects of his mask that had been invisible to me before:
- The face is very round at the temples;
- The mouth is extremely lopsided;
- His mask melts to the left and has several rolls of skin under the chin;
- The eyes bulge forward and pupils are visible;
- The nostrils are ridiculously wide. I couldn't get my nose to flare in the same manner...
I smoothed out the clay with olive oil, following that up with a layer of vaseline (to faciliate the removing of the mask from the clay later on).
But as I compared this smooth surface to Carriès's mask, I realized that I needed to add deep lines to highlight the facial features, like around the swirly eyebrows. I made exaggerated lines that would be visible when the paper covered them.
I also hadn't noticed the warts that dotted the orange mask (I may have gone a bit overboard on that front).
Step 2: Papier-mâché
I followed the recipe for paste from How to Make Masks! by Jonni Good. This time, I worked with Scott Shop Towels like she recommends, rather than regular paper towels like for my last mask. The experience of working with the strong shop towels was such an improvement!
Many of the details were lost in this part of the process, but hints of the extra lines I added were still visible in the paper layer.
Step 3: Paint
Carriès liked to play with colors; he was fascinated by "the coloured effects that could be achieved by varying the clay, glazes and firing used for stoneware" (from the Orsay website). This proved to be a fun challenge to replicate that with acrylic paints!
After covering the mask in white gesso, I gave everything but the warts and eyes a covering of brown-ish yellow with orange highlights. I then painted the eyes a clear blue.
And then, the glaze! I mixed acrylic glazing liquid with brown paint and scrubbed the resulting mixture all over the mask.
When I wiped it off, this was the result:
When I look at my mask, I see all the ways it does not match the Carriès original. But on the whole, I'm pleased with it and I very much enjoyed the process. And I will never look at Carriès's work in the same way!
Up next: a mask from the Louvre
Petit Palais (salle 19)
Address: Avenue Winston Churchill 75008 Paris ∣ Métro: Champs-Elysées Clémenceau (line 1 or 13) ∣ Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm | <urn:uuid:e0599b1f-9753-40f2-b76a-82d883f4a0b2> | {
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Both National Cyber Security Awareness Month and National Bullying Prevention Month were themes for October. These themes continue to draw attention to a growing problem leveraged by the use of the Internet and social networking sites. Cyberbullying is the sending or posting of harmful or cruel text or images using the Internet or other digital communication devices such as email; instant messaging (IM); text messages or digital images sent on mobile phones; social networking sites, webpages, blogs, or virtual worlds; chat rooms or discussion groups; and interactive game sites.
Cyberbullying can be conducted 24 hours a day, seven days a week, making the victim a perpetual target. The harassment can be anonymous, and a single message posted online or sent to a mobile phone can spread to a wide audience. Hurtful or embarrassing messages or images can remain online indefinitely to damage the person’s social life and friendships, and possibly their reputation.
More than half of American teens worry about safety on the Internet and know someone their age who has been targeted by hurtful electronic communications. Nearly a third of teens have been targets themselves.
Those recent survey results, released by the Chicago youth-market research firm TRU, hint at the scale of the problems being addressed more vigorously in the wake of the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi and other cases of cyberbullying.
When it comes to safety online, young people’s main “knowledge gap” relates to “setting ground rules of what’s acceptable behavior … and how that technology may be used against them … where they could be blackmailed or cyber-bullied,” says Richard Harrison, lead mentor for the Safe and Secure Online program, which enlists online security experts to volunteer in schools.
Traditional Search Learning Activity
Assign students to write a report of at least 150 words (or a PowerPoint presentation of at least seven slides) that cites at least three resources. Student should use SIRS Knowledge Source to find information on Cyberbullying. Students should address at least three of the following essential questions for critical thinking in their reports (you can substitute others):
- How can cyberbullying lead to suicide?
- Which students are most likely to suffer from cyberbullying and why?
- What are some successful strategies for coping with cyberbullying?
- What should schools do to help students prevent and cope with bullying? | <urn:uuid:df883bf3-7d42-44bb-b68b-19781311a213> | {
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Dieters who eat meals and snacks high in protein might lose a bit more weight than those who get less protein and more carbohydrates - all other things being equal, a new meta-analysis suggests.
Researchers found that over an average of 12 weeks, people assigned at random to a high-protein diet lost about 1.8 extra pounds, and more body fat, than those assigned to a standard-protein diet.
There was no difference, however, in how much participants' blood pressure, cholesterol levels, or insulin changed based on the protein content of their diets.
Dr Thomas Wycherley from the University of South Australia in Adelaide, the lead author on the study, said that the extra weight loss in the high-protein group was "only modest," but that "it may still represent clinical relevance on a population level." For the study, he and his colleagues analysed 24 past trials that included a total of 1063 people.
What the study found
Participants were all put on a reduced-kilojoule, low-fat diet designed to help them lose weight. About half were prescribed a high-protein version of that diet - containing about 85 grams of protein per day for a 150-pound person - and the other half a standard-protein diet, with 49 grams per day, on average, for a 150-pound person.
Across all trials, high-protein and standard-protein diets were designed to provide the same calorie reduction.
Depending on the study, participants lost an average of anywhere from 2.4 to 25.1 pounds, according to findings published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
It's not obvious why a higher protein-to-carbohydrate ratio might help people shed more pounds - and one obesity researcher not involved in the new analysis questioned whether the trials were even robust enough to make that conclusion.
"The studies are generally far too short to tell impact," said Dr James Levine from the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. What's more, he added, "many are inadequately conducted to be relevant."
Dr Wycherley said it's possible the body may spend more energy processing protein compared to carbohydrates. Another potential explanation for the link his team observed is that eating protein helps preserve muscle mass - and muscle mass burns more calories, even when the body is resting, than other types of mass.
He said people in the studies tended to get protein from a variety of animal and vegetable sources.
Substituting protein for carbohydrates as part of an energy-restricted diet, Dr Wycherley said, is one option for people hoping to lose weight.
But given the limitations of the current evidence, Dr Levine said, "It makes no real difference which of the (weight-loss) approaches one chooses."
(Reuters Health, November 2012)
Tim Noakes on carbohydrates
Low-kJ diets healthier overall
Education helps maintain weight-loss | <urn:uuid:400804ea-6d7c-4d53-b574-39c109cf125d> | {
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SATURDAY, May 9 (HealthDay News) -- People's teeth are wearing away at a faster rate than ever, dissolving under a blistering acid attack that they've brought on themselves, dental experts say.
Dental erosion -- the loss of the protective enamel on teeth -- is reportedly on the increase in the United States. The condition occurs when enamel is worn away by acids in the mouth, leaving teeth sensitive, cracked and discolored.
"Erosion is a chemical process of tooth destruction, not to be confused with abrasion, which is a mechanical process of tooth destruction," said Dr. Melvin Pierson, a spokesman for the Academy of General Dentistry and a dentist in private practice in Sicklerville, N.J.
One study, for instance, found dental erosion in about 30 percent of a group of 900 middle school students across the country. Pierson said those results, published in 2008 in the Dental Tribune, confirmed the suspicions many dentists had harbored. In a survey of dentists taken before the study, nearly half said they thought tooth erosion was on the rise.
Why is this happening? Experts blame what people are drinking and how theyre drinking it, for the most part.
Soft drinks, sports drinks, fruit juices and teas all contain high amounts of acid, said Dr. Edmond R. Hewlett, consumer adviser for the American Dental Association and an associate professor of restorative dentistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Dentistry.
"When we're talking about erosion, it's clearly the acid content that's causing it," Hewlett said. "In soft drinks, especially in cola soft drinks, one of the main flavoring agents is phosphoric acid. That's the acid we use in dentistry to roughen tooth enamel before applying a bonding agent. We use it like sandpaper."
The sugar in most of those drinks also plays a role. When bacterial plaque on the teeth absorbs sugar from drinks and foods, it excretes an acid that eats away at tooth enamel.
"If you are eating sugary foods, the acidity of the plaque on your teeth increases precipitously," Hewlett said.
People often make the situation worse by savoring juices and soft drinks. Holding them in the mouth to enjoy the flavor or the fizzing increases exposure to the acids and sugars in the drinks. "You cause more damage when you drink a large amount and hold it in your mouth to savor the flavor," Pierson said.
Other things contribute to dental erosion, too. Medications such as aspirin can cause erosion, as can conditions such as acid reflux disease or eating disorders associated with chronic vomiting, which expose the teeth to gastric acid.
Pierson believes that dental erosion also is increasing because people are not getting enough fluoride. Many people are eschewing fluoridated public water sources in favor of bottled water, which might not contain fluoride. And they're also substituting soft drinks and juices for water.
"Fluoride helps strengthen the enamel. Erosion is an attack on the enamel," Hewlett said. "You have something that's going to protect it and strengthen it when it's under attack." He recommends that people who aren't drinking public water use a fluoridated toothpaste and mouth rinse.
Another way to help stop erosion is to hold off on brushing your teeth for about a half-hour after drinking a soda or a glass of juice, Hewlett said. If you brush right after, you're adding insult to injury by scrubbing at enamel already softened by the acid attack
"You've removed a microscopic layer of enamel that could have been replenished by the minerals in your saliva," he explained.
Saliva, it turns out, helps protect teeth from people's bad behavior by working to return the pH balance in the mouth to normal and restore minerals leached away by food acids, Hewlett said.
"There's this constant balance in the mouth, and saliva is there as our first line of defense," he said. "If someone has a good saliva flow, it can help repair some of the damage."
People who are worried about tooth erosion should talk about it with their dentist during one of the two visits a year they should be making to the dentist's office, Pierson said.
"That's where you get education from your dentist one-on-one," he said. "They examine your mouth and can ask specific questions based on what they find to address your specific problems."
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on water fluoridation.
SOURCES: Melvin Pierson, D.D.S., Sicklerville, N.J.; Dr. Edmund Hewlett, associate professor, restorative dentistry, School of Dentistry, University of California, Los Angeles; March 2008 Dental Tribune
Copyright © 2009 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Reader comments on this article are listed below. Review our comments policy. | <urn:uuid:a44dafd4-d62c-447f-b7cf-a4ecc92734f8> | {
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Choosing Wisely: Alberta
Following the recommendations by its Climate Change Review Panel, the Alberta government is overhauling its climate change policy. A central part of this plan is the implementation of a carbon tax in 2017. Starting at $20/tonne in 2017 and increasing the $30/tonne in 2018, the tax is expected to raise $3 billion per year. With new carbon revenue on the horizon, this provides an opportunity for Albertans to think about the best way their government can recycle these revenues. Hot off the press, the Commission’s most recent report, Choose Wisely, does just that by providing options and trade-offs of different revenue recycling options in the context of unique provincial circumstances and priorities.
What recycling priorities might fit Alberta’s context?
The report considers how Alberta’s context might make each option for revenue recycling a higher or a lower priority. To be clear, these aren’t recommendations. Provincial governments are best positioned to identify their own priorities. We can, however, take a look at how different factors might make each option a higher or lower priority for Alberta.
Transfers to households
Due to the province’s emission intensive economy and its reliance on coal-fired electricity generation, carbon costs for all households in Alberta will be higher than in other provinces. Additionally, the cost of higher electricity and energy prices will fall disproportionately on low-income households. Our analysis shows that offsetting the full burden for low-income households in the province would require transferring 3% to 9% of carbon revenue.
Income tax cuts
Alberta has some of the lowest corporate and personal income taxes in the country. As a result, cutting these taxes could be a lower priority than other revenue-recycling alternatives.
The oil and gas sector remains and is likely to remain a main driver of both GHG emission and economic activity in Alberta. Expanding carbon policy, the growth of renewable energy and the possibility of long lasting low oil prices put significant pressure on the high-cost sector. As a result, successful investments in innovation and emission-reducing technology could help improve both the environmental and economic performance of the Alberta oil and gas sector.
While Alberta has the some of the youngest public infrastructure stock in Canada, the province has underinvested in public infrastructure compared to other provinces. As such, infrastructure investments, in particular transport infrastructure, might be a priority for Alberta.
Reduction of public debt
In the short-run, using carbon pricing revenue to reduce public debt is likely a low priority as Alberta has the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio of all provinces. However, if oil prices remain low for several years, continued budget deficits are likely and avoiding future debt could become a longer-term priority for revenue recycling.
Transitional support to industry
Alberta’s economy is more vulnerable to competitiveness pressures arising from carbon pricing than those of other provinces. In this context, the government’s proposal to provide output-based allocation to large industrial emitters is warranted.
What should Alberta choose?
Carbon pricing revenue options present opportunities for Alberta to influence both its economic and environmental performance, however, it needs to choose among them.
Event: Recycling Carbon Tax Revenues in Alberta
Our expert panel discussed the the trade-offs of different revenue recycling options, including how to address household fairness and business competitiveness in Alberta.
Watch the Live Panel | <urn:uuid:9b5d8525-d523-49d0-94ef-cbded66e76e1> | {
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Alison Brooks, MD, MPH, a sports medicine physician and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, will present, “Incidence of Sport-Related Concussion in High School Football Players: Effect of Helmets, Mouthguards, Previous Concussions, Years Playing Experience” last week at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (AMSSM) at the Hyatt Regency in New Orleans, La.
Dr. Brooks co-led a prospective cohort study of 2,288 high school football players over two seasons (2012 and 2013) to investigate whether a particular brand of helmet or type of mouthguard affects an athlete’s risk of suffering from sport-related concussion. According to a position statement released by the AMSSM last year on Concussion in Sport, concussion, a traumatic head injury, occurs 3.8 million times per year.
The study compared the helmet brands of Riddell, Schutt and Xenith with purchase years of 2003 through 2013 and generic versus specialized or custom mouthguard types against the incidence and severity (days lost) for each sport-related concussion sustained. Chi-square and t-tests were used to analyze incidence and Wilcoxon Rank Sum tests were used to determine severity. In total, 204 players sustained 208 sport-related concussions, causing them to miss a median of 14 days.
While helmet brand or age did not significantly affect the incidence or severity of sport-related concussion, prior concussion and the use of specialized or custom mouthguards were associated with an increased incidence of the injury. This is in contrast to manufacturers’ claims that a specific brand of helmet or type of mouthguard can significantly reduce the risk of concussion. Final multivariate regression analysis is in progress.
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FREE KS2 Mandarin Chinese Scheme of Work Lesson Plans - Unit 3: Celebrations
Before looking at this unit or any other unit of this Scheme of Work, you are advised to read the teachers notes about the Scheme of Work that can be found HERE
Each unit of this Scheme of Work is is designed to be used across a term (if working within a scholastic year of 6 terms or one unit every half term if working with a scholastic year of 3 terms). It is envisaged that children are taught Mandarin Chinese for between 40 minutes and an hour with follow up either by the Chinese teacher or more likely by the class teacher throughout the week.
This unit 3 is 'Celebrations'. It consists of session 1-6 which are downloadable at the bottom of this page.
***NEW*** Video Podcast: Native Chinese teacher, Li Ziru demonstrates how sounds/words on the Pronunciation practise grid should be correctly pronounced. If you are a non-native Chinese teacher, you may want to consider using these with your children. Look at the video podcasts below.
Questions or comments? Please mail info [at] thechinesestaffroom [dot] com | <urn:uuid:94d9fa27-d689-42ba-a50a-af2fe20be717> | {
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What is narcolepsy? According to WebMD, narcolepsy is a daytime sleep disorder which neurologically affects the control of sleep and wakefulness. In other words, people experience uncontrollable episodes of falling asleep easy during the day, anytime of day. Typically when we fall asleep it takes about ninety minutes for rapid eye movement sleep (REM), narcoleptics REM sleep occurs right away. Researchers have discovered irregularities in various parts of the brain involved in regulating REM sleep patterns. These irregularities apparently contribute to the occurrence of narcoleptic symptoms. Experts believe there are many factors causing narcolepsy that act together causing neurological dysfunction and REM sleep disturbances.
The cause of narcolepsy is not known; however, scientists have made progress toward identifying genes strongly associated with the disorder that control the production of chemicals in the brain that may control our sleep/wake cycles. Some experts think narcolepsy may be due to a deficiency in the production of a chemical called hypocretin by the brain. Hypocretin neurons strongly stimulate various brain nuclei with important roles in wakefulness including the dopamine, norepinephrine, histamine and acetylcholine systems and appear to play an important role in stabilizing sleep/wake cycles. Narcoleptics also exhibit a specific genetic mutation in the T-cell receptor alpha locus. In conjunction, these genetic irregularities cause the autoimmune system to attack and kill the critical hypocretin neurons. Therefore, the absence of hypocretin-producing neurons in narcoleptics may be the result of an autoimmune disorder. They don’t know what triggers this cell destruction but it is hypothesized that it may be a viral infection.
Narcolepsy usually begins between the ages of 15 and 25, but it can become happen at any age. In many cases, narcolepsy is undiagnosed and, therefore, untreated. What are narcolepsy symptoms? Excessive daytime sleepiness or what is known as EDS can interfere with normal daily activities causing lack of energy, mental focus and exhaustion. Cataplexy a narcoleptic symptom defined as a sudden loss of muscle tone which leads to feelings of weakness or a loss of voluntary muscle control. Symptoms range from slurred speech to total body collapse depending on the muscles involved and usually triggered by an emotional response such as; anger, laughter or surprise. Hypnagogic hallucinations are brought on when the person is falling asleep and hypnopompic hallucinations occur when they are waking up. These hallucinations are delusional experiences that are quite vivid and often very frightening. Mostly visual, but sometimes other senses may be involved. Sleep paralysis is the temporary inability to move or speak while falling asleep or waking up. These episodes can last few seconds to several minutes.
If you or someone you know has any of these symptoms they should seek medical care. Your doctor will give you/them a physical exam and medical history to determine a proper diagnosis of narcolepsy. However, none of the major symptoms is exclusive to narcolepsy as they may be signs of other sleep disorders. Several specialized tests including those performed at a sleep clinic are recommended before a narcolepsy diagnosis. There is a blood test called HLA-DQB1*0602, which is usually positive in patients with clear-cut narcolepsy with cataplexy but this only shows that the disorder is probably an autoimmune disorder. And many people are positive for this test that never develops narcolepsy. It is not a test that is clinically very useful and is generally used only in research. Two tests that are essential in the diagnosis of narcolepsy are the polysomnogram (PSG) and the multiple sleep latency test (MSLT) both are performed in a sleep clinic. The PSG is an overnight test that monitors a patient while they sleep for irregularities in their sleep cycle. This can eliminate symptom result from another sleep disorder like sleep apnea. The MSLT is performed during the day and requires the individual to take four or five short naps, two hours apart. This test measures the person’s tendency to fall asleep easy and to determine whether remote factors of REM sleep interfere during waking hours.
Although there is no cure for narcolepsy, the most disabling symptoms of the disorder ED and abnormal REM sleep, such as cataplexy can be controlled in most people with drug treatment. Sleepiness is treated with amphetamine-like stimulants while the symptoms of abnormal REM sleep are treated using antidepressant drugs.
There has recently been a new medication approved for those who suffer from narcolepsy with cataplexy. This drug, called Xyrem, helps people with narcolepsy get a better night’s sleep, allowing them to be less sleepy during the day. For daytime sleepiness, the drug modafinil, which is a wake-promoting agent that is far gentler with fewer side effects than the traditional amphetamines that were used for years. The newest drug to treat narcolepsy is sodium oxybate, which is a strong sedative that is used to consolidate sleep and help narcoleptic patients achieve more deep sleep.
Lifestyle changes such as avoiding caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, heavy meals, regulating sleep schedules, scheduling 10-20 minute daytime power naps and establishing a normal exercise and meal schedule may also help to reduce symptoms.
In the past, many people with narcolepsy had symptoms for years before they got an accurate diagnosis. Often, they were told that they were lazy and unmotivated. Undiagnosed narcolepsy can have devastating effects on daytime activities such as work or schooling. Sometimes it was misdiagnosed as depression, drug abuse or, when hallucinations were reported, schizophrenia. Many patients with a clear history of cataplexy who were told they had seizure disorders or syncopal (fainting) episodes.
The good news is that narcolepsy is better recognized now by general practitioners. If you feel you are someone you know is afflicted with this disorder contact a physician to get a proper diagnosis and treatment. The content provided in Narcolepsy is a Daytime Sleep Disorder is for information purposes only, intended to raise the awareness of different solutions for you or your families sleep problems and should not be considered medical advice. For medical diagnosis and treatment, please see your qualified health-care professional. | <urn:uuid:92c1d954-95f0-4ef3-9ab9-0760e0aed7aa> | {
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For centuries, humanity feared comets as they flew past us from deep space, their luminous tails looming over the Earth. But more dangerous are our unseen solar-system neighbors, the dark asteroids that reside relatively nearby (traveling within a few tens of millions of miles of Earth’s orbit). The first near-Earth object, called Eros, was not discovered until 1898. Since then telescope surveys have revealed several thousand sizable ones (a 10th of a mile across or larger), and it’s estimated there are hundreds of millions that are smaller, down to a yard in width.
Why should we be concerned? Because, writes Donald Yeomans, an object with a diameter of mile or more has “the capacity to wipe out an entire civilization in a single blow.” There are about a thousand such objects of that size out there, but no huge one is threatening us at the moment. So we can sit back and enjoy the light shows, when boulder-sized asteroids create blazing fireballs as they disintegrate in the atmosphere or tinier particles light up as shooting stars.
Yet despite the low probability of a devastating hit this century, Yeomans notes, such an event would be of high consequence. There was that little matter of the dinosaurs being exterminated some 65 million years ago in the aftermath of a catastrophic impact. As the science fiction writer Larry Niven once put it, “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program.” That’s why it’s comforting to know that NASA has a Near-Earth Object Program Office looking out for us, which Yeomans manages.
These objects were not always near us. After the birth of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago, they gradually arrived as the asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter collided with one another like cosmic bumper cars, throwing out fragments that headed toward the inner solar system and settled in. There are important scientific reasons to track them as well: “They are the remnants of the planetary formation process itself,” Yeomans writes, “and as the least changed bodies from that process they offer clues to the chemical and thermal conditions under which the planets formed.”
Nor was the Earth’s colliding with one always a bad thing. When solar-system debris was far more plentiful, the infant Earth was bombarded by myriad strikes, which furnished generous portions of carbon-based materials and water, the building blocks of life. One super-colossal hit gave us the moon to spoon under; the one that decimated the dinosaurs opened up the way for mammals (and eventually us) to reign over the planet.
Despite its title, Near-Earth Objects offers a concise and informative overview of the formation of the entire solar system: why the planets differ, the latest theories on how the planets lined up, and the origin of such leftovers as the comets and asteroids. Yeomans also makes a good case that a near-Earth asteroid is an accessible target for our next space adventure, readying us for Mars and preparing for the time in the future when we might depend on them as a source of rare minerals.
But concerns over the devastating potential of near-Earth objects remain the prime focus. By the 1990s, NASA had a goal of identifying the biggest threats, the ones that could cause global havoc. We’re talking worldwide firestorms, a blackened atmosphere that cuts us off from sunlight (stopping photosynthesis for food), acid rain and possibly herculean tsunamis.
Dedicated telescopes in the United States, Australia and Europe are on the watch. Once an object is identified, its orbit is derived at computer centers run at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, as well as in Italy and Spain. “If a particularly close approach to Earth within the next century or so is noted as being possible, … the object enters the Sentry system, which computes potential future Earth-impact probabilities,” Yeoman writes. They’re now surveying for objects down to a 10th of a mile in size, the ones that could cause regional devastation (like the 1908 Tunguska blast in Siberia that leveled millions of trees).
Is the sentry working? You bet. In 2008, near-Earth object surveyors spotted an incoming asteroid (fortunately only a few yards across), which the next day arrived exactly when predicted, producing a glowing fireball over Sudan and a treasure trove of meteorites. And just this month, one roughly 120 feet wide zipped between Earth and the moon, just two days after it was spotted.
What keeps the reader going is the ultimate question: Can we avert a disastrous collision? Yeomans saves that for an all-too-brief section at the end. Clever minds have devised dozens of harebrained schemes, but he favors the clean and simple. Run into the menacing asteroid with a spacecraft or detonate a nuclear bomb just off its surface, generating a shock blast that pushes it off course. Simply using the gravitational attraction between the cosmic rock and a thrusting spacecraft can be enough; a gentle and sustained push far out can translate into a big miss of Earth. But all these ideas are dependent on getting early notice and knowing the asteroid’s composition and structure. And as yet there is no global policy in place on who makes the call (or pays) for Earth’s rescue.
As we wait for those decisions, let’s hope the incoming object is no bigger than the one Michelle Knapp faced in 1992. A small asteroid fragment hit the back of her car parked in Peekskill, N.Y., and her insurance company wouldn’t pay for the damage, declaring it an “act of God.” But meteorite hunters were more than willing to cart off the remains for $69,000. Now, that happy ending puts the jolly back into the season.
Marcia Bartusiak reviewed this book for The Washington Post. | <urn:uuid:aabecc8b-684c-47b0-b3e5-7f1640229735> | {
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Sarah Eve Roberts, Las Cumbres Observatory Education Specialist
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Astronomers at Las Cumbres Observatory are investigating exoplanets - planets which orbit stars other than our Sun - and they’d like your help.
Discovering exoplanets is tricky since they are so faint compared to the stars they orbit. It requires detective work. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to look through a sequence of images recently taken by our telescopes in Hawaii, Australia and California and help us to spot these exoplanets and measure their size. | <urn:uuid:50214867-d090-4be6-ba0b-389ee28316ce> | {
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The Houston Museum of Natural Science was founded in 1909 – meaning that the curators of the Houston Museum of Natural Science have been collecting and preserving natural and cultural treasures for a hundred years now. For this yearlong series, our current curators have chosen one hundred exceptional objects from the Museum’s immense storehouse of specimens and artifacts—one for each year of our history. Check back here frequently to learn more about this diverse selection of behind-the-scenes curiosities—we will post the image and description of a new object every few days.
This description is from Nancy, the museum’s director of the Cockrell Butterfly Center and curator of entomology. She’s chosen a selection of objects that represent the rarest and most interesting insects in the Museum’s collections,that we’ll be sharing here – and at 100.hmns.org- throughout the year.
Muga Silk Moth – Antheraea assamensis
This large moth from the lowland forests of India and Burna is related to our polyphemus moth (Antheraea polyphemus), the most common giant silk moth in Houston. Here the smaller male, with brushier antennae, is shown on the left, the female on the right. Muga silk moths are not particularly spectacular or endangered, but they are the source of a very special, very expensive fabric called Muga or Muga silk.
Muga silk moth caterpillars eat leaves of trees in the laurel and magnolia families. The silk with which they construct their cocoon when pupating is a rich amber color. Silk “farmers” care for the caterpillars, moving them from tree to tree until they are ready to pupate. The caterpillars pupate inside small boxes made of twigs provided by the farmers, who then harvest the cocoons, unwinding them to make silk thread that is woven into a luxurious fabric. For 600 years, muga silk was worn only by the kings and noble families of the Assam state in northern India and was unknown to the outside world, until it was discovered by a French traveler to the area in 1692. Today muga silk is available from specialty shops, but is very expensive. It is used to make fine saris and other garments.
The silk fabric made from muga silk moth cocoons does not need to be bleached or dyed, but has a natural shimmering golden color that becomes more lustrous the more it is washed. Muga silk is extremely strong and durable (garments often outliving their owners), as well as being stain resistant and absorbing moisture, making it very comfortable to wear.
The muga silk “industry” continues to be mostly the domain of small, local farmers, unlike the hugely industrialized production of the more common mulberry silk (from Bombyx mori, an unrelated moth species).
Learn more about moths and their relatives in a visit to the new Brown Hall of Entomology, a part of the Cockrell Butterfly Center– a living, walk-through rainforest at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. | <urn:uuid:0167dc94-a7bb-453a-a96f-925311e606c6> | {
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Maps are our world writ small.
Take the world and everything upon it and then transfer that wealth of knowledge to paper or pixel and you’ve got a pretty accurate representation of what sort of reality you’d find if you looked outside your window.
Or you could be wrong. Completely wrong. As in, so wrong that an island located on world maps, Google Maps, marine charts and even Google Earth doesn’t actually exist.
So how did we find out that Sandy Island, supposedly located in the South Pacific, didn’t actually exist? Did computer dudes perform some feat of electronic legerdemain? Did the artificial intelligence birthing itself within our computers pop it’s proto-head out and let us in on the secret?
No, not really.
All it took was for a group of scientists to actually go to the spot where Sandy Island was to find out. . . it wasn’t.
So, yeah. That picture there to the right is supposed to show Sandy Island in all of its flyspecked glory. Those are the maps. They’re also very, very wrong.
And, even worse, they weren’t produced by asking Siri where Sandy Island is located.
The supposedly sizeable strip of land, named Sandy Island on Google maps, was positioned midway between Australia and French-governed New Caledonia.
But when scientists from the University of Sydney went to the area, they found only the blue ocean of the Coral Sea.
The phantom island has featured in publications for at least a decade.
Scientist Maria Seton, who was on the ship, said that the team was expecting land, not 1,400m (4,620ft) of deep ocean.
Interestingly, if the island had, in fact, existed, it would have been inside French territorial waters, but it’s not to be found on French maritime maps. According to Seton and other scientists, how the supposed island got onto maps in the first place is a bit of a mystery, but one they intend to solve.
One thing’s for sure, though. No matter the cause, it certainly wasn’t Google’s fault. A typically unnamed Google spokesman said his company wasn’t to blame, but that Mother Earth is looking mighty shifty right about now.
“The world is a constantly changing place and keeping on top of these changes is a never-ending endeavour.”
See? Totally not their fault. Totally.
Sadly, with the actual existence of the island now in doubt, I’m guessing my planned vacation there is right out. Ah well, I hear Atlantis is lovely this time of year. | <urn:uuid:16d6eb97-56a7-4016-b9f0-b67ede8ee05d> | {
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The Himalayan Languages Project, headquartered in Bern, has since 1983 represented the largest sustained language documentation effort in the greater Himalayan region. Members of the multi-national research team consist of both students and young linguists working towards their Ph.D. at Bern University as well as post-doc and senior researchers.
The Indian subcontinent harbours three languages isolates and seven distinct language families. The northern perimeter of the subcontinent is bounded by the highest land barrier on the planet, and one of the world’s most populous language families straddles the Himalayas and is found to be distributed along both its northern and southern flanks.
Since 2001, the Himalayan Languages Project has been collaborating with geneticists and scholars from other disciplines in both East and West on reconstructing Asian population prehistory. The analysis of correlations and discrepancies between the modern distribution of ethnolinguistic communities and molecular polymorphisms found on the DNA of Asian populations continues to reveal forgotten episodes of our past and enhance our understanding of the peopling of the Himalayan region, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. The multidisciplinary collaborative research is buttressed by insights from historical linguistics, archaeology, palaeobotany, palaeoclimatology and anthropology. --> Publications | <urn:uuid:8abf64ae-3e8a-48b3-ba26-72709b9b40b4> | {
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Like most other veggies, having your own fresh, homegrown peppers around the kitchen can spoil you. Peppers picked right off the plant feature all kinds of different flavors that get muted somewhere between the picking and the trucking and the refrigerating that a grocery store pepper has to endure before ending up on your plate.
Strictly speaking, peppers are not among the more temperamental vegetables to grow. They like the basic winning mix of sunshine, fertile, well-drained soil and regular watering. Soil pH should be between 5.5 and 7.0. Because peppers don't get as massive as, say, a tomato plant, they make great raised-bed vegetables. With all the different varieties (bell, Anaheim, banana, pimiento...and LOTS more) you'll probably find a few that are just right.
Prepare your soil with plenty of organic material (like compost or rotted manure). Avoid planting in places where other members of the Nightshade family have grown in the pas three or so years. (There is an exception to this general rule, though. If you're loading your soil up with lots of compost and basically making it new again, you can plant in the same place. If you're not giving it a boost, best to rotate to avoid disease and pests.)
Dig twice as deep and wide as your transplant container, fill the hole up and set your root ball on top of it. Unlike tomatoes, which sprout roots from the stem and aren't picky about planting depth, peppers shouldn't be planted too deep. It can cause all sorts of problems, from rot to tiny fruit.
If you're growing from seed, follow the directions on your seed packet. Make sure to keep your little seedlings warm as they grow.
Peppers don't need to be planted very far apart, and there are actually benefits in planting them closer together rather than farther apart. Shoot for 18 to 24 inches of space, depending on the variety. Planting closer together can help prevent weeds and keep the fruit from getting scalded by the sun. Make sure each plant has access to the sun and other plants won't grow up to shade each other too much (otherwise you'll end up with a runt).
Don't plant too early! Plant your pepper plants from the middle of May to the middle of June. Nighttime temperatures need to remain above 45 degrees (preferably a bit warmer) before you plant your peppers.
Once your plants are in the ground, your job is to keep them watered. Early in the season, this is easy, but as the weather warms up, they'll probably need water each day. Inconsistent watering (drowning, then letting them dry out for a week) will produce unsatisfactory results, like blossom end rot.
Peppers like to stay warm, including warm roots. However, they do appreciate a little protection from very hot, sunny days in later summer. A bit of shade cloth from mid- to later afternoon will do the trick.
To encourage your peppers to bush out, snip the main stem that's growing straight up when the plant is about 7 inches tall. When September rolls around, your plants will still be budding and flowering. To encourage the fruit that's already grown to ripen before nights start getting chilly, pinch off buds and small peppers. (We know, it's sad. But it must be done.)
Cool thing about peppers: they can be harvested at any time during the growth cycle (provided they're big enough). There's not actually a variety of pepper called the "green pepper" -- those are just red or yellow or orange bells that haven't ripened yet. That's why they taste a little less sweet and than their brighter-colored relatives.
That means you can harvest whenever you're ready. Cut the stem an inch or so from the fruit to avoid damaging the plant.
Pepper Facts and Considerations
A little miscellaneous info about peppers...
- Peppers deteriorate in quality quickly once they're ripe. Pick 'em quick or they'll go bad.
- Harvest regularly, because it helps the plant keep producing. Once a pepper plant reaches its weight capacity of fruit on its branches, it stops making more peppers. If you keep it from reaching capacity, it will keep going!
- Hot pepper juices (oils) burn. It sounds ridiculous, until you've tried to remove a contact lens after cutting a pepper, only to realize that the lingering effects of the pepper are burning your eyeball. (Or feeling the burn in other more delicate areas.) Then it's not so funny. Wear gloves (really) because washing your hands doesn't always remove all the oils.
- If you do run into pepper burns, isopropyl alcohol can dissolve the oils. Dairy products (yogurt, sour cream) can sooth the burns.
- For seed-savers, let the peppers stay on the plant for 2 weeks after ripeness. Then take the seeds out and let them air dry completely. After that, you can store them. | <urn:uuid:1af6ef5e-a584-4e06-bcc7-fb4b0f671652> | {
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The amount of wind power in the world is increasing quickly. The background for this development is improved technology, decreased costs for the units, and increased concern regarding environmental problems of competing technologies such as fossil fuels. The amount of wind power is not spread equally over the world, so in some areas, there is a comparatively high concentration.
Northern Ireland is richly endowed with renewable energy resources whose exploitation has become a necessity if the challenging targets imposed by the Kyoto Protocol are to be met. Onshore wind energy is the most competitive form of renewable energy in Ireland, but its stochastic nature is a barrier to unlimited development.
This has led to calls of whether this unrestrained form of renewable energy development should be stifled in order to retain the landscape of areas that Northern Ireland is known for worldwide.
However the economic benefits of wind energy can be significant, especially for the communities in which wind projects are sited. Some of these benefits include:
● Investment in local businesses and infrastructure;
● Construction and operations jobs at the wind project site;
● Increases local tax revenues.
On the other hand, other considerations of the effects of wind farms have to be taken into account. The visual impact of wind turbines on the landscape is especially relevant where the surrounding environment is rural, scenic or sensitive in nature. Additionally the tower structure and the rotor blades of wind turbines can cause electromagnetic interference and can potentially “chop TV signals to an irritating degree.” Environmental effects also include disturbances to flora and fauna.
Do you feel the economic benefits of wind energy should take priority over possible negative environmental and social aspects?
Credits: Photographs by Finbar Gillen. Data linked to sources. | <urn:uuid:f6341a5d-51ee-43b0-b2fc-85752d09f598> | {
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Clanninick Creek ER #75 Purpose Statement
Ecological reserves are areas selected to preserve representative and special natural
ecosystems, plant and animal species, features and phenomena. The key role of ecological
reserves is to contribute to the maintenance of biological diversity and the protection of genetic
materials. All consumptive resource uses and the use of motorized vehicles are prohibited.
Research and educational activities may be carried out but only under permit.
See the full version PDF:clannick
The primary role of Clanninick Creek Ecological Reserve is to preserve a small but exceptional
alluvial growing site for a stand of old growth Sitka spruce. The old growth Sitka spruce trees
reach 2.5 to 3 metres in diameter and 75 metres in height. There are about 35 such large trees
as well as smaller ones. The excellent growth is thought to be as a result of base-rich parent
materials developed from volcanic rocks. The ecological reserve is situated on the floor of a
glaciated creek valley at the western edge of the Vancouver Island Ranges, 2.5 kilometres
inland from the ocean, near Kyuquot Sound.
Clanninick Creek itself has a gravel bottom with occasional large boulders, and the reach
through the ecological reserve is about one kilometre in length, and is a single channel of low
gradient with little meander, frequent shaded pools, and one low waterfall. This shaded creek
provides spawning habitat for small numbers of chi
nook and pink salmon, and significant runs of coho and chum salmon.
Known Management Issues
Impact of adjacent logging surrounding the
ecological reserve, isolating it as a narrow
forested island and resulting in severe blow-
down and possible degraded water quality and
flow regime impacting the spawning salmon
- Work with Ministry of Forests and industry to
take ecological reserve values into
consideration during forest development.
- Ensure boundary signs are visible.
- Develop a better defined boundary description.
- Monitor effects of adjacent use, patrol to ensure boundary is respected.
- Recruit a volunteer ecological reserve warden and develop a formal monitoring program. Water supply for community adjacent to ecological reserve
- Work with community to ensure activity does not impact the ecological reserves values.
- Clanninick Creek Ecological Reserve makes a very minimal contribution (0.03%) to the representation of the Windward Island Mountains Ecosection (WIM), which is well represented in the protected areas system at 17.4%
– biogeoclimatic subzone/variant
- Very minimal contribution (0.07%) to the representation of CWHvh1, which is well represented at 19.3%
- Old growth Sitka spruce, creek habitat for spawning salmon
- Chinook and coho salmon are yellow-listed species of conservation concern (S4)
- Old growth forests, “island” ecology i.e. impact of logging on small remnants. | <urn:uuid:a29cac1b-cffa-4c14-a2a6-ef40a0d256f6> | {
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The fundamental of dental bonding begins with using small yet effective materials to correct ailments or irregularities on the surface of a tooth. Dental bonding can help prove the look of teeth without completely removing them or covering them completely. For a list of guidelines concerning dental bonding, consider this:
– Teeth that suffer from slight spacing ailments or appear to be slightly irregular may benefit from dental bonding therapy.
– Dental bonding treatments are highly effective for use as dental fillings to fix cavities.
– Dental bonding is a system of cosmetic dentistry, typically made of resin or porcelain, that is designed to improve the look and function of teeth by applying materials to each tooth.
– Dental bonding is tooth-colored in their appearance and can blend well with a natural smile.
– Dental bonding lasts over a decade before it needs to be replaced or reapplied.
– Dental bonding is often used to conceal damage brought on by plaque buildup, cavities, oral accidents, and oral injuries.
To prevent oral health hazards from ruining your smile, make sure you are following the proper treatment techniques for a healthy smile that can last a lifetime. If you would like Dr. Sula and our team at Advantage Dentists to bring you in for an oral exam or professional cleaning, please contact our dentist office in Katy, Texas, by calling 281-829-5000. We look forward to making your smile shine! | <urn:uuid:b265798b-5c9f-4daf-b061-f53bb316ee98> | {
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This name generator will give you 10 random Hellenic names and surnames.
The Hellenistic period spanned from 323 BC to 31 BC, but Hellenistic civilization existed from about 1200 BC until 600 CE. During the Hellenistic period Greece's influence on the world was at its strongest, not just in terms of power, but also in terms of art and culture. During this time a lot of progress was made in literature, theatre, music, mathematics, architecture, philosophy, and science, as well as a change in Greek religion (new gods emerged), and progress was made in exploration.
Hellenic names are quite simple. They used a personal name, and if there was any confusion they would use a patronymic (son of father), a place name (person of city), or an epithet-esque name (name, savior), but this wasn't very often.
Since Hellenic culture was adopted throughout various parts of the world the names spread as well, and were used in the Mideast, by Hellenized Jews for example.
To start, simply click on the button to generate 10 random names. Don't like the names? Simply click again to get 10 new random names.
Your art here? Click here to find out more! | <urn:uuid:11e90370-5788-4f44-9ed2-c5f4aba9e69f> | {
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- having a boastfully proud disposition: a vaunting dictator.
- marked by boastful pride: a vaunting air of superiority.
Origin of vaunting
- to speak vaingloriously of; boast of: to vaunt one's achievements.
- to speak boastfully; brag.
- a boastful action or utterance.
Origin of vaunt
Examples from the Web for vaunting
Historical Examples of vaunting
Only fancy the Greek vaunting his triumphs or bewailing his defeats in Turkish!'Lord Kilgobbin
The savage looked around him with a vaunting air as he uttered these words.The Scalp Hunters
I persuaded you to hope for Lombardy, and without any vaunting of my own patriotism.Vittoria, Complete
His vaunting proclamations were headed: In the name of Allah.The Turkish Empire, its Growth and Decay
Well they ken it where little they love it with its vaunting!The Lost Pibroch
- (tr) to describe, praise, or display (one's success, possessions, etc) boastfully
- (intr) rare, or literary to use boastful language; brag
- a boast
- archaic ostentatious display
Word Origin for vaunt
c.1400, "speak vainly or proudly," from Middle French vanter "to praise, speak highly of," from Late Latin vanitare "to boast," frequentative of Latin vanare "to utter empty words," from vanus "idle, empty" (see vain). Related: Vaunted; vaunting. | <urn:uuid:f7a971d6-b678-4fa0-b0c3-9dbcc3c96a8a> | {
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UW student discovers precious gemstone
A University of Washington student on an archaeological dig in Israel has unearthed the find of a lifetime — a gemstone engraved with a portrait of Alexander the Great.
Times higher education reporter
A University of Washington student on an archaeological dig in Israel has unearthed the find of a lifetime — a gemstone engraved more than 2,000 years ago with a portrait of Alexander the Great.
The carnelian stone, less than a half-inch long, is believed to date from soon after Alexander conquered the region in 332 B.C. Likely once part of a signet ring, the stone was found in the Tel Dor excavation site on Israel's northwest coast.
"This is an incredibly rare find," said Sarah Stroup, a UW associate professor of classics who led the team of 20 students for the summer dig. "The carving is of the highest quality that could have been done in that period."
Stroup said the ring was likely a status symbol, once worn by a wealthy resident. Its unearthing adds to the historical record by challenging the assumption that the coastal region was populated by simple folk who weren't hip to the Greek aesthetic, Stroup said.
It also indicates that the Greek king may have been revered — rather than reviled — by at least some of those he conquered.
The fact that the stone was found during a controlled excavation helps give it a more precise and useful history, Stroup said, unlike some similarly engraved stones that were found before modern archaeological methods were in place, or were acquired through the black market.
University of California at Berkeley professor Andrew Stewart, an expert on Alexander the Great, said that while coins depicting Alexander are relatively common, there are perhaps just two or three dozen carved stones with his image dating from pre-Roman times.
Stewart said he is puzzled by Alexander's headdress, which is something he's not seen depicted on the king before. It appears to be made of metal with a ribbon running down to the nape of his neck, Stewart said. He doesn't think Alexander ever wore such a piece, which is likely an embellishment added by an artist working after the king's death in 323 B.C. The gem is priceless, Stewart added.
"This is a very nice discovery, and one that's very hard to make, given that this kind of thing can escape very easily," he said, referring to the stone's tiny size. "It's a very useful addition to our corpus of Alexander images."
Megan Webb, the student who made the discovery, could not be reached Tuesday. Stroup said Webb majored in ceramics at Philadelphia University and was picking up some summer credits at the UW Tel Dor Field School while applying to graduate schools.
Students were attempting to define the edges of a room in a Hellenistic-era building when Webb, who was working with a trowel, spotted the gemstone, Stroup said. It has been cleaned and is on display at a local Israeli museum.
The UW team found the stone in mid-July and returned to the U.S. early last month.
The discovery was announced Tuesday by two Israeli universities that were also involved in excavating the Tel Dor site.
"Never in all my years excavating have I ever seen anything like this come up from the ground, and I don't ever expect to again," Stroup said.
Nick Perry: 206-515-5639 or [email protected]
UPDATE - 10:51 PM
Seattle Public Schools name interim financial officer
Furniture & home furnishings
Adorable tiny Maltipoo Xmas girls!
city of Bothell DNS for SEP2014-04862
City of Duvall MDNS for SPR14-001
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Pa' Ti Xicana: Mujer de Mucha Enagua
by Amelia M.L. Montes (ameliamontes.com)
|"Mujer de Mucha Enagua: Pa' Ti Xicana" by Yreina Cervantez (Serigraph)|
Between 1964 and 1972, I felt the effects of the Civil Rights Movement, the Chicano Movement, the resistance to the Vietnam War through the voices, actions, the reflections in the eyes of eager Catholic nuns—yes, nuns. During these years, I was an elementary school student in a working class, primarily Chicana and Chicano Los Angeles Catholic school. Later on, I would benefit from those who were on the streets during these years—putting their lives on the line so that they and all of us could have a chance to acquire a college degree, so that all of us could have access to a more inclusive curriculum. It was a time of change. Pope John XXIII had announced that it was “time to open the windows of the Church to let in some fresh air.” Paul VI continued the Second Vatican Council by stressing the need “to start a dialogue with the contemporary world.” The nuns heralded that change in so many interesting ways. And I’m focusing on nuns here because of the latest media attention on them in the past few weeks—which reflects the state of the nation at this time.
This picture here of Mother Gabriel Mulligan reminds me of the Mercy nuns' habits when I was in first grade. We only saw the fronts of their faces: the chin, cheeks, forehead, the eyes nose and mouth. We didn’t see their ears and always wondered how they could hear us. The heavy starched white linen that framed their faces was attached to a long black veil that matched the equally black and flowing tunic. A long rosary (thick beads and also black) hung from their belts cinched at the waist. To a small-in-size first grader, these women loomed large over you and if their faces didn’t engender a kind gentleness to mitigate the severity of dress, then the complete look took on quite a menacing presence.
From first to eighth grade, as changes occurred, I was witness to a disassembling of this complex religious habit. First, the heavy starch at the neck disappeared. Then the starch was replaced by softer black or blue fabric. By sixth grade, the nuns were having continual talks with us about the habit, its meaning, and about how a difference in their dress would allow for more accessibility to the public in their community work. So their habit became simpler. The veil was shorter and the tunic was streamlined without such a thick wide belt. By seventh and eight grade, on special occasions, like field trips, the habit was replaced completely by polyester pants and a blouse (yes, pants!) The veil continued to be worn, becoming ever smaller until it disappeared. The picture of Sr. Mary Rose Christy here displays the complete transformation.
|Sr. Mary Rose Christy|
This transformation of dress was more a symbol of the transformation the nuns wished of us (on an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual level) and particularly the women: to question, to be critical thinkers, to become self actualized, and most of all—to be passionate seekers of knowledge.
By high school, I noticed that some of the nuns had left teaching to enter graduate programs, to work solely in the community with non—profit organizations and to become artists. One of these nuns (not a Sister of Mercy, but a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary), Sister Corita Kent, whose serigraphs during the 1960s and 70s became internationally known, was pictured on the cover of Newsweek Magazine.
|"Sister Corita: The Nun Going Modern" (1967)|
|Corita Kent print|
Corita’s influence is still with us. The Corita Art Center is located in Los Angeles. Look at Corita’s artwork here: the powerful colors, the bold lettering, the call to social justice, to empathy and generosity. Then read the attached article (click here).
There are countless nuns who have followed this tradition and who have taught and influenced so many of us, Chicanas/Chicanos and Latinas/Latinos. Take, for example, the work of Yreina D. Cervantez. She says, “Most of my life has been dedicated to issues that are related to community and to creating positive change in communities” (click here for complete article). Her piece at the top of this blog is entitled, “Mujer de Mucha Enagua, Pa’ Ti Xicana” translates to “’woman with a lot of petty coat’ . . . a woman comparable to the idea of a person with a lot of strength, a person who is empowered” yet conscious of patriarchal privilege and the dangers of (as Gloria Anzaldúa points out) "transmitting" (or retransmitting) patriarchy.
And I write of this now because what Pope XXIII described in 1962 as an opening of “the windows of the Church” has now become an era of window closing, of shutting out, of silencing women and enacting another round of patriarchal control. It reflects the entire country--not just silencing of women within the Catholic church.
Thank goodness for Nicholas Kristof’s article “We Are All Nuns,” printed this past April. And (click here) for yet another article and also this one (click here) which includes quotes from two former nuns who say, “This present Pope is the one who said, during our struggle [in the 1980s], that ‘American nuns are dangerous because they are educated.’” At the national level, I think of Arizona and the closing down of Ethnic Studies, of bilingual education, of programs that encourage more Chicanas and Chicanos to be educated.
When I tell my students today how I took classes from nuns who would teach us “Chinese Philosophy,” how these nuns would lead us in five minutes of T’ai Chi Ch’uan before starting class, would talk to us about the importance of finding ones gifts, developing these gifts in order to send them out into the world. These nuns were models for us in protesting the war. They were arrested, they were fearless in their acts of social justice. When I tell my students, they are shocked. They do not have the historical background, but we can give it to them via blog posts, twitter feeds, museums, books.
Dr. Laura Elisa Pérez’s (CU Berkeley) book, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities can be a good start. Pérez discusses over 40 Chicana artists “doing the work that matters” (Anzaldúa).
Just looking at the work of artists such as Yreina Cervantez, Alma Lopez, Ester Hernandez, y muchas mas can give us hope, can keep us going in this difficult time.
|Ester Hernandez print|
Sending you, Queridas y Queridos, a most peaceful and productive Sunday! Stay passionate! Stay awake and alive!
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One of the world’s leading experts in energy storage systems for aircraft predicts when we will see a breakthrough in battery technology and describes NASA’s pioneering work in power systems ahead of his presentation at the forthcoming Electric & Hybrid Aerospace Technology Symposium, which takes place on November 8-9 in Cologne, Germany.
What will you talk about at the Electric and Hybrid Aerospace Technology Symposium?
My presentation will review energy storage options, including batteries, fuel cells, supercapacitors and flow batteries, for electrified aircraft. It will describe what is possible with current batteries and fuel cells and how the latest batteries can influence niche markets. Energy storage requirements for several classes of aircraft will be reviewed. Projections on advances in energy storage systems will be made based on current worldwide activities. Operational and integration challenges for application of energy storage systems in electrified aircraft will be discussed. Specific research and development requirements for electrified aircraft will be highlighted.
What will future energy storage in a large aircraft look like?
For large aircraft like 737 class, the specific energy of a battery pack needs to be five times higher compared with the current state-of-the-art batteries for a viable hybrid electric aircraft.
For fuel cells, the power density has to increase by a factor of five or so for hybrid electric large aircraft with around a 900-1000-mile range. Unless there is a breakthrough, I do not foresee use of batteries or other types of energy storage systems as part of a primary propulsion system for large (737-class) aircraft with long range until 2035 or so.
However, with a two-to-three-times increase in battery specific energy, I can see the use of batteries as part of a primary hybrid electric propulsion system for large 737 class aircraft with a 300-mile range, for which there could be a potential market.
Although it will take a long time before batteries and fuel cells can be used as part of the primary propulsion system for large aircraft, they will find application in the power management system of large aircraft with more electric architecture, maintaining the stability of the power system.
Batteries and other energy storage systems will be used as part of the primary electrified propulsion system for smaller aircraft, like four-passenger urban air mobility vehicles and 10-passenger thin haul aircraft in the near term.
What will be the main technical challenges for testing and certification as more energy storage is used in aircraft?
Commercial and developmental batteries are targeted for the automotive sector. They need to be tested under aircraft operating conditions and mission cycles for electrified aircraft applications.
The key certification challenge is assuring the safety of the aircraft due to battery fire. Li-ion batteries are known to cause a fire in electric vehicles and aircraft. Battery fire is going to remain a major concern for the next generation of high specific batteries that use liquid electrolyte.
A robust battery health management system will be required for early diagnostics and prevention of fire in batteries. In case a fire is initiated in a battery, the fire must be contained to protect the aircraft.
What is NASA’s most important work concerning hybrid electric aircraft?
NASA’s most important work related to hybrid electric aircraft is the development of megawatt-scale high-power density electrical machines and associated power electronics. These will provide a two-to-three-times increase in power density compared with current state-of-the-art power systems.
We are performing demonstrations of megawatt-scale power systems under aircraft operating conditions in the NASA Electric Aircraft Testbed (NEAT). NASA engineers are also developing foundation technologies to increase power density and weight of electrical components, and developing integrated power-propulsion-thermal management modeling tools for design of electrified propulsion system.
Are we still waiting for a battery capacity breakthrough?
There will be a continuous increase in battery capability with time. While a breakthrough that will provide five times the energy density of the state-of-the-art batteries will be wonderful, the industry is not waiting for that to happen to fly hybrid electric aircraft.
There are niche markets for small planes using the current state-of-the-art batteries. While the range will be limited for an all-electric small aircraft using the latest and best batteries, there are many more options if the hybrid electric option is pursued. Both for the urban air mobility and thin-haul market, many companies are developing aircraft that use batteries. Based on an optimistic projection, it is expected that the initial commercial introduction of such vehicles might occur around 2025.
Based on research in advanced batteries, there is an optimistic projection that the specific energy of batteries will double within the next several years. With the potential doubling of the specific energy of batteries, it is expected that the market for hybrid electric and all-electric aircraft will expand, with the capability for longer range and more passengers for urban air mobility and thin haul market segments.
All of these projections are based on the assumption that the advanced batteries meet the life, safety, and operational requirements for hybrid electric aircraft.
Increasing the specific energy of batteries by three times will enable the commercial introduction of regional hybrid electric aircraft by 2030. This will require significant R&D on batteries beyond the scope of current investment by the automotive sector.
So, yes, a battery capacity breakthrough that increases the specific energy by five times will be required for introduction of hybrid electric aircraft for the 737 class and larger aircraft.
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Anger is one of the passions, according to the Catholic Church. The passions are morally neutral, as they originate in flesh beyond our will. The moral value of each passion is assigned by our response to it, taking into account our ability to contain, control, or direct the passion for good.
These involuntary motions of the passions are neither morally good nor
morally bad. They become voluntary in two ways:
- by the command of the will, which can command the inferior powers of the sensitive appetite and excite its emotions;
- by nonresistance, for the will can resist by refusing its consent to their promptings, and it is bound to resist when their promptings are
irrational and inordinate. When voluntary, the passions may increase
the intensity of the acts of the will, but they may also lessen their
morality by affecting its freedom.
Anger, in particular, is taught to be praiseworthy and justifiable with proper zeal.
The desire of vengeance. Its ethical rating depends upon the quality
of the vengeance and the quantity of the passion. When these are in
conformity with the prescriptions of balanced reason, anger is not a
sin. It is rather a praiseworthy thing and justifiable with a proper
zeal. It becomes sinful when it is sought to wreak vengeance upon one
who has not deserved it, or to a greater extent than it has been
deserved, or in conflict with the dispositions of law, or from an
improper motive. (Anger)
And with respect to anger specifically, there are two scriptural passages that contrast with each other, giving us a fuller picture:
12 And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought
in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and
the seats of those who sold pigeons. 13 He said to them, “It is
written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it
a den of robbers.”
14 And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed
them. 15 But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful
things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple,
“Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant, 16 and they said
to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them,
“Yes; have you never read,
“‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies
you have prepared praise’?” 17 And leaving them, he went out of the city to Bethany and lodged there. (Matthew 21:12-17)
Now, a brief commentary on this passage: The scripture doesn't directly state that Jesus is angry. And while it actually does explicitly say so in other places, like Mark 3:5, the cleansing of the temple makes it far more clear, I think, that a zealous, righteous anger is perfectly acceptable to act on -- in rather unfriendly, uncivil seeming ways at that.
But, the mantra against anger is equally -- if not more obvious in scripture. And we hear it right from the mouth of Jesus (same guy who threw tables around):
But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will
be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister,
‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’
will be in danger of the fire of hell. (Matthew 5:22)
In brief, anger is an emotion. In and of itself, it's largely beyond our control and is thereby morally neutral. If aroused by zeal for righteousness, anger-fueled actions are morally good. But, the tendency for normal people to fuel our anger over trivial matters or allow it to drive us into sin is good reason to caution against anger in most, if not all, circumstances.
Jesus is effectively saying, "There's nothing wrong with anger. But, you guys can't seem to handle it. So, just try to dispense with it altogether, OK?" | <urn:uuid:07a2acdd-3c8f-4db8-8cd5-05e512ee0ca2> | {
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An important part of any breeding program is an understanding of color genetics. Lisa Smith gives you all the basics in this easy to article that will wet your appetite for more on color genetics.
There are five basic genes that make up the color of every rabbit. This article will introduce you to these colors.
This gene creates rings of color on the individual hair strands.
This gene determines if the rabbit has a black foundation or a brown one.
This is one of the more interesting genes. It is also known as the chinchilla gene. There are several allelles of this gene some of which are effected by temperature.
A simple gene having to do with how strongly the color will appear in individual hair strands.
This gene determines if the hair color goes completely to the end of the individual hair strand. This gene creates shaded rabbit colors.
Many unfamiliar words get used in genetics. We take a little time to define those words for you to assist in your study of genetics.
The Punnett Square is a very useful tool in determining possible rabbit colors from a breeding. This articles gives the basics on how to use this tool.
Single lotus punnett squares are fairly easy to work with, but they can be done with several Loti.
Heres a brief look at the other genes that contribute to rabbit color | <urn:uuid:7692b627-ea62-4407-8da9-a0fe541c379a> | {
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Prions are infectious agents that cause the inevitably fatal transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) in animals and humans9,18. The prion protein has two distinct isoforms, the non-infectious host-encoded protein (PrPC) and the infectious protein (PrPSc), an abnormally-folded isoform of PrPC 8.
One of the challenges of working with prion agents is the long incubation period prior to the development of clinical signs following host inoculation13. This traditionally mandated long and expensive animal bioassay studies. Furthermore, the biochemical and biophysical properties of PrPSc are poorly characterized due to their unusual conformation and aggregation states.
PrPSc can seed the conversion of PrPC to PrPScin vitro14. PMCA is an in vitro technique that takes advantage of this ability using sonication and incubation cycles to produce large amounts of PrPSc, at an accelerated rate, from a system containing excess amounts of PrPC and minute amounts of the PrPSc seed19. This technique has proven to effectively recapitulate the species and strain specificity of PrPSc conversion from PrPC, to emulate prion strain interference, and to amplify very low levels of PrPSc from infected tissues, fluids, and environmental samples6,7,16,23 .
This paper details the PMCA protocol, including recommendations for minimizing contamination, generating consistent results, and quantifying those results. We also discuss several PMCA applications, including generation and characterization of infectious prion strains, prion strain interference, and the detection of prions in the environment.
22 Related JoVE Articles!
Preparation of a Blood Culture Pellet for Rapid Bacterial Identification and Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing
Institutions: University Hospital Center and University of Lausanne.
Bloodstream infections and sepsis are a major cause of morbidity and mortality. The successful outcome of patients suffering from bacteremia depends on a rapid identification of the infectious agent to guide optimal antibiotic treatment. The analysis of Gram stains from positive blood culture can be rapidly conducted and already significantly impact the antibiotic regimen. However, the accurate identification of the infectious agent is still required to establish the optimal targeted treatment. We present here a simple and fast bacterial pellet preparation from a positive blood culture that can be used as a sample for several essential downstream applications such as identification by MALDI-TOF MS, antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) by disc diffusion assay or automated AST systems and by automated PCR-based diagnostic testing. The performance of these different identification and AST systems applied directly on the blood culture bacterial pellets is very similar to the performance normally obtained from isolated colonies grown on agar plates. Compared to conventional approaches, the rapid acquisition of a bacterial pellet significantly reduces the time to report both identification and AST. Thus, following blood culture positivity, identification by MALDI-TOF can be reported within less than 1 hr whereas results of AST by automated AST systems or disc diffusion assays within 8 to 18 hr, respectively. Similarly, the results of a rapid PCR-based assay can be communicated to the clinicians less than 2 hr following the report of a bacteremia. Together, these results demonstrate that the rapid preparation of a blood culture bacterial pellet has a significant impact on the identification and AST turnaround time and thus on the successful outcome of patients suffering from bloodstream infections.
Immunology, Issue 92, blood culture, bacteriology, identification, antibiotic susceptibility testing, MALDI-TOF MS.
Determination of Protein-ligand Interactions Using Differential Scanning Fluorimetry
Institutions: University of Exeter.
A wide range of methods are currently available for determining the dissociation constant between a protein and interacting small molecules. However, most of these require access to specialist equipment, and often require a degree of expertise to effectively establish reliable experiments and analyze data. Differential scanning fluorimetry (DSF) is being increasingly used as a robust method for initial screening of proteins for interacting small molecules, either for identifying physiological partners or for hit discovery. This technique has the advantage that it requires only a PCR machine suitable for quantitative PCR, and so suitable instrumentation is available in most institutions; an excellent range of protocols are already available; and there are strong precedents in the literature for multiple uses of the method. Past work has proposed several means of calculating dissociation constants from DSF data, but these are mathematically demanding. Here, we demonstrate a method for estimating dissociation constants from a moderate amount of DSF experimental data. These data can typically be collected and analyzed within a single day. We demonstrate how different models can be used to fit data collected from simple binding events, and where cooperative binding or independent binding sites are present. Finally, we present an example of data analysis in a case where standard models do not apply. These methods are illustrated with data collected on commercially available control proteins, and two proteins from our research program. Overall, our method provides a straightforward way for researchers to rapidly gain further insight into protein-ligand interactions using DSF.
Biophysics, Issue 91, differential scanning fluorimetry, dissociation constant, protein-ligand interactions, StepOne, cooperativity, WcbI.
Profiling of Estrogen-regulated MicroRNAs in Breast Cancer Cells
Institutions: University of Houston.
Estrogen plays vital roles in mammary gland development and breast cancer progression. It mediates its function by binding to and activating the estrogen receptors (ERs), ERα, and ERβ. ERα is frequently upregulated in breast cancer and drives the proliferation of breast cancer cells. The ERs function as transcription factors and regulate gene expression. Whereas ERα's regulation of protein-coding genes is well established, its regulation of noncoding microRNA (miRNA) is less explored. miRNAs play a major role in the post-transcriptional regulation of genes, inhibiting their translation or degrading their mRNA. miRNAs can function as oncogenes or tumor suppressors and are also promising biomarkers. Among the miRNA assays available, microarray and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) have been extensively used to detect and quantify miRNA levels. To identify miRNAs regulated by estrogen signaling in breast cancer, their expression in ERα-positive breast cancer cell lines were compared before and after estrogen-activation using both the µParaflo-microfluidic microarrays and Dual Labeled Probes-low density arrays. Results were validated using specific qPCR assays, applying both Cyanine dye-based and Dual Labeled Probes-based chemistry. Furthermore, a time-point assay was used to identify regulations over time. Advantages of the miRNA assay approach used in this study is that it enables a fast screening of mature miRNA regulations in numerous samples, even with limited sample amounts. The layout, including the specific conditions for cell culture and estrogen treatment, biological and technical replicates, and large-scale screening followed by in-depth confirmations using separate techniques, ensures a robust detection of miRNA regulations, and eliminates false positives and other artifacts. However, mutated or unknown miRNAs, or regulations at the primary and precursor transcript level, will not be detected. The method presented here represents a thorough investigation of estrogen-mediated miRNA regulation.
Medicine, Issue 84, breast cancer, microRNA, estrogen, estrogen receptor, microarray, qPCR
qPCR Is a Sensitive and Rapid Method for Detection of Cytomegaloviral DNA in Formalin-fixed, Paraffin-embedded Biopsy Tissue
Institutions: Indiana University School of Medicine, Indiana University Health.
It is crucial to identify cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract of immunosuppressed patients, given their greater risk for developing severe infection. Many laboratory methods for the detection of CMV infection have been developed, including serology, viral culture, and molecular methods. Often, these methods reflect systemic involvement with CMV and do not specifically identify local tissue involvement. Therefore, detection of CMV infection in the GI tract is frequently done by traditional histology of biopsy tissue. Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining in conjunction with immunohistochemistry (IHC) have remained the mainstays of examining these biopsies. H&E and IHC sometimes result in atypical (equivocal) staining patterns, making interpretation difficult. It was shown that quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) for CMV can successfully be performed on formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) biopsy tissue for very high sensitivity and specificity. The goal of this protocol is to demonstrate how to perform qPCR testing for the detection of CMV in FFPE biopsy tissue in a clinical laboratory setting. This method is likely to be of great benefit for patients in cases of equivocal staining for CMV in GI biopsies.
Genetics, Issue 89, qPCR, cytomegalovirus, CMV, biopsy, real-time PCR, gastrointestinal, formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue
An Affordable HIV-1 Drug Resistance Monitoring Method for Resource Limited Settings
Institutions: University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, Jembi Health Systems, University of Amsterdam, Stanford Medical School.
HIV-1 drug resistance has the potential to seriously compromise the effectiveness and impact of antiretroviral therapy (ART). As ART programs in sub-Saharan Africa continue to expand, individuals on ART should be closely monitored for the emergence of drug resistance. Surveillance of transmitted drug resistance to track transmission of viral strains already resistant to ART is also critical. Unfortunately, drug resistance testing is still not readily accessible in resource limited settings, because genotyping is expensive and requires sophisticated laboratory and data management infrastructure. An open access genotypic drug resistance monitoring method to manage individuals and assess transmitted drug resistance is described. The method uses free open source software for the interpretation of drug resistance patterns and the generation of individual patient reports. The genotyping protocol has an amplification rate of greater than 95% for plasma samples with a viral load >1,000 HIV-1 RNA copies/ml. The sensitivity decreases significantly for viral loads <1,000 HIV-1 RNA copies/ml. The method described here was validated against a method of HIV-1 drug resistance testing approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Viroseq genotyping method. Limitations of the method described here include the fact that it is not automated and that it also failed to amplify the circulating recombinant form CRF02_AG from a validation panel of samples, although it amplified subtypes A and B from the same panel.
Medicine, Issue 85, Biomedical Technology, HIV-1, HIV Infections, Viremia, Nucleic Acids, genetics, antiretroviral therapy, drug resistance, genotyping, affordable
Mouse Models of Periventricular Leukomalacia
Institutions: University of California, Davis.
We describe a protocol for establishing mouse models of periventricular leukomalacia (PVL). PVL is the predominant form of brain injury in premature infants and the most common antecedent of cerebral palsy. PVL is characterized by periventricular white matter damage with prominent oligodendroglial injury. Hypoxia/ischemia with or without systemic infection/inflammation are the primary causes of PVL. We use P6 mice to create models of neonatal brain injury by the induction of hypoxia/ischemia with or without systemic infection/inflammation with unilateral carotid ligation followed by exposure to hypoxia with or without injection of the endotoxin lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Immunohistochemistry of myelin basic protein (MBP) or O1 and electron microscopic examination show prominent myelin loss in cerebral white matter with additional damage to the hippocampus and thalamus. Establishment of mouse models of PVL will greatly facilitate the study of disease pathogenesis using available transgenic mouse strains, conduction of drug trials in a relatively high throughput manner to identify candidate therapeutic agents, and testing of stem cell transplantation using immunodeficiency mouse strains.
JoVE Neuroscience, Issue 39, brain, mouse, white matter injury, oligodendrocyte, periventricular leukomalacia
The Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy Model of Perinatal Ischemia
Institutions: Stanford University School of Medicine.
Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy (HIE) is the consequence of systemic asphyxia occurring at birth. Twenty five percent of neonates with HIE develop severe and permanent neuropsychological sequelae, including mental retardation, cerebral palsy, and epilepsy. The outcomes of HIE are devastating and permanent, making it critical to identify and develop therapeutic strategies to reduce brain injury in newborns with HIE. To that end, the neonatal rat model for hypoxic-ischemic brain injury has been developed to model this human condition. The HIE model was first validated by Vannucci et al 1
and has since been extensively used to identify mechanisms of brain injury resulting from perinatal hypoxia-ischemia 2
and to test potential therapeutic interventions 3,4
. The HIE model is a two step process and involves the ligation of the left common carotid artery followed by exposure to a hypoxic environment. Cerebral blood flow (CBF) in the hemisphere ipsilateral to the ligated carotid artery does not decrease because of the collateral blood flow via the circle of Willis; however with lower oxygen tension, the CBF in the ipsilateral hemisphere decreases significantly and results in unilateral ischemic injury. The use of 2,3,5-triphenyltetrazolium chloride (TTC) to stain and identify ischemic brain tissue was originally developed for adult models of rodent cerebral ischemia 5
, and is used to evaluate the extent of cerebral infarctin at early time points up to 72 hours after the ischemic event 6
. In this video, we demonstrate the hypoxic-ischemic injury model in postnatal rat brain and the evaluation of the infarct size using TTC staining.
Neuroscience, Issue 21, Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE), 2 3 5-triphenyltetrazolium chloride (TTC), brain infarct
Modeling Neural Immune Signaling of Episodic and Chronic Migraine Using Spreading Depression In Vitro
Institutions: The University of Chicago Medical Center, The University of Chicago Medical Center.
Migraine and its transformation to chronic migraine are healthcare burdens in need of improved treatment options. We seek to define how neural immune signaling modulates the susceptibility to migraine, modeled in vitro
using spreading depression (SD), as a means to develop novel therapeutic targets for episodic and chronic migraine. SD is the likely cause of migraine aura and migraine pain. It is a paroxysmal loss of neuronal function triggered by initially increased neuronal activity, which slowly propagates within susceptible brain regions. Normal brain function is exquisitely sensitive to, and relies on, coincident low-level immune signaling. Thus, neural immune signaling likely affects electrical activity of SD, and therefore migraine. Pain perception studies of SD in whole animals are fraught with difficulties, but whole animals are well suited to examine systems biology aspects of migraine since SD activates trigeminal nociceptive pathways. However, whole animal studies alone cannot be used to decipher the cellular and neural circuit mechanisms of SD. Instead, in vitro
preparations where environmental conditions can be controlled are necessary. Here, it is important to recognize limitations of acute slices and distinct advantages of hippocampal slice cultures. Acute brain slices cannot reveal subtle changes in immune signaling since preparing the slices alone triggers: pro-inflammatory changes that last days, epileptiform behavior due to high levels of oxygen tension needed to vitalize the slices, and irreversible cell injury at anoxic slice centers.
In contrast, we examine immune signaling in mature hippocampal slice cultures since the cultures closely parallel their in vivo
counterpart with mature trisynaptic function; show quiescent astrocytes, microglia, and cytokine levels; and SD is easily induced in an unanesthetized preparation. Furthermore, the slices are long-lived and SD can be induced on consecutive days without injury, making this preparation the sole means to-date capable of modeling the neuroimmune consequences of chronic SD, and thus perhaps chronic migraine. We use electrophysiological techniques and non-invasive imaging to measure
neuronal cell and circuit functions coincident with SD. Neural immune gene expression variables are measured with qPCR screening, qPCR arrays, and, importantly, use of cDNA preamplification for detection of ultra-low level targets such as interferon-gamma using whole, regional, or specific cell enhanced (via laser dissection microscopy) sampling. Cytokine cascade signaling is further assessed with multiplexed phosphoprotein related targets with gene expression and phosphoprotein changes confirmed via cell-specific immunostaining. Pharmacological and siRNA strategies are used to mimic
SD immune signaling.
Neuroscience, Issue 52, innate immunity, hormesis, microglia, T-cells, hippocampus, slice culture, gene expression, laser dissection microscopy, real-time qPCR, interferon-gamma
Bladder Smooth Muscle Strip Contractility as a Method to Evaluate Lower Urinary Tract Pharmacology
Institutions: University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
We describe an in vitro
method to measure bladder smooth muscle contractility, and its use for investigating physiological and pharmacological properties of the smooth muscle as well as changes induced by pathology. This method provides critical information for understanding bladder function while overcoming major methodological difficulties encountered in in vivo
experiments, such as surgical and pharmacological manipulations that affect stability and survival of the preparations, the use of human tissue, and/or the use of expensive chemicals. It also provides a way to investigate the properties of each bladder component (i.e.
smooth muscle, mucosa, nerves) in healthy and pathological conditions.
The urinary bladder is removed from an anesthetized animal, placed in Krebs solution and cut into strips. Strips are placed into a chamber filled with warm Krebs solution. One end is attached to an isometric tension transducer to measure contraction force, the other end is attached to a fixed rod. Tissue is stimulated by directly adding compounds to the bath or by electric field stimulation electrodes that activate nerves, similar to triggering bladder contractions in vivo
. We demonstrate the use of this method to evaluate spontaneous smooth muscle contractility during development and after an experimental spinal cord injury, the nature of neurotransmission (transmitters and receptors involved), factors involved in modulation of smooth muscle activity, the role of individual bladder components, and species and organ differences in response to pharmacological agents. Additionally, it could be used for investigating intracellular pathways involved in contraction and/or relaxation of the smooth muscle, drug structure-activity relationships and evaluation of transmitter release.
The in vitro
smooth muscle contractility method has been used extensively for over 50 years, and has provided data that significantly contributed to our understanding of bladder function as well as to pharmaceutical development of compounds currently used clinically for bladder management.
Medicine, Issue 90, Krebs, species differences, in vitro, smooth muscle contractility, neural stimulation
Aseptic Laboratory Techniques: Plating Methods
Institutions: University of California, Los Angeles .
Microorganisms are present on all inanimate surfaces creating ubiquitous sources of possible contamination in the laboratory. Experimental success relies on the ability of a scientist to sterilize work surfaces and equipment as well as prevent contact of sterile instruments and solutions with non-sterile surfaces. Here we present the steps for several plating methods routinely used in the laboratory to isolate, propagate, or enumerate microorganisms such as bacteria and phage. All five methods incorporate aseptic technique, or procedures that maintain the sterility of experimental materials. Procedures described include (1) streak-plating bacterial cultures to isolate single colonies, (2) pour-plating and (3) spread-plating to enumerate viable bacterial colonies, (4) soft agar overlays to isolate phage and enumerate plaques, and (5) replica-plating to transfer cells from one plate to another in an identical spatial pattern. These procedures can be performed at the laboratory bench, provided they involve non-pathogenic strains of microorganisms (Biosafety Level 1, BSL-1). If working with BSL-2 organisms, then these manipulations must take place in a biosafety cabinet. Consult the most current edition of the Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories
(BMBL) as well as Material Safety Data Sheets
(MSDS) for Infectious Substances to determine the biohazard classification as well as the safety precautions and containment facilities required for the microorganism in question. Bacterial strains and phage stocks can be obtained from research investigators, companies, and collections maintained by particular organizations such as the American Type Culture Collection
(ATCC). It is recommended that non-pathogenic strains be used when learning the various plating methods. By following the procedures described in this protocol, students should be able to:
● Perform plating procedures without contaminating media.
● Isolate single bacterial colonies by the streak-plating method.
● Use pour-plating and spread-plating methods to determine the concentration of bacteria.
● Perform soft agar overlays when working with phage.
● Transfer bacterial cells from one plate to another using the replica-plating procedure.
● Given an experimental task, select the appropriate plating method.
Basic Protocols, Issue 63, Streak plates, pour plates, soft agar overlays, spread plates, replica plates, bacteria, colonies, phage, plaques, dilutions
High-throughput Detection Method for Influenza Virus
Institutions: Blood Research Institute, Mount Sinai School of Medicine , Blood Research Institute, City of Milwaukee Health Department Laboratory, Medical College of Wisconsin , Medical College of Wisconsin .
Influenza virus is a respiratory pathogen that causes a high degree of morbidity and mortality every year in multiple parts of the world. Therefore, precise diagnosis of the infecting strain and rapid high-throughput screening of vast numbers of clinical samples is paramount to control the spread of pandemic infections. Current clinical diagnoses of influenza infections are based on serologic testing, polymerase chain reaction, direct specimen immunofluorescence and cell culture 1,2
Here, we report the development of a novel diagnostic technique used to detect live influenza viruses. We used the mouse-adapted human A/PR/8/34 (PR8, H1N1) virus 3
to test the efficacy of this technique using MDCK cells 4
. MDCK cells (104
or 5 x 103
per well) were cultured in 96- or 384-well plates, infected with PR8 and viral proteins were detected using anti-M2 followed by an IR dye-conjugated secondary antibody. M2 5
and hemagglutinin 1
are two major marker proteins used in many different diagnostic assays. Employing IR-dye-conjugated secondary antibodies minimized the autofluorescence associated with other fluorescent dyes. The use of anti-M2 antibody allowed us to use the antigen-specific fluorescence intensity as a direct metric of viral quantity. To enumerate the fluorescence intensity, we used the LI-COR Odyssey-based IR scanner. This system uses two channel laser-based IR detections to identify fluorophores and differentiate them from background noise. The first channel excites at 680 nm and emits at 700 nm to help quantify the background. The second channel detects fluorophores that excite at 780 nm and emit at 800 nm. Scanning of PR8-infected MDCK cells in the IR scanner indicated a viral titer-dependent bright fluorescence. A positive correlation of fluorescence intensity to virus titer starting from 102
PFU could be consistently observed. Minimal but detectable positivity consistently seen with 102
PFU PR8 viral titers demonstrated the high sensitivity of the near-IR dyes. The signal-to-noise ratio was determined by comparing the mock-infected or isotype antibody-treated MDCK cells.
Using the fluorescence intensities from 96- or 384-well plate formats, we constructed standard titration curves. In these calculations, the first variable is the viral titer while the second variable is the fluorescence intensity. Therefore, we used the exponential distribution to generate a curve-fit to determine the polynomial relationship between the viral titers and fluorescence intensities. Collectively, we conclude that IR dye-based protein detection system can help diagnose infecting viral strains and precisely enumerate the titer of the infecting pathogens.
Immunology, Issue 60, Influenza virus, Virus titer, Epithelial cells
Construction of Vapor Chambers Used to Expose Mice to Alcohol During the Equivalent of all Three Trimesters of Human Development
Institutions: University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center.
Exposure to alcohol during development can result in a constellation of morphological and behavioral abnormalities that are collectively known as Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASDs). At the most severe end of the spectrum is Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), characterized by growth retardation, craniofacial dysmorphology, and neurobehavioral deficits. Studies with animal models, including rodents, have elucidated many molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in the pathophysiology of FASDs. Ethanol administration to pregnant rodents has been used to model human exposure during the first and second trimesters of pregnancy. Third trimester ethanol consumption in humans has been modeled using neonatal rodents. However, few rodent studies have characterized the effect of ethanol exposure during the equivalent to all three trimesters of human pregnancy, a pattern of exposure that is common in pregnant women. Here, we show how to build vapor chambers from readily obtainable materials that can each accommodate up to six standard mouse cages. We describe a vapor chamber paradigm that can be used to model exposure to ethanol, with minimal handling, during all three trimesters. Our studies demonstrate that pregnant dams developed significant metabolic tolerance to ethanol. However, neonatal mice did not develop metabolic tolerance and the number of fetuses, fetus weight, placenta weight, number of pups/litter, number of dead pups/litter, and pup weight were not significantly affected by ethanol exposure. An important advantage of this paradigm is its applicability to studies with genetically-modified mice. Additionally, this paradigm minimizes handling of animals, a major confound in fetal alcohol research.
Medicine, Issue 89, fetal, ethanol, exposure, paradigm, vapor, development, alcoholism, teratogenic, animal, mouse, model
One-day Workflow Scheme for Bacterial Pathogen Detection and Antimicrobial Resistance Testing from Blood Cultures
Institutions: Maastricht University Medical Center, Erasmus Medical Center.
Bloodstream infections are associated with high mortality rates because of the probable manifestation of sepsis, severe sepsis and septic shock1
. Therefore, rapid administration of adequate antibiotic therapy is of foremost importance in the treatment of bloodstream infections. The critical element in this process is timing, heavily dependent on the results of bacterial identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing. Both of these parameters are routinely obtained by culture-based testing, which is time-consuming and takes on average 24-48 hours2, 4
. The aim of the study was to develop DNA-based assays for rapid identification of bloodstream infections, as well as rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing. The first assay is a eubacterial 16S rDNA-based real-time PCR assay complemented with species- or genus-specific probes5
. Using these probes, Gram-negative bacteria including Pseudomonas spp., Pseudomonas aeruginosa
and Escherichia coli
as well as Gram-positive bacteria including Staphylococcus
spp., Staphylococcus aureus, Enterococcus spp., Streptococcus spp.,
and Streptococcus pneumoniae
could be distinguished. Using this multiprobe assay, a first identification of the causative micro-organism was given after 2 h.
Secondly, we developed a semi-molecular assay for antibiotic susceptibility testing of S. aureus, Enterococcus
spp. and (facultative) aerobe Gram-negative rods6
. This assay was based on a study in which PCR was used to measure the growth of bacteria7
. Bacteria harvested directly from blood cultures are incubated for 6 h with a selection of antibiotics, and following a Sybr Green-based real-time PCR assay determines inhibition of growth. The combination of these two methods could direct the choice of a suitable antibiotic therapy on the same day (Figure 1
). In conclusion, molecular analysis of both identification and antibiotic susceptibility offers a faster alternative for pathogen detection and could improve the diagnosis of bloodstream infections.
Immunology, Issue 65, Infection, Medicine, Microbiology, Bacteria, real-time PCR, probes, pathogen detection, blood culture, 16S rDNA gene, antibiotic resistance, antibiotic susceptibility testing
Modeling Astrocytoma Pathogenesis In Vitro and In Vivo Using Cortical Astrocytes or Neural Stem Cells from Conditional, Genetically Engineered Mice
Institutions: University of North Carolina School of Medicine, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine, University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
Current astrocytoma models are limited in their ability to define the roles of oncogenic mutations in specific brain cell types during disease pathogenesis and their utility for preclinical drug development. In order to design a better model system for these applications, phenotypically wild-type cortical astrocytes and neural stem cells (NSC) from conditional, genetically engineered mice (GEM) that harbor various combinations of floxed oncogenic alleles were harvested and grown in culture. Genetic recombination was induced in vitro
using adenoviral Cre-mediated recombination, resulting in expression of mutated oncogenes and deletion of tumor suppressor genes. The phenotypic consequences of these mutations were defined by measuring proliferation, transformation, and drug response in vitro
. Orthotopic allograft models, whereby transformed cells are stereotactically injected into the brains of immune-competent, syngeneic littermates, were developed to define the role of oncogenic mutations and cell type on tumorigenesis in vivo
. Unlike most established human glioblastoma cell line xenografts, injection of transformed GEM-derived cortical astrocytes into the brains of immune-competent littermates produced astrocytomas, including the most aggressive subtype, glioblastoma, that recapitulated the histopathological hallmarks of human astrocytomas, including diffuse invasion of normal brain parenchyma. Bioluminescence imaging of orthotopic allografts from transformed astrocytes engineered to express luciferase was utilized to monitor in vivo
tumor growth over time. Thus, astrocytoma models using astrocytes and NSC harvested from GEM with conditional oncogenic alleles provide an integrated system to study the genetics and cell biology of astrocytoma pathogenesis in vitro
and in vivo
and may be useful in preclinical drug development for these devastating diseases.
Neuroscience, Issue 90, astrocytoma, cortical astrocytes, genetically engineered mice, glioblastoma, neural stem cells, orthotopic allograft
Modeling Mucosal Candidiasis in Larval Zebrafish by Swimbladder Injection
Institutions: University of Maine, University of Maine.
Early defense against mucosal pathogens consists of both an epithelial barrier and innate immune cells. The immunocompetency of both, and their intercommunication, are paramount for the protection against infections. The interactions of epithelial and innate immune cells with a pathogen are best investigated in vivo
, where complex behavior unfolds over time and space. However, existing models do not allow for easy spatio-temporal imaging of the battle with pathogens at the mucosal level.
The model developed here creates a mucosal infection by direct injection of the fungal pathogen, Candida albicans
, into the swimbladder of juvenile zebrafish. The resulting infection enables high-resolution imaging of epithelial and innate immune cell behavior throughout the development of mucosal disease. The versatility of this method allows for interrogation of the host to probe the detailed sequence of immune events leading to phagocyte recruitment and to examine the roles of particular cell types and molecular pathways in protection. In addition, the behavior of the pathogen as a function of immune attack can be imaged simultaneously by using fluorescent protein-expressing C. albicans
. Increased spatial resolution of the host-pathogen interaction is also possible using the described rapid swimbladder dissection technique.
The mucosal infection model described here is straightforward and highly reproducible, making it a valuable tool for the study of mucosal candidiasis. This system may also be broadly translatable to other mucosal pathogens such as mycobacterial, bacterial or viral microbes that normally infect through epithelial surfaces.
Immunology, Issue 93, Zebrafish, mucosal candidiasis, mucosal infection, epithelial barrier, epithelial cells, innate immunity, swimbladder, Candida albicans, in vivo.
A Restriction Enzyme Based Cloning Method to Assess the In vitro Replication Capacity of HIV-1 Subtype C Gag-MJ4 Chimeric Viruses
Institutions: Emory University, Emory University.
The protective effect of many HLA class I alleles on HIV-1 pathogenesis and disease progression is, in part, attributed to their ability to target conserved portions of the HIV-1 genome that escape with difficulty. Sequence changes attributed to cellular immune pressure arise across the genome during infection, and if found within conserved regions of the genome such as Gag, can affect the ability of the virus to replicate in vitro
. Transmission of HLA-linked polymorphisms in Gag to HLA-mismatched recipients has been associated with reduced set point viral loads. We hypothesized this may be due to a reduced replication capacity of the virus. Here we present a novel method for assessing the in vitro
replication of HIV-1 as influenced by the gag
gene isolated from acute time points from subtype C infected Zambians. This method uses restriction enzyme based cloning to insert the gag
gene into a common subtype C HIV-1 proviral backbone, MJ4. This makes it more appropriate to the study of subtype C sequences than previous recombination based methods that have assessed the in vitro
replication of chronically derived gag-pro
sequences. Nevertheless, the protocol could be readily modified for studies of viruses from other subtypes. Moreover, this protocol details a robust and reproducible method for assessing the replication capacity of the Gag-MJ4 chimeric viruses on a CEM-based T cell line. This method was utilized for the study of Gag-MJ4 chimeric viruses derived from 149 subtype C acutely infected Zambians, and has allowed for the identification of residues in Gag that affect replication. More importantly, the implementation of this technique has facilitated a deeper understanding of how viral replication defines parameters of early HIV-1 pathogenesis such as set point viral load and longitudinal CD4+ T cell decline.
Infectious Diseases, Issue 90, HIV-1, Gag, viral replication, replication capacity, viral fitness, MJ4, CEM, GXR25
Strategies for Study of Neuroprotection from Cold-preconditioning
Institutions: The University of Chicago Medical Center.
Neurological injury is a frequent cause of morbidity and mortality from general anesthesia and related surgical procedures that could be alleviated by development of effective, easy to administer and safe preconditioning treatments. We seek to define the neural immune signaling responsible for cold-preconditioning as means to identify novel targets for therapeutics development to protect brain before injury onset. Low-level pro-inflammatory mediator signaling changes over time are essential for cold-preconditioning neuroprotection. This signaling is consistent with the basic tenets of physiological conditioning hormesis, which require that irritative stimuli reach a threshold magnitude with sufficient time for adaptation to the stimuli for protection to become evident.
Accordingly, delineation of the immune signaling involved in cold-preconditioning neuroprotection requires that biological systems and experimental manipulations plus technical capacities are highly reproducible and sensitive. Our approach is to use hippocampal slice cultures as an in vitro
model that closely reflects their in vivo
counterparts with multi-synaptic neural networks influenced by mature and quiescent macroglia / microglia. This glial state is particularly important for microglia since they are the principal source of cytokines, which are operative in the femtomolar range. Also, slice cultures can be maintained in vitro
for several weeks, which is sufficient time to evoke activating stimuli and assess adaptive responses. Finally, environmental conditions can be accurately controlled using slice cultures so that cytokine signaling of cold-preconditioning can be measured, mimicked, and modulated to dissect the critical node aspects. Cytokine signaling system analyses require the use of sensitive and reproducible multiplexed techniques. We use quantitative PCR for TNF-α to screen for microglial activation followed by quantitative real-time qPCR array screening to assess tissue-wide cytokine changes. The latter is a most sensitive and reproducible means to measure multiple cytokine system signaling changes simultaneously. Significant changes are confirmed with targeted qPCR and then protein detection. We probe for tissue-based cytokine protein changes using multiplexed microsphere flow cytometric assays using Luminex technology. Cell-specific cytokine production is determined with double-label immunohistochemistry. Taken together, this brain tissue preparation and style of use, coupled to the suggested investigative strategies, may be an optimal approach for identifying potential targets for the development of novel therapeutics that could mimic the advantages of cold-preconditioning.
Neuroscience, Issue 43, innate immunity, hormesis, microglia, hippocampus, slice culture, immunohistochemistry, neural-immune, gene expression, real-time PCR
Population Replacement Strategies for Controlling Vector Populations and the Use of Wolbachia pipientis for Genetic Drive
Institutions: Johns Hopkins University.
In this video, Jason Rasgon discusses population replacement strategies to control vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue. "Population replacement" is the replacement of wild vector populations (that are competent to transmit pathogens) with those that are not competent to transmit pathogens. There are several theoretical strategies to accomplish this. One is to exploit the maternally-inherited symbiotic bacteria Wolbachia pipientis. Wolbachia is a widespread reproductive parasite that spreads in a selfish manner at the extent of its host's fitness. Jason Rasgon discusses, in detail, the basic biology of this bacterial symbiont and various ways to use it for control of vector-borne diseases.
Cellular Biology, Issue 5, mosquito, malaria, genetics, infectious disease, Wolbachia
Rapid Genotyping of Mouse Tissue Using Sigma's Extract-N-Amp Tissue PCR Kit
Institutions: University of California, Irvine (UCI).
Genomic detection of DNA via PCR amplification and detection on an electrophoretic gel is a standard way that the genotype of a tissue sample is determined. Conventional preparation of tissues for PCR-ready DNA often take several hours to days, depending on the tissue sample. The genotype of the sample may thus be delayed for several days, which is not an option for many different types of experiments. Here we demonstrate the complete genotyping of a mouse tail sample, including tissue digestion and PCR readout, in one and a half hours using Sigma's SYBR Green Extract-N-Amp Tissue PCR Kit. First, we demonstrate the fifteen-minute extraction of DNA from the tissue sample. Then, we demonstrate the real time read-out of the PCR amplification of the sample, which allows for the identification of a positive sample as it is being amplified. Together, the rapid extraction and real-time readout allow for a prompt identification of genotype of a variety different types of tissues through the reliable method of PCR.
Basic Protocols, Issue 11, genotyping, PCR, DNA extraction, Mice
A Swine Model of Neonatal Asphyxia
Institutions: University of Alberta, University of Alberta.
Annually more than 1 million neonates die worldwide as related to asphyxia. Asphyxiated neonates commonly have multi-organ failure including hypotension, perfusion deficit, hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, pulmonary hypertension, vasculopathic enterocolitis, renal failure and thrombo-embolic complications. Animal models are developed to help us understand the patho-physiology and pharmacology of neonatal asphyxia. In comparison to rodents and newborn lambs, the newborn piglet has been proven to be a valuable model. The newborn piglet has several advantages including similar development as that of 36-38 weeks human fetus with comparable body systems, large body size (˜1.5-2 kg at birth) that allows the instrumentation and monitoring of the animal and controls the confounding variables of hypoxia and hemodynamic derangements.
We here describe an experimental protocol to simulate neonatal asphyxia and allow us to examine the systemic and regional hemodynamic changes during the asphyxiating and reoxygenation process as well as the respective effects of interventions. Further, the model has the advantage of studying multi-organ failure or dysfunction simultaneously and the interaction with various body systems. The experimental model is a non-survival procedure that involves the surgical instrumentation of newborn piglets (1-3 day-old and 1.5-2.5 kg weight, mixed breed) to allow the establishment of mechanical ventilation, vascular (arterial and central venous) access and the placement of catheters and flow probes (Transonic Inc.) for the continuously monitoring of intra-vascular pressure and blood flow across different arteries including main pulmonary, common carotid, superior mesenteric and left renal arteries. Using these surgically instrumented piglets, after stabilization for 30-60 minutes as defined by Z<10% variation in hemodynamic parameters and normal blood gases, we commence an experimental protocol of severe hypoxemia which is induced via normocapnic alveolar hypoxia. The piglet is ventilated with 10-15% oxygen by increasing the inhaled concentration of nitrogen gas for 2h, aiming for arterial oxygen saturations of 30-40%. This degree of hypoxemia will produce clinical asphyxia with severe metabolic acidosis, systemic hypotension and cardiogenic shock with hypoperfusion to vital organs. The hypoxia is followed by reoxygenation with 100% oxygen for 0.5h and then 21% oxygen for 3.5h. Pharmacologic interventions can be introduced in due course and their effects investigated in a blinded, block-randomized fashion.
Medicine, Issue 56, Developmental Biology, pigs, newborn, hypoxia, asphyxia, reoxygenation
Electroporation of Mycobacteria
Institutions: Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry.
High efficiency transformation is a major limitation in the study of mycobacteria. The genus Mycobacterium can be difficult to transform; this is mainly caused by the thick and waxy cell wall, but is compounded by the fact that most molecular techniques have been developed for distantly-related species such as Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis. In spite of these obstacles, mycobacterial plasmids have been identified and DNA transformation of many mycobacterial species have now been described. The most successful method for introducing DNA into mycobacteria is electroporation. Many parameters contribute to successful transformation; these include the species/strain, the nature of the transforming DNA, the selectable marker used, the growth medium, and the conditions for the electroporation pulse. Optimized methods for the transformation of both slow- and fast-grower are detailed here. Transformation efficiencies for different mycobacterial species and with various selectable markers are reported.
Microbiology, Issue 15, Springer Protocols, Mycobacteria, Electroporation, Bacterial Transformation, Transformation Efficiency, Bacteria, Tuberculosis, M. Smegmatis, Springer Protocols
Microinjection of Xenopus Laevis Oocytes
Institutions: University of British Columbia - UBC.
Microinjection of Xenopus laevis
oocytes followed by thin-sectioning electron microscopy (EM) is an excellent system for studying nucleocytoplasmic transport. Because of its large nucleus and high density of nuclear pore complexes (NPCs), nuclear transport can be easily visualized in the Xenopus
oocyte. Much insight into the mechanisms of nuclear import and export has been gained through use of this system (reviewed by Panté, 2006). In addition, we have used microinjection of Xenopus
oocytes to dissect the nuclear import pathways of several viruses that replicate in the host nucleus.
Here we demonstrate the cytoplasmic microinjection of Xenopus
oocytes with a nuclear import substrate. We also show preparation of the injected oocytes for visualization by thin-sectioning EM, including dissection, dehydration, and embedding of the oocytes into an epoxy embedding resin. Finally, we provide representative results for oocytes that have been microinjected with the capsid of the baculovirus Autographa californica nucleopolyhedrovirus
(AcMNPV) or the parvovirus Minute Virus of Mice (MVM), and discuss potential applications of the technique.
Cellular biology, Issue 24, nuclear import, nuclear pore complex, Xenopus oocyte, microinjection, electron microscopy, nuclear membrane, nuclear import of viruses | <urn:uuid:53bcc407-32ba-4c24-afd0-653a7807da5c> | {
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(Under the direction of Professor William N. Still, Jr.) Department of History, May 1977.
This study examines the development of Confederate naval ordnance during the Civil War. The ordnance developed by the Confederate Bureau of Ordnance and Hydrography was extremely important not only to Confederate naval vessels but also to the defense of the Confederacy's rivers and harbors.
This study is arranged topically and deals in turn with the major problems faced by the bureau: the development of manufacturing facilities, the lack of an easily accessible supply of raw materials, the lack of an effective transportation network, the lack of skilled labor, and the bureau's attempt to develop an improved rifled cannon.
The Confederate Bureau of Ordnance and Hydrography, although it faced great obstacles, was able to develop the manufacturing facilities necessary to provide the Confederate States Navy with the implements of war. At the outbreak of the war the only establishment capable of turning out heavy ordnance was Tredegar Iron Works. In 1863 an ordnance station was opened in Selma which turned out twenty pieces of ordnance a day. In addition to this, ordnance installations were established in Richmond, Charlotte, Atlanta, Columbus, and Columbia. These installations had the potential to produce all of the materials of war needed by the Confederate navy.
The construction of the physical facilities was only one of the problems faced by the Confederate Bureau of Ordnance and Hydrography. The plants constructed needed raw materials in order to produce their finished products. The inability of the South to protect its borders and its known supplies of raw materials needed for the production of ordnance and ordnance stores was one of the most serious problems the bureau faced. The problem was compounded further by an inadequate transportation network, and as a result even when raw materials were available the Confederate officials were unable to move them to the manufacturing centers.
Another major problem faced by the bureau was the lack of skilled labor. At the outbreak of the war the South had probably an adequate number of skilled labors to operate the various industrial establishments. However, many of these men were swept into the army, and as the war progressed the need for manpower became so great that the Confederate Bureau of Ordnance and Hydrography was unable to find and keep the number of skilled laborers needed to work the factories at full production. This and the problem of raw materials and transportation were the only major problems faced by the bureau that it was unable to solve.
The great success of the bureau was the development of the Brooke gun. This gun developed by John M. Brooke was very similar to the Parrot gun. While the Parrot gun only had one band shrunk over the breech, the Brooke gun had two or even three. The Brooke gun was the result of a process of evolution. Brooke studied the ordnance work of both European and American experts and his weapon was the culmination of his research. The Brooke gun was without a doubt the most powerful rifled gun of the Civil War and the failure of the United States Navy to use this weapon after the war was the result of a stated preference for smoothbores on the part of several high ranking naval officers. It is possible that if research with the Brooke gun had been continued after the war that the evolution of modern ordnance might have occurred in the United States rather than Europe. | <urn:uuid:cbb270dd-ae1c-4f08-9c4f-9e50116bed7f> | {
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