After employees at Milford Regional Medical Center have stripped the beds and wiped down or disinfected all of the surfaces they can reach, Rosie and WALL-E have a turn with the germs left behind.
The robots, made by Xenex Disinfection Services, use an intense flash of ultraviolet light to fight the bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other micro-organisms that traditional cleaning methods can miss, according to the hospital’s infection control staff.
The 4-foot-tall devices started making the rounds in May at the Milford hospital. Xenex machines are in place in about 250 hospitals across the United States. In Massachusetts, clients include Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, South Shore Hospital and Cambridge Hospital, according to a spokeswoman for the San Antonio-based company.
The robots are among the latest efforts to reduce hospital infections, which afflict about 1 in 25 patients on any given day, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 75,000 patients with hospital-related infections died in 2011, the CDC reported. Its study of acute-care hospitals found that more than half of the infections took place outside of intensive care units.
In Milford, the robots are described by hospital staff as one more tool in the effort to reduce the spread of infection. The nonprofit institution purchased the pair for slightly more than $150,000 after studying the experience of other hospitals, according to a spokeswoman.
The two robots, which received their nicknames from Milford Regional staff, are deployed throughout the facility, including patient rooms, operating rooms, waiting areas, and public bathrooms.
They work individually, wheeled by staff into spaces that have been vacated. Given 10 minutes in a cleared room, the electric-powered robots generate UV-C rays that target micro-organisms that can linger for days, said Kimberly Knox, the hospital’s infection prevention and control coordinator .
In a recent demonstration for news media, Rosie was placed in a vacant patient room, and Hugo Castaneda, an environmental services supervisor, prepared it for action. Once the room was cleared and the door shut, the device’s circular “head” rose and began to flash an intense purple light. Meanwhile, hospital staff down the hall went about their work.
The robots do not replace but rather complement the work done by people. The technology targets the toughest germs that hospitals are most concerned about, Knox said, including Clostridium difficile (or C. diff) , norovirus, influenza viruses, and staph bacteria, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus .
How effective are the machines? The company cites findings in the American Journal of Infection Control, which recently published a 52-month study. The report found patient infections, including those involving C. diff, significantly decreased in a New York hospital that supplemented its cleaning regimen with the UV disinfection, according to a summary.
Mark Stibich, cofounder of Xenex, said hospitals are looking for new methods to combat infection, in part, because health care reform has affected reimbursement of infection-related hospital costs, and also because of concern about patients.
“These infections are much more serious than they’ve ever been because of antimicrobial resistance. It’s resistant to the medications being used,” he said. “Now we have ‘super bugs.’ They’re emerging all the time.”
The robots started working at Milford Regional on May 12. They haven’t been used long enough for the medical center to gauge the result, according to Michael Newstein, an infectious diseases consultant and the chairman of its department of medicine. But the findings elsewhere have been encouraging, he said.
“It kills the spores,” he said, describing Clostridium difficile, “which are the hardest things to kill.”Mary MacDonald can be reached at email@example.com.


Monday 27th April
This week's challenges will be based on Jack and the Beanstalk.
Phonics: Please keep practising your phonics every day - 10 or 15 minutes is all you need to do. Please continue to work through the Phase 3 sounds at your own speed. There are lots of Phase 3 resources available in the Phonics Phase 3 section.
Tricky words: Please keep practising the Phase 2 and 3 tricky words. Can you think of a sentence with a tricky word in it?
Reading: It is important that you continue to read every day. Try reading ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ every day with your mum or dad...or brother or sister so you know the story really well. Have you tried to read any of the Phonics Play Comics that I have uploaded?
Drama: Could you dress up as Jack, the Giant or any of the characters and act out the story? Or could you retell the story to your teddies? Would you be able to retell the story to your mum or dad?
Writing: Can you write a simple sentence linked to the story? Are you able to imagine how the different characters were feeling - could you write a simple sentence as one of those characters? Could you write a sentence to describe the beanstalk? How did the Giant feel when he lost his hen? How did Jack feel when his mum threw the beans out of the window? Get mummy or daddy to take a photo of your writing and send it to me or put it on EExAT.
Maths: Keep practising writing your numbers to 20. Can you put the correct number of beans with the same numbered beanstalk? Can you crack the Jack and the Beanstalk addition code? There are lots of maths resources in the Jack and the Beanstalk folder. Email me a photo of you working or upload it to EExAT.
Science: Have a go at one of the Jack and the Beanstalk science experiments that I have put up – would you be able to ‘Grow a Bean in a Bag’? Could you create your own ‘Glove Garden’?
Art & Design: Can you make your own beanstalk (maybe with a kitchen roll tube) leading up to a castle in the clouds?
Lucky Dip: Surprise me! Send me a photo or video of you learning to do something that I wouldn't expect!
If you want more to do, below you will find lots of activities linked to Jack and the Beanstalk.


Although gloves are still part of a gentleman’s wardrobe today, from the 1900s to the 1960s they were absolutely integral to it. Join us as we explore the history of men’s gloves with a focus on gentleman’s dress gloves.
For the simple reason that gloves keep your hands warm, they will always be worn by men, women and children alike. They don’t need to fear being consigned to sartorial history like other men’s accessories, such as the sock garter or detachable collar (although I should add that I still use such items).
This will not happen to gloves as, to put it simply, you cannot improve their very simple concept, which offers that all-important protection against the elements.
Today, men probably have no more than one or two pairs of gloves, which they bring out when it gets chilly. However, in the days of old, gentlemen would wear gloves for almost every occasion, such as riding or walking in public, or going to the theater or church. For this article on the history of men’s gloves, we’ll go through the different types of fashion gloves available and why they were worn, before examining some of the important changes that took place.
History of Men’s Gloves: Day Gloves
As the name suggests, day gloves (sometimes referred to as ‘street gloves’) were worn as gentlemen sauntered about their daily lives, whether visiting their club, meeting their tailor or conducting important business affairs. Not only did gloves keep their hands warm, but they were also worn for health and cleanliness reasons, too. You see, Edwardian men were worried about picking up germs, so by covering their hands in a protective layer, they felt more likely to stay in good health.
As the decades progressed and life got cleaner, day gloves gradually stopped being worn unless the wearer was cold or for special occasions, such as weddings and funerals.
Certainly in the early decades of the twentieth century, a man’s social status practically dictated the fabric and styling of his gloves. For a gentleman of the upper classes, gloves had to be made of the finest leather and be a perfect fit. Like today when perhaps people may stare critically at a person going to the grocery store in their pajamas, people at the beginning of the twentieth century would notice if your gloves had even the slightest trace of dirt.
Typically, gloves would be in dark colors such as black or grey, ideal colors to be worn with black shoes. Both lined and unlined gloves were available, but should always be made of soft leather. A single button at the wrist secured them. In the late 1940s, the button disappeared and has yet to return, favoring easy on and off action over fit.
History of Men’s Evening Gloves: Formal Gloves
Following on from day gloves comes evening gloves. Yes, you’ve guessed it, this particular type of hand covering was worn in the evening. Unlike today where men often slump home and watch Netflix on the laptop with a glass of wine or bottle of beer (or perhaps that’s just me), men of yesteryear were social piranhas in comparison. They would be invited to parties, be the host and entertain at home or go out to the theater.
White evening gloves were an essential accessory as part of the formal dress uniform, particularly from the 1900s through to the 1920s. They were especially essential when dancing with a lady, as to touch her with bare hands was not considered acceptable behavior. Besides, you wouldn’t want your sweaty hands to risk soiling your lady friend’s delicate gown. Just imagine the embarrassment that this would cause.
A casual elegance raged during the 1930s, with American men following fashion and opting for new washable goatskin gloves in a pearl shade. Over in England, this style of glove was considered to be the correct wear at formal occasions, including weddings.
If they were eating or drinking, of course, the gloves would be removed. After all, they were very pale!
White dress gloves are still worn today, but largely for very formal functions where black or white tie is specified. Unless you’re keen to stand out from the crowd and be a dandy, that is. In which case, white gloves are quite ordinary, boring even. Have you considered fuchsia pink?
White dress gloves are usually made from white goatskin or kid leather, but if funds won’t allow, they are available in white cotton, too. These buttoned and later snapped close at the wrist.
Men’s Vintage Gloves: Knitted Gloves
As leather gloves were expensive, knitted gloves were often worn by working classes. The benefit of knitted gloves was that they could be knitted at home so were a more affordable option, and they also offered more flexibility for men to carry out work with their hands.
A popular type of knitted glove was one without fingers. Often favored by those that work outdoors or cigarette smokers, fingerless gloves have been around for centuries. Keeping most of the hand protected, they allowed the wearer to be able to carry out intricate tasks with their fingers. In the past, glove uses may have included embroidery, sewing or fishing. Today, it’s more likely to be texting.
Knitted gloves were knitted for men fighting in the Second World War, including the fingerless style.
Today, knitted gloves are still very popular and are probably seen more often than their leather counterparts.
Men’s Vintage Gloves: Driving Gloves
Driving gloves date back to the late nineteenth century with the introduction of the first automobile. When motorcars were first invented, they didn’t boast the mod-cons of even the most basic of models today, with air-conditioning, heaters and electric windows. In fact, the first automobiles didn’t have any windows to help the driver keep warm (or very clean). Of course, you don’t miss what you never had; besides, people were just staggered that these peculiar man-made contraptions on wheels didn’t need to be powered by horses.
Driving gloves were a necessity for drivers as they help hands stay clean, warm and protected from the wooden steering wheel (yes, really). Nothing adds a touch of class to driving than a pair of leather driving gloves, which were designed to offer optimal grip on the steering wheel.
Very early driving gloves from 1910 were very much a gauntlet style — very long in length to offer maximum protection to the driver.
Even up to the 1960s, driving gloves were still extremely popular and considered a must-have accessory for fashion conscience folk. Of course, once heaters and non-slip steering wheels were introduced, driving gloves declined in popularity. As they say though, style never goes out of fashion, meaning that driving gloves still endure today, favored by traditionalists and of course, classic automobile drivers.
Driving gloves are typically available in leather and suede and can be in both plain or mixed colors. Do bear in mind that driving gloves are a tight fit to ensure that the driver has a firm grip of the steering wheel.
How Men’s Gloves Changed Through the Decades
While the primary focus during the 1900s and 1910s was for gloves to protect and to be of a high quality, it wasn’t until the 1920s that fashion started to exert a strong influence on a man’s choice in gloves. While gloves were quite tight-fitting throughout the 1900s and 1910s, it was the roaring ’20s where it became fashionable to wear your gloves looser, with men opting for larger sizes. This more comfortable fitting of glove complemented the more loosely fitted clothing of the period.
There is no doubt that sports had a role in fashion conscious 1920s gentlemen rejecting the snug and smooth gloves that were popular only a few years before, in favor of something rough and ready and more roomier. For instance, ‘pock-marked’ pigskin gloves were one of the more popular styles among men in the early to mid ’20s. Buckskin gloves were another glove very much in vogue at this time, despite being once viewed as a working class option. Buck is soft with a rough texture, in keeping with the sports influence.
However, the popularity of buckskin faded towards the end of the 1920s, with the fashion-sensitive world turning to side-vented pigskin gloves. Pigskin gloves looked like a cross between ostrich and chamois. The working class afforded horsehide gloves, a tough leather.
In the slightly more casual 1930s, pigskin remained a solid choice, with oatmeal proving to be a popular color option. During the latter half of the ’30s, impractical pale gloves increased in popularity with favored colors including fawn, pearl grey and lemon yellow.
America caught the ski-craze bug in the late 1930s, resulting in a demand for winter sports wear. Of course, gloves had a major role to play in this, with a huge variety of gloves available. Most men went for gloves with buckskin palms and thumbs, knitted wrists and canvas backs. Knitted wool gloves with leather-laced backs also proved popular as well as beaver gloves which boasted lining made from baby lamb’s wool to protect against extreme cold temperatures.
As fashions and trends constantly change, the 1940s began to shrug off the casualness of the previous decade, with more and more men deciding to adopt a dressier style.
From the 1950s and into the 1960s, it became popular to mix materials. Combinations included mocha dress gloves with a chamois lining; leather fishing gloves with open fingers and a knitted wrist; capeskin slip-ons with knitted sidewalls; and leading the men’s fashion pack, leather with knit and fur. Men were having fun with their gloves, as well as keeping out the cold.
Tips When Buying Vintage Style Gloves
When choosing a pair of gloves, it’s important to consider style, material and fit. Peccary leather is the rarest and most luxurious and the best option for gloves. Originating from South American wild hogs, it is very soft yet durable and if treated well will last for a great number of years.
Lambskin gloves are classic for the cold season, with wool interiors to keep your hands lovely and warm. Do not mix colors either – brown gloves with brown shoes and black gloves with black shoes, please.
Vintage hand warmers can still be found today, as people did used to treat them with kid gloves (do forgive the pun). Search for gloves that are in an unworn condition, if possible, examining the lining for any damage (if there is one). If you’re looking at knitted gloves, obviously check for signs of moth damage.
How to Care for Your Gloves
In order to protect your hands, gloves receive rough treatment instead. After wearing them, gently stretch each finger and the main body of the glove to restore its shape. Always lay them flat and keep them in a dry place. If your gloves get wet, just let them dry naturally (avoiding direct sunlight or radiators).
If you should get any dirt on them, lightly sponge with a moist cloth. To keep the leather supple, periodically treat them with a leather conditioner. I’ve used petroleum jelly before with good results.
Top Ten Gloves Idioms and What They Mean
There are lots of phrases that involve gloves, which shows the indelible mark that this item of men’s accessory has left on the world at large.
- Pick up the gauntlet – You accept the challenge that someone has made.
- Fits like a glove – To fit perfectly.
- The gloves are off – People start to argue or fight in a more serious way. It comes from boxing, where as fighters normally wear gloves so they don’t cause too much damage to their competitor.
- Throw down the gauntlet – In it’s earliest form, it was a physical action to take off your heavy, armored gloves to issue a formal challenge to a duel. In more modern times, it means to challenge or confront somebody.
- Glove money – A tip or gratuity to servants, to allow them to buy gloves.
- Drop the gloves – Similar to ‘the gloves are off’, this popular hockey term that means to engage in or prepare for a fistfight.
- Handle with kid gloves – To treat someone very gently and carefully to avoid upsetting them.
- An iron fist in a velvet glove – This is used to describe someone who seems to be gentle but is in fact forceful and determined.
- Hand in glove – Very close to someone.
- Hang up the gloves – Another phrase that comes from boxing, it means that it’s time to retire.
Well, that concludes our look at the history of men’s gloves, the different types available and how they have left such an impression.


DescriptionWe are so excited to have Ricardo Salvador, Vanessa Vadim, and Jim Goodman join us to talk about the link between Food, Agriculture, and the Climate.
We’re Live! This Thanksgiving, join Jane Fonda for a family dinner digital teach-in with Vanessa Vadim (Jane’s daughter), Jim Goodman from the National Family Farm Coalition, and Ricardo Salvador to talk about the link between Food, Agriculture, and the Climate.
Posted by Fire Drill Fridays on Thursday, November 28, 2019
In this Thursday Teach-In, our focus will be food justice and agriculture. Farmers are a climate crisis casualty. They are among the most impacted by the crisis, and also among the most critical to solving it. We are seeing incredible crop losses due to greater weather extremes – more heat, more floods, more droughts, and also due to expanding pest pressures. The food system is also a climate crisis culprit. The food system is responsible for one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions (agribusiness driven deforestation, energy-intensive factory farms, processed food packaging and processing, food waste and transportation, etc.). The industrial food system is dependent on the very fossil fuels that are driving this crisis—and many of the same companies are implicated. As renewables like solar and wind are taking off, energy companies are moving into industrial agriculture, investing ever more into fossil-fuel dependent fertilizer production. Industrial meat is also a huge part of the problem, because so much farmland is being diverted for animal feed and grazing, because factory farms are so energy-intensive, and because ruminants like cattle produce the heat-trapping greenhouse gas methane through digestion. Three-fifths of agricultural land is used for cattle, which provide only 5 percent of the world’s protein.
Despite all of this, food and farming is a major part of the climate solution. We can transform how we farm and protect vital regions like rainforests from deforestation. We can reduce emissions and keep carbon on the ground and in the soils – not in the atmosphere. Organic and agroecology farming methods produce healthy, abundant food while building healthy soil, and produce more resilient farms that are better able to withstand extreme weather.


Either the polonium was created (primordial, not derived from uranium), or there have been radical changes in decay rates in the past. This is consistent with a young worldâ€”the argon has had too little time to escape. If the line is of good fit and the â€œageâ€ is acceptable, it is a â€œgoodâ€ date. In other words, the 14C/ 12C ratio gets smaller carbon 14 decay dating method. The foregoing article was primarily based on a discussion of radiocarbon dating found in The Biblical Chronologist Volume 5, Number 1. Whatever process was responsible for the halos could be a key also to understanding radiometric dating. Are we suggesting that evolutionists are conspiring to massage the data to get what they want. Testing radiometric dating methods If the long-age dating techniques were really objective means of finding the ages of rocks, they should work in situations where we know the age. Part of the result of these collisions is the production of radiocarbon ( 14C, pronounced c fourteen ), carbon atoms which are chemically the same as stable carbon, but have two extra neutrons. So a bone, or a leaf or a tree, or even a piece of wooden furniture, contains carbon.  Red blood cells and hemoglobin have been found in some (unfossilized. When an organism dies (whether plant or animal) its intake of carbon atoms ceases. Snelling, â€œThe Cause of Anomalous Potassium-argon Ages for Recent Andesite Flows at Mt. A specimen older than 50,000 years should have too little 14C to measure.
Evidence for a rapid formation of geological strata, as in the biblical flood. The secular scientific literature lists many examples of excess argon causing dates of millions of years in rocks of known historical age. Steve Austin sampled basalt from the base of the Grand Canyon strata and from the lava that spilled over the edge of the canyon. Footnotes Today, a stable carbon isotope, 13C , is measured as an indication of the level of discrimination against 14C. The authors decided that was â€œtoo old,â€ according to their beliefs about the place of the fossils in the evolutionary grand scheme of things. Anomalies in deep rock crystals Physicist Dr carbon 14 decay dating method.  Conclusion There are many lines of evidence that the radiometric dates are not the objective evidence for an old Earth that many claim, and that the world is really only thousands of years old. Snelling, â€œRadiometric Dating in Conflict,â€ Creation, 1998, 20(1):24-27. Modern radiocarbon dates are calibrated using long tree-ring chronologies. He shows that the few â€œgoodâ€ dates left after the â€œbadâ€ dates are filtered out could easily be explained as fortunate coincidences. The latter figures are significant because thorium-derived dates should be the more reliable, since thorium is less mobile than the uranium minerals that are the parents of the lead isotopes in lead-lead system. This effectively combines the two uranium-lead decay series into one diagram. He found that even highly weathered soil samples from the area, which are definitely not closed systems, gave apparently valid â€œisochronâ€ lines with â€œagesâ€ of up to 1,445 Ma.  Radioactive decay releases helium into the atmosphere, but not much is escaping.
This gives a maximum age of the moon, not the actual age. Other techniques, such as the use of isochrons, make different assumptions about starting conditions, but there is a growing recognition that such â€œfoolproofâ€ techniques can also give â€œbadâ€ dates. This is because the amount and strength of cosmic radiation entering the earth s atmosphere has varied over time.love awake online dating bangladesh.. Unlike common carbon ( 12C), 14C is unstable and slowly decays, changing it back to nitrogen and releasing energy. Furthermore, the amount of helium in zircons from hot rock is also much more consistent with a young Earth (helium derives from the decay of radioactive elements). It provides an objective, absolute method of determining a sample s age with quantifiable precision. However, with radiometric dating, the different techniques often give quite different results. These displaced neutrons, now moving fast, hit ordinary nitrogen ( 14N) at lower altitudes, converting it into 14C. That is why radiocarbon dating cannot give millions of years. Accordingly, carbon dating carefully applied to items from historical times can be useful. Plants obtain all their carbon atoms from the atmosphere. Again, the only way to know if an isochron is â€œgoodâ€ is by comparing the result with what is already believed. It is simply that all observations must fit the prevailing paradigm. .
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Black Sea Cossack Host
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Black Sea Cossack Host (Russian: Черномо́рское каза́чье во́йско; Ukrainian: Чорномо́рське коза́цьке ві́йсько), also known as Chernomoriya (Russian: Черномо́рия), was a Cossack host of the Russian Empire created in 1787 in the southern Ukraine from former Zaporozhian Cossacks. In the 1790s, the host was re-settled to the Kuban River. It comprised the Caucasus Fortified Defence Line from the mouth of the Kuban River to the mouth of the Bolshaya Laba River.
The Black Sea host played a crucial role in the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–1797. As a result, Catherine II rewarded them with the Kuban land in the North Caucasus (north of the Kuban River, south of the Yeya River and east of the Sea of Azov) by her decree of June 30, 1792. At that time the area was inhabited by a few Nogain steppe nomads. When Russia annexed the Crimean Khanate in 1783 it inherited the Crimean claim to this land. South of the Kuban were Circassians.
Renamed the Black Sea Cossack Host in honor of the victories during the Russo-Turkish War, a total of 25,000 people made the migration in 1792-1794 from Ukraine, settling in the regions north of the Kuban River. Initially the Black Sea Cossacks adhered to Zaporozhian traditions, such as the democratic election of the host government, but in time they adopted many Russian ways.
Instead of a central Sich, they formed a defence line from the inlet of the Kuban River into the Black Sea to the inlet of the Bolshaya Laba River, and colonised the land north of this line with stanitsas.
The Cossacks founded the administrative centre of Yekaterinodar (literally "Catherine's gift") in 1794. At the same time, however, the Black Sea Cossacks also sent men to many major campaigns of the Russian Empire, such as the suppression of the Polish Kościuszko Uprising in 1794, the ill-fated Persian Expedition of 1796 where nearly half of the Cossacks died from hunger and disease.
The Host sent the 9th plastun (infantry) and 1st joint cavalry regiments as well as the first Leib Guards (elite) sotnia to aid the Russian Army during the Patriotic War of 1812. Further participation of the new host occurred in the Russo-Persian War (1826-1828) where they stormed the last remaining Ottoman bastion of the northern Black Sea Coast, the fortress of Anapa, which fell on June 12, 1828. In the course of the Crimean War, the Cossacks foiled attempts by allied forces to land on the Taman Peninsula, whilst the 2nd and 5th plastun battalions took part in the heroic Defence of Sevastopol (1854-1855).
As the years went by, the Black Sea Cossacks continued their systematic penetration into the mountainous regions of the Northern Caucasus. Taking an active part in the finale of the Russian conquest of the Northern Caucasus (1817-1864), they settled regions as these were conquered. To aid them, a total of 70,000 additional ex-Zaporozhians from the Bug, Yekaterinoslav, and finally the Azov Cossack Host migrated there in the mid 19th century. All three hosts needed to be removed to vacate space for the colonisation of New Russia, and with the increasing weakness of the Ottoman Empire as well as the formation of independent buffer states in the Balkans, the need for further Cossack defensive presence in New Russia had ended. They migrated to the Kuban in 1860 and merged with the Caucasus Line Cossack Host, which consisted of migrated Don Cossack elements. Finally in 1864, the Black Sea Cossacks and the Azov Cossacks were united into the Kuban Cossack Host, ninety years after destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich.
Upon creation, the territory of the host was governed by the military government. Later, a dedicated military executive office was created, which was headed by the host's ataman. In military matters, this office was subordinated to Kherson's military governor and, since 1802, to the Crimean Inspectorate. In civil matters, the office was subordinated to the Governor of Taurida Governorate.
- Азаренкова, А. С.; И. Ю. Бондарь; Н. С. Вертышева (1986) . Основные административно-территориальные преобразования на Кубани (1793–1985 гг.) (in Russian). Краснодарское книжное издательство.


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Photochemical smog effects in mixed conifer forests along a natural gradient of ozone and nitrogen deposition in the San Bernardino MountainsAuthor(s): Michael Arbaugh; Andrzej Bytnerowicz; Nancy Grulke; Mark Fenn; Mark Poth; Patrick Temple; Paul Miller
Source: Environment International. 29(2-3): 401-406.
Publication Series: Scientific Journal (JRNL)
Station: Pacific Northwest Research Station
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DescriptionToxic effects of photochemical smog on ponderosa and Jeffrey pines in the San Bernardino Mountains were discovered in the 1950s. It was revealed that ozone is the main cause of foliar injury manifested as chlorotic mottle and premature needle senescence. Various morphological, physiological and biochemical alterations in the affected plants have been reported over a period of about 40 years of multidisciplinary research. Recently, the focus of research has shifted from studying the effects of ozone to multiple pollutant effects. Recent studies have indicated that the combination of ozone and nitrogen may alter biomass allocation in pines towards that of deciduous trees, accelerate litter accumulation, and increase carbon sequestration rates in heavily polluted forests. Further study of the effects of multiple pollutants, and their long-term consequences on the mixed conifer ecosystem, cannot be adequately done using the original San Bernardino Mountains Air Pollution Gradient network. To correct deficiencies in the design, the new site network is being configured for long-term studies on multiple air pollutant concentrations and deposition, physiological and biochemical changes in trees, growth and composition of over-story species, biogeochemical cycling including carbon cycling and sequestration, water quality, and biodiversity of forest ecosystems. Eleven sites have been re-established. A comparison of 1974 stand composition with data from 2000 stand composition indicate that significant changes in species composition have occurred at some sites with less change at other sites. Moist, high-pollution sites have experienced the greatest amount of forest change, while dryer low-pollution sites have experienced the least amount of stand change. In general, ponderosa pine had the lowest basal area increases and the highest mortality across the San Bernardino Mountains. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.
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CitationArbaugh, Michael; Bytnerowicz, Andrzej; Grulke, Nancy; Fenn, Mark; Poth, Mark; Temple, Patrick; Miller, Paul. 2003. Photochemical smog effects in mixed conifer forests along a natural gradient of ozone and nitrogen deposition in the San Bernardino Mountains. Environment International. 29(2-3): 401-406. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0160-4120(02)00176-9.
KeywordsMultiple pollutants, Pine, Ozone, San Bernardino Mountains, Stand composition.
- Influence of ozone and nitrogen deposition on bark beetle activity under drought conditions
- Air pollution impacts in the mixed conifer forests of southern California
- Seasonal influences on ozone uptake and foliar injury to ponderosa and Jeffrey pines at a southern California site
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I work for an electric utility. I've heard tales over the years of invisible high-pressure steam leaks in power plants that have "cut people in two." Any truth to this? --99gre, via e-mail
Much to the disappointment of my inner ghoul, so far I've turned up no confirmed cases of steam bisection. Could it happen, though? You bet.
The boilers in a typical power plant generate steam at around 2,400 pounds per square inch--about 163 times atmospheric pressure. Some "supercritical" steam plants operate at pressures over 4,000 PSI. Here the steam is heated far above the boiling point, generally to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. This "superheated steam" is invisible when released until it starts to condense back into liquid water. Combine high pressure with high temperature and a jet of steam from a leak could travel a long way before becoming visible to an unwary passerby. Anyone walking into such a leak would be seriously injured or killed by the heat alone.
It's been well documented that jets of high-pressure gas (which is what superheated steam is) can cause injuries even without the added complication of heat. OSHA warns against possible amputation from high-pressure gas and limits air pressure for industrial cleaning to 30 PSI. High-pressure gases can easily penetrate the skin, especially via an existing cut or wound, and potentially lead to gas embolism--bubbles in the bloodstream that can migrate to the heart, lungs, or brain and cause serious trouble. U.S. Army medical reports tell of numerous gas-penetration injuries suffered during training with blank firearm rounds. Just 12 PSI can likely pop your eyeball from its socket. Less than 80 PSI of air from 12 inches away reportedly swelled up a woodworker's hand "to the size of a grapefruit." One source reports that high-pressure nitrogen cut into a worker's leg like a knife, and other references warn that high-pressure gases can cut fingers, toes, and other body parts. Again, I didn't find an actual case of high-pressure gas cutting anyone in half, but it's not going out on much of a limb to say it sure would smart.
Steam leaks can injure or kill in many ways. The force of a high-pressure leak, for instance, can turn loose items nearby into projectiles. My assistant Una, who works in the power industry and has visited more than half the steam power plants in the United States, once witnessed a rupture in some 2,400-PSI steam pipes that flung a set of heavy welding tanks 50 feet and through a sheet-metal barrier. Pieces of pipe, insulation, tools--almost anything can become deadly in such circumstances. Ducking won't necessarily save you--a big steam leak in close quarters can quickly raise the surrounding air temperature so high you'll cook from the inside if you breathe. Even at lower temperatures enough steam in a small area can suffocate you as it displaces the air. Una has a friend who got nicknamed "the Lobster" after a relatively low-temperature steam accident--he was exposed to a wet 180-degree leak for a few seconds and spent nearly a month in the hospital. An indirect low-temperature leak can also lead to heat exhaustion if you're around it long enough.
It's common belief among utility operators that a good way to check for high-pressure steam leaks is by waving a broomstick in front of you: when the stick suddenly gets chopped in half, you've found your leak. However, Una contacted operations personnel at several power plants across the U.S., and while almost all had heard of this alleged practice, most thought it would be an unusual way to find a leak these days. A leak in a steam line with enough pressure to cut a broom in half would likely warrant shutting down the unit. Given the danger of a fatal mistake, it's hard to imagine a plant boss sending workers out on a search mission armed only with a trusty broom. Una further points out that a steam leak, invisible or not, usually isn't tough to locate--imagine a locomotive horn a few inches from your ear. Operators in an enclosed control room can hear steam leaks from several floors away.
Some industry sources speculate that using a broom to search for leaks may have started aboard ships with steam boilers, where tight quarters and noisy conditions may have made it difficult to find leaks quickly without some direct evidence. It may even have been recommended as a way to survive a steam leak, using the broom to check that the route to safety was clear. Then again, most shipboard steam isn't at a high enough pressure to slice through wood (although it could cut the bristles). Personally I'm guessing the broomstick thing is part of the informal neophyte training process familiar to anyone who's worked in industry: "Did they tell you about high-pressure steam leaks? Cut you right in half. Better wave this broom."
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.


According to research published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, insomnia is associated with increased risk of heart attack and stroke.
“Sleep is important for biological recovery and takes around a third of our lifetime, but in modern society more and more people complain of insomnia,” said first author Qiao He, a Master’s degree student at China Medical University, Shenyang, China. “For example, it is reported that approximately one-third of the general population in Germany has suffered from insomnia symptoms.”
“Researchers have found associations between insomnia and poor health outcomes,” continued Miss He. “But the links between insomnia and heart disease or stroke have been inconsistent.”
The current meta-analysis assessed the association between insomnia symptoms and incidence or death from cardiovascular disease (acute myocardial infarction, coronary heart disease, heart failure), stroke, or a combination of events. Insomnia symptoms included difficulty initiating sleep, difficulty maintaining sleep, early-morning awakening, and non-restorative sleep, according to the European Society of Cardiology.
The authors analyzed 15 prospective cohort studies with a total of 160,867 participants.
During a median follow-up of three to 29.6 years, there were 11,702 adverse events.
There were significant associations between difficulty initiating sleep, difficulty maintaining sleep, and non-restorative sleep and the risk of heart disease and stroke, with increased relative risks of 1.27, 1.11, and 1.18, respectively, compared to those not experiencing these insomnia symptoms. There was no association between early-morning awakening and adverse events.
“The underlying mechanisms for these links are not completely understood,” continued Miss He. “Previous studies have shown that insomnia may change metabolism and endocrine function, increase sympathetic activation, raise blood pressure, and elevate levels of proinflammatory and inflammatory cytokines – all of which are risk factors for cardiovascular disease and stroke.
Women with insomnia symptoms had a slightly higher risk of cardiovascular and stroke events than men, especially for non-restorative sleep, but the difference between sexes did not reach statistical significance.
Miss He said: “We cannot conclude that insomnia is more dangerous for women, given the limitations of meta-analyses and the lack of a statistically significant difference between sexes. However, we do know that women are more prone to insomnia because of differences in genetics, sex hormones, stress, and reaction to stress. It may therefore be prudent to pay more attention to women’s sleep health.”
Miss He concluded: “Sleep disorders are common in the general population and sleep health should be included in clinical risk assessment. Health education is needed to increase public awareness of insomnia symptoms and the potential risks, so that people with sleep problems are encouraged to seek help.”Advertisement


On Sunday night the Sumida River in Tokyo's Taito Ward lit up with a bright electric blue glow as thousands of solar-powered LED lights flowed down the river. The spectacle was part of the 2012 Tokyo Hotaru Festival, which was inspired by the Japanese tradition of watching fireflies along waterways, according to CNET. Participants bought LED bulbs and tossed them into the river to recreate the firefly effect, and they were collected again downstream.
At the Tokyo Hotaru Festival, the sea of blue LED lights flowed past the Tokyo Sky Tree, a radio broadcast tower that was completed in 2011 and is now the second tallest structure in the world after the Burj Khalifa. The tower was flooded in blue light for the event, reflecting the LEDs in the river below. The event, which took place just a day after the emergence of the amazing ‘supermoon’ on Saturday, was a treat for shutterbugs, with some photographers producing stunning long exposure shots like this and this showing the LEDs streaming down the river. But perhaps the best view of the event was from the air, as captured in this photo.
The LED lights were charged using solar power, according to CNET. But as TreeHugger notes, despite the beauty of the event, it does raise some serious questions about e-waste. Organizers used nets to collect the floating LED bulbs downstream, but what will become of them now? Is there any good use for 100,000 8.5-centimeter-wide LED bulbs (other than heaving them in a river, of course)?


By now you probably know about the plight of America’s honeybees: the collapsed colonies and dying hives, threatening pollination services to crops and the future of a much-beloved insect.
But it’s not just honeybees that are in trouble. Many wild pollinators—thousands of species of bees and butterflies and moths—are also threatened. Their decline would affect not only our food supply, but our landscapes, too. Most honeybees live in commercially managed agricultural colonies; wild pollinators are caretakers of our everyday surroundings.
“Almost 90 percent of the world’s flowering species require insects or other animals for pollination,” said ecologist Laura Burkle of Montana State University. “That’s a lot of plants that need these adorable creatures for reproduction. And if we don’t have those plants, we have a pretty impoverished world.”
Compared to honeybees, wild pollinators are not well studied, and their condition has received relatively little public attention. Most people don’t realize that there are thousands of bee species in the United States. Even many butterflies are overlooked, with the plight of just a few species, particularly monarchs, widely recognized.
Wild bees and butterflies are out on the landscape, making them difficult to count, and a lack of historical baselines makes it challenging to detect long-term trends. Slowly but surely, though, results from field studies and anecdotal reports from experts are piling up. They don’t paint a pretty picture. Many pollinator populations seem to be dwindling.
According to a recent survey organized by the Xerces Society, an invertebrate conservation group, nearly one-third of North American bumblebee species are declining. Other studies have reported similar trends, documenting dramatic declines in once-common species such as the American bumblebee. If that’s happening to bumblebees, says Xerces Society executive director Scott Black, it’s quite possible, even likely, that others are hurting, too.
“There’s very little information status on most of the bees other than bumblebees, but if you look at the life histories of these groups, many are likely even more sensitive to the disturbances leading to the declines, such as pesticides and habitat loss,” Black said. “Although we don’t know what’s going on with all bees, I think we could be seeing real problems.”
Among other pollinators, iconic monarch butterfly declines are well documented: Their numbers are now at a small fraction of historical levels. And entomologist Art Shapiro of the University of California, Davis spent most of the last four decades counting butterflies across central California, and found declines in every region. These declines don’t just involve butterflies that require very specific habitats or food sources, and might be expected to be fragile, but so-called generalist species thought to be highly adaptable. Many other entomologists have told Black the same thing.
“Species that used to be in all our yards are dropping out, but nobody’s monitoring them,” Black said.
Plenty of blame to go around
Some of the factors behind the declines have also been implicated in honeybee die-offs. Like honeybees, wild pollinators are sensitive to pesticides, including neonicotinoids, an enormously popular class of insect-killers used in most major crops that has been linked to bee deaths.
Their use has been restricted on farms in the European Union but continues on U.S. farms. They’re also used even more intensively in nurseries and gardens. What’s more, says Black, instructions on minimizing honeybee harm from pesticides, such as spraying them in the morning, may end up targeting other pollinators.
It’s difficult to quantify the harms caused by pesticides—not just neonicotinoids, but dozens of other chemicals, their effects varying by dose and combination—but “it’s logical to think they’re having some kind of effect,” said biologist Claire Kremen of the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s amazing we see as many pollinators as we do. Those are the ones who’ve survived this continuous pummeling.”
Significant as pesticide impacts could be, though, they may be eclipsed by habitat loss. Across the United States, pollinator habitat is disappearing at rates usually reserved for descriptions of Amazon rain forest deforestation. This is most striking in the Midwest, where more than 36,000 square miles of wetlands and prairie—an area larger than Indiana—has been converted to cropland since 2008.
Farms don’t need to be bad for pollinators. The wetlands and drainage ditches of California’s rice fields provide valuable food and shelter to butterflies, Shapiro says. But in the Midwest and elsewhere, the widespread use of herbicide-resistant crop varieties has allowed farmers to apply herbicide more intensively than ever. It’s now possible to wander a corn farm for days without seeing a single bee.
Add urban and suburban development that produces landscapes of chemically maintained, regularly mowed lawns and roadsides, and “habitat loss is generally thought to be the most important factor driving bee declines,” wrote researchers in 2010.
What are the long-term consequences of pollinator loss? Presently it’s hard to say. In a given locale, losing a few species might have little effect, as others will take over their ecological role. Lose enough, though, and a tipping point might be reached, resulting in a collapse of pollinators and the plants that rely on them to reproduce.
“You can use the example of an airplane: Start to undo some rivets and screws, and it’s still going to fly, because there’s still redundancy in the system,” said Burkle. “But at some point it begins to fall apart.”
It’s not yet possible to predict where that point will be, Burkle said, but stresses are already evident. In a 2013 Science paper, Burkle and colleagues described a 50 percent decline in bumblebee species in an Illinois forest. They also plotted network graphs of historical and present-day interactions between bees and plants. The comparison (above) shows a dramatically shrunken web of relationships.
Tipping point or not, such patterns could eventually translate into agricultural losses. Though most farmers rely on commercial honeybees, wild pollinators in the U.S. still provide an estimated $14.6 billion worth of pollination services every year. The oft-cited figure that one in every three bites of food was pollinated includes not just honeybees, but all pollinators.
“If there was a loss of pollinators,” said USDA entomologist Terry Griswold, “that would have a cascading effect in terms of forage for a good proportion of the biota.” In less technical terms, most of what lives relies on pollinated plants.
If the situation seems grim, though, solutions do exist. Researchers like Kremen and the University of Maine’s Frank Drummond have demonstrated the economic value of creating pollinator-friendly habitat on farms. Others have shown that it’s possible to get industrial-scale yields while using a minimum of pesticides and herbicides.
Kremen noted that costs of helping pollinators are presently borne by farmers, who often want to help but can’t afford it. “Our government has to step up and provide support for food growers to do this,” she said. The USDA did recently start a pollinator habitat restoration program; it’s still small, but it’s a beginning.
The public can also play an important role. Griswold recommended that homeowners leave at least a bit of lawn unmowed—those so-called weeds are habitat and forage for pollinators—and cut back on herbicide and pesticide use. Even those small steps, he said, are quite helpful. At a larger scale, conservation groups like Monarch Watch are working to create pollinator habitat along the butterfly migration route, a project that will require the participation of thousands of people.
“I would like to see communities get together to have butterfly garden corridors running through them,” Shapiro said. “If you get five households on a city block, you’ve got a corridor.”
“If we’re going to deal with these problems, we need to have everybody taking action,” Black said. “In the past, I worked to get wilderness designated—with salmon and spotted owls and wolves, with old growth and wild rivers. That’s different than what I do now, because anybody can do something for pollinators.”Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.


Among European and Western culture, Polish cemeteries are unique. In a remarkable display of remembrance, they are often lavishly covered in flowers, pictures, mementos and candles, particularly around Roman Catholic holidays and especially on All Saints’ Day. Strangers will often look after graves of non-family members; it’s rare to see an uncared-for or unclean tombstone.
The Polish word “zakopane” translates into English as “buried,” so it should be no surprise that one particularly notable Polish burial ground can be found in the popular ski resort town of the same name.
The Old Zakopane Cemetery (as it is commonly known), or Pęksowy Brzyzek (its actual name, meaning roughly “Pęksa’s Brook”), sits behind the old wooden Church of Our Lady of Częstochowa. The hallowed grounds contain over 500 grave sites. Some of Poland ‘s most celebrated denizens-particularly those hailing from the surrounding Podhale region in the Tatry mountains-can be found among those interred in the cemetery. Among the honored dead are polish war heroes and Nazi resistance fighters, who lie side-by-side with authors, architects, mountain climbers, poets, musicians, artists, scientists, and engineers.
What really stands out are the stylistic representations of the grave markers themselves. In a stark contrast to traditional cemetery plots, the burial sites in the Old Zakopane Cemetery are adorned with memorials carved from raw rock and metal, or built in the form of tall wooden totems and sculptures. These monuments to the departed are true pieces of art in their own right, incorporating gnarly branches and moss-covered boulders, sudden visionary protrusions festooned with names and dates. The effect is a dreamy, magical, fairytale environment, with the impression that the entire ensemble is growing organically from the ground.


Ducklings always appear so well-behaved!
We had several looks at both Killdeer and Spotted Sandpiper:
Species list: double-crested cormorant, Canada goose, mallard, American black duck, red-tailed hawk, spotted sandpiper, killdeer, ring-billed gull, mourning dove, chimney swift, belted kingfisher, red-bellied woodpecker, northern flicker, great crested flycatcher, rough-winged swallow, blue jay, American crow, American robin, blue-gray gnatcatcher, European starling, warbling vireo, yellow warbler, house sparrow, red-winged blackbird, common grackle, Baltimore oriole, northern cardinal, rose-breasted grosbeak, American goldfinch, song sparrow. (30 species)
Some botany on this 18 degree, overcast morning:
This morning’s group:
The Valley’s Singing Day by Robert Frost
The sound of the closing outside door was all.
You made no sound in the grass with your footfall,
As far as you went from the door, which was not far;
But had awakened under the morning star
The first song-bird that awakened all the rest.
He could have slept but a moment more at best.
Already determined dawn began to lay
In place across a cloud the slender ray
For prying across a cloud the slender ray
For prying beneath and forcing the lids of sight,
And loosing the pent-up music of over-night.
But dawn was not to begin their ‘pearly-pearly;
(By which they mean the rain is pearls so early,
Before it changes to diamonds in the sun),
Neither was song that day to be self-begun.
You had begun it, and if there needed proof–
I was asleep still under the dripping roof,
My window curtain hung over the sill to wet;
But I should awake to confirm your story yet;
I should be willing to say and help you say
That once you had opened the valley’s singing day.


Sleeping Vishnu, anonymous, c. 1100 - c. 1300
This head originally formed part of a complete figure of Vishnu. The Hindu god would have been represented reclining on his side, resting his head on his hand. The damage behind his right ear marks the place where the hand would have been. According to Hindu belief, creation is cyclical. Before each new creation cycle, Vishnu sleeps and dreams of the coming regeneration.


In music, relative keys are the major and minor scales that have the same key signatures, meaning that they share all the same notes but are arranged in a different order of whole steps and half steps. A pair of major and minor scales sharing the same key signature are said to be in a relative relationship. The relative minor of a particular major key, or the relative major of a minor key, is the key which has the same key signature but a different tonic; this is as opposed to parallel minor or major, which shares the same tonic (from the Latin relativus, itself from relatus, past participle of referre). Relative keys are closely related keys, the keys between which most modulations occur, in that they differ by no more than one accidental (none in the case of relative keys).
The minor key starts three semitones below its relative major; for example, A minor is three semitones below its relative, C major.
For example, G major and E minor both have a single sharp in their key signature at F♯; therefore, E minor is the relative minor of G major, and conversely G major is the relative major of E minor, The tonic of the relative minor is the sixth scale degree of the major scale, while the tonic of the relative major is the third degree of the minor scale. The relative relationship may be visualized through the circle of fifths.
A complete list of relative minor/major pairs in order of the circle of fifths is:
|Key signature||Major key||Minor key|
|B♭, E♭, A♭, D♭, G♭, C♭, F♭||C♭ major||A♭ minor|
|B♭, E♭, A♭, D♭, G♭, C♭||G♭ major||E♭ minor|
|B♭, E♭, A♭, D♭, G♭||D♭ major||B♭ minor|
|B♭, E♭, A♭, D♭||A♭ major||F minor|
|B♭, E♭, A♭||E♭ major||C minor|
|B♭, E♭||B♭ major||G minor|
|B♭||F major||D minor|
|C major||A minor|
|F♯||G major||E minor|
|F♯, C♯||D major||B minor|
|F♯, C♯, G♯||A major||F♯ minor|
|F♯, C♯, G♯, D♯||E major||C♯ minor|
|F♯, C♯, G♯, D♯, A♯||B major||G♯ minor|
|F♯, C♯, G♯, D♯, A♯, E♯||F♯ major||D♯ minor|
|F♯, C♯, G♯, D♯, A♯, E♯, B♯||C♯ major||A♯ minor|
Confusingly, the term for "relative key" in German is Paralleltonart, while parallel key is Varianttonart. Similar terminology is used in most Germanic and Slavic languages, but not Romantic languages. This is particularly confusing with the term parallel chord, which denotes chords derived from the relative key in English usage.
- Benward & Saker (2003). Music in Theory and Practice, Vol. I, p.33-35. ISBN 978-0-07-294262-0. "D flat major and a minor scale that have the same key signature are said to be in a relative relationship."
- Forte, Allen (1979). Tonal Harmony, p.9. 3rd edition. Holt, Rinehart, and Wilson. ISBN 0-03-020756-8. "The key which shares the same key signature but not the same first degree with another scale is called relative. Thus, the relative of C major is A minor (no sharps or flats in either key signature); the relative major of A minor is C major."
- Benward & Saker (2003), p.243.


From the Latin, conscious: com, together + scire, to know. Having an awareness of one’s own existence, sensations, and thoughts and of one’s environment. Subjectively known or felt. Aware.
Most of us would say from that definition that we are already conscious but that is exactly the problem, we are not conscious enough to realize that we are unconscious. We are conscious of the self but not the Self.
The entire thrust of Self-realization comes from a seeking of “awareness.” All of the energy of humanity individually and collectively, consciously or unconsciously, drives us to wake up. It is the “purpose” of life—it is the answer to the Great Question, Why Am I Here? We are here to become CONSCIOUS. Obviously as contemplatives, we mean something much more than the pedestrian meaning of being “conscious.” The awareness that we are seeking is transcendent and takes us into a realm of consciousness beyond striving and suffering, a wondrous realm indeed.
Jungian psychologist Edward Edinger, further defines what being truly conscious would be. “We can proceed further by examining the unconscious side of the term consciousness, namely its etymology. Conscious derives from con or cum, meaning ‘with’ or ‘together,’ and scire, ‘to know’ or ‘to see.’ It has the same derivation as conscience. Thus the root meaning of both consciousness and conscience is ‘knowing with’ or ‘seeing with’ an ‘other.’ In contrast, the word science, which also derives from scire, means simple knowing, i.e., knowing without ‘witness.’ So etymology indicates that the phenomena of consciousness and conscience are somehow related and that the experience of consciousness is made up of two factors—‘knowing’ and ‘witness.’ In other words, consciousness is the experience of knowing together with an other, that is, in a setting of two-ness.” Again, to keep the focus where it belongs, the “setting” is one of two-ness in a relative sense but Oneness in the Absolute or awakened state. Therefore, true consciousness would lead us to a realization of Oneness.
Consciousness then, is created by the union of opposites or making them whole. “The coniunctio of opposites is not generally a pleasant process. More often it is felt as a crucifixion. Consciousness is the third thing that emerges out of the conflict of two-ness. Out of the ego as subject versus the ego as object; [the primary dualism in Ken Wilber’s ‘spectrum of consciousness’ found in this book under the article Spiritual Path.] out of the ego as active agent versus the ego as passive victim; out of the ego as praiseworthy and good versus the ego as damnable and bad; out of a conflict of mutually exclusive duties—out of all such paralyzing conflicts can emerge the third, transcendent condition which is a new quantum of consciousness. The Trinity refers psychologically to the creation of consciousness. Father and Son, like God and man, are opposites which collide on the cross. The Holy Spirit as the reconciling third emerges from that collision proceeding from the Father and the Son. Thus the Holy Spirit (Paraclete) [counselor or comforter] can only come after the death of the Son, i.e., consciousness comes as the fruit of the conflict of twoness. Therefore Christ could say, It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convince the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgement [the opposites and their resolution]. John 16: 7-8, RSV.”
At the risk of becoming too metaphysical we must let Ken Wilber express his profound insight. “But since consciousness is Reality, and Reality is actually non-dual, it would be much more accurate to view consciousness not as relative subject confronting objects but as Absolute Subjectivity above the dualism of subjects vs. object.”
Eckhart Tolle has a fresh perspective and an always unique way of visualizing key concepts like consciousness. “Just as water can be a solid, liquid, or gaseous, consciousness can be seen to be ‘frozen’ as physical matter, ‘liquid’ as mind and thought, or formless as pure consciousness.”
William Irwin Thompson returns our focus to Oneness. “From the esoteric point of view, it is not really appropriate to look at one’s body as the singular form of one’s incarnation; we all take our incarnation in the natural history of the planet, so the planet is actually part of our subtle body. It make no sense to talk about life or the evolution of consciousness unless one is talking about planetary dynamics and the unfolding of the entire story of our Earth.”
As we have seen the Bible when understood consciously also supports Oneness as the only profound worldview as does the Vedanta of Hinduism. “Personality is presented in all its giantism, and yet it is personality that must be offered up, sacrificed to and for the divine. ‘Let the Seer slay reality, then slay the slayer’ is an aphorism of the yogic seer Patanjali. This sacrifice of the personality through and with the personal is something we will encounter again when we consider the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna encourages Arjuna to carry on with the battle and not seek to escape the conflict in the quietistic nihilism of the world-denying sanyasin. It is only through the personal that the personality is transformed. Samson without his strength and sexuality is not Samson; without them, there would be no story at all.”
We all have within us insights awaiting our return to an awakened state so they can emerge into our consciousness as both Peter Russell and David Lorimer experienced. “Many mystics have reported an experience in which consciousness is not bound by space and time.”
“Consciousness is not an object: it is the ultimate subject: The Self is the knower (thou art that), never the known (the object). It is ultimately unknowable precisely because it is the Knower.”
“We are caught up in a consciousness that can no longer distinguish completely between illusion and reality. Thus we live in a hazy, imaginary reality and suffer from that. We begin to recognize our self-created experience of reality for what it is: an illusion. At the same time, it gives us insight into reality and allows us to experience its qualities, which are none other than the qualities of our fundamental humaneness.”
Are we aware of what’s happening in our country and the world at large? What most of us think we know is in fact the creation of the unconscious false self and that behavior is self-destructive. We hear about trigger locks on weapons stored in our houses so our children won’t kill us or each other. Or a community in Idaho passing a law making it illegal to not own a gun so that in the words of the mayor, “we will be safe.” Or the creation of a missile defense system to protect us against an enemy that we have unconsciously created and provoked. The answer is paradoxically, yes and no.
The awareness comes and goes and when it gets too uncomfortable we repress it and call upon our various strategies for coping with the darker realities of life. When we turn on the evening news and we feel relief when the tragedy we see is unfolding in another continent (earthquake) or another country (civil war) or another region (a flood) or another city (serial killer) or another neighborhood (drive-by shooting) we may feel Schadenfreude, the embarrassing (ashamed) reaction of relief when something bad happens to someone else instead of us. This nightmare is the result of an unconscious humanity.
Continuing to grasp the experience being truly conscious we turn to the wisdom of the eastern mystics. “Mind assumes three states of consciousness—waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. I am the witness thereof, remaining aloof from all these states, for I am transcendental consciousness. The blissful Self am I, experienced by transcending the senses, the mind, the intellect, and the ego. I am Brahman.” Bhagavata Purana VI. iv.
We know we are making progress with our practice of choosing response over reaction when we have the insight that only that which never changes is real. “This changeless Reality is pure consciousness.” “It is Sat-Chit-Ananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss) in which there is not even the slightest trace of the I thought. This is also called Mouna (Silence) or Atma (Self). That is the only thing that is.” Raman Maharshi.
Simply put, the equanimity or bliss we all seek is found in the awareness of the present moment. That is consciousness.
References and notes are available for this article.
Also find a much more in-depth discussion of Simple Reality
on this blog and in published books by Roy Charles Henry.


Tomatoes are a great pick in both household dishes and home gardens. If you’re growing tomatoes in the front or backyard, you need to be knowledgeable about how to care for these plants and protect them from pests and other destroying agents.
You may also have to take note of what makes tomato plants vulnerable to diseases and what gardening mistakes often cause their lives. Expert or beginner, you may at times commit these mistakes, so better be aware of them and save those juicy tomatoes from destruction.
1. Plant Your Tomatoes Deep Enough
In the first place, you should have planted tomatoes deep enough. In the succeeding planting schedule, try to be extra careful in planting them deeply enough to survive and thrive and avoid tomato wilt.
Bury two-thirds of the seedling length into the soil. Don’t worry about the little leaves if they get covered. Allow the buried stem to develop more roots.
Remember how a deep and well-grown root system is a key to flourishing tomato growth. More roots mean more capacity to soak up water and nutrients. More nutrients mean a healthier and juicer tomato harvest.
2. Protect Your Tomatoes From Too Much Heat
Be watchful if the garden temperature can reach as much as 90°F. If that is the case, set your tomato plants where they can enjoy an afternoon shade. If a transfer is not likely, you may have to make a way to provide some shade to them.
3. Give Them Enough Sun Exposure
While too much heat brings disaster to your tomato garden, this does not mean you are not going to expose them to the sun. In fact, one huge mistake gardeners make in growing tomatoes is not providing them with enough sunlight.
Tomatoes need a minimum of 6 to 7 hours of sunlight exposure. Putting them in areas that are overly shaded can expose them to diseases and pests.
Finding the right spot is the key. If finding an in-ground spot is not possible, you may plant tomatoes in containers. That way, you can quickly transport them in case the conditions become unfavorable again.
4. Let Them Drink As Much Water Regularly
Tomatoes can experience stress with inconsistent watering. You can end up having tomatoes with cracks if, for instance, you’re watering them a lot this week and the next, you entirely forget about them.
In order not to destroy your own tomato plants, water them slowly and deeply. Think about their deeply reaching roots. You can best care for them by soaking your tomato beds once a week. During summer, you may soak it every 4 to 5 days to compensate with moisture loss under the hot sun.
5. Avoid Crowding Your Plants
If you’ve underestimated the size of your tomato plants, you’re crowding them into their plots. Crowded tomatoes and other veggies will compete for nutrients, water, air, and sunlight.
With little space in between your tomato plants, you’re making them more vulnerable to diseases and pests, too. Be sure to make a reasonable estimate of how big and tall your vegetables can grow. Provide an allowance for sufficient air circulation and adequate sunlight exposure.
6. Keep Your Garden From Squirrels
Found your tomatoes chewed on one side? Your garden probably had several visiting squirrels, feasting on your tomatoes. To keep them away, you can cage squirrels out or scare them. To better protect your tomato plants, just follow these tips:
Make a wire cage; use a bird-netting roof.
- Build single cages for individual tomato plants.
- Build larger cages to enclose entire tomato beds.
- Get a cat or invite one to visit the garden. A neighborhood cat that occasionally visits for little meals or treats will do. Cats, by nature, love hunting, as such, they help a lot in keeping squirrels away.
7. Don’t Ignore Holes Or Spots On Your Tomato Leaves
Have you recently checked out all plant parts? Do you see holes or spots on tomato leaves? Never ignore them.
One of the most common signs of pest infection in tomatoes are holes in leaves. Do not ever ignore these tomato leaf holes. Once you’ve noticed holes, you may suspect of tomato fruitworms.
Also known as cotton bollworms and corn earworms, these insects attack tomatoes plus other plants. Colored green to yellow, or reddish to brown, fruitworms attack tomatoes by tunneling.
Fruitworms will leave the interior part of tomatoes with a cavity filled with nasty fluid and droppings. As a result, tomatoes decay and rot too easily.
If you don’t want to destroy your own tomatoes, never ignore the signs. What you can best do is to employ natural means of getting rid of pests. You can release fruitworm predators such as big-eyed bugs, minute pirate bugs and Hyposoter exiguae wasps in your garden. Also, check for other disease or pest infections.
8. Be Sure To Prune Your Plants
You have to remove unnecessary leaves from tomatoes so you can provide better air circulation. With too many leaves, there will be a compromise on fruit growth. Unnecessary leaves eat up the nutrients, robbing them from tomatoes.
9. Work Out And Fertilize Your Soil Well
Soils you don’t work well from the beginning will demand heavily back at you. Work out the soil well right from the start. Enrich it with fertilizers to avoid trouble in growing tomatoes.
Make sure that the soil allows proper drainage and is well-amended. Prepare your own compost for your soil to ensure a top-quality organic amendment. Composting will be your partner in
10. Rotate Your Crops
If you love tomatoes so much that you keep growing them in the same ground, you’re treading on the path of destroying your next harvest. Tomatoes love nutrients so much that they can deplete what your best soil has.
Try, instead, to plant tomatoes into a different spot each year. Rotate veggies, assigning them to new plots each year. That way, you’re keeping pests and diseases away from their anticipated and targeted spots, too.
Alternatively, if you’re planting in containers, redo the soil each year.
Don’t Take Growing Tomatoes For Granted
Growing tomatoes is a fun and exciting activity, especially if you think about your coming harvest, or if you're gardening with kids and family. However, you can’t be careless about taking care of them, unless you wish to see rotting or cracking ones, some tomato wilt, or spots on tomato leaves.
Admittedly, even gardening experts commit a couple of mistakes when growing tomatoes. This doesn’t give anyone an excuse to stay careless, though. At least, now, you already have the idea on how to troubleshoot common tomato-growing mistakes. Just review the list above and if possible, commit them to memory. Now that you know the fundamentals on how to grow tomatoes disease-free, you can avoid destroying your garden tomatoes.
Look forward, then, to a bountiful and juicy harvest!


11 Creative Wiring Diagram, 2, Switch Uk Ideas
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Creative Wiring Diagram, 2, Switch Uk Ideas - Cable d (fig 2) is a three center and earth, this is the ‘3 wire manipulate’ that links the two mild switches collectively.?com on the first transfer connects to com on the second transfer, l1 on the primary switch connects to l1 on the second, and l2 on the primary switch connects to l2 on the second one.
Fig 2 underneath suggests how we acquire this configuration.?similar to any loop-in loop-out radial circuit, the switch cable from the ceiling rose carries two wires, a everlasting stay and a switched stay. That is cable c underneath, one wire connects to l1 and the other to l2 on the pinnacle transfer.
Right here we a have a schematic (fig 1) which makes it smooth to visualize how this circuit works. In this nation the lamp is off, converting the placement of either transfer will switch the live to the lamp turning it on. In case you now change the location of the opposite switch the circuit is broken another time.
The primary motive that is bad is on protection grounds; say we are running at the light upstairs, so we flip off the upstairs lights circuit thinking we're safe.. Incorrect. The live is picked up downstairs and there are still live conductors feeding the switch upstairs and if someone flipped the downstairs transfer on this diagram that live feed could make bigger all of the way to the lamp too (you’re fried baby!!).
There may be a chance that if your home has those vintage wiring colours the transfer drops can be from a loop-in-loop-out radial lights circuit accomplished with junction bins instead of ceiling roses as shown in fig 2. The switch wiring is all the same however the transfer cord (cable c) leads up to a one of a kind set up. Word: if this approach have been utilized in a protracted hallway where each switches have been downstairs and probably the neutral isn't borrowed from any other circuit (don’t presume this) then this protection problem could not exist. But examine on. I’ve covered this technique of 2 manner switching for reference because you may come across it in antique homes but i don’t suggest you operate it. In case you are doing a new installation or replacing a two manner transfer gadget move for the 3 twine control approach.


This dismissive slang expression came into existence in the USA quite suddenly around 1913 with the ostensible meaning “I should worry!”, which means, of course, “Don’t worry!” or “Who cares?”. It had quite a vogue for a decade or two and was the name of a character played by Merwyn Bogue on a 1930s radio show called Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge (they don’t make titles like that any more).
Those of us who sift the detritus of language for fun and profit are intrigued by it. It looks and sounds Yiddish and the phrases nish gefidlt, nicht gefiedelt, and ich gebliebte have all been suggested as sources. The idea of a Jewish connection was reinforced in 1914 when Harry Hershfield began his cartoon strip Abie the Agent in Hearst newspapers, which featured the car salesman Abraham (“Abie”) Kabibble.
Many people at the time certainly thought it was Yiddish, and it’s notable that some Anglicised it to “I should bibble” or “we should bibble”. But it was equally firmly said by contemporaries that no Yiddish connection existed at all. And the slang term bibble is recorded a few years earlier, albeit with the meaning of nonsense talk. It’s a shortened form of bibble-babble, a reduplication of babble, which goes right back to the sixteenth century and turns up in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “Endeavour thy selfe to sleepe, and leave thy vain bibble babble.”
Might ish-ge-bibble — as it was often written in the early days — have been a fake Yiddishism? It could have been based on German ich for I (often said by natives as ish), the ge prefix for the past participles of German verbs, plus bibble.
In his autobiography, Merwyn Bogue said that he took his stage name from a song he used to sing on the radio show, Isch Gabibble (I Should Worry), words by Sam M Lewis, music by George W Meyer, dated 1913. Bogue said he changed the spelling to make it easier to say. This song seems to have been the immediate source for the sudden arrival and popularity of the term. But did George W Meyer invent it or borrow it in his turn? It would be nice to know.


- The content on this page originated on Wikipedia and is yet to be significantly improved. Contributors are invited to replace and add material to make this an original article.
The acetabulum is the concave articular surface of the pelvis, formed by the parts of three bones, the ilium, ischium, and pubis. The head of the femur articulates with the pelvis at the acetabulum, forming the hip joint. In reptiles and in birds, the acetabulum are deep sockets. It has its counterpart in the pectoral girdle, namely, glenoid fossa.


Prostatectomy: Pioneering Research Gives Patients More Treatment Options
Urology has a number of white knights that have led crusades against many debilitating urologic disorders. But perhaps none is more heroic than those innovative surgeons who have led the way in treating prostate cancer. Without the pioneering spirit of a Theodore Billroth or a Hugh Hampton Young, who adapted their prostatectomies for malignancies, men with early tumors could not choose surgery as a treatment. Without the curiosity of a Patrick C. Walsh, who investigated the gland's anatomy and crafted nerve-sparing surgical techniques, they might still face the devastating side effects of previous operations.
In fact, before Walsh debuted his revolutionary nerve-sparing radical prostatectomy in 1982, prostate cancer sufferers faced an unenviable choice: Undergo surgical removal of the gland and surrounding tissue but risk incontinence and impotence, or choose a treatment that spared the complications but didn't necessarily remove the disease completely. For most men, avoiding a radical prostatectomy in favor of radiation therapy was an easy decision, given the risks of such debilitating surgery. Only seven percent of sufferers opted for it. But today, more than a third of those eligible for the procedure undergo it, most surviving with both erectile function and urinary control intact. Yet long before this standard-of-care turned the tables on side effects, other surgeons would lay the groundwork. Vienna's Billroth boldly ventured into unknown territory when attempting the first radical perineal prostatectomy for cancer in 1867, entering through an incision in the perineum, between the rectum and scrotum.
But it was Johns Hopkins' Hugh Hampton Young—the "Father of American Urology"—who gave this approach staying power. Moved by his success with his perineal prostatectomy in treating patients with benign prostatic hyperplasia, Young leapt at the possibility that cancer could be cured if he extracted the entire prostate and its capsule, studied the prostate's anatomy and designed a surgical plan.
Young, the founder of The Journal of Urology® (the official journal of the AUA), performed his first cancer surgery on April 7, 1904, removing the gland and adjacent tissue of an elderly preacher. Young did achieve some cures, though many prostate malignancies of the time were already well-advanced when diagnosed. But his approach continues its long history. Only when Britain's Terence Millin touted his retropubic approach—essentially Young's operation through a lower abdominal incision rather than a perineal one—in 1945 did surgeons have a second choice.
Yet these options, particularly Millin's, were infamous for their side effects, which could be life-threatening when bleeding was profuse. Virtually all men became impotent; 15-25 percent suffered severe incontinence. Not surprising, by the 1950s doctors had turned to radiation therapy—in lieu of surgery—for its fewer complications, even if it didn't cure the disease.
Walsh put Young and Millin's approaches back on the treatment map by applying his nerve-sparing technique. By defining the periprostatic anatomy, he showed surgeons how they could remove the gland without disturbing the adjacent vessels, nerve bundles, and sphincter mechanisms.
Walsh first developed a safer, bloodless operation, netting better prostate views almost immediately. Yet it was his serendipitous collaboration with Dutch urologist, Pieter Donker, that triggered his groundbreaking techniques. At first, Walsh didn't see the relevance to his own research of dissecting stillborn infant cadavers to study bladder nerves, even though Donker was using the smaller anatomies for a cleaner view. But in scrutinizing a fetus on Feb. 13, 1981, Walsh proved the prostate's nerves were outside the gland, and could be preserved during surgery. Walsh performed his first successful nerve-sparing radical prostatectomy on April 26, 1982, removing the prostate of a 52-year-old psychology professor. The patient led a normal, cancer-free life.
Other urologists rapidly adopted Walsh's techniques in lieu of radiation and other treatment modalities. As more patients underwent surgery for prostate cancer, there was more surgical tissue to harvest, enabling pathologists to characterize the extent of the disease and eventually helping surgeons predict the probability of cure.
Open techniques shifted to minimally invasive techniques for prostatectomy. In 1999, urologists from the Montsouris Institute in Paris published their technique for laparoscopic radical prostatectomy, an approach which was previously felt to be too technically difficult to perform well. Shortly thereafter, robotic surgical platforms became available and many found that minimally invasive prostatectomy could be more easily performed using this approach, especially with regards to intracorporeal suturing. The advantages were a shorter period of convalescence and markedly reduced blood loss when compared to the open approach. As such, the robotic assisted radical prostatectomy underwent rapid adoption in the United States and today is the dominant method by which radical prostatectomy is performed.
Today, as surgeons fine-tune their techniques, scientists are using tissue harvested at surgery to move forward on all prostate cancer research fronts, even focusing on the genes that might trigger this disease. Their hope? Someday they'll be able to avoid surgery altogether by stopping the cancer before it can start.
In the meantime, prostate cancer sufferers are beholden to those noble surgeons who led a crusade against this deadly disease.
Rainer Engel, MD
Benjamin Chung, MD


When researchers dream about electronics of the future, they more or less dream of pouring liquids into a beaker, stirring them together and decanting a computer out onto the table. This field of research is known as self-assembling molecular electronics. But, getting chemical substances to self-assemble into electronic components is just as complicated as it sounds. Now, a group of researchers has published their breakthrough within the field. The group consists of first-year nanoscience students from the University of Copenhagen.
Thomas Just Sørensen, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, spearheaded the research project. The groups result has been published in the internationally recognized journal ChemNanoMat in an article entitled, "Template-Guided Ionic Self-Assembled Molecular Materials and Thin Films with Nanoscopic Order". Sørensen believes that the result will spawn new breakthroughs: "This is a clear step forward towards self-assembling electronics. By mixing solutions of the right substances, we automatically built structures that in principle could have been solar cells or transistors. What is more, is that they were built in the same way that nature builds such things as cell membranes," says Sørensen.
Sørensens co-authors are the entire first-year of University of Copenhagen nanoscience students. This impressive feat is the result of a restructuring of the nanoscience programme in 2010, from a programme structured upon research-based instruction, to one that uses teaching-based research. For their first assignment, the students were simply asked to design, conduct and analyse a range of experiments. The new instructional type has shed research results every year since. However, it wasn't until 2013 that a result was ready to be published.
"For us as a university, the big news is obviously that first year students conducted the research. But, we achieved a very significant result in molecular electronics as well," states Thomas Just Sørensen.
Electronics are normally produced in such a way that one "draws" components onto a silicon wafer and then removes all the bits that are not part of the electronic component. This is called "Top-down" production. Molecular electronics enables the production of transistors, resistors, LED screens, solar cells and so on, using chemistry-based methods. In principle, this means that electronics can become smaller, cheaper and more flexible, as well as environmentally sustainable. But whereas one can draw an integrated circuit on silicon, molecular components must self-organise into the correct structures. This is a major obstacle in the development of methods where molecules must join and self-organise in such a way that they can be found again, according to Sørensen.
"It doesn't help to have a pile of transistors, if you don't know which way they are turned. These cannot be combined in a way to make them work, and one won't know which end to connect to electric current."
The secret behind the breakthrough is... Soap. The molecular components that make self-assembling electronics possible are antifungal agents used in various disinfectants, creams and cosmetics. These cleansers kill fungi by disrupting the structures of their cell membranes. This same ability can be used to create order among molecular components. Sørensen and his students experimented by pouring a flood of various soaps, dish-soaps and washing powders together with component-like chemical substances. The mixtures were then poured out onto glass plates in order to investigate whether or not the "components" were organised by the various cleansing agents. And now they have been, says Sørensen.
"Our self-assembling electronics are a bit like putting cake layers, custard and frosting in a blender and having it all pop out of the blender as a perfectly formed layer cake," says Thomas Just Sørensen.
In the long term, these new discoveries open the door to developing powerful and economical solar energy facilities, as well as improved screen technologies. That being said, the molecules used in the nanoscience programme had no electronic functionality. "If they did, we would have been on the cover of Science instead of in a ChemNanoMat article," says Just Sørensen. Regardless, he remains confident.
"We were able to obtain a structure simply by mixing the right substances. Even random substances were able to organise well and layer, so that we now have complete control over where the molecules are, and in which direction they are oriented. The next step is to incorporate functionality within the layers," says Associate Professor Sørensen. He is convinced that the next batch of challenges will make for perfect assignments for the many years of nanoscience students to come, and that like their current peers, these students will also have the opportunity to publish while in their first year of study.


A new experimental vaccine against Staphylococcus aureus has been shown to be well-tolerated, and to boost antibodies, according to a paper in the December, 2010 issue of the journal Clinical and Vaccine Immunology. The vaccine was developed by Merck.
In the study, investigators led by Clayton Harro of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, gave a single vaccination in one of three different doses, or placebo, to four groups of 31 healthy volunteers, each, who ranged in age from 18-55. All three doses stimulated a rise in antibodies, the two higher doses significantly more so than the lowest dose. Antibody levels reached high levels after about 14 days, and they remained at those levels after three months.
“Based on this and other studies, the vaccine is now being tested in people who are at high risk of getting infected by S. aureus to see if the resulting antibodies can protect them from disease,” says Harro. The need for such a vaccine is critical. S. aureus is the leading cause of hospital-acquired infections. “Invasive S. aureus infections (blood stream, deep wound, prosthetic device) have high associated morbidity and mortality,” says Harro—in the US and Europe, 6 million people become infected annually, and 140,000 die. Multidrug-resistant S. aureus is an increasing problem.
Vaccine design has been a big challenge, says Harro. “S. aureus has a complicated structure, a vast array of strains, and an uncanny capacity to evade immune surveillance systems in our bodies.” But these complexities may have been rendered largely moot when the researchers discovered a single protein on the bacterial surface that is common to most S. aureus strains. Modern antigen discovery techniques, not available until recently, enabled the protein’s discovery.
(C. Harro, R. Betts, W. Orenstein, E.-J. Kwak, H.E. Greenberg, M.T. Onorato, J. Hartzel, J. Lipka, M.J. DiNubile, and N. Kartsonis, 2010. Safety and Immunogenicity of a Novel Staphylococcus aureus Vaccine: Results from the First Study of the Vaccine Dose Range in Humans. Clinical and Vaccine Immunology, 17:1868-1874.)