CHICAGO — A study of more than 1,800 patients who underwent heart bypass surgery has failed to show that prayers specially organized for their recovery had any impact, researchers said on Thursday. In fact, the study found some of the patients who knew they were being prayed for did worse than others who were only told they might be prayed for — though those who did the study said they could not explain why. The patients in the study at six U.S. hospitals included 604 who were actually prayed for after being told they might or might not be; another 597 patients who were not prayed for after being told they might or might not be; and a group of 601 who were prayed for and told they would be the subject of such prayer. The praying was done by members of three Christian groups in monasteries and elsewhere — two Catholic and one Protestant — who were given written prayers and the first name and initial of the last name of the prayer subjects. The prayers started on the eve of or day of surgery and lasted for two weeks. Among the first group — […]
CHICAGO — A perfect storm of high energy prices, government subsidies and renewed interest from Wall Street is boosting investment in alternative energy projects, fund managers and other experts said on Monday. ‘This is the best time to think about energy technology whether you’re a large equity fund, trying to get money for a company you’re running or to make returns in the stock market,’ said Philip Deutch, managing partner of NGP Energy Technology Partners, a $150 million private equity investment fund at a conference on renewable energy. Well known investors such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. , the Carlyle Group and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. have all made recent investments in wind and solar power, Deutch told about 75 people attending the conference in Chicago sponsored by Platts, an energy industry publication. And Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla are investing in ethanol. Recent public offerings by SunPower Corp. , a California-based maker of solar panels, and Q-Cells , a German maker of solar cells, have also caught the attention of investors. But alternative energy is not without risk, primarily due to rapid changes in technology and volatile commodity […]
African-Americans are steadily gaining access to and ease with the Internet, signaling a remarkable closing of the ‘digital divide’ that many experts had worried would be a crippling disadvantage in achieving success. Civil rights leaders, educators and national policy makers warned for years that the Internet was bypassing blacks and some Hispanics as whites and Asian-Americans were rapidly increasing their use of it. But the falling price of laptops, more computers in public schools and libraries and the newest generation of cellphones and hand-held devices that connect to the Internet have all contributed to closing the divide, Internet experts say. Another powerful influence in attracting blacks and other minorities to the Internet has been the explosive evolution of the Internet itself, once mostly a tool used by researchers, which has become a cultural crossroad of work, play and social interaction. Studies and mounting anecdotal evidence now suggest that blacks, even some of those at the lower end of the economic scale, are making significant gains. As a result, organizations that serve African-Americans, as well as companies seeking their business, are increasingly turning to the Internet to reach out to them. ‘What digital divide?’ Magic Johnson, […]
Sea levels will rise much faster than previously thought leading to the flooding of many cities unless major steps are taken to curb carbon dioxide emissions this century, scientists warn today. They say that the planet will see a huge retreat of ice sheets once a threshold of warming is crossed. That would produce a catastrophic sea level rise of at least 20ft, drowning the centre of London and displacing millions in Britain alone. Temperatures are rising on track to melt the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets sooner than thought, triggering the 20ft sea rise by 2600 and inundating heavily-populated coastal areas, including much of the Netherlands. Two international teams report today in the journal Science that Arctic summers by 2100 may be as warm or warmer than they were nearly 130,000 years ago, when sea levels eventually rose up to 20ft higher than today. Such a rise had been thought to be at least 1,000 years away. The work is ‘fascinating and scary at the same time’, said Prof Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University. ‘We should take this as a serious warning sign.’ Profs Bette Otto-Bliesner and Jonathan Overpeck report the findings with colleagues […]
The brains of highly intelligent children develop in a different pattern from those with more average abilities, researchers have found after analyzing a series of imaging scans collected over 17 years. The discovery, some experts expect, will help scientists understand intelligence in terms of the genes that foster it and the childhood experiences that can promote it. ‘This is the first time that anyone has shown that the brain grows differently in extremely intelligent children,’ said Paul M. Thompson, a brain-imaging expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. The finding is based on 307 children in Bethesda, Md., an affluent suburb of Washington. Starting in 1989, they were given regular brain scans using magnetic resonance imaging, a project initiated by Dr. Judith Rapoport of the National Institute of Mental Health. This set of scans has been analyzed by Philip Shaw, Dr. Jay Giedd and others at the institute and at McGill University in Montreal. They looked at changes in the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the thin sheet of neurons that clads the outer surface of the brain and is the seat of many higher mental processes. The general pattern of maturation, they report […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
