At the Fairfax Community Church in Virginia, the faithful regularly pray for ailing strangers. Same goes at the Adas Israel synagogue in Washington and the Islamic Center of Maryland in Gaithersburg. In churches, mosques, ashrams, ‘healing rooms,’ prayer groups and homes nationwide, millions of Americans offer prayers daily to heal themselves, family, friends, co-workers and even people found through the Internet. Fueled by the upsurge in religious expression in the United States, prayer is the most common complement to mainstream medicine, far outpacing acupuncture, herbs, vitamins and other alternative remedies. ‘Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism — every religion believes in prayer for healing,’ said Paul Parker, a professor of theology and religion at Elmhurst College outside Chicago. ‘Some call it prayer, some call it cleansing the mind. The words or posture may vary. But in times of illness, all religions look towards their source of authority.’ The outpouring of spiritual healing has inspired a small group of researchers to attempt to use the tools of modern science to test the power of prayer to cure others. The results have been mixed and highly controversial. Skeptics say the work is a deeply flawed and misguided waste of money that […]
WASHINGTON, DC — When Austin Energy, the publicly owned utility in Austin, Texas, launched its GreenChoice program in 2000, customers opting for green electricity paid a premium. During the fall of 2005, climbing natural gas prices pulled conventional electricity costs above those of wind-generated electricity, the source of most green power. This crossing of the cost lines in Austin and several other communities is a milestone in the U.S. shift to a renewable energy economy. Austin Energy buys wind-generated electricity under 10-year, fixed-price contracts and passes this stable price on to its GreenChoice subscribers. This fixed-price energy product is quite attractive to Austin’s 388 corporate GreenChoice customers, including Advanced Micro Devices, Dell, IBM, Samsung, and 3M. Advanced Micro Devices expects to save $4 million over the next decade through this arrangement. School districts are also signing up. Round Rock School District, for example, projects 10-year savings to local taxpayers at $2 million. Facing a Texas-style stampede of consumers wanting to sign up for the current remaining supply of green electricity, Austin Energy has resorted to a GreenChoice raffle that will be held on March 23. All its customers – both residential and business – were invited to participate […]
JOAQUIN AMARO, Mexico – Decades ago, before massive waves of young men fled north, Pedro Avila Salamanca helped his father harvest corn and fatten pigs. He learned to write his name in a one-room schoolhouse. Sometimes he rode to town on a donkey. It’s all a distant memory now. Everywhere abandoned houses are crumbling. The towns are shrinking. And Avila, 89, who wears donated clothes and lives on the meager checks his daughters send from the United States, can’t remember the last time he ate meat. ‘What would I buy it with?’ he asked. Avila is a part of the immigration debate that neither Mexican political leaders nor cheap-labor advocates in the United States like to talk about: Heavy migration has all but emptied much of the Mexican countryside. Money sent back to Mexico from those working in the United States reached a record high last year, $20 billion, making remittances from migrants Mexico’s second largest source of income, surpassed only by oil exports. But the export of human labor has been devastating here. It’s left the land dotted with near-ghost towns inhabited by the very old and the very young, their lives dependent on whatever […]
Smog is not only bad for the lungs, it is bad for sperm too. A survey of men in Los Angeles has shown that their sperm counts fell as ozone levels in the air increased. Rebecca Sokol and colleagues at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles looked at sperm counts of 48 men who donated to an LA sperm bank at least 10 times in a two-year period. Using air pollution measurements from the zip code where each man lived, the team estimated the amount of various air pollutants that the men were exposed to in the days leading up to each donation. Ozone, formed when sunlight triggers reactions between nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons in smoggy air, was the only pollutant that appeared to be linked to decreased sperm production. It had a damaging effect throughout the 90 day spermatogenesis process. Carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter seemed to have no effect (Environmental Health Perspectives, vol 114, p 360). Ozone cannot reach the testicles directly. Sokol suggests it may cause an inflammatory response or produce toxic substances in the blood that damage sperm. She stresses that the changes she saw […]
WASHINGTON — Miami would be a memory, Bangkok a soggy shadow of its former self and the Maldive Islands would vanish if melting polar ice keeps fueling a faster-than-expected rise in sea levels, scientists reported on Thursday. In an issue of the journal Science focusing on global warming, climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona reported that if global trends continue, Earth could ultimately see sea levels 20 feet higher than they are now. By the end of this century, Earth would be at least 4 degrees F (2.3 degrees C) warmer than now, or about as hot as it was nearly 130,000 years ago. Back then, significant portions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melted, pushing the global sea levels to about 20 feet higher than current levels. A similarly dramatic, and in some cases catastrophic, rise in ocean levels could happen by the year 2500, Overpeck said in a telephone interview, but he noted it could come sooner. ‘We know when the sea level was that high in the past, and we know how much warming is necessary to get that amount of sea level rise from both Greenland and […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
