Having a positive attitude may help cancer patients deal with their disease, but it doesn’t directly affect survival, according to one of the largest and most rigorously designed investigations ever to examine the issue. The study included more than 1,000 people treated for head and neck cancer; the emotional state of patients was found to have no influence on survival. The findings add to the growing evidence showing no scientific basis for the popular notion that an upbeat attitude is critical for ‘beating’ cancer, says University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine behavioral scientist James C. Coyne, PhD, who led the study team. ‘I wish it were true that cancer survival was influenced by the patient’s emotional state,’ he tells WebMD. ‘But given that it is not, I think we should stop blaming the patient.’ ‘The Tyranny of Positive Thinking’ Jimmie Holland, MD, agrees. The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center psychiatrist is a longtime critic of the ‘mind over cancer’ proponents who tell patients they must stay positive to survive their disease. In her book The Human Side of Cancer, Living with Hope, Coping with Uncertainty, Holland coined the term ‘the tyranny of positive thinking’ to describe […]
CHINO HILLS, California — Forget wine-California’s biggest crop is bright green and funny-smelling Suburbs don’t come much tidier than Chino Hills, 30 miles (50 km) east of downtown Los Angeles. Last year, the neighbourhood of coffee-coloured stucco houses and three-car garages boasted an average household income twice that of the nation as a whole. In Vista del Sol, one of its quiet enclaves, every house but one has a neatly-trimmed green lawn. And, until recently, the exception was verdant inside. When the police went in, they found more than 800 marijuana plants-a small part of what is turning out to be an enormous harvest. Greg Garland, a local narcotics cop, used to discover about a dozen houses a year that had been turned into marijuana factories. So far this year he has raided more than 40. The production boom is not confined to the suburbs. Since April the state’s annual ‘Campaign against Marijuana Planting’ has pulled 2.9m plants worth some $10 billion from back gardens, timber forests and state lands (see chart). Marijuana is now by far California’s most valuable agricultural crop. Assuming, very optimistically, that the cops are finding every other plant, it is worth even more […]
A dramatic decline in the ability of the Earth to soak up man-made emissions of carbon dioxide, and a corresponding acceleration in the rate of increase of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, have been detected for the first time by scientists. The discovery that more carbon dioxide from human activities is lingering in the air rather being absorbed by the world’s forests and oceans has alarmed scientists who believe that it signals a potentially dangerous turn of events for the global climate. They fear that a much-anticipated ‘feedback’ in the global climate – when increases in carbon dioxide in the air trigger further increases in atmospheric concentrations of the gas – has already begun to occur decades before many predicted. ‘We always said that these feedbacks would happen in the future, but what this study shows is that these feedbacks are happening right now,’ said Josep Canadell, executive director of the Global Climate Project in Canberra, and the lead author of the study. About half of the carbon dioxide emissions resulting from human activities are absorbed by natural ‘sinks’ on land and the oceans but the new study shows that the efficiency of these sinks has […]
LAS VEGAS — This city, famous for being America’s playground, has also become its security lab. Like nowhere else in the United States, Las Vegas has embraced the twin trends of data mining and high-tech surveillance, with arguably more cameras per square foot than any airport or sports arena in the country. Even the city’s cabs and monorail have cameras. As the U.S. government ramps up its efforts to forestall terrorist attacks, some privacy advocates view the city as a harbinger of things to come. In secret rooms in casinos across Las Vegas, surveillance specialists are busy analyzing information about players and employees. Relying on thousands of cameras in nearly every cranny of the casinos, they evaluate suspicious behavior. They ping names against databases that share information with other casinos, sometimes using facial-recognition software to validate a match. And in the marketing suites, casino staffers track players’ every wager, every win or loss, the better to target high-rollers for special treatment and low- and middle-rollers for promotions. ‘You could almost look at Vegas as the incubator of a whole host of surveillance technologies,’ said James X. Dempsey, policy director for the Center for Democracy and Technology. Those technologies, […]
SAN GABRIEL, Chile — At 4 p.m. sharp on a chilly October afternoon, more than a dozen women walked onto the main road of this tiny Andean town and launched a protest that backed up traffic for blocks. The women wanted their local government to build more sewer lines, and they’d taken it upon themselves to force the issue. Many of them were single mothers, separated or divorced from their husbands. Those who were still married were living alone while their spouses worked hundreds of miles away in northern Chile. ‘There are no men left in this town,’ said Julia Severino, 24, who manned the blockade with her young son. ‘So we women, we’re taking matters into our hands.’ The women of San Gabriel have plenty of company in Latin America. Across the region, a major social shift is under way as traditional, two-parent households led by men give way to growing numbers of families run by women, many of them single mothers. More women are completing their educations, earning their own incomes and reducing their dependence on male breadwinners. They’re also having fewer children. The change has overturned age-old traditions […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
