New research suggests that qualities the world desperately needs more of — love, kindness and compassion — are indeed teachable. Imaging technology shows that people who practice meditation that focuses on kindness and compassion actually undergo changes in areas of the brain that make them more in tune to what others are feeling. ‘Potentially one can train oneself to behave in a way which is more benevolent and altruistic,’ said study co-author Antoine Lutz, an associate scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. How far this idea can be extrapolated remains in question, though. ‘I think there’s no question that people can benefit from these practices,’ said Dr. Louis Teichholz, medical director of complementary medicine and chief of cardiology at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. ‘I think the question is how easy is it to get trained enough so that it will make a clinical difference, and I don’t think this study answers that.’ The findings were published in the March 26 issue of the Public Library of Science One. Recent brain-imaging studies have suggested that the insula and the anterior cingulate cortices regions are involved in the empathic response to other people’s […]
BANGKOK — Top climate brokers from more than 160 nations launched a new round of talks in Bangkok on Monday aimed at setting out a plan for the most ambitious treaty yet for battling global warming. Opening the five-day meeting with a video message, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged countries to work together to find a solution to climate change. ‘The state of our planet requires you to be ambitious in what you aim for and in how hard you work to reach agreement,’ he said. Meeting for the first time since marathon negotiations in Bali, Indonesia late last year, delegates at the UN-led talks will thrash out a plan toward a new global pact on slashing greenhouse gas emissions and battling climate change. The deadline for reaching a new accord is at the end of 2009. Individual countries would then need to ratify it before their current commitments under the existing Kyoto Protocol to cut emissions expire in 2012. Although rich and poor nations now generally agree that the world must take action to halt climate change, they are divided on how to go about it. The United States, which never ratified […]
The unmanned European space ship ‘Jules Verne’ (also known as the Automated Transfer Vehicle – ATV) has performed its first tasks successfully, navigating to within 3.5km of the International Space Station (ISS). The craft, which is carrying some five tonnes of food for the crew at the ISS, used relative GPS measurements to determine its position compared to the position of the space station, then successfully performed an ‘escape’ manoeuvre on the instructions of ground staff, situated in Toulouse, France. The craft must carry out two rigorous navigation rehearsal days before being allowed to attempt the delicate docking with the space station. European Space Agency officials expressed their delight at the performance of the Jules Verne. ‘Having tested very successfully on Saturday the first part of the rendezvous, in particular using the relative GPS between that on Jules Verne and on the Russian Service Module of the ISS, we now have the go-ahead to the test the second part of the rendezvous which uses the optical sensors.’ said John Ellwood, ESA’s ATV project manager. ‘This will be very interesting, but we have a lot of confidence based on the great performance of Jules Verne during […]
VATICAN CITY — Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said on Sunday. Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican’s newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world’s population and Catholics 17.4 percent. ‘For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us,’ Formenti told Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano in an interview, saying the data referred to 2006. He said that if all Christian groups were considered, including Orthodox churches, Anglicans and Protestants, then Christians made up 33 percent of the world’s population — or about 2 billion people. The Vatican recently put the number of Catholics in the world at 1.13 billion people. It did not provide a figure for Muslims, generally estimated at around 1.3 billion. Formenti said that while the number of Catholics as a proportion of the world’s population was fairly stable, the percentage of Muslims was growing because of higher birth rates. He said the data on Muslim populations had been compiled by individual countries and then released by the United Nations, adding the Vatican could […]
WASHINGTON — In the nearly four months since Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson challenged mortgage lenders to modify distressed home loans voluntarily to ease record numbers of foreclosures, it remains difficult to gauge the program’s success. McClatchy followed several homeowners as they worked with - and sometimes battled - lenders and loan collectors during the mortgage modification process, called Hope Now. These homeowners got their loan problems fixed, either temporarily or permanently, but the process was arduous and varied. Some got stays from foreclosure, while others merely saw the threat pushed into the future. For many, the total values of their loans didn’t drop and remained larger than the current values of their homes. ‘You have to fight for your house. If you are in my situation, you have to be persistent and do everything you can imagine,’ said Chris Jennings, a homeowner in Shasta Lake, Calif., a sleepy town not far from the Oregon border. An antiques dealer without a fixed income, Jennings had refinanced his home two years ago with an adjustable-rate loan that was about to tick up on Feb. 15, adding $440 to his monthly payment. He’d assumed, like many other Americans, that […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
