Twenty-five years ago, when our small group of Boston therapists began meeting to discuss how we might apply ancient Buddhist meditation practices in our work, we didn’t often mention it to our colleagues. Most of us had trained or were working in Harvard Medical School facilities, and the atmosphere there was heavily psychoanalytic. None of us wanted our supervisors or clinical teammates to think of us as having unresolved infantile longings to return to a state of oceanic oneness-Sigmund Freud’s view of the meditation enterprise.

At that time, Buddhist meditation was becoming more popular in America, and intensive meditative retreat centers were multiplying. The new centers often were staffed by Western teachers, many of whom had first encountered meditation in the Peace Corps and later trained in monastic settings in the East. Some of our group had studied in Asia; others had been trained by these newly minted Western teachers. Regardless of our backgrounds, what we shared was that we’d all experienced how radically meditation practices could transform the mind.

Therapists of the day typically viewed meditation as either a fading hippie pursuit or a useful means of relaxation, but of little additional value. Meditation teachers had their own biases toward psychotherapy, […]

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Countries restricting abortions, particularly in Africa and Latin America, have higher rates of unsafe abortion than those that allow the procedure, according to a study published today in The Lancet journal.

The rate of unsafe abortion in Africa was 28 per 1,000 women of childbearing age and 31 per 1,000 in Latin America, regions where abortion is highly restricted in almost all countries, according to the study led by Gilda Sedgh at the Guttmacher Institute in New York, using the most recent data gathered in 2008. That compares with less than 0.5 per 1,000 in western Europe and North America.

The World Health Organization defines unsafe abortion as a procedure for terminating a pregnancy that is performed by an individual lacking the necessary skills or in an environment that doesn’t conform to minimal standards. Legally restricting abortions leads to unsafe procedures as women have more difficulty locating practitioners and the ones they do find are less likely to be adequately trained, Sedgh said.

‘The data continue to confirm what we have known for decades: that women who wish to terminate unwanted pregnancies will seek abortion at any cost, even when it is illegal or involves risks to their own lives,

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LAS VEGAS — Today, beekeepers from across the country gathered at a national conference, with environmental organizations at their side, to draw attention to the growing plight facing their industry -the decline of honey bees – a problem that has far reaching implications for the U.S. economy.

‘Bees and other pollinators are the underpinnings of a successful agricultural economy,’ said Brett Adee, Co-Chair of the National Honey Bee Advisory Board and owner of Adee Honey Farms. ‘Without healthy, successful pollinators billions of dollars are at stake.’

Many family-owned beekeeping operations are migratory, with beekeepers traveling the country from state-to-state, during different months of the year to provide pollination services and harvest honey and wax. Bees in particular are responsible for pollinating many high-value crops, including pumpkins, cherries, cranberries, almonds, apples, watermelons, and blueberries. So any decline in bee populations, health and productivity can have especially large impacts on the agricultural economy.

Honey bees are the most economically important pollinators in the world, according to a recent United Nations report on the global decline of pollinator populations.

On Tuesday, commercial beekeepers shared first-hand accounts of the value of beekeeping, and of the dramatic impact of bee declines. Beekeepers estimate that one single bee kill from […]

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It was called the ‘First All-American Tush Tally,

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A new study suggests that people living along the coast of northern Peru were eating popcorn 1,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Researchers say corncobs found at an ancient site in Peru suggest that the inhabitants used them for making flour and popcorn.

Scientists from Washington’s Natural History Museum say the oldest corncobs they found dated from 4700BC.

They are the earliest ever discovered in South America.

Ancient food

The curator of New World archaeology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, Dolores Piperno, says maize was first domesticated in Mexico nearly 9,000 years ago from a wild grass.

Ms Piperno says that her team’s research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that only a few thousand years later maize arrived in South America, where it evolved into different varieties now common in the Andean regions.

Her team discovered the maize in the archaeological sites of Paredones and Huaca Prieta.

‘This evidence further indicated that in many areas corn arrived before pots did, and that early experimentation with corn as a food was not dependent on the presence of pottery,’ Ms Piperno explained.

She says that at the time, though, maize was not yet an important part of their diet.

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