Stephan: Here is some important new research on heart health. And it is quite easy to implement it.
There are lots of ways physicians might treat a patient after a heart attack — certain resuscitation methods, aspirin, clot-busters and more. Now University of Colorado medical school researchers have found a new candidate: Intense light.
‘The study suggests that strong light, or even just daylight, might ease the risk of having a heart attack or suffering damage from one,’ says Tobias Eckle, MD, PhD, an associate professor of anesthesiology, cardiology, and cell and developmental biology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. ‘For patients, this could mean that daylight exposure inside of the hospital could reduce the damage that is caused by a heart attack.’
What’s the connection between light and a myocardial infarction, known commonly as a heart attack?
The answer lies, perhaps surprisingly, in the circadian rhythm, the body’s clock that is linked to light and dark. The circadian clock is regulated by proteins in the brain. But the proteins are in other organs as well, including the heart.
Eckle and Holger Eltzschig, MD, a CU professor of anesthesiology, found that one of those proteins, called Period 2, plays a crucial role in fending off damage from a heart attack. With an international team of expert scientists, including collaborators from […]
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DINO GRANDONI, - The Atlantic
Stephan: Here, yet again, we see national wellness sacrificed to profit for the few. The air you breathe, so that they can be rich, is actually making you and your family unwell. Think about what that says about our national priorities. Instead of pouring trillions of dollars into war, destruction, and killing, we should have been pouring that money into creating transportation and heating systems that do not pollute. That we did not do so has left us all at risk.
Thanks to Brando Crespi.
Today, the American Lung Association released its State of the Air 2012 report, on the quality of the air in the U.S., and as these things tend to go, the good news is always tempered with some bad. Let’s go ahead and get the bad out of the way.
For the time period from 2008 to 2010, 41 percent of Americans — that’s a full 127 million — lived in counties with ‘unhealthful levels of either ozone or particle pollution’ — the first being an invisible gas responsible for 3,700 deaths in the U.S. annually, according to one study; the second being cough-inducing soot hanging in the air that casts a haze over some cities. What does ‘unhealthy’ mean in this context? As the association’s Janice Nolen put it to the Huffington Post, ‘we are not yet at the point where we’re providing air that doesn’t send people to the emergency room,’ with those most at risk being the usual suspects: the young, the elderly, the poor (who tend to live in polluted areas), and those with lung or heart disease.
Of course, well-intentioned people can set different standards for what constitutes air pollution, so what pertinent in these reports is how […]
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Joseph Trento, - National Security News Service
Stephan:
The United States deliberately allowed Japan access to the United States’ most secret nuclear weapons facilities while it transferred tens of billions of dollars worth of American tax paid research that has allowed Japan to amass 70 tons of weapons grade plutonium since the 1980s, a National Security News Service investigation reveals. These activities repeatedly violated U.S. laws regarding controls of sensitive nuclear materials that could be diverted to weapons programs in Japan. The NSNS investigation found that the United States has known about a secret nuclear weapons program in Japan since the 1960s, according to CIA reports.
President Reagan and Vice President Bush
The diversion of U.S. classified technology began during the Reagan administration after it allowed a $10 billion reactor sale to China. Japan protested that sensitive technology was being sold to a potential nuclear adversary. The Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations permitted sensitive technology and nuclear materials to be transferred to Japan despite laws and treaties preventing such transfers. Highly sensitive technology on plutonium separation from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site and Hanford nuclear weapons complex, as well as tens of billions of dollars worth of breeder reactor research was turned over to Japan with […]
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ANDREW JONES, - The Raw Story
Stephan: It will be interesting to see how this plays out. If everyone in the Democratic Party told Obama that he either ends the brutal nonsense of the attacks on medical marijuana or they will do nothing to support him I think we would see a change.
The San Francisco Democratic Party issued a resolution this week calling on President Barack Obama and his administration to end their crackdown on medical marijuana facilities.
The resolution, signed by 21 members of the party’s Central Committee (DCCC), calls on Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag to ‘cease all Federal actions in San Francisco immediately, respect State and local laws, and stop the closure of City-permitted medical cannabis facilities.
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GAIL COLLINS, - The New York Times
Stephan: This report reveals yet another path of greed masquerading as a trend for better education. The more I read, the more I become convinced that until national wellness is our first priority we have no long term hope as a healthy culture. We are in the throes of a kind of addiction madness, to which everything must be sacrificed.
Let’s talk about talking pineapples.
Actually (spoiler alert!) I’m going to use the pineapple as a sneaky way to introduce the topic of privatization of public education. I was driven to this. Do you know how difficult it is to get anybody to read about ‘privatization of education?
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