Thursday, October 23rd, 2014
Katie Valentine, - Think Progress
Stephan: This story presents yet another facet of The Great Schism Trend. There are now three states with state splitting movements. This, I think, results from the fact that Theocratic Rightists don't govern based on facts, and those who have to deal in the real world are desperate to start preparing for what they see coming.
Vehicles negotiate heavily flooded streets as rain falls, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014, in Miami Beach, Fla. Certain neighborhoods regularly experience flooding during heavy rains and extreme high tides.
Credit: AP Photo/Lynne Sladky
One small city in South Florida is willing to secede from the state if it means the threat of sea level rise will finally be taken seriously.
The city commission of South Miami, FL — a city that sits just west of the University of Miami in Coral Gables — passed a
resolution this week that calls for Florida to be split into a North Florida and a South Florida, a creation of an additional state that would allow South Florida to take climate change preparation and adaptation into its own hands.
“It’s very apparent that the attitude of the northern part of the state is that they would just love to […]
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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2014
Cahal Milmo, - The Times of India (India)
Stephan: Here is some wonderful and exciting medical news. For the millions of people with spinal cord injuries that have left them bed or wheel chair bound there may now be hope. American corporate media has paid little or no attention to this development, but I ask readers to pass it on to those to whom it may offer hope. It will take some years to fully implement this new medical development, but the same was true of heart transplants.
Credit: thejrexperiment.com
Millions of paralysis sufferers are today offered the possibility of a cure for the first time after a new technique pioneered by British doctors allowed a man with a severed spinal cord to recover the ability to walk.
A revolutionary implant of regenerative cells has knitted back together the spinal cord of a wheelchair-bound firefighter paralysed from the chest down in a knife attack, restoring sensation and muscle control to his legs.
The astonishing breakthrough by an Anglo-Polish medical team is the first ever instance where a complete spinal paralysis has been reversed and represents the potential conquering of one of the greatest challenges in medical science. If validated, it offers hope of a life-changing therapy to the 2.5m people paralysed by spinal injury in Britain and across the world.
The technique, developed by researchers at University College London and put into practice by surgeons in the Polish city of Wroclaw, uses specialist human cells which repair damage to nasal nerves to enable spinal nerve fibres to re-grow and bridge a severed cord.
In the first procedure of its kind anywhere in the world, […]
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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2014
Christina Sarich, - Nation of Change
Stephan: The failure of the industrial chemical agriculture and husbandry model is becoming increasingly evident. But just as alternatives to carbon energy are gaining momentum, so I hope an agriculture and husbandry alternative, such as that described in this report, takes hold and similarly replaces the chemicals and poisons.
Amish farmers are studying plant immunology in order to grow healthy organic produce free of harmful chemicals.
Amish farmers avoided the draft during WWII, even choosing to face jail time over going to war because they didn’t believe in combat, and now they are taking up a different fight altogether – peacefully – by studying plant immunology in order to grow healthy organic produce without pesticides, herbicides, and other harmful chemicals that biotech companies are lavishing on crops like cheap perfume on an uncouth lady.
Samuel Zook, an Amish farmer recently explained to a reporter:
“If you really stop and think about it, though, when we go out spraying our crops with pesticides, that’s really what we’re doing. It’s chemical warfare, bottom line.”
Zook should know what its like to try to grow without pesticides and still get rid of pests that would ravish his crops. He owns a 66-acre farm that was once riddled with […]
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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2014
Meghan O'Rourke, - The Atlantic
Stephan:
One aspect of the American Illness Profit System that doesn't get much attention is its dreadful effects on the lives and careers of physicians. I first really focused on this trend in an essay I wrote in 2010, Where Can I Find a Family Doctor? An Unintended Consequence of Health Reform. Since then matters have only become worse as this essay spells out. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has helped, but it is still a profit based system where wellness plays only a secondary role. Until we make wellness our first priority we are never going to truly heal Americans or America.
Credit: hellostockphoto.com
For someone in her 30s, I’ve spent a lot of time in doctors’ offices and hospitals, shivering on exam tables in my open-to-the-front gown, recording my medical history on multiple forms, having enough blood drawn in little glass tubes to satisfy a thirsty vampire. In my early 20s, I contracted a disease that doctors were unable to identify for years—in fact, for about a decade they thought nothing was wrong with me—but that nonetheless led to multiple complications, requiring a succession of surgeries, emergency-room visits, and ultimately (when tests finally showed something was wrong) trips to specialists for MRIs and lots more testing. During the time I was ill and undiagnosed, I was also in and out of the hospital with my mother, who was being treated for metastatic cancer and was admitted twice in her final weeks.
As a patient and the daughter of a patient, I was amazed by how precise surgery had become and how fast healing could be. I was struck, too, by how kind many of the […]
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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2014
, - Medical University of Vienna
Stephan: Here is some interesting new archaeological research on gladiators which my vegetarian readers particularly may find of interest.
Source: Sandra Lösch, Negahnaz Moghaddam, Karl Grossschmidt, Daniele U. Risser, Fabian Kanz.
Stable Isotope and Trace Element Studies on Gladiators and Contemporary Romans from Ephesus (Turkey, 2nd and 3rd Ct. AD) - Implications for Differences in Diet.
PLoS ONE, October 15, 2014 DOI:
10.1371/journal.pone.0110489 
Anthropology unlocks clues about Roman gladiators’ eating habits.
Credit: OEAI, Pietsch
Roman gladiators ate a mostly vegetarian diet and drank ashes after training as a tonic. These are the findings of anthropological investigations carried out on bones of warriors found during excavations in the ancient city of Ephesos.
Historic sources report that gladiators had their own diet. This comprised beans and grains. Contemporary reports referred to them as “hordearii” (“barley eaters”).
In a study by the Department of Forensic Medicine at the MedUni Vienna in cooperation with the Department of Anthropology at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Bern, bones were examined from a gladiator cemetery uncovered in 1993 which dates back to the 2nd or 3rd century BC in the then Roman city of Ephesos (now in modern-day Turkey). At the time, Ephesos was the capital of the Roman province of Asia and had over 200,000 inhabitants.
Using spectroscopy, stable isotope ratios (carbon, nitrogen and sulphur) were investigated in the […]
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