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What is a kidney biopsy?
The word biopsy comes from the Greek words bios (life) and opsis (vision) and it involves the examination of tissues removed from a living organism. A kidney (or renal) biopsy is where a small piece of tissue is taken from the kidney to be examined under a microscope.
Why is kidney biopsy performed?
It is performed when there are symptoms and signs of kidney disease, but it is impossible to make a precise diagnosis with the help of blood tests, X-rays or other investigations.
The usual reasons for doing a renal biopsy are
- large amounts of blood and protein in the urine, with impaired kidney function,
- when it is uncertain whether a mass (tumour) in the kidney is cancer or not, and
- to determine if there is rejection of the kidney after renal transplantation.
How is a kidney biopsy performed?
There are four techniques for renal biopsy:
- percutaneous needle
- open surgical
- laparoscopic, and
- transjugular biopsy.
The word percutaneous means “through the skin”. Percutaneous needle biopsy is usually performed with the patient awake, while the skin over the kidney is injected with a painkiller (local anesthesia, usually lignocaine). The patient normally lies on his stomach, but in the case of a transplanted kidney he lies on his back. The kidney is visualized with ultrasound (sonar) or X-ray imaging (computerized tomography – CT) and a biopsy needle 1-2 mm in diameter is passed through the skin into the kidney. The needle has a hollow section inside, and triggering the needle takes a core of tissue 1-2 mm in diameter and 8-10 mm in length.
Open renal biopsy is performed with the patient asleep (under general anaesthesia) and lying on the side opposite to the kidney that is biopsied. A cut about 10-15 cm long is made in the flank, and under direct vision a small sliver of tissue about 10 by 5 mm is cut out of the kidney. Bleeding is stopped by placing stitches into the kidney, sometimes also using a special type of gauze or glue that promotes blood clotting.
Laparoscopy is done under general anaesthesia. Two small cuts 5-10 mm in diameter are made in the flank. Through one of these cuts a tubular telescope with a camera is inserted to directly visualize the kidney, and through the other an instrument (biopsy forceps) is passed. Small pieces of kidney tissue are taken with the forceps, and bleeding is stopped by burning with a laser.
Transjugular biopsy is where a thin catheter is inserted into the jugular vein in the neck. The catheter is passed down into the renal vein and a biopsy needle is passed through the catheter to obtain tissue cores from the inside of the kidney.
A specially trained doctor (a pathologist) examines the kidney tissues under a microscope and makes a diagnosis based on the appearance of the cells (histology).
How should I prepare?
The doctor should explain the whole procedure to you, including the risks and possible problems (complications), and you should be given an informed consent form to sign. You should tell the doctor if you are taking any medicines because some of them may impair the ability of your blood to clot. The doctor will usually do a blood test to determine if you have any blood clotting disorder.
You should not eat or drink anything for about 6 hours before the procedure. If it is done under local anaesthesia, there will be some pain where the local anaesthetic is injected into the skin, but you will usually not feel pain when the biopsy needle is put into the kidney itself. The doctor will ask you to take a deep breath and hold your breath, so that the kidney does not move when the needle is placed into it. This usually takes 10-30 seconds, during which time you should not exhale. The doctor may take several biopsy cores, each time asking you to hold your breath. You will usually be kept in hospital for some time after the procedure to see if there are any complications.
What are the risks?
The main risk is bleeding from the kidney, which has a very rich blood supply. The blood may accumulate around the kidney and not be recognized until a litre or more has been lost, so it is important to have your pulse and blood pressure regularly checked for 24-48 hours after the procedure. The blood may also go down the kidney tube (ureter) to the bladder, so you may see blood in your urine. If the bleeding is severe, blood transfusion may be necessary. If the bleeding continues, it may be necessary to get special X-rays (arteriogram) to see which blood vessel in the kidney is bleeding, so that it can be plugged (embolized) with material injected into the vessel.
Sometimes it is necessary to do an open operation, and in rare cases it may be necessary to remove the kidney to stop the bleeding. Infection may occur as a result of the biopsy, but this is rare. Symptoms that indicate a possible complication after kidney biopsy include bloody urine more than 24-48 hours after the procedure, inability to pass urine, increasing pain at the biopsy site, fever, dizziness or fainting.
What are the limitations of the procedure?
The pieces of tissue may be too small to make a definitive diagnosis under the microscope, or the biopsies may not be representative, with the result that the wrong diagnosis is made. In about 90% of cases, however, the correct diagnosis can be made and the risk of complications is comparatively small (about 5%).
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Whether it’s a dull ache or a sharp stab, back pain is among the most common of all medical problems. In any three-month period, about one-fourth of U.S. adults suffer through at least one day of back pain.
Many people lump all back aches and pains together as a “bad back.” But there are actually many causes for back pain, including muscle spasms, ruptured disks, back sprains, osteoarthritis, infections, and tumors. One possible cause that rarely gets the attention it deserves is ankylosing spondylitis (AS), a form of arthritis that’s associated with long-term inflammation of the joints in the spine.
If you’ve never heard of AS, you’re certainly not alone. Yet it’s more prevalent than you might think. AS is head of a family of diseases—also including psoriatic arthritis and reactive arthritis—that cause inflammation in the spine and joints. As many as 2.4 million U.S. adults have one of these diseases, according to the National Arthritis Data Workgroup. So maybe it’s time you got to know AS better.
Ankylosing Spondylitis 101
AS mainly affects the spine and sacroiliac joints (places where the spine joins the pelvis). Inflammation in these areas can cause back and hip pain and stiffness. Eventually, long-lasting inflammation may lead some bones of the spine, called vertebrae, to fuse together. This makes the spine less flexible and may lead to a stooped-over posture.
At times, AS also affects other joints, such as those of the knees, ankles, and feet. Inflammation in joints where the ribs attach to the spine may stiffen the ribcage. This limits how much the chest can expand, restricting how much air the lungs can hold.
Occasionally, AS affects other organs, too. Some people develop inflammation of the eyes or bowel. Less often, the largest artery in the body, called the aorta, may become inflamed and enlarged. As a result, heart function may be impaired.
How the Disease Progresses
AS is a progressive disease, which means that it tends to get worse as time goes by. Typically, it starts with pain in the low back and hips. Unlike many kinds of back pain, however, the discomfort of AS is most severe after a rest or upon rising in the morning. Exercise often helps it feel better.
Typically, the pain comes on slowly. Once the disease is established, the symptoms may go through good and bad periods. But as the years pass, the inflammation tends to move up the spine. It gradually causes greater pain and more restricted movement.
The symptoms of AS vary from person to person. Here’s a look at how they might progress:
As your lower spine stiffens and fuses: You can’t get close to touching your fingers to the floor when bending over from a standing position.
As pain and stiffness increase: You may have trouble sleeping and be bothered by fatigue.
If your ribs are affected: You may find it difficult to take a deep breath.
If the disease spreads higher up your spine: You may develop a stooped-shoulder posture.
If the disease reaches your upper spine: You may find it hard to extend and turn your neck.
If inflammation affects your hips, knees, and ankles: You may have pain and stiffness there.
If inflammation affects your feet: You may have pain at your heel or the bottom of your foot.
If inflammation affects your bowel: You may develop abdominal cramps and diarrhea, sometimes with blood or mucus in the stool.
If inflammation affects your eyes: You may suddenly develop eye pain, sensitivity to light, and blurred vision. See your doctor immediately for these symptoms. Without prompt treatment, eye inflammation can lead to permanent vision loss.
Why Treatment Is Important
There’s still no cure for AS. But treatment can ease its symptoms and may possibly keep the disease from getting worse. For most people, treatment involves taking medication, doing exercises and stretches, and practicing good posture. For severe joint damage, surgery is sometimes an option.
If you’re bothered by long-term pain and stiffness in your low back and hips, don’t just write it off to having a bum back or not being 20 anymore. See your doctor. If it turns out to be AS, early treatment can make you feel more comfortable now, and it might prevent some serious problems in the future.
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Folic Acid and Birth Defects
For at least three decades researchers have suggested that low folic acid intake during pregnancy is related to birth defects such as spina bifida and anencephaly. Two more recent studies, one in Hungary and another in England, are even more convincing that supplementing a pregnant woman's diet with this B vitamin dramatically decreases her baby's chance of birth defects.
Hungarian researchers worked with almost 5000 pregnant women. Every day half of the women received a multi vitamin and mineral tablet containing 800 micrograms of folic acid. The rest took a tablet with a minimum of nutrients and no folic acid. All the women took their tablets one month before conception and continued through their first trimester. The folic acid group had 40 percent less birth defects than the women given none of this vitamin and none of their babies with neural tube problems. There were six cases of neural tube defects among the newborns whose mothers who didn't take folic acid (13).
When English investigators gave four milligrams of folic acid each day to women who had given birth to a child with a neural tube defect in the past, the results were even more pronounced. Almost three-quarters of these supplemented women delivered children free
from this birth defect (14). As of last September, health officials at the Centers for Disease Control recommended that all women of childbearing age should take folic acid as a preventive measure (15).
- Needleman HL, Gatsonis CA. Low-level lead exposure and the IQ of children. Journal of the American Medical Association 1990;263(5): 673-78.
- Anon. Fatal pediatric poisoning from leaded paint--Wisconsin, 1990. Journal of the American Medical Association 1991;265(16): 2050-51.
- Jaroff L. Controlling a childhood menace. Time 1991, February 25: 68-69.
- Sibbison JB. USA: lead in soil. The Lancet 1992;339: 921-22.
- Anon. Is aluminum a dementing ion? The Lancet 1992;339: 713-14.
- Sherrard DJ. Aluminum--much ado about something. The New England Journal of Medicine 1991;324(8): 558-9.
- Farrar G et al. Defective gallium-transferrin binding in Alzheimer disease and Down syndrome: possible mechanism for accumulation of aluminum in brain. The Lancet 1990;335: 747-50.
- Rosenberg IH, Miller JW. Nutritional factors in physical and cognitive functions of elderly people. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 1992;55: 1237S-43S.
- Jenner FA. Vitamins in schizophrenia. The Lancet 1973, October 6: 787-88.
- Foster HD. The geography of schizophrenia: possible links with selenium and calcium deficiencies, inadequate exposure to sunlight and industrialization. Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine 1988;3(3): 135-40.
- Nielsen FH. Nutritional requirements for boron, silicon, vanadium, nickel, and arsenic: currently knowledge and speculation. Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology 1991;5: 2661-2667.
- McBride J. The making of an essential element? Agricultural Research 1989, April: 12-13.
- Czeizel AE, Dudas I. Prevention of the first occurrence of neural-tube defects by periconceptional vitamin supplementation. The New England Journal of Medicine 1992;327(26): 1832-35.
- MRC Vitamin Study Research Group. Prevention of neural tube defects: results of the Medical Research Council Vitamin Study 1991;338(8760): 131-37.
- Cimons M. US advises folic acid use to reduce birth defects. Los Angeles Times 1992, September 15: A1 & A17.
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Johns Hopkins Medicine
Office of Communications and Public Affairs
Media Contact: Joanna Downer
April 22, 2004
GENOME-WIDE SCREEN REVEALS NEW TRICKS OF OLD GENES
Process Shows How Mounds of Data Can Be Effectively Managed
Johns Hopkins scientists have successfully used new techniques to search the yeast genome for genes that help keep copied chromosomes together, protecting the integrity of the organism's genetic material during cell division.
By combining two genome-wide screens, the researchers were able to narrow down the dozens of genes identified by the first screen to just 17 that made both cut-offs -- a number small enough to be cost- and time-efficient to consider in some detail. Their report appears in the April issue of Molecular Biology of the Cell.
"Data created from new genome-scanning techniques can be overwhelming. Reading all there is to know about 50 genes to figure out what new knowledge may be lurking in the haystack is very difficult," says Forrest Spencer, Ph.D., associate professor in Hopkins' McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine. "But by overlapping information from two screens, we were able to figure out what Mother Nature was trying to tell us that wasn't too complicated for us to understand."
While the researchers had hoped their screens would reveal new genes and their functions, they instead identified genes previously linked to two other aspects of shepherding genetic material during cell division. Fifteen of the highlighted genes were already known to help ensure the accuracy of copied DNA and two help move chromosomes to opposite ends of the dividing cell.
But the researchers' results give these "old" genes new jobs, associating them with cohesion, the little-understood process of keeping a chromosome and its copy together until the cell is ready to split in two. If the "sister" chromosomes aren't kept together, both copies could end up on one side of the dividing cell. Another problem is that the copies could undergo extra rearrangements, risking loss of important genes.
"If there's no cohesion, the cell will die," says Spencer. "However, if the process sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, some cells survive but their genetic material gets scrambled."
It's that sometimes-yes-sometimes-no problem that Spencer and her team are trying to figure out, in part because it's interesting biology, but also because genetic instability plays such a big role in the development of cancer in humans. No one knows exactly at what point errors enter the genetic material and aren't fixed, but the intricacies of chromosomes' manipulation during cell division seem a good place to start.
Postdoctoral fellow Cheryl Warren, Ph.D., started the search by screening 5,916 yeast genes -- all at once -- for ones needed for survival in the absence of a gene called ctf4, already known to be a critical component of cohesion. Twenty-six genes popped out of this screen, a type known as "synthetic lethal" since the yeast survive the loss of either one, but not both, genes.
However, the synthetic lethal effect of some, if not many, of the genes from this screen would be due to problems other than faulty cohesion, the researchers knew. "We had to do something else to get a manageable starting point," says Warren.
So, using a technique she developed to identify whether a gene's loss causes the genetic material to become scrambled, Warren tested those 26 genes to see which of them seemed most likely to contribute to genetic instability through their involvement in cohesion. In these experiments, markers were scattered throughout the yeast's genetic material so she could easily tell if pieces of the genome moved or went missing when a gene was knocked out.
Only 17 of the 26 identified genes caused genetic instability when missing from the yeast genome. Fifteen of those genes are involved in double-checking whether newly formed strands of DNA matched the cell's original genetic material and calling in "repairmen" as needed (a process called the "S-phase checkpoint"). The other two genes are part of the machinery previously known to help move the two sets of chromosomes to opposite sides of the dividing cell.
"By using both screens, we got a number that was small enough to follow-up on, and yet large enough to reveal a trend," says Warren. "This is the first evidence that proteins involved in checking the DNA sequence are also involved in keeping sister chromosomes together, and it's a great starting point for understanding more."
The research was funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Institute for General Medical Sciences, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, all components of the National Institutes of Health.
Authors on the report are Warren, Spencer, Mark Eckley, Marina Lee, Joseph Hanna, Adam Hughes, Brian Peyser and Chunfa Jie of the McKusick-Nathans Institute; and Rafael Irizarry of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
On the Web:
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Anatomy and Function of the Heart's Electrical System
Click Image to Enlarge
The heart's electrical system
The heart is, in the simplest terms, a pump made up of muscle tissue. Like all pumps, the heart requires a source of energy and oxygen in order to function. The heart's pumping action is regulated by an electrical conduction system that coordinates the contraction of the various chambers of the heart.
How does the heart beat?
An electrical stimulus is generated by the sinus node (also called the sinoatrial node, or SA node). This is a small mass of specialized tissue located in the right atrium (right upper chamber) of the heart. The sinus node generates an electrical stimulus regularly (60 to 100 times per minute under normal conditions). The atria are then activated. The electrical stimulus travels down through the conduction pathways (similar to the way electricity flows through power lines from the power plant to your house) and causes the heart's ventricles to contract and pump out blood. The right and left atria (the two upper chambers of the heart) are stimulated first and contract for a short period of time before the right and left ventricles (the two lower chambers of the heart).
The electrical impulse travels from the sinus node to the atrioventricular node (also called AV node). There, impulses are slowed down for a very short period, then continue down the conduction pathway via the bundle of His into the ventricles. The bundle of His divides into right and left pathways to provide electrical stimulation to the right and left ventricles.
Normally at rest, as the electrical impulse moves through the heart, the heart contracts about 60 to 100 times a minute, depending on a person's age.
Each contraction of the ventricles represents one heartbeat. The atria contract a fraction of a second before the ventricles so their blood empties into the ventricles before the ventricles contract.
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The student's eyes drift to the classroom window and the teacher's voice fades from consciousness.
The daydream begins. It's a familiar scene, one we have likely both experienced as students and struggled against in our students as teachers. But daydreaming is not what it might seem. Recent research in both psychology and neuroscience makes clear that daydreaming is an essential part of mental processing, reasoning and, yes, even learning.
1. Daydreaming is the Mind's Natural State
The most common view of the human mind assumes that our normal way of thinking consists of concentrated focus upon immediate tasks at hand. But researchers have found that this is not the case.
Daydreaming is now considered to be the normal state of our minds, with focus appearing as a break from the more common mind wandering. A recent study has found that our mind wanders forty seven percent of the time we are awake with very few activities not equally peppered with natural periods of daydreaming.
Another study has shown that the parts of the brain stimulated during daydreaming consist of the "default network" regions of the brain that are associated with most higher level mental activity. This suggests that we have evolved specifically to be a daydreaming species. It is even more telling that those who suffer injuries to the region of the brain in which daydreaming occurs suffer from a lack of spontaneous speech and thought.
The fact that daydreaming is the natural state of the human brain suggests that those who take most naturally to daydreaming will best exhibit the skills necessary for successfully navigating the human world. Far from representing a lack of discipline, daydreaming is a hallmark of a healthy and active human mind.
2. Critical Thinking and Intelligence
Aside from the "default network", one of the main regions of brain used during daydreaming consists of the "executive network", the region of the brain associated with complex problem solving. Before this was revealed, for example through the 2009 study at the University of British Columbia, it was commonly thought that the "executive network" was only active during focused problem solving.
As this study suggests, a healthy amount of daydreaming is connected to improved critical thinking capabilities, an invaluable characteristic in successful learners.
It has also been shown that daydreaming is dramatically more present in those considered to be of superior intelligence when compared with learners of average intelligence. One study suggests that the improved integration of the default and executive networks developed through their continual exercise through daydreaming significantly contributes to the formation of increased intelligence.
It's a truism that our "dreams", by which we usually mean our goals and desires, provide motivation in life. What is less recognized, however, is the central role played by the process of daydreaming in envisioning and imaginatively experiencing the lives we wish to lead and people we want to become.
Our goals and desires are what they are because we have spent time freely living through our daydreams what it would be like to achieve them. For these reasons, daydreaming in learners is related to higher levels of ambition and a deeper sense of motivation.
Freely imagining "what you would do if..." is far from idle. Having envisioned scenarios and played out possible events gives us an increasing sense that we can handle them.
In this way the imaginative anticipation that often occurs in daydreaming contributes as much to a robust sense of confidence as it does to a healthy motivation. Think about it this way, daydreaming is a training ground for your mind where it plays through and sometimes struggles with scenarios it has not experienced or wants to react differently to in the future.
Though successful training certainly doesn't guarantee success during the real event, it does provide a mental preparedness and a firm sense that no matter what may occur we can deal with it. For this reason some of the most confident learners are also those with the healthiest daydreaming lives.
5. Increased Insight
Did you ever wonder what causes that moment of insight when something suddenly clicks or a solution becomes clear? The answer is a lot of hard work on the part of your brain that goes unnoticed.
Moments of insight, those sudden revelations that seem to come from nowhere, are long prepared for through the brain's ongoing hidden organizing and processing. Daydreaming, as a mental state activating both the default and executive networks of the brain, plays an important role in that organizing and processing. What you may think is just your mind drifting is actually your mind actively forming connections between information, synthesizing what was previously only chaos, and preparing the ground for the moment when things suddenly fit into place.
Once we appreciate this we see that daydreaming is just as productive as spending an hour working on a difficult math problem. Recent work has shown that spending less time on the problem and more time letting our mind wander could contribute to getting the answer faster.
Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara have shown, as discussed in an article in The New Yorker, that spending time daydreaming after first being given a task leads to more insightful responses to the task than focus and concentration do.
In his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the phenomenon of "thin-slicing", the mind's jumping to conclusions based on surprisingly little information.
Despite what we tend to assume, Gladwell demonstrates that jumping to conclusions based on limited information is often statistically the most reliable way to arrive at the right decision. For example, Cook County Hospital changed the way it diagnoses heart attacks to focus on less information.
Here is how Gladwell describes this part of the book on his website: "They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain-like blood pressure and the ECG-while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain."
The key point about thin-slicing is that its effectiveness depends upon two factors. Knowledge, especially when derived from experience, and mental integration that allows for swift access to the knowledge and experience we have gained. If we return to our image of daydreaming as the training ground of the mind, the increased integration it imposes on knowledge and experience we have collected improves our ability to successfully jump to conclusions based on little information.
It makes us more successful thin-slicers and improves our split-second decision making.
7. Improved Problem Solving
What is problem solving? From what we have already said we might suggest it is an effective use of the default and executive networks of the brain resulting in increased intelligence, critical thinking, insight and thin-slicing.
The argument that the integration of default and executive networks results in improved problem solving is offered by the author of Daydreams at Work: Wake Up Your Creative Powers, Amy Fries, in an article at Psychology Today: "...your mind-wandering capacity is like that computer program-it can get to solutions that your conscious mind just can't see."
In general daydreaming makes us better thinkers. Being better thinkers makes us better learners.
The traditional view of daydreaming understands it as a form of escapism.
We are unhappy or uninterested in where we are and so imagine we are somewhere else. It is important, this view assumes, to resist this escapist urge and instead cope with the world as it is. It turns out, however, that daydreaming is itself a central element of our mental coping mechanisms.
As already mentioned, daydreaming provides the brain with the exercise course where it can secretly play out different solutions to problems. More than this, however, those precious daydreaming moments allow us the conscious rest necessary to face difficult tasks or situations with a fresh mind. Yet, during these seeming moments of rest, the brain is still hard at work beneath the surface organizing potential responses without the generally awkward interference of conscious thought.
Researchers such as Eric Klinger have shown that children who weave an imaginative story around their play are likely to be happier at play and to play longer. It is easy to generalize this point to adults as well, the ability to tell ourselves imaginative stories about the world and our own lives through daydreaming makes even the tedious or downright painful parts of our life more enjoyable.
In learning the ability to cope with challenging, frustrating or boring tasks is a key ingredient for success.
9. Mental Elasticity
Coping is a key element of mental elasticity, the ability to shift our thought and behavior smoothly in response to changing situations and information.
Daydreaming, as the practice ground for mental processing, greatly increases the mind's ability to smoothly shift in the face of unanticipated events and situations. So while daydreaming clearly contributes to organizing information and experience we have already learned, making the learned material more useful by improving our ability to apply it, it also enhances our response time in the face of the unexpected.
Recent research has shown that children with a healthy amount of empty play time, i.e. play time not directed through specific games or spent watching television, display a greater amount of creativity.
Those, on the other hand, who tended to turn to entertainments such as television when bored were unable to invent interesting stories. The time spent daydreaming during imaginative play is a practice period for creative invention. The neuroscience of this should be clear when one considers the similarity between problem-solving and creativity in general.
Those parts of the brain used during creative problem solving are also used during daydreaming.
Concentration, while certainly important in both education and life, is not something we can increase simply through hard work, practice or will.
The brain, much like a muscle, can indeed be improved but there is a limit to how far it can be developed. The fact that we are a daydreaming species and that daydreaming is the natural state of the human mind points to the artificiality of the mental states associated with extended concentration.
What is becoming clearer is that concentration is not as simple as one might think. Rather, what appears to be the ability to continually concentrate on one problem or subject is looking more like a complex play involving using daydreaming rest periods, even surprisingly brief breaks, in a way that refreshes our ability to concentrate. Consider daydreaming like taking a power nap.
Even a half-minute spent briefly relaxing control upon the mind can improve a learner's concentration immediately after this break.
12. Increased Short Term Productivity
Even as concentration works best interspersed with brief, and some times longer, moments of daydreaming "rest" during which the mind synthesizes what has been gained, so too does productivity in general go up when it is demanded in smaller bursts and peppered with healthy moments of daydreaming.
This is nowhere demonstrated as clearly as through the highly successful Pomodoro Technique for time management. This technique employs a timer and breaks productive work into twenty-five minutes segments with a short five-minute break between each segment of work. After four such segments of work and breaks you take a longer break of fifteen minutes.
This technique's surprising ability to increase productivity depends upon the mind's limited power of concentration with moments of daydreaming rest needed between periods of increased mental control.
What it suggests is that teachers would do well, not only to appreciate the importance of daydreaming for successful learners, but even to organize lessons so as to actively encourage short breaks for daydreaming.
13. Connection to Class Material
Learning is nearly impossible if students do not feel connected to the material they are learning.
Students have to care about what they learn to be the most successful learners. This connection to the material involves imaginatively playing with the material through which students rearrange and experiment while finding ways to connect it to their wider concerns, life, and fantasies.
For this reason students who actively daydream, especially when they are encouraged to incorporate class material into their daydreams in whatever way they like, are much more successful learners.
14. Increased Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
One of the most important skills for people in general, let alone learners, is what we might call the "moral imagination".
The moral imagination is the ability to think oneself into another person's shoes, to imagine what it would be like to be them. This skill is necessary if one is to expand one's sense of sympathy and empathy, but it is also a key element in problem-solving and reading comprehension. If a student is to understand a text or solve a problem what is required is creatively putting themselves in the place of the characters in the text, or in the sphere of life that most naturally relates to the problem to be solved.
For this reason emotional intelligence, the ability to have a varied and complex emotional life through engagement with and response to the emotions of others, is a central if unexpected element of all mental processing and learning. It is just this ability to imagine our way out of our own situation and into that of another that daydreaming develops and encourages.
For this reason not only are daydreamers more empathetic and emotionally open people, they are also better at comprehending literary and historical texts.
15. Improved Self-Knowledge
Since the time of Socrates it has been thought that coming to know ourselves is both a major goal and the foundation of all truly successful learning. We can think about daydreaming as carrying out a dialogue with ourselves.
In contrast, watching television or playing video games primarily involves an external exploration or dialogue, one that can involve learning but doesn't often involve reflective self-discovery. If we are to be successful learners we need to have a robust sense of our interests, our goals and the talents or skills we wish to have.
This intimately involves the imaginative self-exploration only a healthy daydreaming life can provide.
Clearing out distractions and allowing time for reflective thought is a great way to tap into your creativity. <a href="http://zenhabits.net/creative-habit/">Being alone with your thoughts</a> is oftentimes a prerequisite for the kind of outside-the-box that's necessary for artistic expression.
Although loneliness can be a contributing cause of depression, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1131927?uid=3739936&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101521304683">studies have found </a>that time spent in solitude can actually ward off depression in adolescents. A 1997 study found that although teens didn't describe solitude as a positive experience, many reported increased feelings of well-being afterwards.
When you're away from people, technology, work and the myriad distractions of everyday life, you can finally take time to breathe and just be. Use your alone time as a chance to clear out your cluttered mind and just get back in touch with yourself.
It's tough to stop and take stock when you're constantly on the go and spending time with friends, family or classmates. Taking a little "me" time gives you an opportunity to get away from distractions for long enough to reflect on your relationships and the course of your life so that you can determine what changes, if any, you may want to make.
Once you become more comfortable with the idea of being alone, doing activities like shopping, seeing a movie, or hiking by yourself can actually be enjoyable. You can do whatever<em> you </em>want without having to adhere to anyone's preferences, schedule or expectations. You might discover that spending at least one afternoon or evening per week on your own doing something you love can be totally relaxing and liberating.
Learning to enjoy the time you spend alone can help you to build a better relationship with yourself. Voluntary solitude is a great way to get back in touch with your feelings and remember all the things that make you awesome. If you want to feel more confident and self-sufficient, first tackle your fear of being alone.
Time spent in solitary reflection has been linked to <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/high-octane-women/201201/6-reasons-you-should-spend-more-time-alone">improved concentration</a>, as well as higher levels of academic performance. In their book "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," authors and sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa <a href="http://www.bucknell.edu/x67495.xml">find that students who study alone</a> are more apt to succeed and retain knowledge than those who study in groups.
Follow William Koch on Twitter: www.twitter.com/inform_ed
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Evaluating the Use of Process Mapping and Visual Storyboarding in the Classroom
Stephanie Munson, Assistant Professor, Industrial Design Program | University of Illinois, Chicago
Kevin Reeder, IDSA, Associate Professor, Industrial Design Program | Georgia Institute of Technology
At the 2005 Eastman/IDSA Education Conference, Stephen Wilcox gave a presentation on procedure mapping. The next day, Kevin Reeder, with Stephanie Munson, discussed visual storyboarding. Both procedure mapping and visual storyboarding are communication methods that emphasize viewing and discussing the entire use, storage to storage, of a product. In turn, the design team uses the broad view to pinpoint areas where greater research is needed, a competitive market edge can be achieved, opportunities for innovation can be identified, and empathy for the user becomes critical. As a process communication tool, a procedure or process map/visual storyboard can be a fluid, pin-up device to communicate project concerns to all parties involved. It can example the overlap of industrial design and business marketing issues or industrial design to manufacturing. In all cases, process mapping and visual storyboarding provide a broad, overarching message to the participants in the product development process.
At the 2005 Eastman IDSA Education Conference, Stephen Wilcox, a principal at Design Science, discussed the value of using information graphics to make complex forms of information understandable. As example, Dr. Wilcox discussed the construction of a procedure map and its function as a communication tool within the design team as well as with the client.
Michael Lee Smith, director of process improvement at ETS, on corporate procedures states that “Process mapping is a technique for making work visible.” and “There has probably never been a process map developed where someone has not said, ‘Why are we doing it that way?’.”
Chris Ahoy, associate vice president at Iowa State University describes a process map as “a workflow diagram to bring forth a clear understanding of a process or series of parallel processes.”
Adrian Mallon in an Internet article states storyboards need not take the considerable time that some think that it does, depending on how one goes about it (“Storyboarding Multimedia” 1). And there are significant advantages to be considered. There is a document, which everyone can point to as a common point of reference, enabling the design team (which includes client) to say, ‘Yes, that is what I meant’, or ‘No, we’ve a problem here’. Problems may be spotted from the storyboard that may have proven more costly to correct at a later stage.”
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Professor Peter Hayes (Northwestern U.) specializes in thehistory of Germany in the 20th century, particularly the Nazi period. He did an admirable speaking job, presenting a dark and serious topic while dealing gracefully with the challenges of a late evening audience digesting its dinner and a very noisy, joyful event happening in the room next door. Learn more about Peter Hayes at http://www.history.northwestern.edu/people/hayes.html.
Professor Hayes challenged eight widely-believed "facts" about the Holocaust, pointing out that when the public thinks it knows something, scholarship often has trouble making itself heard. His hope was that the audience at AJL might be more receptive than many others, and allow new ideas to penetrate. Here are the eight misconceptions that, when examined more closely, turn out to be untrue. (From notes scribbled during the keynote address, please forgive any errors.)
1. Anti-semitism played a major role in bringing Hitler to power.
Apparently we've put the cart before the horse. "More Germans became anti-semites because they became Nazis, than became Nazis because they were anti-semites."
2. Killing Jews was Hitler's goal from the beginning.
The original intention seems to have been to remove the Jews from German-held territory, but it soon became apparent that by gaining territory they were gaining Jewish residents. The more practical way to remove them was to kill them, but the Nazis realized this only after they started taking over other countries.
3. TheAllies could have saved many more Jews than they did.
Anti-immigrant sentiment was very strong at the time, and politicians who pushed for bringing in more Jews would have been voted out of office. Also, 3/4 of the six million were killed out of reach of Allied intervention in northeastern Europe, in a short period of time, while the Germans seemed to be winning the war.
4. Jews could have done more to save themselves.
Jews were a tiny percent of the population in all the countries where they lived, and being more assertive wouldn't have had much impact on the larger population's opinions/actions. The Jewish ghetto uprisings that did happen were quickly squashed and didn't really save lives, so more uprisings probably wouldn't have saved more lives.
5. Greater solidarity with or sympathy for Jews in Europe would have saved more Jews.
Individual people saved other individual people, but to really raise the numbers you would have needed institutions or governments working to save Jews. More Jews were saved by the collaborating French government than by individual righteous gentiles, just because governments have more power than individuals. But most of the governments in Europe had been taken over by the Nazis.
6. Killing Jews diverted resources and weakened the German war effort.
It didn't take large numbers of guards or even trains to deal with imprisoning/killing Jews, compared to the number of soldiers overall.
7. Persecution of Jews was driven by greed (ie the desire to take the Jews' possessions).
Taking Jewish possessions was a side benefit for the Nazis, not their main goal. They got more money by taking over banks in the countries they invaded than by taking Jewish possessions.
8. The Holocaust represents modernity and its dangers.
The image of mechanized murder has been overblown. "Auschwitz was a dis-assembly line, but more like a 19th century slaughterhouse than a modern factory." Most killing was done with simple tools: a gun, carbon dioxide from a car. And cultural genocide is certainly not a new idea.
Conclusion: the common denominator of all 8 myths is the desire to shield ourselves from the horror, to think that thinks could have been better or to find a place to lay blame. But these are prettifications of history.
Posted via web from The AJL Convention Blog
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Nathan Adler was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1803. After being educated at Gottingen, Erlangen and Wurzburg, he became chief rabbi of Oldenburg in 1829 and of Hanover in 1830. Adler moved to England and in 1845 was appointed as chief rabbi of the united congregations of the British Empire. In 1855 Adler established the first Jewish College to train ministers.
When Nathan Adler died in 1890 he was replaced as chief rabbi by his son Hermann Adler. This was a time when Jewish immigration was growing very fast. A significant number of Jewish immigrants from Europe refused to accept the authority of the new chief rabbi. His Anti-Zionism was especially unpopular with the recent arrivals. Hermann Adler, who wrote The Jews in England, died in 1911.
Source: Spartacus Educational
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It’s What was for Dinner
There are 650 species of river snails in North America which makes this continent the richest in the world for these tiny animals. Many of these are shell dwelling soft bodied gastropods that live in the streams and rivers of the southeastern region of our country. Within this group is a genus called Leptoxis (or more commonly known as Anculosa) which are gill breathing and operculum bearing snails that usually live in the bottom of reasonably fast flowing streams in the middle South to southern Midwest. Of the thirty three known members of the Leptoxis genus, many are now threatened with extinction because of river impoundment and siltation and industrial/agricultural pollutions. But during the prehistoric times in the region, the natives consumed the little mollusk Anculosa because it was available in enormous numbers and became what was for dinner.
Most of us contemporary people would not wish to gather river snails for food but beginning perhaps as far back as the Paleo Period (10,000 BC) the American natives did just that. Possibly during the Archaic Period and most likely during the Woodland Period (1000 BC to AD 1000) most definitely during the Mississippian Period (AD 1000 to 1700) these people did harvest and eat the various river snails found in the waterways in the southeast. As the natives became more agrarian and began living in small permanent villages near the rivers and large streams, they were adjacent to the watery homes of the apparently easy to catch snails. Probably during that time of clean natural water sources there were many millions of these mollusks for the taking and the natives did take them. We know that because there have been huge mounds of discarded mollusk shells found near rivers from Kentucky to Alabama and Virginia to Georgia. They would most likely have placed the snails in steatite or ceramic pots of boiling water and waited for the heat to force the little cooked animals from their shells so they could be eaten. The empty shells would have then been discarded or used for ornaments.
The freshwater Anculosa snails produce the calcium carbonate body coverings by excreting consumed calcium and other minerals and which harden into the protective shells. The outside of the shells are coated with a horny epidermal called periostracum which give the shells various colors from to tans and browns to gold and blue. These hues are most likely evolutionary means for the snails to camouflage themselves from predators such as fish, turtles, water birds and humans.
There have been some large caches of Anculosa shells, which look like miniature conch or whelk shells, found in the southeast and that were purposely altered to make beads. An edge of the shell whorl would have been rubbed against an abrasive substance such as sandstone or granite until a hole was made. Or a hole was bored using a rotating chipped stone drill. A sinew string or thong could then have been passed through the manufactured hole and out through the natural shell opening through which the animal moved and ate. The beads, which are normally less than an inch long from the base of the whorls to the top of the spire, could have been strung into necklaces and bracelets, hung from the earlobes or sewn onto garments by using these holes. Archaeological investigations have uncovered ancient burials that had thousands of these shell beads placed with the deceased. One grouping found in Tennessee had an estimated one hundred thousand of the Anculosa shell beads. Calcium carbonate is a hard substance that any of you who have picked up a marine shell on a beach can attest. It must have taken almost countless hours for the bead makers to rub and/or drill holes in a hundred thousand beads. And that is just one of the many riverside groupings that has been found during the last hundred or so years. These little beads, which can still be found today as bleached and patinated white/grey shells, must have had some important meanings to the natives and we shall probably never know what those meanings were. But we do know that they extracted a source of food from the little mollusk. The little gastropods houses certainly had ornamental shell usage, but the Anculosa snails themselves would have been what was for dinner.
Burch, J. T. 1989
NORTH AMERICAN FRESHWTER SNAILS
Dillon, Robert T. 2000
THE ECOLOGY OF THE FRESHWATER MOLLUSCS
Emerson, Thomas J. 2009
ARCHAIC SOCIETIES: DIVERSITY AND COMPLEXITY ACROSS THE
Goodrich, Calvin 1922
THE ANCULOSAE OF THE ALABAMA RIVER DRAINAGE
Lewis, T. M. N. & Madeline Kneberg 1959
“The Archaic Culture in the Middle South”, AMERICAN ANTIQUITY,
Vol. 25, No. 2
Parmalee, Paul W. 1906
“Remains form the Aztalan Site”, WISCONSIN ARCHAELOGICAL SOCIETY
Webb, William S. 1974
Wood, W. Raymond 1974
JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH, Vol. 30, No. 1
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/National Wildlife Federation) - Many children are too busy tweeting to go outside and hear a real tweet. Kids today spend an average of seven hours per day using electronic media but only four to seven minutes outside in unstructured outdoor play time.
"The importance of media in today's world is indisputable, but a sky's-the-limit approach to technology can have a powerful downside for kids if it's not tempered with something more down to earth," said Lindsay Legendre, manager of the National Wildlife Federation's Be Out There movement -- an effort to get more children outdoors more often.
Research shows that spending time outdoors makes kids grow lean and strong, enhances their imaginations and gives them time to let off steam and just be kids. The Kaiser Family Foundation says children who spend too much time with technology are more likely to get fair or poor grades. As a result of research like this. NWF's Be Out There movement created the "Outdoor Play for Every Day: A Parent's Guide for Overcoming Common Obstacles to Kids and Outdoor Play," which is loaded with tips and activities to help parents overcome the lure of technology and other common obstacles to getting kids outdoors.
Consider the following suggestions to maximize outdoor time while making peace with media and technology:
* Monkey See/Monkey Do. Set a good example about limiting tech time, and your kids will be more likely to follow suit. Talk to your kids, and let everyone have a say on the amount of time that screens will be used each week so ground rules are clear up front.
* Pay to Play. Encourage kids to earn screen time by balancing it with equal amounts of reading, chores or playing outside. Len Saunders, author of "Keeping Kids Fit" and father of two, suggests that for every hour of physical activity, kids earn 30 minutes of tech time.
* Let 'Em Pick. Offer kids a set amount of screen time each day and let them decide how to use it (watch TV, play video games or surf the web). If the weather is nice, and they want to trade their screen time for playing outdoors, they can bank their screen time for use on a rainy day.
* Go Geocaching. Take your kids on an outdoor adventure that combines popular GPS technology and a treasure hunt. Don't have a GPS? There are several smart phone apps that can do the trick. Learn more at www.Rangerricktrails.com
For parents who want their kids to enhance their physical and mental health by playing outside more often, the Be Out There Parent Guide is a valuable resource. Find the Guide and more ideas for enjoying outdoor time at www.beoutthere.org
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Is it an allergy?
Drug allergies can be a confusing area for parents because an adverse reaction to a medication does not necessarily mean that the child is allergic to that medicine.
In fact most drug-related symptoms will not be caused by an allergic reaction. Nevertheless, whether it’s an allergic or a non-allergic reaction, all adverse drug events should be checked out by a doctor, as they can be very serious, even life-threatening.
What are the symptoms of allergic reactions?
Most allergic reactions occur fairly soon after taking a medicine, however, it is possible to develop an allergic reaction after several weeks on a drug, or during subsequent use of medicine.
The most common symptoms of an allergy include:
- Skin rash
- Facial swelling
- Shortness of breath
And it’s worth noting that many of these are also the symptoms of a non-allergic reaction.
What is anaphylaxis?
While rare, it is the most serious allergic drug reaction and is a medical emergency. Anaphylaxis symptoms usually start within minutes of exposure to a drug. Symptoms of a possible anaphylactic reaction include:
- Tightening (constriction) of the airways and a swollen tongue or throat, causing trouble breathing
- Shock, with a severe drop in blood pressure
- Weak, rapid pulse
- Nausea, vomiting or diarrhoea
- Dizziness, light-headedness or loss of consciousness
It's possible to have an allergic response to a drug that caused no problem in the past.
Common drug allergies
This is the most common drug allergy, with penicillins, cephalosporins and sulfonamides (those containing sulpher) the main culprits. Antibiotics can also cause non-allergic side effects such as a skin rash and digestive problems.
Allergic reactions can occur, but rarely, after a vaccination. Usually an allergic reaction is triggered by other ingredients in the vaccine such as egg or neomycin, rather than the vaccine itself. Non-allergic reactions to vaccines are common, but in most cases they aren't severe and symptoms improve quickly.
What are non-allergic reactions?
An allergy involves the body’s immune system identifying a chemical or substance as harmful and creating antibodies to attack it. In most cases, what appears to be an allergy is actually a reaction that doesn't involve the immune system.
Some drug reactions that are similar to, but may not be an allergic reaction include:
- Breathing difficulties: nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) including aspirin and ibuprofen can cause asthma-like symptoms in some people so it's understandable why these can be confused with an allergy.
- Skin rashes: medicines can affect the skin in many different way, for example, sulfonamides may cause cause a rash by making the skin burn more easily in the sun.
- Stomach problems: nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea are common side effects with antibiotics.
- Dizziness or light-headedness: many medicines can cause this by lowering blood pressure or by affecting the central nervous system.
- Swelling of the face, lips, tonuge or other parts of the body: some medicines for high blood pressure and heart conditions can cause these symptoms directly without involving the immune system.
Who’s at risk?
Anyone can have an allergic reaction to a medicine but there are some factors that can suggest an increase in your risk, such as:
- Having a past allergic reaction to the same drug or another drug. If past reactions have been mild, you could be at risk of a more severe reaction.
- Taking a drug similar to one that caused a reaction in the past.
- Having a health condition that weakens your immune system.
- Having hay fever or another allergy.
When to seek medical help
Inform your doctor of any reactions as it can influence whether you can be prescribed the same medicine again. If possible, see your doctor when the allergic reaction is occurring. This will help identify the cause and make sure you get treatment if it's needed.
Obviously if there are any severe symptoms or signs of anaphylaxis, seek urgent medical attention.
Related allergy articles
This article was written by Fiona Baker for Kidspot, Australia’s best family health resource. Sources include NPS MedicineWise.
Last revised: Tuesday, 15 February 2011
This article contains general information only and is not intended to replace advice from a qualified health professional.
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Hyperactivity, also referred to as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD (A-D-H-D), is a condition that occurs when excessive levels of impulsiveness, inattentiveness, and hyperactivity characterize a child's behavior. Although children can be diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder with or without hyperactivity, most experts agree that inattention and hyperactivity generally go hand and hand. Hyperactivity is far from rare, and it occurs in boys more often than in girls. The condition is usually first noticed by teachers, because the child's activity and restlessness tend to impair schoolwork. Hyperactive children refuse to sit still, and often fidget or squirm in their seats during class. They're prone to outbursts of temper, find it difficult to follow instructions, and have trouble remembering their assignments. They typically disrupt class, are involved in fights, have a poor self-image, and have a hard time making friends. One unfortunate aspect of the condition is that parents and teachers sometimes blame the child's problems in school on lack of effort, and this only complicates matters. Fortunately, hyperactive children generally respond extremely well to treatment, which may consist of counseling, special education programs, or medication. For more information, consult a local health care professional.
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Scientists from Stanford University, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the American Museum of Natural History, and other organizations are closing in on the answer to an important conservation question: how many humpback whales once existed in the North Atlantic?
Building on previous genetic analyses to estimate the pre-whaling population of North Atlantic humpback whales, the research team has found that humpbacks used to exist in numbers of more than 100,000 individuals. The new, more accurate estimate is lower than previously calculated but still two to three times higher than pre-whaling estimates based on catch data from whaling records.
Known for its distinctively long pectoral fins, acrobatics, and haunting songs, the humpback whale occurs in all the world's oceans. Current estimates for humpback whale numbers are widely debated, but some have called for the level of their international protection to be dropped.
The study appears in the recently published edition of Conservation Genetics. The authors include: Kristen Ruegg and Stephen Palumbi of Stanford University; Howard C. Rosenbaum of the Wildlife Conservation Society and the American Museum of Natural History; Eric C. Anderson of the National Marine Fisheries Service and University of California-Santa Cruz; Marcia Engel of the Instituto Baleia Jubarte/Humpback Whale Institute, Brazil; Anna Rothschild of AMNH's Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics; and C. Scott Baker of Oregon State University.
"We're certain that humpback whales in the North Atlantic have significantly recovered from commercial whaling over the past several decades of protection, but without an accurate size estimate of the pre-whaling population, the threshold of recovery remains unknown," said Dr. Kristen Ruegg of Stanford University and the lead author of the study. "We now have a solid, genetically generated estimate upon which future work on this important issue can be based."
"Our current challenge is to explain the remaining discrepancy between the historical catch data and the population estimate generated by genetic analyses," said Dr. Howard Rosenbaum, study co-author and Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Ocean Giants Program. "The gap highlights the need for continued evaluations of whale populations, and presents new information informing the debate and challenges associated with recovery goals."
"We have spent a great deal of effort refining the techniques and approaches that give us this pre-whaling number," said Dr. Steve Palumbi of Stanford. "It's worth the trouble because genetic tools give one of the only glimpses into the past we have for whales."
Reaching some 50 feet in length, the humpback whale was hunted for centuries by commercial whaling fleets in all the world's oceans. Humpbacks had predictable migration routes and were reduced to several hundred whales in the North Atlantic. The global population was reduced by possibly 90 percent of its original size. The species received protection from the International Whaling Commission in North Atlantic waters in 1955 due to the severity of its decline.
Since that time, the humpback whales of the North Atlantic have made a remarkable comeback; experts estimate the current size of the North Atlantic's humpback whale population to be more than 17,000 animals. North Atlantic humpback whales are now one of the best-studied populations of great whales in the world and the mainstay of a multi-million dollar whale-watching industry.
But estimating the number of whales that existed prior to commercial whaling is a far more difficult problem, critical in determining when the total population has recovered. Historical catch data from the logs of whaling vessels suggest a population size between 20,000-46,000 whales, but the current genetic analysis indicates a much larger pre-whaling population. The results of the genetic analysis indicate that the North Atlantic once held between 45,000—235,000 humpback whales (with an average estimate of 112,000 animals).
A previous study using the mitochondrial DNA of humpbacks in the North Atlantic suggested a higher pre-whaling population size; an average of 240,000 individuals. To increase the accuracy of the current analysis, the team measured nine segments in the DNA sequences throughout the genome (as opposed to just one DNA segment used in the previous study).
Palumbi, who participated in the first humpback genetic analysis, added: "The International Whaling Commission reviewed the results of the first study and recommended we improve the method in six specific ways. We've done that now and have the best-ever estimate of ancient humpback populations."
Scott Baker, Associate Director of Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute and a co-author said: "These genetic estimates greatly improve our understanding of the genetic diversity of humpback whales, something we need to understand the impact of past hunting and to manage whales in the uncertain future."
The research team analyzed genetic samples from whales in the North Atlantic as well as the Southern Hemisphere. Southern Atlantic whales were used to answer one of the six IWC questions: was there intermixing of whale populations across the equator? The samples were analyzed by sequencing specific regions of DNA in known genes. By comparing the genetic diversity of today's population to the genetic mutation rate, Ruegg and colleagues could estimate the long-term population size of humpbacks. They also showed no substantial migration of humpbacks whales across the Equator between the Southern and Northern Atlantic, and no movement from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
The team recently used the same techniques to estimate pre-whaling numbers for the Pacific gray whale and the Antarctic minke whale. A difference of two to three times also was recorded between the genetic and catch estimates for the grey whale population, but were exactly on target for the Antarctic minke whale, which has not been extensively hunted.
Wildlife Conservation Society: http://www.wcs.org
This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.
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History of Western Political Tradition A brief overview of the development of political philosohpy from Socrates to Marx by John A. Sterling
Biblical origins of American Political philosophy by John A. Sterling. A look at the biblical and philosophical origins of self-government.
Christianity as an Influence on the Founders A look at some of the best-known founding fathers and what they said about Christianity and the Bible. Also, what their contemporaries said about them and their faith. By John A. Sterling
Scroll down the page for Documents and quotes that demonstrate the ideological basis of American Self-Government
1. Magna Carta
2. The Mayflower Compact
3.Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms.
4. The Declaration of Independence
5. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights
6. The Federalist Papers This hyperlink takes you to the THOMAS information site maintained by the U.S. Government. To return to the Law & Liberty Foundation, use the BACK button on your browser.
7. Davy Crockett's speech on the Floor of Congress 1830
8. Madison Veto of Public Works Law March 3, 1817
9. Sermon by Samuel West on the right to rebel against governors, 1789
10. Offenses Against God by Sir William Blackstone11. Discourse on Civil Liberty by Nathaniel Niles, legislator, judge, & preacher, (1741-1821)
12. Civil Disobedience: A duty to disobey by Jonathan Mayhew, (1720-1766)
Sites on the Web where you can find many more historical documentsLINKS The Constitution Society
Articles on Religion and America's Founding
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The Heart Catheterization Procedure
A heart catheterization involves placing a catheter (a long thin tube) into the heart to measure pressures, inject dye and take X-rays. This procedure normally takes less than an hour.
Providing Excellent Cardiovascular Health Care
Our staff of medical professionals has vast experience in cardiovascular health care and diagnostic procedures. Based on years of practical and specialized training, our cardiovascular team provides our patients with the finest care available in South Carolina.
Assessing Your Cardiac and Vascular Health
To properly evaluate your cardiac and vascular health condition, your physician may recommend a cardiac catheterization (a “heart cath”), a diagnostic procedure used to evaluate problems with the heart and its blood supply. Cardiac catheterization provides information about:
- blood flow through the heart and coronary arteries (blood vessels that supply blood to the heart muscle) or other major blood vessels that carry blood to and from the heart;
- pressure within the heart chambers;
- the detailed structure of various parts of the heart and vascular (blood vessel) system; and the heart's pumping ability.
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A packet filtering firewall, designed to regulate incoming and outgoing packets from a network or an operating system, is akin to security personnel guarding the entrance to a commercial or residential property. Such a system has very little authority, unless given additional powers, in what applications inside the operating system or network are able to do.
That is where an application “firewall” comes into play. It is designed to ensure that applications in an operating system (or in some instances, a network) adhere to access control rules that govern their “activities.” It should be noted that an application firewall, like a stateful packet filter, is not a one-shot security solution. It merely adds an extra layer of security to a system, complementing other security protocols and systems in place. That idea also formed the main point of why your computer needs a firewall enabled.
This crude sketch shows applications in an operating system when there is no application firewall to regulated their actions. They are free to wander as they please.
And here is what it looks like with an application firewall activated. By the way, this screen shot and the one above, were taken from Tomoyo’s website, an application firewall featured in this article:
There are three such applications built into the Linux kernel, and they are available as loadable modules. While they tend to be described using slightly different terminologies, and may even differ in how to operate, once activated, they have the same effect – intelligently enforcing access rights for applications they are configured to monitor. In alphabetical order, the three application firewalls are:
An effective and easy-to-use Linux application security system. AppArmor proactively protects the operating system and applications from external or internal threats, even zero-day attacks, by enforcing good behavior and preventing even unknown application flaws from being exploited. AppArmor security policies completely define what system resources individual applications can access, and with what privileges. A number of default policies are included with AppArmor, and using a combination of advanced static analysis and learning-based tools, AppArmor policies for even very complex applications can be deployed successfully in a matter of hours.
SELinux, or Security-Enhanced Linux, was contributed to the Linux kernel by the National Security Agency. It is the application firewall activated by default in Fedora, and it has a reputation as being a bit more difficult to manage and configure than the others. The following is a brief description of SELinux from its Fedora project page.
Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) adds Mandatory Access Control (MAC) to the Linux kernel, and is enabled by default in Fedora. A general purpose MAC architecture needs the ability to enforce an administratively-set security policy over all processes and files in the system, basing decisions on labels containing a variety of security-relevant information. When properly implemented, it enables a system to adequately defend itself and offers critical support for application security by protecting against the tampering with, and bypassing of, secured applications.
MAC provides strong separation of applications that permits the safe execution of untrustworthy applications. Its ability to limit the privileges associated with executing processes limits the scope of potential damage that can result from the exploitation of vulnerabilities in applications and system services. MAC enables information to be protected from legitimate users with limited authorization as well as from authorized users who have unwittingly executed malicious applications.
Tomoyo was launched in 2003 and its development is sponsored by Japan’s NTT DATA Corporation. It is, as far as I know, the only one that is not used by default on any Linux distribution. However, that should change when the next edition of Chakra Edn is released. According to the official description, Tomoyo is a:
Mandatory Access Control (MAC) implementation for Linux that can be used to increase the security of a system, while also being useful purely as a system analysis tool.
TOMOYO Linux focuses on the behaviour of a system. Every process is created to achieve a purpose, and like an immigration officer, TOMOYO Linux allows each process to declare behaviours and resources needed to achieve their purpose. When protection is enabled, TOMOYO Linux acts like an operation watchdog, restricting each process to only the behaviours and resources allowed by the administrator.
Most distributions have one of these applications activated by default. If yours does not, talk to the developer(s) about it. Sometimes, all you need to do is install the userland utilities for managing it.
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Active Sunspot Shoots Off Intense New Solar Flare
The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured this image of the sun during an M6.1 flare that peaked at 7:44 AM EDT on July 5, 2012. The image is shown in the 304 Angstrom wavelength, which is typically colorized in red.
The sun fired off yet another intense solar flare today (July 5), the latest in a series of storms from a busy sunspot being closely watched by space telescopes and astronomers.
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory snapped a daunting new image of a strong M-class solar flare that peaked this morning at 7:44 a.m. EDT (1144 GMT). The M6.1 flare triggered a moderate radio blackout that has since subsided, according to officials at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The eruption came from a sprawling sunspot, called Active Region 1515, which has been particularly dynamic this week. In fact, the sunspot region has now spewed 12 M-class solar flares since July 3, NASA officials said in a statement today. The sunspot region is huge, stretching more than 62,137 miles long (100,000 kilometers) in length, they added.
This sunspot region has also produced several coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are clouds of plasma and charged particles that are hurled into space during solar storms. Powerful CMEs have the potential to disrupt satellites in their path and, when aimed directly at Earth, can wreak havoc on power grids and communications infrastructure.
The CMEs that were triggered by this week's solar flares, however, are thought to be moving relatively slowly, and will likely not hit Earth since the active region is located so far south on the face of the sun, NASA officials said. [More Solar Flare Photos from Sunspot AR1515]
But, the sunspot is slowly rotating toward Earth, and scientists are still monitoring its activity.
"Stay tuned for updates as Region 1515 continues its march across the solar disk," officials at the Space Weather Prediction Center, a joint service of NOAA and the National Weather Service, wrote in an update.
X-class solar flares are the strongest sun storms, with M-class flares considered medium-strength, and C-class the weakest. Today's M6.1 eruption is a little over half the size of the weakest X-class flare, NASA officials said.
Radio blackouts can occur when a layer of Earth's atmosphere, called the ionosphere, is bombarded with X-rays or extreme ultraviolet light from solar eruptions. Disturbances in the ionosphere can change the paths of high and low frequency radio waves, which can affect information carried along these channels.
Radio blackouts are categorized on a scale from R1 (minor) to R5 (extreme). An R2 radio blackout can result in limited degradation of both high- and low-frequency radio communication and GPS signals, NASA officials said.
The sun is currently in an active phase of its roughly 11-year solar weather cycle. The current cycle, known as Solar Cycle 24, is expected to peak in mid-2013.
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Early Embryo's Odd Behavior Reveals Chances of Miscarriage
Time-lapse images of human embryos in the first two days of development.
CREDIT: Kevin E. Loewke
Amazing time-lapse videos of embryos in the very earliest stages of development could help fertility doctors prevent miscarriage, new research suggests.
By watching the timing of the cells' development, doctors could determine which cells are genetically healthy, and which have abnormal numbers of chromosomes, finds the study published today (Dec. 4) in the journal Nature Communications.
"What we've shown is that by watching, you can detect some differences in the movements in the cell cycle of those [embryos] that are carrying errors from those that are more likely to survive," said study researcher Renee Reijo Pera, who studies stem cells and early embryo development at Stanford University.
Chromosomes are coiled packets of DNA. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, but genetic accidents can alter that number, a condition called aneuploidy. Some aneuploidies cause disorders such as Down syndrome, which occurs when there are three chromosomes on what should be the 21st pair. Other aneuploidies are incompatible with life, causing early miscarriage or later stillbirth.
Extra or missing chromosomes are shockingly common, affecting up to 75 percent of all embryos, studies find. This may be why as many as 50 to 75 percent of pregnancies are so-called "chemical pregnancies," meaning that an embryo spontaneously aborts right after implantation in the uterus. Many women with chemical pregnancies may not even realize they were ever pregnant.
There's little to be done about these early miscarriages in typical pregnancies. For in vitro fertilization (IVF), however, it's important to choose embryos with the best chance of life to prevent miscarrying.
Pera and her colleagues have already found that abnormal embryos show strange behaviors in the first four days of development. For example, the length of time it takes an abnormal embryo to complete its very first division from one cell body to two differs from the time it takes for a normal embryo to do the same.
Abnormal embryos also show more fragmentation, Pera told LiveScience. Fragmentation occurs when one cell in an embryo experiences a problem. In most situations, a cell with a problem simply dies. In embryos, however, these cells seem to break apart instead. Often, DNA-containing cell fragments will fuse with other cells in the embryo, transferring extra chromosomes to those cells.
The researchers wanted to know whether they could use these odd behaviors to reliably distinguish a healthy embryo from a doomed one. They took 75 human embryos that had been frozen at the single-cell phase and cultured them in Petri dishes for two days, taking a microscopic snapshot of each embryo every five minutes. [See Video of the Developing Embryos]
These snapshots were then strung together into time-lapse movies, which the researchers analyzed for the timing of various cell-division phases.
Of the 75 original cells, 53 survived four days, which represents the zygote stage of embryonic development. Of those, 45 were usable for genetic analysis. About 75 percent, or 34 of the 45 cells surviving to the zygote stage, had the wrong number of chromosomes.
The abnormal cells showed more variations in their cell-division cycles than normal cells, the researchers found. While normal cells all developed at similar paces, abnormal cells lagged behind or sped ahead in the divisions of the first, second and third cells.
Combining data about the abnormal timing with other signs that something has gone wrong (such as fragmented DNA and asymmetrical cell sizes within a developing embryo) could reliably show which cells have the right number of chromosomes and which don't, the researchers report.
The findings offer some insight into why early human development is so likely to go wrong, Pera said. Other animals don't have so many problems, she said. Mice, for example, make mistakes in embryo development only about 1 percent of the time.
Researchers have long thought that perhaps humans have so many problems because women's eggs degrade with age, Pera said. But in the current study, only 20 percent of the embryos showed these kind of errors. Much more frequent were so-called mitotic errors, which occur later in development, after sperm and cell fuse and the embryo begins to divide.
"That so many errors are being made after the egg and the sperm come together, that appears to be kind of special to humans," Pera said.
A California-based biotech company has now licensed the embryo-watching technology and is going to begin testing it in fertility clinics, Pera said. The hope is that doctors can use the technique as a way to non-invasively watch embryos before implanting them in women, ensuring that they pick the cell clusters most likely to survive to birth.
Editor's Note: This article was updated at 4pm EST to add comments from the researcher.
MORE FROM LiveScience.com
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The introduction of steam power into factories from the beginning of the nineteenth century meant that goods could be made more cheaply and easily than by hand. Steamships brought raw materials and foodstuffs to Europe in larger quantities and more reliably than before. Here we look first at how shops changed and were themselves mechanised in order to sell larger quantities of manufactured goods to an increasingly prosperous public.
A new cultural industry arose as steam power was also applied to the printing press. Books became cheaper and more plentiful. Newspapers sold by the million and became brighter and more readable. The inexpensive mass-audience magazine was born, and with it came new forms of advertising aimed directly at the consumer.
The electric telegraph connected distant places by wire, but by the 1890s telegraphy without wires, or radio communication, had been discovered. From this came broadcasting, which was to become part of almost every home in Britain within 15 years. Television went from a theory propounded in a scientific journal in 1912 to an established fact in 1936. Although television itself did not become a mass medium until the 1960s, many of the elements of the consumer world we know today were in place by 1940.
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Volume 9, Issue 2
Tricks of the Trade
In and Out
Download This Issue
Learning about Differential Equations from Their Symmetries
Application of MathSym to Analyzing an Ordinary Differential Equation
In the previous section we used a scaling symmetry to help understand the solutions of a pair of differential equations. In each case, the scaling symmetry was found by inspection. Here I present the computation of the complete set of point symmetries for two additional differential equations. Our third example is a nonlinear ordinary differential that we analyze using its two symmetries. The final example is the partial differential equation known as the cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation .
Example three is the ordinary differential equation
that arises in the study of nonlinear water wave equations. I also show that we can use its two symmetries to begin to learn something about the structure of its solutions.
MathSym returns a system of equations, the determining equations, whose solutions generate the symmetries of equation (8). Internally, the MathSym package denotes all independent variables in an equation as and dependent variables as . This way it can be run on systems of equations with arbitrary numbers of independent and dependent variables without needing to know how to treat different variable names. Furthermore, constants are represented as internally and printed as . With this notation, constants are treated correctly by Mathematica's differentiation routine Dt. MathSym's output is the following list of determining equations.
With the output from MathSym we can continue our analysis of equation (8). First, we solve the determining equations:
The functions and determine two symmetries that can be used to convert equation (8) into two integrals. The reader is directed to similar computations for the Blasius boundary layer equation which appear on pages 118-120 of .
We begin by considering the symmetry that occurs because of the term. Setting and produces a transformation and . We next look for two quantities that do not change under this transformation. Obvious choices are and . If we assume that is a function of and write the differential equation for that arises by insisting that satisfy equation (8), we find
This is a standard reduction of order for autonomous equations that may be found in a sophomore differential equations text such as .
This equation in and has a symmetry that is generated by the constant appearing in equations (9) and (10). From this symmetry we can derive new variables and and consider as a function of . In terms of and , equation (11) becomes
We have now converted the problem of solving the original equation into two integrations. First we find as a function of giving us a solution of equation (12) and hence of equation (11). Then we return to the original variables and have implicitly as a function of . Integrating again gives a relationship between and .
We can make Mathematica carry out some of these computations. First we will ask that it determine a solution to equation (12) by integrating both sides of the equation.
In the equation for we can return to the original variables and .
What results is an implicit relationship between and and while MathSym has been successful in generating the symmetries of equation (8), it still is a challenge to solve this equation.
About Mathematica | Download Mathematica Player
Copyright © 2004 Wolfram Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Digestive Diseases: Food Poisoning
Food poisoning is a common, yet distressing and sometimes life-threatening problem for millions of people in the U.S., and throughout the world. People infected with foodborne organisms may be symptom-free or may have symptoms ranging from mild intestinal discomfort to severe dehydration and bloody diarrhea. Depending on the type of infection, people can even die as a result of food poisoning.
More than 250 different diseases can cause food poisoning. Some of the most common diseases are infections caused by bacteria, such as Campylobacter, Salmonella, Shigella, E. coli O157:H7, Listeria, and botulism.
What Is Campylobacter Infection?
Campylobacter is a bacterium that causes acute diarrhea. Transmission usually occurs through ingestion of contaminated food, water, or unpasteurized milk, or through contact with infected infants, pets or wild animals.
Is Campylobacter Infection a Serious Health Concern?
It can be, especially in those with weakened immune systems. In rare cases, Campylobacter infection can cause additional problems such as arthritis or brain and nerve problems. Occasionally, these problems occur after the diarrhea has stopped.
How Is Campylobacter Infection Diagnosed and Treated?
If you think you may have been exposed to the infection, see your doctor. By testing a sample of your stool, the bacteria can be identified.
If you are found to have the infection, you will likely recover on your own without treatment within 2-5 days. Drink plenty of fluids to prevent becoming dehydrated.
In more severe cases, antibiotics (such as Cipro), if given early in the illness, can be used to shorten the length of time you are sick.
What Is Salmonella?
Salmonella is a bacterial infection that can be passed on to humans from domestic and wild animals, including poultry, pigs, cattle, and pets. But most often, it is caused by drinking unpasteurized milk or by eating undercooked poultry and poultry products such as eggs. Any food prepared on surfaces contaminated by raw chicken or turkey can also become tainted with salmonella. Less often, the illness may stem from food contaminated by a food worker.
Salmonella can escape from the intestine and go into the blood and travel to other organs. It may become a chronic infection in some people, who can be symptom-free yet capable of spreading the disease to others.
Salmonella infections occur worldwide, but it is most extensively reported in North America and Europe.
Symptoms include acute onset of:
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Definition of Immunization
Immunization: Vaccination. Immunizations work by stimulating the immune system, the natural disease-fighting system of the body. The healthy immune system is able to recognize invading bacteria and viruses and produce substances (antibodies) to destroy or disable them. Immunizations prepare the immune system to ward off a disease. To immunize against viral diseases, the virus used in the vaccine has been weakened or killed. To immunize against bacterial diseases, it is generally possible to use only a small portion of the dead bacteria to stimulate the formation of antibodies against the whole bacteria. In addition to the initial immunization process, it has been found that the effectiveness of immunizations can be improved by periodic repeat injections or "boosters." Also see Immunizations (in the plural) and Immunization of a specific type (such Immunization, Polio).
Last Editorial Review: 4/27/2011 5:27:15 PM
Back to MedTerms online medical dictionary A-Z List
Need help identifying pills and medications?
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There is much a pregnant woman can do to take care of herself during pregnancy. If she has any questions about diet, the use of drugs or nutritional supplements, physical activity, and sexual intercourse during pregnancy, she can talk with her doctor.
Diet and Weight:
During pregnancy, the woman's diet should be adequate and nutritious. If she does not consume enough nutrients for herself and the fetus, nutrients first go to nourish the fetus. However, adding about 250 calories to the daily diet is usually enough to provide nourishment for both. Most of the extra calories should be protein. The diet should be well balanced and include fresh fruits, grains, and vegetables. Cereals that are high in fiber and low in sugar are a good choice.
In the United States, most women get enough salt in their diet, without adding salt to their food at the table. Commercially prepared foods often contain excessive amounts of salt and should be consumed sparingly.
Dieting to lose weight during pregnancy is not recommended, even for obese women, because some weight gain is essential for the fetus to develop normally. Dieting reduces the supply of nutrients to the fetus.
An average-size woman should gain about 25 to 30 pounds during pregnancy. Gaining more than 30 to 35 pounds puts fat on the woman and the fetus. Because controlling weight gain is more difficult later in pregnancy, a woman should try to avoid gaining too much weight during the first months. On the other hand, not gaining weight can hinder the growth and development of the fetus. A woman should try to gain between 2 and 3 pounds each month during early pregnancy.
Sometimes a pregnant woman gains weight because she is retaining fluid. Fluid may be retained because when she lies flat, the enlarging uterus interferes with blood flow from the legs back to the heart. Lying on one side, preferably the left side, for 30 to 45 minutes 2 or 3 times a day may relieve this problem. Wearing elastic support stockings may also help.
Drugs and Dietary Supplements:
Generally, avoiding drugs during pregnancy is best. However, drugs must sometimes be used (see Drug Use During Pregnancy). A pregnant woman should check with her doctor before taking any drug—including nonprescription (over-the-counter) drugs, such as aspirin, or medicinal herbs—particularly during the first 3 months.
Pregnancy doubles the amount of iron needed. Most pregnant women need an iron supplement because the average woman does not absorb enough iron from food to meet the requirements of pregnancy. If a woman has anemia or develops anemia during pregnancy, she may need to take a larger dose of iron than other pregnant women. Iron supplements may cause mild stomach upset and constipation.
All pregnant women should take a folate (folic acid) supplement (usually included in prenatal vitamins) daily. Ideally, the folate supplement is begun before pregnancy. A deficiency of folate increases the risk of having a baby with a birth defect of the brain or spinal cord, such as spina bifida. Women who have had a baby with spina bifida should start taking a high dose of folate before they become pregnant. For some other women who may have a folate deficiency, the amount of folate in a standard prenatal vitamin is sufficient, even if the risk is somewhat increased. For example, women who are exposed to excessive ultraviolet (UV) light, particularly fair-skinned women, may have decreased folate levels. Also, women who have taken oral contraceptives within several months before conception are more likely to develop a folate deficiency, but there is no proof that they are more likely to have a baby with spina bifida.
If the diet is adequate, other vitamin supplements may not be needed, although most doctors recommend that pregnant women take a prenatal multivitamin containing iron and folate daily.
Many pregnant women are concerned about moderating their activities. However, most women can continue their usual activities and exercises throughout pregnancy. Mildly strenuous sports, such as swimming and brisk walking, are good choices. Vigorous activities, such as running and horseback riding, are also possible if done cautiously, to avoid injury, particularly to the abdomen. Contact sports should be avoided.
Sexual desire may increase or decrease during pregnancy. Sexual intercourse is safe throughout pregnancy unless a woman has vaginal bleeding, pain, leakage of amniotic fluid, or uterine contractions. In such cases, sexual intercourse should be avoided.
Preparing for Breastfeeding:
Women who are planning to breastfeed do not need to do anything to prepare their nipples for breastfeeding during pregnancy (see Newborns and Infants: Breastfeeding). Expressing fluids from the breast manually before delivery may lead to an infection of the breast (mastitis) or even early labor. The body prepares the areola and nipple for breastfeeding by secreting a lubricant to protect the surface. This lubricant should not be rubbed off. Observing and talking with women who have breastfed successfully may be instructive and encouraging.
Travel During Pregnancy:
The safest time to travel during pregnancy is between 14 and 28 weeks. Travel time should not exceed 6 hours a day. Women can obtain useful tips and information about travel from their doctor, so discussing their travel plans with the doctor is a good idea.
When traveling in a car, airplane, or other vehicle, pregnant women should always wear a seat belt. Placing the lap belt across the hips and under the expanding abdomen and placing the shoulder belt between the breasts can help make wearing seat belts more comfortable. The belts should be snug but not uncomfortably tight.
During any kind of travel, pregnant women should stretch and straighten their legs and ankles periodically. Travel on airplanes is safe until about 36 weeks. The primary reason for this restriction at 36 weeks is the risk of labor and delivery in an unfamiliar environment.
Last full review/revision November 2007 by Haywood L. Brown, MD
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Added: 06/17/2009 This site is an animation of the light dependent (oxygen generating) reactions of photosynthesis. Note that the mechanism depicted is for prokaryotes and differs somewhat from what occurs in eukaryotes.
Added: 06/17/2009 This site provides an excellent presentation on this difficult topic. In topic 1, students look at the components of chemiosmosis in the bacterium Paracoccus denitrificans in which they step through animations of electron transport, proton gradient, and A
Added: 06/17/2009 This site is an excellent introduction to thermodynamics as it applies to living organisms. In topic 1, students make decisions for a paramecium living in a Petri dish that will determine if it will have enough energy to survive and reproduce. Students wi
Added: 06/17/2009 These learning materials address the dynamic processes of photosynthesis that are found in the chloroplast. They include the light reactions (cyclic and non-cyclic of Photosystems I & II) and the non-light limited reactions of the Calvin Cycle. Structure of the chloroplast is included and the many images and flash movies are provided as downloadable files.
Added: 06/17/2009 This Website covers cell biology all in animation. Cell structure with descriptions of each part, DNA structure, an animated overview of water chemistry, the light and dark reactions of photosynthesis are all presented in this Website. You are also able to see cells broken apart and explained, molecules in structural form, and the pH scale describing acidic and basic.
Added: 06/17/2009 Tutorials on energy conversions, cellular respiration, photosynthesis, proteins, DNA, RNA, DNA replication, protein synthesis, and mutation. Complete with illustrations and animations.
Added: 06/17/2009 This Website includes interactive learning with animation, movies, and tutorial links. It is created to help in teaching and the learning of science. Topics include basic chemistry, mitosis, meiosis, photosynthesis, and virology.
Added: 06/17/2009 Interactive animated tutorial that demonstrates photosynthesis, develops understanding of the organelles and compounds at work, describes the light and dark reactions and photorespiration.
Added: 06/17/2009 These problem sets are part of the University of Arizona Biology Project. They are located in the Biochemistry section. Each problem set gives a multiple choice question; incorrect answers take student to a tutorial. These self-grading problems are a good learning tool.
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Preceded by calendrical dates, both these monuments depict snakes with their maws wide open, out of which emerge humans. The other three sides of the stelae are covered with what some scholars maintain is a writing system.
Stelae 1 and 3
Late Classic (600-900 A.D.)
Xochicalco, State of Morelos
Originally, approximately 1.50 m.
National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico.
Photo © Jorge Pérez de Lara
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* (Under Construction)
Ninety Five Theses and the Revolution that followed
by Thomas Leckwold
Martin Luther's Ninety Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences was
nailed to the castle church in Wittenberg, in now modern day Germany, on October
31, 1517. This document was a protest that strongly criticized the practice of selling
indulgences of the Roman Catholic Church, known here after as the Church. The document
was a challenge to church authority that set forth events that permanently changed
the religious, political, and social factors of central Europe, and led to a series
of wars using the pretext of faith, and the role of the Church in the political
structure of Western Europe. Luther's document was not meant to be a call to revolution,
but the social conditions, and economic factors, along with religious convictions
did set in motion a revolution and subsequent conflicts in central Europe.
Cairo’s Fortress on the Mountain
by David W. Tschanz
Cairo residents call it the Qal'at al-Jabal, the Fortress on the Mountain, or just al-Qal'ah, the Fortress. The rest of the world simply calls it “The Citadel.” For nearly a millennium it has stood as a silent sentinel, residence, and symbol of power.
Standing on its battlements, and looking westwards provides a view of over 4500 years of architectural marvels from the mosque of Sultan Hasan, just below to the Pyramids of Giza across the Nile. From atop this fortress the awesome sweep of history is a vivid reality. It is a view that must have given even the sultans who ruled from here, cause to reflect.
Member Article: Armenian Warriors, Japanese Samurai
by Dr. Armen Ayvazyan
Armenian historiography contains considerable information about ancient and medieval Armenian military ideology.
In the works of fifth century historians Pavstos Buzand and Movses Khorenatzi, the commands and legacy of the Armenian
sparapets (commanders in chief) to their successors articulate in detail the obligations and responsibilities of
Armenian warriors. Their norms of conduct share striking similarities with the system of values of the Japanese samurai
codified during the 16th to 18th centuries, as well as with later medieval West European chivalry of the eight to 14th
“Fight and offer your life for the Armenian World just as your brave forefathers did, consciously sacrificing their lives for this Homeland…”
Member Article: Byzantine Military Pragmatism vs. Imperial Prejudice: Possible Reasons for Omitting the Armenians from the List of Hostiles in Maurice’s
by by Dr. Armen Ayvazyan
The problem of the various images of the Armenians in Byzantium has already become the subject of numerous, if sketchy, historical investigations and remarks. As a rule, students of this subject have focused on the images of those Armenians who resided beyond Armenia proper in the Byzantine capital and peripheral provinces as either newly-arrived immigrants or old-established inhabitants. Consequently, the shaping of the images of the Armenians in Byzantine Empire was appropriately sought and analyzed in such spheres as ecclesiastical differences between Armenian and Greek Churches, the ethnic peculiarities of everyday life as well as the rivalry in the imperial court between the Armenians and Greeks, the two major ethnic components of Byzantine elite. In contrast, this essay aims to analyze the Byzantines’ image of the Armenians of Armenia, that is, those who continued to live in and exercise military and political authority over their homeland. Accordingly, this study focuses on the geopolitical determinant in the construction of Armenian images in the imperial strata of Byzantine society.
Member Article: Lusty Stukeley: Deceiver of Princes
by Comer Plummer
The day was Monday, August 4, 1578. Sir Thomas Stukeley stood in his armor on the plain of Ksar el-Kebir, in the heart of the Kingdom of Fez, with the hosts assembling for battle around him. He had collected himself by then, having shed the ordeal of the previous night, with its discomforts and frustrations. He would have been calm and reflective, as only experienced soldiers could be at such times. Thomas probably knew that he was playing his final card. In a life of twists and turns the climactic moment had at last arrived. There was no maneuvering out of it. He was adrift among forces beyond his control. At last, on this battlefield, his destiny would be decided.
Member Article: Constantinople - The Citadel at the Gate
by Comer Plummer, III
The art of fortification is a clear reflection of our past. It bears witness to our roots as a race of mutually hostile
societies, and impresses upon us the determination of a people to defend themselves.
It has existed ever since man first came to realize the value of natural obstacles to his common defense, and evolved
as he sought to invoke his own methods to fully exploit this advantage. The building of barriers rapidly evolved from
the simple mud parapets and mountain top abodes of the Neolithic Age to the construction of linear and point stone
obstacles of the Bronze Age, best represented by the Hittite capital of Hattusas.
Member Article: The Battle of Poyang Lake
by Joshua Gilbert
In late August 1363 AD the two main contenders for control of China,
Zhu Yuanzhang and Chen Youliang, faced off on Poyang (also called Boyang)
Lake, the largest freshwater body of water in China.
In the end Zhu Yuanzhang would win the battle and go on to found one of
China’s greatest dynasties: the Ming.
Member Article: Apocalypse Then: The
Battle of the Three Kings
by Comer Plummer
Don Sebastian, the twenty-four-year-old King of Portugal, rose early on the
morning of August 4, 1578. He was restless as they dressed him under the silken
tent in new armor, over which was applied a leather tunic to guard against the
heat of the Sun. Outside, the din of the camp was building as the army too
girded for battle. On the hills facing them, the Moroccan army was also
Member Article: The Emergence of Seapower in the Yuan Dynasty
by John J. Trombetta and Steven C. Ippolito
John Keegan views the Mongolian war-making polity as a fusion of the "horse
and human ruthlessness[.]" The great khans, Chinggis, Ogodei, Mongke, and
Khublai Khan, gathered the martial energies of the steppe nomad in the quest
for Empire, and released them like so many dogs of war upon Asia, Europe,
China, Korea, the Middle East of Persians and Arabs, and Japan. Results were
startling: extraordinary political changes that reworked the map of the
thirteenth century Asia, and a transformation of war in the Asian steppe
"making it for the first time," in the view of Keegan, "'a thing in
Member Article: The Hundred Years War: An Analysis of the Causes and Conduct of the Longest
by Patrick J. Shrier
The Hundred Years War between England and France from 1337-1453 is best viewed
as a series of interconnected wars with the same basic objective instead of as
one long war. There was not continuous fighting during the period nor did
England and France keep armies constantly in the field, rather it was almost a
game between the two countries with clearly defined rules as to when to fight
and when to rest. The period was marked by many truces some for just a season
and some lasting years. The most striking thing when one studies the wars of
the period is how the English army was almost invariably superior to the French
in capabilities yet somehow the English managed to lose the war.
Member Article: The Muslim Horde's Easy Invasion of Iberia
by Robert C. Daniels
After a short foray in July of 710 AD, Muslim forces from North Africa invaded
the Christian Iberian Peninsula (modern day Spain and Portugal) in the spring
of 711, and within two years, with the exception of the extreme northwestern
portion of the peninsula, had successfully overpowered and conquered the
Visigothic Christian realms of Iberia. Not only did it take the Frankish
forces under Charles Martel to stop the Muslim horde at the battle of Poitiers
in 732 from further intrusions into Western Europe, it would take nearly eight
centuries for the Iberian Christians to re-take the peninsula from the Muslims.
Member Article: The Orin War
by Joshua Gilbert
The Onin War, (so called because it occurred in the regnal year Onin 1), was
the catalyst that sparked the century long period of Japanese history known as
the Sengoku Jidai, the "Age of the Country at War". What began originally as a
dispute between a father and his son-in-law, became an eleven year war that
trashed the once great city of Kyoto and sparked an era of bloodshed that
remains famous to this day.
The Onin War began because of the weakness of one Shogun. In 1464, Ashikaga
Yoshimasa, the 8th member of the Ashikaga clan to hold the title
Seii-Taishogun, and a man renowned for his focus on tea parties and poetry,
wanted to retire but had no son. He decided to instead make his younger
brother, Yoshimi, his heir. However Yoshimi was a Buddhist monk, so the Shogun
had to first drag his brother out of the monastery in order to make him his
Member Article: The Battle of Shrewsbury
by John Barratt
By the beginning of the 15th century, the English longbowman was one of the
most effective killing machines in Western Europe. For over half a century he
had dominated the battlefields of France and Northern Spain, winning for
England’s Plantagenet monarchy an extensive continental domain. The battle of
Shrewsbury, described by a contemporary writer as “the sorry bataille of
Schrvesbury between Englysshmen and Englysshmen”, witnessed the dawn of a new
and more terrible era in English warfare, when, for the first time in a major
engagement, the English longbowman turned their deadly power against each
other. It was a foretaste of the bloodbath which would follow half a century
later in the Wars of the Roses, and would also provide William Shakespeare with
the inspiration for one of his greatest plays - King Henry IV Part One.
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Sexuality refers to one's capacity for sexual feelings, experiences and responses. The "Circles of Sexuality" model describes it as comprising five broad, interconnected areas: sensuality, intimacy, sexual identity, sexual health and reproduction. Sexuality is a complex blend of many biological phenomena and varies greatly from person to person.
Sexuality in humans typically begins developing in the early teenage years, during the biological process called puberty. Humans are among the few animals to engage in both reproductive and nonreproductive sex, and sexuality becomes a fundamental aspect of our personalities and social lives. It is often the driving force behind our strong emotional feelings toward others, as well as a motivator for many of our decisions and actions.
While it is ever-present in our lives, some aspects of sexuality still have societal taboos and stigmas attached to them. The historical taboos against homosexuality and the LGBTQ community, however, have begun to erode in recent years due to growing societal acceptance. (Photo: Shutterstock)
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New research from the Environmental Working Group shows that the animal products you eat have remarkably different affects on the environment .
The research shows that Lamb, beef and cheese have the highest emissions. In part this is because they come from ruminant animals that constantly generate methane through their digestive process. Methane (CH4) – a greenhouse gas 25 times more (CH4) potent than carbon dioxide (CO2), accounts for nearly half the emissions generated in this study’s Nebraska beef production model (see chart below). Pound for pound, ruminants also require significantly more energy-intensive feed and generate more manure than pork or chicken (see figure 2).
- Lamb has the greatest impact, generating 39.3 kg (86.4 lbs) of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) for each kilo eaten – about 50 percent more than beef. While beef and lamb generate comparable amounts of methane and require similar quantities of feed, lamb generates more emissions per kilo in part because it produces less edible meat relative to the sheep’s live weight. Since just one percent of the meat consumed by Americans is lamb, however, it contributes very little to overall U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
- Beef has the second-highest emissions, generating 27.1 kilos (59.6 lbs) of CO2e per kilo consumed. That’s more than twice the emissions of pork, nearly four times that of chicken and more than 13 times that of vegetable proteins such as beans, lentils and tofu. About 30 percent of the meat consumed in America is beef.
- Cheese generates the third-highest emissions, 13.5 kilos (29.7 lbs) of CO2e per kilo eaten, so vegetarians who eat a lot of dairy aren’t off the hook. Less dense cheese (such as cottage) results in fewer greenhouse gases since it takes less milk to produce it. It takes 10 pounds of milk to make 1 pound of cheese.
Full Lifecycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Common Proteins and Vegetables
The EWG are calling for us all to forgo meat and cheese one day a week, environmentally it would be the same as the country driving 91 billion fewer miles a year.
The call joins a growing movement advocating once-a-week meat-free meals, from an International Meatless Monday campaign and a European Veggie Days movement to decisions by some Catholic bishops to suggest a return to the no-meat Fridays of old.
The EWG report is the most recent in a long list calculating the greenhouse gases emitted in food production.
Source: Environmental Working Group
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Lockheed’s Missile and Space Division designed the YO-3A as a nearly silent observation aircraft. The United States Army used the plane to spot nighttime enemy activity and direct artillery fire during the war in Vietnam. A downward-facing periscope equipped with night vision and infrared (heat sensing) capabilities allowed the aircraft’s forward observer to spot activity on the jungle floor, even in nearly complete darkness.
The YO-3A and it's prototype, the QT-2 represent represented the first use of aerial stealth technology in combat. Unlike the stealth aircraft we know today, the QT-2 and YO-3A were not designed to hide from radar, but to hide from human detection. The plane’s muffler-equipped engine drove a special slow propeller that eliminated the buzzing sound typical of propeller aircraft. This let the YO-3A operate almost unheard by people on the ground. Lockheed project manager, Stanley Hall described the aircraft’s noise as “the gentle rushing sound of the ocean surf”.
The Museum’s aircraft, 69-18005, was the sixth of just 11 aircraft constructed. It served in Vietnam from 1970–1972 before it was sold to an aviation school. The Museum acquired the aircraft in 2010 from Mr. Bruce Elliot of La Connor, WA.
The YO-3A exhibit tells the story of this highly unique aircraft and looks at the sources of airplane noise and ongoing efforts to quiet them down.
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Creativity and Innovation. Students can be encouraged to identify interesting heroes and produce creative stories, short films, and artwork to honor them that can then be shared through the MY HERO website.
Communication and Collaboration. Since MY HERO includes participants and an audience from around the world, students embark on the path of creating clear and compelling content when they create their work for publication. Teachers have commented on student awareness of the impact of their work and the widespread reactions they receive.
Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making. Students employ online and offline critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making tools as they evaluate their research and decide on heroes to feature in their stories, artwork, or short film.
Digital Citizenship. As responsible global citizens, students consider heroic attributes that contribute positively to our world, and choose stories of heroism to share through their contributions to the MY HERO website.
Technology Operations and Concepts. Students consider, identify, and employ a range of software and hardware as they develop their MY HERO artwork, short film, or story.
By evaluating the level of understanding and competency students already have with regard to the use of technology tools, teachers can provide them with next steps and deeper challenges to encourage their mastery of NETS through MY HERO projects.
Technology operations and concepts. As teachers develop their lessons for students to develop stories, artwork, or short films for the MY HERO project, they practice what they will be asking their students to do, thus demonstrating and improving their own technology expertise.
Planning and designing learning environments and experiences. For over ten years, the MY HERO Project has collected student and adult stories focused on heroes in a variety of categories. Through an online tool, eCreate, teachers can build a page of hero stories on a particular curricular theme or interdisciplinary topics, or a page of their own students’ work and make them available to students. The opportunities for creating rich learning situations for students abound.
Teaching, learning, and the curriculum. Including MY HERO content in lessons and challenging students to research and write hero stories for inclusion on the site constitute fine examples of using technology in a meaningful way to maximize student learning.
Assessment and evaluation. To evaluate student work, teachers may require students to word process their stories, email them to the teacher, edit their work electronically, and upload their stories to the MY HERO site. Teachers can assess through observation, note taking on a laptop, or applying a rubric to online submissions.
Productivity and professional practice. As teachers share their MY HERO assignments with their colleagues via email, listservs, or forums, they can refine and improve the assignments they give their students.
Social, ethical, legal, and human issues. By allowing all students to explore the MY HERO project website and contribute stories, teachers address issues of equitable access, and support the idea of the power of diverse talents and experiences as students read a range of inspiring hero stories.
While administrators may not be directly involved with students and teachers as they engage in developing content for the classroom and the MY HERO website, administrators can make a powerful statement by encouraging teachers to develop curriculum that includes using and contributing to the MY HERO project.
Leadership and vision. Administrators, through their example, inspire good work. By becoming familiar with the many features of the MY HERO project, and allowing time for teachers to do the same, administrators provide a strong model for teachers who are working hard to integrate technology in a meaningful way in their classrooms.
Learning and teaching. Through inspiring stories of real people, students find their place in the world, and begin to see the potential each of us has to contribute to our world. The MY HERO project focuses attention on good work and positive contributions, while making it easy for students and teachers to use technology tools to add more curricular-based stories to the Y HERO global database.
Productivity and professional use. The MY HERO project includes a number of tools for teachers, such as eCreate, that are easy to use and allow teachers to develop personalized hero web pages for classroom use. Administrators can facilitate teacher and student improvement in employing technology by encouraging the use of projects such as MY HERO that utilize technology tools and resources embedded in curriculum. Administrators can be asked to contribute a hero story to a class project!
Support, management, and operations. A carefully monitored project such as MY HERO meets the guidelines set by most schools that direct online technology use. Because of the ease with which teachers from a variety of disciplines can develop a MY HERO project that meets their curricular goals, administrators can support this model for technology integration into curriculum.
Assessment and evaluation. Administrators can assess some levels of student and teacher fluency with technology by viewing her/his school’s contributions to the MY HERO project.
Social, legal, and ethical issues. By promoting online projects that pay attention to the good works of the world’s citizens, require research and citing sources, and provide an environment for a global exchange of ideas among students and teachers such as the MY HERO project, administrators model support for the best uses of technology in education.
The MY HERO project offers many opportunities for students, teachers, and administrators to practice and perfect technology standards identified by ISTE’s NETS project. At the same time, solid curricular goals and interesting content mark MY HERO stories, artwork, and short films. All this in a global context makes the MY HERO project a powerful addition to any school’s teaching and learning practices.
Common Core State Standards : Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects
The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers.
The Common Core Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects Standards are specifically for 6-12 and begin at grade 6; standards for K–5 reading in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects are integrated into the K–5 Reading standards. These standards in literacy work in tandem to define college and career readiness expectations—the former providing broad standards, the latter providing additional specificity.
Common Core - Media Standards
The Common Core Standards are a nationwide effort to define the knowledge and skills that U.S. students should have within their K-12 education careers, so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs.
The following is a collection of The Standards in English Language Arts that relate specifically to students' use of media in different grade levels. As you will see, the term "media" can refer to online, film/tv-related or artistic materials that can be utilized as sources in the course of research projects. Media can also refer to multi-media and/or artistic content that students create for class projects and presentations.
One of the goals of the CCS is that students will leave their schooling with a firm grasp of 21st-century media and technology skills. In calling for students to develop skills in both the critical analysis and production of media, the CCS recognizes the increasing importance of media literacy in the modern world. MY HERO shares this view, and our Media Arts curricula provide teachers with the tools they need to develop their students' mastery of media and technology.
In a time when so many schools and districts have cut their fine arts programs, a project that ties art to curriculum is a welcome idea. The MY HERO Project provides opportunities for students to create artwork on the hero theme, and produce short films on the topic as well.
The National Visual Arts Standards consist of six items and are discussed in three grade levels—K-4, 5-8, and 9-12—that promote developmentally appropriate student work and understanding of concepts. The six standards are as follows:
Understanding and applying media, techniques, and processes.
Using knowledge of structures and functions.
Choosing and evaluating a range of subject matter, symbols, and ideas.
Understanding the visual arts in relation to history and cultures.
Reflecting upon and assessing the characteristics and merits of their work and the work of others.
Making connections between visual arts and other disciplines.
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Dietary carbs are currently regarded as the culprit for most modern human diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative diseases. Indeed, numerous studies demonstrate the association between over consumption of carbs and a high percentage of blood sugar problems, obesity and cognitive impairments among modern humans from all age groups.
Consequently, carb-bashing today is at an all-time high. Many people develop carb phobia and low or no carb diets are now the darling of the media. So it seems, the two most popular dietary methods are currently carb or calorie restriction. Most, if not all diets are based on either one or both methods.
Yet, in spite of the growing awareness of the hazards of over consumption of carbs and calories, the rate of weight gain, obesity and blood sugar related diseases is still accelerating. To make matters worse, people who follow extreme low calorie or low carb diets often face unpleasant symptoms including mental and physical fatigue, chronic cravings for carbs (in particular sweets), loss of libido and severe mood swings. Bodybuilders, who try to slim down via low calorie low carb diets, often face similar adverse symptoms in addition to loss of muscle mass and strength.
Obviously, something must be wrong with the assumption that chronic carb and calorie restriction is the practical solution for most of modern disease. Even though the idea of carb and calorie restriction may very well work theoretically, in practical terms (in vivo) it fails.
The purpose of this article is to shed some light on the critical role of dietary carbs in human metabolism as well as to challenge the notion that carbs aren't essential for human survival. Finally, conclusions are presented together with some practical methods as to how to take advantage of dietary carbs for reaching a desired metabolic potential to build lean tissue (including muscles), burn fat and increase energy production.
Maximum oxygenation is a biological term that describes maximum energy production from metabolic processes that require oxygen. Active individuals, including athletes and bodybuilders, should note that maximum oxygenation is a principal key to maximum performance. The upcoming paragraph may be somewhat technical. Nevertheless, understanding this topic could mean the difference between average and superior capability to build muscles and ignite energy.
Living organisms derive most of their energy from oxidation-reduction (redox) reactions, which involve the transfer of electrons to the respiratory chain complex (an aerobic energy-yielding metabolic process that involves interaction between hydrogen protons and oxygen). Aerobic energy production requires oxygen and yields most of the energy needed for survival. In fact, the electron transfer system (oxidative phosphorylation) yields ten times more energy than the Krebs cycle itself.
Dr. Otto Warburg, one of the world's foremost leading biochemists, won a Nobel Prize for his basic work with respiratory enzymes and cellular energy production. He discovered and characterized certain nucleotide compounds and proteins, which are necessary for the actions of the respiratory chain, which, as noted, yields most of the energy needed to maintain an optimum metabolic state.
Dr. Warburg suggested that energy released in the oxidation of foodstuff may be conserved and transferred via a special mechanism for use in synthesis and growth. On the other hand, anaerobic respiration (an energy yielding metabolic process that does not require oxygen) may adversely catabolize and damage healthy tissues. Dr. Warburg and other researchers showed that there is indeed a relationship between anaerobic respiration, tissue destruction and cancer. Dr. Abram Hoffer and Dr. Morton Walker, in their book Smart Nutrition (Avery 1994), suggested that anaerobic respiration is the most primitive energy producing method compared to aerobic respiration which is a later development in the evolution of life from unicellular to multicellular organisms. It is likely that multicellular organisms did not develop until cells became aerobic.
According to this theory, the switch back from aerobic to anaerobic respiration brings the cell back to a primitive condition that may cause uncontrolled cell division and a resultant catastrophic damage to the whole organism. As you're about to see, aerobic respiration clearly depends on dietary carb utilization and the production of substrates and enzymes that serve as energy molecules. All energy molecules are, in fact, made from nucleotides. Most important, all nucleotide material, including all energy molecules, are derived from glucose that is then predominantly derived from dietary carbs.
The Essential Role of Carbs
It is commonly assumed that carbs serve as fuel and nothing more. This assumption is wrong and quite misleading since it fails to recognize the main biological functions of carbs, which go far beyond being just a sheer substrate for energy. Evidently, optimum carb utilization from food is critically necessary in order to afford full activation of two vitally important metabolic pathways, which are bound together: i) the pentose phosphate pathway and ii) the uronic acid pathway.
As you'll soon see, these pathways play essential roles in facilitating DNA, RNA and nucleotides synthesis as well as steroid hormones production, enhancing immunity and generation of energy. As such, these pathways regulate hormonal actions, rate of tissue regeneration as well as protection against DNA damage and disease. Most important, both pathways' actions depend upon dietary carb consumption and utilization.
The Pentose Phosphate Pathway
The pentose phosphate pathway (PPP) is an anabolic process that is derived from glucose metabolism and occurs mostly (but not exclusively) in the liver. It utilizes pentose (a five-carbon sugar) from and glucose (a six-carbon sugar).
The pentose phosphate pathway's primary functions are:
- To generate the energy molecule NADPH for biosynthesis reaction in the cells
- To provide ribose-5 phosphate for the synthesis of nucleotides and nucleic acid including DNA and RNA
- To metabolize dietary pentose from the digestion of nucleic acid
- To biosynthesize steroid hormones and fatty acids (by utilizing in NADPH)
- To regenerate the most powerful antioxidant glutathione enzyme and thereby protect cells and mitochondrial DNA from oxidative stress and aging
- To support the production of UDP glucuronic acid, that is essentially important for overall detoxification. Hormonal transport production of proteoglycan and glycoproteins and the synthesis of sphingolipids (lipids that are necessary for detox and neural protection)
The Adverse Effects of Low Calorie and Low Carb Diets
As you can see, the pentose phosphate pathway controls critical metabolic functions. However, in times of a desperate need for energy, such as during prolonged fasting or due to low calorie diets, the pentose phosphate pathway may shut down its main functions and instead switch into sheer energy production. It is likely that energy demand is a top priority for the body and therefore, in times of desperate need for energy, the body would suppress certain important metabolic pathways to accelerate immediate energy production. In fact, 30 percent of liver glucose oxidation can occur via the pentose phosphate pathway.
Consequently, dietary carb utilization is a factor that can significantly influence the pentose phosphate pathway's actions. Since the synthesis of glucose from protein or fat (gluconeogenesis) is in fact a limited metabolic process that occurs mostly in the liver (muscle can't produce glucose), it is reasonable to conclude that severe low carb diets, for active individuals in particular, which chronically over-restrict dietary carb consumption (under 100g of carbs per day), may adversely affect the pentose phosphate pathway due to insufficient glucose supply and increased energy demand.
The pentose phosphate pathway's actions also decreases with age, a fact that may contribute to the decline in steroid hormone production, muscle waste, increased vulnerability to disease and reduced energy production. Finally, it's important to note that insulin sensitivity is necessary for optimum glucose utilization and the activation of the pentose phosphate pathway.
Glucuronic Acid Pathway (or Uronic Acid Pathway)
The glucuronic acid pathway, or as it is called, uronic acid pathway, is also derived from glucose metabolism, mostly in the liver. Its active compound UDP glucuronic acid is a co-enzyme responsible for binding with toxins to facilitate their elimination. In that respect, UDP glucuronate conjugates with endotoxins such as bilrubine (a toxin metabolite of hemoglobin and dietary meat) as well as sulphoric acid and thereby protects the body from endotoxicity and exposure to carcinogens.
SIDEBAR: Meat Eaters and Coffee Drinkers
Meat eaters and coffee drinkers should be aware of the important role that glucuronate plays in overall detox, in particular with regard to the digestion and assimilation of animal protein and the neutralization of coffee acid toxin compounds.
The Uronic Acid Pathway is a primal evolutionary metabolic process that initially synthesizes Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) in mammals, except in primates including humans. Nevertheless, UDP glucuronic acid's primal actions include:
- The transport of fat soluble hormones and substances to target tissues for subsequent release
- The production of proteoglycans and glycoconjugated compounds such as glucosamine glycan and glycoproteins, which perform critical immune and hormonal signaling functions on the cell surface and in the extracellular matrix. Some proteoglycans serve as growth factor receptors.
The uronic acid pathway also regulates the production of sphingolipids (lipids which are based on a lipophilic amino alcohol backbone rather than glycerol). Sphingolipids play an important role in transduction signals, protection against toxins, viruses and bacteria, activation of cell receptors and neuroprotective actions. The glucuronic acid pathway functions depend on the pentose phosphate pathway and therefore depends on overall glucose metabolism. Evidently, both pathways' optimal actions requires sufficient dietary carb utilization.
In summary, dietary carbs and glucose utilization go far beyond just sheer energy production. Chronic carb or calorie over restrictions may help one lose fat in the short run. However, in the long run, such dietary methods may diminish the essentially important pentose phosphate pathway with its related UDP glucuronic acid functions and thereby adversely affect critical metabolic processes including steroid hormone synthesis, nucleic acid and nucleotides production, tissue repair, removal of toxins and overall generation of energy.
Bodybuilders and athletes should never overlook the important role of carb utilization in muscular development and overall performance. Nonetheless, the question remains - how can one practically consume carbs in order to maximize all the beneficial effects without causing insulin resistance or fat gain?
How To Take Advantage of Dietary Carbs for Building Lean Tissue, Removing Toxins, Burning Fat and Igniting Maximum Energy
- Avoid prolonged low calorie or crash diets to grant sufficient energy supply necessary for optimum function of the pentose phosphate pathway and the related uronic acid pathway
- Avoid chronic carb over restriction due to prolonged very low or no carb diets. Insufficient carb utilization may adversely affect the pentose phosphate pathway and its related UDP glucuronic acid functions.
- Limit your carb consumption to one meal per day, preferably at night. That way you may be able to keep high insulin sensitivity toward the end of the day and thereby afford optimum carb utilization.
- You can opt to cycle between days of low carbs and days of moderate to high carbs. This method could be highly effective in protecting against insulin resistance and preventing fat gain, while maximizing carb utilization for overall regeneration of tissue and ignition of energy. For instance, you can incorporate a high carb day followed by two days of low carbs (high fat), followed by a moderate carb day, followed by a low carb high protein day, and so on.
- Minimize simple carb consumption. Prioritize your dietary carb intake. Always choose complex carbs with low a glycemic index and those that are naturally high in fiber. The best choices for carb food are legumes, roots, squashes, barley, oats, wild rice and quinoa. Whole complex carb food releases glucose at a slower rate than simple carb food and therefore may afford better glucose utilization with a decreased risk of insulin and blood sugar fluctuation.
- Do not eat carbs alone, in particular grains or roots. Always combine these carbs with protein or fat to decrease their glycemic effect. Carbs alone may provoke an insulin spike and a consequent low blood sugar with symptoms such as dizziness, fatigue, irritability, headaches and a craving for sweets. Bodybuilders and athletes should carefully design their pre-workout recovery meals to contain a high ratio of protein to carbs.
- Eating low glycemic whole fruits such as apples, berries or kiwis on an empty stomach is ok. Nonetheless, it is highly recommended to squeeze lime or lemon juice on the top. Acid slows the rate of carb absorption. The fiber in whole fruits significantly reduces the sugar impact and effectively enhances overall detox.
- Take multivitamin and multimineral supplements as well as EFAs to facilitate optimum assimilation of all essential nutrients. A lack of even one essential nutrient may lead to severe metabolic impairment and compromise the ability of the body to utilize glucose and energy. B vitamins, in particular, are precursors to co-enzymes, which are vitally important for glucose and energy utilization. Antioxidants are necessary for protection against oxidative free radicals and overall detox. Note that active individuals, including bodybuilders and athletes, need to increase essential nutrients and antioxidant intake due to higher food consumption and increased oxygenation with their respective waste and toxin metabolites.
Dietary carbs should be regarded as a double edge sword. Nonetheless, in times of so much confusion as to what to eat and how much, it's important to present another way of looking at food, including carbohydrate-rich foods.
Food should be regarded as a source of complete nourishment and as
such, it should satisfy three requirements:
- Food should supply all essential and conditionally essential nutrients
- Food should be clean of chemical toxins. It should smell and taste well and be fully digestible.
- Food should supply an optimal amount of energy substrates (including glucose) to satisfy the body's metabolic needs. Optimum means: the right amount needed - no less, no more!
Dietary carbs are a most viable source of conditionally essential glucose as well as fiber, minerals, oils and phytonutrients. Carbs add unique taste, smell and aroma to food and are considered the cleanest and most digestible fuel. One should never dismiss the importance of smell, taste and overall satiety from food. Hunger and satiety mark the presence of most powerful neuropeptides that aside from regulating feeding cycles, also regulate hormonal secretion, sleep-awake cycles, aggression and relaxation, regeneration of tissues (growth), overall energy expenditure and rate of fat burning.
From that aspect, both sensation of hunger and satisfaction from food are necessary for maximum nourishment. Food works as a source of nutrients and also as a neurocatalyst for other numerous critical metabolic functions that regulate the rate of growth, fat burning and energy production. Chronically over restricting or eliminating dietary carbs from one's diet may lead to severe consequences including hormonal and neural impairments, stunted growth, sluggish metabolism and advanced aging, notwithstanding chronic hunger, in particular craving for sweets, mood swings, depression and fatigue.
Saying all that, carbs should always be treated as the fastest to assimilate and most aggressive component of food. As noted, they should never be consumed too often during the day to avoid insulin resistance and blood sugar fluctuation.
Finally, use your instincts and common sense. Through trial and error, you can find the right amount of carbs that your body needs. Using old dietary methods such as carb depletion followed by carb the loading will enable you to periodically consume a large amount of carbs without gaining fat. Remember, what you see is what you get, and in a related matter, what looks good, smells good and tastes good is generally good.
Regardless of what many low carb advocates say, our human body is well preprogrammed to ingest and utilize carbs. Therefore, chronically over restricting or avoiding carbs may be biologically perceived by the body as a suppression of a primal need. When you go against your true nature, your body may come back with a vengeance to reclaim what was taken away from it, and it will do so by inducing an excruciating hunger with a chronic cravings for sweets, that often leads to compulsive binging on carbs and undesirable fat gain. Do not deny your body from its primal need to eat carbs. Do not tempt to fool your body with carb substitutes and artificial sweeteners. Nothing can take the place of real dietary carbs and their critical function in your body.
NOTE: People suffering from diabetes and blood sugar related problems should consult their physician or health professional before adopting any dietary regimen.
||Ori Hofmekler is a modern renaissance man whose formative military experience prompted a life interest in survival science. Defense Nutrition's mission is to help people defend themselves against industrial and natural substances known for causing weight gain, hormonal disorders and cancer. Find out more at www.DefenseNutrition.com
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National Alliance on Mental Illness
page printed from http://www.nami.org/
(800) 950-NAMI; [email protected]
Using Virtual Reality to Treat PTSD
Dr. Robert McLay with some of the virtual reality equipment used for treatment. Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Press
By Taylor Poor, NAMI Education Program Coordinator
Dr. Robert N. McLay’s recent book, At War with PTSD: Battling Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with Virtual Reality (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), offers a valuable lesson about treating people rather than diseases. After all, as the author says, “doing mental health is not just about biology.”
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a type of anxiety disorder associated with the direct or indirect experience of a traumatic event, and often involves memory disturbances, emotional detachment, hypervigilance (abnormally increased arousal) or insomnia. Though soldiers have endured the psychological consequences of armed combat for millennia, PTSD has gained credence only recently as a biological disease with a potentially measurable impact on the brain, a disease that can occur at any age, following any type of traumatic experience, from assault or rape to war or a natural disaster. But the increase of PTSD’s validity as a clinical diagnosis does not protect service members and veterans from the shame of the stigma they face from comrades-in-arms—and from the civilian population once they return home.
At War with PTSD: Battling Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with Virtual Reality
By Robert N. McLay
Dr. McLay emphasizes the importance of looking at where patients are coming from before starting treatment, whether that’s the battlefield, a prison, or a home with domestic abuse. He draws from countless individual testimonies (“psychiatric fables”) to illustrate the diversity of patients who are looking for different solutions and who require different approaches. Maybe the same basic treatment techniques will find success with both service members and non-service members experiencing PTSD, but for those service members, the idea that “somebody else gets it” is important; it’s helpful to talk to a military psychiatrist rather than a civilian doctor.
However, the distinction between combat PTSD and other types of PTSD isn’t necessarily clinical. Dr. McLay explains that combat PTSD is typically a version of “complex PTSD,” involving multiple, compounded traumatic incidents; unlike “simple PTSD,” which involves a single incident. However, the unique components of combat trauma, combined with the military atmosphere (“no problem marines can’t solve by more yelling”), demand a fine-tuned and circumspect treatment approach.
Dr. McLay always intended to join the military as a scientist, but “put it on the back burner” while at work on his B.A., M.A., Ph.D. and M.D. When the Navy offered him a job, he found the perfect arena for his psychiatric expertise: directing development programs for new technology to assist service members experiencing the stress of deployment. In 2008, he took a virtual reality machine with him on deployment to Camp Fallujah, Iraq, where he tested the effectiveness of virtual reality therapy on soldiers living with PTSD in the field. From the service members he treated, he learned about the values of confronting traumatic experiences head-on, through reconstructed combat landscapes, as well as the limitations of any form of treatment in the face of stigma and skepticism.
At the end of his book, Dr. McLay talks about the future of PTSD treatment for service members. He asks about two components of this future: reduction in stigma and scientific improvements in treatment.
Regarding stigma, the current landscape remains bleak: the world of psychiatric treatment for military veterans is a murky swamp of “perverse incentives”, Dr. McLay explained on the phone at the end of October. On the one hand, he believes initiatives to officially grant service members with PTSD eligibility for prestigious honors such as the Purple Heart (an unsuccessful political cause since World War I, and one NAMI supports) are well-intentioned efforts to reward bravery and to recognize that PTSD represents a real war wound, thereby reducing stigma.
However, Dr. McLay also believes that the difficulties of separating valid PTSD cases from “malingering”—faking illness to avoid duty—mean awarding the Purple Heart for PTSD could in fact worsen stigma as an unintended consequence. Meanwhile, service members who face discrimination when they apply for disability benefits without a visible wound are unlikely to then seek treatment, and thus possibly lose those hard-won benefits.
On the other hand, continuing advances in research and technology paint a brighter picture. Dr. McLay has cautiously gained confidence in virtual reality treatments since his return to the U.S., but is “convinced VR is not going to solve all our problems.” Other promising possibilities include: stellate ganglion block, or an anesthetic injection to a spinal nerve cluster that alleviates pain and some other PTSD symptoms; transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which involves producing weak electric currents in the brain; and “third location”, or staged, decompression, where instead of being transported straight back into civilian society, service members returning from duty can spend a period of time in a non-combat zone outside of their home country. All of these techniques serve to widen the array of treatment options that can be personalized to reflect an individual patient’s hopes and priorities.
The reason Dr. McLay’s book doesn’t feel like the typical treatise on a controversial mental health diagnosis is his unassuming tone. There is no pedagogy about symptomatology or the complexities of PTSD: he seems to be simply taking the reader along for the ride as he figures out the answers—or some possible answers, at least—to the very questions he’s just asked in the text. His final message, which he reiterates on the phone, is similarly simple: the only way to reduce stigma is “to get the word out” about mental illness, and particularly PTSD. With the help of accessible, informative and compelling books like At War With PTSD, that goal seems more reachable than ever.
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Joined: 16 Mar 2004
|Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 11:36 am Post subject: Assembly lines for nanotechnology.
|24 August 2007 RSC Publishing - Chemical Technology
Nano production lines
Researchers in Switzerland have built nanoscale cargo loading stations and shuttles, an important step towards assembly lines for nanotechnology.
Drawing of a nano conveyor belt
Biological assembly lines consist of kinesin proteins which carry cargo, like organelles or vesicles, and literally walk along microtubules. However, as far as man-made systems go, 'nothing comparable to a macroscopic assembly line exists at the nanoscale,' according to Viola Vogel of the Department of Materials at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. 'Imagine if you wanted to build a car by fabricating all of its components, putting them in a glass full of water and hoping that they would self-assemble spontaneously into the finished car.'
The challenge is to tune the interactions in the system so that the cargo remains stuck to the station when not needed, but can be picked up easily by the shuttle. As a test of principle, Vogel and colleagues used gold nanoparticles coated in anti-biotin antibodies as cargo, and compared loading stations made of biotin-tipped DNA with biotin-tipped polyethylene glycol. Biotinylated microtubules, powered by kinesin motors, act as shuttles rather than conveyor belts, as they do in cells.
Vogel and team then tracked the fate of the gold nanoparticles with scanning electron microscopy. They found that the shuttles did indeed pick up the nanoparticles and that they held on to them, with a loss rate of about 28% over 12 minutes. They also found that DNA stations are more effective than polymer ones.
'Future challenges will be to combine the main components of a transport system: pick-up of cargo from defined locations, guided transport, and controlled discharge of the load at the final destination,' commented Vogel. She went on to caution: 'The problems are always in the details of working through the engineering challenges of interfacing biological molecules with synthetic devices.'
Story posted: 24th August 2007
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Materials Science Research Rack Heats Up For Valuable Space Station Science
Have you ever wondered how we develop new materials or find out what properties we can change in existing materials to improve them? Scientists and researchers at NASA are doing just that through materials science research using the Materials Science Research Rack (MSRR
) aboard the International Space Station
Materials science research is the applied study of the properties of matter and substances. This type of research in space benefits from the microgravity environment, and it allows researchers to isolate chemical and thermal properties of materials from the effects of gravity.
The MSRR is about the size of a large refrigerator and contains two furnace inserts that can heat materials to temperatures of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Cartridges are placed inside the furnace insert one at a time for processing. Once a cartridge is in place, the experiment can be run from the ground. Processed samples are returned to Earth as soon as possible for evaluation and comparison of their properties to samples from similarly processed cartridges on the ground. Researchers have used the rack to process 16 samples of different materials since the facility launched to the space station in 2009.
In late 2011, there was a loss of communications between the MSRR and the computer that controls it. The automatic safety procedures on the rack caused it to shut down as designed; but, in doing so, it also caused the temperatures inside the furnace to exceed their normal limits. These higher temperatures caused some of the material inside the furnace to become bonded to the furnace itself. This required the station crew to clean the furnace and remove the materials.
To prevent such an event from happening again, Shawn Reagan, manager of the MSRR project at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and his team worked with Marshall engineers to design a software upgrade for the MSRR. This update will prevent this scenario from occurring in the future, allowing the facility to begin processing samples again.
"The MSRR has been a great tool in understanding how different materials like ceramics or metals react when heat is applied to them in space," said Reagan. "The original design of the software that controls the MSRR called for it to shut down within 30 seconds of losing communications from the main computer that controls it. Through our experience over the last several years on how the MSRR operates, we were able to design a much more efficient software program that will allow the furnace to stay operating for up to three hours after losing communications. This will give researchers enough time to troubleshoot any problems and prevent any contamination of the furnace due to overheating of materials."
Getting the MSRR back online is important because applied materials science is essential for the development of new, safer, stronger and more durable materials for use throughout everyday life. One of the goals of performing research in space is to gain a better understanding of the role of gravity in the microstructural development during solidification.
One of the first experiments
performed on the MSRR melted and solidified an aluminum and silicon alloy. This type of processing typically is used for producing commercially important products such as high temperature turbine blades.
The MSRR was fired up on Jan. 23 and began its work processing the first of 11 new samples that will be tested over the next several months.
"Everything looks great and the first sample was processed successfully," said Reagan. "We are really proud of our team for working through these issues with the MSRR and designing this software to make it work even better. This is what science is all about -- working through challenges and coming out of those with an even better product."
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center
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Talking Points on the Environment #14
Checklist for Endangered Species Act Reform
Congress will soon take up the issue of Endangered Species Act reform.
Before Congress can devise a species protection plan that will work for all
species -- both humans and wildlife -- it must first:
- Realize that the American people want genuine species protection and that
an incentive-based plan must be devised. While most Americans would object to
the excesses of the current Endangered Species Act -- excessive protections
afforded the Flat-Spired Snail, for example -- most favor some form of
protection for the most valued species. The best way to protect these species
while protecting individual liberty is through a voluntary, incentive-based
- Recognize that the current Endangered Species Act has failed. Some 900
plants and animals are currently listed as either "endangered" or "threatened"
under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and nearly 4,000 other species are
either candidates for future listing or are in the process of being listed.
Since the ESA's inception 21 years ago, only 27 species have managed to get off
the "endangered" list. Of these, seven were delisted due to
extinction. The remaining delistings were due to "data error"
(meaning the species was wrongly listed in the first place), court orders, or
species improvement unrelated to the ESA. The ESA has failed at its central
mission -- protecting and recovering endangered and threatened species.
- Understand why the Endangered Species Act has failed. The ESA has failed
because it creates perverse incentives that actually encourage the destruction
of species habitat. Under the ESA, private landowners can be barred from
engaging in activities such as farming if their property is identified as
potential habitat for an endangered species. Since the government offers no
compensation for either the revenue or property value losses that result,
landowners have an incentive to make sure their land will not attract species.
They also have an incentive to harvest whatever natural resources their land
possesses quickly while they still have access to them, damaging habitat in the
- Accept that a goal of reform is to eliminate injustice, not simply to
limit that injustice to a relative few. The ESA is fundamentally flawed and
should be replaced. Piecemeal reforms -- those that simply tinker with
existing law -- will do little to protect endangered species and little to help
those who have been forced to foot the bill for what is essentially a public
good. A species protection plan that protects both species and individuals'
constitutionally-guaranteed private property rights is possible. But
protection of property rights must be absolute: Reforms that solve some of the
ESA's problems while continuing to place an unjust burden on small numbers of
politically-powerless Americans is unethical and doomed to failure.
Recommendations developed based on information from David Ridenour of The
National Center for Public Policy Research; Myron Ebell, formerly of the
American Land Rights Association; John Shanahan of The Heritage Foundation; "Perverse
Incentives and Endangered Species," by Brian Seasholes of the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, The Washington Times, April 6, 1995; and NWI Resource ,
Issue Date: April 12, 1995
Talking Points on the Economy: Environment #14, published by The National
Center for Public Policy Research, 501 Capitol Ct NE, Washington, D.C.
20002 Tel. (202) 543-4110, Fax (202)543-5975, [email protected],
http://www.nationalcenter/inter.net. For more information about Talking Points
on the Economy: Environment #14 contact Bob Adams at 202/543-4110 or
<<< Return to the Science and Environment
<<< Return to the Talking Points on the
Environment Cards Page
<<< Return to the NCPPR Home Page
| 3.230466 |
When James III was killed at Sauchieburn, his fifteen-year-old son James IV succeeded him. He had been the rebels? assumed figurehead, and for his indirect role in his father?s death James decided to wear a heavy iron belt for the rest of his life. A highly intelligent man, James IV proved an effective ruler. He spoke many languages and took an interest in literature, science and law. Determined to establish strong central leadership he suppressed the Lordship of the Isles and created a powerful navy. In 1503 he married the English king?s daughter, Margaret Tudor, in an attempt to create peace between the two countries. However, when England invaded France, James felt obliged to assist his old ally. He confronted the English army in 1513 but was killed in the disastrous battle of Flodden.
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by William Wasden Jr.
Introduction by Cle–alls (Dr. John Medicine Horse Kelly)
The potlatch is the traditional way that North America's northwest Aboriginal people have always celebrated important events. Potlatches are the gatherings at which communities install chiefs, adopt new family members, make peace and more. These lavish affairs include feasting, speeches, gift–giving, songs and dances. But, between 1884 and 1951, the Canadian government outlawed our potlatches. Since then, slowly, very slowly, we have begun anew to openly conduct these crucial celebrations and all that goes with them.
Non–Aboriginal authorities also attempted to nullify our ability to identify ourselves in our own words. Now, many of us are reviving our traditional names, both individuals and entire nations. As a Haida, my Taas Laanaagaas clan (Sandy Beach People) gave me the name of my grandfather, the Rev. Minister Peter Kelly: Cle–alls (Fireweed, or the Orator). That name is an immense honour. But it is an equally immense responsibility. I use Cle–alls daily now and prefer it to my English name. A growing number of people in our region do the same.
Years ago, the great Professor Franz Boas (1858–1942) and his eminent disciples laboured long and hard to document our languages and cultures. I, for one, appreciate their efforts. However, even those well–meaning people made mistakes. For example, Professor Boas called one First Nation the Kwaguił. But, the proper name that covers all those people is Kwakwaka'wakw.
Also, see how I have spelled Kwagu'ł? The "ł" symbol refers to a special sound that is like a breathy 't' and 'l' combined into one. But, it does not occur in English, so Professor Boas chose to write the ł as "tl". It is as close as an English–only keyboard can get.
The ł sound suggests an important truth: Northwest coastal Aboriginal languages, dances, songs, stories, sounds, words and meanings belong solely to our peoples. We treat them as heirlooms, as other North Americans regard gold, silver, or diamonds. Northwest cultures are unique to the Kwakwaka'wakw nation and its neighbors, the Salish, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Nisga'a and my own people, the Haida.
That is one reason why not only we but the entire world must do everything possible to keep these languages, songs, dances and stories alive. If they die, our people and our children – and the human race – will lose something that no one can ever recover. Our languages, celebrations and traditions define who we are, and they keep our heritages alive.
They are our lifeblood.
How'a and How'a sta,
Cle–alls (Dr. John Medicine Horse Kelly)
* * *
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EVEN a material 10 billion times as strong as steel has a breaking point. It seems neutron stars may shatter under extreme forces, explaining puzzling X-ray flares.
Neutron stars are dense remnants of stars gone supernova, packing the mass of the sun into a sphere the size of a city. Their cores may be fluid, but their outer surfaces are solid and extremely tough - making graphene, the strongest material on Earth, look like tissue paper by comparison.
These shells may shatter, though, in the final few seconds before a pair of neutron stars merges to form a black hole - a union thought to generate explosions known as short gamma-ray bursts.
David Tsang of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues have calculated how the mutual gravitational pull of such stars will distort their shape, creating moving tidal bulges. As the stars spiral towards each other, orbiting ever faster, they squeeze and stretch each other ever faster too.
A few seconds before the stars merge, the frequency of this squeezing and stretching matches the frequency at which one of the stars vibrates most easily. This creates a resonance that boosts the vibrations dramatically, causing the star's crust to crack in many places - just as a wine glass may shatter when a certain note is sung, the team says (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.108.011102).
The star's gravity is too powerful to let the pieces fly away, but the sudden movement can disturb its magnetic field, accelerating electrons and leading to a powerful X-ray flare. That could explain observations by NASA's Swift satellite in which a blast of X-rays preceded some short gamma-ray bursts by a few seconds.
Combining observations of X-ray flares with those of gravitational waves emitted by the stars as they spiral together could fix the exact frequency at which the shattering occurs, which would reveal more about the stars' mysterious interiors, says Tsang.
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The social studies curriculum builds a strong understanding of history, geography, civics, current events, economics, and world cultures. Students learn about United States and world history including eras, themes, and significant events that are central to understanding the experiences of other times and other nations. The study of economics and current events help students understand the forces that shape both the world and their personal lives. Understanding civics and government allow students to see their responsibilities as citizens, and the shows how the interactions of different kinds of governments play out on the world stage. The development of geographic principles allows students to comprehend and analyze current events on a national and international level. Additionally, the curriculum examines world cultures, allowing students to compare the aspects of American life with other societies of modern times and the past.
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We have been chatting about lowercase ls a lot around here lately because my son recently gained a new sight word FIRE (it’s always all in caps on extinguishers, fire doors etc..) – and the uppercase i throws him off sometimes. So we had a brief discussion about fonts ( using your computer to show all the silly different ways to make the same letter is a great way to play with that idea), and decided since we were talking so much about this letter we’d use it for this week’s craft.
- Gather your materials. You will need a full sheet of blue construction paper, some white, yellow and red as well. Glue, blue markers , scissors and sea life stickers.
- Write a lowercase l on some white paper.
- Start by having your child draw waves on the paper. I was so surprised that this was my son’s favorite part, he was so into it, carefully drawing squiggly lines.
- Next add sea life to the ocean. This is not a must do step but I think it’s important to reinforce some learning about the sea. We took time to talk about the different animals on the stickers ( crabs, sea horses, fish and starfish) and peeling those little stickers off is great fine motor practice.
- While they are working on their ocean, cut out the red roof and yellow ray of light.
- Hand them the lowercase l, ask them what letter it is, sounds it makes and why you are making it into a lighthouse.
- My son insisted on making red stripes on it , so I grabbed him a crayon. ( Mental note where is my red marker?? Can’t find it anywhere.)
- Cut the l out.
- Add glue to your ocean
- Add your lighthouse, my son’s was way to the right only because he didn’t want to cover any of his stickers. Place yours wherever as long as it’s vertical .
- Add the roof
- Add the ray of light and let dry.
Over the Irish Sea
When I was 1 I sucked my thumb
and then I went to sea
I climbed aboard a pirate ship
and the captain said to me
“Let’s go this way , and that way.
backwards and forwards,
over the Irish sea!”
* Continue counting with rhyming words like 2 and shoe, 3 and knee etc
Books About The Sea!
Stanley at Sea by Linda Bailey made me giggle . The story is about 4 dogs that go out to sea unintentionally when they are searching for food. While out there they start wondering when outside will end because the sea is so wide and they are so far from land. One dog suggest that outside will end when then hit a fence. Sure enough they hit what they think is a fence, what readers know is a tanker and are rescued and fed steak and sausages they can eat before being returned to their owners. Doggie nirvana for sure. I love that the book is presented through the dog’s perspective, it gives young kids a chance to laugh and correct the dogs ideas about the things they encounter.
My Very Own Lighthouse by Francisco Cunha is a book about what it’s like to watch a parent go out to sea while you wait at home for their safe return. The little girl in this book is worried about her dad who is a fisherman so her mom explains to her why there are lighthouses. She decides to make her very own so that she can keep her daddy safe. I love the authors deep understanding of childhood anxiety, and how he has her gain some control by making her very own lighthouse with toys and a star. It’s not realism ( using a star as the light) , but any child will relate to the shift in power from being afraid and having nightmares to feeling as though she is actively helping keep her dad safe.
A Sea-Wishing Day by Robert Heidbreder is a wonderful tale of adventure, pirates, mermaids and treasure! The best part the little boy and his canine companion never really leave his backyard in the city , instead the adventure is all in their imagination. Anyone with a preschooler will appreciate this book, playing pretend is a huge part of most 3-5 year old’s playtime, and it should be. This book encourages, as well as celebrates that as this little boy discovers adventures on the high sea.
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Boat b !
When I presented my son with 4 different b themes to choose from his choice was clear, “Boat bbbb boat, boat let’s make a boat!” so we did. I have been enjoying watching him trace the letters now instead of scribbling on them randomly like he used to. It’s clear his ability to write is naturally emerging and I am tickled to see it come out like this. What new development have you seen your child do recently? Leave a comment and share!
- Gather your materials. You will need 3 full sheets of construction paper, and one smaller blue piece for waves, glue, scissors and markers. The letter stickers are optional .
- Start by writing a large lowercase b on one sheet of construction paper.
- Have your child decorate it as they see fit. Mine like I said is big into tracing, which is very interesting since I have never once done a letter tracing work sheet with him.
- While they do that draw 2 sails and a boat on another sheet, as well as some waves on the smaller blue piece.
- Have them color the sail and boat with markers when they are done with the b.
- My son insisted on cutting out the waves himself. So I grabbed his scissors too. I cut out the boat and sails while he was doing this.
- Glue the waves on the remaining full sheet of paper.
- Glue the b on and add the glue for the boat and sails.
- Add the sails.
- Add the boat.
- Give the boat a name- using the letter stickers and let dry.
Sail Away by Donald Crews was a huge hit. I can’t say I am surprised at all my son loves this author and it’s easy to understand why. The text is simple, as is the premise of the book. Readers don’t get deeply invested in the characters, they are faceless people on a sail boat, instead the focus is on the boat istself. Where it goes, how the weather affects it and how it gets beck to where it started from. I have always enjoyed the use of light in Donald Crews books, you don’t have to explain to your child that a storm is coming or that time has passed because the light in the illustrations does the explaining for you. Great boat book!
Toy Boat by Randall de Seve is a story that will pull at your heart as well as make you cheer, well it made my 3 year old cheer anyway! A little boy makes his very own toy boat and plays with it, in the tub and even sleeps with it. One day when he is at the beach it floats off into the open ocean. It’s turbulent, scary and well anxious to see this tiny boat made of household things fight the waves. My son was visibly shaken by it’s unintentional freedom. With a little help from a friendly fishing boat the toy boat returns home and both boat and boy rejoice. This is a common theme for boat books- but the illustrations by Loren Long really help this one stand out above the others. My son cheered every time we read the part when they are reunited!
More Boat Crafts & Books
Pretend play activities that combine imaginative play with crafts are our favorite things to do lately. Also our supplies are made up of many recycled and reusable materials. This can be done with boxes, wagons pretty much anything your child can sit in! When they are pretending go along with their suggestions and let them lead. It’s your turn to ask “Why?” and follow along. Most of all have fun.
- Gather your materials. We are using a laundry basket, some party streamers, a wrapping paper tube, some painters tape, pipe cleaners, a paper grocery bag, sticky back foam, markers and scissors.
- Start by having your child decorate the mast of the sail ( aka the wrapping paper tube) with markers and foam.
- While they are doing that , draw a sail on the inside of the grocery bag.
- Fold and cut two layers ( so the inside is facing out ) of sail.
- Decorate the sail with markers and foam.
- Tape the sail to the mast. I am using painters tape because my son likes the blue. Any tape will work.
- Decorate the boat. We weaved the party streamers in and out of the little holes on the sides of our basket. I didn’t want anything sticky in the basket since my laundry does sometimes get put in it.
- Attach the mast. I am using pipe cleaners wrapped around the tube and tied to the basket. Like I said above I didn’t want sticky tape residue on my basket. If you are using a box no biggie but this worked for us. I covered the sharp edges with painters tape which also won’t leave a residue.
- All Aboard! We played ferry boat, and the drink you see was part of our pretend play. I had to be the lady in the ferry cafeteria and make him a drink before he got back in his Honda and we docked. Hey it got some banana into him too !
- Gather your materials. You will need construction paper, a blue marker, scissors and glue.
- Give your child the marker and a piece of construction paper to draw the water and waves.
- While they are drawing the turbulent sea, cut out a semi circle, a long thin rectangle, two triangles and 3 small circles.
- When they are done break out the glue! Add the glue for the boat first.
- Add the semi circle boat.
- Next add the glue for the mast and the rectangle.
- Time to add the triangles
- Dot on three dots of glue for the port holes.
- Add the little circles.
- Sail Away !
“The Seaside Switch” by Kathleen V. Kudlinski is a book packed with information about tides and creatures in the sea. As a child I found nothing more fascinating than a tide pool and all the scurrying crabs and this book captures that. It’s main story is how the tide changes throughout the day and brings with it different animals. The book is too long for most toddlers but my son enjoyed pointing out the animals in the book.
” Busy Boats” by Tony Mitton is a fun little book packed full of good information about boats. The text is short , rhymes and matches the illustrations perfectly. It’s hard to find non fiction books that small ones will sit for and listen to, the cartoon characters in this book will grab and keep your child’s attention , I also like how small the books are, perfect for car rides and longer travel!
Boats are big deals around our house, I hope you like our creation!
- Gather your materials. You will need A paper towel roll, the top of an egg carton, some tissue paper, glue, paint scissors and tape.
- Paint the egg carton. We used the dot a art paint, because it goes on with very little mess and had a playdate shortly after art time but any paint will do, just keep it thin so it doesn’t saturate the carton.
- Next up the paper towel roll mast!
- While your child is painting, cut the tissue paper into a sail.
- Glue onto the mast.
- Add a layer of tape on top to keep the sail in place. You don’t have to do this but I find tissue paper is so flimsy that I did 3 layers and needed glue on the bottom and tape on top.
- Glue the mast onto the boat, I poured a ton of glue and stuck the roll into it. Let dry.
- Voila , your boat is beautiful and environmentally responsible!
” An Island in the Soup “ by Mirelle Levert is an award winning book , and it’s easy to see why. The story follows a little boy who refusing to eat imagines a fantasy world in his bowl of soup, it rains peas and carrots and he encounters a bad fairy but in the end he eats his delicious soup. The illustrations are perfect although the bad fairy’s unibrow is very very frightening!
” Busy Boats” by Tony Mitton is s cute little book that uses cartoony characters to help explain all about boats and how they work. This is a perfect book for children who’s attention isn’t held by a non fiction book, but wants to know more about boats!
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Internet Citizen Science Databases
Salamander Study: This project has students collect data on the proximity of salamanders to a stream. During the field portion, students check under "wood cookies" for salamander locations. What are the abiotic conditions when salamanders are found further from the stream? Explore our data to find out.
Ozone Bio-monitoring Study: Ground-level ozone creates visible symptoms on sensitive plants that are exposed to this invisible air pollutant. Students collect data on the percent of ozone damage covering leaves on plants growing in our monitoring garden. Explore the data to find out what the symptom looks like, how quickly it progresses and how you might be able to monitor in your schoolyard.
Terrestrial Invertebrate Study: Changes in climate can result in subtle shifts in phenology (life cycle events such as when an insect emerges or when a plant blooms). Students collect data on insect orders found living in decaying leaves in our study plot. Explore the data to find out if the appearance of certain insects is shifting over time.
Water Quality Study: All streams in the Smokies originate in the park but even they are not pristine because of acid deposition and recreational activities in the park. Compare data collected by students in the park with a stream near your schoolyard. How does the pH differ, which location gets the most Stonefly larvae?
Lichen Monitoring: Lichens absorb nutrients from the air when they are wet which makes them sensitivie to acid deposition. Data is collected on the perecentage of coverage of three different lichen growth forms on selected trees throughout Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Are sensitive lichen growth forms being replaced by more tolerant groups?Using the databases, students can compare changes over time and geography.
Hands on History: Search photos, transcribed interviews and other first hand personal accounts of life in the region before Great Smoky Mountains became a National Park. There is also a database containing information from every cemetery and every gravestone located in the Smokies. Check out the teacher resource section for classroom activities.
How to Participate
Click any of the database links to explore our student citizen science research projects.
Are you doing a similar study in your own schoolyard? Add your location to the Hands on the Land database to track your own research findings. Just become a member of the Hands on the Land network of educators.
- Grade Levels:
- Third Grade-Graduate Level (Masters, PhD)
- Anthropology, Aquatic Studies, Biodiversity, Biology: Animals, Biology: Plants, Botany, Chemistry, Climate, Climate Change, Conservation, Earth Science, Ecology, Education, Environment, History, Hydrology, Science and Technology
| 3.48022 |
Imagine having to walk for five or six kilometres to get water, only to find it's contaminated when you get there. Not only is it soul destroying, it's a waste of time for, usually, women who could be carrying out other vital tasks. Over one billion people worldwide have no access to safe drinking water and, according to the World Health Organisation, around 80% of all sickness and disease is caused by inadequate water and bad sanitation. We must put a stop to this.
Orphans in Need runs programmes to install water pumps in vulnerable areas to eradicate this problem. Just one pump could benefit around 600 people on a daily basis and dramatically improve daily life.
We also want to educate communities on the links between safe water, sanitation, diseases and unsafe hygiene practices.
Simply teaching children, as well as adults, to wash their hands after using the toilet and before eating, could lead to a dramatic reduction in water-borne diseases. With these facilities readily to hand, orphans everywhere could lead far more fulfilling lives, which could also be enhanced by a donation from you today.
| 3.013612 |
A tsunami is a series of waves most commonly caused by violent movement of the sea floor. In some ways, it resembles the ripples radiating outward from the spot where stone has been thrown into the water, but a tsunami can occur on an enormous scale. Tsunamis are generated by any large, impulsive displacement of the sea bed level. The movement at the sea floor leading to tsunami can be produced by earthquakes, landslides and volcanic eruptions.
Most tsunamis, including almost all of those traveling across entire ocean basins with destructive force, are caused by submarine faulting associated with large earthquakes. These are produced when a block of the ocean floor is thrust upward, or suddenly drops, or when an inclined area of the seafloor is thrust upward or suddenly thrust sideways. In any event, a huge mass of water is displaced, producing tsunami. Such fault movements are accompanied by earthquakes, which are sometimes referred to as “tsunamigenic earthquakes”. Most tsunamigenic earthquakes take place at the great ocean trenches, where the tectonic plates that make up the earth’s surface collide and are forced under each other. When the plates move gradually or in small thrust, only small earthquakes are produced; however, periodically in certain areas, the plates catch. The overall motion of the plates does not stop; only the motion beneath the trench becomes hung up. Such areas where the plates are hung up are known as “seismic gaps” for their lack of earthquakes. The forces in these gaps continue to build until finally they overcome the strength of the rocks holding back the plate motion. The built-up tension (or comprehension) is released in one large earthquake, instead of many smaller quakes, and these often generate large deadly tsunamis. If the sea floor movement is horizontal, a tsunami is not generated. Earthquakes of magnitude larger than M 6.5 are critical for tsunami generation.
Tsunamis produced by landslides:
Probably the second most common cause of tsunami is landslide. A tsunami may be generated by a landslide starting out above the sea level and then plunging into the sea, or by a landslide entirely occurring underwater. Landslides occur when slopes or deposits of sediment become too steep and the material falls under the pull of gravity. Once unstable conditions are present, slope failure can be caused by storms, earthquakes, rain, or merely continued deposit of material on the slope. Certain environments are particularly susceptible to the production of landslide-generated earthquakes. River deltas and steep underwater slopes above sub-marine canyons, for instance, are likely sites for landslide-generated earthquakes.
Tsunami produced by Volcanoes:
The violent geologic activity associated with volcanic eruptions can also generate devastating tsunamis. Although volcanic tsunamis are much less frequent, they are often highly destructive. These may be due to submarine explosions, pyroclastic flows and collapse of volcanic caldera.
(1) Submarine volcanic explosions occur when cool seawater encounters hot volcanic magma. It often reacts violently, producing stream explosions. Underwater eruptions at depths of less than 1500 feet are capable of disturbing the water all the way to the surface and producing tsunamis.
(2) Pyroclastic flows are incandescent, ground-hugging clouds, driven by gravity and fluidized by hot gases. These flows can move rapidly off an island and into the ocean, their impact displacing sea water and producing a tsunami.
(3) The collapse of a volcanic caldera can generate tsunami. This may happen when the magma beneath a volcano is withdrawn back deeper into the earth, and the sudden subsidence of the volcanic edifice displaces water and produces tsunami waves. The large masses of rock that accumulate on the sides of the volcanoes may suddenly slide down slope into the sea, causing tsunamis. Such landslides may be triggered by earthquakes or simple gravitational collapse. A catastrophic volcanic eruption and its ensuing tsunami waves may actually be behind the legend of the lost island civilization of Atlantis. The largest volcanic tsunami in historical times and the most famous historically documented volcanic eruption took lace in the East Indies-the eruption of Krakatau in 1883.
Tsunami waves :
A tsunami has a much smaller amplitude (wave height) offshore, and a very long wavelength (often hundreds of kilometers long), which is why they generally pass unnoticed at sea, forming only a passing "hump" in the ocean. Tsunamis have been historically referred to tidal waves because as they approach land, they take on the characteristics of a violent onrushing tide rather than the sort of cresting waves that are formed by wind action upon the ocean (with which people are more familiar). Since they are not actually related to tides the term is considered misleading and its usage is discouraged by oceanographers.
These waves are different from other wind-generated ocean waves, which rarely extend below a dept of 500 feet even in large storms. Tsunami waves, on the contrary, involvement of water all the way to the sea floor, and as a result their speed is controlled by the depth of the sea. Tsunami waves may travel as fast as 500 miles per hour or more in deep waters of an ocean basin. Yet these fast waves may be only a foot of two high in deep water. These waves have greater wavelengths having long 100 miles between crests. With a height of 2 to 3 feet spread over 100 miles, the slope of even the most powerful tsunamis would be impossible to see from a ship or airplane. A tsunami may consist of 10 or more waves forming a ‘tsunami wave train’. The individual waves follow one behind the other anywhere from 5 to 90 minutes apart.
As the waves near shore, they travel progressively more slowly, but the energy lost from decreasing velocity is transformed into increased wavelength. A tsunami wave that was 2 feet high at sea may become a 30-feet giant at the shoreline. Tsunami velocity is dependent on the depth of water through which it travels (velocity equals the square root of water depth h times the gravitational acceleration g, that is (V=√gh). The tsunami will travel approximately at a velocity of 700 kmph in 4000 m depth of sea water. In 10 m, of water depth the velocity drops to about 35 kmph. Even on shore tsunami speed is 35 to 40 km/h, hence much faster than a person can run.It is commonly believed that the water recedes before the first wave of a tsunami crashes ashore. In fact, the first sign of a tsunami is just as likely to be a rise in the water level. Whether the water rises or falls depends on what part of the tsunami wave train first reaches the coast. A wave crest will cause a rise in the water level and a wave trough causes a water recession.
Seiche (pronounced as ‘saysh’) is another wave phenomenon that may be produced when a tsunami strikes. The water in any basin will tend to slosh back and forth in a certain period of time determined by the physical size and shape of the basin. This sloshing is known as the seiche. The greater the length of the body, the longer the period of oscillation. The depth of the body also controls the period of oscillations, with greater water depths producing shorter periods. A tsunami wave may set off seiche and if the following tsunami wave arrives with the next natural oscillation of the seiche, water may even reach greater heights than it would have from the tsunami waves alone. Much of the great height of tsunami waves in bays may be explained by this constructive combination of a seiche wave and a tsunami wave arriving simultaneously. Once the water in the bay is set in motion, the resonance may further increase the size of the waves. The dying of the oscillations, or damping, occurs slowly as gravity gradually flattens the surface of the water and as friction turns the back and forth sloshing motion into turbulence. Bodies of water with steep, rocky sides are often the most seiche-prone, but any bay or harbour that is connected to offshore waters can be perturbed to form seiche, as can shelf waters that are directly exposed to the open sea.
The presence of a well developed fringing or barrier of coral reef off a shoreline also appears to have a strong effect on tsunami waves. A reef may serve to absorb a significant amount of the wave energy, reducing the height and intensity of the wave impact on the shoreline itself.
The popular image of a tsunami wave approaching shore is that of a nearly vertical wall of water, similar to the front of a breaking wave in the surf. Actually, most tsunamis probably don’t form such wave fronts; the water surface instead is very close to the horizontal, and the surface itself moves up and down. However, under certain circumstances an arriving tsunami wave can develop an abrupt steep front that will move inland at high speeds. This phenomenon is known as a bore. In general, the way a bore is created is related to the velocity of the shallow water waves. As waves move into progressively shallower water, the wave in front will be traveling more slowly than the wave behind it .This phenomenon causes the waves to begin “catching up” with each other, decreasing their distance apart i.e. shrinking the wavelength. If the wavelength decreases, but the height does not, then waves must become steeper. Furthermore, because the crest of each wave is in deeper water than the adjacent trough, the crest begins to overtake the trough in front and the wave gets steeper yet. Ultimately the crest may begin to break into the trough and a bore formed. A tsunami can cause a bore to move up a river that does not normally have one. Bores are particularly common late in the tsunami sequence, when return flow from one wave slows the next incoming wave. Though some tsunami waves do, in deed, form bores, and the impact of a moving wall of water is certainly impressive, more often the waves arrive like a very rapidly rising tide that just keeps coming and coming. The normal wind waves and swells may actually ride on top of the tsunami, causing yet more turbulence and bringing the water level to even greater heights.
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Introduction: the enigma of sexual size dimorphism
This introductory chapter opens by describing general patterns of variation in sexual size dimorphism (SSD), with emphasis on several taxa (plants, fishes, and aquatic invertebrates) not included in the survey chapters that follow. It also highlights recently documented examples of extreme SSD, such as Lamprologus callipterus, a shell-brooding cichlid fish, where males are >12 times heavier than females, and the blanket octopus (Tremoctopus violaceous), where females can be 40,000 times larger than the dwarf males. The chapter then develops the two major integrative themes of the book: discovering the adaptive significance of SSD and determining the importance of genetic constraints in shaping its evolution. After briefly summarizing the contributions of the chapters to these themes, the chapter closes by discussing methodological difficulties associated with estimating adult body size and SSD in natural populations.
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
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Pali Proper Names - I -
- Icchā Sutta.-Wishes it is which hold the world prisoner; by
subjugating them, liberty is gained. S.i.40.
- Icchānangala Sutta
- Idagalissara.-A village in South India where Kulasekhara had an
encampment in his fight with the Sinhalese forces (Cv.lxxvi.149).
- Iddhi Sutta
- Iddhikathā.-The second division of the Paññāvagga of the
- Iddhipāda Samyutta.-The fifty-first division of the Samyutta Nikāya
(S.v.254-93), consisting of eight chapters. It is the seventh section of the
- Iddhipāda Sutta/Vagga
- Iddhivaddhana.-One of the palaces, occupied during his lay-life by
Sumana Buddha. BuA.125; Bu.v.22 gives other names for his palaces.
- Iddhiya.-See Itthiya.
- Idhalokika Sutta
- Ilanga.-See Sena Ilanga and
- Illisa Jātaka (No. 78)
- Ina Sutta.-Deals at length with the disadvantages, both material
and moral, of poverty and consequent indebtedness. A.iii.351-4.
- Inandapada.-A Damila chieftain whom Kulasekhara enlisted as his
ally. He was a troop leader in Uccankuttha. Cv.lxxvii.74ff.
- Indadvāra.-One of the fourteen gates of Pulatthipura built by
Parakkamabāhu I. (Cv.lxxiii.160).
- Indaka (Sutta)
- Indakhīla Sutta.-Like a tuft of cotton-wool or a ball of
thistledown, wafted by every wind, are recluses and Brahmins who do not
understand, as they really are, the facts of Ill; like an indakhīla,
unshakable, unquakable, are those who do so understand. (S.v.443-5).
- Indakūta.-A peak near Rājagaha, the abode of the yakkha Indaka. The
Buddha once lived there. (S.i.206).
- Indapatta (Indapattana, Indapattha)
- Indasama.-A king of thirteen kappas ago; a previous birth of
Setuccha Thera (ThagA.i.207), also called Khajjakadāyaka (Ap.i.182).
- Indasamānagotta Jātaka
- Indavarī.-Chief among the lay-women who supported Nārada Buddha
- Indranagarī.-The capital of Indra (Cv.lxxxviii.121), evidently
another name for Amarāvatī.
- Indriya Jātaka (No. 423)
- Indriya Sutta
- Indriyabhāvanā Sutta
- Indriyagocara Sutta
- Indriyakathā.-The fourth division of the Mahāvagga of the
Patisambhidāmagga (ii., pp.1-35).
- Indriyāni Sutta.-There are four indriyas: saddhā, viriya, sati and
- Ingirīsi.-The Pāli name for the English. E.g., Cv.ci.29.
- īsādantā.-A class of elephants mentioned with Hemavatas and others
(Vv.xx.9). They have trunks like the poles of a carriage, slightly curved
- Isayo Araññakā (or Gandha) Sutta
- Isayo Samuddakā (or Sambara) Sutta
- Isibhatta Thera.-Brother of Isidāsa.
- Isibhūmangana.-A spot in Anurādhapura where half the relics of
Mahinda were buried by King Uttiya (Mhv.xx.46). The Dīpavamsa (xvii.109) calls
- Isidāsī Therī
- Isidatta Sutta
- Isigana.-Perhaps the name of a Pacceka Buddha, whom the Bodhisatta
once reviled. The reading is, however, very uncertain. Ap.i.299; see footnote.
- Isigili Sutta
- Isindā.-A tribe mentioned in a list of various tribes. Ap.ii.359.
- Isisinga.-A hermit, the son of the
Bodhisatta and a doe. His story is related in the
Alambusā Jātaka and in the
- Issā Sutta.-The nun who is possessed of five qualities, including
envy, goes to hell without any doubt (A.iii.140).
- Issāpakata-itthi Vatthu
- Issara Sutta
- Issariya.-A Damila general whom Dutthagāmani subdued at Hālakola
- Issatta Sutta
- Issukī Sutta.-A woman who is faithless, shameless, unscrupulous,
envious and of weak wisdom is reborn in purgatory (S.iv.241).
- Itthā Sutta
- Itthi Vagga.-The seventh section of the Eka Nipāta of the
- Ittiya.-See Itthiya.
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Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
The memory controller is a digital circuit which manages the flow of data going to and from the main memory . It can be a separate chip or integrated into another chip, such as on the die of a microprocessor .
Diagram of the computer memory hierarchy The term memory hierarchy is used in computer architecture when discussing performance issues in computer architectural design, algorithm predictions, and the lower level programming constructs such as involving locality of reference .
Why memory must be managed
Table of Contents , Show Frames , No Frames The memory management subsystem is one of the most important parts of the operating system.
Beginner's Guide: Overview | Allocation techniques | Recycling techniques Memory management is a complex field of computer science and there are many techniques being developed to make it more efficient.
Memory management is the act of managing computer memory .
| 3.113876 |
Quarks are completely confined within protons and neutrons: a phenomenon that we do not completely understand. The artist's view below represents the two interlinked phenomena that drive confinement: the long-range correlations in the physical vacuum that surround the proton and excludes the color-field emanating from quarks and the extremely strong gluon-fields between the quarks.
To make progress on confinement we need to separate these two effects and study each individually. One way to do this is to make a much larger system of quarks and gluons where the role of the vacuum at the surface of the larger system is much reduced. Such a large system can be produced by compressing or heating nuclear matter so that the neutrons and protons begin to overlap. As the boundaries between each neutron and proton disappear, a large volume of a new state of matter should be formed - the quark gluon plasma (QGP). The strong interactions between quarks and gluons dominate the properties of the QGP, and because of the larger volume of the system, the influence of the correlated vacuum is much reduced.
Collisions between two heavy nuclei take place at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). Our first results from PHENIX indicate that the plasma may be formed in these reactions. Leading the evidence for the QGP is the reduced yield of particles at high transverse momenta (pt). These particles predominantly come from rare, high-momentum collisions between quarks and gluons (partons) that occur in the hot, early stage of the reaction. As high momentum partons travel through the forming plasma, they are predicted to lose a considerable fraction of their energy. Outside the collision zone high-momentum partons fragment into hadrons, and any energy-loss in the plasma softens the hadronic spectrum, i.e. lowers the measured yield of hadrons at high-pt.
The first high-pt spectra from Au+Au collisions measured by PHENIX at RHIC were published in 2001 with the key observation that the high-pt spectra are softer in central than in peripheral collisions.
Because a central reaction would produce a larger volume of QGP, this result is consistent with the hard-scattered parton losing energy in a QGP.
The overall caution remains that a heavy-ion reaction is a very complex, challenging environment. A strong case for the existence and properties of the QGP must rely on a broad range of observations. To extend our repertoire of probes, our group is currently analyzing data on J/psi suppression in Au+Au collisions.
Looking forward to the future, at ISU we are leading a major upgrades for PHENIX : a new Si vertex detector to quantitatively probe the early, highest energy-density phase of the matter formed in a heavy-ion reaction by measuring the yield and spectra of heavy-flavored mesons. Measuring the spectra of charm and beauty-mesons requires a tracking resolution of less than 100 mm to measure the decay of mesons displaced from the collision point.
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Sheet Music - Purpose and use
Sheet music can be used as a record of, a guide to, or a means to perform, a piece of music. Although it does not take the place of the sound of a performed work, sheet music can be studied to create a performance and to elucidate aspects of the music that may not be obvious from mere listening. Authoritative musical information about a piece can be gained by studying the written sketches and early versions of compositions that the composer might have retained, as well as the final autograph score and personal markings on proofs and printed scores.
Comprehending sheet music requires a special form of literacy: the ability to read musical notation. Nevertheless, an ability to read or write music is not a requirement to compose music. Many composers have been capable of producing music in printed form without the capacity themselves to read or write in musical notation—as long as an amanuensis of some sort is available. Examples include the blind 18th-century composer John Stanley and the 20th-century composers and lyricists Lionel Bart, Irving Berlin and Paul McCartney.
The skill of sight reading is the ability of a musician to perform an unfamiliar work of music upon viewing the sheet music for the first time. Sight reading ability is expected of professional musicians and serious amateurs who play classical music and related forms. An even more refined skill is the ability to look at a new piece of music and hear most or all of the sounds (melodies, harmonies, timbres, etc.) in one's head without having to play the piece.
With the exception of solo performances, where memorization is expected, classical musicians ordinarily have the sheet music at hand when performing. In jazz music, which is mostly improvised, sheet music—called a lead sheet in this context—is used to give basic indications of melodies, chord changes, and arrangements.
Handwritten or printed music is less important in other traditions of musical practice, however. Although much popular music is published in notation of some sort, it is quite common for people to learn a piece by ear. This is also the case in most forms of western folk music, where songs and dances are passed down by oral—and aural—tradition. Music of other cultures, both folk and classical, is often transmitted orally, though some non-western cultures developed their own forms of musical notation and sheet music as well.
Although sheet music is often thought of as being a platform for new music and an aid to composition (i.e., the composer writes the music down), it can also serve as a visual record of music that already exists. Scholars and others have made transcriptions of western and non-western musics so as to render them in readable form for study, analysis, and re-creative performance. This has been done not only with folk or traditional music (e.g., Bartók's volumes of Magyar and Romanian folk music), but also with sound recordings of improvisations by musicians (e.g., jazz piano) and performances that may only partially be based on notation. An exhaustive example of the latter in recent times is the collection The Beatles: Complete Scores (London: Wise Publications, c1993), which seeks to transcribe into staves and tablature all the songs as recorded by the Beatles in instrumental and vocal detail. (More...)
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- SPECIAL REPORTS
- THE MAGAZINE
Mount Everest is located in southern Asia's Great Himalayan mountain range, straddling the border of Tibet and Nepal. Global positioning indicates the mountain continues to grow a few fractions of an inch each year and to move slightly to the northeast due to the shifting of tectonic plates.
Mount Everest is the highest point on Earth. Satellite-based technology pinpointed its height at 29,035 feet in 1999. Everest's upper slopes are so high that the atmosphere there contains just one-third of the breathable oxygen found at sea level. At 28,250 feet, Mount K-2 in Kashmir is the world's second-highest peak.
Mount Everest was named after Sir George Everest, a British surveyor who spent 25 years of his life mapping the Indian subcontinent. Everest most likely never saw the mountain himself, but his triangulation theories allowed successors to locate its summit in 1852. In Tibet, the mountain's name is Chomolungma, or ``Goddess Mother of the World.'' In Nepal, the mountain's name is Sagarmatha, or ``Goddess of the Sky.''
Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first recorded climbers to scale Everest in 1953. Nepalese guide Appa Sherpa holds the record for most successful ascents at 17. New Zealand mountaineer Mark Inglis became the first double amputee to reach the summit in 2006. In May, 71-year-old Katsusuke Yanagisawa reportedly became the oldest man ever to climb the mountain. About 200 climbers have died while making attempts on Everest, including several this year.
Sources: Kalamazoo Gazette, May 31, 2007.
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by Laura Whitehorn
A new discovery may finally skin staph
Scientists are cracking the code of staph (Staphylococcus aureus), a
bacterial skin infection harder on HIVers than on neggies. They’ve
found that the stuff that gives the bug its distinctive gold surface
(aureus means golden) also shields it from the immune system.
Pinpointing this defense mechanism could spur better meds—for the
drug-resistant kind, too. Until then, here are some steps for stopping
- Get clean: Wash with soap and water, especially after skin-to-skin contact.
- Get covered: Wrap cuts or abrasions with clean bandages.
- Get your own: Don’t share razors or towels.
- Get culture: Testing suspected staph tells your Doc which anti-biotics to prescribe.
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Experimental Fusion Research
PPPL fusion research centers on the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX), which is undergoing a $94 million upgrade that will make it the most powerful experimental fusion facility, or tokamak, of its type in the world when work is completed in 2014. Experiments will test the ability of the upgraded spherical facility to maintain a high-performance plasma under conditions of extreme heat and power. Results could strongly influence the design of future fusion reactors.
The Laboratory develops components and scientific data for ITER, which represents the largest step to date toward the development of a commercial fusion reactor. ITER, whose name is Latin for “the way,” is being built in Cadarache, France, by the European Union, the United States, China, India, Japan, Korea and Russia. The facility is designed to produce 500 million watts of fusion power for at least 400 seconds by the late 2020s to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion as a source of energy.
PPPL conducts research on the use of liquid lithium to help keep fusion reactions hot. The Laboratory’s Lithium Tokamak Experiment (LTX) is the world’s first experimental fusion facility to have liquid lithium covering all its walls to absorb plasma particles that escape from magnetic confinement. The shiny metal keeps the particles from re-entering the plasma as a cold gas, retains impurities that can cool the plasma and halt fusion reactions, and prevents damage to the plasma-facing walls. Included in this research are experiments led by Princeton University engineer Bruce Koel on the behavior of lithium and other wall materials.
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Mathematics for the Environment
Published January 18th 2011 by Chapman and Hall/CRC – 679 pages
Published January 18th 2011 by Chapman and Hall/CRC – 679 pages
Mathematics for the Environment shows how to employ simple mathematical tools, such as arithmetic, to uncover fundamental conflicts between the logic of human civilization and the logic of Nature. These tools can then be used to understand and effectively deal with economic, environmental, and social issues. With elementary mathematics, the book seeks answers to a host of real-life questions, including:
A truly interdisciplinary, concrete study of mathematics, this classroom-tested text discusses the importance of certain mathematical principles and concepts, such as fuzzy logic, feedback, deductive systems, fractions, and logarithms, in various areas other than pure mathematics. It teaches students how to make informed choices using fundamental mathematical tools, encouraging them to find solutions to critical real-world problems.
The book can be recommended to all those readers who are interested in applied mathematics as well as to those who do not think of themselves as mathematicians yet being interested in laws and relationships in which mathematics may be a helpful tool.
—Herbert S. Buscher, Zentralblatt MATH 1211
The book is heavily referenced … there are many detailed exercises designed to highlight how mathematics can be used to explain natural phenomena and human behavior and its consequences. … this book could serve as a text for courses in applied mathematics and a resource for study material in many other subject areas …
—MAA Reviews, July 2011
MATHEMATICS IS CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE
Earth’s Climate and Some Basic Principles
One of the Greatest Crimes of the 20th Century
Edison’s Algorithm: Listening to Nature’s Feedback
Fuzzy Logic, Filters, the Bigger Picture Principle
Consequences of the Crime: Suburbia’s Topology
A Toxic Consequence of the Crime
Hubbert’s Peak and the End of Cheap Oil
Resource Wars: Oil and Water
The CO2 Greenhouse Law of Svante Arrhenius
Economic Instability: Ongoing Causes
Necessary Conditions for Economic Success
The Mathematical Structure of Ponzi Schemes
Dishonest Assessment of Risk
One Reason Why Usury Should Again Be Illegal
What Is Mathematics? More Basics
The Definition of Mathematics Used in This Book
The Logic of Nature and the Logic of Civilization
Cycles and Scales in Nature and Mathematics
The Art of Estimating
We All Soak in a Synthetic Chemical Soup
Thomas Latimer’s Unfortunate Experience
What’s in the Synthetic Chemical Soup?
Synthetic Flows and Assumptions
The Flow of Information about Synthetic Flows
You Cannot Do Just One Thing: Two Examples
Mathematics: Food, Soil, Water, Air, Free Speech
The "Hour Glass" Industrial Agriculture Machine
Industrial Agriculture Logic vs. the Logic of Life
Fast Foods, Few Foods, and Fossil Fuels
Genetic Engineering: One Mathematical Perspective
Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!
Oceans: Rising Acidity and Disappearing Life
Stocks, Flows and Distributions of Food
My Definition of Food
Choices: Central vs. Diverse Decision Making
Mathematics and Energy
How Much Solar Energy Is There?
Solar Energy Is There, Do We Know How to Get It?
Nuclear Power: Is It Too Cheap to Meter?
Net Primary Productivity and Ecological Footprints
NPP, Soil, Biofuels, and the Super Grid
The Brower–Cousteau Model of the Earth
How Heavily Do We Weigh upon the Earth?
Mining and Damming: Massive Rearrangements
Fish, Forests, Deserts, and Soil: Revisited
The Cousteau–Brower Earth Model
Fuzzy Logic, Sharp Logic, Frames, and Bigger Pictures
Sharp (Aristotelian) Logic: A Standard Syllogism
Measuring Truth Values: Fuzzy/Measured Logic
Definitions, Assumptions and the Frame of Debate
Humans in Denial — Nature Cannot Be Fooled — Gravity Exists
The Bigger Picture Principle
The Dunbar Number
The Sustainability Hypothesis: Is It True?
The Dunbar Number
Public Relations, Political Power, and the Organization of Society
Political Uses of Fear
Confronting Fear (and Apathy): Organizing Your Community for Self-Preservation and Sustainability
MATH AND NATURE: THE NATURE OF MATH
One Pattern Viewed via Geometry and Numbers: Mathese
The Square Numbers of Pythagoras
The Language of Mathematics: Mathese
A General Expression in Mathese: A Formula for Odd Numbers
An Important Word in Mathese: Σ
Sentences in Mathese: Equations with Σ and a Dummy Variable
Induction, Deduction, Mathematical Research, and Mathematical Proofs
What Is a Mathematical Proof?
What Is a Deductive System?
Originalidad es volver al Origen
Axioms and Atoms
Molecules and Atoms; the Atomic Number and the Atomic Mass Number of an Atom
Scaling and Our First Two Axioms for Numbers
Our First Axiom for Numbers
Number 1: Its Definition, Properties, Uniqueness
The Definition of Multiplicative Inverse
Our Second Axiom for Numbers
If … , Then … . Our First Proofs
Return to the Problem: How Many Protons in One Gram of Protons?
What Is a Mole? Scaling Up from the Atomic to the Human Scale
Five More Axioms for Numbers
Associativity, Identity, and Inverses for +
Commutativity of + and *
What Patterns Can Be Deduced in Our Deductive System?
Playing the Mathematics Game
Rules for Playing the Mathematics Game
The Usual Rules for Fractions Are Part of Our Deductive System
Can You Tell the Difference between True and False Patterns?
ONE OF THE OLDEST MATHEMATICAL PATTERNS
A Short Story and Some Numberless Mathematics
Relations Defined as Collections of Ordered Pairs
Transitive and Reflexive Relations
Relations That Are Functions
A Set of Social Rules for the Warlpiri People
The Section Rule
The Mother Relation Rules
The Marriage Rules
The Father Relation Rules
Cultural Contexts in Which Mathematics Is Done
Counting Social Security Numbers among Other Things
Permutations: Order Matters
There Are n! Permutations of n Distinct Objects
Counting Connections: Order Does Not Matter
Equivalence Relations and Counting
Using Equivalence Relations to Count
Combinations: Order Does Not Matter
Additional Counting Problems
BOX MODELS: POPULATION, MONEY, RECYCLING
Some Population Numbers
Counting People in the World
A Fundamental Axiom of Population Ecology
Counting People in the United States
Basic Mathematical Patterns in Population Growth
Schwartz Charts Are Box-Flow Models
Our First Population Model: Simple Boxes and Flows
Three Basic Operations: Addition, Multiplication, and Exponentiation
Defining Logarithm Functions
Computing Formulas for Doubling Times
Logarithms to Any Base
Further Study: More Complicated Models and Chaos Theory
The World’s Human Population: One Box
Box Models: Money, Recycling, Epidemics
Some Obvious Laws Humans Continue to Ignore
A Linear Multiplier Effect: Some Mathematics of Money
Multiplier Effects Arising from Cycles: The Mathematics of Recycling
A Simple Model of an Influenza Epidemic
CHANCE: HEALTH, SURVEILLANCE, SPIES, AND VOTING
Chance: Health and News
If You Test HIV Positive, Are You Infected?
Chance and the "News
Surveillance, Spies, Snitches, Loss of Privacy, and Life
Is Someone Watching You? Why?
Living with a Police Escort?
I’m Not Worried, I’ve Done Nothing Wrong
Identity Theft, Encryption, Torture, Planespotting
Encryption Mathematics and Identity Protection
Extraordinary Rendition = Kidnapping and Torture
Planespotting: A Self-Organizing Countermeasure the CIA Did Not Anticipate
Bigger Pictures and the CIA
Voting in the 21st Century
Stealing Elections Is a Time Honored Tradition
A Simple Solution Exists
Two Modest Proposals
What Exactly Is Economics?
It Takes the Longest Time to Think of the Simplest Things
A Preview of Two Laws of Nature
Three Kinds of Economists
The Human Economy Depends on Nature’s Flows of Energy and Entropy
Nature’s Services and Human Wealth: Important Calculations
How We Treat Each Other: How We Treat Nature — The Tragedy of the Commons
Mathematical Concepts and Economics
New Mathematical Patterns: Self-Organizing Systems
Finding a Niche: Habits and Habitats
The Concept of Money
Financial Wealth and Real Wealth
Is Financial Collapse Possible Now?
Follow the Money
Are You Paying More or Less Than Your Fair Share of Taxes?
Financial Growth vs. Fish Growth
Fractional Reserve Banking: An Amazing Mathematical Trick
Distributed vs. Centralized Control and Decision Making
Farms: To Be Run by Few or by Many?
Utilities: MUNI or Investor-Owned?
Linux vs. Microsoft
Medicine for People or for Profit or Both?
A Little History
An Example of the Need for Fuzzy Logic: The Definition of Poverty
Energy and Thermodynamics
Energy and the First Law of Thermodynamics
The First Law of Thermodynamics
Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Early Statements of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Algebraic Statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
So What Is Entropy and Can We Measure It?
Some Applications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Power Plants and Hurricanes
Hiking up a Mountain
Understanding Entropy with a Little Mathematics
The Financial Mathematics of Loans, Debts, and Compound Interest
Simple and Compound Interest: A Review
How Much Does a Debt Really Cost You? Buying on Time and/or Installment Plans. Amortization. The Four Important Numbers: P, R, r, n
Examples of Individual Debt: Rent-to-Own, Credit Cards, and Loans
Information Flow in the 21st Century
Investigative Journalism Requires Cash
Thesis: The Range of Debate is Too Narrow Now
Time Series Test and Multiple Source Test
Measuring the Range of Debate
Distractions and Illusions
Media Literacy: Censorship and Propaganda
Filters and Censors
Censorship: External and Internal
Conclusion and Epilog: Where Are the Adults?
Martin Walter is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Walter is a Sloan, Woodrow Wilson, and National Science Foundation Fellow as well as a member of the American Mathematical Society and Mathematical Association of America. He has lectured or taught in various countries, including Japan, China, Poland, Romania, Australia, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Brazil.
| 3.462554 |
Right now, the accelerator is stopped for the annual maintenance shutdown. This is the opportunity to fix all problems that occurred during the past year both on the accelerator and the experiments. The detectors are opened and all accessible malfunctioning equipment is being repaired or replaced.
In the 27-km long LHC tunnel, surveyors are busy getting everything realigned to a high precision, while various repairs and maintenance operations are on their way. By early March, all magnets will have been cooled down again and prepared for operation.
The experimentalists are not only working on their detectors but also improving all aspects of their software: the detector simulations, event reconstruction algorithms, particle identification schemes and analysis techniques are all being revised.
By late March, the LHC will resume colliding protons with the goal of delivering about 16 inverse femtobarns of data, compared to 5 inverse femtobarns in 2011. This will enable the experiments to improve the precision of all measurements achieved so far, push all searches for new phenomena slightly further and explore areas not yet tackled. The hope is to discover particles associated with new physics revealing the existence of new phenomena. The CMS and ATLAS physicists are looking for dozens of hypothetical particles, the Higgs boson being the most publicized but only one of many.
When protons collide in the LHC accelerator, the energy released materializes in the form of massive but unstable particles. This is a consequence of the well-known equation E=mc2, which simply states that energy (represented by E) and mass (m) are equivalent, each one can change into the other. The symbol c2 represents the speed of light squared and acts like a conversion factor. This is why in particle physics we measure particle masses in units of energy like GeV (giga electronvolt) or TeV (tera electronvolt). One electronvolt is the energy acquired by an electron through a potential difference of one volt.
It is therefore easier to create lighter particles since less energy is required. Over the past few decades, we have already observed the lighter particles countless times in various experiments. So we know fairly well how many events containing them we should observe. We can tell when new particles are created when we see more events of a certain topology than what we expect from those well-known phenomena, which we refer to as the background.
We can claim that something additional and new is also occurring when we see an excess of events. Of course, the bigger the excess, the easier it is to claim something new is happening. This is the reason why we accumulate so many events, each one being a snap-shots of the debris coming out of a proton-proton collisions. We want to be sure the excess cannot be due to some random fluctuation.
Some of the particles we are looking for are expected to have a mass in the order of a few hundred GeV. This is the case for the Higgs boson and we already saw possible signs of its presence last year. If the observed excess continues to grow as we collect more data in 2012, it will be enough to claim the Higgs boson discovery beyond any doubt in 2012 or rule it out forever.
Other hypothetical particles may have masses as large as a few thousand GeV or equivalently, a few TeV. In 2011, the accelerator provided 7 TeV of energy at the collision point. The more energy the accelerator has, the higher the reach in masses, just like one cannot buy a 7000 CHF car with 5000 CHF. So to create a pair of particles with a mass of 3.5 TeV (or 3500 GeV), one needs to provide at least 7 TeV to produce them. But since some of the energy is shared among many particles, the effective limit is lower than the accelerator energy.
There are ongoing discussions right now to decide if the LHC will be operating at 8 TeV this year instead of 7 TeV as in 2011. The decision will be made in early February.
If CERN decides to operate at 8 TeV, the chances of finding very heavy particles will slightly increase, thanks to the extra energy available. This will be the case for searches for particles like the W’ or Z’, a heavier version of the well-known W and Z bosons. For these, collecting more data in 2012 will probably not be enough to push the current limits much farther. We will need to wait until the LHC reaches full energy at 13 or 14 TeV in 2015 to push these searches higher than in 2011 where limits have already been placed around 1 TeV.
For LHCb and ALICE, the main goal is not to find new particles. LHCb aims at making extremely precise measurements to see if there are any weak points in the current theoretical model, the Standard Model of particle physics. For this, more data will make a whole difference. Already in 2011, they saw the first signs of CP-violation involving charm quarks and hope to confirm this observation. This measurement could shed light on why matter overtook antimatter as the universe expanded after the Big Bang when matter and antimatter must have been created in equal amounts. They will also investigate new techniques and new channels.
Meanwhile, ALICE has just started analyzing the 2011 data taken in November with lead ion collisions. The hope is to better understand how the quark-gluon plasma formed right after the Big Bang. This year, a special run involving collisions of protons and lead ions should bring a new twist in this investigation.
Exploring new corners, testing new ideas, improving the errors on all measurements and most likely the final answer on the Higgs, that is what we are in with the LHC for in 2012. Let’s hope that in 2012 the oriental dragon, symbol of perseverance and success, will see our efforts bear fruit.
To be alerted of new postings, follow me on Twitter: @GagnonPauline or sign-up on this mailing list to receive and e-mail notification.
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For over ten years, Raising A Reader has been a leader in evidence-based literacy programming for young children. Outcome data demonstrate that Raising A Reader effectively develops family reading habits and, by doing so, helps young children enter school ready to learn. Raising A Reader Affiliates across the nation reflect the unique needs of their communities, enhance use of existing community services (particularly local libraries), and have a lasting impact on the lives of the children and families they touch.
- 75% increase in the number of parents who shared books with children five or more times per week (Norfolk, VA; 2004)
- Raising A Reader five-year-olds in Head Start scored 69% higher in pre-reading and 59% higher in book knowledge than other Head Start five-year-old or older children. (San Francisco County, CA; 2003)
- 350% increase in the percentage of Spanish-speaking parents taking their preschool children to the library at least once per month (Santa Clara County, CA; 2001)
“One of my greatest concerns is that very young, low income families often have nothing but a television as a means of receiving information and enjoyment. Often the reading/language skills assessed inchildren of these families are at the lower end of normal—RAR turns this around!” -- Educator, Multnomah County, OR
“One local mother told us that her 8 year-old could not read and that she herself did not graduate from High School, but that her 4 year-old was learning to read because of Raising A Reader. She also shared that because of Raising A Reader, she was learning to read and she had been inspired to go back to school to get her GED.” -- Sarah Bishop, United Way of Southampton Roads, Norfolk, VA
“A family who participated in the library event had NEVER taken their children to the library. The parents now have a library card and have returned to the library on their own.” -- Jeanne Chisena, Northeast Michigan Community Service Agency (NEMCSA), Alpena, MI
“Raising A Reader gives Spanish speaking parents the ability to practice reading basic English in the privacy of their home which begins to build confidence to read outside the home.” -- Dawn Ryan, Preschool Teacher, Aspen, CO
Raising A Reader does more than just give children books in the hopes they will be read. RAR helps families learn to share books so they can understand the delight that comes with reading (‘book cuddling’) and the power they have to help young children enter school ready to learn.
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Author: Carolyn Wilhelm
Children find favorite words, phrases, and sentences from familiar stories. Working together, they combine their words and phrases to create a poem. The poem is then shared as performance poetry.
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A resolution of the humanitarian situation is the most urgent concern for Sri Lanka, but there is a politics behind this war that must be understood to guide solidarity from outside. It dates back to the decades prior to and following Sri Lanka's independence from colonial Britain.
The tragedy of Sri Lanka is characterised by two destructive nationalisms. On the one hand, we have Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and its mobilisation by successive regimes in their bid for state power. On the other hand, the Tigers, with their most extreme interpretation of Tamil nationalism, have dominated the Tamil political scene.
This ethnicisation of politics is the legacy of colonial reforms, whereby Sinhala nationalists appropriated state institutions, followed by discriminatory legislation against minorities, particularly on citizenship, language policy and access to education during the decades after independence in 1948 (see Deirdre McConnell). The attacks on the Tamil minority also took on violent form with periodic pogroms, culminating in the July 1983 riots and the government-engineered massacre of more than 2,000 Tamils. This led to the mushrooming of Tamil militancy, with thousands of youth taking up arms against the state.
While there were a number of Tamil militant groups during the early 1980s, by 1986 the Tigers had all but eradicated the other Tamil militant groups, staking their claim for 'sole representation' of the Tamil community. The Tigers went further in isolating both themselves and the Tamil community, not only by the massacre of Sinhalese civilians, beginning in 1985, but also by the ethnic cleansing of the entire Muslim population in the north, numbering about 75,000 people, and the killings of Muslims in the east, including the 1990 massacres in two mosques during prayer, resulting in at least 150 deaths.
These two destructive nationalisms reinforce each other and together have produced a deadlock trapping both communities. The ensuing political crisis has been deepened by the effects of 25 years of war. The warring parties have both sought military solutions to the problem, undermining efforts to resolve the conflict through a democratic and inclusive process that would bring all those concerned to the negotiating table.
Since abrogating the ceasefire agreement in the latest phase of the war, the Rajapakse government has again chosen the military option, sidelining the political process. In the past couple of years, the centre stage of Sri Lankan politics has been dominated by the discourse of war, including that of 'war on terror'. This has given the most recalcitrant Sinhala Buddhist nationalist forces new vigour. In the past, when the political process was being pursued, albeit temporarily, these forces from time to time were sidelined. Now they have an important role in the heart of government.
Likewise the LTTE has time and again scuppered attempts at a settlement by successive Sri Lankan governments, the Indian government with its intervention in the mid-1980s and more recently the international community in the form of the Norwegian brokered peace process. It has remained inflexible in its quest to achieve military objectives and an exclusively Tamil independent state. It systematically assassinated independent Tamil politicians and intellectuals, including Neelan Tiruchelvam and Kethesh Loganthan, two of the most engaged constitutional scholars, as the Tigers did not want the political process to find any traction within the Tamil community.
After 25 years of war, however, the LTTE's armed campaign has sapped the energy of the Tamil people, who are desperate for the war to end. For them, the LTTE's armed campaign for its secessionist project has not been a liberatory process. It has held its writ over the people it purports to represent with brutal and total control, crushing all dissent, and using them only to feed off as resources, practising extortion and the forced recruitment of child soldiers. The Tamil people's experience of their self-styled leaders has in many ways made them lose faith in the armed campaign for secession, and the Tamil constituency that is voicing a dissenting position vis-à-vis Tamil nationalism and the LTTE's military objectives is a growing one.
Reframing the national question
One way to break the deadlock spawned by the two destructive nationalisms is to reframe the 'national question', as the problem is historically known in Sri Lanka. This would necessitate going beyond any formulaic solution based on the 'right to self-determination'.
Some intellectuals are indeed reframing the problem as a question of the minorities' share in state power and the protection of the political rights of minorities against a majoritarian state. This reframing of the issue as one of minorities gains importance given the assertion of separate identities by the Muslim and up-country Tamil communities, both of which were marginalised by the rhetoric and deadlock of the two nationalisms, not to mention the caste, class and gender concerns within the Tamil and Sinhala communities that are repressed by nationalist politics.
Democratisation and a political solution
With the victory of President Chandrika Kumaratunga on a peace platform in 1994 after 17 years of United National Party (UNP) rule, the devolution debate made significant progress in understanding and seeking to reolve the problem of minorities. The draft constitution of 2000 and the experts' committee majority report of 2006 submitted to the all-party representative committee - appointed by President Rajapakse and deliberately undermined by the president himself early on in the process - provided solid foundations for a new constitutional order. This would need to clearly demarcate powers for the provinces, limit executive interference, loosen the centralised character of the state, remove the executive presidency and create a bicameral legislature with greater representation for minorities at the centre.
While the contours of a political solution may be apparent to the intellectual community that has been at the centre of the devolution debate, there are two major problems that will hinder any progress. First, there is the lack of political will on the part of the Rajapakse government, which seems more interested in giving centrality to Sinhala Buddhist majoritarianism. And second, there are serious concerns over the deterioration of the democratic health of the country in the context of war politics and the Rajapakse government's attempt to entrench an authoritarian oligarchy.
The issue of democratisation has not historically been one that Tamil politics has engaged in seriously. This may be in part because of the LTTE's brutal culture, but it was also the case with Tamil moderates prior to the Tigers' emergence. An important lesson from Sri Lanka's post-colonial history, however, is that a political solution is unlikely to work if democracy in the country is under attack. There is also the corollary that the brazen attacks the minorities as practiced by the current regime are linked to the attacks on democracy that affect the Sinhala community as well. The issue of the hour is as much about democratisation as it is about finding a political solution: one is unworkable without the other.
The task at hand, then, is the construction of a consensus among the minorities, who include the Tamils and Muslims but also caste minorities, the economically marginalised, the rural poor in the Sinhala community and so on. Tamil nationalism, due to its exclusivist politics, alienated the other minorities and large sections of the Sinhala communities; a minorities' consensus would seek the opposite and work towards coexistence within an inclusive vision.
Historically, there have been frequent calls for a 'southern consensus', meaning now a consensus between the two major political parties, the SLFP and the UNP, as a way of arriving at an agreement towards a political solution and the two-thirds majority in parliament necessary to change the constitution. While such an agreement on a far reaching political solution would be welcome, the historical failure of Sri Lanka's elite to forge the consensus necessary to build a stable bourgeois democratic state and the current political scene, with the ascendancy of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, does not bode well. Nevertheless, calls by the powerful international actors towards a 'southern consensus' and a political process towards constitutional reform would be one important way of checking the rapidly deteriorating environment.
A minorities' consensus, on the other hand, would be an attempt at a bottom-up approach, beginning with the marginalised, to rekindle a national debate on a political solution and democratisation. The tragic history of Sri Lanka points to no easy solutions. The long march towards peace and justice may have to begin with the difficult process of building social movements but it will also require solidarity. That is, solidarity to dislodge destructive nationalisms, the militarisation of state and society, to support efforts at democratisation and to challenge authoritarianism.
Over the decades the powerful Tamil diaspora and the emerging Sinhala diaspora have reinforced the dynamic of destructive nationalisms through both financial and political support. The unconditional support for the Tigers by large sections of the Tamil diaspora can even be witnessed today in many of the protests in western capitals, with slogans such as 'Prabhakaran is our Leader' and 'We want Tamil Eelam'. Feeding such nationalism goes hand in hand with the silencing of other minorities who came under brutal attack by the Tigers. Furthermore, it also reflects the irresponsible mindset that does not question the continued forced recruitment and use as cannon fodder of thousands of Tamil children and youth belonging to the poor who could not flee Sri Lanka.
While the unprincipled machinations of the 'international community', led by the Norwegians in the peace process of 2002, which glossed over questions of democracy, human rights and the other minorities in the interest of the foreign discourse of conflict resolution is not of much surprise, there are worrying questions about the role of progressive actors in the west. Have they questioned their acts of solidarity to see if they lead to constructive developments in the interests of the marginalised in Sri Lanka? Or has the western left merely retreated into formulaic acts of support for the 'right to self-determination' and the 'national liberation movement'?
Within Sri Lanka, courageous voices have arisen, such as the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), who at great human cost challenged nationalist ideologies and raised the concerns of marginalised communities. Such intellectual challenges should be heard in the west and solidarity should entail intense scrutiny of positions and politics on the ground, including critically challenging the various 'representatives' of the Tamil and others in the diaspora.
This does not mean that solidarity must be muted on the abuses and actions of the Sri Lankan state. The urgent need of the hour is a resolution to the humanitarian crisis and strong pressure to address the human rights situation. There needs to be mounting pressure on UN forums to challenge the Sri Lankan government. At a time when media freedom and dissent is under severe attack inside Sri Lanka, the discussions and debates on a political solution and democratisation have to be supported from outside. But it has to be done in a manner that is pluralist in vision and does not polarise or marginalise communities even further. Local efforts to rejuvenate the devolution debate should be encouraged and social justice perspectives that challenge the blindness of donors' 'post-conflict development' should be supported. Now more than ever the peoples of Sri Lanka need not just solidarity, but solidarity that is constructive and responsible.
Ahilan Kadirgamar is an activist with the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum and contributing editor of Himal Southasian magazine.
Viva Siva Now in his eighties, A Sivanandan remains an important figure in the politics of race and class, maintaining his long-held insistence that only in the symbiosis of the two struggles can a genuinely radical politics be found. By Arun Kundnani
Background to brutality The resumption of Sri Lanka's bloody civil war following the government's unilateral abrogation of the ceasefire with the Tamil Tigers last year has seen killing and other abuses on a massive scale. Deirdre McConnell examines the background to the continuing conflict between the country's Sinhalese majority and its Tamil and other minorities
Can’t you see the writing on the wall With hundreds of civilians killed and a quarter of a million people trapped by the current fighting, Lonán Álvaro considers the humanitarian cost of Sri Lanka's 25-year long conflict
The Brighton pay dispute: the union view GMB union organiser Rob Macey puts the workers' side of the argument
The pay dispute at Brighton council: a Green view Davy Jones, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Brighton Kemptown, gives his view of a dispute that has caused huge debate among Green Party members in the city and across the country
Jeremy Hardy thinks… about the right to exist 'We’d all say a person has a right to a home, but we wouldn’t say their home has rights.'
Back to the fragments Lynne Segal, one of the authors of the seminal 1979 socialist-feminist text Beyond the Fragments, reflects on its lessons for today
Turkey: A people imprisoned Once seen as a moderate party, the AKP government in Turkey is using anti-terrorism legislation to unleash a wave of repression against the left and the Kurdish movement. Tim Baster and Isabelle Merminod spoke to activists in the country
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Substance comparatively opaque to X-rays, which appears lighter on X-ray film and allows a body structure that does not normally contrast with its background to be seen clearly on the film. Common contrast media include barium sulfate and iodized organic compounds. They are given by the route that introduces them into the structure to be examined—swallowed or as an enema for the digestive tract, inhaled for the respiratory tract, or injected for blood vessels and for organs and tissues they supply. Serious reactions to contrast media are not infrequent. Seealso diagnostic imaging.
Learn more about contrast medium with a free trial on Britannica.com.
Iodine based contrast media such as urografin or Omnipaque is used most commonly in radiology, due to its relatively harmless interaction with the body. It is primarily used to visualise vessels, but can also be used for tests of the urinary tract, uterus and fallopian tubes.
|Ionic||Diatrizoate (Hypaque 50)||Ionic Monomer||300||1550||High Osmolar|
|Ionic||Metrizoate (Isopaque Coronar 370)||Ionic||370||2100||High Osmolar|
|Ionic||Ioxaglate (Hexabrix)||Ionic dimer||320||580||Low Osmolar|
|Non-Ionic||Iopamidol (Isovue 370)||Non-ionic monomer||370||796||Low Osmolar|
|Non-Ionic||Iohexol (Omnipaque 350)||Non-ionic||350||884||Low Osmolar|
|Non-Ionic||Ioxilan (Oxilan)||Non-ionic||Low Osmolar|
|Non-Ionic||Iodixanol (Visipaque 320)||Non-ionic dimer||320||290||Iso Osmolar|
These often appear in the form of barium sulfate. Barium is mainly used in the imaging of the digestion system.
Negative contrast always occurs in a gas, usually as one of the following:
Examples of the use of negative contrast medium are as follows:
Although rare, it is possible to be allergic to contrast media. Reactions can range from minor to severe, in the worst case scenario, resulting in death.
Mild (no treatment necessary)
Moderate (treatment necessary, but no intensive care)
Severe (life-threatening, intensive care necessary)
Contrast media is never given to a patient unless a doctor is present to assist should an allergic reaction occur. Patients are usually screened before being given contrast, by means of a series of questions. These typically include an allergy history and a history of any asthma and diabetes.
It has been recommended that metformin, an oral antidiabetic agent, be stopped for 48 hours following the intravascular administration of contrast media and that the use of metformin not be resumed until renal function has been shown to be normal. The reasoning is that if the contrast medium causes kidney failure (as happens rarely) and the person continues to take metformin (which is normally excreted by the kidneys), there may be a toxic accumulation of metformin, increasing the risk of lactic acidosis, a dangerous complication.
However, guidelines published by the Royal College of Radiologists suggest this is not as important for patients who receive <100mls of contrast media and have normal renal function. If renal impairment is found before administration of the contrast, metformin should be stopped 48 hours before and after the procedure..
Association of pancreatitis with administration of contrast medium and intravenous lipid emulsion in a patient with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. (Case Report).
Jan 01, 2003; Abstract: Computed tomography is widely used to diagnose acute pancreatitis. Iodinated contrast medium lengthens the duration of...
Patent No. 7,477,929 Issued on Jan. 13, Assigned to Siemens for Living Body Contrast Medium Flow Forecasting Method (German Inventors)
Feb 26, 2009; ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 26 -- Ernst Klotz of Uttenreuth, Germany, and Annabella Rauscher of Erlangen, Germany, have developed a...
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About a million years before her was "Ardi" (Ardipithecus ramidus), which had much more primitive feet, suggesting that although she might have been able to walk upright, she still was well adapted to life in the trees. So it came as quite a surprise last year when researchers described part of a fossil foot from 3.4 million years ago—close to Lucy’s age—that resembled the apelike foot of the much older Ardi.
I report on the latest thinking about what Ardi, the mysterious new fossil foot and other finds mean for understanding human origins in the February issue of Scientific American. In the video below Yohannes Haile-Selassie, of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who led the project and research effort to describe the new find, explains why the primitive foot was such a shock.
The famous "Lucy" specimen (Australopithecus afarensis) is one of the earliest known human ancestors to have had a comfortably humanlike upright stride. Her kind lived some 3.6 million to 2.9 million years ago.continue to source article at scientificamerican.com
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This preparation describes the
production of a tertiary alcohol from a Grignard reagent and a ketone.
The reaction is performed in a
reflux apparatus which has a calcium chloride guard tube inserted in the top of
- Place a 250 cm3 three-necked round-bottomed flask, a
double-surface water condenser, a tap funnel and a guard tube containing
anhydrous calcium chloride in an oven at 120oC for an hour or
- What is a double-surface condenser, and why is it needed?
- A double-surface condenser has a water jacket both on the outside and
through the centre of the condensing tube. It is needed where, as here,
the condensed liquid is very volatile.
- What is the purpose of the guard tube?
- The guard tube prevents water vapour from entering the apparatus from
- Why is the apparatus and the reagents dried?
- Grignard reagents react easily with water. Any moisture present will
prevent the reaction from occurring.
- Allow the apparatus to cool, and assemble it as a refluxing apparatus
with the guard tube in the top of the condenser, a tap funnel in the
second neck of the flask and a mechanical stirrer in the third neck. The
apparatus should be clamped so as to leave room for the use of a cooling
bath of iced water around the flask if necessary.
- Why might the apparatus need to be cooled during the reaction?
- The reaction is exothermic.
- Place in the flask 6.2g of magnesium turnings (those for the
preparation of Grignard reagents) and 100 cm3 of dry ether.
Place 27 cm3 of dried 1-bromobutane in the tap funnel.
- Justify the quantities used.
- There is 0.25 mol of magnesium and 0.25 mol of 1-bromobutane (density
1.28 g cm-3), this being the 1:1 ratio in which the reactants
- What is used to dry the ethoxyethane?
- Sodium metal.
- What is used to dry the 1-bromobutane?
- Anhydrous potassium carbonate.
- Run in about half of the 1-bromobutane and stir briefly. When the
mixture has settled, drop in one or two small crystals of iodine so that
they rest on the surface of the magnesium - do not stir. The reaction
should begin within a few minutes; the reaction mixture should be allowed
to reflux gently with cooling as necessary using an ice-water bath. During
this time add the remaining 1-bromobutane in small portions.
- What is the purpose of the iodine crystals?
- The iodine initiates the reaction. (It is often said that it is
catalytic, but it cannot be recovered from the reaction mixture at the end
- it is chemically changed, so is not really catalytic.)
- When the preparation of the Grignard reagent is complete the liquid in
the flask will be cloudy and of a greyish colour. Place in the tap funnel
a solution of 18.5cm3 of dried propanone in 19 cm3
of dried ethoxyethane. Stir the mixture in the flask rapidly, and add the
propanone solution slowly, cooling the flask in ice if necessary. This
reaction is vigorous. When all the propanone has been added the mixture
should be allowed to stand overnight.
- Why is the propanone dried?
- Water (with which propanone is miscible in all proportions) would
decompose the Grignard reagent to give an alkane.
- Suggest a suitable drying agent for propanone.
- Anhydrous potassium carbonate or anhydrous calcium chloride.
- Decompose the product by pouring the reaction mixture on to 150g of
crushed ice, stirring well. Dissolve the precipitated magnesium compounds
by the addition of 10% aqueous hydrochloric acid with stirring until
the precipitate has disappeared. Transfer the mixture to a separating
funnel, and run off and keep the lower aqueous layer; transfer the
ethoxyethane layer to a suitable flask.
- What is the precipitated magnesium compound?
- Magnesium hydroxide.
- Which ions are present in the aqueous solution after treatment with
- Magnesium ions, and bromide and chloride ions.
- Return the aqueous layer to the funnel, and wash it with 15cm3
of ethoxyethane. Keep the aqueous layer as before, combining the
ethoxyethane solution with that separated earlier. Repeat the washing of
the aqueous layer with 15cm3 of ethoxyethane twice more,
combining all the washings with the original solution.
- Why is the aqueous layer washed with ethoxyethane?
- The product alcohol is significantly soluble in water, so the washing
with fresh ethoxyethane removes some of the dissolved alcohol.
- Why is the aqueous layer washed three times with 15 cm3
of ethoxyethane rather than with one 45 cm3 portion?
- The alcohol in the aqueous layer is in equilibrium with that in the
ethoxyethane layer. It can be shown that three washings are more efficient
at removing the alcohol rather than one washing with the same total volume
of ethoxyethane. This is a general principle in solvent extraction.
- Add some anhydrous potassium carbonate to the ethoxyethane solution,
and leave to stand until it is clear.
- What is the purpose of adding potassium carbonate?
- It is a drying agent.
- What is the significance of the liquid becoming clear?
- Wet organic liquids that are not water miscible are cloudy; the
clearness shows that the ethoxyethane solution is now dry.
- Transfer the ethoxyethane solution to a clean distilling flask, and
distil off the ethoxyethane using a warm water bath.
- Why is a warm water bath used to heat the flask?
- Ethoxyethane vapour is explosive in air, so no naked flames must ever
be used anywhere in a room where ethoxyethane is being used.
- When all the ethoxyethane has been removed, fractionally distil the
remaining liquid using an electric heating mantle, collecting the fraction
that boils between 137-141oC.
- Why is the range between 137-141oC chosen?
- The product alcohol boils at 139oC so distils over in this
- Why is an electric heating mantle used?
- A boiling water bath would be too cool, and although the ethoxyethane
has been distilled off there is still enough vapour around to make the use
of flames dangerous.
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The hoary marmot (Marmota caligata), the Alaska marmot (M. broweri), and the woodchuck (M. monax) are the three species of marmots that live in Alaska. The hoary marmot can be found at the bases of active talus slopes in the mountains of central, southeastern, and southwestern Alaska. It also occurs down to sea level along some areas of the coast. The Alaska marmot lives in similar talus habitat throughout much of the Brooks Range. The woodchuck digs its den in loess (wind-deposited soils) along river valleys in the dry lowlands of eastcentral Alaska.
General description: Large relatives of the squirrel, the hoary and closely related Alaska marmots weigh 10 pounds (4.5 kg) or more and may exceed 24 inches (61 cm) in total length. The woodchuck weighs between 2 and 6 pounds (.4-2.7 kg). They may grow to be 20 inches (50.8 cm) long. The animals attain their maximum weight in late summer, when they accumulate thick layers of fat that will sustain them through winter hibernation. Body shape is similar in all three species: head short and broad, legs short, ears small, body thickset, tail densely furred, and front paws clawed for digging burrows. Hoary and Alaska marmots are predominantly gray with a darker lower back and face and a dark, reddish tail. The hoary marmot has a white patch above its nose and usually has dark brown feet, giving it the Latin name caligata, meaning “booted.” The Alaska marmot does not have a white face patch, its feet may be light or dark, and its fur is much softer than the stiff fur of the hoary marmot. A uniform reddish brown, the woodchuck has an unmarked brown face. The name woodchuck originated as a Cree Indian word used to describe a number of similar-sized animals and does not describe characteristics of the woodchuck's behavior or habitat preference.
Life history: In Alaska, all marmots mate in April or May. About a month later, two to six young are born hairless and blind. The young disperse two months after birth and may breed for the first time when they are 2 or 3 years old. Marmots may live to 5 years or more. They feed on grasses, flowering plants, berries, roots, mosses, and lichens.
Hoary and Alaska marmots make their summer homes on the bases of active talus slopes, where the rocks protect them from predators and provide lookout stations. Woodchuck dens may be up to 30 feet long, are dug in the loamy soils of river valleys in Interior Alaska, and end with a chamber containing a large grass nest. Most marmot dens have a main entrance with a mound of dirt near the hole and a number of concealed entrances. Marmots are social animals. Although each family has a separate burrow, these burrows are located near each other, forming a colony.
True hibernators, marmots enter a state of torpor in winter during which all bodily functions are reduced. Hoary marmots and woodchucks hibernate alone in the same burrows in which they spent the summer. To protect themselves from the cold, they plug the tunnel leading to the nest chamber with a mixture of dirt, vegetation, and feces. They emerge from their winter hibernation in April or early May to find food and mates. Adapted to the harsher winter climate of the Brooks Range, Alaska marmots create a special winter den which has a single entrance and is characteristically located on an exposed ridge that becomes snow-free in early spring. The entrance is plugged after all colony members are inside, and no animals can leave until the plug thaws in early May. Consequently, Alaska marmots mate before they emerge from their winter den. These dens are relatively permanent for each colony, and some are used for more than 20 years. Because hibernation begins in September, most marmots in Alaska spend two-thirds of each year locked in their winter dens.
Marmots are most active in early morning and late afternoon, although they may leave their burrows during other daylight hours. Marmots need wind to control mosquito levels and rarely venture out on calm days. The Alaska marmot marks its territory by rubbing its face and glands on rocks and along trails. The hoary marmot probably marks its territory in the same way.
The pelt colors of marmots help them blend with the lichen-colored rocks or rusty-brown soil of their surroundings. Nevertheless, marmots remain alert for predators including eagles, foxes, coyotes, wolves, and bears. When the Alaska marmot is alarmed, it produces a slurred, low-pitched warning call. The alarm call of both hoary marmot and the woodchuck is a loud whistle. They also hiss, squeal, growl, and yip. In areas where marmots are hunted by humans, they have learned to remain quiet when humans approach. Good climbers and swimmers, woodchucks may also take to trees or water to avoid predators.
Marmots often secondarily benefit other animals and plants. Abandoned marmot holes can become homes for small mammals. In moderation, their digging and defecation loosen, aerate, and improve the soil. Alaska Natives have long relished marmot meat and used its thick coat for warm clothing. Although these wary animals are difficult to approach closely, persistent observers are rewarded by the fascinating sight of a marmot community.
The northern flying squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus yukonensis) is a gliding (volplaning) mammal that is incapable of true flight like birds and bats. There are 25 subspecies across North America with Interior Alaska being the most northern and western limit of the species' range. The generic name, Glaucomys, is from the Greek glaukos (silver, gray) and mys (mouse). Sabrinus is derived from the latin word sabrina (river-nymph) and refers to the squirrel's habit of living near streams and rivers.
General description: Adult flying squirrels average 4.9 ounces (139 gm) in weight and 12 inches (30 cm) in total length. The tail is broad, flattened, and feather-like. A unique feature of the body is the lateral skin folds (patagia) on each side that stretch between front and hind legs and function as gliding membranes. This squirrel is nocturnal and has large eyes that are efficient on the darkest nights. Eye shine color is a distinctive reddish-orange. Flying squirrel pelage is silky and thick with the top of the body light brown to cinnamon, the sides grayish, and the belly whitish.
Habitat requirements: Flying squirrels require a forest mosaic that includes adequate denning and feeding areas. Den sites include tree cavities and witches' brooms. Tree cavities are most numerous in old forests where wood rot, frost cracking, woodpeckers, and carpenter ants have created or enlarged cavities. Witches' brooms, clumps of abnormal branches caused by tree rust diseases, are the most common denning sites of flying squirrels in Interior Alaska. About November or December, when temperatures begin to drop sharply, flying squirrels move out of cavities and into brooms. In the coldest periods of winter, they form aggregations of two or more individuals in the brooms and sleep in torpor.
Feeding areas preferred by flying squirrels contain fungi (mushrooms and truffles), berries, and tree lichens and may be in either young or old forests. Dried fungi cached in limbs by red squirrels are sometimes stolen by flying squirrels.
Flying squirrels probably get water from foods they eat and rain, dew, and snow. Constant sources of free water (lakes, ponds, and watercourses) do not appear to be a stringent habitat requirement.
In a year's time, a flying squirrel in Interior Alaska may use as many as 13 different den trees within 19.8 acres (8 ha). On a night foray, a squirrel may travel as far as 1.2 miles (2 km) in a circular route and be away from its den tree for up to 7 hours. It may change den trees at night and move to different ones more than 20 times over a year, staying in each for a varying numbers of days. Den trees with brooms are used more than twice as much as trees with cavities.
Fairly dense, old closed-canopy forests with logs and corridors of trees (especially conifers) that are spaced close enough to glide between are needed for cover from predators. High quality flying squirrel habitat can be a community mosaic of small stands of varying age classes in which there is a mix of tall conifers and hardwoods. Part of the mosaic must be old coniferous forest with den trees containing witches' brooms, woodpecker cavities, and natural cavities for nesting sites. Riparian zones provide excellent habitat in all coniferous forest associations.
Life history: Flying squirrels in Alaska may breed anytime from March to late June, depending on length and severity of the winter. The female can breed before 11 months of age and give birth at about 1 year of age. Gestation requires about 37 days, so the young are born from May to early July. One litter of two per year is probably the usual case for Alaska, but they are known to have litters ranging from one to six in other parts of their range. At birth, the young flying squirrel (nestling) is hairless, and its eyes and ears are closed. Development is slow in comparison with other mammals of similar size. Their eyes open at about 25 days, and they nurse for about 60 to 70 days. By day 240, the young are fully grown and cannot be distinguished from adults by body measurements and fur characteristics. Mortality rate for flying squirrels 1 and 2 years old is about 50 percent, and few live past 4 years of age. Complete population turnover can occur by the third year.
Individual flying squirrels nest in tree cavities, witches' brooms, and drays. In Interior Alaska, most brooms and cavity entrances have southerly exposures. Nests in cavities are usually located about 25 feet above the ground but may range between 5 and 45 feet. Flying squirrels excavate chambers in witches' brooms and line them with nesting materials. A dray nest is a ball-like mass of mosses, twigs, lichens, and leaves with shredded bark and lichens forming the lining of the chamber. Flying squirrels build drays entirely by themselves or modify the nests of other species (e.g., bird nests, red squirrel nests). The dray is usually positioned close to the trunk on a limb or whorl of branches with its entrance next to the trunk. Most drays in Alaska are probably conifers.
Food habits: The flying squirrel is omnivorous. While little is known about its diet in Alaska, the food it consumes in other parts of its range include mushrooms, truffles, lichens, fruits, green vegetation, nuts, seeds, tree buds, insects, and meat (fresh, dried, or rotted). Nestling birds and birds' eggs may also be eaten. Those observed foraging in the wild in Interior Alaska ate mushrooms (fresh and dried), truffles, berries, tree lichens, and the newly flushed growth tips on white spruce limbs. In spring, summer, and fall the diet is mostly fresh fungi. In winter it's mostly lichens. Flying squirrels are not known to cache fungi for winter in Alaska, but they are known to do so elsewhere in their range. Witches' brooms and tree cavities would be likely places to find their caches.
Predators and parasites: Owls, hawks, and carnivorous mammals prey on flying squirrels. Primary predators are probably the great horned owl, goshawk, and marten due to their common occurrence and widespread range in Alaska's forests. Three different flea species may infest a single squirrel.
Economic and ecological value: Flying squirrels are important to forest regeneration and timber production because they disperse spores of ectomycorrhizal fungi like truffles. Truffles are fruiting bodies of a special type of fungus that matures underground. They are dependent upon animals to smell them out, dig them up, consume them, and disperse their spores in fecal material where the animal travels. The animal serves to inoculate disturbed sites (e.g., clearcuts, burned areas) with mycorrhizae that join symbiotically with plant roots and enhance their ability to absorb nutrients and maintain health. The flying squirrel's ecological role in forest ecosystems, therefore, gives it economic value. In addition, they may be important prey for a variety of hawks, owls, small carnivores, and furbearers like marten, lynx, and red fox. Many Alaskans value flying squirrels just for their interesting habits and aesthetic qualities.
Management considerations: Logging for house logs, wood for fuel, and lumber can have devastating effects on flying squirrel populations if clearcut size is too large or if some scattered tall conifers in large cuts are not retained as cover and for travel across the open spaces. Management should include retention of other squirrel species in shared habitats. Snags with woodpecker holes or other natural cavities and coniferous trees with witches' brooms must also be maintained in managed forests in order to provide adequate habitat for flying squirrels.
The red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) makes itself quite conspicuous with its lively habits and noisy chatter. Cone cuttings on stumps or rocks are common and tracks in snow are numerous where this squirrel occurs. It can be found in spruce forests over most of Alaska and has a wide range in North America. It occupies a wide variety of forest habitat, occurring in the hardwood forests of eastern North America and the coniferous forests of the west and north.
General description: The active rodent averages 11 to 13 inches in length (28-33 cm), including tail, and is a rusty-olive color on the upper parts of its body with a whitish belly and underparts. In summer, a dark stripe on the side separates the upper rusty color from the white of the belly. The bushy tail is often a lighter orange or red with light tipped hairs.
Life history: Red squirrels are solitary but pair for mating in February and March. Females usually breed when they are 1 year old. Three to seven young are born after a gestation period of 36 to 40 days. The young are born blind and hairless, weighing about ¼ ounce at birth. They are weaned at about 5 weeks but remain with the female until almost adult size.
The young leave the female and are independent during their first winter. This means that they have to be successful at gathering and storing a winter's supply of food.
Behavior: Much of the red squirrel's time in the summer is spent cutting and storing green spruce cones. There may be several bushels of cones stored in a cache. Caches may attain a diameter of 15 to 18 feet and a depth of 3 feet. Red squirrels also cache mushrooms on tree branches. They eat seeds, berries, buds, fungi, and occasionally insects and birds' eggs. They are busy collecting and storing food from early morning until dusk and also on moonlit nights.
Nests may be a hole in a tree trunk or a tightly constructed mass of twigs, leaves, mosses, and lichens in the densest foliage of a tree (making the nest almost completely weatherproof). A loose mass of twigs and leafy debris in a high tree is used as a “fair weather” nest. Their ground burrows, also known as middens, are used mostly for food storage. There is usually one large active midden in each territory with perhaps an inactive or auxiliary midden.
The home range of red squirrels is about ½ to 1 acre, and each squirrel knows its territory well. Each squirrel has several nests in its territory and always seems to know which retreat is nearest. Territorial behavior seems to be most rigid during caching of food and relaxes somewhat in the spring.
The red squirrel is active all year but may remain in its nest during severe cold spells and inclement weather. They are agile climbers and, being extremely curious, will often attempt to enter buildings, upsetting anything they can move and gnawing on woodwork. Once in a house or cabin, they can be very destructive, tearing out insulation and mattress stuffing for use as nesting material and caching food stores in any available niche.
Predators: The main predators of red squirrels are hawks, owls, and marten. Other predators may occasionally take a squirrel but are not serious threats. Around populated areas, one of the predators is the domestic housecat.
Human use: The red squirrel is used to a limited extent by man for food and fur. Squirrels may be small but the meat is good eating. In parts of Canada and Alaska the pelts are sold for their fur. Red squirrels may damage trees, cutting off twigs by the bushel, but they are also helpful because they distribute and plant seeds of spruce and other trees.
The Arctic Ground Squirrel (Spermophilus Parryii) was named "tsik-tsik" by the Inupiat Eskimos on account of a call this little rodent makes when it is alarmed?
Tsik-tsiks are found in both arctic and alpine tundra. They fatten themselves on seeds, mushrooms and berries—almost doubling their body weight over the summer—in preparation for fall hibernation. Although they insulate their winter burrows with grasses and block the entrances with dirt, winter temperatures inside the burrows still fall well below 0° F.
During hibernation, the body temperature of the arctic ground squirrel drops from 98.6° F to 26.4° F—that's below the freezing point of water and is the lowest known body temperature of any living mammal. Most mammals, including people, would be frozen solid at that body temperature! Scientists aren't sure just how these diminutive rodents do it, but they apparently have developed a unique mechanism that allows their body fluids to become supercooled—to fall below the freezing point without crystallizing into ice and damaging cell tissue.
Periodically throughout the winter, the tsik-tsik will rouse itself, briefly raising its body temperature more than 70° F in four hours, before going back into hibernation. Not until late March or early April does the arctic ground squirrel finally emerge from its winter den to the light of another spring and six months of intense activity.
Arctic ground squirrels are the largest and most northern of the North American ground squirrels. This species is common in the ice-free mountainous regions of Denali. Permafrost and soil type are two of the most important factors limiting ground squirrel distribution in Denali.
Arctic ground squirrels are burrowing animals and they establish colonies in areas with well-drained soils and views of the surrounding landscape. Colonies often consist of multiple burrows and a maze of tunnels beneath the surface. Well-drained soils are important, as flooding of these burrows causes considerable problems for squirrels. Accordingly, squirrels usually avoid establishing colonies or excavating burrows where permafrost is close to the surface.
Like many other arctic animals, arctic ground squirrels have unique physiological adaptations that allow them to survive during winter. Arctic ground squirrels are obligate hibernators and spend 7 to 8 months in hibernation. Researchers at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks have shown that during hibernation, arctic ground squirrels adopt the lowest body temperature ever measured in a mammal. The body temperature of hibernating squirrels drops below freezing, a condition referred to as supercooling. At intervals of two to three weeks, still in a state of sleep, hibernating squirrels shiver and shake for 12 to 15 hours to create heat that warms them back to a normal body temperature of about 98 degrees Fahrenheit. When the shivering and shaking stops, body temperature drops back to the minimal temperature. This type of hibernation is rare among mammals and scientists are still studying this unique physiological behavior.
In Denali, ground squirrels are active from late April to early October, but the sexes and age-classes show some differences in their annual activity patterns. Adult males are usually the first to emerge from hibernation. They dig their way through the snow and stay relatively close to their burrows until the snow cover melts. Breeding occurs in May and a single litter of 5 to 10 pups is born in June. The young develop rapidly and usually emerge from their burrows in mid-July. By late summer, young abandon their natal burrow and occupy a neighboring, empty burrow or excavate a new one.
Adults start hibernating as soon as they have enough body fat to survive the winter, often in late August when plenty of foods are still available. It is probably safer to enter hibernation early, even when foods are accessible, than to remain on the surface vulnerable to predators. Youngsters, however, take much longer to find foods and put on body fat and they are often active until late September. This means that youngsters are more vulnerable to predation than adults.
The diet of arctic ground squirrels is diverse and opportunistic. They eat many types of vegetation including the leaves, seeds, fruits, stems, flowers, and roots of many species of grasses, forbs, and woody plants. They also eat mushrooms and meat from freshly killed animals (including ground squirrels). Because they are active only during the short subarctic summer, arctic ground squirrels must be efficient foragers. As summer progresses, they put on a tremendous amount of fat stores for the winter and often double their body weight by the time they enter hibernation in fall.
The social behavior of arctic ground squirrels is complex. This species is highly territorial and squirrels may kill other squirrels over territorial disputes. However, other related females in the colony often care for orphaned youngsters. Further, territorial behavior lessens during late summer, and male squirrels may move between colonies or establish colonies of their own.
So many different predators eat arctic ground squirrels that Adolph Murie called them the "staff of life" in Denali. They are one of the most important summer food sources for golden eagles, gyrfalcons, foxes, and grizzly bears.
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At Bryce Canyon National Park, erosion has shaped colorful Claron limestones, sandstones, and mudstones into thousands of spires, fins, pinnacles, and mazes. Collectively called "hoodoos," these colorful and whimsical formations stand in horseshoe-shaped amphitheaters along the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau in Southern Utah. Hoodoos formed over thousands of years by the same processes that form the features of surrounding parks. Water, ice (at varying intervals) and gravity are the forces that form Bryce Canyon.
Dolomite, limestone and siltstone are very hard and form the protective caprock on most of the spires. Frost wedging is the erosional force that breaks apart the harder rocks. Mudstone is the softest rock in a hoodoo and is easily identified because it forms the narrowest portion of the pinnacles. As mudstone moistens it erodes easily and will run down the sides forming a stucco or protective coating. Every time it rains the stucco is renewed. Eolian or wind forces erode at slow rates. If wind does not erode the stucco layer fast enough it will renew before eolian erosion affects the rock. For this reason wind has little to no affect on hoodoo formation or destruction.
Bryce Canyon National Park is named for pioneer Ebenezer Bryce who came to the Paria Valley with his family in 1875. He was sent by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints because his skill as a carpenter would be useful in settling this area. Bryce built a road to the plateau top to retrieve firewood and timber. He also built an irrigation canal to raise crops and animals. Local people called the canyon with the strange rock formations near Ebenezer's home "Bryce's Canyon". The Bryces moved to Arizona in 1880, the name remained.
As southern Utah developed, Reuben and Minnie Syrett--who homesteaded just outside the present park boundaries--brought their friends to see the intricately eroded stone formations. By popular demand, they developed sleeping and eating facilities on the canyon rim. They called their establishment, "Tourist's Rest." When the area was set aside as a national monument in 1923, the Union Pacific Railroad bought out the Syrett's interests and began to construct Bryce Canyon Lodge intending to make the Bryce Canyon area part of their new "Loop Tour" of the southwest. The Syrett's then built "Ruby's Inn" on their own land just north of the park.
Click Here for information about the shuttle service for Bryce Canyon National Park
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The Images of Back Children in Gwendolyn Brook's Poetry: A StudyBY: p.suresh kumar R.panneerselvam | Category: Education | Submitted: 2012-04-13 08:18:42
In between, her poetic achievement is marked by gradual and progressive ascent. She became the first African American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, membership of the Academy if Arts and Letters un 1976, winning if two Guggenheim awards, poet laureateship of Illinois in 1968, the award by the National Endowment for Arts in 1989,JJeffrson lectureship by the National Endowments of the Humanities in 1994, the National Medals of Arts award in 1995, the "First Woman" award from the Federal Government in 1999, and more than fifty honorary decorates from various colleges and universities.
Brools's creative output extends over a period of six decades. Her poetry is distinctive not only in her handling of multiplicity of forms but also in her craftsmanship. She has committed herself to the ideals of social justice for her race and sex as well as ro the aesthetics of art. The issues of racism and an authentic identity have been the recurrent themes of African American Writers. Witnessing the growth of black literature by stages-form anger to defiance, to protest, to recognition, to search for identity, and to reconciliation, Brooks wrote poetry that was at once potent, provocative, poignant, and starling, a poetry that resisted racism, asserted black consciousness, and upheld the black values, a poetry that instilled a new faith in self-reliance and dignity, and a poetry that can be a source of inspiration of succeeding generations writers.
A study of Brooks's poetry will be incomplete without a study of her poetry for children, who also encounter the same kind of racial discrimination which the adult balcks are subjected to in the racially prejudiced America. Before 1967, Brooks published only one volume of poetry ofr children: Bronzeville Boys and Gorls(1956). The book consists of thirty-four poems, which are illustrated by Ronnai Solbert. All these poems portray the individual experiences of thirty-seven children, but Brooks is objective and detached in her portrayal of these boys and girls.
In poems written in couplets, the first line rhymes with the second, the third line rhymes with the foruth, and so on:
I have a secret place to go.
Not any one may know.
And sometimes when the wind is rough
I cannot get there fast enough
Brooks is sensitive to the prosodic features of language:
The loudness in the road
And laughs away from me.
It laughs a lovely whiteness,
And whitely whirs away,
Some other where,
Still white as milk or shirts.
So beautiful it hurts.
The compound image "flitter-twitter" defines the delicate motion of the snow. The onomatopoeic words "SUSHES" and "hushes" convey the power of the silent and quite snow to quell "the loudness in the road." "Loudness" suggests the traffic and noise, which stand in opposition to the silence of the world of nature. The irregular length of the lines suggests the irregular but the motion of the snow.
Further, Brooks's poems for children cannot be categorized as nonsense verses. On the contrary, they are sensible verses. Though they appeal to our imagination, the children in her poems do not live in a pastoral, romantic, or idealized world. They are always the poor black children living in the urban ghettos. They suffer poverty and entrapment. In Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic voice, Melhem argues that Brooks" Acknowldges no cruel children but implies cruelty, the indifference that sanctions poverty and compels children to be prematurely involved in adult problems" (95).
Brooks's description of the bleak experience of children is an compiled protest against the socioeconomic injustices that they encounter. In "John, who is Poor," Brooks depicts the poverty of the black boy, John, who lives with his widowed mother. She request the children in the neighborhood to sympathize with him, and share their eatables with him:
Oh, little children, be good to John!-
Who lives so lone and alone.
Whose Mamma must hurry to toil all day.
Whose papa is dead and done.
Give him a berry, boys, when you may,
And Girls, some mint when you can. (1-6)
But the poet dies not know" when his hunger will end, No yet when it began" (7-8).Brooks makes it clear that racial oppression is the causes of the sufferings of the black children. But her criticism is not overt. Further, she is objective in her description of their poverty, In keeping with the mood of the 1940s and1950s, she beloved that the whites would help the blacks solve their problems. But it took about eleven years, for her, from the year of her publication of Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), to realize that the whites remained indifferent to the problems of the blacks.
After 1967, Brooks published three volumes of poetry for Children: Alones, The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves, and Children Coming Home. In Aloness (1971), A reflective poem of fifty-one lines, Brooks projects a child's experience of solitude. The drawings by Leroy Foster present an appealing little black boy. The nine postures of the boy are indicative of this none different moods. Unlike Bronzeville Boys and Girls, which is written in quatrains and couplets with rhyme, Aloneness is written in free verse without rhyme. It is written from the point of view of the black boy, who defines loneliness as the pain of being alone: "Loneliness means you want somebody./You have not planned to stand somewhere with other people gone./ Loneliness never has a brought color . Perhaps it is gray"1-3_). As the speaker is a child, the images are simple. The child imagines that the couloirs of loneliness are "gray." The implied idea is the child's association of the color of loneliness with the4 black people's collective loneliness in the racially oppressive America. The child defines aloneness/solitude as the pleasure of beings alone: "But aloneness is delicious" (9). He compares aloneness with" a red small apple" (12). Then he turns to the image of a pond. Aloneness is "like loving a pond in summer," a simile that graphs the child's experience of place and time (15). Nowhere does the poem mention about racial discrimination. But the poem is educational in tone. Brooks's aim is to develop a positive sense of identity among blacks.
While Aloneness is in free verse, The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves or What You are You are is rhymed like" Bronzeville Boys and Girls." The poem is illustrated by the drawings of Timothy Jones. It is a beast fable. Unlike Aloneness, Which is indirectly didactic, The Tiger is directly didactic, offering strategies for survival. The title implies human folly. The tiger wears white gloves to be fashionable, but his companions ridicule his strange behavior. The theme is self-acceptance and pride:
THAT TIGER FLOCK
AQND WISELY WEARING
WHAT'S FIERCR AS THE FACE.S
NOT WHITNESS AND LACE. (15-23)
The "tiger" represents the black people. "Whiteness" Represents the spurious standards of beauty established by the whites. As a metaphor, "gloves" represents phenomena like the black people's return to hair-straightening, which, for Brooks, means aping the white values. The idea is that black is that black people should develop their own attributes and esteem them.
As a realist, Brooks always portrays what the blacks experience in society. Despite her commitment to black consciousness, she has not forgotten the continuous bleak experiences of the black-adults as well as children. the volume children coming home!1991), Brooks's children do not live in a romantic or an idealized world. They encounter social and economic injustices. In the prefatory poem, "After School," Brooks delineates the odds against children:
* Not all of the children
* Come home to cookies and coca.
* One will be shot on his way home to warmth, wit and wisdom. [t/o]
* One teacher mutters"My God, they are gone,"[t/o]
* One is ripe to report Ten People to the Principal. [t/o]
*One whispers"The Little Black Bastards."
The poem attests to the simplicity of her poetry written after 1967. In this dramatic monologue, written in a child's voice, Brooks has abandoned lyricism and rhyme, and "deliberately abandoning the formal virtuosity that characterized her earlier work, Brooks represents children's voices through a seemingly simple, declarative method... (Flynnn494). The image of the innocent child exposes the evils of the social practices. Brooks's intention behind the exposition is to make the children" seek out their own strength" (495).
Brooks. Gwendolyn. Bronzeville Boys and Girals. New York: Harper, 1956.
---. Aloneness. Dotroit: Broadside, 1969.
---.The Near-Johannesburg Boy, and Other Poems. Chicago: David, 1987.
---.The tiger who wore white Gloves: Or You Are What You Are. Chicago: Third world. 1987.
---.Children Coming Home. cChicago:David,1991
Flynn, Richard. 'The Kindergarten of New Consciousness':
Cwendolyon Brooks and the Social Construction of Childhood."
African American Review 34.3(2000):483-99.
Melhem,D.H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. Kentucky: Up of Kentucky, 1989.
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It's Pumpkin Time
- Grades: PreK–K, 1–2, 3–5
It’s October, fall is here, Halloween is near, all of which means — it’s Pumpkin time! This month we are diving into pumpkins hands first. Before my class could fully experience pumpkins, we started out by reading a lot of books. Last week I shared a few of my favorite fall books. This week I am sharing one more book, specifically about pumpkins, along with some science activities that relate to all of them.
Getting in the Mood
We began our week by reading the story It's Pumpkin Time by Zoe Hall. Later, I will make the book available in the listening center. After reading the story, we made an anchor chart about pumpkins showing what we know about them and what they need to grow. My students were very excited to share their experiences with me. Many have even planted their own pumpkins in the past. We followed this discussion up with a short sequence activity of how to grow a pumpkin
I brought several pumpkins of different sizes into the classroom for the students to observe. We picked the largest one to determine its circumference. As I passed around a skein of white yarn, the students each cut off a piece hoping it was the exact length to circle the largest part of our pumpkin. After taping their names to their pieces of yarn, we used a separate color for the actual length needed and compared the lengths on our large class graph. We had one student guess exactly!
Will It Sink or Float?
Taking our largest pumpkin and one of our smaller ones, I asked the class to predict whether they would sink or float. Some students remembered our coconut experiment and thought that because the pumpkins were bigger than a coconut, they would sink. After everyone made and charted their predictions, it was time to fill the container with water and see what would happen. We put in the small pumpkin, and it floated. The students were very excited, but some were still certain that the big pumpkin would sink. They were surprised when I submerged the large pumpkin in the water and it popped up to the surface. We repeated the experiment the following day using pumpkin seeds and, again, students predicted what would happen. Then placing a few seeds in a small container of water, we watched the seeds float to the top.
Experiencing the Pumpkin
I posted a note on our parent communication board asking for pumpkins and received a very generous donation of 11. With help from a wonderful parent volunteer, we cut off the tops of the pumpkins to show the students what was inside. I divided the class into groups of two and let anyone who wanted to stick his or her hand inside to feel around and describe the sensation. After everyone had a chance to feel the "guts," each pair scooped out the seeds and pulp into containers to observe. As they scraped and pulled out the stringy pulp and seeds, I walked about the classroom observing and listening to their conversations. Some students were "grossed-out" by the entire process, others were so excited they could hardly contain their enthusiasm, and for some it was their very first experience.
Using their fingers, they sifted and sorted through the pulp, pulling out the seeds. Once the seeds were separated from the pulp, the students counted them with their partners into groups of tens. We used clear portion cups to hold the seeds. I made sure to pair students who are unable to count objects to ten with more capable students. We also made a chart as we counted the cups. This was a great opportunity to practice counting by tens and a chance to revisit tally marks. We stopped counting the seeds after we had reached 2,000. We filled a gallon bag with the seeds. I took all of the seeds home to wash and cook. We enjoyed the seeds the following day during our snack time.
Growing Our Own Pumpkin
After reading about using a pumpkin as a planter to grow pumpkins, I decided this would be a great experience and a fun science activity to try with my own class. To start, we cut off the top of a pumpkin. Leaving all the seeds and pulp inside, we added some soil and then water. I was afraid to leave the pumpkin outside over the weekend, and this turned out to be a big mistake as the only thing that grew was mold. I wiped off the mold and placed the decaying pumpkin outside our back door and left it. After doing a little research, I decided to try it again with a smaller pumpkin and less water. Again, we cut open the pumpkin and added soil, but this time we only added a 1/2-cup of water. We then placed the pumpkin outside our classroom in the sun. Each day we are adding just a little water, no more than 1/2 a cup. With any luck we will have a sprout very soon. Meanwhile, we thought we would observe the decaying pumpkin I had left outside each day to see what would happen. After only one week of adding the soil, we noticed a sprout! Now we are waiting for our smaller pumpkin to sprout as well.
Pumpkins Are Everywhere
In math we used pumpkins to create patterns. The most popular one was the AB pattern. After students created their pattern strips, we turned them into headbands.
We also made a sequence book about the life cycle of the pumpkin. Students practiced reading and retelling the story before taking it home to share with their family.
Another favorite daily activity is our pocket chart poem. This week our poem is about pumpkins, of course. Each day students take turns pointing to the words while read along.
We finished our week with a pumpkin glyph. The students answered questions about pumpkins to create their glyphs.
We have had a lot of fun this week while learning at the same time. We will continue to watch our "pumpkin in a pumpkin" grow. Our plan is to transfer it into our new school garden when the garden is complete. I know my students will be talking about these experiences for a long time.
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Schoolcraft County’s history is as deep as the forests and lakes which attracted its original Native American settlers, and the generations of pioneers who discovered --- and continue to discover --- what this beautiful area has to offer.
The first Europeans believed to have visited the area were members of French explorer Jean Nicolet’s expedition, who passed through the area in the summer of 1634 in search of a route to the Orient (they got as far as Green Bay). In the fall of 1679, Rene Robert de La Salle visited the area abroad the Griffen, the first sailing ship to ply the Great Lakes.
The early Native American residence, most of whom were members of the Ojibwa tribe, settled around Indian Lake and at the mouth of the French-named Manistique River. In 1832, the “Snowshoe Bishop” Fredric Baraga established a Catholic mission on the eastern shore of Indian Lake. It was also during this time that Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Michigan’s first Indian Agent and the county’s namesake, was mapping the area, documenting the lives of tribal residence and negotiate treaties. Schoolcraft County was officially organized in 1871, with Manistique designated as the county seat.
The county’s first major industry was lumber. Beginning in the early 1880s, logging companies began extracting timber from the vast forests of white pine. The little town of Seney, with its rail access to St. Ignace and Marquette, and river route to Manistique, became a center of the logging boom. During its heyday, Seney was a bustling town of more than 20 saloons, 10 hotels, several stores and about 3,000 residents.
Much of the timber harvested from the county’s forests was floated down the river to Manistique, where it was milled, loaded on ships and sent to communities around the Great Lakes and beyond. But by the turn of the century, what had seemed inexhaustible resources was gone: The forests had been stripped, and the reign of “King Pine” was over.
Southwest of Manistique, on the Garden Peninsula in Delta County, is the site of another major 19th century industry. During the mid-1800s raw iron ore was being shipped at tremendous expense from the Upper Peninsula mines to the foundries in the lower Great Lakes. To make the process more cost-effective, a smelting operation was built at Fayette. From 1867 until it closed in 1891, Fayette’s blast furnaces produced more than 229,000 tons of iron, using local hardwood for fuel and native limestone t purify the iron ore.
Despite the demise of the timber and iron ore industries, many Schoolcraft residents stayed on, supporting their families through fishing, farming, and small business. Pulpwood and paper manufacturing, and limestone mining and processing, developed into major industries. The area’s abundant wildlife, temperate summers and clear lakes and rivers had long been a favorite vacation retreat from the hustle and bustle of the Midwest’s cities, and with the increase in winter-related recreation, tourism grew into a major component of the county’s economy.
Residences are proud of their area’s rich heritage, and they keep their history alive at a number of museums and historic sites. The Bishop Baraga Mission and Indian Cemetery, at Indian Lake, features replicas of the early log mission and surrounding bark dwellings. Manistique is a jumping of point to visit four historic Upper Peninsula lighthouses: the Manistique East Breakwater Light, Seul Choix Point Lighthouse and Museum, Peninsula Point Lighthouse and Sand point Lighthouse and Museum.
The Schoolcraft County Historical Park, in Manistique, features a museum and a historic 200-foot-tall brick water tower which has recently been restored. The 80-year-old structure, listed on the National and State historic registries, is located near the city’s unique Siphon Bridge. The bridge is part of a concrete flume built in 1919 to channel water to the paper mill.
Fayette State Historic Park features a museum, and a ghost town of 19 structures that includes several public and commercial building, residences and the ruins of the blast furnace complex. From ghost towns to lighthouses, Schoolcraft County offers fun and education insights into the past for visitors of all ages.
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Anti Gravity: When Hippos Go Bad; January 2000; Scientific American Magazine; by Mirsky; 1 Page(s)
Imagine a sport-utility vehicle interested in mating. That frightening scenario roughly captures your typical hippopotamus in rut. Hippos are big and surprisingly fast, able to reach speeds of 25 miles per hour. Unfortunately, anything of that size and speed may do inadvertent damage when in pursuit of an amorous adventure. Thus did a tragic death recently befall one Jean Ducuing, the director of a zoo near Bordeaux.Ducuing was killed by a charging hippo that may have been seeking intimacy with, or dominance over,nearby farm equipment.
The sex life of the hippo is far stranger than this incident illustrates. For one thing, hippos in the wild not only have sex,they host it.Back in 1994, researchers publishing in the Canadian Journal of Zoology announced the amazing finding of a species of leech, Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi, for which hippos are a secret love nest. In the researchers' own words: "Evidence suggests that mating in P. jaegerskioeldi is restricted to the rectum of the hippopotamus." ( Restricted being the operative word.)
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July 17, 1998 July 15, 1998: A unique levitation furnace that flew on the Space Shuttle in 1998 is being eyed for upgrades to fly on future Shuttle and International Space Station missions.
"TEMPUS on MSL-1 provided it was operationally reliable," said Dr. Ivan Egry, the project scientist at the German Space Agency (DLR). "I am really surprised at how much scientific data we are still squeezing out of it."
Egry spoke Tuesday morning to the third Biennial Microgravity Materials Science Conference sponsored by NASA.
TEMPUS - built by the DLR and used jointly by DLR and NASA - is the German acronym for containerless electromagnetic processing in weightlessness. That, simply put, is what TEMPUS does. An electromagnetic coil inside the TEMPUS facility positions metal samples with about 1/1,000th the force needed on the ground to work against gravity and keep the samples from touching the container walls. A second coil pumps in radio wave energy - a bit like a microwave oven - to melt the sample.
This approach is vital in a number of research areas because touching the container walls will instantly cool the sample and levitation on the ground often involve forces great enough to disturb the sample. Scientist don't want either to happen when they are trying to make precise measurements of fundamental properties that can help them refine manufacturing processes on Earth.
TEMPUS flew on the Microgravity Sciences Laboratory-1 mission in 1998, and on the second International Microgravity Laboratory (IML-2) in 1994. Data are still being analyzed, but Egry gave a preview Tuesday, including benchmark data that will let scientists correct the surface tension measurements for one type of metal, and make the first-ever reliable viscosity measurements.
"Many things were surprising," Egry said when asked about the data from TEMPUS. Among them were the first experimental measurements of the electrical conductivity of cobalt-palladium in both its liquid and solid states.
TEMPUS demonstrated its value by making repeat measurements that matched very closely with one another. Consistency is crucial when one is trying to establish basic physical properties. For example, one line of experiments involved cooling metals, such as zirconium, far below their normal freezing point and then recording the point where they froze, how much heat they gave off, and other details. The zirconium sample was put through 120 melt/freeze cycles.
"It's really amazing to see how one undercooling cycle follows the other," Egry said as he showed a graph showing precise repeatability in the data.
All told, the MSL-1 mission hosted 22 experiments comprising 197 hours of test run and 437 melting cycles.
Spurred by this success, DLR is looking at adapting TEMPUS to fly on Spacelab, and to incorporate better sample handling and video capabilities, and a broader temperature range. DLR also is looking at an Advanced TEMPUS that would allow scientists to replace samples in orbit - so the furnace would not have to be brought back - and add other improvements to enhance the science.
Editor's Note: The original news release, with images and related links, can be found at: http://science.msfc.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/msad15jul98_2.htm
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center--Space Sciences Laboratory.
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Sep. 24, 2002 Penn State engineers have optimized an energy harvesting circuit so that it transfers four times more electrical power out of vibration – the ordinary shakes and rattles generated by human motion or machine operation.
Using their laboratory prototype, which was developed from off-the-shelf parts, the Penn State researchers can generate 50 milliwatts. Although they haven't tried it, they believe the motion of a runner could be harnessed to generate enough power to run a portable electronic music device. By comparison, simple, un-optimized energy harvesting circuits, for example the type used to power LEDs on "smart" skis, can only generate a few milliwatts.
The researchers say the new circuit offers an environmentally friendly alternative to disposable batteries for wearable electronic devices or for wireless communication systems. In addition, the circuit could be used in sensor and monitoring networks that manage environmental control in office buildings, robot control and guidance systems for automatic manufacturing, warehouse inventory; integrated patient monitoring, diagnostics, drug administration in hospitals, interactive toys, smart home security systems, and interactive museums.
The new circuit is described in a paper, "Adaptive Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Circuit for Wireless, Remote Power Supply," published in the September issue of the journal, IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics. The authors are Geffrey K. Ottman, former Penn State master's degree student; Dr. Heath Hofmann, assistant professor of electrical engineering; Archin C. Bhatt, former Penn State master's degree student; and Dr. George A. Lesieutre, professor of aerospace engineering and associate director of the Penn State Center for Acoustics and Vibration.
Lesieutre explains that, like other energy harvesting circuits, the new Penn State device depends on the fact that when vibrated so that they bend or flex, piezo-electric materials produce an alternating or AC current and voltage. This electrical power has to be converted to direct current or DC by a rectifier before it can be stored in a battery or used. Hofmann adds that the magnitude of the piezoelectric material's vibration determines the magnitude of the voltage: "Since, in operation, the amount of vibrations can vary widely, some way must also be found to adaptively maximize power flow as well as convert it from AC to DC."
Using an analytical model, the team derived the theoretical optimal power flow from a rectified piezoelectric device and proposed a circuit that could achieve this power flow. The circuit includes an AC-DC rectifier and a switch-mode DC-DC converter to control the energy flow into the battery.
The Penn State researcher notes that using an approach similar to one used to maximize power from solar cells, the team developed a tracking feature that enables the DC-DC converter to continuously implement the optimal power transfer and optimize the power stored by the battery.
The circuit is the first to include an adaptive DC-DC converter and achieves about 80 percent of the theoretical maximum – well above the operating output of simple energy harvesting circuits.
The research was supported by a contract with the Office of Naval Research.
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Dec. 17, 2009 In a pilot project that could help better manage the planet's strained natural resources, space-age technologies are helping a Washington state community monitor its water availability. NASA satellites and sensors are providing the information needed to make more accurate river flow predictions on a daily basis.
"World leaders are struggling to protect natural resources for future generations," said Jeff Ward, a senior research scientist at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is managed by Battelle. "These tools help us sustainably use natural resources while balancing environmental, cultural and economic concerns."
Ward manages a project on behalf of Battelle that is helping to better predict the flow of the Dungeness River, near Sequim, Wash., with data collected by NASA instruments. The project started by creating a new model that predicts river flows in the river's surrounding valley. It then expanded to help other communities in Kansas, Maine, Oregon and Washington state better manage their water and land resources with similar technologies.
The project -- called the North Olympic Peninsula Solutions Network -- is lead by the North Olympic Peninsula Resource Conservation & Development Council and supported by PNNL and others.
Lucien Cox of NASA will present the project's results Dec. 16 at the 2009 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
The project will help regional natural resource managers assess the abundance -- or lack thereof -- of the Dungeness River. The river model was developed to show how NASA technologies like satellites, sensors and computational models could be used to improve short-term stream flow predictions. The river model relies on snowpack and temperature data collected from satellites, as well as real-time snowpack and water data collected by various agencies.
The new Dungeness River model's calculations can tell what kind of flow to expect -- from a trickle to a deluge -- on a daily and monthly basis. Before, resource managers primarily relied on either water levels physically measured at gauges or historical data to predict total expected water volume over two to six months. Neither method provided flow predictions as frequently as the new model.
Having more precise river flow predictions is especially important along the Dungeness River, where the towering Olympic Mountains create a drying rain shadow effect and steep slopes prevent above-ground water reservoirs. Sequim receives just 15 inches of rain annually. Water is so treasured that the agricultural city is home to a 114-year-old festival that celebrates a historic irrigation system.
"Improving the accuracy of stream flow predictions is important to a diverse group of water users, including irrigation-dependent farmers, planners making urban growth decisions and those concerned about salmon survival or water quality," said Clea Rome, North Olympic Peninsula RC&D coordinator. "Stream flow prediction tools can help us avoid a crisis by alerting us before droughts are in full effect, giving us enough notice to adjust water use."
But the practical use of NASA technologies isn't limited just to Sequim or river water. The North Olympic Peninsula Solutions Network is helping four other resource, conservation and development councils tackle their unique problems.
Another resource -- soil -- has the Solomon Valley RC&D in north central Kansas concerned about agricultural tilling and erosion. Striking a balance between agriculture and forestry is critical for the Threshold to Maine RC&D in southwest Maine. The Wy'East RC&D is looking to better manage water supply and demand in north central Oregon. And in Okanogan, Wash., the possibility of water shortages worries the North Central Washington RC&D.
"Space technologies can help us get the best science to the ground, to the decision makers here in the Okanogan Basin," said Samantha Bartling, North Central Washington RC&D coordinator. "We expect it'll help us more precisely predict water availability for a long time to come."
The four councils are working with North Olympic Peninsula Solutions Network leaders to determine how NASA technologies can best address their different challenges.
The project is funded by a $1.6 million grant from NASA. More information can be found at the North Olympic Peninsula Solutions Network website, http://pcnasa.ctc.edu/.
Other project partners include: the Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Services; NRCS National Water and Climate Center; National Association of RC&D Councils; Idaho National Laboratory; Olympic National Park; Clallam County; The Dungeness River Management Team; The Elwha-Morse Management Team; Peninsula College and Pacific Northwest Regional Collaboratory.
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Mar. 27, 2011 Researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) have discovered the existence of a black hole 5.4 times greater in mass than that of our Sun, located in the X-ray binary system XTE J1859+226. The observations carried out from the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), managing to obtain the first spectroscopic data from this binary system to be published, have been determinant for the discovery.
X-ray binaries are stellar systems composed by a compact object (which may be a neutron star or a black hole) and a 'normal' star. The compact object sucks matter out of the star and adds it slowly to its own mass, through a spiral disc formed around it. This process of absorption is known as acretion. Only 20 binary systems, out of an estimated population of around 5,000 within our Galaxy, are known to contain a black hole.
XTE J1859+226 is, in particular, a transient X-ray binary located in the Vulpecula constellation. It was discovered by satellite RXTE during an eruption registered in 1999.
"Transient X-ray binaries are characterised for spending most of their life in a state of calmness, but occasionally entering eruption stages, during which the rhythm of acretion of matter toward the black hole is triggered," Jesús Corral Santana explains, an astrophysicist from the IAC, who led the work published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).
Neutron stars as well as black holes are the remains left by a massive star after its death. Most of the known neutron stars have a mass around 1.4 times that of the Sun, though in some cases, values up to over twice the mass of the Sun have been measured. Astronomers believe that when greater than tree times the solar mass, neutron stars are not stable, and end up collapsing and forming a black hole.
For Corral-Santana, "measuring the mass of compact objects is essential to determine what kind of object it may be. If it's greater than three times the solar mass, it can only be a black hole. We found that XTE J1859+226 has a black hole more than 5.4 times greater than the mass of the Sun. It's the definitive confirmation of the existence of a black hole in this object."
"With this result we add a new piece to the study of the mass distribution of black holes. The shape of this distribution has very important implications for our knowledge about the death of massive stars, the formation of black holes, and the evolution of X-ray binary systems," the IAC astrophysicist adds.
Twelve years of observation: measuring the visible and the invisible
The astrophysicists' team at IAC hadn't lost track of the stellar object since it entered an eruption stage in 1999, when they started to set up observation campaigns to follow its evolution. The researchers have combined the photometric measures from the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in year 2000, and those from the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) in 2008, with the spectroscopy carried out with the GTC in 2010, the first one ever published about this particular object.
"Due to the low brilliance of the system under observation, we needed 10 meter telescopes in able to obtain spectra. In this sense, having been able to make our observations from the GTC has been determinant," Corral-Santana emphasises.
The measurements at the GTC were carried out with the OSIRIS instrument, which may be used as a camera or as a spectrograph in the visible range. The spectrograph decomposes the light emitted by a star into its different frequencies and allows detecting lines corresponding to the different chemical elements present in its atmosphere. These lines adduce information about the physical properties of the star and its movement.
The photometric measures allowed determining the orbital period of the binary (6.6 hours), while the spectroscopy data also provided information about the speed of the star's orbital movement around the black hole. The combination of both of these parameters proved to be vital to calculate the mass of the back hole.
The Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (in La Palma, Canary Islands), is the biggest optical-infrared telescope of the World, with a 10.4 metre diameter mirror.
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- J. M. Corral-Santana, J. Casares, T. Shahbaz, C. Zurita, I. G. Martínez-Pais, P. Rodríguez-Gil. Evidence for a black hole in the X-ray transient XTE J1859 226. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, 2011; DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-3933.2011.01022.x
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June 11, 2012 In a pair of related studies, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have identified several proteins that help regulate cells' response to light -- and the development of night blindness, a rare disease that abolishes the ability to see in dim light.
In the new studies, published recently in the journals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and The Journal of Cell Biology, Scripps Florida scientists were able to show that a family of proteins known as Regulator of G protein Signaling (RGS) proteins plays an essential role in vision in a dim-light environment.
"We were looking at the fundamental mechanisms that shape our light sensation," said Kirill Martemyanov, a Scripps Research associate professor who led the studies. "In the process, we discovered a pair of molecules that are indispensible for our vision and possibly play critical roles in the brain."
In the PNAS study, Martemyanov and his colleagues identified a pair of regulator proteins known as RGS7 and RGS11 that are present specifically in the main relay neurons of the retina called the ON-bipolar cells. "The ON-bipolar cells provide an essential link between the retinal light detectors -- photoreceptors and the neurons that send visual information to the brain," explained Martemyanov. "Stimulation with light excites these neurons by opening the channel that is normally kept shut by the G proteins in the dark. RGS7 and RGS11 facilitate the G protein inactivation, thus promoting the opening of the channel and allowing the ON-bipolar cells to transmit the light signal. It really takes a combined effort of two RGS proteins to help the light overcome the barrier for propagating the excitation that makes our dim vision possible."
In the Journal of Cell Biology study, Martemyanov and his colleagues unraveled another key aspect of the RGS7/RGS11 regulatory response -- they identified a previously unknown pair of orphan G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) that interact with these RGS proteins and dictate their biological function.
GPCRs are a large family of more than 700 proteins, which sit in the cell membrane and sense various molecules outside the cell, including odors, hormones, neurotransmitters, and light. After binding these molecules, GPCRs trigger the appropriate response inside the cell. However, for many GPCRs the activating molecules have not yet been identified and these are called "orphan" receptors.
The Martemyanov group has found that two orphan GPCRs -- GPR158 and GPR179 -- recruit RGS proteins and thus help serve as brakes for the conventional GPCR signaling rather than play an active signaling role.
In the case of retinal ON-bipolar cells, GPR179 is required for the correct localization of RGS7 and RGS11. Their mistargeting in animal models lacking GPR179 or human patients with mutations in the GPR179 gene may account for their night blindness, according to the new study. Intriguingly, in the brain GPR158 appears to play a similar role in localizing RGS proteins, but instead of contributing to vision, it helps RGS proteins regulate the m-opioid receptor, a GPCRs that mediates pleasurable and pain-killing effects of opioids.
"We are really in the very beginning of unraveling this new biology and understanding the role of discovered orphan GPR158/179 in regulation of neurotransmitter signaling in the brain and retina," Martemyanov said. "The hope is that better understanding of these new molecules will lead to the design of better treatments for addictive disorders, pain, and blindness."
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- Y. Cao, J. Pahlberg, I. Sarria, N. Kamasawa, A. P. Sampath, K. A. Martemyanov. Regulators of G protein signaling RGS7 and RGS11 determine the onset of the light response in ON bipolar neurons. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012; 109 (20): 7905 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1202332109
- C. Orlandi, E. Posokhova, I. Masuho, T. A. Ray, N. Hasan, R. G. Gregg, K. A. Martemyanov. GPR158/179 regulate G protein signaling by controlling localization and activity of the RGS7 complexes. The Journal of Cell Biology, 2012; 197 (6): 711 DOI: 10.1083/jcb.201202123
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Francis Willis (1718-1807)
Francis Willis trained at Oxford as a clergyman. For most of his life he ran a small private asylum in the Lincolnshire countryside where he cared for men and women struggling with mental health problems. Willis’s fame and clientele grew. Local officials pressured him to get a medical degree, which he earned from Oxford aged 41, but his skills came mainly from experience, not study. Willis’s methods were diverse. They involved orthodox medical practices such as blistering and crude psychological tactics like coercion. He also knew when to appeal to his patients’ good sense and humanityand often encouraged them to take responsibility for their actions. His most lasting fame came in his seventies when he treated King George III. Later doctors, particularly Philippe Pinel, heralded Willis as a pioneer of what became known in the 1800s as moral treatment.
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|Arabic Level 2 Class:
This is an elementary level class which will expand upon the student's basic skill levels gained in the Arabic Intro class. The vocabulary learned in this class will relate to family life, work, and the extended family. Students will also become more familiar with introductions and conversation skills. By the end of this course students should be able to easily hold a basic conversation about themselves, their family, their home, their work, and their likes and dislikes. Grammar points covered in this class include the construct phrase (idaafa), sentence structure (subject and predicate), continued study of the present tense, and possessive pronouns. Chapters 1-3 in the textbook Al-Kitab 1 will be covered as well as several supplemental resources.
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Species: Octopus vulgaris
, the Common Octopus.
Members of the class cephalopoda are carnivorous hunters. They have the most advanced nervous system of all invertebrate animals and are an important example of advanced cognitive evolution in animals. O. vulgaris
is the most studied of all octopus species and possesses excellent eyesight, capable of distinguishing shapes, textures, and colour. It is the only animal which has been conclusively shown to use tools, and is proficient at learning simple processes such as unscrewing a jar.
Cephalopods are able to release dark pigment into the water as an escape mechanism, which in the past has been extracted and used by humans as an ink or dye. The word sepia comes from the Latin word for cuttlefish, s?pía
This ring is made using 3D Printing.
It is available in either stainless steel
It is available in sizes XS, S, M, L, XL. - ring size chart
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The drowned man represents any number of mythological or epic historical figures, and we'll go through them one by one. First off is the name the villagers assign him: Esteban. Who is this Esteban? As it turns out, Esteban is another name for Estevanico, a slave from the early 1500s who was supposedly the first man born in Africa to set foot in the Americas. Estevanico (or Esteban) became a legendary figure in Latin America, and was later given a set of incredible skills – he mastered dozens of languages, knew everything about medicine, was even considered by some to be a deity, or so the story goes.
When the women of the village call the drowned man Esteban, they might very well be referring to this Estevanico. (At the end of the story, the women imagine a captain speaking of Esteban's village "in fourteen languages" (12). This may be a reference to the myth that Estevanico spoke so many languages fluently.)
When the oldest women calls the drowned man Esteban, Márquez writes that some of the younger women hoped it might be Lautaro. In the mid 1500s a war occurred in what today is Chile between the colonizing Spaniards and the native Mapuche people. In this conflict, Lautaro was a military leader of the natives. The drowned man's handsomeness and sheer masculinity inspires the young women to fantasize that he is this famed leader. There are some interesting questions to consider here: why is it that the older women's thoughts turn to the Esteban, while the younger women think of Lautaro? And why is it that, once they get a better look at the drowned man, everyone agrees that it is Esteban, rather than Lautaro?
Many scholars have also pointed out that the drowned man is a shade of Quetzalcoatl, an Aztec god. The drowned man in many ways takes on the role of a deity for the villagers. He arrives from some other world (the sea), is essentially worshipped by the villagers, and permanently changes their lives.
Mythology in this story isn't limited just to the drowned man. The entire tale is rooted in mythological history; even the villagers take on mythological roles themselves by the end of the narrative. When the women weep for the drowned man at his funeral, Márquez writes, "Some sailors who heard weeping from a distance went off course and people heard of one who had himself tied to the mainmast, remembering ancient fables about sirens" (12). This comment is an allusion to Greek mythology.
Some background on the sirens. The sirens were half-women, half-bird creatures who lived on an island. They used to sing in beautiful voices to lure sailors off their course. The sailors would head towards the voices and then crash their ships on the jagged rocks, which pretty much meant death. When Odysseus was sailing by the siren's island, he made the rest of his men plug up their ears and tie him to the mainmast. This way, he got to hear the beautiful sound of their voices without being driven to suicide. Here in "The Handsomest Drowned Man," the women weeping over Lautaro are compared to the sirens, and some sailor going by ties himself to the main mast in an attempt to mimic Odysseus. The point is that through the drowned man, the villagers enter the realm of the mythological themselves.
The allusions to Esteban, Lautaro, Quetzalcoatl, and Odysseus's sirens illustrates the magical realism we've been mentioning. (If you haven't read "Genre" yet, go ahead and take a look.) "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" is exploring this mingling of the real (a little fishing village) with the mythological (a magnificent dead man).
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& Tornado Alley
the Programming Language
A Language for Symbolic Computation
through the Processing of Lists
There are primarily two computer languages used in artificial intelligence work, LISP and PROLOG. LISP, which is short for List Processing, was created by John McCarthy of Stanford University. It looks klutzy but it is based upon the lamba calculus and works quite well for computation associated with artificial intelligence. PROLOG has an elegant formulation but it does not have the range of application that LISP has. The Japanese when they formulated the Fifth Generation project chose PROLOG over LISP as the programming language. This was perhaps one of the factors that contributed to the failure of the Fifth Generation project.
HOME PAGE OF Thayer Watkins
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Do you know which language is the official language of 21 countries in the world, spanning four continents? It's Spanish (or Espa-ol), of course! Spanish is not only the official language of Spain and Mexico, but also of many countries in South and Central America. Which other countries can you name? Did you know that it's also the official language of a country in Africa? Equatorial Guinea lies on the western coast of Africa and its two official languages are Spanish and French.
Not all Spanish sounds the same and not all Spanish words mean the same thing in each country.
Many Spanish words have been incorporated into the English language. Did you know that the word "burrito" actually means "little donkey?"
Have you ever heard of someone naming a car "won't go?" Not many people would want to buy that car. That's exactly why the Chevrolet Nova didn't sell in Spain and Latin America. "No va" means "won't go" in Spanish.
The United States territory Puerto Rico means "rich port." The Central American country Costa Rica means "rich coast." The state of Colorado's name is actually from the Spanish word meaning "red." Nevada means "snowy" or "snowed upon" in Spanish. Do you know what state's name comes from an old Spanish term meaning "earthly paradise?" California. Can you think of any other common names that stem from the Spanish language?
Have you heard the saying "Mi casa es su casa?" It's a sign of hospitality that means "my house is your house." In English we might more commonly say "make yourself at home." In some parts of India, a salary is called "pagar," which in Spanish means "to pay."
Many names are actually Spanish words as well. For example, a "bandera" is a flag so the actor Antonio Banderas' name means "flags." Geraldo Rivera's last name means "riverbank" or "riverside" in Spanish, as does the name of the great Mexican artist Diego Rivera. "Rivera" looks like the word "river" in English but the word for "river" in Spanish is actually "ri-!"
Spanish is all around us. What other words of Spanish origin can you find?
-- Gwendolyn Gallace, Spanish teacher, Jefferson, Maine.
*** Try to figure out what the Spanish poem, La Boda (right), says!
Hoy en este amanecer,
Suenan las campanas sin cesar,
Los musicos tocan su música,
Porque la boda ya va a empezar.
La gente se levanta,
Al ver la novia entrar,
Con su vestido blanco,
Y con una alegra
Que no puede dejar.
Atras de ella,
Los pajes tiran flores,
Con sus caritas peque-as,
Y sus vestidos de muchos colores.
Al fin la novia para,
Y atras voltea,
Por su novio espera.
El novio ahora camina,
Hacia su novia bella,
Nervioso y feliz,
Pero siempre pensando en ella.
Mientras la ceremonia sigue,
Un angel del cielo viene,
Les da amor y felicidad,
De la que el tiene.
El angel les dice,
Que vivan felices y llenos de alegra,
Y que el amor siempre encuentren,
Dia tras dia.
-- por Marian Urias, 11 a-os de edad, Mexicana, 6th grade, El Paso, Texas.
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A Field Guide to Supernova Spectra
Both types exhibit a wide variety of subclasses. Type Ia is of no interest because these stars don't emit neutrinos. Types Ib and Ic are thought to undergo core collapse like Type II supernovae and, therefore, should emit neutrinos.
As Maurice Gavin explains in "The Revival of Amateur Spectroscopy", low-resolution spectra of objects as faint as magnitude 13 or thereabouts are accessible to modest amateur equipment. (A few superposed 20-minute exposures with a 12-inch telescope or so should produce an adequate image.) But what will supernovae spectra look like especially shortly after the outburst begins as captured by small telescopes and low-resolution spectrographs?
Here's your field guide. To prepare it, we started with high-resolution, calibrated spectra supplied by Alexei Filippenko (University of California, Berkeley). Then, to simulate Gavin's CCD results, we degraded the spectra to a resolution of 50 angstroms per pixel. Finally, and with dramatic results, we changed the intensity along each spectrum to reflect variations in the unfiltered sensitivity of popular CCD chips the KAF-0400 from Kodak and the ICX055BL from Sony. Thus, what you see here is what you will get! (Astrophotographers using panchromatic emulsions will record spectra that look much like the originals.)
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SmartDraw includes thousands of professional-looking examples like this Tooth Decay (Caries) and Cavity Prevention that you can easily download, edit and customize to make your own in just minutes.
Text in this example:
Tooth Decay & Cavity Prevention STEP ONE: Floss
Use floss to remove germs and food particles between teeth. Rinse. Holding Floss Using floss between lower teeth. Ease the floss into place gently. Do not snap it into place—this could harm your gums. STEP TWO: Brush Teeth
Use any tooth brushing method that is comfortable, but do not scrub hard back and forth. Small circular motions and short back and forth motions work well. Rinse. To prevent decay, it’s what’s on the toothbrush that counts. Use fluoride toothpaste. Fluoride is what protects teeth from decay.
Brush the tongue for a fresh feeling! Rinse again.
Food residues, especially sweets, provide nutrients for the germs that cause tooth decay, as well as those that cause gum disease. That’s why it is important to remove all food residues, as well as plaque, from teeth. Remove plaque at least once a day—twice a day is better. If you brush and floss once daily, do it before going to bed. Another way of removing plaque between teeth is to use a dental pick—a thin plastic or wooden stick. These picks can be purchased at drug stores and grocery stores. Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research LifeART Collection Images Copyright © 1989-2001 by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore, MD
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10 New Alien Planets a Diverse Bunch, Telescope Shows
Artist's impression of the CoRoT satellite.
CREDIT: CNES/Active Design
A European space telescope has discovered 10 previously unknown alien planets, including two Neptune-like objects that circle the same star, researchers announced today (June 14).
France's CoRoT satellite detected the 10 alien planets, all of which are gaseous like Saturn or Jupiter. However, they exhibit a range of masses, densities, orbital characteristics and other properties, researchers said. The new discoveries highlight the diversity of worlds beyond our solar system and boost the confirmed count of extrasolar planets up to 565, they added.
"Ever since the early days of exoplanet astronomy, we’ve been amazed by the variety of planets that have been discovered: gaseous giants larger than Jupiter and smaller, rocky bodies, down to masses comparable to the Earth’s," said Malcolm Fridlund, the European Space Agency's project scientist for CoRoT, in a statement. [Photos: The Strangest Alien Planets]
Researchers announced the findings today (June 14), at the Second CoRoT Symposium in Marseille, France.
Alien planet haul
Like NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, CoRoT searches for alien planets by what is known as the transit method. This technique looks for tiny dips in a star's brightness that could potentially be caused by a planet passing in front of it from our perspective.
The 10 newly discovered alien worlds have all been confirmed by follow-up observations using ground-based telescopes. Seven of the discoveries are so-called "hot Jupiters," gas giants that orbit extremely close to their parent stars. Another one is smaller than Saturn, and the other two are Neptune-like siblings circling the same star.
While all the newfound alien planets are gaseous, they make up a diverse group. Their densities, for example, span a wide range, from values similar to that of Saturn (the least dense planet in our solar system) to densities comparable to that of rocky Mars, researchers said.
One planet orbits a 10-billion-year-old star, which is twice as old as the sun. Another circles a star just 600 million years old. Two of the exoplanets also lie on highly elongated orbits — a surprise to scientists, considering how unstable such paths are thought to be.
A planetary zoo
Since the first planet beyond our solar system was discovered back in the 1990s, astronomers have discovered an astonishing diversity of alien worlds.
"The new set of 10 planets that we announce today are no exception, exhibiting as they do a rich list of very interesting properties," Fridlund said.
To date, astronomers have confirmed at least 565 alien planets, and the Kepler project has already identified 1,235 more "candidate" planets that await in-depth follow-up study. Researchers have predicted that at least 80 percent of Kepler's planetary candidates will eventually be confirmed.
Since its launch in 2006, CoRoT has detected several hundred candidate planet-hosting stars. The 10 new finds bring the satellite's total number of confirmed planet discoveries to 26.
Many more finds will likely follow — from Kepler, CoRoT and other instruments — helping astronomers better understand alien planets on a broader scale, researchers said.
"Although the study of exoplanets is relatively young, we have already reached a stage where we can characterize the details of worlds orbiting other stars, and CoRoT is making a crucial contribution to this field," Fridlund said. "With hundreds of systems observed to date, we no longer have to worry about 'taming the beasts' and we can dedicate our efforts to the 'zoology' of exoplanets, which is enormously enhancing our knowledge about planetary systems."
MORE FROM SPACE.com
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Teide National Park
The largest and oldest of the Canary Islands' parks
Its landscape revolves around the largest volcano in Spain: the Teide, which last erupted in 1798. The volcanic cones and the lava outcrops form an extraordinary conjunction of colours and shapes, and are home to a wide diversity of flora of great biological value.
The Teide National Park was created in 1954 in order to protect this spectacular landscape of great ecological value which lies at the foot of the colossal volcano. The Teide is the volcanic formation located on an ancient and gigantic cauldron-shaped depression, formed by two semi-calderas separated by the Roques de García rock formations. Plant and animal species that are unique in the world live in the shadow of the Teide. There is an astonishing diversity of plants: Teide broom, red echium, blue echium, the guanche rose (Bencomia extipulata), flixweed, rosalillo de cumbre (Pterocephalus lasiospermus), silver thistle (Stemmacantha cynaroides)... The most important species in the park are the invertebrates. Over 700 types of insects have been recorded, of which 50% are endemic to the area. There are some species of reptiles (such as the Tenerife lizard) and birds (Egyptian vulture, sparrowhawks, lesser kestrels, red kite), and a few mammals, the most common of which are the mouflon, rabbits and five species of bat.
面積: 18.990 ヘクタール
所在地: It is situated in the heart of the island of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands.
見学情報: There are two public bus routes: number 348, from Puerto de la Cruz, and number 342, from Playa de las Américas. There is a cable car that affords spectacular views, although it does not take you right to the top: you must walk the last stretch. A special permit is required to go to the highest cone on the summit of the Teide. For more information, check the Visitor Centres on this page.
More access information.
環境情報: The primary interest of this national park is its flora, as it has 212 species of plants, of which 58 are endemic to the Canary Islands. One of these natural treasures is the Teide violet, which has the honour of being the highest flowering species in the whole of Spain. The park also stands out because of its volcanic landscape, and as a place for stargazing.
文化情報: The island of Tenerife is one of Spain's most important tourist destinations. Its appeal lies in the excellent climate, its beaches, the Teide, and a wide variety of cultural attractions. One of the best times to visit the islands is in February when the Carnival festivities take place. The rest of the year you can find crowded and festive pilgrimages: San Isidro, in La Orotava; San Benito; in La Laguna; and San Roque, in Garachico. Regarding the gastronomy, traditional honey extraction is an important activity in the heart of the park, in the Las Cañadas area.
許可: You will find more information about the permits you need at the following links:
Access to the Teide peak
Propuestas educativas, Recorridos por el Parque, Montañismo, Visitas guiadas
Park offices (Tenerife)
Tel.: +34 922922371
Fax.: +34 922244788
Teide National Park でできること
全ての著作権は保護されています。 Turespaña / Segittur © 2013
サイトの管理者: Sociedad Estatal para la Gestión de la Innovación y las Tecnologías Turísticas, S.A. (SEGITTUR)
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|Women’s Suffrage in the UK||Women Suffrage in the USA||Parliamentary Reform|
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Cady, the daughter of Daniel Cady, a lawyer and politician, was born in Johnstown, New York, 12th November, 1815. She studied law under her father, who later became a New York Supreme Court judge. During this period she became a strong advocate of women's rights.
In 1840 Elizabeth married the lawyer, Henry Bewster Stanton. The couple both became active members of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Later that year, Stanton and Lucretia Mott, travelled to London as delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention. Both women were furious when they, like the British women at the convention, were refused permission to speak at the meeting. Stanton later recalled: "We resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and form a society to advocate the rights of women."
However, it was not until 1848 that Stanton and Lucretia Mott organised the Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. Stanton's resolution that it was "the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the sacred right to the elective franchise" was passed, and this became the focus of the group's campaign over the next few years.
In 1866 Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone established the American Equal Rights Association. The following year, the organisation became active in Kansas where Negro suffrage and woman suffrage were to be decided by popular vote. However, both ideas were rejected at the polls.
In 1868 Stanton and Susan B. Anthony established the political weekly, The Revolution, and the following year the two women formed a new organisation, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). The organisation condemned the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments as blatant injustices to women. The NWSA also advocated easier divorce and an end to discrimination in employment and pay.
Executive Committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association
Another group, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), was also active in the campaign for women's rights and by the 1880s it became clear that it was not a good idea to have two rival groups campaigning for votes for women. After several years of negotiations, the AWSA and the NWSA merged in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Stanton was elected as NAWSA first president but was replaced by Susan B. Anthony in 1892.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose autobiography, Eighty Years and More, was published in 1898, died in New York, on 26th October, 1902.
(1) Editorial, Time and Tide (9th July, 1926)
Feminism, like any other great movement, proceeds at varying paces and in varying forms in different countries. Few things are more enlightening than a study of the inter-reactions of the feminist movement in the two great English speaking peoples during the past seventy or eighty years. It is curious how closely related have been the movements on the two sides of the Atlantic. Each has continually learnt from the other. Beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft in the late 18th century, the feminist movement owed its next big impetus (in the eighteen forties and fifties) to Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony, of New England. It was Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth C. Stanton who organised the first Equal Rights Convention which was held in New York in 1848; and it was Lucretia Mott who laid. down the definite proposition which American women are still struggling to implement today: 'Men and Women shall have Equal Rights throughout the United States.' A few years later Susan B. Anthony, the pioneer Suffragist, came into the American movement.
It was not till the eighteen sixties that the political feminist movement came alive in Great Britain. Dame Millicent Fawcett was even in those early days one of the leading names connected with it. The British suffragists pushed forward enthusiastically for some twenty years, but the failure to achieve success in 1885, when the third Reform Bill was passed giving the agricultural labourer the vote, seemed to take the heart out of our early suffragists, and the movement died down again. Meanwhile, in the nineties the American women were full of life and enthusiasm, winning victory after victory in State after State.'
In 1902 Susan B. Anthony came to England and stayed with Mrs. Pankhurst in Manchester. The result of that visit was far-reaching. All unwittingly the old pioneer handed back the torch to the British suffragists. 'It is unendurable,' declared Christabel Pankhurst after her departure, 'to think of another generation of women wasting their lives begging for the vote. We must not lose any more time. We must act.' Those words heralded the birth of the British militant movement. From that moment onwards British feminists went forward without pause till the outbreak of war in 1914 and when that time came (although the actual Bill was not passed until 1918) the first instalment of victory was virtually won.
Meanwhile in America by 1912 things had died down to very much the same state as the English movement has been in since 1918. Votes had been achieved in a considerable number of States, the feeling was widespread that a partial victory was good enough for the moment and that complete victory would ' come all in good time without much further trouble. And then in 1912 Alice Paul, lit by the fire of the English militant movement, returned to America - and America woke up. It took the Americans just eight years from that date to achieve complete political equality; but they were under wise leadership (Alice Paul will surely go down to history as one of the great leaders of the world), and when they did achieve political equality they did not make the mistake of supposing that that was the end. They turned back to the 'declaration of sentiments' laid down by Lucretia Mott in 1848 and they realised that political equality was only the first step on the path which they had chosen and that there could be neither halting nor relaxing their pace until they had come to the end of that path.
(2) Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speech at the Woman's Convention (25th May, 1851)
The great work before us is the education of those just coming on the stage of action. Begin with the girls of today, and in twenty years we can revolutionize this nation. The childhood of woman must be free and untrammeled. The girl must be allowed to romp and play, climb, skate, and swim; her clothing must be more like that of the boy - strong, loose-fitting garments, thick boots, etc., that she may be out at all times, and enter freely into all kinds of sports. Teach her to go alone, by night and day, if need be, on the lonely highway, or through the busy streets of the crowded metropolis. The manner in which all courage and self-reliance is educated out of the girl, her path portrayed with dangers and difficulties that never exist, is melancholy indeed. Better, far, suffer occasional insults or die outright, than live the life of a coward, or never move without a protector. The best protector any woman can have, one that will serve her at all times and in all places, is courage; this she must get by her own experience, and experience comes by exposure. Let the girl be thoroughly developed in body and soul, not modeled, like a piece of clay, after some artificial specimen of humanity, with a body like some plate in Godey's book of fashion, and a mind after the type of Father Gregory's pattern daughters, loaded down with the traditions, proprieties, and sentimentalities of generations of silly mothers and grandmothers, but left free to be, to grow, to feel, to think, to act. Development is one thing, that system of cramping, restraining, torturing,
perverting, and mystifying, called education, is quite another. We have had women enough befooled under the one system, pray let us try the other. The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be "a hand, not a mouth"; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession. Woman has relied heretofore too entirely for her support on the needle - that one-eyed demon of destruction that slays its thousands annually; that evil genius of our sex, which, in spite of all our devotion, will never make us healthy, wealthy, or wise.
Teach the girl it is no part of her life to cater to the prejudices of those around her. Make her independent of public sentiment, by showing her how worthless and rotten a thing it is. It is a settled axiom with me, after much examination and reflection, that public sentiment is false on every subject. Yet what a tyrant it is over us all, woman especially, whose very life is to please, whose highest ambition is to be approved. But once outrage this tyrant, place yourself beyond his jurisdiction, taste the joy of free thought and action, and how powerless is his rule over you! his sceptre lies broken at your feet; his very babblings of condemnation are sweet music in your ears; his darkening frown is sunshine to your heart, for they tell of your triumph and his discomfort. Think you, women thus educated would long remain the weak, dependent beings we now find them? By no means. Depend upon it, they would soon settIe for themselves this whole question of Woman's Rights. As educated capitalists and skilled laborers, they would not be long in finding their
true level in political and social life.
(3) Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speech (20th February, 1894)
The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul - our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment - our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world other own, the arbiter other own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.
Secondly, if we consider her as a citizen, as a member of a great nation, she must have the same rights as all other members, according to the fundamental principles of our Government.
Thirdly, viewed as a woman, an equal factor in civilization, her rights and duties are still the same - individual happiness and development.
Fourthly, it is only the incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter, which may involve some special duties and training. In the usual discussion in regard to woman's sphere, such men as Herbert Spencer, Frederick Harrison and Grant Alien uniformly subordinate her rights and duties as an individual, as a citizen, as a woman, to the necessities of these incidental relations, some of which a large class of women never assume. In discussing the sphere of man we do not decide his rights as an individual, as a citizen, as a man, by his duties as a father, a husband, a brother or a son, some of which he may never undertake. Moreover he would be better fitted for these very relations, and whatever special work he might choose to do to earn his bread, by the complete development of all his faculties as an individual. Just so with woman. The education which will fit her to discharge the duties in the largest sphere of human usefulness, will best fit her for whatever special work she may be compelled to do.
The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear - is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself.
To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny the rights of property is like cutting off the hands. To refuse political equality is like robbing the ostracized of all self-respect, of credit in the market place, of recompense in the world of work, of a voice in choosing those who make and administer the law, a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment. Shakespeare's play of Titus and Andronicus contains a terrible satire on woman's position in the nineteenth century - "Rude men seized the king's daughter, cut out her tongue, cut off her hands, and then bade her go call for water and wash her hands." What a picture of woman's position! Robbed other natural rights, handicapped by law and custom at every turn, yet compelled to fight her own battles, and in the emergencies of life fall back on herself for protection.
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This Victorian churchyard has a special role in the life of what is now a culturally diverse, vibrant urban community.
- It is a quiet green space that invites appreciation of the protected wildlife.
- The memorials open a window on to local history. Buried in the churchyard are people from many different walks of life and economic status. The high percentage of children's graves, and the memorial to the Master and Matron of the Workhouse, signpost issues of public health and social welfare. Commonwealth War Graves prompt consideration of the families who lost their young men in the two World Wars. Some memorials reflect changing artistic expressions of religious faith and hope, and the mini-labyrinth, designed as a 'rest-space', makes a modern day contribution.
- The number of Religious Orders that are commemorated points to their role in welfare, educational and spiritual outreach. The central memorial to Father Benson recalls the strength of his vision in serving the needs of the people in East Oxford.
You are invited to embark on a trail through the churchyard, in virtual space and then in reality!
an educational resource supported by The Heritage Lottery Fund
You can download a copy of the entire site [18MB], for example for burning on to CD, or to use offline.
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Not far from the familiar starry figure of Orion the Hunter are the two star clusters of Taurus the Bull: the Hyades and the Pleiades. The Hyades cluster is punctuated by the bright red star Aldebaran, the eye of the Bull. The fainter Pleiades cluster, or Seven Sisters, is twice as far from us as the Hyades and sometimes is mistaken for the Little Dipper.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Stars are born in clusters — families of dozens to hundreds of stars that share the same age and chemical makeup — but they don’t remain in clusters their whole lives. Like fledgling birds, stars eventually leave the nest in which they were born to roam the galaxy alone.
There are hundreds of star clusters that populate our Milky Way galaxy, many of which are visible from Earth to unaided human eyes. Most appear as faint, fuzzy smudges in the night sky because of their great distance from us, but there are two clusters close enough to allow us to see their brightest members as individual suns.
On cold, crisp November evenings, you can spot these two magnificent star clusters in our constellation of Taurus the Bull. They are the Hyades (high-a-deez) and the Pleiades (plee-a-deez) star clusters. The Hyades cluster forms the familiar V-shaped face of Taurus, with the bright orange star Aldebaran as one of his glaring red eyes. Aldebaran itself is not a member of the Hyades but is superimposed on the cluster as a foreground star, only half as far away. At a distance of 153 light years, the Hyades cluster is the closest star cluster to our solar system.
Leading the Hyades westward across the sky is Taurus’ second star cluster, the Pleiades, marking the Bull’s shoulder. Also known as the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades star cluster lies nearly twice as far from us as the Hyades cluster, so it appears much smaller in size, but its importance to the sky-watchers of the past cannot be overstated. The star Aldebaran received its name from the Arabic words that mean “The Follower” because it rises just behind the Pleiades and obediently follows them across the heavens.
The Hyades and Pleiades star clusters are steeped in ancient legend and have been pondered and ogled by curious eyes since antiquity. Here’s a sample of the star lore surrounding these two clusters.
Hyas was the son of a Titan named Atlas. His seven half-sisters by a different mother were the Hyades, a name that means “the rainy ones.” Hyas grew into a renowned archer and hunter but one day wound up being killed by his prey — a wild boar. His sisters were so overcome with grief that they wept themselves to death. Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, immortalized the sisters by placing them among the stars as the Hyades star cluster. During the rainy season of April and May, the Hyades are not seen because they are too close to the sun in our daytime sky. The Greeks considered the springtime rains as the never-ending tears of the Hyades, grieving for their fallen brother.
The Pleiades were the seven half-sisters of the Hyades by yet a different mother. After Atlas and the Titans were defeated by Zeus and the Olympians in the great war for control of the universe, Atlas’ punishment was to toil for eternity, holding up the sky. Unable to look after his daughters, Atlas had to watch helplessly as the brute Orion relentlessly pursued the seven beautiful Pleiades. Zeus took pity on them and first changed them into doves so that they might escape Orion’s advances before finally changing them into the seven twinkling stars of the Pleiades star cluster, just out of Orion’s reach. He placed them in the heavens beside their grieving half-sisters, the Hyades.
Look for the Hyades and Pleiades star clusters high in the eastern sky at about 9 p.m. in late November. The three stars of Orion’s Belt point upward to them like an arrow. The dazzling planet Jupiter shines nearby both clusters this fall and winter. Aim your binoculars at the clusters to see dozens of fainter stars.
Professor Jimmy Westlake teaches astronomy and physics at Colorado Mountain College’s Alpine Campus. Check out Westlake’s astrophotography website at www.jwestlake.com.
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Key Stage 1 (5 - 7 yrs)
At Key Stage 1, drama is incorporated into many different areas of the curriculum and taught by the class teacher. Drama can provide an opportunity for success irrespective of academic ability and can lead to the development of confident, articulate and well-rounded children.
The drama curriculum has five main components:
- Language and literacy
- Theatre skills
- Personal and social development
- Participation in examination syllabus from both the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the English Speaking Board
- Performance evaluation
Performance is a vital part of any drama curriculum and provides a real purpose for much of the work the children do. All children are given the opportunity to perform in staged productions in front of an audience and also on a smaller scale in front of their peers. Year 1 produce a show in the Lent term and Year 2 produce a show in the Summer term. These productions involve all of the children as do the Christmas nativity plays.
Years 2 also participate in formal Speech examinations with the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art once each year.
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Imaging and radiology
Radiology is a branch of medicine that uses imaging technology to diagnose and treat disease.
Radiology may be divided into two different areas, diagnostic radiology and interventional radiology. The field of therapeutic radiology, which uses x-rays to treat cancer, is now called radiation oncology.
Doctors who specialize in radiology are called radiologists.
Interventional radiology; Diagnostic radiology; X-ray imaging
Diagnostic radiology helps health care professionals see structures inside your body. Using these images, the radiologist or other physicians can often:
- Diagnose the cause of your symptoms
- Monitor how well your body is responding to a treatment you are receiving for your disease or condition
- Screen for different illnesses, such as breast cancer or heart disease
The most common types of diagnostic radiology include:
- Computed tomography (CT), also know as a CAT scan (computerized axial tomography)
- CT angiography
- Fluoroscopy with scanning, including upper GI and barium enema
- Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
- Magnetic resonance angiography (MRA)
- Nuclear medicine, which includes such tests as a bone scan, thyroid scan, and thallium cardiac stress test
- Plain x-rays
- Positron emission tomography, also called PET imaging or a PET scan
Interventional radiology uses imaging to help guide the doctor when inserting catheters, wires, and other small instruments and tools into your body.
Doctors can use this technology to diagnose or treat conditions in almost any part of the body, instead of needing to directly look inside of your body through a scope (camera) or surgery.
Some of these conditions include cancers or tumors, blockages in your arteries and veins, fibroids in the uterus, back pain, gallstones and gallbladder problems, and thyroid disorders.
The doctor will make no incision (cut) or only a very small one. You rarely need to stay in the hospital afterwards. Most patients need either conscious sedation (medicines to help you relax) or spinal or epidural anesthesia.
Radiologists who perform these types of procedure receive 1 or 2 extra years of training after they have finished medical school and basic training in radiology.
Examples of interventional radiology procedures include:
- Angiography or angioplasty and stent placement
- Catheter embolization
- Vertebroplasty and kyphoplasty
- Needle biopsies of different organs, such as the lungs and thyroid
- Radiofrequency ablation
- Breast biopsy, guided either by stereotactic or ultrasound techniques
- Uterine artery embolization
- Feeding tube placement
- Injecting cancer treatments at the site of the tumor
Reviewed By: Ken Levin, MD, Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Good Shepard Hospital, Allentown PA. Review provided by VeriMed Healthcare Network. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Medical Director, A.D.A.M. Health Solutions, Ebix, Inc.
| 3.671674 |
I'm sure you've heard that abusing alcohol hurts your health. But how many years of drinking do you think it takes to visibly affect your brain? Ten years? Twenty?
It turns out that it doesn't take that long at all—in fact, scientists can already see changes in the brains of teenagers who drink.
In a new research study, Professor Susan Tapert of the University of California at San Diego used an imaging machine called an MRI to scan the brains of teens who binge drink—defined as drinking 4 or 5 (or more) drinks in a couple of hours. Dr. Tapert found that the "white matter" in their brains—the part that transmits signals, like a television cable or a computer USB cord—was abnormal when compared with the white matter of teens who don't binge drink. Transmitting signals is a big part of what the brain does, so affecting the white matter in this way could also affect thinking, learning, and memory.
The really scary part is that these teens weren't alcoholics, and they didn't drink every day. All they did (to be considered "binge drinkers") was drink at least four (for women) or five (for men) drinks in one sitting, at least one time during the previous three months.
How could it be possible for just a few sessions of heavy drinking to affect the white matter of the brain? Well, science has shown that alcohol can poison brain cells and can alter the brain's white matter in adult alcoholics. Dr. Tapert thinks that teenagers' brains are even more susceptible this way. She says, "because the brain is still developing during adolescence, there has been concern that it may be more vulnerable to high doses of alcohol."
Many questions still remain, including how long it takes before these changes occur, and how much they affect the function of the brain. To figure this out, scientists would have to look at the binge drinkers' brains before and after they started drinking. That way, they can tell if the differences might have already been there before the teens started drinking. It's possible that having abnormal white matter in the brain somehow increases the chance of being a binge drinker. In order to answer that question, Dr. Tapert says they need to do longer studies that follow teens' brain growth over time.
The bottom line? If you're a teen, drinking to the point of getting drunk could damage the white matter of your brain—even if you do it only once in a while.
Find out more through the following resources:
- SAMHSA Fact Sheet on Binge Drinking
- NIH Fact Sheet on Underage Drinking (PDF, 305 KB)
- USCD News Release: Binge Drinking May Hamper Information Relay System in Teen Brain
- Dr. Tapert's Study: Altered White Matter Integrity in Adolescent Binge Drinkers
- NIAAA's Rethinking Drinking Web page
| 3.372624 |
A full and active life supported by caring relationships can reduce the occurrence of challenging behaviors in people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities1. However, if such behaviors occur, people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities and those who support them must have access to positive behavioral supports that focus on improved quality of life as well as reductions in the behaviors.
People with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities need supportive and caring relationships in order to develop full and active lives. Historically, people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities across the age span have frequently been subjected to aversive procedures (i.e., electric shock, cold water sprays and deprivations like withholding food or visitation with friends and family) that may cause physical pain, discomfort and/or psychological harm. Children and adults with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities are frequently subjected to physical restraint, including the use of life-threatening prone restraint and seclusion for long periods of time.
Research indicates that aversive procedures such as deprivation, physical restraint and seclusion do not reduce challenging behaviors, and in fact can inhibit the development of appropriate skills and behaviors. These practices are dangerous, dehumanizing, result in a loss of dignity, and are unacceptable in a civilized society.
Research-based positive behavioral supports should be readily available in natural settings including the family home. Families, caregivers, educators, direct support personnel, and other professionals and paraprofessionals should be provided with training and support in implementing effective positive behavioral interventions and supports in all environments.
Behavioral supports should be individually designed and positive, emphasize learning, offer choice and social integration, be culturally appropriate, and include modifying environments as needed.
The Arc and AAIDD are opposed to all aversive procedures, such as electric shock, deprivation, seclusion and isolation. Interventions must not withhold essential food and drink, cause physical and/or psychological pain or result in humiliation or discomfort. Physical restraints should only be used as a last resort to eliminate the danger of physical injury to self or others.
The following factors should be considered in developing a positive behavioral intervention plan:
- The circumstances and environment in which the behavior occurred;
- The perspectives of the individual, his or her family and their social/cultural background and values;
- The contributing factors, such as physical or medical conditions, social and environmental influences;
- The completeness and accuracy of any data which has been collected about the behavior;
- The nature, extent, and frequency of the perceived challenging behavior; and
- The function of the behavior, especially what the person may be trying to communicate.
Further, any positive behavioral inventions must also include consideration of:
- The potential secondary effects and risks associated with the intervention;
- The legal, social and ethical implications;
- The ease and practicality of implementation; and
- The consistency with values of the individual’s culture.
Positive behavioral supports should be:
- Designed in a person-centered process involving the individual;
- Developed within the broader context of providing quality medical, psychological, educational, and facilitative services;
- Based on a functional analysis of the behavior and the circumstances under which it occurred, a thorough assessment of each individual’s unique abilities and contributions, and an understanding of how previous interventions worked;
- Provided through a least restrictive strategy and described in a written plan;
- Grounded in evidence-based procedures that will:
- prevent challenging behaviors;
- teach new skills that may replace challenging behaviors;
- prevent the on-going reward of a challenging behavior;
- reinforce positive behavior;
- ensure safety (when necessary); and
- provide systemic information on the effectiveness of the support.
- Used in a humane and caring manner respecting individual dignity;
- Implemented in positive, socially supportive and culturally appropriate environments, including the home;
- Carried out by individuals (i.e., staff, family members and others) who have been trained and are qualified to effectively apply positive, non-aversive approaches;
- Include adaptations to the environment and reinforcers that people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities and their families identify as positive; and
- Monitored continuously and systematically to ensure appropriate implementation and that the support is consistent with individual needs, positive in its methods, successful in achieving established goals, and changed in a timely fashion if success is not evident or occurring at an appropriate rate.
||Board of Directors, AAIDD
July 18, 2010
||Board of Directors, The Arc of the United States
August 23, 2010
||Congress of Delegates
November 6, 2010
1“People with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities” refers to those defined by AAIDD classification and DSM IV. In everyday language they are frequently referred to as people with cognitive, intellectual and/or developmental disabilities although the professional and legal definitions of those terms both include others and exclude some defined by DSM IV.
| 3.572727 |
When he shot President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth was 26 years old, and one of the nation’s most famous actors. (Charles DeForest Fredericks/National Portrait Gallery)
John Wilkes Booth, a Maryland native, spent the war performing in theatrical productions. But the conflict was never far from his mind. In a letter to his mother, he expressed chagrin that he hadn’t joined the Confederate army, writing, “I have … begun to deem myself a coward, and to despise my own existence.” He was outraged by the reelection of Lincoln, whom he viewed as the instigator of all the country’s woes. The month after the inauguration, Booth learned that Lincoln would be attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre on April 14. That night, he crept into Lincoln’s theater box and shot him in the back of the head. It was the first time a president had been murdered. “Wanted” posters were issued for Booth, and on April 26, he was cornered in a tobacco barn and shot by a federal sergeant, acting against orders to bring him in alive.
Several months later, Charles Creighton Hazewell, a frequent contributor, sought to make sense of the assassination—speculating that the plot may have been hatched in Canada (where a number of secessionist schemes had originated) and hinting at evidence that the plan had been endorsed at the highest levels of the Confederate government.—Sage Stossel
The assassination of President Lincoln threw a whole nation into mourning … Of all our Presidents since Washington, Mr. Lincoln had excited the smallest amount of that feeling which places its object in personal danger. He was a man who made a singularly favorable impression on those who approached him, resembling in that respect President Jackson, who often made warm friends of bitter foes, when circumstances had forced them to seek his presence; and it is probable, that, if he and the honest chiefs of the Rebels could have been brought face to face, there never would have been civil war,—at least, any contest of grand proportions; for he would not have failed to convince them that all that they had any right to claim, and therefore all that they could expect their fellow-citizens to fight for, would be more secure under his government than it had been under the governments of such men as Pierce and Buchanan, who made use of sectionalism and slavery to promote the selfish interests of themselves and their party … Ignorance was the parent of the civil war, as it has been the parent of many other evils,—ignorance of the character and purpose of the man who was chosen President in 1860–61, and who entered upon official life with less animosity toward his opponents than ever before or since had been felt by a man elected to a great place after a bitter and exciting contest …
That one of the most insignificant of [the secessionists’] number should have murdered the man whose election they declared to be cause for war is nothing strange, being in perfect keeping with their whole course. The wretch who shot the chief magistrate of the Republic is of hardly more account than was the weapon which he used. The real murderers of Mr. Lincoln are the men whose action brought about the civil war. Booth’s deed was a logical proceeding, following strictly from the principles avowed by the Rebels, and in harmony with their course during the last five years. The fall of a public man by the hand of an assassin always affects the mind more strongly than it is affected by the fall of thousands of men in battle; but in strictness, Booth, vile as his deed was, can be held to have been no worse, morally, than was that old gentleman who insisted upon being allowed the privilege of firing the first shot at Fort Sumter. Ruffin’s act is not so disgusting as Booth’s; but of the two men, Booth exhibited the greater courage,—courage of the basest kind, indeed, but sure to be attended with the heaviest risks, as the hand of every man would be directed against its exhibitor. Had the Rebels succeeded, Ruffin would have been honored by his fellows; but even a successful Southern Confederacy would have been too hot a country for the abode of a wilful murderer. Such a man would have been no more pleasantly situated even in South Carolina than was Benedict Arnold in England. And as he chose to become an assassin after the event of the war had been decided, and when his victim was bent upon sparing Southern feeling so far as it could be spared without injustice being done to the country, Booth must have expected to find his act condemned by every rational Southern man as a worse than useless crime, as a blunder of the very first magnitude. Had he succeeded in getting abroad, Secession exiles would have shunned him, and have treated him as one who had brought an ineffaceable stain on their cause, and also had rendered their restoration to their homes impossible. The pistol-shot of Sergeant Corbett saved him from the gallows, and it saved him also from the denunciations of the men whom he thought to serve. He exhibited, therefore, a species of courage that is by no means common; for he not only risked his life, and rendered it impossible for honorable men to sympathize with him, but he ran the hazard of being denounced and cast off by his own party … All Secessionists who retain any self-respect must rejoice that one whose doings brought additional ignominy on a cause that could not well bear it has passed away and gone to his account. It would have been more satisfactory to loyal men, if he had been reserved for the gallows; but even they must admit that it is a terrible trial to any people who get possession of an odious criminal, because they may be led so to act as to disgrace themselves, and to turn sympathy in the direction of the evil-doer … Therefore the shot of Sergeant Corbett is not to be regretted, save that it gave too honorable a form of death to one who had earned all that there is of disgraceful in that mode of dying to which a peculiar stigma is attached by the common consent of mankind.
Whether Booth was the agent of a band of conspirators, or was one of a few vile men who sought an odious immortality, it is impossible to say. We have the authority of a high Government official for the statement that “the President’s murder was organized in Canada and approved at Richmond”; but the evidence in support of this extraordinary announcement is, doubtless for the best of reasons, withheld at the time we write. There is nothing improbable in the supposition that the assassination plot was formed in Canada, as some of the vilest miscreants of the Secession side have been allowed to live in that country … But it is not probable that British subjects had anything to do with any conspiracy of this kind. The Canadian error was in allowing the scum of Secession to abuse the “right of hospitality” through the pursuit of hostile action against us from the territory of a neutral …
That a plan to murder President Lincoln should have been approved at Richmond is nothing strange; and though such approval would have been supremely foolish, what but supreme folly is the chief characteristic of the whole Southern movement? If the seal of Richmond’s approval was placed on a plan formed in Canada, something more than the murder of Mr. Lincoln was intended. It must have been meant to kill every man who could legally take his place, either as President or as President pro tempore. The only persons who had any title to step into the Presidency on Mr. Lincoln’s death were Mr. Johnson, who became President on the 15th of April, and Mr. Foster, one of the Connecticut Senators, who is President of the Senate … It does not appear that any attempt was made on the life of Mr. Foster, though Mr. Johnson was on the list of those doomed by the assassins; and the savage attack made on Mr. Seward shows what those assassins were capable of. But had all the members of the Administration been struck down at the same time, it is not at all probable that “anarchy” would have been the effect, though to produce that must have been the object aimed at by the conspirators. Anarchy is not so easily brought about as persons of an anarchical turn of mind suppose. The training we have gone through since the close of 1860 has fitted us to bear many rude assaults on order without our becoming disorderly. Our conviction is, that, if every man who held high office at Washington had been killed on the 14th of April, things would have gone pretty much as we have seen them go, and that thus the American people would have vindicated their right to be considered a self-governing race. It would not be a very flattering thought, that the peace of the country is at the command of any dozen of hardened ruffians who should have the capacity to form an assassination plot, the discretion to keep silent respecting their purpose, and the boldness and the skill requisite to carry it out to its most minute details: for the neglect of one of those details might be fatal to the whole project. Society does not exist in such peril as that.
john wilkes booth, a Maryland native, spent the war performing in theatrical productions. But the conflict was never far from his mind. In a letter to his mother, he expressed chagrin that he hadn’t joined the Confederate army, writing, “I have … begun to deem myself a coward, and to despise my own existence.” He was outraged by the reelection of Lincoln, whom he viewed as the instigator of all the country’s woes.
The month after the inauguration, Booth learned that Lincoln would be attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre on April 14. That night, he crept into Lincoln’s theater box and shot him in the back of the head. It was the first time a president had been murdered. “Wanted” posters were issued for Booth, and on April 26, he was cornered in a tobacco barn and shot by a federal sergeant, who acted against orders to bring him in alive.
Several months later, Charles Creighton Hazewell, a frequent Atlantic contributor, sought to make sense of the assassination—speculating that the plot may have been hatched in Canada (where a number of secessionist schemes had originated) and hinting at evidence that the plan had been endorsed at the highest levels of the Confederate government.
Read the full text of this article here.
This article available online at:
| 3.817156 |
Christmas Lights Powered By Poop
Research At UC Denver Proves Viability Of Waste As Energy Source
Last Updated: 879 days ago
A small lighted Christmas tree in a UC Denver laboratory proves the practicality of a novel renewable energy source, and points to its enormous potential.Jason Ren, an assistant professor of civil engineering, calls it "bug power" referring to the millions of bacteria that help generate electricity from wastewater. The process creates two desirable byproducts."Those bacteria are able to consume the waste and produce electricity as well as clean water," Ren said.Bacteria in the microbial fuel cells essentially eat the waste and give off electrons in the process. Those electrons are then captured by a graphite brush. Also, Ren recently discovered that salt water could be turned to fresh water as a third, simultaneous function."Electricity on one side, treating wastewater on the other side, while desalinating sea water in the middle," Ren said, pointing to a small three-chambered reactor."I think it's pretty promising," said Jae-Do Park, an assistant professor of electrical engineering. He is working to make the electricity functional."To harvest the energy from the fuel cell in the most efficient way, and at the same time to form that power from the fuel cell into a usable shape," Park said.The glowing LED lights on the laboratory Christmas tree are proof that it's possible to turn poop into power using bacteria. The microbial fuel cell research is gaining attention and from high places. The Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Navy have both provided grants to help advance the technology and its applications.
| 3.089562 |
These are my skewness notes for S1 which explain the coefficient of skewness at the bottom.
In a symmetrical distribution mean = median = mode and Q2 – Q1 = Q3 – Q2. A positive skew distribution has a tail to the positive side, mean > median > mode and Q2 – Q1 < Q3 – Q2. A negative skew distribution has a tail to the negative side, mean < median < mode and Q2 – Q1 > Q3 – Q2. Skewness can be given quantity as well as direction by using (3 (mean-median))/(standard deviation) . To compare the relative dispersion between data sets the coefficient of variation is used, it is given by V= 100σ/μ= 100s/x ̅ and as a percentage. When data is skewed the median and the interquartile range are used as measures of location and dispersion as they are not affected by extreme values. The dispersion of a set of data is therefore measured by the quartile coefficient of variation which is given by QV= (50 (Q_3- Q_1))/Q_2 .
x ̅ is mean of x and Q_3 is the upper quartile mark, if the notation wasnt that clear
Last edited by abbii; 18-04-2010 at 21:29.
Last edited by .ACS.; 18-04-2010 at 21:35.
Reason: Decided to add Latex
| 3.254613 |
Twenty-five days. That's how long it took Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University to undo more than 30 years of exquisitely programmed biology packed into a woman's cheek cell and just maybe change the world. In a procedure that some scientists thought could take decades to discover, Yamanaka tricked the cheek cell into acting like an embryonic stem cell capable of dividing, developing and maturing into any of the body's more than 200 different cell types. And he wasn't alone: on the same day that he published his milestone in the journal Cell, James Thomson, a pioneering University of Wisconsin molecular biologist, reported similar success in Science.
Their papers cap a year of remarkable research, in which scientists have surged ahead of ethicists and politicians in finding ever more clever ways to generate stem cells. But where other breakthroughs relied on using cells from living embryos tiny bits of inchoate life, fraught with ethical issues the work by Yamanaka and Thomson sidesteps that abyss by nursing adult cells into a state in which their cellular destiny is yet to be fulfilled. No embryos, no eggs, no hand-wringing over where the cells come from and whether it is ethical to make them in the first place.
Stem cells generated by this method are ideal not just because they are free of political and moral baggage. They can also be coaxed into becoming any type of tissue, and then be transplanted back into the donor with little risk of rejection. Still, these cells are far from ready for medical use. The viruses used to ferry the genes that manipulate the cells can introduce genetic mutations and cancer. And with myriad ways to reprogram a cell, sorting out the best ones will take time meaning that stem cells from embryos will remain useful (and controversial) for a while. Both Yamanaka and Thomson admit that we still know too little about how the process works to exploit the method's full potential. Nevertheless, their discovery has moved stem-cell research back to an embryonic state of its own in which anything, it seems, is possible.
| 3.038948 |
The drought in Texas, during March, was the worst since 1895.
That is about the time my parents were born 120 years ago.
I never thought it could be worse than the drought of the 1950s, but it is. Drive out into grazing country where mesquite aren't too thick and all you can see is dry, cracked soil with an occasional fire ant or a gopher mound in the sandier soil.
Comparing the current drought with the seven-year drought in the 1950s, old-timers say the current drought sapped the soil of moisture faster than it did in the 1950s.
It just stopped raining last July, and pasture after pasture was hit by wildfires.
Right now, there is no potential to produce hay, harvest wheat or plant cotton or grain sorghum this May. Unless there is a week of rain fairly soon there is no hope for agriculture this year.
The Texas Ag Extension Service says that, despite a few recent showers in some areas, the cotton growing in Texas and Oklahoma is still in a drought. Any crop planted in southern Texas earlier in the year that got up out of the ground is now being sand blasted by hot, dry winds.
Wildfires have burned at least 1.5 million acres in the state since Jan. 1.
In addition to grazing losses, ranchers are facing rangeland stock water tanks that are dry or nearly dry. Streams are not flowing and lakes and big tanks are turning to deep mud.
| 3.019557 |
“Redefining a word isn't always the same as giving it a new meaning. Sometimes you're just trying to pare it down to the core concept that people missed the first time around. Dictionary definitions of "camera" used to mention film and plates; now they just refer to a photosensitive surface. But the meaning of "camera" isn't different; it's just that now technology lets us see what its essence has been all along.”—Geoff Nunberg on how dictionaries are even grappling with getting ‘marriage’ right
“Equality,” “prejudice,” “race” itself — how can you have mid-nineteenth-century characters use words like those without anachronistically evoking the connotations they have for us? To many of Lincoln’s contemporaries and even his allies, “equality”still evoked alarming echoes of the French Revolution. To speak of “race equality” implied not just that people should all be treated alike, but that the races really were morally and intellectually equivalent. That was an extreme and dubious proposition to all but a few radical Republicans, like Thaddeus Stevens. ”—Geoff Nunberg on how connotations have changed since the 19th century and how those connotations are alluded to in Tony Kushner’s screen adaptation of Lincoln.
'Occupy': Geoff Nunberg's 2011 Word Of The YearGeoff Nunberg
‘Occupy’: Geoff Nunberg’s 2011 Word Of The Year (via NPR)
| 3.044157 |
We created this website to teach participant programmers, even those with a poor base, how to use HTML but not only. We invite you to start the programming course right away. But first, "the menu"...
Beginner`s guide - For those of you who are beginners in the way of creating a web page
HTML Tutorials - For those of you who start the creation of web pages with some HTML base
Start with the beginning >>>
This series of tutorials is made to give you some experience, so that you can be capable to read and write in HTML, to be able to save documents and after that to see your work in a web browser. Unfortunately this page does not have a rubric for teaching you how to use all base functions of an computer, so in this point of view you can ask for help to a friend of yours so that you will be helped in :
- Knowing what is an notepad and how to use it
- Knowing how to open a file using internet Explorer(or any other
browser, you can choose it )
- Knowing how yo make and what represents a copy/paste
First web page
For the beginning copy next HTML cod in notepad. Assure that the operation
is right executed or the page will not function.
<body> <h2>My first web page !</h2>
Thee upper code, is all you need to create a simple web page. Now
you can save the document in notepad selecting from File menu
the Save As option. In the new opened window, select All Files.
We will give a name to the file, for example "index.html", without
using the quotation marks. Check twice before you push the Save button.
I will ask you to try to remember where you have saved the file
because we will work with this file a bit later.
How to see your first web pages - Browsers
So that you can see your web page, you should use a browser. Browsers are those internet programs who interpret HTML cods, similar with those you have copied and saved in notepad. These transforms the HTML cod in a web page that can be read by any internet user. The most used browsers are:
How to see your first web page
If you want to see your web page, you have to open "index.html" file in a browser.In this way, open a new Internet Explorer window and follow my instructions:
- From File select Open
- Click on Browse so that you open Windows Explorer
- Do you remember where you have saved the file? Very well, there
you must go.
- When you found it do a double-click to open it
Congratulation ! YOu have just opened your first web page.
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Codes Generators 2
Last Generators added on ScriptGenerator.net
Tutorial html, html beginers, webhosting guide, domain name, table, html color codes, html tutorial, html tags, html
| 3.070654 |
Hb electrophoresis; Hgb electrophoresis; Electrophoresis - hemoglobin
Hemoglobin electrophoresis is a test that measures the different types of the oxygen-carrying protein (hemoglobin) in the blood.
Blood is typically drawn from a vein, usually from the inside of the elbow or the back of the hand. The site is cleaned with germ-killing medicine (antiseptic). The health care provider wraps an elastic band around the upper arm to apply pressure to the area and make the vein swell with blood.
Next, the health care provider gently inserts a needle into the vein. The blood collects into an airtight vial or tube attached to the needle. The elastic band is removed from your arm.
Once the blood has been collected, the needle is removed, and the puncture site is covered to stop any bleeding.
In infants or young children, a sharp tool called a lancet may be used to puncture the skin and make it bleed. The blood collects into a small glass tube called a pipette, or onto a slide or test strip. A bandage may be placed over the area if there is any bleeding.
No special preparation is necessary for this test.
When the needle is inserted to draw blood, some people feel moderate pain, while others feel only a prick or stinging sensation. Afterward, there may be some throbbing.
You may have this test if your health care provider suspects that you have a disorder caused by abnormal forms of hemoglobin (hemoglobinopathy).
Many different types of hemoglobin (Hb) exist. The most common ones are HbA, HbA2, HbF, HbS, HbC, Hb H, and Hb M. Healthy adults only have significant levels of HbA and HbA2.
Some people may also have small amounts of HbF (which is the main type of hemoglobin in an unborn baby's body). Certain diseases are associated with high HbF levels (when HbF is more than 2% of the total hemoglobin).
HbS is an abnormal form of hemoglobin associated with sickle cell anemia. In people with this condition, the red blood cells sometimes have a crescent or sickle shape. The cells easily break down, or can block small blood vessels.
HbC is an abnormal form of hemoglobin associated with hemolytic anemia. The symptoms are much milder than they are in sickle cell anemia.
Other, less common, abnormal Hb molecules cause anemias.
In adults, these hemoglobin molecules make up the following percentages of total hemoglobin:
In infants and children, these hemoglobin molecules make up the following percentages of total hemoglobin:
Note: Normal value ranges may vary slightly among different laboratories. Talk to your doctor about the meaning of your specific test results.
The examples above show the common measurements for results for these tests. Some laboratories use different measurements or may test different specimens.
The presence of significant levels of abnormal hemoglobins may indicate:
There is very little risk involved with having your blood taken. Veins and arteries vary in size from one patient to another and from one side of the body to the other. Taking blood from some people may be more difficult than from others.
Other risks associated with having blood drawn are slight but may include:
You may have false normal or abnormal results if you've had a blood transfusion within the previous 12 weeks.
Nagel R. Methemoglobinemias and unstable hemoglobins. In: Goldman L, Ausiello D, eds. Cecil Medicine. 23rd ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Saunders Elsevier; 2007:chap 168.
Steinberg M. Sickle cell disease and associated hemoglobinopathies. In: Goldman L, Ausiello D, eds. Cecil Medicine. 23rd ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Saunders Elsevier; 2007:chap 167.
© 2011 University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC). All rights reserved.
UMMC is a member of the University of Maryland Medical System,
22 S. Greene Street, Baltimore, MD 21201. TDD: 1-800-735-2258 or 1.866.408.6885
| 3.893126 |
9 January 2013. Climate change poses many challenges to beaches and coastal areas and to the people living near these areas. In order to educate school students and community members on how to protect their beach environments, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Jakarta office and the FOCIL Foundation organized a Sandwatch training of trainers for teachers and students from Wangi-wangi island, Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, in Wakatobi, Indonesia, on 17 and 18 December 2012.
The training involved 18 students and 6 teachers from 3 local schools and started the implementation of Sandwatch activities on the island. In particular, the event aimed to socialize the concept of Sandwatch for climate change adaptation and education for sustainable development, discuss Sandwatch methodologies, and develop a one-year workplan for Sandwatch implementation in the respective schools.
During the training workshop and a fieldtrip, teachers and students identified the environmental problems facing Waha beach, discussed the environmental problems they will focus on as part of Sandwatch activities (each school will choose a beach where they will implement Sandwatch), and debated on how Sandwatch activities can be regularly implemented in the schools for the next 5 months and beyond.
Coastal environmental issues identified and discussed at the training include sand mining and the ensuing rapid erosion, beach use, and debris. One-year workplans for beach monitoring, data analysis, result sharing and taking action are currently being developed by each school.
Participants are encouraged to share the knowledge they have gained with other students and to invite them to implement Sandwatch activities and be part of the global Sandwatch programme. It is expected that by mid 2013, at least 40 students will have been involved in Sandwatch activities in Wakatobi. The first beach monitoring will be carried out by mid January 2013.
The Sandwatch project was launched by UNESCO in 1999 as a volunteer network of primary and secondary school students and teachers. Sandwatch seeks to develop awareness of the fragile nature of the marine and coastal environment and the need to use it wisely. The project activates an educational process through which school students and community members learn and work together. They critically evaluate the problems and conflicts facing their beach environments and develop sustainable approaches to address these issues. Sandwatch provides a practical ‘hands-on’ approach for integrating the values inherent to sustainable development into all aspects of learning. It thereby empowers citizens to act for positive environmental and social change.
| 3.113594 |
For nearly half-a-century, molecular biologists have sought to solve the mystery of how proteins are synthesized and the intricacies of ribosomes — the small particles in cells on which proteins are synthesized. Two UCLA molecular biologists propose a solution in the March 21 issue of the journal Nature.
The scientists — James A. Lake, UCLA professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology, and UCLA graduate student Anne B. Simonson — show how the “factory of life” works.
“The ribosome is like a computer-driven protein factory that has been cloaked in secrecy,” Lake said. “We knew the shape of the factory, and we could see the trucks going in, but we couldn’t peer beyond the factory gate. We knew the names of the employees, but we didn’t know what they did. Now we have a hypothesis of how the employees move in and out of different rooms to get their work done, and even what they have for lunch. Our hypothesis of how protein synthesis works may be refined, but we are confident that the central parts are correct.
“Proteins are the workhorses of the cell, the molecules that make us what we are, and every protein in our body is made on a ribosome,” Lake said. “Ribosomes are central to life, and are in every living organism, from the smallest bacteria to humans.”
Why is it important to understand how ribosomes make proteins?
Each of our cells has more than 100,000 ribosomes, and solving what Lake calls “the puzzle of life” requires a much greater understanding of the ribosome’s role in protein synthesis than the broad outlines scientists have had until now. In addition, the research could lead to new antibiotics, and insights into how genes are regulated, which could lead to new treatments for a variety of diseases, Lake said.
In molecular biology, translation is the process that turns genes into proteins — the “molecules of life.” Scientists have not understood how this critical process works, but have known that it has three phases: initiation, elongation and termination, of which elongation is the key. A number of antibiotics work at the translation level.
“Elongation is the heart of protein synthesis,” Lake said, the phase in which the ribosome adds amino acids, sometimes hundreds of them.
In their Nature paper, Lake and Simonson explain the molecular details of elongation, including the location and movement of more than 10,000 atoms. In addition, they have located a novel binding site for transfer RNA (tRNA) when it enters the ribosome.
“Genes are being turned on and turned off, and transcribed and translated constantly in our cells,” Simonson said. “Learning the mechanisms of how this works is key.”
With the new knowledge, it may become possible to make modifications in parts of the translation process to suppress lethal mutations and design new proteins to counteract the defects that cause numerous diseases, Lake said.
If the ribosome is a factory, then the workers in the hard hats include tRNA and EF-Tu, a ubiquitous protein molecule that is like a large motor transporting tRNAs and amino acids. Simonson and Lake have learned how they move and function.
“EF-Tu moves to exactly where it needs to go to transport the tRNA to where it needs to be so the amino acids are close enough together to be added to the end of a growing protein chain,” Lake said. “The structure led us. The ribosome’s structure was telling us, ‘It can’t move like that, it doesn’t fit there, you have to turn it this way.’ All the times we would make mistakes, the ribosome would correct us.”
“The most exciting moment for me occurred late one night when we saw the initial binding site for tRNA before it turns,” Simonson said. “The structure of the ribosome dictated how it fit in. We looked at each other and said, ‘Wow! That’s amazing.’”
The research, which involved sophisticated computer simulation, was federally funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and the Astrobiology Institute.
| 3.622951 |
Glycohemoglobin (HbA1c, A1c)
Test Overview Back to top
Glycohemoglobin (A1c) is a blood test that checks the amount of sugar (glucose) bound to the hemoglobin in the red blood cells. When hemoglobin and glucose bond, a coat of sugar forms on the hemoglobin. That coat gets thicker when there's more sugar in the blood. A1c tests measure how thick that coat has been over the past 3 months, which is how long a red blood cell lives. People who have diabetes or other conditions that increase their blood glucose levels have more glycohemoglobin than normal.
An A1c test can be used to diagnose prediabetes or diabetes. The A1c test checks the long-term control of blood glucose levels in people with diabetes. Most doctors think checking an A1c level is the best way to check how well a person is controlling his or her diabetes.
A home blood glucose test measures the level of blood glucose only at that moment. Blood glucose levels change during the day for many reasons, including medicine, diet, exercise, and the level of insulin in the blood.
It is useful for a person who has diabetes to have information about the long-term control of blood sugar levels. The A1c test result does not change with any recent changes in diet, exercise, or medicines.
Glucose binds to hemoglobin in red blood cells at a steady rate. Since red blood cells last 3 to 4 months, the A1c test shows how much glucose is in the plasma part of blood. This test shows how well your diabetes has been controlled in the last 2 to 3 months and whether your diabetes treatment plan needs to be changed.
The A1c test can also help your doctor see how big your risk is of developing problems from diabetes, such as kidney failure, vision problems, and leg or foot numbness. Keeping your A1c level in your target range can lower your chance for problems.
Why It Is Done Back to top
This test is done to:
- Diagnose prediabetes and diabetes.
- Check your treatment for diabetes.
How To Prepare Back to top
You do not need to stop eating before you have an A1c test. This test can be done any time during the day, even after a meal.
How It Is Done Back to top
The health professional taking a sample of your blood will:
- Wrap an elastic band around your upper arm to stop the flow of blood. This makes the veins below the band larger so it is easier to put a needle into the vein.
- Clean the needle site with alcohol.
- Put the needle into the vein. More than one needle stick may be needed.
- Attach a tube to the needle to fill it with blood.
- Remove the band from your arm when enough blood is collected.
- Put a gauze pad or cotton ball over the needle site as the needle is removed.
- Put pressure on the site and then put on a bandage.
How It Feels Back to top
The blood sample is taken from a vein in your arm. An elastic band is wrapped around your upper arm. It may feel tight. You may feel nothing at all from the needle, or you may feel a quick sting or pinch.
Risks Back to top
There is very little chance of a problem from having blood sample taken from a vein.
- You may get a small bruise at the site. You can lower the chance of bruising by keeping pressure on the site for several minutes.
- In rare cases, the vein may become swollen after the blood sample is taken. This problem is called phlebitis. A warm compress can be used several times a day to treat this.
- Ongoing bleeding can be a problem for people with bleeding disorders. Aspirin, warfarin (Coumadin), and other blood-thinning medicines can make bleeding more likely. If you have bleeding or clotting problems, or if you take blood-thinning medicine, tell your doctor before your blood sample is taken.
Results Back to top
A1c is a blood test that checks the amount of sugar (glucose) bound to hemoglobin. The result is shown as a percentage. The result of your A1c test can also be used to estimate your average blood sugar level. This is called your estimated average glucose, or eAG. Your doctor will have your test results in a few days.
The American Diabetes Association (ADA) criteria to diagnose diabetes includes the option of testing A1c. The diagnosis of diabetes needs to be confirmed by repeating the same blood sugar test or doing a different test on another day.
The normal values listed here—called a reference range—are just a guide. These ranges vary from lab to lab, and your lab may have a different range for what's normal. Your lab report should contain the range your lab uses. Also, your doctor will evaluate your results based on your health and other factors. This means that a value that falls outside the normal values listed here may still be normal for you or your lab.
Less than 5.7%
|Prediabetes (increased risk for diabetes)||
6.5% and higher
|A1c %||Estimated average plasma glucose (mg/dL)||Estimated average plasma glucose (mmol/L)|
|Children younger than 6 years old||Less than 8.5%|
|Children ages 6–12 years old||Less than 8%|
|Teens ages 13–19 years old||Less than 7.5%|
Some medical conditions can increase A1c levels, but the results may still be within a normal range. These conditions include Cushing's syndrome, pheochromocytoma, and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).
Corticosteroid treatment increases the A1c level.
A1c levels may be higher in children and adolescents with diabetes.
What Affects the Test Back to top
Reasons you may not be able to have the test or why the results may not be helpful include:
- Having severe blood loss or a blood transfusion in the last 3 months.
- Having certain medical conditions, such as sickle cell anemia, hemolytic anemia, some types of thalassemia, and severe kidney disease.
- Having your spleen taken out. This changes the normal life cycle of red blood cells and A1c levels.
What To Think About Back to top
- If you have diabetes, your doctor may recommend that you have an A1c test every 3 to 6 months, depending on how well you are meeting your treatment goals.
- Some people who develop diabetes have normal A1c levels early in the course of their disease.
- A1c levels can be normal in some people who have untreated diabetes and certain medical conditions, such as sickle cell anemia, hemolytic anemia, severe kidney disease, or pregnancy.
- A1c levels are not useful for finding low blood sugar (hypoglycemia).
- The A1c test does not replace the need for other regular blood glucose tests, including checking your blood sugar at home and a regular blood glucose test.
References Back to top
- American Diabetes Association (2012). Diagnosis and classification of diabetes mellitus. Diabetes Care, 35(Suppl 1): S64–S71.
- American Diabetes Association (2012). Standards of medical care in diabetes—2012. Diabetes Care, 35(Suppl 1): S11–S63.
Other Works Consulted
- Fischbach FT, Dunning MB III, eds. (2009). Manual of Laboratory and Diagnostic Tests, 8th ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
Credits Back to top
|Primary Medical Reviewer||E. Gregory Thompson, MD - Internal Medicine|
|Specialist Medical Reviewer||Alan C. Dalkin, MD - Endocrinology|
|Last Revised||May 17, 2012|
Last Revised: May 17, 2012
To learn more visit Healthwise.org
| 3.774201 |
Malathion Pesticide Exposure and Its Effects
Attention and behavior disorders are some of the most common conditions among young children, and some of the most concerning for parents. Researchers have long been looking for causes of these types of conditions, and while heredity and chemical imbalances are commonly thought to be causes, exposure to malathion pesticide is also showing to be a possible source.
Pesticides called organophosphates, which include parathion and malathion pesticide chemicals, have been shown to be a possible link in the development of attention difficulties in children who are exposed to the toxins. While it is one of the lesser potent pesticides that have been included in the study, the prevalence of the use of malathion pesticides make exposure to the substance very easy.
The malathion pesticide is used in the treatment of fruits, vegetables, cotton, landscaping, public pests, recreation areas such as playgrounds, and much more. In order to help keep exposure to malathion pesticide to a minimum, many people choose to:
- Wash all fruits and vegetables thoroughly before eating
- Cook foods completely
- Wash new clothing before wearing
- Constantly wash hands, especially when out in public areas
- Avoid touching the face or mouth, as well as foods, with dirty hands
If your child is displaying symptoms of attention or behavioral problems, and you suspect it may be caused by over exposure to malathion pesticide, contact your physician. He or she may be able to help properly diagnose the condition and help you create a plan to manage the condition.
| 3.467304 |
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