Trends That Will Affect Your Future …

LOL!

This may be a game changer. As with all these stories i always think:
If we had spent the money we squander to little effect in Iraq and Afghanistan, where would we be today in the Green Transition?

The results described in this report have been published in: The American Chemical Society's Nano Letters journal.

Thanks to Damien Broderick, PhD.

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New type of rechargeable battery – just add water



The mixing entropy battery could be used to build power plants at estuaries where fresh water rivers join the ocean (Image: NASA)

By Alan Brandon
May 5, 2011

Scientists at Stanford have developed a battery that uses nanotechnology to create electricity from the difference in salt content between fresh water and sea water. The researchers hope to use the technology to create power plants where fresh-water rivers flow into the ocean. The new "mixing entropy" battery alternately immerses its electrodes in river water and sea water to produce the electrical power.

Making electricity from the difference in salinity (the amount of salt) in fresh water and sea water is not a new concept. We've previously covered salinity power technology, and Norway's Statkraft has built a working prototype power plant. But the Stanford team, led by associate professor of materials science and engineering Yi Cui, believes their method is more efficient, and can be built more cheaply.

Other fresh/salt water power plants work by releasing energy through osmosis (the passing of solvent molecules through a membrane). The Stanford team's approach harnesses entropic energy from the interaction of the fresh water and salt water with the battery's electrodes.

The mixing entropy battery works by exchanging the electrolyte (a liquid that contains ions or electrically charged particles – in this case water) between when the battery is charged and when it is discharged. The ions in water are sodium and chlorine, which are the elements of ordinary table salt. The saltier the water is, the more sodium and chlorine ions there are, and the more voltage that can be produced.

The battery is first filled with fresh water and charged. Then the fresh water is swapped out for salt water. Because salt water has 60 to 100 times more ions than fresh water, the electrical potential is increased and the battery can discharge at a higher voltage, providing more electricity.

After the battery is discharged, the salt water is drained and fresh water is added to begin the cycle again.

To enhance the efficiency of the battery, the positive electrode is made from nanoscale rods of manganese dioxide. The negative electrode is made of silver. The design of the nanorods provides about 100 times more surface area for interaction with the sodium ions compared to other materials, and allow the ions to move in and out of the electrode more easily. The Stanford team reports a 74 percent efficiency in converting the potential energy in the battery to electricity. Cui believes that with further development the battery could achieve up to 85 percent efficiency.

The Stanford team has calculated that with 50 cubic meters (more than 13,000 gallons) of fresh water per second, a power plant based on this technology could produce up to 100 megawatts of power. That is enough electricity to support about 100,000 households.



The mixing entropy battery alternately immerses its electrodes in fresh water and salt water to produce electricity


While salt water is plentiful in the ocean, the volume of fresh water required suggests that a good location for a mixing entropy battery power plant would be where a river flows into the ocean. Because river deltas and estuaries are sensitive environments, the Stanford team designed their battery to have minimal ecological impact. The system would detour some of a river's flow to produce power, before returning the water to the ocean. The discharge water would be a mix of river water and sea water, and released into an area where the two waters already meet.

In fact, the fresh water doesn't have to come from a river. Cui says that storm runoff, gray water, or even treated sewage water could potentially be used. As an added benefit, the mixing entropy process can be reversed to produce drinking water by removing salt from ocean water.

The Stanford scientists are currently working on modifications to get the battery ready for commercial production. For example, the silver electrode is very expensive, and they hope to develop a cheaper alternative. Because the mixing entropy battery is simple to make and produces energy efficiently, the team hopes that their technology can become a significant source of renewable energy in the future.

Source;
http://www.gizmag.com/rechargeable-battery-freshwater-seawater/18565/

Hmmm...of course this is an estimate...

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North America Settled by Just 70 People, Study Concludes



Live Science
http://www.livescience.com/289-north-america-settled-70-people-study-concludes.html

And then there's this--------

In America, being poor is a criminal offense

It takes a special kind of bully to target the most vulnerable and neediest families in society, which millionaire politicians like to argue are draining America's treasury. I am referring to Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA), who recently introduced a bill that would require states to implement drug testing of applicants for and recipients of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. This is reminiscent of Sen. Orrin Hatch's (R-UT) failed legislation last summer to drug test the unemployed and those receiving other forms of government cash assistance, which ultimately died in the Senate. So far, Boustany's proposal is following the same fate as Hatch's, but around the country states are taking matters into their own hands.

In at least 30 state Legislatures across America, predominately wealthy politicians are quite impressed with themselves for considering bills that would limit the meager amount of state help given to needy families struggling to make ends meet. Many have proposed drug testing with some even extending it to recipients of other public benefits as well, such as unemployment insurance, medical assistance, and food assistance, in an attempt to add more obstacles to families' access to desperately needed aid.

States named in rest of article here: http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/179882.html

Please note that this piece is fully sourced and URLs are provided to back up the facts -- and we are dealing here with facts. See this as an expression of ultimate contempt by the social psychosis placing profit above all. The task of the 21st century is going to be how to permit the benefits of the profit system while, as the same time, placing human values first.

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GM soy destroying children

Thursday, May 12, 2011 by: Kaitlyn Moore

NaturalNews) Soy, once touted as a medical miracle, has been outed. Ninety-one percent of the soy we consume is tainted by the filth of the GMO machine, literally the most quietly kept epidemic of our lifetime. Soy makes up a large portion of the diet for the chickens, pigs, and cows some of us eat. Even the vegetarian/vegan community is exposed as a number of meat substitutes list soy as a main ingredient. Soy and soybean oil have wiggled their way into a wide array of processed foods including salad dressings, peanut butter, tamari, mayonnaise, crackers, baby formula, baked good mixes, textured vegetable protein, and the list goes on. So unless you are eating an organic version of any of the above, there is a good chance you are exposing yourself to GMO soy.

Genetically engineered crops are destroying the environment, the health of indigenous communities, and ultimately our health as end of the chain consumers. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine has reported a number of studies. Their results? Frightening. Think major issues like infertility (http://www.responsibletechnology.or...), immune problems, accelerated aging, and even changes in the cellular structure of major organs (http://www.responsibletechnology.org/). Also, as a result of the antibiotic resistant genes within GE food, they are the highly suspected culprits behind the new "superbug." The animals involved in the studies ended up deformed, sterile, and dead.

Children are the most susceptible to these harmful effect, since they are constantly in a state of high growth; parents should take care. GMO foods, and especially soy, have been tied to an increase in allergies, asthma, and a propensity to get antibiotic resistant infections.

None of this would surprise any of the individuals in various South America countries that live near GM crops. South America is the world's largest provider of soy (http://www.naturalnews.com/031382_G...).

A recent story in the UK Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/ea...) revealed that the herbicides used on GM soy are so toxic that direct contact often results in severe illness and sometimes death. Petrona Villasboa is one of those that has faced direct loss. Her son was accidenatlly sprayed by one of the machines that are often spraying Monsanto's Roundup on the surrounding crops. Silvino Talavera died that same day - and it was a horrible death (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/ea...). That's not all - Non GMO farmers are being displaced, and those that stay run a calculated risk. Mothers living close to GM farmland are twice as likely to have a fetus with a birth deformity.

The industry doesn't want this information out there. Monsanto provides over 90 percent of GMO soy seeds and related herbicides to farmers worldwide (http://www.smdp.com/Articles-c-2011...).

Agent Orange was one of Monsanto's first herbicides and the resulting effect to U.S soldiers and Vietnamese citizens was reprehensible( http://www.organicconsumers.org/mon...).

Scientist who push to hard to get a widespread scientific inquiry about the devastating effects of GE foods have had subtle and not-so-subtle pressure applied and been forced to back off their findings (http://www.responsibletechnology.or...).

Just as efforts are underway to assist these farmers in seeing the benefits of growing organic food as a means of survival and commerce, the end consumer must also make a change. Soy purchases must be viewed in a whole new light. The best way to protect your family from these potential harmful effects is to remove it from your diet or stick to strictly organic soy and organic processed foods.

for more on this subject-
Source
http://www.naturalnews.com/032370_GM_soy_children.html

This is what the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld policy of creating and utilizing mercenary forces has loosed upon the world. It's been done before, and does not end well. Think late Roman empire.

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Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater’s Founder


Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, has a new project.

Story here;
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/middleeast/15prince.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

There is a correlation between conservative religious beliefs and spousal abuse, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, literacy, and educational level. Now here is the not surprising data showing that the willful ignorance of the Religious Right also correlates with its failure to find financial success. Rather than examine this it is much easier to strike out with anti-semitism, racism, and resentment. This is part of what drives the Tea Party.

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Is Your Religion Your Financial Destiny?

By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: May 11, 2011

The economic differences among the country’s various religions are strikingly large, much larger than the differences among states and even larger than those among racial groups.

The most affluent of the major religions — including secularism — is Reform Judaism. Sixty-seven percent of Reform Jewish households made more than $75,000 a year at the time the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life collected the data, compared with only 31 percent of the population as a whole. Hindus were second, at 65 percent, and Conservative Jews were third, at 57 percent.

On the other end are Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Baptists. In each case, 20 percent or fewer of followers made at least $75,000. Remarkably, the share of Baptist households making $40,000 or less is roughly the same as the share of Reform Jews making $100,000 or more. Overall, Protestants, who together are the country’s largest religious group, are poorer than average and poorer than Catholics. That stands in contrast to the long history, made famous by Max Weber, of Protestant nations generally being richer than Catholic nations.

Many factors are behind the discrepancies among religions, but one stands out. The relationship between education and income is so strong that you can almost draw a line through the points on this graph. Social science rarely produces results this clean.

What about the modest outliers — like Unitarians, Buddhists and Orthodox Christians, all of whom are less affluent than they are educated (and are below the imaginary line)? One possible explanation is that some religions are more likely to produce, or to attract, people who voluntarily choose lower-paying jobs, like teaching.

Another potential explanation is discrimination. Scott Keeter of Pew notes that researchers have used more sophisticated versions of this sort of analysis to look for patterns of marketplace discrimination. And a few of the religions that make less than their education would suggest have largely nonwhite followings, including Buddhism and Hinduism. Pew also created a category of traditionally black Protestant congregations, and it was somewhat poorer than could be explained by education levels. These patterns don’t prove discrimination, but they raise questions.

Some of the income differences probably stem from culture. Some faiths place great importance on formal education. But the differences are also self-reinforcing. People who make more money can send their children to better schools, exacerbating the many advantages they have over poorer children. Round and round, the cycle goes. It won’t solve itself.




Source;
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/magazine/is-your-religion-your-financial-destiny.html?_r=2

There is no question our social programing has taken its toll...one even sees it on these forums. :(
"Another facet of the growing failure in the U.S. to create a nurturing environment for the next generation."

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Studied:
Rejection May Hurt More Than Feelings


New research suggests rejection's sting is more like physical pain was understood.

By PAMELA PAUL
Published: May 13, 2011

THE GIST Being socially rejected doesn’t just feel bad. It hurts.

THE SOURCE “Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Representations With Physical Pain,” by Ethan F. Kross, Marc G. Berman, Walter Mischel, Edward E. Smith and Tor D. Wager; published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

NOBODY would deny that being ostracized on the playground, mocked in a sales meeting or broken up with over Twitter feels bad. But the sting of social rejection may be more like the ouch! of physical pain than previously understood.

New research suggests that the same areas in the brain that signify physical pain are activated at moments of intense social loss. “When we sat around and thought about the most difficult emotional experiences, we all agreed that it doesn’t get any worse than social rejection,” said the study’s lead author, Ethan F. Kross, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.

The image of a bunch of social scientists inflicting pain on laboratory volunteers seems creepily Mengelian, but in this case the experiments involved were markedly less cruel. First off, the subjects weren’t socially rejected by the laboratory technicians — each of the 40 volunteers was recruited specifically because he or she felt intensely rejected as a result of a recent (unwanted) breakup.

Once in the lab, participants were hooked up to functional M.R.I. scanners, which measure brain activity. They were then asked to look at photos of their former lovers and brood over a specific rejection experience involving that person. (Sob.) Later, they were asked to look at a photograph of a friend and to think about a recent positive experience they had with that person.

On to more fun! Next was the physical pain component, also in two parts. First, participants experienced noxious thermal stimulation on their left forearms (the “hot trial”), simulating the experience of spilling hot coffee on themselves. Then, they underwent a second, nonnoxious thermal stimulation (the “warm trial”). Technicians monitored their brain activity to see which areas lighted up.

Lo and behold, bad breakups and hot coffee elicited a similar response in the brain, at least as measured by fMRI machines.

Previous research had shown that while social rejection hurt, it did not activate parts of the brain associated with physical distress. But this team found that when the emotional pain was awful enough, those parts of the brain were affected as well, and in equal part. According to the authors, the emotional pain simulated in previous experiments (being told a stranger dislikes them, looking at rejection-themed paintings) wasn’t powerful enough to elicit a true-to-life response. “We were shocked because no prior research had demonstrated this same connection,” Dr. Kross said.

What the team doesn’t yet know is what region of the body feels the physical pain or whether it’s diffused. And while people have long taken painkillers to cope with emotional distress, there’s no telling, in this instance, whether a Tylenol can help.



Source;
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/fashion/is-rejection-painful-actually-it-is-

Sanicle wrote:And then there's this--------

In America, being poor is a criminal offense

It takes a special kind of bully to target the most vulnerable and neediest families in society, which millionaire politicians like to argue are draining America's treasury. I am referring to Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA), who recently introduced a bill that would require states to implement drug testing of applicants for and recipients of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. This is reminiscent of Sen. Orrin Hatch's (R-UT) failed legislation last summer to drug test the unemployed and those receiving other forms of government cash assistance, which ultimately died in the Senate. So far, Boustany's proposal is following the same fate as Hatch's, but around the country states are taking matters into their own hands.

In at least 30 state Legislatures across America, predominately wealthy politicians are quite impressed with themselves for considering bills that would limit the meager amount of state help given to needy families struggling to make ends meet. Many have proposed drug testing with some even extending it to recipients of other public benefits as well, such as unemployment insurance, medical assistance, and food assistance, in an attempt to add more obstacles to families' access to desperately needed aid.

States named in rest of article here: http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/179882.html

I admit that I didn't click on the full article. I wish to say, however, that I can see the thought behind this legislation. If people are needing a handout, they shouldn't be spending their cash on illegal street drugs. If you can afford the drugs, you can give up some of the benefits, that you get, that I have to pay for. Once the recipients are drug tested and kicked out of a program, it should be made very easy to qualify back into the system once those recipients are clean. That way, there is no excuse that "the children will go hungry." Put down the smoke and clear your head as to why you are on assistance, anyway. Disabilities do not count. The money saved should be used for the long long waiting lists for government assisted programs for getting people off drugs for good. Thanks for letting me rant. Linda

With an estimated 40 million Americans without any health insurance this not a healthy trend...

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"This is the latest report on what the Illness Profit System has wrought in America. And once again you can see clearly the choice to place profit above national health,
expressed in all these individual cases. It's not hard to see why the World Health Organization rates us as 37th in the world for quality of healthcare."

Study: Third of hospital ERs have closed over past 20 years



By Mary Brophy Marcus, USA TODAY

Close to a third of emergency departments closed shop over the past two decades, a new study shows.

From 1990 to 2009, the number of hospital emergency departments in non-rural areas in the USA declined by 27%, according to a study in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.

"That's a hefty number, and more than I expected," says study author Renee Hsia, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of California-San Francisco.

Hsia says she and colleagues did a "survival analysis," much like researchers do for breast cancer patients. "In our study, we used the ER as the patient," says Hsia.

They found that the number of emergency departments dropped from 2,446 to 1,779 — an average of 89 closings per year. The figure included only non-rural locations since those in rural areas generally receive special funding from federal sources.

Hsia says researchers wanted to examine the factors that led to closings. "Certain hospitals are at higher risk for losing their ERs than others," she says. ERs shut down were more likely to:

•Have low profit margins;

•Serve patient below the poverty level;

•Serve patients with poorer forms of insurance, including Medicaid;

•Be in for-profit hospitals;

•Be in more competitive markets;

Emergency experts aren't surprised by the shrinking ER trend.

"It isn't shocking. Health care is a business and certainly health care parallels the course of small business needing larger corporate affiliations to survive," says Carl Ramsay, chairman of emergency medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital, in New York City.

Hsia says it's very concerning that during the same period of time that number of ERs has decreased, there's been a 35% increase in ER visits.

"The demand for care has increased and has rapidly outpaced our supply. They're going in opposite directions," she says. Other studies show that the more crowded emergency departments become, the less able they are to give optimal care, and remain America's health care "safety net," she says.

It's a myth that ERs are sucking the healthcare system dry, says Sandra Schneider, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians. "About 92% of patients who come to ERs have to be there. So you're not going to get the money you need by closing emergency departments," Schneider says. She says studies show only 2% of total healthcare costs occur in emergency medicine, while treating obesity-related illnesses is linked to about 20% of costs, and hospital readmission rates are linked to about 15%.

"The ER is the bird's eye perspective of the whole healthcare system. If we really want a better system, not just band-aid solutions, we need to look at how to simplify the way we pay for health care," says Hsia.

Source;
http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/health/healthcare/hospitals/2011-05-17-ERs-closing-US_n.htm

Secret Service interrogates 13-year-old over Facebook comment

Following the killing of Osama Bin Laden 13-year-old Vito LaPinta posted on his Facebook that US President Barack Obama should be cautious because terrorists may want to retaliate. The Secret Service sprang into action!

“I was saying how Osama was dead and for Obama to be careful because there could be suicide bombers,” explained LaPinta.

His goal was to express concern, but Obama’s Secret Service took it as a threat.

About a week after his post the Secret Service showed up at LaPinta’s school. He was escorted to the principal’s office where he was greeted by the principal and a Secret Service agent who informed him he had made a threat against the US President.

“He told me it was because of a post I made that indicated I was a threat toward the President. I was very scared,” LaPinta recalled to Seattle’s Q13 FOX.

The boy’s mother was not present and not even informed until after her son was already being questioned. The school called here, but proceeded anyway, arguing that the mother was not taking the call seriously.

“I answered it, and it's the school security guard who's giving me a heads up that the Secret Service is here with the Tacoma Police Department and they have Vito and they're talking to him,” said Timi Robertson, LaPinta’s mother. “I just about lost it. My 13-year-old son is supposed to be safe and secure in his classroom and he's being interrogated without my knowledge or consent privately.”

By the time Robertson arrived her some had been being interrogated for about a half an hour without her presence or consent.

Once she arrived at the school the agent quite the interview and informed LaPinta that hje was not in any trouble. It is unclear why he waited so long and the Secret Service has refused to comment on the matter.

Link: https://rt.com/usa/news/secret-service-teen-facebook-comment/

Here is some more good news; it's a story from a several months ago, but I missed it, and the trend it represents is growing, although still somewhat problematic.
This is the antipode to Monsanto's approach to agriculture.

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The new black gold?

Biochar - charcoal derived from burning plants - can boost crop yields and help fight climate change.


Experiments around the world have convinced soil
scientist Johannes Lehmann of biochar's benefits.

by Andrew Tolve

In the summer of 2002, scientist and entrepreneur Danny Day sent a lab assistant to retrieve some charcoal from behind Day’s lab in Blakely, Georgia. At the time, he was researching how to turn peanut shells into hydrogen for the U.S. Department of Energy. He regularly used charcoal to preheat the reactor. When his assistant returned, he came bearing strange news: Plants had taken root in the bed of charcoal—weeds, grass, turnips as big as baseballs, enough to fill four garbage bags.

How had turnips sprouted from a pile of charcoal? Day wondered.

Charcoal is easy to make. Take biomass like wood, leaves and grass clippings, and burn it in an oxygen-free setting until all that remains is a bit of ash and a bunch of carbon. Typically, the carbon is released into the atmosphere when charcoal is burned. But if you buried the charcoal instead, the carbon would remain safely captured. And if charcoal helps turnips grow as big as baseballs, there might be a very good reason to bury it.

Such was Day’s thinking as he rushed behind his lab with a sample bag, a -microscope and a digital camera. In the eight years since that moment, “biochar”—charcoal deliberately buried to bolster crops and sequester carbon—has heated up the climate change debate.

Universities are researching the concept, and entrepreneurs are launching startups with millions of dollars of private investment. People like former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson talk up biochar’s potential to offset the combined carbon outputs of all planes, cars and buses, while critics warn of unintended side effects.

“This began with nothing, zero, just a pile of charcoal,” Day says, “and now it’s all over the world. It’s wonderful.”

I traveled to meet Day at a lab in Marietta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, where he was running analytical tests on various biochar feedstocks. His main piece of equipment had just broken down, but that didn’t dampen his spirits. “This might not end up being very big,” he says of biochar in his lyrical, ironic Southern drawl. “It could be like, you know, just another Internet.”

Day has reason to think big. Studies suggest biochar is excellent at retaining moisture and thus, when buried, operates as a sort of emergency reservoir, taking in and holding what water is available. Microbes love the oils in biochar, so it stimulates microbial activity and stabilizes nutrients. As an added bonus, biochar can replace nitrogen fertilizers that release nitrous oxide, a chemical compound with a greenhouse effect 300 times as potent as carbon dioxide. The net impact is sequestered carbon and higher crop yields.

Results like this have stimulated activity all across the private sector. Some startups are creating biochars that could replace or complement traditional fertilizers, targeting everything from wheat, soybeans and sugarcane to fruit, vegetables and palm oils. Many companies are hunkered down in “stealth mode,” racing for first-to-market advantage, according to David Shearer, co-founder of the biochar enterprise Full Circle Solutions in San Francisco. “This is potentially a $50 billion industry. If you factor in the agriculture benefits, the soil restoration -benefits, the carbon benefits and the -energy -benefits, it’s a huge number.”

Full Circle believes there’s a range of opportunities for its products, including in environments with degraded soil. “Biochar has the most significant impact on soils in severe need of restoration,” says Shearer. “We can take the world soil base from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, identify where the soils are in the worst shape, and by adding our biochar products, dramatically increase crop yields to meet the planet’s food needs.”

Other startups make the machines that manufacture biochar, known as pyrolysis units. Loaded with biomass, pyrolysis units not only produce biochar but also heat, which can be used locally, and oil that can be refined for transportation.

“Two-thirds of this planet’s population lives off the grid,” says Thomas Harttung, an organic farmer and founder of the biochar firm Black Carbon in Denmark, “and there are hundreds of thousands of diesel engines out there producing electricity locally, very inefficiently, with great pollution and at great cost. So there’s a huge demand for substitutes for fossil fuels in electricity generation, and we see this as a promising way to do it.”

Harttung wants to produce pyrolysis units and distribute them in the developing world—“dropped in by parachute if need be,” he insists—to provide clean, locally produced power.

Carbonscape, a startup in New Zealand, is making biochar by way of industrial-scale microwaves, and Biochar Engineering, a startup based in Golden, Colorado, plans to release a commercial pyrolysis unit this summer. Given the commercial interest, Day is advising, startups and municipalities on how to implement biochar programs in local communities.

On the tables in Day’s Marietta lab lie shards of corn stover from Iowa, bamboo from China, tan-tan from the Virgin Islands and peanut shells and pine wood from Georgia. Day’s ultimate goal is to create a vast network of local biochar programs employing local workers and using local biomass to sequester carbon, increase local crop yields and provide energy to the region.

“Think of all the different biomass that can be turned into biochar,” Day says. “We can set up revenue models for processing organic waste that are actually profitable for cities. If we’re trying to sequester carbon, the way to do it is to extract the energy value and then take the fixed carbon back to the ground in a form that nature can use.”

Burying charcoal for its agricultural benefits is not, in fact, an entirely new concept. For years, scientists assumed the Amazon basin had wretched soil conditions because the rainforest stored all the nutrients up in the canopy. Archeologists believed the Amazon had never supported a fully developed agrarian civilization.

But in the late 1800s, they began to uncover beds of deep, dark, nutrient-rich soil that teemed with healthy microbial activity. A hundred years later, scientists realized these pockets of rich soil—called terra preta, or “dark earth”—were not a fluke of nature but the remnants of a vibrant civilization that had discovered the beauty of biochar.

“If you live and work on soils in the Amazon, you can’t help but notice the terra preta,” says Johannes Lehmann, a soil scientist who has worked on the issue of depleted soils in South America. “So we said, Okay, if there is a lot of charcoal carbon in these soils, let’s try to put -charcoal into soils today and see what it does to soil fertility.” Lehmann’s subsequent greenhouse and field experiments have created a buzz among soil scientists and environmental engineers.

Upward of 10 American universities are experimenting with biochar. In 2009, the University of Edinburgh in Scotland launched the U.K. Biochar Research Centre. That same year, New Zealand’s Massey University did the same with the New Zealand Biochar Research Center. Lehmann is now at Cornell University, where he serves as chairman of the International Biochar Initiative and orchestrates research projects worldwide.

In Kenya, he’s mapping out how much biomass local farmers have, how they use it, what biomass is best for making biochar, how local women respond to biochar stoves, what sort of emissions these stoves produce and how biochar impacts local crops. The goal: to understand the scientific and social impact of biochar before products hit the market.

Not everyone is convinced that biochar is a climate crisis game-changer. “There have been many incidences in the past where people have gotten into a lot of hype and ended up making a bigger problem than there was before,” says K.C. Das, director of the Biorefining and Carbon Cycling Program at the University of Georgia. “We’re not in that business. I like the hype, but I want to be realistic, too. Biochar will only work if it is environmentally sustainable and has economic benefits. At this point, I don’t think we’ve solved both of those problems.”

Das was speaking alongside his char maker in Athens, Georgia, where I traveled from Marietta for a tour of his lab, nestled in rolling farmland on the outskirts of town. The day I was there, Das had filled the char-maker—a large-scale batch pyrolysis unit beside a down-draft gasifier, in biochar jargon—with wood chips and was heating them to the boiling point. Das planned to send the resulting char to soil scientists to test how its chemistry -impacted soil.

“The temperatures [in the pyrolysis unit], what biomass you use, what carrier gas you use, heating rates—all these variables affect the char in subtle ways that are not very well defined and not well understood,” Das explains. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.

Critics are wary of biochar precisely because so much has yet to be figured out. Last April, when 11 African nations approached the UN to consider biochar as an official offset for emissions, 143 non-profit groups protested that it was a “charred earth policy.” These groups worry that burying biochar amounts to a major climate intervention with unknown, and potentially disastrous, repercussions. “The evidence of [biochar] working at any scale really isn’t there,” says Almuth Ernsting, co-director of the non-profit Biofuelwatch. “There’s a complete lack of long- or medium-term field studies that look at impacts on soil -fertility.”

Critics like Ernsting point to several specific concerns. For one, theoretical models of biochar adoption assume that all char will be successfully buried in the ground. But several studies indicate that as much as 30 percent of biochar is lost into the atmosphere during transportation and application, as well as during storms as windblown dust. Black carbon in the atmosphere has a larger greenhouse effect than CO2, Ernsting notes.

A second concern is that subsidized biochar will put pressure on biomass, and companies may begin to grow and cut down trees exclusively for the production of biochar and the carbon credits that come with it. Carbonscape, the New Zealand startup, has proposed one such -tree-farming model.

“Where the market goes from here depends on whether enough policymakers believe claims made about biochar enough to incentivize commercialization,” says Ernsting. “There is definitely a case for studying the role of charcoals in soils. But this is not ready to be commercialized.”

James Bruges, author of The Biochar Debate, agrees that biochar has its risks. “If you are producing the charcoal in order to earn carbon credits, it can lead to all sorts of distortions,” he says. “The danger is that if you concentrate on the crops that capture the most carbon, companies would buy out the small-scale farmer and just plant monocultures on a large scale.”

Bruges, who works with the Indian non-profit Social Change and Development, has seen firsthand some of the complexities of making biochar a reality. In 2008, biochar helped banana farmers in southern India double their yields while halving their water use. But since then, the cost of local biochar has increased due to demand, local women have proven reluctant to use biochar cooking stoves, the introduction of larger pyrolysis units is mired in delays and organizers fear widespread use won’t happen unless the government subsidizes biochar or doles out carbon credits for its use.

Despite setbacks like these, Bruges still describes biochar as “the one technology that can save us.” Of course, it is unlikely that any single technology on its own can counter all the effects of climate change. But if its early promise pans out, biochar could become a crucial tool for sequestering carbon and repairing the planet’s degraded soils.

Andrew Tolve typed this story with fingers stained black by biochar.

Source;
http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/71/biochar-black-gold/

More on the emerging biochar trend.

The long-lasting, eco-friendly, carbon-storing wonder stuff

By Annie Maccoby Berglof

Published: May 20 2011 22:01

There is a popular saying among organic gardeners: “feed the soil not the plants”. For the past 80 years, organic gardeners have fed their soils with a wide range of composts, from the home-made, high-fertility wormy stuff to nutritionally-balanced nursery-bought bags based on peat.

But recently, an additive has been discovered, or rather rediscovered, prompting excitement among gardeners. Available alone or now as pre-mixed, peat-free compost, the wonder material is biochar, a charcoal-like substance produced through the oxygen-free, slow burning of woody biomass garden cuttings, grasses, crop waste.

Biochar, according to its fans, not only dramatically increases carbon content in the soil, it may also capture excess carbon, acting as a possible prescription against climate change. Michael Hayes, director of the Carbolea Research Group at the University of Limerick, says: “Garden soil that’s continually cultivated loses its organic matter as carbon dioxide. This is the reason gardeners put compost in the soil: to increase organic matter content. But of course, as every gardener knows, compost decomposes. The slow transformations in biochar mean that it retains carbon and can last in the soil for millennia.”

One of the producers of biochar-based garden products is Craig Sams. He founded the first macrobiotic restaurant in London in the 1960s and then started the first UK-based organic food exporter, Whole Earth Foods. He also co-developed the world’s first organic chocolate company, Green and Black’s. Sams, 66, believes biochar will play a role in revitalising soil without gardeners having to resort to peat, a finite resource. “Using peat releases large amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. Most gardeners don’t realise they are polluters.”

He first became aware of soil quality on his family farm in Nebraska, where the fields were once famous for their striking “black earth”. Yet over-farming took its toll, often degrading the soil: “The first settlers in the 1880s started out with rich soil that was 45 tons of carbon per hectare: now it’s five. All that carbon was ploughed out. And then driven out by chemical fertilisers.” In 1991, Sams came across peanut farmers in Togo who grew organic cocoa beans. Sams, then treasurer and later chairman of the UK Soil Association, started to pay closer attention to the make-up of compost. “We had to think not just about what went into the gut but what went into the compost; how you got the balance between fungi, bacteria, nitrogen and other nutrients.” Charles Mann’s book 1491 introduced Sams to terra preta, the Amazonian “black earth”, often 2m deep that, say researchers, turned out to be man-made, essentially biochar, produced hundreds of years earlier in an apparent systematic bid to fertilise poor soils.

Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use this link to reference the article - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1a639f7e-81ab-11e0-8a54-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1NC4JQ73E

Produced in covered pits, in the charring process called pyrolysis, biochar had another plus, says Sams: it took advantage of soils as natural carbon sinks: “Two-thirds of the carbon within the smouldered biomass stays in the biochar, feeding the soil. Biochar also provides a matrix for decomposition.” Climate change advocates have proposed wide-scale projects to turn a range of wastes into biochar and take advantage of the carbon-storing properties of soil.

As a global cure-all, however, biochar has some strong sceptics, including Daniel Schrag, director of the Harvard Centre for the Environment: “I think the jury is still out. I just did a review and while there are some provocative results, there is not yet good evidence to determine what fraction of biochar produced will stay in the soil for hundreds of years. And biochar is not one material but a range of materials depending on the temperature at which you make it and the feedstock you use: is it gardening material? Wood? Animal waste? And burning fields to increase nutrient loads of the soil: that’s a long-standing practice.”

Sams counters that unlike the traditional “slash-and-burn” methods of farmers, the ancient “slash-and-char” practice captures carbon that would be lost to the atmosphere, heating it up, and returns it to the soil, dramatically increasing plant yields. He adds that growers have already observed progress in trials in Belize and the UK. “We need more trial studies,” concedes Cecile Girardin, an Oxford-based researcher also selling biochar. “You have to do localised research.” Professor Hayes says that there are already abundant data on the benefits of biochar: for instance, it encourages the growth of good soil fungi.

Hayes calls for regulation of biochar to give consumers more information. “At the moment, there is no regulation over biochar,” says Girardin. While “biochar is a potentially great contribution in mitigating soil depletion and CO2 emissions,” says Hayes, the big challenge will be to get the biochar made right: “We have to look at composition, what it’s made from and how. We’ve found that biochar, made with some types of pig waste and animal sludge can be mutagenic, or carcinogenic and potentially harmful to human health.” However, Hayes says biochar made from non-animal sources/vegetation is safe.

Source:
he Financial Times Limited 2011
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1a639f7e-81ab-11e0-8a54-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1N0C4BZjk

Robert Gates probably knows more about American defense than anyone else. I think it is important to take what he says seriously.

Each year we spend more than twice what all the other nations of the world taken together spend. By some estimates the full defense, intelligence, homeland security budget runs to over a trillion dollars a year.
I think it is worth asking: why is the world so much scarier for Americans than everyone else, and what did we do to make it that way?

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Exit Gates With a Warning

Robert Gates begs Americans to have an honest debate about defense spending.


By Fred KaplanPosted Tuesday, May 24, 2011

As he prepares to leave the Pentagon after a four-and-a-half-year stint as defense secretary, Robert Gates has been making the rounds to his old stomping grounds, delivering farewell addresses designed to make his audiences squirm.

He did it again today, before the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank that, as he put it, has been "inextricably tied to the war in Iraq, the conflict that pulled me out of private life and back into the public arena" (a move about which Gates clearly feels both honored and ambivalent).

His message to the assembled neocons was this: Like it or not, the defense budget is going to be cut over the next 10 years; he's already weeded out the particularly wasteful or redundant weapons systems and bureaucratic structures; so we're going to have to slice into "force structure"—Army divisions, Marine expeditionary units, Air Force wings, Navy ships—the meat and muscle of U.S. fighting power.

Rather than take the easy way out and "salami slice" a certain percentage of all costs off the top, a technique sure to leave a "hollowed-out" force (plenty of troops and weapons but too little money for operations, maintenance, or training), Gates said the Congress, the president, and the American people must make conscious choices of what military missions to forgo and what level of risk to accept.

It's a good point, and I think it's also Gates' way of saying that he's relieved to be leaving this job—not just for all the reasons that he's mentioned or implied already (he's tired, he's been at this for longer than he'd intended, he hates Washington, he yearns to retire to his two nice houses in the Pacific Northwest), but also because he's reached the end of his comfort zone when it comes to slashing the defense budget.

In both halves of his tenure, the last two years of George W. Bush's presidency and the first two and a half of Barack Obama's, Gates has been a transformative defense secretary—more so than any since Robert McNamara under President John F. Kennedy. (Under Lyndon B. Johnson, he slid into tragedy.)

Gates killed or halted more than 30 weapons systems, including some of the services' most cherished chestnuts (the Air Force's F-22 fighter, the Army's Future Combat Systems vehicle, the Navy's DDG-1000 destroyer). He forced the chiefs to build or accelerate a new generation of weapons that rubbed up against their institutional interests but were vitally necessary to the wars they were fighting (the MRAP, mine-resistant ambush-protected, troop-carrier and a slew of unmanned aerial vehicles, aka "drones").

He has helped change the military culture: the way the Pentagon does business and the services fight wars. But he has no interest in challenging that culture's foundations—the global reach of U.S. military power and presence. That is to say, he's a radical, to the extent that he has forced the bureaucracy to perform its missions more effectively—but he's a conservative, in that he's dedicated above all to preserving those missions.

President Obama wants to cut defense spending by another $400 billion over the next 12 years. A coalition of liberal doves and deficit hawks may force deeper cuts still. The Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission, for instance, recommends cutting it by $1.2 trillion. Gates probably isn't the ideal man to do that; he won't be around to do it anyway; all he's saying, with one foot out the door, is that his successors should at least do it sensibly.

There was a time when the Defense Department and its overseers in the congressional armed services committees did this sort of analysis routinely. But the knack, or the demand for it, dried up during "the post-9/11 decade," when the military grew "accustomed," as Gates put it in his AEI speech, to a "no-questions-asked" attitude on funding requests for anything and everything the services wanted. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the same point in hearings this past January: "We've lost our ability to prioritize, make hard decisions, make trades."

The question is whether Congress will just slash money arbitrarily, the salami-slicing that Gates fears, or whether it—and the team that Gates' presumptive successor, Leon Panetta, puts together—will restore the art of military-budget analysis.

Gates did a fair bit of this in his time. He halted the F-22 not just because it was an expensive Cold War relic but because his analysts noticed that the Air Force's justification for continuing to build more planes was deeply flawed.

At the time, the Air Force already had 183 of these planes. Its senior officers wanted to build a total of 387. Yet their case for this expansion, laid out in internal briefing books, assumed that the United States would someday fight two wars simultaneously against two foes with just as much air power as we have. It also assumed that a large percentage of the F-22s would be in routine maintenance depots when the wars started—i.e., that the two foes would coordinate a surprise attack.

The unstated implication was that if the attacks did not come as a surprise, and if we therefore had more of the F-22s online and ready to go, we wouldn't need quite so many planes to begin with. And if we were willing to let go of the premise that two comparably powerful nations (a resurgent Russia and a much more powerful China?) would go to war against us simultaneously, the 183 F-22s that we already had—in addition to the many other planes in the arsenal—would be plenty.

And so Gates stopped the project. Obama agreed, to the point where he announced he would veto the entire defense bill if it contained money for a single additional F-22. And Congress went along (with 15 Republican senators joining in), despite the fact that the Air Force had over the years ingeniously parceled out contracts and subcontracts to corporations in 44 states.

Many other weapons systems and military missions could be subjected to the same sort of analysis. For instance, the defense budget that Obama and Gates put forth in February includes $24.6 billion for 11 new ships, $4 billion for two new Virginia-class submarines, and $1 billion for a down payment on a new nuclear aircraft carrier. Are all these things really needed? What are the assumptions and scenarios that support the case? How valid are they? Do we need to spend $9.4 billion to buy 32 F-35 stealth fighter planes, when we're also spending $2 billion to upgrade the older (but still world-class) F-15s? And what about the $1.4 billion for 24 new Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles? Is our nuclear deterrent degraded without them?

These are the questions that Gates is saying we need to ask, even if he might disagree with the answers.

Source;
http://www.slate.com/id/2294845/pagenum/all/#p2

This is one of the many reasons why the Right's attempts to retard stem cell research is proving to be such a very bad idea. In the longer term this "red" trade will disappear as growing organs becomes a realistic possibility. But in the short term this is what we will live with.

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Flesh for sale
From kidney brokers to blood farmers, a journalist exposes the "red market" in human body parts

By Laura Miller

During the mid-2000s, Scott Carney was living in southern India and teaching American anthropology students on their semester abroad when one of his charges died, apparently a suicide. For two days, he watched over her body while the provincial police investigated her death, reporters bribed their way into the morgue to photograph the newsworthy corpse, local doctors performed an autopsy, and ice had to be rounded up to retard decomposition. Finally, his boss asked Carney to take pictures of the girl's mangled remains for analysis by forensic experts back in the States.

This unsettling experience gave Carney his first inkling of how a human being becomes a thing. When he abandoned academia for investigative journalism (he writes for Wired, Mother Jones and other publications), his South Asian surroundings offered him many examples of the ways human bodies -- in part or in whole -- are transformed into commodities. He calls this the "red market," a term that encompasses the trade (legal and illegal) in human bones, blood, organs, embryos, surrogate pregnancy and living children.

"The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers" is the alarming product of Carney's research. It includes vivid, on-the-spot reports from Indian "bone farms," where remains looted from graveyards are processed into skeletons for Western anatomy students (hundreds of reeking bones left out to bleach in the sun) and tsunami refugee camps where most of the residents bear the scars of kidney "donations." Carney relays these tales with enough florid touches ("Toads the size of baseball mitts hop across the muddy track") to make them seem downright hallucinatory.


Freakish as these stories can be -- none more so than the dairy farmer who kept several men prisoner in sheds, some for more than three years, extracting their blood to sell to a nearby hospital -- they are the secret face of the age of modern medical miracles. Poor people supply human flesh in various forms for rich people, while a well-meaning ethical system of anonymity and mandated "altruism" allows middlemen to siphon off most of the profits.

When the supply isn't sufficient to the demand, some enterprising individuals take it upon themselves to even things up. One of the most heartrending stories Carney tells is of an Indian family who bankrupted themselves trying to find their son, who was kidnapped by an orphanage and essentially sold to an American adoption agency. The Midwestern couple that may have adopted the boy are resisting attempts to establish the child's identity, even though the Indian father tells Carney he understands "it's not realistic for us to ask for him back, but at least let us know him."

Denial makes such injustices possible. Carney argues that the inequities of the red market were only exacerbated by regulations like the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, which prohibited the sale of human organs and tissue and was championed by then-Sen. Al Gore as a way to make sure that the human body could not be treated as "a mere assemblage of spare parts." Although Carney is no fan of the market philosophy that would reduce our bodies to salable "widgets," he thinks we need to face up to the fact that altruistic donation will never provide as much of these precious materials as we desire. "As a society we neither want to accept open trade in human tissue, nor do we want to reduce our access to life-extending treatments. In other words, we want to have our cake and eat it, too."

He also thinks "absolute transparency of the supply chain" would go a long way toward eliminating the brokers, recruiters and suppliers who exploit those driven to trade their kidneys and blood for cash or to rent out their wombs. "Every bag of blood should include the name of the original donor, every adopted child should have full access to his personal history, and every transplant recipient should know who gave him an organ," he writes. (Contrary to what you see in the movies, much of this information is sequestered by what Carney regards as "misguided" privacy laws.) Yes, the hustlers will immediately commence forging documents, but even so, "a clear paper trail makes it easier to flag dangerous operators."

And while he doesn't come right out and say it, Carney obviously thinks the world's privileged patients ought to revise their expectations and reconcile themselves to their mortality. He more or less implies that the handful of years most kidney transplant recipients gain from the operation may not be worth the cost in exploitation. (Most Indian "donors" get as little as $800 for their organs -- though some are promised more -- not enough to make a significant difference in their circumstances or lift them out of destitution for more than a year or so. This is out of the $14,000 or so paid by the recipient for the transplant.)

No doubt Carney doesn't linger on this point because he knows it's a nonstarter. Most people would countenance a good deal of dodgy behavior if it meant a few more years of life for themselves or a loved one. Nevertheless, it makes sense that they be made aware of how much their survival may have cost others, and Carney rightly decries the "depersonalization of human tissue" that obscures that cost. This challenging and revelatory book makes it a little bit harder to overlook the human being in every human body.

Source;
http://www.salon.com/books/what_to_read/index.html?story=/books/laura_miller/2011/05/29/red_market

More on the coming food crisis. Note that once again the problem is a sequence of extreme weather events.

Thanks to Steve Hovland.

***********

Grocers warn: Yes, we'll have no bananas

May 26, 2011


Lara Moroko and her daughter Evie, 4, weigh up buying some bananas at Harris Farm Markets in Sydney's Broadway yesterday.

SKY-HIGH banana prices are set to surge again as the shortage of the fruit reaches extreme levels.

Australian Banana Growers Council chief executive Jonathan Eccles said yesterday heavy rain and a cold snap since Cyclone Yasi wiped out 75 per cent of the crop in February had slowed banana growth and cut production.

"We'll certainly see wholesale prices increase because of the supply and demand market," Mr Eccles said. "What happens at a retail level will depend on the individual retailer."

Industry experts predict the high prices will not start to ease until August, when cyclone-affected plantations in north Queensland begin to harvest again.

The major supermarket chains have already raised their prices to $12.98 a kilogram for Cavendish bananas and some independent fruit shops are selling the fruit for nearly $17/kg.

Mr Eccles said bananas were selling at wholesale for $10/kg but would probably rise to $12/kg at the height of the shortage.

Sydney Market Reporting Service fruit surveyor Chris Cope said the markets usually received up to 160,000 cartons of bananas weekly at this time of year.

He said currently it was fewer than 20,000 cartons. "In the next couple of weeks, we'll see an extreme shortage," Mr Cope said.

Tristan Harris, director of buying and marketing at Harris Farm Markets, said the company's 22 stores across NSW were selling loose bananas for $9.99/kg and bunches of Cavendish bananas for $14.99/kg.

Mr Harris predicted that even though wholesale prices would rise further, retailers would not increase their prices because consumers would not buy the more expensive fruit. "All retailers are going down to cost price to sell them."

He said the idea that fruit and vegetable retailers were price gouging was laughable. "The banana market is very efficient and there are lots of players. (When prices rise), it's not a company gouging, it's the market correcting for supply and demand."

Mother of three Lara Moroko, 39, was grocery shopping in Sydney yesterday but did not buy any bananas.

"My reference price for bananas is an upper end of about $8/kg," said Ms Moroko, who teaches strategy at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management. "My kids aren't addicted to bananas and eat a lot of different fruit, but if it was the only fruit they ate, I'd pay $15/kg."

She said consumers were adjusting their spending habits to cope with increasing cost-of-living pressures: "We are buying all our fruit and vegetables seasonally to get the better price. It's the only way you can stay within your budget."

Source;
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/executive-lifestyle/grocers-warn-yes-well-have-no-bananas/story-e6frg8jo-1226062993305

This is so sad. These past few years we've been planting a variety of banana trees and 3 of them have finally produced.

Carol wrote:This is so sad. These past few years we've been planting a variety of banana trees and 3 of them have finally produced.

Thanks Carol

Hear that Australia !

Carol has all the Bananas




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrmBWtOWYsA

Five major extreme weather events have left the world food system in massive disarray. The development of Virtual Agri-States is leaving a growing number of people starving.
Yet, almost no one in the U.S. knows this. Instead, tonight, I listened to Anderson Cooper spend 30 minutes talking about the Anthony Weiner story, an ephemera.
reference: http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/01/beat-360%C2%B0-6111/

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World's food system broken, Oxfam warns


Millions in poor nations must queue for rations

Doubling of prices and 70 per cent rise in demand means millions more will go hungry

By Cahal Milmo, Chief Reporter

Wednesday, 1 June 2011

Millions more people across the world will be locked into a cycle of hunger and food crisis unless governments tackle a "broken" production system which is being exploited by speculators and will cause a doubling in basic foodstuff prices in the next 20 years, a leading aid agency has warned.

Research by Oxfam has highlighted a combination of factors, ranging from climate change and population growth to subsidies for biofuels and the actions of commodities traders, which will throw development in poor countries into reverse unless radical reform of the global food system is undertaken.

The charity found that the world currently produces enough food to sustain the population, but still 925 million people go hungry every year. This situation will dramatically worsen as the population reaches 9 billion by 2050, meaning demand for food will increase by 70 per cent at a time when capacity to increase yields is running at less than 1 per cent a year.

Source;
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/worlds-food-system-broken-oxfam-warns-2291469.html

When government (entities) keep redeploying soldiers into this quite unnatural (an inhuman) environment...Then feed these (very unnatural) antidepressant of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) class - into the mix - there should be no wonder nor doubt as to the real culprit cause and effects upon the conscious minds of these individual human beings.
giovonni
______________________________

"It must require a massive amount of denial, and disassociation to live with yourself having caused the death, agony, and crippling mental effects that have arisen from the wars you have created."
S. A. Schwartz

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Bomb Blast Damage Found in Brain Scans of GIs

By John Gever, Senior Editor, MedPage Today
Published: June 02, 2011

Neuron damage in explosion-related "mild" traumatic brain injuries can be more extensive than previously thought and is not necessarily related to the severity of clinical symptoms, researchers said.

Among 63 U.S. soldiers evacuated from Iraq or Afghanistan and diagnosed clinically with blast-related mild traumatic brain injury, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) revealed significant damage to neuronal axons that was not evident on CT or conventional MRI scans, according to David L. Brody, MD, PhD, of Washington University in St. Louis, and colleagues.

Statistical analysis of the DTI scans showed that abnormalities were significantly more common in the middle cerebellar peduncles, cingulum bundles, and right orbitofrontal white matter in these soldiers than in 21 others with blast exposure but no diagnosis of brain injury.

Yet only 18 of the 63 brain-injured soldiers had definitively abnormal findings from the DTI scans when analyzed individually, suggesting that the extent of axonal damage did not correlate strongly with clinical symptoms.

"Traumatic brain injury remains a clinical diagnosis," Brody and colleagues wrote in the June 2 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

However, they also argued that DTI could be included in triage and treatment planning if clinical utility is eventually established, because it is easy to perform with ordinary MRI machines.

Previous imaging studies that used CT or conventional MRI scans had largely failed to find axonal damage in individuals with clinical brain injuries related to blasts.

On the other hand, Brody and colleagues noted, computer models have predicted mechanical stresses within the brain strong enough to tear axons.

To resolve this seeming paradox, they enrolled soldiers who had suffered mild brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan from roadside bombs and other explosions. All participants not only were exposed to these primary blasts but also had related mechanical blows to the head, such as from vehicular crashes or from hitting their heads on the ground.

None of the participants showed any intracranial abnormalities with CT scans performed without contrast agents or with conventional MRI.

With DTI, however, reductions in anisotropy were noted in several brain regions relative to the 21 controls. Those regions included the cingulum bundle, uncinate fasciculus, and anterior limb of the internal capsule, which have also been implicated in civilian cases of mild traumatic brain injury, the researchers indicated.

But other loci of abnormalities were distinct from those found in civilian studies, largely of car accident cases.

In general, the abnormalities were most frequent in brain regions predicted in computer modelling to sustain the most severe mechanical stresses from blasts.

When reduction in anisotropy in at least two brain regions was set as the definition of clear axonal injury -- a level that could be met by chance in two of 63 healthy individuals -- 18 of the 63 study participants with clinical brain injury qualified.

On one hand, this finding confirmed that axonal injury can occur in conjunction with mild traumatic brain injury -- but on the other, it evidently isn't a sufficient condition for clinical symptoms, Brody and colleagues concluded.

"Normal findings on a DTI scan do not rule out traumatic brain injury, nor are DTI findings in isolation sufficient to make this diagnosis with certainty," they wrote.

The study also included additional scans six to 12 months later in 47 of the clinically brain-injured soldiers and 18 of the controls. The abnormalities tended to change over time, but in a manner seen in previous studies of acute injuries.

Whereas the initial scans pointed to axonal injury plus cellular inflammation and edema, Brody and colleagues wrote, the follow-up scans were "most consistent with persistent axonal injury plus resolution of the edema and cellular inflammation."

These changes suggest that the abnormalities resulted from the blast event and not some unreported previous head injury, they added.

A major limitation of the study was the inclusion criterion that required a mechanical head injury in addition to the blast itself. As a result, Brody and colleagues indicated, it was impossible to attribute the axonal injuries to the blast versus the mechanical blow.

Another caveat was the study's restriction to personnel evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan, as opposed to those treated there and returned to duty. Brody and colleagues noted that the study sample may therefore represent more seriously injured troops.

In an accompanying editorial, Allan Ropper, MD, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said the study provided "tentative validation" of the hypothesis that axonal damage can accompany milder forms of traumatic brain injury.

"Even if this information is exploratory, with further information on the relationship among blasts, axonal damage, and PTSD anticipated in the future, soldiers injured in this way and their resultant disability deserve the utmost attention," Ropper wrote.

Source;
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/HeadTrauma/26809

This is how truly insane American policies have become. We cannot feed our children, their schools are failing, one out of six Americans has no health insurance, but the money for war and this sort of madness is always available. When you hear a politician tell you that there isn't enough money to do something, you know you are listening to either a dolt or a liar.

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Report: Countries holding U.S. debt also get foreign aid
By Bernie Becker - 06/03/11

Foreign governments that hold billions of dollars in American debt also get substantial amounts of aid from the U.S., according to a recently released report.

The Congressional Research Service found that more than a dozen countries – including China, Brazil, Russia, Mexico and India – that hold at least $10 billion in Treasury securities also get U.S. assistance in a variety of areas, from fighting HIV or the illegal drug trade to help with the environment or general governance.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who requested the CRS examination, said the U.S. giving aid to countries it borrows from was a dangerous mix for both sides.

“If countries can afford to buy our debt perhaps they can afford to fund assistance programs on their own,” Coburn said in a statement. “At the same time, when we borrow from countries we are supposedly helping to develop we put off hard budget choices here at home. The status quo creates co-dependency and financial risk at home and abroad.”

The CRS report comes as Vice President Joe Biden and top lawmakers are trying to reach a deal to rein in deficits that would allow the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling to be raised.

Moody’s sounded an alarm on the progress of debt ceiling talks on Thursday, but a meeting between Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and House freshman on the issue had little to no progress.

In all, the foreign governments holding U.S. debt also got well over $1 billion in aid in the 2010 fiscal year.

China, the top keeper of U.S. debt ($1.1 trillion), also received more than $27 million in U.S. aid in the 2010 fiscal year, CRS reported.

Colombia, Mexico and Egypt all received at least $250 million of aid in 2010, and the Treasury Department says all three have at least $15 billion in American debt.

Source;
http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/164659-report-countries-holding-us-debt-also-get-foreign-aid

For those interested here is the report;
http://coburn.senate.gov/public//index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=8afef35c-cdd1-487c-

Here is some good news on the solar front. The major drawback of solar has been its inability to produce at night.
This new installation seems to have overcome that limitation.

Thanks to Judy Tart.

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Making light work of it:
The world's first solar power station that generates electricity at NIGHT

By Daily Mail Reporter

3rd June 2011

Article & Video
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1393879/Gemasolar-Power-Plant-The-worlds-solar-power-station-generates-electricity-NIGHT.html

Our problem in America is willful ignorance, and a commitment, by a significant percentage of our population, to fact-free ideologies. The solution to our problems is not rocket science, but it does require honesty, life-affirming compassion, and an allegiance to facts.

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What Germany's Economy Can Teach Obama

by Leslie H. Gelb

When Germany’s Angela Merkel is in Washington on Tuesday, President Obama should ask her to explain how her country manages to succeed with jobs and exports despite high taxes and welfare, says Leslie H. Gelb.

As President Obama decorates German Chancellor Angela Merkel with the Medal of Freedom on Tuesday, he might reflect on her economy, rolling along in ways that shame America’s foundering recovery. Obama and non-hallucinatory Republicans might ask her about the solidity of German growth and jobs, despite high taxes, high social-welfare benefits, and high wages, all the things many Americans scorn as business killers. If the scorners would listen for a change, here’s what they would hear from Merkel about a successful German economy:

• Exports, especially high-quality manufactured goods, are the driving force of Germany’s gains in a global economy. German sales abroad rank second in the world, just behind China, which has 16 times its population, and ahead of the U.S., which has four times its population.

• German business and labor leaders set aside differences to pursue common interests in jobs and profits in the national economic interest.

• German economic policymaking is more pragmatic than partisan. German leaders do not say that the answer can only be this or only be that; they accept the common-sense conclusion that it has to be this and that. Thus they pursue a combination of budget stimulus and austerity, higher taxes to reduce their deficits and maintain welfare benefits, and governmental investments for jobs and future competitiveness.

In other words, U.S. leaders just might learn something from Merkel about how to run a 21st-century industrial economy in a democracy. (If readers aren’t interested in how and why this is so, or if they can’t count, or just like pontificating without facts, they can skip to the last paragraph.)

Here’s what the German economy looks like:

The German growth rate is good, not great, about on par with the U.S. (Germany’s projected growth for 2011 is 2.5 percent, while the United States’ is 2.8 percent.) After the recent global recession, Germany fell further and faster than most others because global demand decreased and the German economy relies so heavily on exports. But it also recovered more quickly. It did all this while heavily subsidizing its Eastern half, which still lags economically after decades of Communist rule.

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The German economy is performing in a very solid fashion, even as it is collecting the highest taxes in the Western world.


President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel attend a news conference on April 3, 2009 in Baden Baden, Germany.

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Strikingly, the growth rate stayed at positive levels despite Germany’s high tax burden, nearly the highest in the world. Its average tax rate, including social security contributions, is 50.9 percent, as compared to 29.4 percent for America, which has one of the lowest rates in the world. Most impressively, Germany’s unemployment rate stands at 7 percent against 9.1 percent for the United States.

More surprising still is how much Germany spends to take care of its people in need, or aging, or sick, or out of work. According to the OECD fact-keeping organization, German social spending in 2009 was 31.1 percent of net national income, while Americans spent only 18.1 percent, and OECD industrialized countries averaged 24.4 percent.

How does Germany manage to grow despite this tax burden?

Exports and manufactured goods lead the way. Germany was a close second to China in 2010, exporting $1.34 trillion as compared to China’s $1.51 trillion. Even more telling is that while Germany ran a trade surplus of $218 billion in 2010, the United States had a trade deficit of $497.8 billion.

Exports are historically a German strong point. Germany takes great pains to train and retrain workers. German workers also take their jobs seriously and turn out highly competitive products. And worker representatives sit on their companies' boards. German business leaders are marvelous at finding sales opportunities abroad and looking for even small manufacturing niches to fill for widgets and gadgets, and then responding rapidly with the product. They also have the highest reputation for servicing their goods. The result is that Germany, on a population basis, punches well above its weight.

Germans also observe a kind of social contract. Klaus Kleinfeld ought to know about this and the American economy as well. He now serves as chairman and CEO of Alcoa Inc. and once headed the giant German firm Siemens. Kleinfeld, who’s admiring of many things about the American economy, stresses one particular reason for German success: “the social contract, the willingness of business, labor, and political leaders to put aside some of their differences and make agreements in the national interest. This approach finds its roots in the rebuilding of the nation after the Second World War and more recently in the reunification of East and West Germany.”

Kleinfeld and others saw this tradition of compromise coming together in a series of agreed-upon reforms initiated several years ago. The reforms were intended to loosen labor-market rules, reduce unemployment, and lift Germany’s economy after three years of stagnation. In sum, labor unions gave up benefits and some power, while business committed to continue investing and keeping jobs in Germany rather than exporting jobs. For its part, government spearheaded creative labor initiatives, such as work-time accounts, which allow firms to reduce the hours worked by employees during downturns and save them in an “account” for growth years.

Finally, and despite fierce political fights, political parties agreed on a pragmatic economic policy, including both stimulus and deficit reduction. In 2009, Merkel presided over a $72.4 billion stimulus package, the biggest stimulus plan since World War II. Last year, Merkel oversaw budget cuts to save nearly $123 billion by 2014, the biggest austerity plan since World War II. The package cuts federal jobs and reduces military personnel, but also removes some energy subsidies and institutes several new taxes. As part of this deal, Merkel agrees to maintain spending on education and research without raising income and value-added taxes.

Obviously, modern Germans do not march in lock-step like their ancestors. Like Westerners generally, they’re now independent and assertive. Equally obviously, no one has been more productive than the American worker, and American manufacturing is rebounding. But there is one point that cannot be denied: The German economy is performing in a very solid fashion, even as it is collecting the highest taxes in the Western world, taxes to provide a sense of collective equity and allow for pragmatic economic problem solving. For the most part, Americans don’t think they have anything to learn from anybody—but they do, especially from Germany.

Source;
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-06-05/obama-can-learn-from-germanys-economy-high-taxes-exports-welfare-jobs/?cid=hp:beastoriginalsL2

Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior government official, is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins 2009), a book that shows how to think about and use power in the 21st century. He is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

cold this be...?

An aspect of nuclear radiation i never thought about. There are so many things warping our lives and our world,
influences all created by our lack of vision and our psychosis that profit is the only priority that matters.

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from Jenn Savedge

Nuclear radiation influences boy-to-girl ratio
New study finds that nuclear radiation from bomb tests and power plant accidents leads to the birth of more boys than girls.



Does nuclear radiation cause more boys to be born than girls? According to a new study, it certainly looks that way.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research, looked at the global dispersal of nuclear radiation in relation to the gender of babies born in certain locations throughout the world. Scientists analyzed population data for several decades for 39 European countries and the United States.

Under normal circumstances, male births outnumber female births by a ratio of 105 to 100. Nobody knows why, but that just seems to be the case. However, when researchers looked closely, they found an increase in the number of male births relative to female births in all of the countries from the period of 1964 to 1975 — and in many eastern European countries for several years after 1986. This increase was noted in all countries investigated and can be linked to the global dispersal of radioactive atoms from open-air atmospheric atomic bomb tests that were conducted until the early '60s.

Another spike in male births was noted in relation to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, but in this case, the effect was more localized. The closer the country was to Chernobyl, the stronger the effect. According to the study, more males were born relative to females in Belarus (near Chernobyl) than in France, and the effect was not noted at all in the United States.

So why would nuclear radiation cause more males to be born than females? Nobody really knows, but according to the study's authors, previous radiation experiments on animals suggest the boost in males may be due to damage to X chromosomes in sperm.

Now all eyes are focused on Japan to determine whether or not the Fukushima Daiichi disaster will cause a similar effect in Japan or possibly even on the West Coast of the United States.


Source;
http://www.mnn.com/family/babies-pregnancy/blogs/nuclear-radiation-influences-boy-to-girl-ratio