An excellent idea

In a bit of promising news, we now have packing material that grows itself!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100727121933.htm

Named 'Mycobond', this new invention allows mushrooms to grow upon sterilized cotton dregs or wood pulp. This growth occurs within plastic molds of customizable shapes, and is stopped via heat treatment once the mold (pun intended!) has been filled. The final product looks and acts quite like synthetic packing foam, but takes only about 1/8 of the energy to create.

Upcoming changes in the sterilization process, from steam heat to essential oil application, are expected to lower that fraction to only 1/40 of the energy needed to make a comparable amount of petro-based plastic packaging. Quite the astronomical savings...plus the essential oil treatment will allow companies to grow their own packaging via a kit supplied by the company, Ecovative, that is responsible for all of these impressive improvements in the way we protect what we ship.

When the packaging is no longer needed for protecting shipments, it is best thrown into the compost. There it returns to nourish the soil, and perhaps to grow more mushrooms or cotton in a near perfect cycle. Hail human ingenuity; now to spread it from here to China.

Gluten News

Today researchers from announced that the trio of protein fragments partially composing the protein called gluten had finally been determined. As this article states:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100721141840.htm

gluten can cause coeliac disease and the skin ailment, dermititis herpetiformis, in those whose immune system reacts excessively to especially the three specific protein fragments discovered by the team of Dr Bob Anderson, head of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute's (Australia) coeliac research laboratory. Coeliac disease impacts an estimated 0.25% of the US population, and it's digestive impact is severe due to inflammation of the small intestine due to the excessive immune response to gluten's "toxic trio."

However, a much higher percentage of individuals are allergic or sensitive to gluten in a manner that does not produce the severe diarrhea of coeliac sprue or the specific skin rash of dermatitis herpetiformis. For these individuals, who make up approximately 5% of Americans (about 15% purportedly have an immune reaction to at least one food), nausea, hives, eczema, mental sluggishness, autoimmunune rheumatoid arthritis, migraines, and respiratory difficulties (anaphyaxis is rare) are the common symptoms.

The proclivity toward gluten sensitivity is genetically linked, and it can be lessened by waiting a full year before feeding a newborn infant any gluten products. Waiting in this way apparently gives the newborn digestive tract a chance to fully develop, and to not allow as many undigested (and therefore perceived by the immune system as foreign) gluten particles to attract babies' antibodies.

Currently little can be done for all of these gluten-related patients unless gluten from wheat, rye, barley, and maybe oats (with oats' avedin being similar to gluten) is avoided. Anti-inflammatories, naturopathic and allopathic, are the most common attempts to control symptoms. In my own case I can eat gluten without getting eczema if I am relaxed and getting plenty of sun. The more stressed I feel, and the less sun I get, the more eczema appears. Before I found out I was gluten sensitive, ten large eczema rings wept down my left chest and left arm and mental sluggishness soon after eating could be extreme -- especially if the gluten came along with sugar in a dessert.

This symptomatic experience of mine is quite common, and if gluten sensitive folks refrain from gluten assiduously for a year or more it is often possible to continue eating moderate amounts of gluten throughout life with minimal reaction. But some, such as my mother and sister, can simply never eat gluten without experiencing some dreaded symptom. Desensitization, using the toxic trio, may be a godsend for them and others who want to relax more around food choices -- often filled with gluten in our grain loving culture.

So this is how it works

We current humans consume and pollute (soon we'll be like the fremen in 'dune' who live in perfect ecological harmony with their environs) and think that eco-disaster is just over the horizon. Then Gaia reveals yet another buffering system that keeps things together just enough that sheer apocalyptic horror never materializes. Gradually we as a species wisen up and become more fremen-like; and Gaia continues relatively unimpeded.

The latest evidence for this encouraging (though I wont get carried away) phenomenon is the bearded goby fish of Namibia. Who would have guessed that such an unprepossessing character could save an entire ecosystem almost singlehandedly? Yet just look what this fish can do, and does: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/bearded-goby/

The goby ignores toxic mud and a low-oxygen environment, feeds on overwhelmingly excessive jellyfish populations, and act as necessary food for other species that would die without them. Their presence is called "lucky" by one of the biologists quoted in the article above. Gaia may beg to differ; and perhaps humanity can assist the cause by breeding goby or similar creatures for other toxic sea areas around the world.

There's a lot of big bad news out there right now. Let's celebrate the little, lovable, lucky(?) goby.

Fat seems to mean lazy...sorry

In a helpful 'chicken or egg' research article regarding childhood obesity, it has been found that

treating obesity with physical activity doesnt work well since obese kids dont like physical activity. Nor does physical activity predict future childhood (and hence adult) obesity.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100707212127.htm

http://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2010/06/23/adc.2009.17592

So we now know to a greater extent that fatness produces physical inactivity, not the other way around. "EarlyBird [Diabetes Study] has already shown how the trajectory leading to obesity is established very early in life, long before children go to school, and how most childhood obesity is associated with obesity in the same-sex parent."

This trajectory seems to be caused by early feeding habits, especially excessively large portions in general and excess dietary fat and sugar in specific. As usual, eating a vegetable, fruit, and grain-based whole foods diet will solve much of this obesity issue in one fell swoop. But the childish ongoing food desires of adult humanity continue to worsen the obesity epidemic.

Recently it was reported http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html that in the US in 1991 the fattest state on average was Mississippi, with an obesity rate of ~16%. In 2008 the THINNEST state was Colorado, with a ~19% obesity rate. Such are the stats that nightmares are made of; and, yes, a lot of these same nightmares are caused by eating a mound of ice cream (with or without pickles) before bed!

So eat plants; and feed your kids plants. Our human suffering will decrease by a bit. Simple.

7

Expressing emotions with wisdom

Some say emotions are best unexpressed, since vented anger has been shown to increase blood pressure, heart rate, and the general length of time that a 'fight or flight' sympathetic nervous system response endures. Yet even stoic Gandhi said that one should express anger if one is angry...with the caveat that one should mature to the point that no anger is produced no matter what the provocation!

New research shows that overall emotional suppression is socially foolish, for it partitions us off as alien to the rest of our predictably emotive human species, and thus makes it more difficult for us to create and maintain friendships and friendly work relations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/health/06mind.html?src=me&ref=general

Ideally we keep emotions in our back pocket, to use when helpful (to paraphrase Swami Satchitananda). This does not mean we pretend to be emotional in order to manipulate others. Rather, it means that we are masters of these three emotional techniques -- as illustrated in the linked article above:

"Three components of regulation: concealing (i.e., suppression), adjusting (quickly calming anger, for instance) and tolerating (openly expressing emotion)."

Sometimes we will choose to suppress an emotion, so that we are not laughing at funerals, for example. At other times we will 'hiss' at an annoying one, for example, perhaps to keep a predator at bay. Then we will quickly calm ourselves when full safety has returned. And at still different times we may express our emotions fully, perhaps as at an aforementioned funeral; or raucous festive occasion; or loving relationship...

Like a dancer or musician or artist with a trillion potential creative actions at our beck and call, let us be expert emotional expressors creating a trillion variations from our emotional palette. Remember that emotional intelligence does not equal single-noted emotional rigidity. It equals trillion-noted emotional fluidity.

All this, in not quite 150 years

"On July 3, 1863, the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania ended after three days in a major victory for the North as Confederate troops retreated."

It is easy to complain about present day circumstances, especially since we don't yet have the virtual reality opportunity to experience the trevails of yesteryear. Let the following list of medical progress since the Civil War allow you some vicarious experience however. Celebrate this fourth of July by rejoicing in our recent independence from a host of perennial, disease aiding enemies. One hundred fifty years is an eyeblink compared to the 100,000 to 1,000,000+ years that humans in different versions have walked the Earth. We have made great progress, in a multitude of ways, within the last tenth to hundredth of a percent of our shared existence. Now it is our shared duty to keep up even better, wiser work, since our global biosphere is in real trouble. For now, however, the celebratory list:

Some Medical Progress since 1863, with this being a heavily allopathic list. Still, it seems to me we're way better off than if these advances had never occured:

• 1867 - Lister publishes Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery, based partly on Pasteur's work.
• 1870 - Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch establish the germ theory of disease
• 1879 - first vaccine for cholera
• 1881 - Louis Pasteur develops an anthrax vaccine
• 1882 - Louis Pasteur develops a rabies vaccine
• 1890 - Emil von Behring discovers antitoxins and uses them to develop tetanus and diphtheria vaccines
• 1895 - Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovers medical use of X-rays in medical imaging
• 1901 - Karl Landsteiner discovers the existence of different human blood types
• 1901 - Alois Alzheimer identifies the first case of what becomes known as Alzheimer's disease
• 1906 - Frederick Hopkins suggests the existence of vitamins and suggests that a lack of vitamins causes scurvy and rickets
• 1907 - Paul Ehrlich develops a chemotherapeutic cure for sleeping sickness
• 1908 - Victor Horsley and R. Clarke invents the stereotactic method
• 1909 - First Intrauterine device described by Richard Richter.^[17]
• 1917 - Julius Wagner-Jauregg discovers the malarial fever shock therapy for general paresis of the insane
• 1921 - Edward Mellanby discovers vitamin D and shows that its absence causes rickets
• 1921 - Frederick Banting and Charles Best discover insulin - important for the treatment of diabetes
• 1921 - Fidel Pagés pioneers epidural anesthesia
• 1923 - First vaccine for Diphtheria
• 1926 - First vaccine for Pertussis
• 1927 - First vaccine for Tuberculosis
• 1927 - First vaccine for Tetanus
• 1928 - Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin
• 1929 - Hans Berger discovers human electroencephalography
• 1932 - Gerhard Domagk develops a chemotherapeutic cure for streptococcus
• 1933 - Manfred Sakel discovers insulin shock therapy
• 1935 - Ladislas J. Meduna discovers metrazol shock therapy
• 1935 - First vaccine for Yellow Fever
• 1936 - Egas Moniz discovers prefrontal lobotomy for treating mental diseases
• 1938 - Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini discover electroconvulsive therapy
• 1943 - Willem Kolff build the first dialysis machine
• 1949 - First implant of intraocular lens, by Sir Harold Ridley
• 1952 - Jonas Salk develops the first polio vaccine
• 1957 - William Grey Walter invents the brain EEG topography (toposcope)
• 1960 - Invention of Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR)
• 1960 - First combined oral contraceptive approved by the FDA^[17]
• 1962 - First Oral Polio Vaccine
• 1964 - First vaccine for Measles
• 1965 - Frank Pantridge installs the first portable defibrillator
• 1965 - First commercial ultrasound
• 1967 - First vaccine for Mumps
• 1967 - Christiaan Barnard performs first human heart transplant
• 1970 - First vaccine for Rubella
• 1971 - Sir Godfrey Hounsfield invents the first commercial CT scanner
• 1976 - First commercial PET scanner
• 1978 - Last fatal case of smallpox^[18]
• 1980 - Raymond Damadian builds first commercial MRI scanner
• 1981 - First vaccine for Hepatitis B
• 1987 - Ben Carson, leading a 70-member medical team in Germany, was the first to separate occipital craniopagus twins.
• 1992 - First vaccine for Hepatitis A available^[19]
• 2003 - Carlo Urbani, of Doctors without Borders alerted the World Health Organization to the threat of the SARS virus, triggering the most effective response to an epidemic in history. Urbani succumbs to the disease himself in less than a month.
• 2005 - Jean-Michel Dubernard performs the first partial face transplant
• 2006 - First HPV vaccine approved
• 2006 - Second rotavirus vaccine approved (first was withdrawn)
• 2008 - Laurent Lantieri performs the first full face transplant