Why we should break up sitting times

BAKER IDI HEART & DIABETES INSTITUTE

Overweight office workers, drivers and call centre staff who sit for long periods could improve their health by simply breaking up their sitting time with frequent activity breaks according to new research by Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, published online today in Diabetes Care – a publication of the American Diabetes Association. Baker IDI researchers examined spikes in participants’ blood glucose levels after consuming a high-calorie meal and found that their bodies were much more effective in controlling glucose and insulin levels when they performed regular two minute bouts of either light or moderate-intensity activity. Repeated spikes in glucose, or blood sugar, are known to contribute to a number of negative health outcomes, including hardening of the arteries and cardiovascular disease. Insulin is important, because it plays a key role in controlling blood sugar levels. Lead researcher, Associate Professor David Dunstan explained; “When we eat, we get rises in blood glucose. With larger and more frequent rises in blood glucose, we gradually accumulate damage to the walls of our veins and arteries. This increases our susceptibility to heart disease. So, we want to minimise these rises in order to improve our health outcomes.” “In a controlled laboratory environment that mimicked the typical patterns of desk-bound office workers, participants who interrupted their sitting time with regular activity breaks, showed up to 30 per cent improvement in the body’s response to a meal containing glucose. The good news is that the improvements were seen even with light-intensity activity, which is the equivalent of strolling.” “Our research has already shown that sitting for long periods can be hazardous to health. Sedentary behaviour is also a risk factor for chronic diseases, including some cancers. The results of this study now provide some direction about what activity can be undertaken to break up sitting time and counteract the negative effects of sitting for long periods, including the frequency of breaks required to improve health outcomes. “Being overweight has been shown to be associated with an increased susceptibility to impaired glucose metabolism.  So the findings are likely to have important implications for people who already have difficulty processing blood sugars.” Dunstan said; “When we sit, we have muscle ‘dis-use’ – our muscles are essentially ‘sleeping’. When we’re up and moving, we’re contracting muscles and it appears that these frequent contractions throughout the day are beneficial for helping to regulate the body’s metabolic processes.” The findings may also provide added support to the current Australian OHS recommendations that desk bound employees take a break from their computer screen approximately every 30 minutes to reduce eye strain. While the majority of people in a modern office based environment are required by their jobs to sit for long periods, the researchers warned that there are other settings in which people need to be mindful of breaking up long sitting periods. These include the home environment where long periods of TV or video viewing and computer use is increasingly frequent or long car commutes that many people find difficult to avoid. “The findings are not confined to people who are overweight and suggest that even people who are not overweight could benefit from breaking up their sitting time, commented Dunstan.” Study Methodology Participants were aged 45-65 and were either overweight or obese with a body mass index of 31.2 kg/m2 (overweight or obese). Each participant was required to participate in three separate daily sitting schedules with a break of six days between each of the days. In the first trial condition, each participant sat for 5 hours with no break. In the second experiment, they walked on a treadmill at a light-intensity pace for 2 minutes every 20 minutes. And in the third trial condition, they walked on a treadmill at moderate-intensity pace for 2 minutes every 20 minutes. Key Finding Importantly, the researchers found that the benefit of walking at a light intensity pace was almost identical to walking at a moderate intensity pace , suggesting that it was not so much the amount of effort put into the break that was critical but the act of standing up and moving and thereby reducing sitting time was intrinsically beneficial.  Dunstan said; “We were encouraged to see people getting a tangible benefit from breaking up their sitting time with light-intensity activity. We appreciate that it’s not very common to find a treadmill in the workplace and how difficult it would be for people to engage in reasonably vigorous movement in the office. Just standing up regularly, walking to the printer, using the stairs instead of an elevator and standing while on the phone are all likely to deliver a benefit.” “As recently as two decades ago, people were moving more frequently throughout the day in the workplace. Prior to email, people had to collect mail from a pigeon hole, or walk over to people’s desks for a chat. I think we’ve reached a crisis point where we need to step back and acknowledge that sitting for long periods is not what our bodies were designed for.” The researchers concluded that regularly breaking up sitting time by standing up more, finding ways to move about and generally being more active instead of sitting could prove to be an important public health and clinical intervention strategy for reducing cardiovascular risk. Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.

Melioidosis found in stormwater

JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY

The study shows that people should avoid driving or walking through floodwater to protect their health. Image: BeyondImages/iStockphoto During Northern Queensland’s wet season, many people know to avoid driving or walking through floodwater for safety reasons, but researchers have found they should also avoid it to protect their health. Research conducted by James Cook University’s Environmental and Public Microbiology Health Research group, within JCU’s School of Veterinary and Biomedical Science in Townsville have found the infectious disease melioidosis linked to run-off and stormwater. Melioidosis is an environmental-based tropical disease caused by the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei. It is a disease that lives naturally in soil around Northern Queensland, with most cases occurring in the Torres Strait, Mornington Island and Townsville, but it has not been reported from groundwater before. Symptoms include high fevers, pneumonia and sepsis, which cannot be transmitted through human contact. According to JCU Associate Professor in microbiology, Dr Jeff Warner, the discovery has linked groundwater to transmission of disease in Townsville for the first time. “This finding may help explain the reported infection peak during the wet season and after periods of extreme weather,” he said. Associate Professor Warner said globally, the mortality rate (those that die after they contract the illness) was between 11 – 40 percent, and in Townsville it is reported to be about 20 percent, or 1 in 5. “We are fortunate we have doctors that can recognise and treat the disease here, but prevention is always better than cure.” Anthony Baker is the lead author and PhD student within the group who has published results that for the first time implicated groundwater in the potential transmission of the disease in Townsville. Mr Baker’s paper, Groundwater Seeps Facilitate Exposure to Burkholderia pseudomallei, was published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology late last year. “We have found the organism, linked to clinical disease in ground water, not just soil. “Whether inhaling the organism through aerosols or contracting it through cuts and abrasions, water is now implicated in disease transmission in Townsville,” he said. “With collaborators at the CSIRO and Jessica Ezzahir, a JCU honours student, we are going to be looking at different aspects of the water and the environment to see what influences survival or persistence of the organism. This may help us understand the ecology of the disease a bit better,” he said. Associate Professor Warner said he believed that thanks to Anthony’s research findings, they may be able to help a public health campaign to ‘avoiding soil in the wet season is good, but avoiding runoff or storm water, perhaps even better’. Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.

Leap years keep calendars in sync

QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

"If there were no leap years, the seasons would completely swap every 750 years - i.e. the middle of summer would become the middle of winter..." Image: BrianAJackson/iStockphoto Without leap years, Earth would experience "calendar climate change" and the seasons would completely swap every 750 years, a QUT scientist says. Astronomy expert Dr Stephen Hughes said leap years kept the calendar in sync, otherwise the middle of summer would become the middle of winter - as once happened in ancient Egypt. "The year, defined as when the sun arrives back at the same place in the sky on its apparent circuit around the Earth, is not exactly 365 days long," Dr Hughes said. "Rather, it's 365 days, 5 hours and 48 minutes. In other words, the calendar is out of sync by about one day out every four years. "So, every four years an extra day puts the Earth calendar in sync." Dr Hughes, from QUT's Science and Engineering Faculty, said the additional day in February still did not perfectly compensate for extra time. "Because the extra time required for the sun to get back to the same position is just short of one quarter of a day, three leap days are missed out every 400 years," he said. "Years divisible by 100, such as 1900 or 2100, are not leap years. Years divisible by 400, for example, 2000, are leap years. "If there were no leap years, the seasons would completely swap every 750 years - i.e. the middle of summer would become the middle of winter - calendar climate change. "This actually happened in ancient Egypt. "The Egyptian calendar year was exactly 365 days in length. In the Sinai Peninsula there is a carving by an Egyptian worker complaining that it has become summer in winter." Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.

Bhajan by Shraddhaji

The emotional historian?

Danelle van Zyl-Hermann. Credit: Antonio Schmandke.
Danelle van Zyl-Hermann, a Gates scholar with an interest in the emotional history of South Africa, explains why the study of society's sentiments can unlock a better understanding of the past.
Reflecting back on the past month and its association with St. Valentine’s Day, it seems February often confronts us with emotion a bit more overtly – even if it is only the retail version of romantic love. It has been hard to miss the flowers, the chocolates and the cards, the pink and red and sparkly silver which seems to appear every year for the convenience and consumption of those lucky in love – only to have vanished forebodingly on the morning of the fifteenth. But when did all this happen? I don’t mean, when is the date when store managers give the okay to their assistants to switch the Christmas tinsel and reindeer for dangling cupids against a backdrop of hearts, and then to replace these a few weeks later with florid posters proclaiming the imminence of Mother’s Day. Rather, when did these symbols start representing love? Why did it become accepted or important to celebrate certain kinds of affective relationships in such a public way? While these sentiments seem so obvious to us, would their meanings have been equally intelligible to people living a century or two ago? How has the way in which romantic or familial love is represented impacted the ways in which it is experienced, expressed or understood? These are just some of the kinds of questions which come up for the historian of emotions.
The historical study of human emotions such as fear, shame, disgust, anger, love and happiness is a relatively recent development, forming part of the rise of cultural history and a scholarly interest in subjectivity. Traditionally, emotions are regarded as the domain of psychology and neuroscience. These fields tend to view feelings as physiologically governed and therefore emphasise their universalism: that emotions are the same today as they were in the past and will be in the future, irrespective of the spatial or temporal context in which they function. But social constructionists have critiqued this perspective, showing that the experience, expression and interpretation of emotions take place within a specific social context, and therefore emotions must be culturally specific and embedded in cultural meaning. It follows that the experience, expression, evaluation and interpretation of emotion is intimately bound up with its cultural context and is subject to change over time. In short, emotions have a history.
This is skilfully demonstrated in Fear: a cultural history by the British historian Joanna Bourke. In this book Bourke studies two centuries of dread and panic in the Anglo-American world. From the Victorians’ fear of being buried alive to post-9/11 trepidations over terrorist attacks, she effectively shows how an emotion changes over time within the context of broader social stresses. Interest in studying change and continuity in human emotions has accelerated so rapidly that many universities now house centres and institutes specifically dedicated to the historical study of the emotions. Cambridge was one of the first universities to offer a course on the topic as part of the Themes and Sources history undergraduate paper. The course is taught by a host of acclaimed Cambridge historians and allows students to ponder the literature and evaluate different approaches and methodologies in the historical study of emotions.
But why do feelings deserve so much attention? Proponents of the approach argue that emotions are on par with class or gender – indispensable categories of analysis which should be considered in any historical study in order to more fully comprehend the past. The study of emotions should therefore not simply form a peripheral or unique field of inquiry, but be integrated into all historical research. The American medievalist Barbara Rosenwein explains: “Thus, for example, a history of Germany between the two world wars should include a discussion of not only the economy, the relations between men and women, the ideologies of communism, fascism, and liberalism, and so on, but also the emotions that were privileged – and denigrated – during that period by various dominant and marginal groups.” To Rosenwein, this engagement with emotions in all areas of historical inquiry is “the ultimate goal” (2010).
Yet this trend towards historicising emotions has not caught on in all national historiographies. In my own main field of interest, South African history, there seems to be precious little, well, emotional awareness. Why are South African historians “less emotional”?
During the 1980s, when the cultural turn in historiography was in full swing and the history of emotions was fast developing into an independent field in Europe and the United States, South Africa was firmly caught in the escalating struggle against apartheid. In traditionally nationalist universities and research institutes, scholarship typically continued to revolve around the nationalist project, investigating issues relevant to the continuation of white supremacy and focusing on the history of South Africa since European settlement in the mid-1600s. Race was the central and unquestioned category of analysis. This was the case not simply because many academics supported the system, but also because they were dependent on state funding for their livelihoods. Critical voices sounded from more liberal institutions, where scholars were pointing to the importance of class, investigating the histories of South Africa’s non-white population and trying to lend a voice to the disadvantaged and the marginalised. An ideological war was being waged, a national state of emergency – literally – in which there seemed to be little space for sentiment.
The concerted efforts of the liberation struggle culminated in the first democratic elections of April 1994. Yet despite such obviously emotional phenomena as the euphoria of democracy, Nelson Mandela’s charismatic allure and the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the years following the “miracle” did not see historians’ attention shift to the significance of emotions. Instead, the end of apartheid and the resulting opening up of the academy saw researchers move to studying previously taboo topics such as the past prior to European settlement, and the complexities of identity formation and resistance within South Africa’s multicultural setting. A reinvention of the education system demanded that history quite literally be rewritten to include previously silenced communities and explain the system of racial discrimination and structural inequality which was the country’s heritage. Much like Germany’s need as from the 1950s to master its particular history saw the development of a very specific post-war historiography in that national context, so efforts to understand the origins, rise and demise of apartheid, and to overcome its legacy, occupied South African research agendas. In many of these studies – such as those dealing with daily humiliations under the apartheid system, the intricacies of the relationships between white “masters” and their non-white “servants”, and instances of resilience under these conditions – emotions slumber beneath the surface, even if the authors failed to recognise the history of emotions as such.
Today, almost twenty years on, there has still been little conscious effort to historicise South Africa’s emotional landscape. For all the academic engagement which exists with the country’s traumatic past, it is remarkable that the emotional issues arising from this have not been widely recognised as an area worthy of historical investigation. A handful of local historians have started looking at humour, laughter and the joke to explore the experiences, identity, memory and attitudes of various communities at specific historical junctures, but these historians do not necessarily posit their work in terms of emotions history – and it is debatable to which degree humour and laughter in their usage point to specific emotions at all.
But there might be another explanation for the relative absence of emotional analysis in South African historiography. Possibly, it is not only due to the engagement of the academy (and of South African society in general) with the legacy of apartheid, but also to a pervasive social view of emotions as irrational, unpredictable and dangerous. This view sees emotionality being associated with weakness, instability or lack of control – a notion which resonates in many “western” societies and would be familiar to many readers. Emotions are seen as something which should be relegated to the private sphere – the realm, traditionally, of women – outside of which a degree of emotional constraint is expected. Within the South African context of limited resources and opportunities and the challenges of change, society does champion strength, street-wise savvy and independence above emotional awareness and sensibility. While the contention would need to be investigated systematically, it is possible that this view of feeling as something which should not play an important role in rational behaviour, keeps scholars from recognising – or admitting – the importance of emotions. As the South African academy remains male-dominated to a large degree, one might see the prevalence of historical studies insensitive to feelings as a kind of “masculine” disciplining of “feminine” emotional phenomena.
My own PhD research seeks to contribute towards an emotions history of South Africa. Responding to broader historiographical lacunae, I am investigating the experiences of working class Afrikaners with transformation and democratisation as from the 1980s. This research not only problematises notions of the blanket privileging of whites during apartheid, but enquires into this community’s emotional experiences, their emotional investment in their material circumstances and how emotions may be employed to negotiate political space. Does the interpretation of transformation-as-trauma hold true for all Afrikaners? How does one make sense of the feelings of shame and defeatism which run parallel to expressions of pride and anger in the broader community? Why does the representation of Afrikaners as victims – both discursively and visually – find so much appeal within a community which actually seems to have retained most of its wealth and structural privilege? These are just some of the contradictions which a historical attentiveness to emotions allows us to explore. As a colleague recently remarked, “It doesn’t make sense to look at Afrikaners without looking at emotions!”

Indeed, South African history is ripe for the emotional picking. The dedicated academic engagement with discourse analysis which already exists, along with an interest in past practices relating to sexuality, gender and the body increasingly opens up intellectual space for the discussion of emotions. In a country as ethnically diverse, economically divided and politically sensitive as South Africa, there are myriad opportunities for researchers to set up emotional camp and start delving into the past sensibilities of their chosen subjects.

Danelle van Zyl-Hermann is a PhD candidate in history supervised by Prof Megan Vaughan. She has previously published on emotional life at the Cape of Good Hope at the turn of the nineteenth century. Danelle is a Gates Scholar and member of St John’s College, Cambridge.
Provided by University of Cambridge

"The emotional historian?." February 29th, 2012. http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-emotional-historian.html
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Fear factor isn't enough: Ads have to gross you out to work best

(PhysOrg.com) -- We've all seen the ads meant to scare us into buying products like protective sunscreen or to avoid doing something like drugs. Well, it turns out those advertisements may only freeze us with fear and inaction. New research from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University shows, in order to work best, these ads also have to disgust and gross us out.
“Fear creates uncertainty and insecurity over what to do, but disgust gives us a very strong impulse to avoid and distance ourselves from the item or situation as quickly as possible,” explains Andrea Morales, W. P. Carey School of Business marketing professor, lead author of the work. “When you add a disgusting message or image to an advertisement, it can significantly increase the ad’s effectiveness.”
The new research from Morales and her colleagues was just posted online by the Journal of Marketing Research. It points to successful, disgusting campaigns, such as one by the New York City Department of Health that centered on images of soda turning into gobs of fat. Department officials say sugar-rich beverage consumption in the area dropped by 12 percent after the campaign. Other popular advertisements in the disgusting category include a medication ad with a creepy yellow rat-like creature attacking a human toenail, a pain-medication ad featuring a pair of feet covered in fire ants, and an anti-smoking matchbook with graphic images of decayed, blackened teeth.
“Disgust dramatically enhances persuasion and compliance above and beyond just fear appeals,” says Morales. “You have to go beyond scare tactics to produce a strong and immediate avoidance reaction or a change in behavior. For example, disgust is especially good at motivating people toward losing weight, quitting smoking or changing another behavior to improve their health.”
In particular, the research discusses a real ad campaign in Britain that showed graphic images linking cigarettes with fat-filled arteries. The 2004 campaign by the British Heart Foundation and the local Department of Health was so successful that the United Kingdom’s government is planning to print these pictorial-warning images on all tobacco products sold in the U.K.
“We’ve also seen several recent ads for cleaning products that disgust viewers by talking about and showing the dirt, grime and germs left behind when you use other, less effective mops, cleansers, even toothpaste,” says Morales. “A new series of Febreze commercials shows people in filthy rooms, but smelling pleasant odors thanks to the spray.”
In a series of five experiments, the researchers repeatedly found the same thing. When people looked at ads with neutral messages or those simply meant to induce fear, they didn’t work as well as those using disgust.
For example, 155 undergraduate students looked at various versions of a real anti-meth ad with the same words and format, but different, altered images. The version with a teen whose face was covered in open sores was found to be much more effective than the versions with a picture of a coffin or two teens sitting side by side. The coffin, while scary, didn’t portray an immediate, imminent, disgusting threat.

Another experiment involved showing participants a sunscreen ad with identical images, but different text in each case. The most persuasive version talked about “open sores that crust and do not heal for weeks,” “scaly red patches” and “wart-like growths that ooze and bleed.” The reaction to it was far more significant than a neutral ad version and one that simply talked about “a severe sunburn” and the “possibility of heat stroke.”

Morales’ co-authors are Eugenia Wu, assistant professor at Cornell University and Gavan Fitzsimons, professor at Duke University.
More information: The full write-up called “How Disgust Enhances the Effectiveness of Fear Appeals,” is available at the Journal of Marketing Research website at http://www.journal … /jmr.07.0364 .
Provided by Arizona State University

"Fear factor isn't enough: Ads have to gross you out to work best." February 29th, 2012. http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-factor-isnt-ads-gross.html
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Seeing science with an artist's eye

Neuroscientist Heather Bimonte-Nelson uses paint on canvas to explain her research in a way that words can't. Credit: Pete Zrioka, OKED
For many, the words “scientific research” call to mind a collection of cartoonish clichés – white lab coats and goggles, microscopes and bubbling beakers. But research isn’t just a set of props and piles of data. It’s a story that starts with a question and journeys to an answer, an ongoing narrative that can be told in a variety of ways.
Heather Bimonte-Nelson, a neuroscientist at Arizona State University, explores the brain and its functions through science and explains her science through art. Armed with spatulas, acrylic paints, inks and a handful of appropriated household tools, she produces intensely detailed paintings that further the story of her research.
“Science is really about convincing people that your hypothesis or theory could be the truth in nature,” says Bimonte-Nelson, an associate professor of psychology. “And if you’re not a good storyteller, people will never believe it. You could have the best theory ever, but if you can’t communicate it effectively so others understand it, it doesn’t count.”
Bimonte-Nelson is the head of the Memory and Aging Laboratory, which focuses on learning, memory and brain changes that occur as we age. Recently, researchers in the lab demonstrated a link between the birth control shot and memory loss in rodents. The scientists juggle multiple projects, mostly related to hormone therapies and the impact they have on brain functions and memory. Bimonte-Nelson's paintings are reflections of her research work, depicting spidery neurons, fading memories and cell death.
While she describes herself as “always crafty,” Bimonte-Nelson only began painting about a year ago, and has since then produced an estimated 40 pieces. Some adorn her office, others she’s given to students and friends. Works in progress and finished pieces dominate her dining room, which serves as her makeshift studio.
A cut above a diagram in the average psychology textbook, the paintings explain the interworking of the mind in intricate and striking detail.
Bimonte-Nelson and her husband Matthew Nelson have two daughters, Hailey, 8, and Brooke, 6. Both girls have a history of epilepsy, and while their conditions are in remission, it’s always in the forefront of Bimonte-Nelson’s mind – and her art.
One painting, simply titled “GABA,” functions as a portrait of her daughters’ seizures, and the quest to control them. Even tones of light green and cerulean blue streak down the canvas, but are disrupted on one side in a dramatic blood-red band.
The colors represent neurotransmitters in the brain. The blues and greens are the inhibitory gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA, and the red is glutamate, an excitatory neurotransmitter.
“GABA is very soothing, a great inhibitor,” explains Bimonte-Nelson. “Without GABA, you’d be running around with no control. With a seizure, there’s a big imbalance between these inhibitory and excitatory systems in the brain.”
While “GABA” could be considered as more of a personal piece, Bimonte-Nelson’s inspiration to paint first came in the form of writer’s block.
“I was writing a grant and I had a vision of a painting in my head. I couldn’t really formulate the words for it, but I saw the picture,” she recalls.
After painting for a while, Bimonte-Nelson understood the connection she was looking for. She had found the right words for her grant, and was able to complete it. After she finished that first piece, “Dancing Neurons,” she says she felt a sense of accomplishment and a greater understanding of the science she was working on at the time.
A network of black neurons dominates the painting, with different color pockets evenly distributed across the canvas, representing the different neurotransmitters inside the brain.
During sleep, your brain goes through a process called consolidation, in which the neurons that have fired throughout the day in a specific pattern fire in again that pattern, said Bimonte-Nelson. Consolidation is how information goes from short- to long-term memory.
The prominent dark blue hues give “Synchrony of Memory in Replay” a calming, restful feel, while the neuron seems to crackle with the electricity of coding memories.
“Synchrony of Memory in Replay” exemplifies the most engaging attribute of Bimonte-Nelson’s paintings. As art, they’re attractive enough to find a home in an ornate frame. But it’s the inspiration, the science from which they are derived that makes them interesting, captivating pieces. Even people with little or no understanding of science can understand the processes her paintings depict.
Bimonte-Nelson’s husband of nearly 10 years, Matthew Nelson, sees that accessible quality in his wife’s work.
“People tend to reach a point when talking to scientists where they just glaze over,” says Nelson, a research operations manager at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. “With something like Heather’s paintings you don’t get lost in the words, you just get lost in the art.”
These literal representations of cerebral processes are engaging to not only the scientifically challenged but also those intensely familiar with science.
“As a scientist, I think the mixture of art and science is absolutely beautiful,” says Jazmin Acosta, a postdoctoral fellow in Bimonte-Nelson’s lab. “Not only can we see a representation of what we’re studying, but it also gives us another perspective. It illustrates things very clearly.”
Bimonte-Nelson’s husband, who worked as a researcher for 15 years prior to moving into administration, asserts that most scientists fail to become independent researchers because they can’t sell their ideas.
In other words, they can’t tell their story.
Bimonte-Nelson doesn’t seem to have that problem. In her lectures, she’s animated and full of energy. In her lab, she sells the story of her research with words and data. In her art, she provides an unconventional and beautiful way to look at science.

“In anything you are passionate about, it is necessary to be a good communicator and storyteller – you can do that through art, through words or through presentations,” Bimonte-Nelson says. “Silence does not change the world. You have to be good at conveying information or your ideas, scientific or not, will never come across. If you can not express, in some form, what you want the world to hear or interpret, it is as if that thought never existed.”

Provided by Arizona State University

"Seeing science with an artist's eye." February 29th, 2012. http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-science-artist-eye.html
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Jobs @ NDTV - Delhi

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Problem Solving

“If one adopts the principles enunciated in Bhagavad-gita, he can make his life perfect and make a perfect solution to all the problems of life which arise out of the transient nature of material existence.” (Shrila Prabhupada, Bhagavad-gita, Introduction)

As soon as you introduce the property of transience, you get problems. For starters, since the objects in question are temporary in their manifestation, once this property is known fear will follow. Take a house for example. You purchase the house and then live comfortably within it, but you know that it can deteriorate. If you don’t keep up with the mortgage payments or if you don’t take care of the needed repairs on time, the comfortable dwelling can quickly become a thing of the past. The greatest fear of all is death, which is spared for no one. Since life is full of problems, the tendency towards looking for solutions is as natural as eating when you’re hungry. If you’re already looking for answers, why not head straight for the guidebook that in the beginning addresses life’s most difficult questions. From there find not only the solution to birth and death but also the tools necessary for dealing with any derived problem that should arise.

“Just as the ripened fruit has no other fear than falling, the man who has taken birth has no other fear than death.” (Lord Rama, Valmiki Ramayana, Ayodhya Kand, 105.17)

As the famous prince of the Raghu dynasty and divine incarnation of Godhead once said, for a mature human being there is no other fear than death. That fact puts everything into the right perspective. The fear over losing health insurance relates to death. The fear over becoming destitute, of having no money to provide for basic necessities, also is tied to death. This fear is prevalent in the mature human being and not so much in the child because of the difference in intelligence. The child has yet to be disappointed by life, and they haven’t learned that everything within it is temporary. The adult may have achieved all of their childhood dreams and still had to deal with so many problems thereafter. Therefore once there is maturity, the human being knows that they have nowhere left to go but down.
The fear of death is not just personal either. Often times it extends to family members. This is actually a very nice sentiment, revealing some of the properties of the essence of identity that are mentioned in the conversation documented in that famous guidebook. During economic downturns polling companies will try to get a pulse on the nation’s thoughts of the economy. A common answer given to questions about one’s personal financial situation is: “I’m doing okay, but I’m worried about my neighbor. I’m worried about the country. It seems like there are no jobs anywhere.” Though the human being knows that their destiny is death, somehow they tend to pity others, even those who are in better off positions.
Emotions like these consumed a hesitant warrior on the eve of a giant battle. Fortunately for him, his problems were solved by the one person who can remove all distresses. The warrior Arjuna was more than capable of doing away with his enemy; what he lacked was the desire to fight. He knew that he was in the right with respect to raising hostilities, but if following the righteous path meant killing so many well-wishers and family members on the opposing side, Arjuna would rather be wrong.
Lord Krishna, Arjuna’s chariot driver at the time, stepped in and dealt with this all-encompassing problem. Arjuna was worried about death, and not even his own. He was worried about what would happen to the opposing members should they perish in battle. In this way the talk that followed between Krishna and Arjuna became the most applicable guidebook, as its starting premise is something missed through mental speculation.
In any problem, the solution is found through proper knowledge of the relevant parties. Proper knowledge addresses the inner properties of the situation, knowing how the different entities operate. If there is a misidentification, how can a proper solution be found? Sure, we can consult a guidebook on how to fix our wireless internet connection or properly bake a cake, but these are small problems. The fact that everything around us is temporary ensures that little problems will never go away. Having to fill up gasoline is a tiny nuisance. Drive enough back and forth to work and eventually you’ll have to break your routine and head to the gas station for a fill up. Many of the problems occur at regular intervals. They are deemed problems because they are unwanted inconveniences of life.
Krishna did not start off dealing with smaller problems. He did not wish to dwell on Arjuna’s hesitancy or his misdirected affection for his family members right away. These were indeed the external causes to his decision to refrain from fighting, which introduced a new problem, but at the root of the issue was a misidentification. Arjuna was seeing something that is temporary and taking it to be permanent. The body is not our identity; the soul is. We know that the body is temporary because it changes all the time. We even know that it goes away at the end of life, like the fruit that falls off the tree. If death is already destined to happen, why should one lament it when following religious principles?
Let’s say that I have an iPad filled with movies and books. I know that if I watch a few movies, one after another, pretty soon the device will lose battery strength. A low battery indicates a problem, which is solved by a recharge. Should I be travelling on a trip where power outlets are not readily available, once the recharge is required, I can no longer use the device. Does this mean that I shouldn’t watch a single movie? If that is the case, why have the device? The battery will be drained regardless, so utilizing the device for its intended purpose is the much better course of action. We don’t despise the car because it will run out of gasoline if we drive it enough.
In a similar manner, the body is already destined for death, so lamenting over this fact was not wise for Arjuna. Whether he fought or didn’t fight, those family members would have to perish. By abiding by Krishna’s orders, which were not made up on the spot and which had been followed for thousands of years even at this time, Arjuna would not be doing anything wrong. He was a fighter by occupation, so it was his duty to protect the innocent. If he wasn’t up for the job, who would protect the property of the helpless citizens relying on the stronger government forces?
The route of solving smaller problems first is unfortunately taken by governments as well. Famous politicians often believe that the government’s duty is to solve problems, when in fact its primary role is to defend property and life. Yet what are the distressed citizens to do? In a society where the information of the proper identification of the individual is absent, the real problems of life, namely birth, death, old age and disease, will never be solved. Without a solution to the death problem, there will be constant fear and hesitation. The poor person worries about food and clothing and the rich man is concerned with maintaining his standard of living up until the time of death. In either case there is fearing, which indicates that there are problems no matter where you are in life.
Krishna rightly revealed to Arjuna that the soul never dies, nor does it take birth. It is eternal. The consciousness of the living entity at the time of death determines the next destination. Therefore following the original guidebook that is the Vedas - which are explained nicely by the saints and by Krishna Himself in works like the Bhagavad-gita - leads to a proper consciousness at the time of death. Something temporary is the cause of distress, while something permanent is in line with the properties of the soul. Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and His internal energy are permanent, while the external energy of material nature is temporary. Identify with nature and you’ll be in constant trouble. Identify with spirit and you’ll have the tools to solve even trivial problems.
How does this work exactly? How does connecting with Krishna solve the problem of finding a job or putting food on the table? The Lord’s ultimate advice to Arjuna was to always think of Him and follow the duties prescribed for his order with detachment. “Don’t worry about the outcome; just follow God, thinking of Him in a loving mood.” This advice would serve Arjuna well, for he was firmly convinced of it by the teachings presented by Krishna, which would later on be known as the Bhagavad-gita, a work to be studied by scholars, inquisitive minds, and sincere spiritualists alike.
By knowing that I am spirit and that Krishna is Supreme Spirit, if I regularly chant His names, “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare”, I stand a good chance of thinking about Him at the time of death. Krishna is eternal and lives in a permanent abode. A consciousness fixed on Him leads the individual to a residence in that imperishable home, where the only problem is: “How can I serve Krishna more?”
Through regular chanting in the discipline known as bhakti-yoga, or devotional service, the foremost desire of the individual is to stay connected with Krishna. The Lord bears the burden for success in this endeavor, and since He is Achyuta [one who never falls down], He never denies any sincere soul the success they deserve. The problems in life are automatically solved because from within as the chaitya guru and from without as the spiritual master Krishna gives hints on how to find the conditions ideal for continuing in devotion. With a purified consciousness, a commonly employed solution to problems is to just abandon the activity. Another method is to look for situations which bring as little distractions as possible. In Arjuna’s case, he took on the great burden of fighting in a war, but he was unattached to the result. As the supreme director standing right in front of him, Krishna made sure that Arjuna would emerge victorious, keeping his consciousness pure the whole time.
Find a solution to the root of all problems and you will have a way of dealing with the many issues that arise in a temporary existence. Birth and death are unavoidable for aspects of life that are temporary, but with a mind focused on the proper aim, detachment becomes rather easy to invoke. Association with the body is life’s biggest problem and connecting with Shri Krishna in a bond of love is the only solution.
In Closing:

Anger, sadness, depression and strife.

Form the many problems of life.

Try to initially tackle just the smaller,

In hopes that will address the larger.

But there is a better, more direct route,

Tackle issues of birth and death at their root.

Hesitant warrior Arjuna’s mind in a stir.

Went to his friend Shri Krishna for answers.

What followed was the most sacred talk,

Became Bhagavad-gita, path to success chalked.

The History of the Indian Rupee

In 1935, under the Paper Currency Act of 1861, the Raj was granted the monopoly of issuing notes, ending the practice of private and presidency banks. But these currencies continued to be in use till the RBI issued its own coins and notes. Interestingly, till about 50 years ago, other currencies besides the RBI’s existed in, for instance, Portuguese Goa and Hyderabad. The central bank’s first currency, issued in 1938, was a five-rupee note bearing the portrait of King George VI. This was followed by notes of 10, 100, 1,000 and, yes, 10,000 rupees.
In the subsequent years, global developments, security concerns and the high cost of minting money led to many changes in the motif and the material of the currency. In 1940, the one-rupee note was reintroduced as a wartime measure. The watermark was made more difficult to copy and the security thread was introduced in 1944 to counter high-quality forgeries of rupees by the Japanese during their assault on Burma in WW II.

There is no uniformity or regularity in the change of colour, security features or pattern. “It isn’t wise to change the design and features frequently as it inconveniences people. At the same time, to prevent forgeries, we can’t keep it constant,” says Alpana Killawala, the RBI’s chief general manager. The George VI series continued till 1947. After Independence, a new design one-rupee coin was released in 1949. After careful consideration, King George VI’s portrait was replaced by Asoka’s Lion Capital, though a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi was initially considered but rejected. In 1960, the Hirakud dam, a symbol of India’s industrialisation, replaced the elephant motif on the Rs 100 note.

During the first decade of Independence, the rupee was divided into 16 annas. Each anna was subdivided into either four pices or 12 pies. The Anna Series, introduced on January 26, 1950, was the first coinage of the Republic of India. It was continued for seven years, and then replaced with the decimal system, which divided the rupee into 100 naya paise. High inflation led to change in the metal for coins—from silver to nickel to aluminium to steel. Similarly, the paper currency has undergone a sea change—the economic crisis of the late 1960s led to a reduction in the size of notes and fears of black money in circulation led to the cancellation of high denomination notes like the Rs 1,000, the Rs 5,000 and the Rs 10,000 in 1978. But in 2000, the Rs 1,000 series were reintroduced with optically variable ink that changes colour on tilting. Given that the lifespan of a currency note is generally only two years, many of the paper currencies, such as the Rs 1 and Rs 2 notes, have now been phased out. The five-rupee note is due to be phased out too.

The coins and notes of today are all part of the Mahatma Gandhi series that came into use in 1996. The currency notes have complex watermarks, windowed security thread, a latent image of Gandhi and intaglio features for the visually handicapped. Further enhancements in 2005-06 raised intaglio printing and widened the security thread.

The lure of this must-see history of the rupee will be difficult to resist.

Schizophrenia patients’ ability to monitor reality may be helped by computerized training

People with schizophrenia who completed 80 hours of intensive, computerized cognitive training exercises were better able to perform complex tasks that required them to distinguish their internal thoughts from reality.
As described in the journal Neuron (2/22/12), a small clinical study conducted at the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC) and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), tested the digital exercises as a new therapy for schizophrenia.
“We predicted that in order to improve complex cognitive functions in neuropsychiatric illness, we must target impairments in lower-level perceptual processes, as well as higher-order working-memory and social cognitive processes,” said Srikantan Nagarajan, PhD, a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at UCSF and a senior author of the study.
When compared with their assessments before the training, schizophrenia patients who received 80 hours of computerized training over the course of 16 weeks became better at monitoring reality. This improvement coincided with increased activation in a key part of the brain: the medial prefrontal cortex.
“The medial prefrontal cortex is a critical higher-order brain region that supports successful reality-monitoring processes,” said Karuna Subramaniam, the study's first author, who worked directly with the patients in the study and analyzed their data.
How the Study Works
Schizophrenia strikes about 1 percent of all Americans and about 51 million people worldwide. It is one of the most intractable and difficult to treat psychiatric illnesses, with prognosis becoming progressively poorer the longer a patient has the disease, according to the study's senior author, Sophia Vinogradov, MD, professor and interim associate chief of staff for mental Health at SFVAMC and interim vice chair of psychiatry at UCSF.
One of the core impairments of the disease is losing a grip on what is real, she said. “Reality-monitoring is the ability to separate the inner world from outer reality," she explained. "It is a complex cognitive function that is impaired in schizophrenia."
In the study, the brains of 31 patients with schizophrenia and 15 healthy people used for comparison were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they performed a reality-monitoring task.
Then, 16 of the 31 patients with schizophrenia were randomly assigned to complete 80 hours of computerized training composed of auditory, visual and social cognitive exercises that included programs designed by the Posit Science Corporation. The other 15 patients with schizophrenia were assigned to play computer games for the same amount of time.
After 80 hours, all of the subjects repeated the original reality-monitoring task in the MRI scanner, to monitor brain activity associated with their ability to discern words they made up in their head (internally-generated information) from words the experimenter showed them (externally-presented information).
The reality-monitoring test consisted of a study phase and a retrieval phase. During the study phase, subjects read sentences with noun-verb-noun structures outside the scanner. These were simple sentences like: "The chicken crossed the road." During this study phase, the final word of each sentence was either presented by the scientists or it was left blank for subjects to make up and fill in themselves (e.g., "The rabbit ate the ___" to which the subject might write down, "carrot").
Then, 45 minutes later, the subjects performed the retrieval phase in the MRI scanner where their brain activity was monitored while they were shown pairs of nouns from the sentence list. They had to identify whether the second word in the noun pair was a word that they had previously generated themselves during the study phase ("rabbit-carrot") or was one that the experimenter had presented to them ("chicken-road").
Compared to their pre-training assessments, people who had received the computerized cognitive training were better able to distinguish between the words they had made up themselves and those that had been presented to them. Furthermore, analyses of the MRI data revealed they also had increased activity in the part of the brain (the medial prefrontal cortex) that governs these decisions.
“Interestingly, greater activation within the medial prefrontal cortex was also linked with better social functioning six months after training,” Subramaniam said. "In contrast, patients in the computer games control condition did not show any improvements, demonstrating that the behavioral and neural changes were specific to the computerized training patient group.”
What this suggests, said Vinogradov, is that “the neural impairments in schizophrenia are not immutably fixed but may be amenable to well-designed interventions that target restoration of neural system functioning.”
The study “sets the groundwork for what could be a new treatment approach in psychiatric illness – a new tool we could use in addition to medication, psychotherapeutic approaches or cognitive behavioral approaches,” she said.
The article, "Computerized Cognitive Training Restores Neural Activity within the Reality Monitoring Network in Schizophrenia" by Karuna Subramaniam, Tracy L. Luks, Melissa Fisher, Gregory V. Simpson, Srikantan Nagarajan, and Sophia Vinogradov appears in the Feb. 23 issue of Neuron.
This work was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. Gregory Simpson, an author of the study, is a senior scientist at Brain Plasticity Institute, Inc. Sophia Vinogradov, also a study author, is a consultant to Brain Plasticity Institute, Inc., which has a financial interest in computerized cognitive training programs.
UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care.
Provided by University of California, San Francisco

"Schizophrenia patients’ ability to monitor reality may be helped by computerized training." February 29th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-schizophrenia-patients-ability-reality-computerized.html

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Almost half of depression in adults starts in adolesence

(Medical Xpress) -- A new study by research psychologists at Bangor and Oxford Universities show that half of adults who experience clinical depression had their first episode start in adolescence. In fact, the most common age to see the start of depression is between 13-15 years-old.
‘Depression used to be a problem that first surfaced in middle-aged people’ says Professor Mark Williams of Oxford University who led the study with Professor Ian Russell and Rebecca Crane of Bangor University. ‘In recent decades, however, researchers began to find that patients were first becoming depressed at an increasingly young age, a trend that has contributed to depression becoming one of the most pressing health issues across the world’.
As part of the study, they assessed the age at which people first became depressed and its links to later mental health problems and suicidal feelings. The study involved 275 people who had suffered repeated bouts of depression. All were carefully assessed to determine at what age they had first experienced the combination of symptoms that would indicate clinical depression. In the article published this month in the Journal of Affective Disorders the researchers showed that 48 percent of these patients had first suffered the illness before the age of 18 years. In fact, the most common age of their first episode of depression was 13-15 years.
‘These results are important because depression is a problem that tends to return. If you’ve been depressed once, then you have a roughly 50:50 chance of becoming depressed again. If you have become depressed twice or more, then this risk rises to 70-80 percent.
Yet the good news is that there are things we can do to prevent it happening. Talking therapies such as Cognitive Therapy and Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) can have a major impact on the type of recurrent depression that starts early in life, and researchers are starting to examine how best to prevent depression before it becomes a life-long problem.
Rebecca Crane of the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice at Bangor University adds: 'The Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy course offers people who are vulnerable to recurrent depression the opportunity to engage in a raining process which builds skills in recognising and responding wisely to the first signs of depression.'
'Over repeated episodes of depression unhelpful habitual patterns of thinking and feeling are established. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy teaches participants to recognise and respond to these patterns in new ways’. 'Here at Bangor University we offer mindfulness classes to the general public. These courses are open to everyone and so are not specifically aimed at people with recurrent depression - they do however develop the skills which research has demonstrated is relevant to people who are vulnerable to depression.'
Provided by Bangor University

"Almost half of depression in adults starts in adolesence." February 29th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-depression-adults-adolesence.html

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Study challenges guidelines on art therapy for people with schizophrenia

Referring people with schizophrenia to group art therapy does not improve their mental health or social functioning, finds a study published in the British Medical Journal today.
The findings challenge national treatment guidelines which recommend that doctors consider referring all people with schizophrenia for arts therapies.
Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder which affects as many as one in 100 people at some point in their lives. While antipsychotic medication can reduce symptoms, many people continue to experience poor mental health and social functioning.
Art therapy has been used as an additional treatment for people with schizophrenia, and is recommended in national treatment guidelines, but few studies have examined its clinical effects.
So a team of UK researchers set out to examine the impact of group art therapy for people with schizophrenia compared with an active control treatment and standard care alone.
The study involved 417 people aged 18 or over with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Participants were split into three groups: 12 months of weekly group art therapy plus standard care; 12 months of weekly activity groups plus standard care; or standard care alone.
Art therapy patients were given access to a range of art materials and encouraged to use these to express themselves freely. Activity group patients were encouraged to take part in activities such as playing board games, watching and discussing DVDs, and visiting local cafes. The use of art materials was prohibited.
Outcome measures included global functioning (ability to carry out usual daily activities), mental health symptoms, social functioning and satisfaction with care. Levels of attendance at both art therapy and activity groups were low.
No differences in global functioning and mental health symptoms were found between the three groups, and no differences in social functioning and satisfaction with care were found between art therapy and standard care groups.
The authors conclude: "While we cannot rule out the possibility that group art therapy benefits a minority of people who are highly motivated to use this treatment, we did not find evidence that it leads to improved patient outcomes when offered to most people with schizophrenia."
However, they add that studies of other creative therapies for people with schizophrenia, such as music therapy and body movement therapy, are more promising, and that it may be only when such activities are combined with other interventions that benefits are seen.
In an accompanying editorial, Tim Kendall, Director at the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, suggests that art therapy is unlikely to be of clinical benefit for people suffering from schizophrenia, but it still has great potential for success in the treatment of negative symptoms.
Provided by British Medical Journal

"Study challenges guidelines on art therapy for people with schizophrenia." February 28th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-guidelines-art-therapy-people-schizophrenia.html

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Do women with bulimia have both an eating disorder and a weight disorder?

Researchers at Drexel University have found that a majority of women with bulimia nervosa reach their highest-ever body weight after developing their eating disorder, despite the fact that the development of the illness is characterized by significant weight loss. Their new study, published online last month in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, adds to a body of recent work that casts new light on the importance of weight history in understanding and treating bulimia.
"Most patients lose a lot of weight as part of developing this disorder, and all dedicate significant effort, including the use of extreme behaviors, to prevent weight gain," said Jena Shaw, a clinical psychology doctoral student in Drexel's College of Arts and Sciences who was lead author of the new study. "In spite of this, we found that most women also regain a lot of weight while they have bulimia. We want to find out why that is."
Working with Dr. Michael Lowe, a professor of psychology at Drexel, and other collaborators, Shaw examined data from two study populations of women with bulimia, including a group of 78 women who were patients at the Renfrew Center in Philadelphia studied over two years, and a group of 110 women from a Harvard study who were interviewed at six-month intervals for eight years.
"Most of the women we studied reached their highest weight ever after developing bulimia and before remission," Shaw said. A total of 59 percent of women in the two-year study population, and 71.6 percent of women in the eight-year study population, showed this weight history pattern. These weights were even higher than their weights before developing bulimia, despite the fact that their pre-bulimia weights were overall already higher than average.
The researchers also explored group differences between women who reached their highest weight after onset of bulimia, and those whose highest weight preceded the eating disorder. The women who reached a new highest weight during bulimia had generally developed the disorder at an earlier age, and struggled with it for a longer period of time.
These findings add to a body of work led by Lowe that emphasizes the importance of weight and weight history in the outcomes and treatment of bulimia. Lowe's research has quantified relationships between personal weight history and the symptoms and outcomes of eating disorders.
"Bulimia nervosa was first medically described in 1979 among patients whose body weight generally appeared 'normal,' but who, in most cases, had weighed substantially more in the past," said Lowe. "Yet relatively few studies have considered weight history or the fear of becoming overweight again as a possible perpetuating factor for the disorder."
In his eating disorder studies, Lowe has examined a variable called "weight suppression," which is the difference between a person's past highest weight and her current weight. Most people with bulimia have higher weight suppression values than their peers without bulimia. His studies have shown correlations between higher weight suppression in bulimic women and undesired outcomes including greater likelihood of dropping out of treatment, less likelihood of abstaining from binge/purge behaviors, greater weight gain and longer time to remission. Recently, other researchers have found a relationship between weight suppression and metabolism in healthy women, suggesting that people with higher weight suppression must eat fewer calories to maintain their weight than women of similar weight who have always been close to their current weight.
By clarifying the connections between women's weight history and the course of their eating disorder, researchers may identify ways to use productive discussion of weight and weight history to improve treatments, Lowe said.

Provided by Drexel University

"Do women with bulimia have both an eating disorder and a weight disorder?." February 29th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-women-bulimia-disorder-weight.html
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'World searches' - most popular searches on Cambridge Dictionaries and the reasons behind them

Cambridge Dictionaries Online has published a list of the top words and phrases that got the world searching in 2011, with some surprising insights into their popularity.
Words and phrases people search for are frequently affected by major global events: searches for 'tsunami', 'meltdown', 'riot', 'looting', and 'turmoil' all increased dramatically around corresponding events last year, but the words people search for in response to current events are not always as predictable.
When the phone-hacking story erupted in mid-July 2011, there was only a moderate increase in searches for 'hack', but a far more conspicuous spike in searches for 'humble'. Rupert Murdoch used this when he had to face a Commons Select Committee on July 19th, saying: "this is the most humble day of my life".
The phrase 'eat your heart out', already a surprisingly popular search, had a huge increase on May 11th - can this all be due to an episode of Glee in which a character says the line "Eat your heart out, Kate Middleton"?
Dominic Glennon, Reference Systems Manager for Cambridge Dictionaries Online, said: "It may surprise many people, as it does us, that by far the most common search on Cambridge Dictionaries Online for the whole year is actually the word dictionary itself!"
The top ten searches in 2011 were:
1. dictionary 

2. bear 

3. eat your heart out
4. lead 

5. concern 

6. lie 

7. issue 

8. despite 

9. appreciate 

10. schedule
Paul Heacock, Publishing Manager for Cambridge Dictionaries Online, said: "We are delighted that Cambridge Dictionaries Online, a free global resource, is assisting learners in their understanding of the events and language used around them. Cambridge Dictionaries Online was set up in 1999 as a free ELT resource, for learners of English as a foreign language, but has quickly become widely used by both native and non-native English speakers and learners."
In 2011 Cambridge Dictionaries Online had 20 million unique visitors, making over 63 million visits and viewing almost 300 million pages.
More information: To view and search Cambridge Dictionaries Online (free of charge), go to: dictionary.cambridge.org
Provided by Cambridge University Press

"'World searches' - most popular searches on Cambridge Dictionaries and the reasons behind them." February 29th, 2012. http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-world-popular-cambridge-dictionaries.html

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Professor proposes challenge to prove whether people can see entangled images

a) Spontaneous parametric down conversion: A photon from a laser beam excites a nonlinear medium (usually a crystal) to a virtual level that decays spontaneously into two possible paths. Either an identical laser photon is created or a pair of photons appear. Their energy adds up to the energy of the laser photon. Photons from all colors (wavelengths) can be obtained. b) The photon pairs follow directions given by linear momentum conservation. F designate an optical interference fi lter. Image: Geraldo A. Barbosa, arXiv:1202.5434v1 [q-bio.NC]
(PhysOrg.com) -- Geraldo Barbosa, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University has posed an interesting challenge. He wonders if the human eye and brain together are capable of actually seeing entangled images. This is not a philosophical question, as he has phrased the query as part of a practical experiment that someone with the proper lab could actually carry out. To that end, he’s posted a paper on the preprint server arXiv with the hope that a physics team will take up the challenge.
The whole idea is based on entanglement and the means by which researchers make it come about. What they do is shoot a laser at a non-linear crystal causing the photons in the beam to be converted into lower frequency entangled pairs. Those pairs are then directed to sensors which individually are able to measure a fuzzy or blurred “image”. But when both of the entangled photons are taken together as a single measurement, the image sharpens. These images are of course far too small for the human eye to see, plus they don’t last long enough for them to be seen anyway. To address these issues, researchers have taken to firing lasers that are formed into patterns such as a doughnut shape in a continuous sequence. The result is a steady stream of entangled pairs being created in the shape of a doughnut.
Barbosa wants to know what would happen if instead of forming a doughnut shape, the lasers were made to look like a letter in the alphabet, such as the letter A, and then of course if it were made large enough to be seen by the human eye. Two entangled letter As should be created and seeable albeit in a lower frequency. If that happened, would the human eye when paired with the brain’s abilities, be able to merge the two into a sharp readable image, or would we see just the individual blurred images captured by just one sensor?
Barbosa doesn’t know, and neither does anyone else, thus he suggests someone or some group build an experiment to find out.
The ability to see things differently than we are accustomed to seeing isn’t anything new of course. Some animals can see things in the infrared spectrum for example and evidence has been slowly emerging as described here, here and here, suggesting that some migrating birds are able to “see” the Earth’s magnetic field. So maybe it’s possible that we see entangled images every day, and just don’t know it.
Hopefully someone will take Barbosa up on his challenge, and then we’ll all find out if it’s possible or not.
More information: Can humans see beyond intensity images? by Geraldo A. Barbosa, arXiv:1202.5434v1 [q-bio.NC] http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5434

Abstract
The human's visual system detect intensity images. Quite interesting, detector systems have shown the existence of different kind of images. Among them, images obtained by two detectors (detector array or spatially scanning detector) capturing signals within short window times may reveal a "hidden" image not contained in either isolated detector: Information on this image depend on the two detectors simultaneously. In general, they are called "high-order" images because they may depend on more than two electric fields. Intensity images depend on the square of magnitude of the light's electric field. Can the human visual sensory system perceive high-order images as well? This paper proposes a way to test this idea. A positive answer could give new insights on the "visual-conscience" machinery, opening a new sensory channel for humans. Applications could be devised, e.g., head position sensing, privacy in communications at visual ranges and many others.

via ArXiv blog
© 2011 PhysOrg.com
"Professor proposes challenge to prove whether people can see entangled images." February 29th, 2012. http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-professor-people-entangled-images.html
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Worrying rise in number of medical students in prostitution over last 10 years

One in ten students now claim to know someone who is using prostitution to pay for university fees, a medical student writing for the Student BMJ claims.
Although the numbers are still small, this figure as a percentage, is two and a half times larger than 10 years ago when just 4% of students claimed to know a peer placing themselves in the sex trade. This figure rose to 6% in 2006 and now stands at just under 10%.
The author, a final year medical student at the University of Birmingham, writes about the obvious correlation between rising tuition fees and the prevalence of prostitution among students. She argues that it is due to the rising costs of both tuition and living that students are finding themselves in huge amounts of debt.
The English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) has noticed an increase in the number of calls from students considering sex work. A spokesperson for the ECP says that many medical students think "prostitution is the only means of financial survival. […] Jobs in shops and pubs that students usually take up are increasingly scarce and low paid".
Medical schools do not believe that prostitution among students is widespread. They have no specific rule on this matter but do suggest that medical students act within the General Medical Council's guidance for medical practice, "Duties of a doctor". However, this does not necessarily state that a doctor cannot be a prostitute. Furthermore, no case has been recorded in which a patient's health has suffered because a doctor also worked in this trade.
The author concludes that because there is no official guidance on the issue, there is no clear answer for students. What is worrying, she writes, is when students think "they have no choice but to resort to prostitution" and questions whether the "hike in fees" will lead to an increase in students entering the sex trade.
An accompanying editorial looks at the case of a medical student who faced either prostitution or "dropping out of medical school". The author, who wishes to remain anonymous, argues that "if studies are not grossly affected by how they are funded […] then it doesn't matter how we make a living". His opinions have, however, been met by some criticism from older students who had feelings of "condemnation" and "disgust" towards a medical student using prostitution to pay off his debts.
Provided by British Medical Journal

"Worrying rise in number of medical students in prostitution over last 10 years." February 28th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-medical-students-prostitution-years.html
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Robert Karl Stonjek