Monday, July 30, 2012

Study of Lucid Dreamers Leads to Better Understanding of Consciousness

Scientists studying lucid dreamers – men and women who can become fully aware in and control their dreams – have pinpointed a specific area of the brain that enables people to perceive the world in a self-reflective manner. The organic components that allow for this kind of metacognition have eluded scientists for some time, and this ground-breaking study could pave the way for a better understanding of how people think and process information.

The human capacity of self-perception, self-reflection and consciousness development are among the unsolved mysteries of neuroscience. Despite modern imaging techniques, it is still impossible to fully visualise what goes on in the brain when people move to consciousness from an unconscious state. The problem lies in the fact that it is difficult to watch our brain during this transitional change. Although this process is the same, every time a person awakens from sleep, the basic activity of our brain is usually greatly reduced during deep sleep. This makes it impossible to clearly delineate the specific brain activity underlying the regained self-perception and consciousness during the transition to wakefulness from the global changes in brain activity that takes place at the same time.

Read more at EurekaAlert.

Top 10 GMO Foods to Avoid


It’s important to note that steering clear from these foods completely may be difficult, and you should merely try finding other sources than your big chain grocer.

If produce is certified USDA-organic, it’s non-GMO (or supposed to be!) Also, seek out local farmers and booths at farmer’s markets where you can be ensured the crops aren’t GMO.

Even better, if you are so inclined: Start organic gardening and grow them yourself.

Top 10 Worst GMO Foods for Your GMO Foods List

1. Corn: This is a no-brainer. If you’ve watched any food documentary, you know corn is highly modified. “As many as half of all U.S. farms growing corn for Monsanto are using genetically modified corn,” and much of it is intended for human consumption. Monsanto’s GMO corn has been tied to numerous health issues, including weight gain and organ disruption.

2. Soy: Found in tofu, vegetarian products, soybean oil, soy flour, and numerous other products, soy is also modified to resist herbicides. As of now, biotech giant Monsanto still has a tight grasp on the soybean market, with approximately 90 percent of soy being genetically engineered to resist Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup. In one single year, 2006, 96.7 million pounds of glyphosate was sprayed on soybeans alone

3. Sugar: According to NaturalNews, genetically-modified sugar beets were introduced to the U.S. market in 2009. Like others, they’ve been modified by Monsanto to resist herbicides. Monsanto has even had USDA and court-related issues with the planting of it’s sugarbeets, being ordered to remove seeds from the soil due to illegal approval.

4. Aspartame: Aspartame is a toxic additive used in numerous food products, and should be avoided for numerous reasons, including the fact that it is created with genetically modified bacteria.

5. Papayas: This one may come as a surprise to all of you tropical-fruit lovers. GMO papayas have been grown in Hawaii for consumption since 1999. Though they can’t be sold to countries in the European Union, they are welcome with open arms in the U.S. and Canada.

6. Canola: One of the most chemically altered foods in the U.S. diet, canola oil is obtained from rapeseed through a series of chemical actions.

7. Cotton: Found in cotton oil, cotton originating in India and China in particular has serious risks.

8. Dairy: Your dairy products contain growth hormones, with as many as one-fifth of all dairy cows in America are pumped with these hormones. In fact, Monasnto’s health-hazardous rBGH has been banned in 27 countries, but is still in most US cows. If you must drink milk, buy organic.

9 and 10. Zucchini and Yellow Squash: Closely related, these two squash varieties are modified to resist viruses.

The dangers of some of these foods are well-known. The Bt toxin being used in GMO corn, for example, was recently detected in the blood of pregnant women and their babies. But perhaps more frightening are the risks that are still unknown.

With little regulation and safety tests performed by the companies doing the genetic modifications themselves, we have no way of knowing for certain what risks these lab-created foods pose to us outside of what we already know.

The best advice: steer clear of them altogether.

Source: Activist Post

Handcuffs and CDs via Shutterstock

Crime fighters have long used brains and brawn, but now a new kind of technology known as “predictive policing” promises to make them more efficient.

A growing number of law enforcement agencies, in the US and elsewhere, have been adopting software tools with predictive analytics, based on algorithms that aim to predict crimes before they happen.

The concept sounds like something out of science fiction and the thriller “Minority Report” based on a Philip K. Dick story.

Without some of the sci-fi gimmickry, police departments from Santa Cruz, California, to Memphis, Tennessee, and law enforcement agencies from Poland to Britain have adopted these new techniques.

The premise is simple: criminals follow patterns, and with software — the same kind that retailers like Wal-Mart and Amazon use to determine consumer purchasing trends — police can determine where the next crime will occur and sometimes prevent it.

Colleen McCue, a behavioral scientist at GeoEye, a firm that works with US Homeland Security and local law enforcement on predictive analytics, said studying criminal behavior was not that different from examining other types of behavior like shopping.

“People are creatures of habit,” she said.

“When you go shopping you go to a place where they have the things you’re looking for… the criminal wants to go where he will be successful also.”

She said the technology could help in cities where tight budgets were forcing patrol reductions.

“When police departments are laying more sworn personnel, they can do more with less,” she said.

The key to success in predictive policing is getting as much data as possible to determine patterns. This can be especially useful in property crimes like auto theft and burglary, where patterns can be detected.

“You can build a model that factors in attributes like the time of year, whether it is hot and humid or cold and snowy, if it is a payday when people are carrying a lot of cash,” says Mark Cleverly, who heads the IBM unit for predictive crime analytics.

“It’s not saying a crime will occur at a particular time and place, no one can do that. But it can say you can expect a wave of vehicle thefts based one everything we know.”

IBM has worked with dozens of agencies such as London’s Metropolitan Police, the Polish National Police and a number of US and Canadian cities.

In Memphis, officials said serious crimes fell 30 percent and violent crimes declined 15 percent since implementing predictive analytics in a program with IBM and the University of Memphis in 2006.

The program known as CRUSH — Criminal Reduction Utilizing Statistical History — targeted certain “hot spots” to allow police to deploy more efficiently.

John Williams, crime analysis manager for the city’s police, said the system has had a dramatic impact, allowing Memphis to get off the list of worst US cities for crime.

“If the data is indicating a hot spot, we are able to immediately deploy resources there. And in a lot of instances we are able to make quality arrests because we’re in the right area at the right time,” he told AFP.

Although beat officers can use their instincts for similar results, Williams said the software could be far more precise, such as predicting burglaries in a small geographic area between 10 pm and 2 am.

In one case, the software was able to help police break up a group that was committing armed robberies on the city’s Hispanic population.

“There were 84 robberies, but we had no idea it was so organized,” Williams said.

By crunching the numbers, police were able to pinpoint the zone and time of likely holdups: “We caught a group of robbers in progress, we had leads on additional robberies,” he said.

Williams said police officials from as far away as Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro and Estonia have come to review the experience in Memphis.

In Los Angeles, another program developed by scientists at the University of California-Los Angeles and Santa Clara University was tested in a single precinct, and resulted in a 12 percent drop in crime while the rest of the city saw a 0.2 percent increase.

That test and others led to the creation of a company called PredPol.

And Los Angeles will expand its use of the program under contract with PredPol, said CEO Caleb Baskin.

Baskin said the system is based on a model from mathematician George Mohler which “is very effective in predicting the time and location for crimes that have not yet taken place.”

PredPol had begun working with other cities in California and “we’ve had inquiries from a lot of places in the US and international locations,” Baskin said.

“The science that underlies the tool will work anywhere. The question is does the agency maintain a database that we can plug into.”

While use of such analytics generally wins plaudits for helping “smarter” policing, it does raise concerns about Big Brother-like snooping.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia, said the use of technology could be positive but that it could lower the threshold for constitutional protections on “unreasonable” searches.

“To stop you and frisk you and search you, a police officer needs reasonable suspicion, so my question is how will this affect reasonable suspicion?” he said.

If the search is based on a computer algorithm, Ferguson said, and the case comes to court, “How do you cross-examine a computer?”

IBM’s Cleverly said the technology can in many cases improve privacy.

“You can pinpoint the record of who has access to information, you have a solid history of what’s going on, so if someone is using the system for ill you have an audit trail,” he said.

As for “The Minority Report” and its predictive software, Cleverly said, “It was a great film and great short story, but it’s science fiction and will remain science fiction. That’s not what this is about.”

Source: Raw Story

Fluoride Lowers IQ in Kids, New Study Shows

A review of some two dozen studies by Harvard University researchers published this month in a peer-reviewed federal journal suggests that fluoride added into water supplies “significantly” decreases the IQ of children, leading to renewed calls by activists to end the controversial practice of fluoridation. Most public water supplies in the United States still have the chemical added in by authorities under the guise of preventing tooth decay.

"The children in high fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ than those who lived in low fluoride areas," noted the Harvard research scientists about the results of their study, echoing claims by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that there is substantial evidence of developmental neurotoxicity associated with the chemical. “The results support the possibility of an adverse effect of high fluoride exposure on children’s neurodevelopment.” 

The researchers also expressed concerns about the potential of fluoride to cause irreversible brain damage in unborn children. "Fluoride readily crosses the placenta,” they observed. “Fluoride exposure to the developing brain, which is much more susceptible to injury caused by toxicants than is the mature brain, may possibly lead to damage of a permanent nature."

The study, which was published on July 20 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives of the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, also called for further studies on the issue. While fluoride may cause neurotoxicity in animals and adults, not enough was known about the chemical’s effects on the neurodevelopment of children, the researchers said.

“Fluoride seems to fit in with lead, mercury, and other poisons that cause chemical brain drain,” noted senior study author Philippe Grandjean, a professor of environmental health at Harvard. “The effect of each toxicant may seem small, but the combined damage on a population scale can be serious, especially because the brain power of the next generation is crucial to all of us.”

Of course, the latest study is hardly the first to document the toxic effects of fluoride on the human brain. Even recently, after some two dozen studies documented the problem, scientists and experts spoke out about the dangers of fluoridation.

“In this study we found a significant dose-response relation between fluoride level in serum and children’s IQ,” observed Fluoride Action Network director Paul Connett, Ph.D., after a previous study was released showing the same effects. “This is the 24th study that has found this association, but this study is stronger than the rest.”

Numerous other studies, including a 2006 report by the U.S. National Academy of Science, have concluded that fluoride affects brain function and can cause other health problems. Most of the research so far, however, has been conducted abroad — much of it in countries without government fluoridation of public water supplies.

In the United States, authorities have been fluoridating the water for decades, and very few proper investigations have studied its potential effects — especially on the developing minds of children. But opposition to the practice is growing quickly, with each new study adding fuel to the fire.

A broad coalition of American attorneys, doctors, dentists, and activists has long demanded that authorities stop adding fluoride to the public’s drinking water. And like other recent studies highlighting the myriad dangers, the latest research — especially because it was published in a federal journal — has already been seized on by opponents of water fluoridation.

"It's senseless to keep subjecting our children to this ongoing fluoridation experiment to satisfy the political agenda of special-interest groups," said attorney Paul Beeber, president of the New York State Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation. "Even if fluoridation reduced cavities, is tooth health more important than brain health? It's time to put politics aside and stop artificial fluoridation everywhere."

Alleged dental benefits aside, other critics of water fluoridation oppose the controversial practice in principle, pointing out that instead of being used to purify the water supply, it is added to treat people in what amounts to the mass-medication of populations without lawfully required individual consent. Some experts even challenge the supposed usefulness of fluoride in preventing cavities.

As evidence about the dangers of fluoridation continues to build, however, communities across America have been debating whether or not to stop medicating people through the water supply. More than a few municipal governments have already stopped the controversial practice altogether. But as analysts have noted, officials and much of the mainstream medical establishment have tended to ignore the growing amount of research exposing the toxicity of fluoride.

“Will the latest Harvard-backed study be ignored by major public health organizations, or will serious change be initiated?” wondered Natural Society’s Anthony Gucciardi, citing decades-old evidence that the toxic chemical leads to a wide array of health problems including brain damage, accelerated tumor growth, and even death. “This should come as no surprise to those who have followed fluoride research over the past several years.”

The most recent study on fluoride relied on more than two dozen previous studies documenting the effects of the chemical on the brains. Researchers concluded that future investigations should examine information on exposure by unborn children and neurobehavioral performance.

Activists hope the latest research may be the beginning of the end for proponents of mass medicating Americans through the water supply. However, considering the vast amount of research already available that has been largely overlooked or even concealed by public health authorities, it remains unclear whether any significant reforms will be forthcoming.

Native American Prophecy