Day: 03/08/2013

Why greeting cards aren’t dead.

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When guests visited the Hirschfeld family’s Manhattan home in the early nineties, Alexa Hirschfeld played gallery owner.

The towheaded elementary schooler would run upstairs to her younger brother James’s closet, then return with handfuls of his artwork. She’d dazzle guests with his latest paintings and sketches, pointing out aspects of each work she knew each visitor would find most compelling. Hirschfeld took care to remember who liked which piece best, and which styles of her brother’s art earned the most attention.

“I never knew what my role in art was,” she reflects. “Because I was such a deep appreciator, and such passionate appreciator. But every time I would try to sit down and be an illustrator or painter, it was just not my best use.”

Nearly two decades later, she is still helping others appreciate art, albeit in a much different medium. We’re sitting at a conference table at her and James’s online card company, Paperless Post, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Hirschfeld looks more than a little tired, slumped into a bright red chair in the otherwise white room. I’ve pulled her away from talks with her Web developer team over a new iPad app.

“Busy day?” I ask. “Every day is busy,” she sighs. It’s less a complaint than an acknowledgment of reality — she’s the 28-year-old cofounder of a startup that’s gained 2 million users over its three years of existence.

The Hirschfeld siblings launched Paperless Post in 2009 based on the idea that people actually want visually pleasing online content. James, then a college senior, felt the Internet lacked artful options for invitations and greeting cards. So he posed the concept of creating a digital card company to Alexa.

“The first thing I said was that people would use it, and I don’t know if they’d pay for it,” she remembers telling her brother. So the siblings researched the approaches of likely competitors, services such as Evite and Facebook Events.

“We looked so closely at all of them. And instead of being disturbed by what we saw, it really helped us narrow our entry point to the market,” Alexa tells me. She speaks slowly and deliberately, looking off at the side wall as she formulates her response. “We basically positioned ourselves as something super narrow and super new — a more design-focused company, which was seeking to bring the best of the old tradition to the new medium, and updating it to make it better where possible.”

The Hirschfelds took care to study what users wanted from online greetings and invitations. People seemed to view the current offerings as wanting in terms of style.

“I thought it was interesting that none of the competitors online really cared about the invitation itself, they all cared about the Web presence. It was like an afterthought. Whereas all the users in the real world really cared about the invitation itself. That was probably the most surprising thing, it was the most heartening thing too. What the consumer wants is, surprise surprise,” she smiles, “pretty things, easy things, responsive things.”

So, Alexa and her brother created a business plan that might seem archaically sensible in the current tech age. “We basically built a pricing model that surgically identified what people wanted to pay us for and what they didn’t want to pay us for,” she explains. “One of the things we figured out early on was that we could create value for people by creating a product that allowed them to design something that they couldn’t design without us.”

Paperless Post began as a fully premium service, with a set price for every card. But the Hirschfelds soon learned that users preferred to pay per card feature. The site now operates on a coin system, with each coin costing about 20 cents. Those coins buy customizable features for your card, such as envelope liners, stamps, additional notes, and different colored backgrounds. Paperless Post cards feature in-house illustrations, as well as graphics made through partnerships with designers like Kate Spade. Sending multiple cards multiplies the number of coins that a particular greeting costs. Some simple, non-customized cards can be sent for free, and new users begin with 25 coins in their digital purse.

Those small coin payments have added up for the startup. It reached a positive cash flow by its second year of business. Paperless Post also has managed to penetrate a market that has evaded its less design-conscious competitors — digital wedding invitations.

Hirschfeld credits the startup’s success to a practical harnessing of aesthetics. “I believe in form,” she tells me, looking off at the wall again, “and the manner of what you say being as important as the content of what you say. And what this company lets people do is in line with that. ”

As a classics major at Harvard University, Alexa wrote her thesis about the poet Constantine Cavafy, which provides some insight into her philosophy about design. “His entire poetics was about the importance of style. A lot of time the style is the substance.” And with Paperless Post, she says, appearance really is the product.

While the company originally found success offering the digital version of something physical, it recently began offering paper versions of its digital cards.

“So many people were asking for it,” Hirschfeld says of the printed product line, “it would have been a risk not to build it and try it.”

So Paperless Post launched its Paper line in October 2012, at a price point five to 10 times higher than its digital cards. Within five weeks of launch, the founders witnessed a day when Paper’s revenue outstripped that of the digital cards.

I ask Hirschfeld whether the success of paper cards spells failure for digital greetings. “No,” she answers with certainty. “It’s that,” she pauses, “basically print is more of a statement now. People still want to make those statements.” She says there are uniquely physical ways in which one uses paper greetings, such as the holiday cards you find displayed on the mantle or the name cards at a wedding reception table. “The physical world is not going away,” she adds, “just items take on different meaning. Paper takes on this archival, very important meaning now that it’s not the only way to communicate something.”

Hirschfeld sees this dual online-offline access as key to a modern content company’s success. She points to Netflix and Amazon (with its Kindle) as companies that have made a flexible medium the product itself — we pay them for the way they allow us to easily access content.

“Seamlessness makes a lot of sense for us,” she explains. “Because even hard paper invitations are a digital product. The physical item itself is not always the most important part, it’s the visual information and the actual data that’s important. A design is an intellectual product.”

Two decades after her years as a child curator, Hirschfeld has found her role in the creative world– connecting people with aesthetics for which they’re happy to pay.

Source: Smart Planet.

Art Glenberg, on how the body affects the mind.

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 picture_of_artPsychologists and philosophers have long thought of the brain as the primary tool for all abstract thinking,  like reasoning or judgment. But recently, science has been changing its mind on this.

Over the last decade researchers have produced striking evidence that the body, and its relationship to the environment, is completely intertwined in the thinking process. For instance, simply sitting in a wobbly chair makes us judge others’ relationships to be unstable. Wearing a white lab coat, thought to be a doctor’s coat, helps our concentration and focus. Literally washing our hands rids us of guilty feelings.

So seemingly inconsequential events have a huge influence over our emotions, thoughts, and decisions. And this, scientists say, is because our abstract knowledge comes not from some disembodied reasoning within the brain but rather from our concrete experiences interacting with the world from the moment we are born. The very structure of reason itself comes from our visual and motor systems.

It was the philosopher Rene Descartes in the 17th Century who famously wrote: I think, therefore I am. But with embodied cognition on the rise in mainstream Western thought it might be time to supplant that statement with: I move, therefore I think.

Our awareness of this phenomenon will have a profound impact on our day-to-day behavior. We now know that our facial expressions can absolutely change our moods. And that children are more successful in math if they use their hands and bodies to guide themselves through algebraic problems. In fact, a new study suggests that the number one thing we can do to preserve our brain function is to be physically active — regardless of any intellectual enrichment.

SmartPlanet spoke with one of the founding fathers of the embodied cognition field, Art Glenberg, professor of psychology at Arizona State University, to talk about this turn of events in how we consider mind and body.

SmartPlanet: So how do you define embodied cognition?

Art Glenberg: I define it as all cognitive processes — from high-level processes like language, to more basic levels like perception — are based on neural and bodily systems of action, perception and emotion. Even when we’re thinking complex thoughts, those thoughts are grounded in our perception and emotional systems.

Do you have an example of embodied cognition at work?

Absolutely. Let me tell you my favorite from my lab, and that’s the Botox experiment.

The question that we were asking was: To what extent do the neural and bodily systems of emotion play a role in understanding language about emotional experiences.

We created sentences that either tapped into happy experiences or sad experiences, or angry experiences. One of the angry sentences is something like, “After talking with the bigot you slammed the car door as hard as you could.”

And a sad one is “It’s your birthday and when you open your email, your inbox is empty.”

We had people reading these sorts of sentences, and we measured how long it takes them to read and understand them.

OK, and how does Botox work into this?

Here’s the key: We measure how long it takes before and after these women get injections of Botox into their corrugator muscle, that’s the muscle in your forehead that you use for frowning.

The Botox is used to relax the muscle and then eventually get rid of frown lines.

Right. So there’s a connection between facial expression and understanding emotional sentences?

Our hypothesis that frowning is not just an expression of an emotion, but it also intensifies the emotion. We wanted to know: If we could block that expression of the emotion, would we then slow the understanding of these emotional sentences?

And did you?

That’s exactly what we found. Before the Botox — when people could frown — they were faster to understand the angry and sad sentences than after the Botox.

And their understanding of the happy sentences was completely unaffected by the Botox. So this sort of peripheral bodily mechanism seems to be having an effect on very higher order cognitive activity — in this case, understanding language about emotions.

As I understand it, this is a major transition in psychological science, to move away from what was thought of as brain as a “central processing unit” — much the way a computer might work — to one where our bodies are central to cognitive processes. What are the implications of embodied cognition for us on our day-to-day? How might this transition in thinking ultimately affect us and our culture?

Well, one example of its impact is understanding how we interact with one another and how we understand what other people are thinking.

For the longest time, the hypothesis was that we understood other people’s thinking, other people’s goals, other people’s intentions through a high-level reasoning process.

And now?

More recently, particularly with the discovery of mirror neurons, the hypothesis has changed drastically.

We better explain what mirror neurons are.

Mirror neurons were discovered in monkeys, in the mid-1990s by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his lab in Parma, Italy. And their finding was that brain cells in the monkey’s motor system were active when the animal was making a particular action, like reaching for a peanut — but that’s obvious. The astounding thing was that the same cell was active to virtually the same extent when the animal saw the experimenter reach for the peanut.

So, it was as if the animal was literally feeling or experiencing what the experimenter might have been feeling, even though the monkey was just watching and not performing the action?

The animal is understanding the experimenter’s action of reaching for the peanut in terms of its own action. The animal assumes that that experimenter’s goal is its own goal.

The data is very clear in showing that, yes, we understand other people’s actions via our own motor system. You can also find this in the emotional domain. For instance, when we see other people being disgusted, retching, we feel sort of sick. And it turns out that the reason we are feeling disgusted upon seeing another person disgusted is that certain parts of the brain are active when a) we feel disgusted and b) we see somebody else being disgusted.

These sensory, motor and emotional processes are playing an important role in out understanding of others.

I also understand you are using the ideas of embodied cognition to help children learn to read. So there are implications for education?

Yes we’ve been developing a technique for teaching elementary school children how to read. The idea is to get the children to appreciate that when they’re reading it requires a simulation of what they’re reading.

Can you give us an example?

Yes, let’s say the child is reading a story about activities on a farm and they read a sentence like “Then the farmer drives the tractor to the barn.”

Well it’s not just being able to say the word. The idea of reading is being able to emulate or imagine the situation of the farmer getting into the tractor and driving the tractor to a particular location.

The way we teach the children to do that is by having them read, but with toys available so that after they read a sentence like that they literally take the toy farmer and put the farmer into the toy tractor and move the toy tractor to the barn.

And what we find is that by helping children to envision what they’re reading that their reading comprehension doubles.

Wow, that is significant.

It’s important to remember that when children are learning to read it’s really hard because the first thing they have to do is learn the sounds of the letters and that’s completely arbitrary.

Right. That is very hard.

And they need to learn how to blend those sounds together just so they can pronounce the words. And those processes in learning to decode the words — to go from what’s on the page to saying them — is so difficult that some children don’t take the next step. They never get to the meaning behind those words. And our intervention is meant to help them take the last step.

Source: Smart planet.

Particle Physics: String Theory And The Nature Of Our Reality

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For thousands of years, humans have attempted to explain the fundamental particles from which all matter is made up of. Today, we call this particle physics. It’s the examination of matter and how it interacts at a subatomic level to create all things that make up our physical reality. It attempts to identify what all matter is made out of and the forces that determine the way particles behave. Looking at things on a small scale like this may help us understand reality on a large scale level. This is because on a physical level, everything is made up of matter which are tiny particles that are influenced by a force that physics is constantly trying to discover.

We are all matter, tiny little particles that are vibrating at a certain frequency. When we look at what determines our behaviour, we have to include thoughts, feelings and emotions, which are all non physical phenomenon that are usually not included in determining the behaviour of particles. It’s my opinion that the underlying forces that influence the behaviour of all matter are influenced by non-physical phenomenon like consciousness. Particles have consciousness, because we have consciousness, and we are a bunch of particles. You can read more about how consciousness creates reality here.

It’s human nature to contemplate and question the reality that we perceive to be surrounding us.  It’s also natural to want to dig deeper and find out as much as we can with the resources that are given to us. I often wonder what scientific discoveries are found within the department of defense who pump trillions of dollars into black projects that go unaccounted for, and a large majority of it is to develop technologies that the human race cannot yet imagine. Obviously science is a big part of that world, a world we do not know of. I’ve always wondered how far behind mainstream science is from that world, maybe one day soon we will find out. At the same time, our gift of intuition can reveal to us everything we desire to know. When you let go of the need for proof, the proof reveals itself to you.

Recently, Garry McKinnon performed the biggest military hack of all time, maybe this can help you better understand information and the science that goes behind it that we do not yet have the privilege  to learn, thus keeping us stuck in old concepts of reality. 

Ancient civilizations like Leumeria, Atlantis, Sumer and the Maya had a tremendous amout of knowledge with regards to the true nature of reality. Their knowledge often dealt with the non-physical world and how it influences our physical reality. Even the predecessors of these civilizations pondered the makeup of the physical world we see all around us. From ancient philosophers like Epicurus who knew of tiny atoms that were invisible to the human eye, to Plato who was aware of the immaterial world, physical and non-physical all the way up to modern metaphysics and philosophy. It seems that all of the matter that makes up planet Earth has been part of the pondering of what is. Humans, (matter, energy, vibration) however you want to consider a human being, is conscious, it is perceiving and thinking, it has emotions and all of these affect the vibrational frequency of the matter that makes up the being. I believe that particle physics, and our attempts to explain the behaviour and matter that make up our physical reality, is influenced by non physical things which is why science has such a hard time explaining the true nature of reality, but continues to creep closer and closer to truth. I also believe that groups on the planet have tapped into this non physical reality, and understand it very well. Let’s take a look at another popular theory of reality, string theory.

String Theory

From my research, string theory can be a pretty complicated thing to understand. At it’s basic level, the general idea and concept behind it is not. String theory attempts to look at the nature of our reality on the smallest possible scale. It suggests that our reality is made up of tiny strings, that these strings are behind the observable physical phenomenon that make up our physical world. It suggests that reality is made up of tiny strings of energy that vibrate. The frequency of their vibrations determines the outcome and behaviour of the particles we know to be real. According to string theory, matter is the manifestation of the vibrational frequency of the string. This is interesting because if matter is the manifestation of the vibrational frequency, then our physical reality must be a manifestation of a vibrational frequency as well. We are all atoms that vibrate at a frequency, the rate and nature of our vibration (human beings) is responsible for manifesting the matter that we call physical phenomenon, is it not? This gives further credence to the suggestion that we create our own reality, and the rate which we vibrate at plays a very significant role in manifesting physical reality.

Think of it like a guitar string, depending on how the string is plucked, different musical notes are created, similarly the particles we observe using particle accelerators could be thought of in this manner. They are simply expressing themselves according to the vibrational frequency of the string.

This is the basic underlying example of string theory. It goes into different particles, like bosons, which often cary forces and their relations to fermions which are elementary particles like electrons. Bosons are the force carriers and fermions are usually just associated with matter. The relationship between the two account for multiple versions of string theory, and superstring theory. String theory also goes into multiple dimensions, which is another interesting topic I believe holds truth. I definitely believe in multiple dimensions of reality, I also believe not only in extraterrestrial life, but extra dimensional life that is able to perceive dimensions below it.

Questions

The only question I have, and maybe some of you out there can answer it. In string theory, what determines the vibrational frequency of the string? If the vibrational frequency of the string determines how particles act, interact and react to make up our physical reality, we must look at what is determining the vibration that in turn creates our reality. Again I believe this answer to be consciousness. I don’t think the string gives way to the existence of particles which show the property of consciousness. I believe consciousness exists in the first place and it determines the vibration of the string. But then what creates the consciousness that determines the vibrational frequency? Very interesting.

I believe non-physical phenomenon like thoughts, emotions, feelings and perception all make up the rate at which our atoms vibrate. I believe our vibrational frequency has the potential to enter into new dimensions of reality. I think the natural state of a human being is to exist at a high vibrational frequency, and I believe many things on this planet are designed to keep us in a vibrational frequency lock. This includes all major industries we use to govern our everyday lives.

The video below shows that scientists are still trying to determine weather or not it would be physically possible to go through a wormhole. At the same time, I believe our black budget world has already developed the technology to do so. Like I mentioned earlier, this is why I believe there is a group on the planet that operates at a completely different level of understanding about science and technology, while the mainstream world is left to ponder what is already known.

Sources:

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/research/gr/public/qg_ss.html

http://plus.maths.org/content/string-theory-newton-einstein-and-beyond

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/the-basic-elements-of-string-theory.html

 

 

Children In Europe Develop Narcolepsy After Receiving H1N1 Pandemrix Vaccine.

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Over 800 children in Europe have developed Narcolepsy after receiving the H1N1 Pandemrix flu vaccination. GlaxoSmithKline is a British multinational pharmaceutical, biologics, vaccines and consumer healthcare company that is headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It ranks among the top five largest pharmaceutical companies in the world along with Pfizer, Novartis, and Sanofi. It’s a well known fact that most medical research is funded by large scale pharmaceutical companies like this one, keep that in mind next time you decide to take a vaccine, we urge you to do your research beyond ‘medical’ literature.

A lot of evidence has emerged against the H1N1 flu vaccine (Pandemrix)  that was administered to children in Europe during the 2009-2010 swine flu “pandemic.”  It turns out that this vaccine was responsible for causing permanent side effects in multiple children that received it. Hundreds of children who live in Sweden now have narcolepsy as a result of the vaccine, and many people within Europe are starting to ask questions about the overall safety of flu vaccines. Scientists have found a link between Pandemrix and an increased risk of narcolepsy, which echoes pervious findings in several other European countries. A study by the United Kingdom’s Health Protection Agency (HPA) and two hospitals found that the risk of narcolepsy in children aged 4 to 18 after receiving the vaccine was 1 in 55,000 doses. I have a feeling that these numbers are skewed, because there is so much evidence that proves how harmful this vaccine was, with no way to deny it. I would not be surprised if the HPA (formerly the British Medical Journal) decreased the ratio, sometimes corrupt agencies who are ‘caught’ agree with findings, to give the illusion that they are not involved. Either way you look at it, there should be a zero percent chance of any damage. Another point to consider is, just because some do not show observable harmful consequences of vaccinations, does not mean that those consequences do not exist, vaccinations are full of multiple toxins that are not needed in the human body. The vaccine was so toxic that the use of it was restricted to children under the age of 20 in all of Europe since July of 2011.

These findings suggest there is an increased risk in children of narcolepsy after Pandemrix vaccination, and this is consistent with findings from studies in other European countries. Elizabeth Miller, MB BS, a consultant epidemiologist with the HPA.

Emmanuel Mignot, one of the world’s leading experts on narcolepsy is funded by GlaxoSmithKline, he also came out and voiced his opinion and said that there is no doubt whatsoever that the Pandemrix is responsible for causing the increase in narcolepsy cases in European children. Sweden seemed to be the country hit hardest, approximately five million Swedes chose to take the H1N1 vaccine in 2009-2010. Since then, over 200 cases of narcolepsy have been reported and confirmed, hundreds of young people have had their lives almost completely torn apart. In 2011, the pharmaceutical company pleaded guilty to marketing vaccines that were known to be contaminated with bacteria, and this all started from an inside whistleblower. The fact that the company was aware of the harmful toxins and bacteria within the vaccine should set off alarm bells of those who read this. Real health care starts in your kitchen, your immune system and consciousness is more than enough to protect you against harmful diseases. Pharmaceutical companies seem to have an anterior motive that goes beyond money, and into the manipulation of human DNA.

Vaccines have been garnering a lot of attention over the past few years, and rightfully so. The world is finally waking up,  medical research and the big pharmaceutical industry are becoming more transparent by the day. Vaccines contain Mercury, Msg, Formaldehyde, Aluminum and are the cause of multiple diseases. Your immune system and a healthy kitchen is all you need, don’t let your immune system become dependent on something that isn’t good for you, parents, wake up! From the day your child is born they are injected with harmful toxic chemicals. 

 Sources:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/22/us-narcolepsy-vaccine-pandemrix-idUSBRE90L07H20130122

http://www.naturalnews.com/039116_children_harmed_vaccines.html

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Concerns/h1n1_narcolepsy_pandemrix.html

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/pandemrix-and-narcolepsy/

FDA Admits Chicken Meat Contains Arsenic.

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Killing animals for mass consumption is inhumane and not harmonious with our hearts. We have been desensitized to inhumane practices within the food industry. It’s been over 6 years since The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) found that chicken contained Arsenic. With the risk of being exposed, the FDA has finally admitted to this fact and no longer can they continue with their desire to sweep this information under the rug.

Ingested inorganic arsenic is metabolized to mono and dimethylated compounds, these are predominantly found in urine. Big pharmaceutical companies produce and sell four arsenic compounds that are added to animal feed for turkey, chicken and swine production to increase weight and improve pigmentation of the meat. As far back as 2006, the IATP’s report Playing Chicken: Avoiding Arsenic in your meat estimated that more than 70 percent of all U.S. chickens raised for meat are fed arsenic. That report found detectable levels of arsenic in many  brand name poultry products form supermarkets and fast food restaurants. One way farmers add arsenic to chicken feed is through drugs like Pfizer’s Roxarsone.

Arsenic’s a poison that causes cancer, among other harm. The FDA can’t seriously uphold its public health mission while allowing residues of arsenic in the meat our children and families eat. – David Wallinga, M.D. IATP

It’s about time that the FDA took action, they have confirmed that chickens given the drug do test positive for inorganic arsenic which, as stated above was found as early as 2006. Despite finding this fact in 2006, the industry continued to ignore it and steadily maintained that arsenic could not and did not make it into the meat. While admitting to the arsenic, the FDA continues to maintain that there is no meaningful risk to those eating the chicken. It is no surprise that this point is emphasized by the pharmaceutical company and the National Chicken Council. How can the FDA claim that arsenic at a low level is still safe to eat? How can we be sure it is at a low level given how cancer rates are rising every year? Even though the FDA admits to arsenic being a carcinogen, meaning it increases the risk of cancer, they still justify its placement in the chicken we eat. Chicken littler containing arsenic is also fed to cows in factory beef operations. So the arsenic that’s pooped out by the chickens gets consumed and concentrated in the tissues of cows, which is then ground into hamburger to be consumed by the masses who don’t even know they’re eating it.

Human health affects of arsenic exposure, especially inorganic arsenic exposure, can vary depending on route of exposure. For ingestion, adverse effects are most often manifested as skin discolouration and lesions and in the gastrointestinal tract (nausea, diarrhoea, and abdominal pain). Ingestion has also been linked to cancer of the skin, bladder, liver and lung. Inhalation exposure has been linked to an increased incidence of irritation of mucous membranes and lung cancer. Inorganic arsenic is classified as a known human carcinogen.

The state of Maryland has recently passed a bill that bans arsenic in chicken feed. Pfizer’s roxarsone arsenic based drug has been in chicken feed since the 1940′s. The inorganic arsenic not only ends up in meat, it ends up in soil. The chickens in Maryland, for example, produce about a billion pounds of waste a year and that waste gets used as fertilizer. Maryland is the first state to pass such a bill, and it is logical to assume that this problem exists with chicken feed, the chicken meat and the fertilizer from chicken waste in all other states too. It’s good to know that this is becoming known, and I am sure this information will spread as we continue to wake up.

 

Sources:

http://www.epa.gov/teach/chem_summ/Arsenic_summary.pdf

http://www.mnn.com/food/healthy-eating/blogs/arsenic-in-chicken-feed-affects-more-than-chickens

http://www.iatp.org/blog/201112/arsenic—it’s-in-animal-feed-too

http://grist.org/food-safety/2011-06-08-fda-admits-supermarket-chickens-test-positive-for-arsenic/

http://worldtruth.tv/fda-finally-admits-chicken-meat-contains-cancer-causing-arsenic/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/08/arsenic-chicken_n_873299.html

Beam of Hope.

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Beth colorfully compares her first proton therapy treatment session to watching a scene from a science fiction movie unfold around her. Although the pristine white walls and state-of-the-art equipment conjure up images from the future, the technology will soon be a reality on the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital campus. The hospital is currently building the world’s only proton center dedicated solely to the treatment of children.

Part of a $198 million project to enhance the hospital’s clinical and laboratory facilities, the St. Jude Red Frog Events Proton Therapy Center is slated to open in 2015.

The new center will greatly enhance the hospital’s ability to conduct research optimizing the use of proton therapy in children.

“This facility will enable us to complete important trials while providing the support that only St. Jude can provide to patients,” says Larry Kun, MD, chair of St. Jude Radiological Sciences.

What is proton therapy?

Proton therapy offers tremendous advantages compared to X-ray technology because it is more precise and may be used to deliver a potentially higher dose of radiation to the tumor with fewer side effects. By confining radiation exposure to the tumor itself, the pinpointed therapy reduces a person’s risk of experiencing toxic effects on major organs and of developing secondary cancers later in life.

“It’s exciting to hear that St. Jude is building its own proton therapy center,” adds Beth, who participated in a St. Jude protocol that involved traveling to Florida for treatment.

Beth was found to have a rare brain tumor known as craniopharyngioma when she was a college sophomore. After six weeks of daily proton therapy, which lasted from one to two hours each, Beth’s tumor is now smaller.

“St. Jude has given Beth hope, and that was more than any other therapy could offer,” says Beth’s mom.

Precise treatment

Beth’s doctor, Thomas Merchant, DO, PhD, division chief
of St. Jude Radiation Oncology, says proton therapy represents the next logical step for the hospital as it remains a world leader in the research and treatment of brain tumors and radiation therapy. Proton therapy can deliver high radiation doses directly to tumors while sparing normal tissues and reducing the side effects of traditional X-ray therapy. Proton therapy’s chief advantage is the ability to control its depth and intensity in tissue. The more precise the beam, the more targeted the therapy.

“It’s very important that we deliver precise treatment to children, and we’ve designed our facility in such a way that when it opens in 2015, it will have one of the narrowest beams in the United States,” says Merchant, who toured leading proton centers throughout the world in researching the project.

In addition to treating brain tumors, the new technology will also be used to treat Hodgkin lymphoma and other solid tumors such as Ewing sarcoma, neuroblastoma and retinoblastoma. Treatment sessions may range from 20 minutes to an hour.

“It’s been wonderful to be able to offer the treatment to our patients at the facility in Florida, but it’s a huge challenge for the families to have to uproot again,” says St. Jude social worker Melanie Russell. “When we have our own treatment facility here, it will be so much easier for our families.”

The new tower housing the facility will also include expanded surgical suites, an advanced Intensive Care Unit, the new Computational Biology department and a global education and collaboration center.

Source: http://www.stjude.org

NASA Discovers Hidden Portals In Earth’s Magnetic Field.

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Our planet has come a long way in scientific breakthroughs and discoveries. Mainstream science is beginning to discover new concepts of reality that have the potential to change our perception about our planet and the extraterrestrial environment that surrounds it forever. Star gates, wormholes, and portals have been the subject of conspiracy theories and theoretical physics for decades, but that is all coming to an end as we continue to grow in our understanding about the true nature of our reality.

In physics, a wormhole was a hypothetical feature of space time that would be a shortcut through space-time. We often wonder how extraterrestrials could travel so far and this could be one of many explanations. Although scientists still don’t really understand what they have found, it does open the mind to many possibilities.

Turning science fiction into science fact seems to happen quite often these days and NASA did it by announcing the discovery of hidden portals in Earth’s magnetic field.  NASA calls them X-points or electron diffusion regions. They are places where the magnetic field of Earth connects to the magnetic field of the Sun, which in turn creates an uninterrupted path leading from our own planet to the sun’s atmosphere which is 93 million miles away.

NASA used its THEMIS spacecraft, as well as a European Cluster probe, to examine this phenomenon. They found that these portals open and close dozens of times each day. It’s funny, because there is a lot of evidence that points toward the sun being a giant star gate for the ‘gods’ to pass back and forth from other dimensions and universes. The portals that NASA has discovered are usually located tens of thousands of kilometres from Earth and most of them are short-lived; others are giant, vast and sustained.

As far as scientists can determine, these portals aid in the transfer of tons of magnetically charged particles that flow from the Sun causing the northern and southerns lights and geomagnetic storms. They aid in the transfer of the magnetic field from the Sun to the Earth. In 2014, the U.S. space agency will launch a new mission called Magnetospheric Multi scale Mission (MMS) which will include four spacecraft that will circle the Earth to locate and then study these portals. They are located where the Earth and the Sun’s magnetic fields connect and where the unexplained portals are formed.

NASA funded the University of Iowa for this study, and they are still unclear as to what these portals are. All they have done is observed charged particles flowing through them that cause electro-magnetic phenomenon in Earth’s atmosphere.

Magnetic portals are invisible, unstable and elusive. they open and close without warming and there are no signposts to guide is in – Dr Scudder, University of Iowa

Mainstream science continues to grow further, but I often get confused between mainstream science, and science that is formed in the black budget world. It seems that information and discovery isn’t information and discovery without the type of ‘proof’ that the human race requires. Given that the human race requires, and has a certain criteria for ‘proof’, which has been taught to us by the academic world, information can easily be suppressed by concealing that ‘proof’. It’s no secret that the department of defence receives trillions of dollars that go unaccounted for and everything developed within the United States Air Force Space Agency remains classified. They are able to classify information for the sake of ‘national security’. Within the past few years, proof has been emerging for a number of phenomenon that would suggest a whole other scientific world that operates separately from mainstream science.

We have the technology to take ET home, anything you can imagine we already have the technology to do, but these technologies are locked up in black budget projects. It would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity – Ben Rich, Fmr CEO of LockHeed Skunk Works

I use this video a lot in many of my posts, but it is just a profound statement, I love to use it over and over. He is x NASA personnel so it kind of fits in with the article.

Sources:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/29jun_hiddenportals/

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/mag-portals.html

Urge Feds to Cut Funding for Cruel Experiments at UCSF.

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The University of California-San Francisco (UCSF)—which receives half a billion dollars a year in taxpayer funds for research—has a long history of abusing mice, monkeys, and other animals imprisoned in its laboratories and violating federal animal welfare laws and guidelines. New documents obtained by PETA reveal that these miserable conditions continue to plague the more than 1 million animals in UCSF’s laboratories.

Government reports and internal UCSF records document more than 100 violations of federal animal welfare laws and guidelines in just the past few years. Among the dozens of violations:

·         Experimenters didn’t provide pain relief to mice and rats who had their skulls, backs, and abdomens cut into.

·         Experimenters placed live newborn mice inside a freezer meant for dead animals.

·         Experimenters cut out both of a rabbit’s eyes in an unapproved surgery.

·         Experimenters cut the toes off of mice without pain relief, and mice died from dehydration because staff failed to notice that they didn’t have any water.  

A rhesus monkey named Peanut was subjected to multiple invasive brain surgeries and was deliberately deprived of food so that he would perform tasks while locked in a restraint chair. Peanut lost 25 percent of his body weight, but it was only after he was killed that experimenters realized that Peanut’s jaw didn’t open properly and that he probably hadn’t been able to chew food.

A monkey named Squinty suffered with chronic dermatitis for more than a year. Red rashes and open lesions covered his body, and one medical report noted that the condition was so severe that there was “[n]o normal skin to provide a comparison.”

Another monkey named Petra was subjected to invasive brain experiments and suffered chronic and painful complications, including a terrible bacterial infection in the wound where her head had been cut open. Experimenters continued to torment Petra for nearly two years despite her deteriorating health. She rapidly began to lose weight, circled endlessly in her cage, and ripped out her own hair.

UCSF’s history of violating federal animal welfare laws and guidelines dates back more than 15 years and includes a $92,500 fine that the university was forced to pay in 2005 for dozens of violations of the Animal Welfare Act.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) policies require facilities receiving taxpayer money to abide by animal welfare laws and guidelines as a condition of their receiving grants, but last year, UCSF received more than $500 million in taxpayer money—half of which was likely spent on experiments involving animals—even though it continues to regularly violate these provisions.

Please join PETA and call on NIH to cut taxpayer funding for experiments on animals at UCSF.

Source:PETA

URL: http://www.peta.org/index_landing.asp

Warning Against Calcitonin Salmon for Osteoporosis — Cancer Risk Cited.

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FDA advisors recommend against use of calcitonin salmon (a man-made version of the hormone found in salmon) for the treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis because the potential cancer risks outweigh the benefits, Reuters reports.

Briefing materials prepared by the FDA say that the potential for cancer risk “appears plausible” and that “significant questions” remain about whether therapy is effective in reducing fractures.

Currently available as a nasal spray (Miacalcin, Fortical) or injectable solution (Miacalcin), calcitonin products accounted for about 5% of sales of osteoporosis medications in 2011, according to the report.

The FDA will make a final determination after considering the advisory committee’s recommendations.

Source:Reuters

GERD Guidelines Issued.

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New guidelines on the diagnosis and management of gastroesophageal reflux disease appear in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

Among the strong recommendations with the highest level of evidence:

  • Don’t use barium radiographs to diagnose the condition.
  • Use an 8-week course of proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs) for symptom relief and healing of erosive esophagitis.
  • The various PPIs show the same level of efficacy.
  • There is not an increased risk for adverse cardiovascular events among PPI users taking clopidogrel.

Source:American Journal of Gastroenterology