Almost 70% of the dishes contain a layer containing PFOA which means perfluorooctanoic acid (so -called non-stick pans), and other compounds which are also used to make garments resistant to spots. Many scientists and studies agreed that these non-stick pans are detrimental to your health. When the non-stick pans are heated, they release toxin in the air in your kitchen. When they are heated to 680 degrees, they release six toxic gases.
When making non-stick metal plates, materials and substances marked with PFAS are used. All these toxic vessels are characterized by the so- called “non-stick coating”, which provides the food to burn or stick to the bottom.
Recent studies show that some kinds of PFASs cause severe liver toxicity, disruption of metabolism and immunity disorders. Also these can cause several types of cancer (cancer testis and kidney cancer). It is also considered that the toxins impede the baby while it is in the uterus.
Unfortunately, these toxins are not transmitted only on the food, they are also spread in the air, drinking water, earth and they pollute the entire environment.
What is more alarmingly is the fact that vessels heated on 1000 degrees emit the harmful agent PFIB (perfluoroisobutene). These toxins can be accumulated in the blood, and can lead to chronic disease.
In order to avoid this non – stick pans, it is the best to use ceramic or glass cookware. Experts say that consumers should be aware of the potential health risk when using products containing perfluorooctanoic acid.
In aviation circles, the talk of the future involves phrases like “space planes” and “hypersonic atmospheric flight vehicles.” A group presently in the spotlight is from Germany; they are carrying a roadmap for low-cost space access which involves calling upon the air passenger market for fast-travel flights.
Welcome to the world of SpaceLiner, which, when fully developed, could have dramatic impact in global aerospace. The DLR Institute of Space Systems said this suborbital, hypersonic, winged passenger transport idea is under investigation at DLR-SART. (DLR is a German aerospace research agency and it evaluates complex systems of space flight. SART is Space Launcher Systems Analysis.)
SpaceLiner is a rocket-propelled intercontinental passenger transport, described by the institute as a two-stage vehicle powered by rocket propulsion.
Guy Norris, Los Angeles-based senior editor for Aviation Week, described it as a rocket-powered system that incorporates a flyback booster and other dual-use technologies which could also be applied to “architectures for launching payloads into low Earth orbit.” Conceived as a winged airliner carrying 50 passengers from Europe to Australia in 90 minutes, Norris added that, to serve a potentially larger market, DLR has also outlined a 100-seat version that would be capable of one-hour intercontinental and transpacific missions.
The concept being laid out in detail sounds like a business feasibility study as much as a technical initiative. The backdrop for all this lies in the cost factor in space transportation. This has been a key challenge. Production is one of the main cost drivers due to the very low manufacturing numbers of stages and engines. If the number of launches per year were to be increased, manufacturing and operating cost of launcher hardware would shrink. Without a new market application for space technology no improvement is to be expected, said the Institute. What could ignite a larger market?
“A new kind of high-speed transport based on a two-stage Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) has been proposed by DLR under the name SpaceLiner,” they stated.
Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen will be used as propellants. They said the combination was both powerful and eco-friendly.”
The reusable vehicle would be accelerated by 11 liquid rocket engines—nine for the booster and two for the passenger stage, operated using the cryogenic liquid oxygen and hydrogen.
Mark Prigg in the Daily Mail said that “Engineers predict that advances in materials could be combined with new cooling technologies and heat shielding to safeguard the SpaceLiner’s structures against the intense heat of hypersonic flight.”
The passenger cabin could function as an autonomous rescue capsule that could separate from the vehicle in case of an emergency, allowing the passengers to return safely to Earth.
The SpaceLiner could play a cost-cutting role by stimulating large production runs of reusable rocket engines and booster vehicles.
Martin Sippel, leader of the SpaceLiner project at DLR’s Space Launcher Systems Analysis group, talked to Aviation Week about these plans.
“We could increase hundredfold the number of launches and, as it is a reusable vehicle designed for between 150 and 300 flights, you have serial production of engines. If you have 11 engines per vehicle then you would build 2,000 engines per year or so. That’s a huge production run, and that was the motivation.”
The concept involves a two-stage, vertical-takeoff configuration of a large unmanned booster and a manned stage designed for 50 passengers, for example, and two crew members. The fully-reusable vehicle is accelerated by a total of eleven liquid rocket engines (9 for the booster, 2 for the passenger stage), which are to be operated using cryogenic liquid oxygen (LOX) and hydrogen (LH2).
After engine cut-off, the orbiter stage is to enter a high-speed gliding flight phase and be capable of traveling long intercontinental distances within a very short time. Altitudes of 80 kilometers and Mach numbers beyond 20 are projected, depending on the mission.
Long-distance trips such as Europe –Australia could be accomplished in 90 minutes. An intercontinental route between Europe and North-West America could be reduced to flight times of slightly more than one hour.
We are talking about a new era, potentially, of rocket-based, ultra-fast transportation as a new application for launch vehicles.
The group mentioned other intercontinental missions, which potentially could generate market demand.
With SpaceLiner travel, the thinking is that production rates of the reusable launch vehicles and rocket engines could increase hundredfold.
What’s next on their roadmap? Norris said that early concept reviews would take place around 2016-17; the next review, in 2019-20. After that, Norris described various next steps before building the first hardware in 2030. Flight tests of the prototype could begin in 2035, with service entry in the 2040s. “It sounds a long way off into the future but we need to achieve our 2020 goal of funding, otherwise we cannot keep these later dates,” Sippel said inAviation Week.
Calcar calcanei is a bulge on the heel bone mostly downwardly positioned and this is considered to be a reactive creation of bones due to chronic mechanical overload which inflames during walking and then causes ache. This is mostly the case in elders and people who stand a lot because of their jobs. This condition is characterized with a sharp pain in the middle of the heel. Painful symptoms appear in the first steps after sleep or prolonged sitting in the heel area or in the inside surface of the heel. This pain can be so persistent that people feel as if a nail is piercing their heels. Moreover, traditional methods of healing are far more efficient than any store bought ointments.
We have tried several methods which proved as efficient. We recommend them to all of those who have this problem.
-The simplest cure is to slowly hit the heel onto the floor several times per day since this increases the circulation and calcium metabolism and prevents salt piling.
Potato compress also helps with the pain. You need to wash the potato and ground it together with the peel. Apply from the mixture onto a gauze and apply it to the heel. Wrap a nylon bag and put on socks. Change the compress on a daily basis and this treatment lasts around 7 to 8 days.
-Honey and salt compress. Mix honey and salt in the same proportion (1:1) and apply onto the heel. Then put a piece of gauze, and put a plaster and wrap it with a nylon bag. Put on socks and sleep with them. Apply these compresses each night. After only few treatments you will feel less pain. The treatment should last 10 days after which the pain will disappear completely.
-A healing tincture with aspirin. Ground 10 aspirin pills (200 mg) and mix them with 250 ml of Alcohol (or medicinal alcohol from 70 percent) and leave it like that for 1 to 2 days. Mix the tincture each night and soak a piece of gauze in it. Put the gauze onto the heel, wrap it with nylon gauze and put on a sock. Wear it through the night and in the morning wash it off and apply some oily feet cream. After 10 treatments the feet and heels will be free from rough skin. Also, you can cleanse the feet with a brush or a pumice stone and afterwards apply cream.
Cardiovascular disease is a major cause of death in patients with a kidney transplant. This should be no surprise as many of these patients get transplanted with a significant history of traditional as well as non-traditional risk factors related to CKD or wait-time on dialysis. I encourage all my patients to exercise and stay active in the first year after transplant, but don’t know exactly how much or what type of exercise is required to provide an unclear amount of cardiovascular benefit.
In ESRD patients, aerobic training has been shown to reduce the pulse wave velocity (PWV), which is a non-invasive measure of arterial stiffness that has been positively correlated with mortality in kidney transplant recipients. Several small studies have found that aerobic training or aerobic plus resistance exercise training improves cardiorespiratory fitness, quality of life, and hand strength, but none have evaluated the impact on cardiovascular measures. However, a new study in AJKD by Greenwood et al measured the effect of three exercise programs on pulse wave velocity, cardiorespiratory fitness, and serum inflammatory markers. This trial randomized 60 adult kidney transplant recipients within the first year of transplant to one of three arms: an individualized aerobic training program, a resistance-training program, or usual care. The intervention groups were both required to attend twice-weekly outpatient exercise and education sessions, and to also undergo a home-based exercise session once a week for a total of 12 weeks. The study measured PWV, VO2peak and serum inflammatory markers before and after the 12-week period.
Compared to usual care, the mean difference in PWV was significantly lower at 12 weeks in patients who completed either the aerobic training or resistance training (both with P<0.001). Both exercise interventions were also associated with significant improvements in the relative and absolute VO2peak. There were no significant differences in inflammatory markers between the three groups. Overall, this suggests that a supervised exercise program using either aerobic or resistance training improves cardiorespiratory fitness and reduces arterial stiffness. One caveat to this conclusion is that both exercise intervention groups had 7 participants (35% of each arm) who were lost to follow up because they needed to return to work and presumably could not attend the outpatient sessions. This suggests that the exercise program required to meet these outcomes may be too cumbersome for patients who are further from surgery and returning to work. The analysis only included patients who completed the trial, and exclusion of the dropouts may have biased the results. Despite the small sample sizes in this pilot study, it seems that in the short term, adhering to a rigorous exercise program reduces the PWV and improves fitness in kidney transplant recipients. It is unknown if the PWV returned to baseline in those patients who stop exercising. An intense 12-week regimen seems to be beneficial, but we should also think about exercise interventions that are sustainable for the long-term as well.
Researchers have unraveled the mystery of the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile, with help from another Leonardo da Vinci painting that uses the same clever technique.
The Mona Lisa has captivated people for centuries because her smile is so elusive; from one angle, she seems to be smiling, but when you look directly at her lips, her smile appears to flatten. It’s really a clever visual trick, in which subtle blending of colors exploits our peripheral vision.
And now it appears da Vinci had used the trick before. A recently discovered earlier da Vinci portrait, “La Bella Principessa,” uses the same visual effect to create the impression of an elusive smile.
La Bella Principessa
The girl in the portrait is Bianca, the illegitimate daughter of Ludovico Sforza, who ruled Milan during the 1490s. Her father commissioned the painting in 1496, in honor of Bianca’s upcoming wedding to a commander of the Milanese army. She was 13 years old.
Bianca’s portrait conveys all the tension and complexity of her situation. When viewed from a distance, Bianca seems to be smiling. But up close, her mouth seems to tilt downward, giving her a grim, melancholy look. And like the Mona Lisa, Bianca’s smile appears more readily in viewers’ peripheral vision, and fades when viewers look directly at her lips.
“As the smile disappears as soon as the viewer tries to ‘catch it’, we have named this visual illusion the ‘uncatchable smile,’” researchers Alessandro Soranzo and Michelle Newberry of Sheffield Hallam University wrote in apaper published in the journal Vision Research.
The Uncatchable Smile
To find out how da Vinci’s subtle illusions worked, Soranzo and Newberry set up a series of experiments in which people either viewed the portraits from a distance or saw blurred versions to simulate peripheral vision. (We see things in the center of our field of vision more sharply than we see things on the edges.)
People agreed that the Mona Lisa and “La Bella Principessa” appeared more content, on a numerical scale from one to seven, from a distance than when viewed up close, but distance didn’t make a difference for “Portrait of a Girl,” painted in 1470 by Piero del Pollaiuolo, who didn’t use da Vinci’s visual illusion. Digitally blurred copies of the images created the same effect as distance.
Next, to test how precisely this ambiguity was achieved, researchers showed subjects copies of the paintings with black rectangles over the subjects’ eyes, mouth, or both.
With the mouths covered, the ambiguity vanished. That indicated that the subjects’ shifting expressions were originating from their mouths.
Here’s the Trick
The portraits’ mouths seem to change their slant thanks to a technique called sfumato, which blends colors and shades to produce soft, gradual transitions between shapes, without any clear outlines. In both the Mona Lisa and “La Bella Principessa,” da Vinci used sfumato to soften the outlines of the mouth, so there’s no clear line between the lips and the rest of the face.
When a viewer focuses on the subject’s eyes, the sfumato technique creates the illusion of the lips slanting upward. But when you look at her lips themselves, they seem somewhat pursed.
That’s why the Mona Lisa seems to smile more when you’re not looking at her mouth.
Soranzo told Discover, “Given da Vinci’s mastery of the technique, and its subsequent use in the Mona Lisa, it is quite conceivable that the ambiguity of the effect was intentional.” And da Vinci may have experimented with the technique even earlier, in his 1483 work “Virgin of the Rocks,” although that hasn’t been proven yet.
“Many of Leonardo’s followers used a similar technique, but without they haven’t been able to achieve the same result,” said Soranzo. Soranzo next intends to analyze da Vinci’s work in comparison to his followers’ in order to better understand the secrets of that subtle smile.
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