Mind over matter: Study shows we consciously exert control over individual neurons
University of California — Los Angeles: University of California — Los Angeles Every day our brains are flooded by stimulation — sounds, sights and smells. At the same time, we are constantly engaged in an inner dialogue, ruminating about the past, musing about the future. Somehow the brain filters all this input instantly, selecting some things for long- or short-term storage, discarding others and focusing in on what’s most important at any given instant.
How this competition is resolved across multiple sensory and cognitive regions in the brain is not known; nor is it clear how internal thoughts and attention decide what wins in this continual contest of stimulation.
Now a collaboration between UCLA scientists and colleagues from the California Institute of Technology has shown that humans can actually regulate the activity of specific neurons in the brain, increasing the firing rate of some while decreasing the rate of others. And study subjects were able to do so by manipulating an image on a computer screen using only their thoughts.
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EarthTalk: What are the benefits of “hydroponic” growing of lettuce and other crops? and can pollution affect my child’s IQ?
Dear EarthTalk: What are the environmental benefits of the hydroponic growing of lettuce and other crops?
– Bruce Keeler, Oakland, CA
While organic agriculture is all the rage, growing by leaps and bounds to meet increased consumer demand for healthier food, another option that’s less well known but just as healthy is hydroponics, whereby plants are grown in nutrient-fortified water-based solutions without a soil substrate whatsoever. Besides not needing chemical fertilizers or pesticides (most of which are toxic as well as derived from petroleum), hydroponics also take up much less space than traditional agriculture, meaning that even an apartment window can yield impressive amounts of food throughout the calendar year.
Hydroponic growing not only eliminates
the need for chemical fertilizers and
pesticides but also takes up much less
space than traditional agriculture,
meaning that even an apartment window
can yield impressive amounts of food
throughout the calendar year.
Photo credit: Ars Electronica,
The Window Project
In traditional forms of agriculture, soil facilitates the process of providing the mineral nutrients that plants need to grow. Organisms in the soil break down the nutrients into inorganic basic forms that the plants can then take up accordingly and put to use photosynthesizing. Of course, some of the organisms the soil attracts are unwelcome, and not every speck of soil is ideal as a growth medium, so we have come up with ways to kill off unwanted pests (pesticides) and pump up the ground’s productivity (fertilizers).
But growing fruits and vegetables hydroponically obviates the need for fertilizers and pesticides — let alone soil — altogether. “Without soil, there is little to no microbial activity, so the plants depend on direct nutrients from nutrient solutions,” reports Alexandra Gross in E – The Environmental Magazine. “And because hydroponics occur in a highly controlled space and microbial activity is at minimum, pesticides, insecticides and herbicides are not needed.”
In most hydroponic systems, the nutrient solutions include inorganic salt fertilizers and semi-soluble organic materials such as bat guano (manure), bone meal and fish emulsion. Since growing hydroponically does not require chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the method is inherently “organic,” although the federal government doesn’t recognize it as such officially. Hydroponic farmers are trying to get the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to take soil out of the equation when it comes to defining organic so that their products can bear an organic certification label on store shelves and appeal to a quickly growing segment of green-minded consumers.
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The Happy Planet Index: a new way of measuring our countries’ well-being
TED.com: By measuring a country’s success based on well-being and happiness, instead of economic productivity and consumption of natural resources, statistician Nic Marks claims this “Happy Planet Index” can better indicate a nation’s overall well-being and that the Earth doesn’t have to pay a price for our happiness.
No Standard for the Placebo?
University of California – San Diego: Much of medicine is based on what is considered the strongest possible evidence: The placebo-controlled trial. A paper published in the October 19 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine – entitled “What’s In Placebos: Who Knows?” calls into question this foundation upon which much of medicine rests, by showing that there is no standard behind the standard – no standard for the placebo.
The thinking behind relying on placebo-controlled trials is this: to be sure a treatment itself is effective, one needs to compare people whose only difference is whether or not they are taking the drug. Both groups should equally think they are on the drug – to protect against effects of factors like expectation. So study participants are allocated “randomly” to the drug or a “placebo” – a pill that might be mistaken for the active drug but is inert.
But, according to the paper’s author, Beatrice Golomb, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, this standard has a fundamental problem, “there isn’t anything actually known to be physiologically inert. On top of that, there are no regulations about what goes into placebos, and what is in them is often determined by the makers of the drug being studied, who have a vested interest in the outcome. And there has been no expectation that placebos’ composition be disclosed. At least then readers of the study might make up their own mind about whether the ingredients in the placebo might affect the interpretation of the study.”
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Study confirms: Whatever doesn’t kill us can make us stronger
Psychologists say we fare better after some life difficulties, than if we’ve had many or none at all
University at Buffalo: We’ve all heard the adage that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, but until now the preponderance of scientific evidence has offered little support for it.
However, a new national multi-year longitudinal study of the effects of adverse life events on mental health has found that adverse experiences do, in fact, appear to foster subsequent adaptability and resilience, with resulting advantages for mental health and well being.
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Emotional effects of heavy combat can be lifelong for veterans
University of Florida: The trauma from hard combat can devastate veterans until old age, even as it influences others to be wiser, gentler and more accepting in their twilight years, a new University of Florida study finds.
The findings are ominous with the exposure of today’s men and women to heavy combat in the ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan wars on terror at a rate that probably exceeds the length of time for U.S. veterans during World War II, said UF sociologist Monika Ardelt.
“The study shows that we really need to take care of our veterans when they arrive home, because if we don’t, they may have problems for the rest of their lives,” she said. “Yet veterans report they are facing long waiting lines at mental health clinics and struggling to get the services they need.”
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Daily choices can affect long-term happiness
New Scientist: Choose wisely when considering a partner, whether to attend church and how you look after your body. These decisions could have a significant effect on your overall life satisfaction.
To find out whether people really are destined for a certain level of happiness, Bruce Headey at the University of Melbourne in Australia and his team questioned people in Germany about their jobs, lifestyles and social and religious activities. The survey was initially completed by 3000 people annually, but that rose to 60,000 per year by the end of the 25-year study period.
They found that certain changes in lifestyle led to significant long-term changes in reported life satisfaction.
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