วันอาทิตย์ที่ 30 ธันวาคม พ.ศ. 2555

[rael-science] All Food Ingredients Linked To Cancer, But Researchers Say Don’t Worry Evidence is Weak‏

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2012/12/27/all-food-ingredients-linked-to-cancer-but-researchers-say-dont-worry-evidence-is-weak/

All Food Ingredients Linked To Cancer, But Researchers Say Don’t Worry Evidence is Weak

December 27, 2012 | By admin | 7 Replies

Marco Torres, Prevent Disease
Waking Times

There is evidence linking almost every food or ingredient to cancer, but according to researchers, there’s no need to worry because the evidence for pretty much all of it is very weak they say.

Not a week goes by without a new research finding that links part of our diet to an increased risk of some form of cancer, and researchers want us to ignore all these findings because they claim they’re based on weak statistical evidence.

So apparently we should casually mull over all the information we now have on genetically modified foods, artificial flavours, colors, preservatives, emulsifiers, and sweeteners.

Every single artificial flavor and color in the food industry has some kind of detrimental health effect. These include neurotoxicity, organ, developmental, reproductive toxicity and cancer. Ignore them.

Genetically modified (GM) foods causes allergies, organ damage, cancer, immunotoxicty, and damaging transgenes which affect future generations. No problem, no worries.

Artificial preservatives are responsible for causing a host of health problems pertaining to respiratory tract, heart, blood and other. Some are very neurotoxic especially when combined with specific nutrients. Ignore that too.

Sweeteners such as Neotame are thousands of times sweeter than sugar. They are all very potent, neurotoxic, immunotoxic and excitotoxic, but according to researchers there’s no strong evidence.

So What Did They Find?

Researchers in the USA set out to see whether, in fact, all foods have been studied for their effectiveness at curing or causing cancer.

The research, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, took a random sample of 50 foods and ingredients and searched the academic literature to see whether research studies had associated them with cancer risk.

Led by John Ioannidis at Stanford Prevention Research Center, USA, the research team found that 80% of their sample food recipeshad been studied in regard to their relationship to cancer, “and the large majority of these studies were interpreted by their authors as offering evidence for increased or decreased risk of cancer.”

“However, the vast majority of these claims were based on weak statistical evidence,” said the research team.

“We have seen a very large number of studies, just too many studies, suggesting that they had identified associations with specificfood ingredients with cancer risk,” said Ioannidis.

Food industry champions playing the public relations game with very informed consumers are now having to back peddle and go on damage control.

“People get scared or they think that they should change their lives and make big decisions, and then things get refuted very quickly,” he told Reuters Health. “There’s very strong evidence, and pretty strong expectation, that some nutrients in some foods would be related to cancer risk – either protecting or increasing the risk – but it’s very hard to believe that almost anything would be associated with cancer.”

Study Details

The research team selected 50 foods and food ingredients at random and then assessed whether the academic literature from the previous 35 years provided a suggestion of any link to cancer risk.

“We surveyed recently published studies and meta-analyses that addressed the potential association between a large random sample of food ingredients and cancer risk of any type of malignancy,” the researchers wrote.

The team found that 40 out of their 50 sample foods had been linked to cancer in some way — with half having more than 10 studies reporting on such risks.

Those ingredients linked to cancer were: veal, salt, pepper spice, flour, egg, bread,pork, butter, tomato, lemon, duck, onion, celery, carrot, parsley, mace, sherry, olive, mushroom, tripe, milk, cheese, coffee, bacon, sugar, lobster, potato, beef, lamb, mustard, nuts, wine, peas, corn, cinnamon, cayenne, orange, tea, rum, and raisin.

“These ingredients studied include many of the most common sources of vitamins and nutrients,” said the team, while they noted that the 10 ingredients for which a cancer association was not identified were generally more obscure: bay leaf, cloves, thyme,vanilla, hickory, molasses, almonds, baking soda, ginger, and terrapin.

“We should acknowledge that our searches for eligible studies were not exhaustive,” said Ioannidis and his colleagues.

“Covering the entire nutritional epidemiology literature would be impossible.”

The team added that the interest in linking food and food ingredients to cancer has grown rapidly in recent years, with around 85% of all scientific studies on food and cancer occurring between 2000 and 2011.

Source:
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

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WARNING FROM RAEL: For those who don't use their intelligence at its
full capacity, the label "selected by RAEL" on some articles does not
mean that I agree with their content or support it. "Selected by RAEL"
means that I believe it is important for the people of this planet to
know about what people think or do, even when what they think or do is
completely stupid and against our philosophy. When I selected articles
in the past about stupid Christian fundamentalists in America praying
for rain, I am sure no Rael-Science reader was stupid enough to believe
that I was supporting praying to change the weather. So, when I select
articles which are in favor of drugs, anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish, racist,
revisionist, or inciting hatred against any group or religion, or any
other stupid article, it does not mean that I support them. It just
means that it is important for all human beings to know about them.
Common sense, which is usually very good among our readers, is good
enough to understand that. When, like in the recent articles on drug
decriminalization, it is necessary to make it clearer, I add a comment,
which in this case was very clear: I support decriminalizing all drugs,
as it is stupid to throw depressed and sad people (as only depressed and
sad people use drugs) in prison and ruin their life with a criminal
record. That does not mean that there is any change to the Message which
says clearly that we must not use any drug except for medical purposes.
The same applies to the freedom of expression which must be absolute.
That does not mean again of course that I agree with anti-Jews,
anti-Semites, racists of any kind or anti-Raelians. But by knowing your
enemies or the enemies of your values, you are better equipped to fight
them. With love and respect of course, and with the wonderful sentence
of the French philosopher Voltaire in mind: "I disapprove of what you
say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".

--
--
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"Ethics" is simply a last-gasp attempt by deist conservatives and
orthodox dogmatics to keep humanity in ignorance and obscurantism,
through the well tried fermentation of fear, the fear of science and
new technologies.

There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history,
it is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.

On the contrary, let us embrace Science and the new technologies
unfettered, for it is these which will liberate mankind from the
myth of god, and free us from our age old fears, from disease,
death and the sweat of labour.

Rael
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[rael-science] Man-made tornadoes could one day power our cities‏

http://www2.electronicproducts.com/Man_made_tornadoes_could_one_day_power_our_cities-article-FANE_tornado_power_Dec2012-html.aspx

This article was posted on 12/19/2012.

Man-made tornadoes could one day power our cities

If we look around the Earth, we can see that Mother Nature has provided us with many stored energy resources that can potentially be used to power our world, such as the latent heat of water vapor or the heat content of tropical ocean water.

Canadian engineer Louis Michaud has been working on one of the Earth’s natural disasters, tornadoes, as a source of power. In 2009, Michaud founded the company AVEtec and performed a successful test of an atmospheric vortex engine (AVE) that can harness the physics of tornadoes and their upward heat flow to produce cheap and clean energy.

Michaud’s visions of manipulating Mother Nature are not necessarily new. For years, people such as Nikola Tesla and companies such as Lockheed Martin have pursued ways to extract heat from the ocean in order to generate electricity.

Prototype model of the AVE. (Image via vortexengine.ca)

Now, after years of struggling to be viewed as a serious company, AVEtec has just received $300,000 in funding from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, to improve on the initial concept and build a working engine to prove the viability of using this technology to produce electricity with virtually no carbon foot print.

“The power in a tornado is undisputed," said Louis Michaud. "My work has established the principles by which we can control and exploit that power to provide clean energy on an unprecedented scale.”

How the atmospheric vortex engine works

A tornado contains serious amounts of energy, but usually that kind of energy is difficult to harness due to the raging and threatening nature of this work of nature. Michaud built on this idea, though, and instead of creating technology that vents waste heat into cooling towers, warm or humid air enters a circular station where it takes the form of a rising vortex (just like a controlled tornado). The temperature difference between this heated air and the atmosphere above it is what supports the vortex and drives multiple turbines. The vortex can be shut down at any time by turning off the source of warm air.

How the AVE works. (Image via vortexengine.ca)

AVE power generation does not produce carbon emissions and does not need to store energy. AVEtec projects that the cost of the energy it generates could be as low as $0.03 per kilowatt hour. An AVE power station could have a diameter of 100 meters and generate 200 megawatts of electrical power, the same order of magnitude as conventional coal power stations.

AVEtec’s next step is to use the funding wisely and create a working prototype with Lambton College in Ontario that will be 26 ft in diameter and will generate a 1-ft tornado that will power a turbine.

For those worried that a man-made tornado might get out of hand and escape, wreaking havoc, Michaud reassures us that can't happen because all you need to do in order to stop the whole process is turn off the fan that feeds the vortex the warm air.

Michaud was featured in “Mad Like Tesla: Underdog Inventors and their Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy” by Tyler Hamilton. To read most of the chapter on the Atmospheric Vortex Engine, visit http://vortexengine.ca/covers/Tesla_Excerpt.pdf ■

[rael-science] ‘Unhinged’ French on cocktail of pills, claims new book‏

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/9765948/Unhinged-French-on-cocktail-of-pills-claims-new-book.html

‘Unhinged’ French on cocktail of pills, claims new book

France's dubious title as the leading country for consuming antidepressants has created an army of potentially unhinged individuals on a cocktail of inappropriate and dangerous drugs, a new book claims.

Approximately 200 million boxes of prescription antidepressant drugs are reportedly sold in France annually Photo: ALAMY

Renowned as a land of douceur de vivre, or the sweet life, France is also the country where pill-popping to stave off depression or other mental afflictions has reached new heights.

More than one in five people in France has taken one of the four families of ‘psychotropic’ drugs – antidepressants, tranquillisers, sleeping pills and antipsychotic drugs – two-thirds of them women. That’s around 10 to 15 million people,” said Guy Hugnet, author of Psychotropic Drugs, the Investigation.

Approximately 200 million boxes of such drugs are sold in France annually, and Mr Hugnet said, “We are world champions, per capita.”

“Psychotropic drugs are useful when used for mental illness or emergencies. But in France, they are used in an anarchic way and only a third of such consumption is justified,” he said.

In 2008, a group of 15 eminent psychiatrists sounded the alarm, by warning of the dangers of what they called “the over-medication of feeling blue” and the inability of French doctors to prescribe alternative forms of treatment, such as psychotherapy.

But Mr Hugnet said the French have blind faith in pills, will visit several doctors if they do not receive enough, and expect to be reimbursed by the health system.

Approximately 90 per cent of such prescriptions come from GPs who have no proper training on mental disorders or in psychotropic drugs and their side effects, and they rely on advice from powerful and self-interested pharmaceutical lobbies, the book claims.

Denouncing what it calls a “national and legal overdose”, it publishes a series of terrifying prescriptions from French GPs mixing antidepressants and other strong drugs – often to cure mild complaints of “feeling out of sorts”.

The author handed the prescriptions to independent experts, who denounced them as “contrary to all common sense”.

He cited an example in early December, in Sète, south-west France, of a 49-year-old man who shot dead two neighbours who had woken him with their music at night.

“The man was totally out of it as he was on four psychotropic drugs. He said he was in an altered state. This is a man who had no mental illness,” said Mr Hugnet.

Another man, Philippe, went to see his doctor for mild depression linked to a romantic split. He died from a heart attack after being pumped full of powerful antipsychotic drugs.

“Often, these people are taking a mixture of medication. People don’t talk about it, as in France, medicine is a religion that cannot be questioned,” said Mr Hugnet.

[rael-science] China Opens Longest High-Speed Rail Line‏

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The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
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Contributed by Joseph Kollar
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/business/global/worlds-longest-high-speed-rail-line-opens-in-china.html

China Opens Longest High-Speed Rail Line

HONG KONG — China began service Wednesday morning on the world’s longest high-speed rail line, covering a distance in eight hours that is about equal to that from New York to Key West, Fla., or from London across Europe to Belgrade, Serbia.

Trains traveling 300 kilometers, or 186 miles, an hour, began regular service between Beijing and Guangzhou, the main metropolis in southeastern China. Older trains still in service on a parallel rail line take 21 hours; Amtrak trains from New York to Miami, a shorter distance, still take nearly 30 hours.

Completion of the Beijing-Guangzhou route — roughly 1,200 miles — is the latest sign that China has resumed rapid construction on one of the world’s largest and most ambitious infrastructure projects, a network of four north-south routes and four east-west routes that span the country.

Lavish spending on the project has helped jump-start the Chinese economy twice: in 2009, during the global financial crisis, and again this autumn, after a brief but sharp economic slowdown over the summer.

The hiring of as many as 100,000 workers for each line has kept a lid on unemployment as private-sector construction has slowed because of limits on real estate speculation. The national network has helped to reduce air pollution in Chinese cities and helped to curb demand for imported diesel fuel by freeing capacity on older rail lines for goods to be carried by freight trains instead of heavily polluting, costlier trucks.

But the high-speed rail system has also been controversial in China. Debt to finance the construction has reached nearly 4 trillion renminbi, or $640 billion, making it one of the most visible reasons total debt has been surging as a share of economic output in China, and is approaching levels in the West.

Each passenger car taken off the older, slower rail lines makes room for three freight cars because passenger trains have to move so quickly that they force freight trains to stop frequently. But although the high-speed trains have played a big role in allowing sharp increases in freight shipments, the Ministry of Railways has not yet figured out a way to charge large freight shippers, many of them politically influential state-owned enterprises, for part of the cost of the high-speed lines, which haul only passengers.

The high-speed trains are also considerably more expensive than the heavily subsidized older passenger trains. A second-class seat on the new bullet trains from Beijing to Guangzhou costs 865 renminbi ($139) one way, compared with 426 renminbi ($68) for the cheapest bunk on one of the older trains, which also have narrow, uncomfortable seats for as little as 251 renminbi ($40).

Worries about the high-speed network peaked in July 2011, when one high-speed train plowed into the back of another near Wenzhou in southeastern China, killing 40 people.

A subsequent investigation blamed flawed signaling equipment for the crash. China had been operating high-speed trains at 350 kilometers an hour (about 218 m.ph.), and it cut the top speed to the current rate in response to that crash.

The crash crystallized worries about the haste with which China has built its high-speed rail system. The first line, from Beijing to Tianjin, opened a week before the 2008 Olympics; a little more than four years later, the country now has 9,349 kilometers, or 5,809 miles, of high-speed lines.

China’s aviation system has a good international reputation for safety, and its occasional deadly crashes have not attracted nearly as much attention. Transportation safety experts attribute the public’s fascination with the Wenzhou crash partly to the novelty of the system and partly to a distrust among many Chinese of what is perceived as a homegrown technology, in contrast with the Boeing and Airbus jets flown by Chinese airlines.

Japanese rail executives have complained, however, that the Chinese technology is mostly copied from them, an accusation that Chinese rail executives have strenuously denied.

The main alternative to trains for most Chinese lies in the country’s roads, which have a grim reputation by international standards. Periodic crashes of intercity buses kill dozens of people at a time, while crashes of private cars are frequent in a country where four-fifths of new cars are sold to first-time buyers, often with scant driving experience.

Flights between Beijing and Guangzhou take about three hours and 15 minutes. But air travelers in China need to arrive at least an hour before a flight, compared with 20 minutes for high-speed trains, and the airports tend to be farther from the centers of cities than the high-speed train stations.

Land acquisition is the toughest part of building high-speed rail lines in the West, because the tracks need to be almost perfectly straight, and it has been an issue in China as well. Although local and provincial governments have forced owners to sell land for the tracks themselves, there have been disputes over suddenly valuable land near rail stations, with the result that surprisingly few stores and other commercial venues have sprung up around some high-speed stations used by tens of thousands of travelers every day.

Zhao Xiangfeng, a farmer in Henan Province, said a plan to build a mini-mall on his and six other farmers’ land near a station had been shelved indefinitely after he and three of the other farmers refused to lease the land for any price close to what the village leadership offered. He said he worried that local leaders might try stronger tactics on the farmers to force them to lease the land and revive the project.

The 664-mile southern segment of the new high-speed rail line, from Guangzhou as far as Wuhan, has been open for nearly three years. The trains, which come every four to 12 minutes, are often packed, which could limit the number of seats available for travel to Beijing.

[rael-science] After 2,000 Years, Scientists Learn How One Chinese Herbal Medicine Works‏

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The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
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Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/revealed-secrets-of-ancient-chinese-medicinal-herb-2012-12

After 2,000 Years, Scientists Learn How One Chinese Herbal Medicine Works

Scientists in the United States on Sunday offered a molecular-level explanation for how a Chinese herbal medicine used for more than 2,000 years tackles fever and eases malaria.

The herb is an extract of the root of a flowering plant called blue evergreen hydrangea, known in Chinese as chang shan and in Latin as Dichroa febrifuga Lour.

Chang shan's use dates back to the Han dynasty of 206 BC to 220 AD, according to ancient documents recording Chinese oral traditions.

In 2009, researchers made insights into its active ingredient, febrifuginone, which can be pharmaceutically made as a molecule called halofuginone.

They found that halofuginone prevented production of rogue Th17 immune cells which attack healthy cells, causing inflammation that leads to fever.

A study published in the journal Nature on Sunday found halofuginone works by hampering production of proteins for making "bad" Th17 cells, but not the "good" ones.

Specifically, it blocks molecules called transfer RNA (tRNA), whose job is to assemble a protein bit by bit, in line with the DNA code written in the gene.

As for malaria, halofuginone appears to interfere with the same protein-assembly process that enables malaria parasites to live in the blood, the study said.

"Our new results solved a mystery that has puzzled people about the mechanism that has been used to treat fever from a malaria infection going back probably 2,000 years or more," said Paul Schimmel, who headed the team at the Scripps Research Institute in California.

Halofuginone has been tested in small-scale human trials to treat cancer and muscular dystrophy. Drug engineers also eye it as a potential tool for combatting inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis, which are also autoimmune diseases.

MAELOHIMY

The Elohim Sound

วันอาทิตย์ที่ 30 ธันวาคม พ.ศ. 2555

[rael-science] All Food Ingredients Linked To Cancer, But Researchers Say Don’t Worry Evidence is Weak‏

[rael-science] Man-made tornadoes could one day power our cities‏

Man-made tornadoes could one day power our cities

[rael-science] ‘Unhinged’ French on cocktail of pills, claims new book‏

‘Unhinged’ French on cocktail of pills, claims new book

France's dubious title as the leading country for consuming antidepressants has created an army of potentially unhinged individuals on a cocktail of inappropriate and dangerous drugs, a new book claims.

[rael-science] China Opens Longest High-Speed Rail Line‏

China Opens Longest High-Speed Rail Line

[rael-science] After 2,000 Years, Scientists Learn How One Chinese Herbal Medicine Works‏

After 2,000 Years, Scientists Learn How One Chinese Herbal Medicine Works

The Elohim Sound

วันอาทิตย์ที่ 30 ธันวาคม พ.ศ. 2555

[rael-science] All Food Ingredients Linked To Cancer, But Researchers Say Don’t Worry Evidence is Weak‏

[rael-science] Man-made tornadoes could one day power our cities‏

Man-made tornadoes could one day power our cities

[rael-science] ‘Unhinged’ French on cocktail of pills, claims new book‏

‘Unhinged’ French on cocktail of pills, claims new book

France's dubious title as the leading country for consuming antidepressants has created an army of potentially unhinged individuals on a cocktail of inappropriate and dangerous drugs, a new book claims.

Related Articles

[rael-science] China Opens Longest High-Speed Rail Line‏

China Opens Longest High-Speed Rail Line

[rael-science] After 2,000 Years, Scientists Learn How One Chinese Herbal Medicine Works‏

After 2,000 Years, Scientists Learn How One Chinese Herbal Medicine Works