Please watch the films below, make notes about their content and bring them into next class.

Medical myths
Strange medical practices

Drink Green Tea For Healthy Teeth And Gums

Recent study suggests that antioxidants in green tea may help reduce periodontal disease.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090305183128.htm

with reference to the latest class

TEST-TUBE NERVE CELLS OFFER HOPE British researchers have discovered an innovative way to skip animal tests as they search for new treatments for a disfiguring genetic disease. Patients with neurofibromatosis develop multiple tumors on nerves in the brain and spinal cord.

Professor Oliver Hanemann and his team at the South West Peninsula Medical School use cultures of normal and tumor-derived human neural cells grown in plastic dishes in the laboratory to both investigate the biology of the tumors and quickly screen potential therapies that might kill the tumor cells. Since the team uses therapies already approved by the United Kingdom’s drug-screening process, successful candidates from the cellular model tests can go directly to trials in human patients. The studies have already revealed key aspects of the cells that affect their growth and allowed the cancer drug sorafenib to move into clinical trials. “Using human in vitro cell culture, which is the unique aspect of our work, allows us to move seamlessly and relatively quickly from lab-based biochemistry to drug therapies, clinical trials, and hopefully successful outcomes,” said professor Hanemann.

ALTERNATIVES TO ANIMAL RESEARCH

VaxDesign is changing the way researchers study the immune system with the MIMIC (Modular IMmune In vitro Constructs) system, which is described as “immune testing in a test tube.”

Many researchers looking for new vaccines use animals, including mice, rats, dogs, and nonhuman primates. More animals are used to test the potency of each batch of vaccine. These tests are not only cruel but they also often do not accurately predict human immune response, as has been illustrated by the many failures of potential HIV vaccines in clinical trials and the TGN412 clinical disaster in the United Kingdom.

MIMIC allows researchers to test potential human immune system responses to new or existing vaccines. The system uses human cells, but it is better than a single-cell culture model because it contains different modules that cover the entire vaccination process: the tissue at the vaccination site (usually mucosal tissue), lymphoid system tissue, and functional tests that mirror the immune system response. The system is contained within a plate of test tubes that can be used with an automated system, which saves time and money as well as animals’ lives.

VaxDesign is currently undergoing a validation program designed to offer data that will allow the MIMIC system to be used for safety testing. VaxDesign was awarded an Innovation Fund award from the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative this year.

Source: www.vaxdesign.com.

MEDICINE

"Proteins From Garden Pea May Help Fight High Blood Pressure, Kidney Disease..."

"A new type of yogurt fights the bacteria that cause stomach ulcers. Manufacturers sell it in Japan under the name "Dr. Piro" and in Korea as "Gut."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090322154405.htm

MEDICINE

THE BIOLOGY OF BELIEF

I made my entry based on article which you can find on:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1879016-1,00.html.

First of all we need to know that the main organ which works during our meditation or praying is parietal lobe. It concerns matters of faith. Obviously, there are more organs which works hardly during that activities (for instance thalamus or frontal lobe) but parietal lobe works the hardest.

We are “needy creatures” like authors says and we make our brain’s spiritual centers to use all the time. We pray for peace, we meditate for serenity or travel to Lourdes in search of miracle or go to Mecca to show our devotion. But there is nothing we pray – or chant or meditate – for more than health.

There is one very important thing: “The way the brain works is so compatible with religion and spirituality that we’re going to be enmeshed in both for a long time” – says Dr. Andrew Newberg, a professor of radiology, psychology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Enmeshed in the brain” – that sentence is the best to describe Newberg’s work of the past 15 years. He has looked very closely in how our data – processing works, conducting brain scans of more than 100 people who have different kinds or worshipful. What has he discovered? Hi observed that people who have meditated 15 years or more have thicker frontal lobes than nonmeditators. Also, people who describe themselves as highly spiritual have an asymmetry in the thalamus.

Another his research was connected with memory. He scanned brains of people who complained of poor recall before meditation and after. As the lobes bulked up, memory improved.

Another important and interesting thing is placebo effect. Give a patient a sugar pill but call it an analgesic, and pain may actually go away. Parkinson’s disease patients who are told to have an operation (but in fact they wouldn’t have it) have smaller symptoms of disease. Newberg did some researching with cancer patients. He gave them a pill and told that it was the new best medicine. Then, he gave them mineral water and said that it was better kind of it. And patients felt better. But when they got to know that it wasn’t a medicine, they died.

If belief in a pill can be so powerful, belief in God ought to be even more so. One way to test this is simply to study the health of regular churchgoers. Robert Hummer observed that those who never attend religious services have twice the risk of dying over the next 8 years as people who attend once a week.

Neal Krause has focused on how regular churchgoers weather economic downturns as well as the stresses and health woes that go along with them. Not surprisingly, he has found that parishioners benefit when they receive social support from their church. But he has also found that those people who give help fare even better than those who received it. He has also found that people who maintain a sense of gratitude for what's going right in their lives have a reduced incidence of depression, which is itself a predictor of health. And in another study he conducted that was just accepted for publication, he found that people who believe their lives have meaning live longer than people who don't.

Churchgoers… I found some really interesting information about them. There is something called “At the Drive-In Chuch”. It means that people go to church and sit… in their cars during all service. Reverend Larry G. Deitch run the service. He encourages churchgoers to take with them their pets. During service, churchgoers drink wine that is passed out during communion and later, church workers collect donations. What’s more, Deitch usually say “good-bye” to every car which participated the service.

Bizzare?

But let’s come back to the topic.

What is interesting, in African – American churches have been introduced the Body and Soul Project which aim was to make parishioners eat better, exercise more and generally improve their fitness. What’s more, pastors have talked about it in their sermons and there was healthier food at community events.

Many scientist and theologians who study this matters wonders about if we offer patient psychologist’s help, why don’t we offer him pastor’s help? And there have been a survey in the group of oncologists and a large proportion of them felt it was appropriate to talk about spiritual issues with patients and to offer a referral if they weren’t equipped to address the questions themselves. An also patients said that they wanted to talk about it with doctors but doctors never initiated discussion about that things.

Kristeller had participated in work exploring how physicians could help their patients quit smoking, has talked with patients and help doctors find the reason of smoking and find the better way to heal it. The success of that approach led her to develop a similar guide for doctors who want to discuss religious questions with cancer patients. An patients say that those discussions are very helpful.

To sum up, I would like to quote reporters sentence: “Doctors, patients and pastors battling disease already know that help comes in a whole lot of forms.”

And now some examples of healing by faith:

India

In some sects of Islam, the verses of the Koran are thought to have healing properties. In Srinagar, the capital of the Indian-controlled section of Kashmir, a spiritual healer treats a man suffering from temporary blindness with prayers and restorative Koranic verses.

New York, USA

Practitioners of Santeria gather in New York City. A blend of African, Native American and Roman Catholic religious practices, Santeria involves the worship of Santos, an amalgam of African gods and Christian saints. Followers believe that ebos, or imploratons, can bring luck, place and remove curses and heal sicknesses.

Ukraine

Founded 12 years ago by the Nigerian pastor Sunday Adelaja, the Embassy of God is a charismatic Protestant sect. Its followers believe that some of their members have been chosen to receive the Holy Spirit, which allows them to speak in tongues and heal with their hands. In the photo above, one such woman uses the spirit to elicit a trance and cure an ill church member.

New Mexico, USA; Lourdes, France

The dirt at Santuario de Chimayo, left, north of Santa Fe, is said to have healing powers, not unlike the water which flows from the spring near the site where Catholics believe the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant girl in 1858.

sources: http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/2006/drive_in_church/

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1879016-1,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1878443_1842224,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1878443_1842227,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1878443_1842231,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1878443_1842232,00.html

Cow Urine Can Cure Many Diseases

Drinking cow's urine is the latest fad in a health conscious Indian city. Cow's urine is recommended by yoga and homeopathy experts as a cure for a range of ailments. The Calcutta Telegraph says sales have gone through the roof in the city of Hyderabad. Nirmal Kumar, a meditation and yoga expert, says: "Earlier, people felt insulted when I recommended it. Now, not only my students but their family members, too, consume it."

http://www.yogsandesh.org/articles/36/1/Cow-Urine-Can-Cure-Many-Diseases/Page1.html
http://www.mothercow.org/oxen/cow-urine-therapy.html
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3197162.html
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/coke-has-a-rival-rsss-cow-urine-cola/421641/





sources:
youtube.com
ananova.com
grumpyoldsod.com
mothercow.org

Preparing your posts, please respect copy rights and use links to the sites only. Please DO NOT COPY articles!

Thank you.

Agnieszka Dremza

the facebook generation

Facebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.

The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.

The website currently has more than 175 million active users worldwide. Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria and Iran. It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service. Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. It is also facing several lawsuits from a number of Zuckerberg's former classmates, who claim that Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property.

A REAL ADDICTION?
This is a real post from allfacebook.webside forum:

"Are you addicted to Facebook? I know I am. It starts of with a simple exploration of your friends on the site and suddently you are logging on 10 times a day to see if any of your friends have made updates to their profile, changed their relationship status or have posted new videos or articles. Suddnely you are glued to your computer monitor and the only thing on the screen is Facebook. So maybe your addiction isn’t that bad but apparently enough people are addicted that wikiHow has published an article entitled “How to Quite Facebook.”"

It's a scary reality. For many users facebook is an addiction, so serious as alcoholism, or so. Better think it over.



WHAT ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY ON FACEBOOK - according to facebook terms of use?

One study at the University of North Carolina, for example, found more than 60 percent of Facebook users posted their political views, relationship status, personal picture, interests and address. People also post a whopping 14 million personal photos every single day, making Facebook the top photo website in the country. Then users diligently label one another in these pictures, enabling visitors to see every photo anyone has ever posted of other people, regardless of their consent or knowledge. Even if users terminate their membership, pictures of them posted by others remain online. But users can't really quit, anyway.
Like guests at the Hotel California, people who check out of Facebook have a hard time leaving. Profiles of former members are preserved in case people want to reactivate their accounts. And all users' digital selves can outlive their creators. As the company's "terms of use" explain, profiles of deceased members are kept "active under a special memorialized status for a period of time determined by us to allow other users to post and view comments."
Facebook's 58 million active members have posted more than 2.7 billion photos, with more than 2.2 billion digital labels of people in the pictures. But what many users may not realize is that the company owns every photo. In fact, everything that people post is automatically licensed to Facebook for its perpetual and transferable use, distribution or public display. The terms of use reserve the right to grant and sublicense all "user content" posted on the site to other businesses.
Terrifying? Yes it is.

So.. do YOU have a facebook?

sources: allfacebook.com, The Nation, wikipedia.com, New Yorker

Class organisation rules

1. No more than 2 absences in a semester will be accepted.

2. Students who will retake more than 2 quizzes ( no matter whether vocabulary or grammar) after the classes finish ( June 5) will get a grade no higher than 3.

My duty hours this semester:
Mondays 13.00-13.30 room 109
Wednesdays 10.30-11.30 room 109 or 102 ( depending on the number of students)

3. Students are expected to check blog content before EACH class.

Best :)
Agnieszka Dremza

The Greener Way to Pay

Printing cash consumes energy, but it beats credit.

It takes an enormous quantity of energy to print, transport, count and sort the dollar bills in your wallet. The U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving cranks out $750 million in new currency each day, trucking the paper from its Massachusetts manufacturing plant to be printed in Washington and then to secret distribution points, where it's held before it's carted off to banks. When you pay with a credit or debit card, in contrast, all you're doing is moving electrons, as e-money moves between accounts—so it has to be the greener alternative, right? Not so fast.

Credit and debit cards are made using six different kinds of plastic. They're laminated and embossed to make them slick enough to slide through card readers. There are more than 2 billion cards in America alone—and each will take decades to fully biodegrade after it expires, gets shredded and buried in a landfill. The machines and servers that track card spending all run on electricity, most of it generated by burning carbon-rich coal. And even in an age of electronic bill payment, at the end of the month most credit-card customers still receive paper statements, sent through the U.S. mail, and many still write a check to pay the bill and then mail it back. That kicks off an entirely different energy-intensive process, as the banks route and process those paper checks.

Cash has other advantages. It's made mostly from cotton and linen—both of which, when harvested, emit less carbon than cutting trees. Once bills get printed, they stay in circulation for up to five years, on average. As its color suggests, it is the greener alternative when it comes to payment methods. The fact that it won't put you at risk for experiencing your own personal credit crisis is just icing on the cake.

source: http://www.newsweek.com/id/170350
by Joanna Kuc

Eco-news

EARTH CHANGE THEORY.

By its very nature, planet Earth is always in a state of flux and change. Many predict 'doomsday fear-based scenarios' due to increasing earth changes.

The term 'Earth Changes' to describe this apocalyptic sequence of events originates with the American psychic Edgar Cayce who made many prophesies of cataclysms involving the whole planet. He claimed the polar axis would shift and that many areas now land would become Ocean floor.

The belief that the California coast would slip into the sea - a common feature of Earth Changes predictions - originated with Cayce's alleged prophecies. In more recent times, self-proclaimed psychic Gordon Michale Scallion has issued a variety of prophecies centering on the concept of 'Earth Changes' that mimic Cayce's.

Scallion also believes that a series of major tectonic events will re-shape the globe, and herald a new age in human life. Scallion and his predictions were featured on a number of documentaries that appeared prior to the year 2000, highlighting millenarian beliefs in both world and New Age religious traditions.

Recent events in world affairs (September 11, the beginning of the 21st Century, and the 2004 Asian tsunami) have been interpreted by Earth Change believers (as well as some more mainline religious movements) as signs that the era of Earth Changes or the apocalypse is at hand, or soon to begin.

Some believers in the Earth Changes phenomenon interpret the changes as purely physical or scientific in nature; they believe that the changes are the product of natural processes (such as global warming, or changes in the Earth's orbit), and that life after the period of changes will be dominated by the struggle for survival.

Groups that support such a belief may evolve into survivalist-style organizations, hoping to pool supplies and expertise to create communities that will survive the coming change.

Other groups interpret the changes in a more positive and spiritual light, seeing the changes as the product of a wholesale transformation of human life - an Aquarian age - that may include contact with divine or alien intelligences and the fullfillment of religious prophecy.

Since the growth in popularity of the Internet, many Earth Changes believers have used the world wide web to discuss and popularize their beliefs. Famous adherants of the Earth Changes beliefs (like Scallion) publish their predictions on the web and publish information that they claim validates or proves these predictions. Believers in the Earth Changes phenomena may congregate around sites that track and report on natural disasters, wars, politcal developments, and other phenomena that are seen as possible signs or components of the predicted changes.

GLOBAL WARMING- fact or swindle...

Source: http://www.crystalinks.com/earth_changes.html
www.all-creatures.org

Cancelled class

Due to a conference, 13.15 class on March 5 has been moved to Thursday March 19 18.30 ( we meet at the reception). You can also come this Friday at 11.30 or 13.15 to make up for the Thursday March 5 13.15 class.

Best :)
Agnieszka Dremza

Relationship


What is the relationship? This is a connection between two or more people. There are many examples of relationships, like a connection between man and woman like love, cohabitation, friendship or a bond between parent and child in other words family love, marriage. Individuals can also have relationships with groups of people, such as the relation between a pastor and his congregation, a grandfather and a granddaughters, or a mayor and a people from “his/her” town. These bonds are so strong that nothing can withstand them and they are unconditional. The connection is based on truth and faith between people. What kind of friend is/are a man/men if we cannot trust him/them. But always we should remember, that even a very strong relationship can be destroyed by a lie or a neglect. All this types of relationships are different, because all relationships involve some level of interdependence. People in relationships share their feeling, thoughts, and engage in activities together, so they always have something in common. Always if one member of the relationship has some problems it impacts on the rest of a group.
The relationships between people are very important nowadays (there were in the past and there will be in the future), in private life as well as in professional life. Staying in contact with other people can be very useful and help you in your career or to find a good job. But also this is very important in your private life, because these days we live in very stressful, hard times and sometimes the only remedy can be a talk with someone trusted. A possibility to confidence one’s secret to somebody. This makes that we feel more comfortable, when we know that there is someone who thinks about us, that we are not alone in this crazy world.

by Marcin Kowalski