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Monday, August 04, 2003
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 Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. writes: The stress in our lives is now so great and so insidious that more and more people are making the deliberate decision to understand it better and to bring it under personal control. They realize the futility of waiting for someone else to make things better for them. Such a personal commitment is all the more important if you are suffering from a chronic illness or disability that imposes additional stress in your life on top of the usual pressures of living. The problem of stress does not admit to simpleminded solutions or quick fixes. At root, stress is a natural part of living from which there is no more escape than from the human condition itself. Yet some people try to avoid stress by walling themselves off from life experience; others attempt to anesthetize themselves one way or another to escape it. Of course, it is only sensible to avoid undergoing unnecessary pain and hardship. Certainly we all need to distance ourselves from our troubles now and again. But if escape and avoidance become our habitual ways of dealing with our problems, the problems just multiply. They don't magically go away. What does go away, or get covered over when we tune out our problems or run away from them, is our power to grow and to change and to heal. When it comes right down to it, facing our problems is usually the only way to get past them. There is an art to facing difficulties in ways that lead to effective solutions and to inner peace and harmony. When we are able to mobilize our inner resources to face our problems artfully, we find we are usually able to orient ourselves in such a way that we can use the pressure of the problem itself to propel us through it, just as a sailor can position a sail to make the best use of the pressure of the wind to propel the boat. You can't sail straight into the wind, and if you only know how to sail with the wind at your back, you will only go where the wind blows you. But if you know how to use the wind energy and are patient, you can sometimes get where you want to go. You can still be in control. If you hope to make use of the force of your own problems to propel you in this way, you will have to be tuned in, just as the sailor is tuned in to the feel of the boat, the water, the wind, and his or her course. You will have to learn how to handle yourself under all kinds of stressful conditions, not just when the weather is sunny and the wind blowing exactly the way you want it to. (08/04/03)
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 Wendell Berry writes: LET US BEGIN BY ASSUMING what appears to be true: that the so-called "environmental crisis" is now pretty well established as a fact of our age. The problems of pollution, species extinction, loss of wilderness, loss of farmland, loss of topsoil may still be ignored or scoffed at, but they are not denied. Concern for these problems has acquired a certain standing, a measure of discussability, in the media and in some scientific, academic, and religious institutions. This is good, of course; obviously, we can't hope to solve these problems without an increase of public awareness and concern. But in an age burdened with "publicity," we have to be aware also that as issues rise into popularity they rise also into the danger of oversimplification. To speak of this danger is especially necessary in confronting the destructiveness of our relationship to nature, which is the result, in the first place, of gross oversimplification. The "environmental crisis" has happened because the human household or economy is in conþict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last I've hundred years that nature is merely a supply of "raw materials," and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining, even as mining itself has become more technologically powerful and more brutal. And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as "environmental" problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them. This oversimplification is now either a matter of corporate behavior or of behavior under the influence of corporate behavior. This is sufficiently clear to many of us. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations. (08/04/03)
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 Science News Online -- For more than a decade, Cynthia Kenyon has watched microscopic worms of the species Caenorhabditis elegans live far longer than they should. She has seen mutant strains of this worm, which is normally dead and gone after a mere 2 or 3 weeks, last well into their second month. It's as if a person lived to be 200 years old. Kenyon's long-lived worms are a result of mutations in individual genes. That's a radical notion to many scientists who have long thought of aging as an uncontrollable process of deterioration that isn't regulated by single genes. "There have to be genes that affect life span," counters Kenyon of the University of California, San Francisco. Noting the dramatic differences in life span among various animals—a mouse may last for 2 years while a bat can live for half a century—Kenyon has become convinced that longevity has evolved in animals many times. She argues that her long-lived nematodes can reveal some of the fundamental molecular biology that controls longevity in more-complex organisms, even people. In 1993, Kenyon and her colleagues jump-started the field of aging genetics when they reported on a mutant strain of C. elegans that lives twice as long as normal. It showed the largest proportional lifespan extension of any animal known at the time. Researchers eventually determined that this long-lived nematode strain arose from a defect in a hormone-triggered cascade of molecular signals that resembles one in people that is prompted by the hormone insulin. Mutations affecting a similar hormone-driven cascade in fruit flies can lengthen the lives of these insects as well. Over the past few months, Kenyon's team and several other groups of worm researchers have documented an unexpectedly large number of genes controlled by this hormonal system, including genes involved in stress responses and antimicrobial actions. This aging pathway appears to be at work in mammals, also. Two research teams have shown that altering how mice respond to insulin or a related hormone can extend the animals' lives, raising the prospect that manipulating these hormones in people could slow aging or enable them to age with better health. (08/04/03)
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 Science News Online -- On Oct. 26, 1948, a temperature inversion laid a blanket of cold, stagnant air over Donora, Pa., a tiny mill town on the Monongahela River. Over the next 5 days, the buildup of pollution cloaked the sun, sometimes restricting vision to just a few feet. Twenty people died outright and 50 more perished within a month from lingering health damage, says consulting epidemiologist Devra Davis, a former Donora resident whose own family survived the tragedy. As bad as her hometown's pollution had been, its impact would pale against a 5-day killer smog that settled on London in December 1952. It killed some 12,000 people within 3 months, according to calculations in a June 2001 report by Davis and Michelle L. Bell of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "With a death rate more than three times the norm for this period, the London fog of 1952 is widely regarded as a catalyst for the study of air pollution epidemiology," the pair noted. That science would eventually show that even the diffuse dust wafting in seemingly clear air could kill. Its victims are just harder to identify than those in the London and Donora catastrophes because most who succumb are elderly or already in ill health. Indeed, a trailblazing 1991 analysis by Joel Schwartz, then at the Environmental Protection Agency, concluded that some 60,000 U.S. residents die from heart attacks and respiratory problems each year because of the effects of airborne dust at concentrations within federal pollution limits. (08/04/03)
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 Science News Online -- An enzyme prevents brain cells in aging mice from developing knots of proteins resembling those that are a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, scientists report. Known as Pin1, the enzyme could form the basis of new treatments for the memory-stealing disorder. In 1995, Kun Ping Lu of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Tony Hunter of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., discovered Pin1. They subsequently showed that it interacts with a protein called tau, an important component of one of the two brain lesions seen in Alzheimer's disease. Known as tangles, these snarls of tau filaments turn up inside nerve cells. In contrast, the other lesion consists of an abnormal buildup outside nerve cells of a protein fragment known as beta-amyloid. Most neuroscientists favor the hypothesis that beta-amyloid triggers the brain-cell loss in Alzheimer's disease, but some argue that tau is equally, if not more, important. Tau protein normally shapes a cell's interior skeleton, but in Alzheimer's disease, molecular tags called phosphates get added to tau. This embellishment seems to promote tangle formation. Lu, Hunter, and their colleagues had shown that Pin1 binds to tau overloaded with phosphates. This alters the protein's shape in such a way that those tags get shed. "It's important for restoring the function of tau," says Lu. This finding and others persuaded Lu that Pin1 can protect brain cells from the ravages of tangles. (08/04/03)
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 Science News Online -- Astronomers have found new evidence for one of the strangest properties of the universe. A mysterious substance, dubbed dark energy, appears to be ripping the cosmos apart, causing the universe to expand at an ever-faster rate. The wrenching findings come from a correlation between two kinds of sky maps—one that denotes the positions of large numbers of galaxies and another, a snapshot of the cosmic microwave background, which is the remnant radiation from the Big Bang. By comparing the maps, astronomers have found the imprint of dark energy, which pushes objects apart and thus counters gravity's familiar tug. ... "Since the implications of dark energy are so profound for physics, having multiple, independent lines of evidence for its existence is absolutely essential," says Joshua A. Frieman of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., a coauthor of one of four dark-energy studies recently posted online. Each study uses data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a satellite that is generating detailed maps of the cosmic microwave background. (08/04/03)
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5:55:26 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
9/1/2003; 1:44:54 AM.
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