Scientists at Columbia say they have not only come up with an answer, but have also devised, for mice, an experimental drug that can revive the animals and let them keep running long after they would normally flop down in exhaustion.

For decades, muscle fatigue had been largely ignored or misunderstood. Leading physiology textbooks did not even try to offer a mechanism, said Dr. Andrew Marks, principal investigator of the new study. A popular theory, that muscles become tired because they release lactic acid, was discredited not long ago.

In a report published Monday in an early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Marks says the problem is calcium flow inside muscle cells. Ordinarily, ebbs and flows of calcium in cells control muscle contractions. But when muscles grow tired, the investigators report, tiny channels in them start leaking calcium, and that weakens contractions. At the same time, the leaked calcium stimulates an enzyme that eats into muscle fibers, contributing to the muscle exhaustion.

In recent years, says George Brooks of the University of California, Berkeley, muscle researchers have had more or less continuous discussions about why muscles fatigue. It was his work that largely discredited the lactic-acid hypothesis, but that left a void.

What did make muscles tired?

The new work in mice, Dr. Brooks said, “is exciting and provocative.” It is a finding that came unexpectedly from a very different line of research. Dr. Marks, a cardiologist, wanted to discover better ways to treat people with congestive heart failure, a chronic and debilitating condition that affects an estimated 4.8 million Americans.

Its hallmark is a damaged heart, usually from a heart attack or high blood pressure. Struggling to pump blood, the heart grows, sometimes becoming so large that it fills a patient’s chest. As the disease progresses, the lungs fill with fluid. Eventually, with congested lungs and a heart that can barely pump, patients become so short of breath that they cannot walk across a room. Half die within five years.

In his efforts to understand why the heart muscle weakened, Dr. Marks focused on the molecular events in the heart. He knew the sequence of events. As the damaged heart tries to deal with the body’s demands for blood, the nervous system floods the heart with the fight or flight hormones, epinephrine and norepinephrine, that make the heart muscle cells contract harder.

The intensified contractions, Dr. Marks and his colleagues discovered, occurred because the hormones caused calcium to be released into the heart muscle cells’ channels.

But eventually the epinephrine and norepinephrine cannot stimulate the heart enough to meet the demands for blood. The brain responds by releasing more and more of those fight or flight hormones until it is releasing them all the time. At that point, the calcium channels in heart muscle are overstimulated and start to leak.

When they understood the mechanisms, the researchers developed a class of experimental drugs that block the leaks in calcium channels in the heart muscle. The drugs were originally created to block cells’ calcium channels, a way of lowering blood pressure.

Dr. Marks and his colleagues altered the drugs to make them less toxic and to rid them of their ability to block calcium channels. They were left with drugs that stopped calcium leaks. The investigators called the drugs rycals, because they attach to the ryanodine receptor/calcium release channel in heart muscle cells. The investigators tested rycals in mice and found that they could prevent heart failure and arrhythmias in the animals. Columbia obtained a patent for the drugs and licensed them to a start-up company, Armgo Pharma of New York. Dr. Marks is a consultant to the company.

It hopes to start testing one of the drugs for safety in patients in the spring, but the tests will not be at Columbia because of the university and investigators’ conflicts of interest. In the meantime, Dr. Marks wondered whether the mechanism he discovered might apply to skeletal muscle as well as heart muscle. Skeletal muscle is similar to heart muscle, he noted, and has the same calcium channel system. And heart failure patients complain that their muscles are extremely weak.

“If you go to the hospital and ask heart failure patients what is bothering them, they don’t say their heart is weak,” Dr. Marks said. “They say they are weak.”

So he and his colleagues looked at making mice exercise to exhaustion, swimming and then running on a treadmill. The calcium channels in their skeletal muscles became leaky, the investigators found. And when they gave the mice their experimental drug, the animals could run 10 to 20 percent longer.

Then, collaborating with David Nieman, an exercise scientist at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., the investigators asked whether the human skeletal muscles grew tired for the same reason, calcium leaks.

Highly trained bicyclists rode stationary bikes at intense levels of exertion for three hours a day three days in a row. For comparison, other cyclists sat in the room but did not exercise.

Dr. Nieman removed snips of thigh muscle from all the athletes after the third day and sent them to Columbia, where Dr. Marks’s group analyzed them without knowing which samples were from the exercisers and which were not.The results, Dr. Marks said, were clear. The calcium channels in the exercisers leaked. A few days later, the channels had repaired themselves. The athletes were back to normal.

Of course, even though Dr. Marks wants to develop the drug to help people with congestive heart failure, hoping to alleviate their fatigue and improve their heart functions, athletes might also be tempted to use it if it eventually goes to the market.

The odds are against this particular drug being approved, though, cautions Dr. W. Robb McClellan, a heart disease researcher at U.C.L.A.

“In heart failure, there are three medications that improve mortality, but there have probably been 10 times that many tested,” he said.

Even if the first drug that prevents calcium leaks does not work in patients, Dr. McClellan added, the important advance is to understand the molecular events underlying fatigue. “Then,” he said, “you can design therapies.”

So the day may come when there is an antifatigue drug.

That idea, “is sort of amazing,” said Dr. Steven Liggett, a heart-failure researcher at the University of Maryland. Yet, Dr. Liggett said, for athletes “we have to ask whether it would be prudent to be circumventing this mechanism.”

“Maybe this is a protective mechanism,” he said. “Maybe fatigue is saying that you are getting ready to go into a danger zone. So it is cutting you off. If you could will yourself to run as fast and as long as you could, some people would run until they keeled over and died.”

Ana Homayoun repeats that question countless times a day. No, she does not screen airline passengers or work security at a basketball arena.

Ms. Homayoun is a tutor. She helps teenagers with subjects like math and science, but she particularly specializes in teaching boys how to become more organized.

One afternoon in her cozy office suite in this affluent suburb south of San Francisco, she asked John Ferrari, 14, to go through a two-inch stack of papers he pulled from his backpack. He sorted through the papers, placing them in separate piles — writing, spelling, vocabulary, tests — to bring order to his loose-leaf binder.

“Oh, here’s my class schedule, what a relief,” said John, an eighth grader.

A moment later, he stumbled across something even more valuable. “I have to turn this in tomorrow,” John said. “It’s the name I want on my diploma.”

With girls outperforming boys these days in high school and college, educators have been sparring over whether there is a crisis in the education of boys. Some suggest the need for more single-sex schools, more male role models or new teaching techniques. Others are experimenting with physical changes in classrooms that encourage boys to move around, rather than trying to anchor them to their seats.

But as they debate, high-priced tutors and college counselors have jumped into the fray by charging as much as $100 an hour and up to bring boys to heel.

The tutors say their main focus is organizational skills because boys seem generally to have more difficulty getting organized and multitasking than girls do.

And so private counselors in places as diverse as Chicago, New York City, Sarasota, Fla., and Bennington, Vt., who guide juniors and seniors in applying to college, have devised elaborate systems — from color-coded, four-month calendars that mark dozens of deadlines to file boxes that students must take to each session.

Donna Goldberg began working with students in Manhattan on how to get organized 17 years ago. Her inspiration was her own son, then in seventh grade. Mrs. Goldberg was astonished to learn that he had not been turning in any homework.

“He opened his backpack, which was really a black hole, and he said, ‘Here it is,’ ” she said. He had not understood that in seventh grade he was responsible for handing in his homework, instead of waiting to be asked.

Some educators think the tutors are on the right track, whether or not there is science to back them up. “The guys just don’t seem to develop the skills that involve organization as early,” said Judith Kleinfeld, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska and founder of the Boys Project, a coalition of researchers, educators and parents to address boys’ problems.

Mrs. Goldberg, Ms. Homayoun and other private tutors say boys must learn not only how to organize, but also how to manage their time and even how to study.

Robert Gittings, a sixth grader, has been coming weekly to work with Ms. Homayoun since September. He, too, is asked to empty his backpack, and on one visit, cheerfully removed a vast collection of textbooks, binders, workbooks, paperback books and hardcover library books.

Most of the binders were orderly and reasonably neat. But there was a stack of papers from science, nearly an inch thick, that needed to be sorted.

“Do you have homework for tonight?” Ms. Homayoun asked.

He replied, “We have a work sheet.” But it was not in the homework section of the science binder or in his daily planner.

Then Robert remembered where he put it. From a side pocket of his backpack, he pulled a sheet of paper that has been folded into a tiny rectangle.

Ms. Homayoun laughed and said gently, “Maybe we should put that in the homework section?”

Ms. Homayoun opened her business, Green Ivy Educational Consulting, not long after graduating from Duke University in 2001. She created her organizational system — basically an elaboration of the ways she studied in high school — after she began tutoring six years ago.

“I would ask, What’s the class that troubles you the most?” she said. “I would ask to see the binder, and it would always be the messiest.”

She requires her clients to have a three-ring, loose-leaf binder for each academic subject, to divide each binder into five sections — notes, homework, handouts, tests and quizzes, and blank paper — and to use a hole puncher relentlessly, so that every sheet of school-related paper is put into its proper home.

Students must maintain a daily planner; they are required to number the order in which they want to do each day’s homework and draw a box next to each assignment, so it can be checked off when completed.

Homework must be done in a two-hour block in a quiet room, with absolutely no distractions: no instant messaging, no Internet, no music, no cellphone, no television.

While some girls need help getting organized, at least three-quarters of her students are boys, Ms. Homayoun said. Girls usually adopt her methods more quickly.

“Girls pick up on this much faster,” said Ms. Homayoun, 28, who has a relaxed but firm manner and a gift for diplomacy with teenagers and their parents. “Boys, you still have to be on them for a while. They’re not going to pick up on it immediately. You have to roll with it.”

Two seniors arrived for weekly appointments, expecting to complete their college applications and file them online. But the tutor discovered that one boy left out sections of basic personal information on his application, while the other missed a requirement for three short essays by the University of Virginia. Each was disappointed that there was more work to do.

“Sorry,” she consoled one. “It’s like thinking you’ve finished a marathon and finding out you have three miles left.”

With guidance and constant follow-up, boys can make significant progress, Ms. Homayoun said. Ernie McMillan, 17, a high school senior who has been working with her since the summer before his junior year, is one example. He created orderly binders, kept on top of his daily planner, took notes while reading and even agreed to eliminate distractions during homework.

In the spring of his sophomore year, Mr. McMillan had a 2.8 grade-point average, a B-minus. After working with Ms. Homayoun, he raised his average to 3.1 in the first semester of his junior year. Last spring, he brought it up to 3.5, a B-plus.

“I was really happy about that,” he said. “I always thought I could do it, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t. I just needed that backing, that structure. I was turning in my assignments on time. I was working ahead on my classes. I was organized in a way I never had been before.”

Mr. McMillan stopped for a moment, before adding, “She totally reworked my backpack, too.”

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Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Consumers, not just factory workers, may be in danger from fumes from buttery flavoring in microwave popcorn, according to a warning letter to federal regulators from a doctor at a leading lung-research hospital.

A pulmonary specialist at Denver's National Jewish Medical and Research Center has written to federal agencies to say doctors there believe they have the first case of a consumer who developed lung disease from the fumes of microwaving popcorn several times a day for years.

"We cannot be sure that this patient's exposure to butter-flavored microwave popcorn from daily heavy preparation has caused his lung disease," said Dr. Cecile Rose. "However, we have no other plausible explanation."

The July letter, made public Tuesday by a public-health policy blog, refers to a potentially fatal disease commonly called popcorn lung that has been the subject of lawsuits by hundreds of workers at food factories exposed to chemicals used for flavoring.

In response to Rose's finding, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association issued a statement Tuesday recommending that its members reduce "to the extent possible" the amount of diacetyl in butter flavorings they make. It noted that diacetyl is approved for use in flavors by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

One national popcorn manufacturer, Weaver Popcorn, of Indianapolis, said last week it would replace the butter-flavoring ingredient because of consumer concern. Congress also has been debating new safety measures for workers in food-processing plants exposed to diacetyl.

The FDA said in an e-mail it is evaluating Rose's letter and "carefully considering the safety and regulatory issues it raises."

Fred Blosser, spokesman for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said it is the first case the institute has seen of lung disease apparently linked to popcorn fumes outside the workplace.

The occupational-safety arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is working on a response to the letter.

William Allstetter, spokesman for National Jewish Medical, confirmed the letter was sent by Rose, a specialist in occupational and environmental lung diseases and director of the hospital's Occupational and Environmental Medicine Clinic.

In the letter, Rose acknowledged it is difficult to confirm through one case that popping buttered microwave popcorn at home can cause lung disease.

However, she said she wanted to alert regulators of the potential public-health implications.

Rose said the patient, a man she wouldn't identify, consumed "several bags of extra-butter-flavored microwave popcorn" every day for several years.

He described progressively worsening respiratory symptoms of coughing and shortness of breath. Tests found his ability to exhale was deteriorating, Rose said, although his condition seemed to stabilize after he quit making microwave popcorn.

She said her staff measured airborne levels of diacetyl in the patient's home when he cooked the popcorn. The levels were "similar to those reported in the microwave-oven exhaust area" at the quality-assurance unit of the popcorn plant where the affected employees worked, she said.

Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company

And what a law. Unlike, say, traffic or drug laws, you don’t have a choice about obeying gravity or any of the other laws of physics. Jump and you will come back down. Faith or good intentions have nothing to do with it.

Existence didn’t have to be that way, as Einstein reminded us when he said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Against all the odds, we can send e-mail to Sri Lanka, thread spacecraft through the rings of Saturn, take a pill to chase the inky tendrils of depression, bake a turkey or a soufflé and bury a jump shot from the corner.

Yes, it’s a lawful universe. But what kind of laws are these, anyway, that might be inscribed on a T-shirt but apparently not on any stone tablet that we have ever been able to find?

Are they merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world? Do they govern nature or just describe it? And does it matter that we don’t know and that most scientists don’t seem to know or care where they come from?

Apparently it does matter, judging from the reaction to a recent article by Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University and author of popular science books, on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.

Dr. Davies asserted in the article that science, not unlike religion, rested on faith, not in God but in the idea of an orderly universe. Without that presumption a scientist could not function. His argument provoked an avalanche of blog commentary, articles on Edge.org and letters to The Times, pointing out that the order we perceive in nature has been explored and tested for more than 2,000 years by observation and experimentation. That order is precisely the hypothesis that the scientific enterprise is engaged in testing.

David J. Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., and co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, told me in an e-mail message, “I have more confidence in the methods of science, based on the amazing record of science and its ability over the centuries to answer unanswerable questions, than I do in the methods of faith (what are they?).”

Reached by e-mail, Dr. Davies acknowledged that his mailbox was “overflowing with vitriol,” but said he had been misunderstood. What he had wanted to challenge, he said, was not the existence of laws, but the conventional thinking about their source.

There is in fact a kind of chicken-and-egg problem with the universe and its laws. Which “came” first — the laws or the universe?

If the laws of physics are to have any sticking power at all, to be real laws, one could argue, they have to be good anywhere and at any time, including the Big Bang, the putative Creation. Which gives them a kind of transcendent status outside of space and time.

On the other hand, many thinkers — all the way back to Augustine — suspect that space and time, being attributes of this existence, came into being along with the universe — in the Big Bang, in modern vernacular. So why not the laws themselves?

Dr. Davies complains that the traditional view of transcendent laws is just 17th-century monotheism without God. “Then God got killed off and the laws just free-floated in a conceptual vacuum but retained their theological properties,” he said in his e-mail message.

But the idea of rationality in the cosmos has long existed without monotheism. As far back as the fifth century B.C. the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras and his followers proclaimed that nature was numbers. Plato, a few hundred years later, envisioned a higher realm of ideal forms, of perfect chairs, circles or galaxies, of which the phenomena of the sensible world were just flawed reflections. Plato set a transcendent tone that has been popular, especially with mathematicians and theoretical physicists, ever since.

Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate from the University of Texas, Austin, described himself in an e-mail message as “pretty Platonist,” saying he thinks the laws of nature are as real as “the rocks in the field.” The laws seem to persist, he wrote, “whatever the circumstance of how I look at them, and they are things about which it is possible to be wrong, as when I stub my toe on a rock I had not noticed.”

The ultimate Platonist these days is Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In talks and papers recently he has speculated that mathematics does not describe the universe — it is the universe.

Dr. Tegmark maintains that we are part of a mathematical structure, albeit one gorgeously more complicated than a hexagon, a multiplication table or even the multidimensional symmetries that describe modern particle physics. Other mathematical structures, he predicts, exist as their own universes in a sort of cosmic Pythagorean democracy, although not all of them would necessarily prove to be as rich as our own.

“Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you,” he wrote in New Scientist.

This would explain why math works so well in describing the cosmos. It also suggests an answer to the question that Stephen Hawking, the English cosmologist, asked in his book, “A Brief History of Time”: “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Mathematics itself is on fire.

Not every physicist pledges allegiance to Plato. Pressed, these scientists will describe the laws more pragmatically as a kind of shorthand for nature’s regularity. Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, put it this way: “A law of physics is a pattern that nature obeys without exception.”

Plato and the whole idea of an independent reality, moreover, took a shot to the mouth in the 1920s with the advent of quantum mechanics. According to that weird theory, which, among other things, explains why our computers turn on every morning, there is an irreducible randomness at the microscopic heart of reality that leaves an elementary particle, an electron, say, in a sort of fog of being everywhere or anywhere, or being a wave or a particle, until some measurement fixes it in place.

In that case, according to the standard interpretation of the subject, physics is not about the world at all, but about only the outcomes of experiments, of our clumsy interactions with that world. But 75 years later, those are still fighting words. Einstein grumbled about God not playing dice.

Steven Weinstein, a philosopher of science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, termed the phrase “law of nature” as “a kind of honorific” bestowed on principles that seem suitably general, useful and deep. How general and deep the laws really are, he said, is partly up to nature and partly up to us, since we are the ones who have to use them.

But perhaps, as Dr. Davies complains, Plato is really dead and there are no timeless laws or truths. A handful of poet-physicists harkening for more contingent nonabsolutist laws not engraved in stone have tried to come up with prescriptions for what John Wheeler, a physicist from Princeton and the University of Texas in Austin, called “law without law.”

As one example, Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, has invented a theory in which the laws of nature change with time. It envisions universes nested like Russian dolls inside black holes, which are spawned with slightly different characteristics each time around. But his theory lacks a meta law that would prescribe how and why the laws change from generation to generation.

Holger Bech Nielsen, a Danish physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and one of the early pioneers of string theory, has for a long time pursued a project he calls Random Dynamics, which tries to show how the laws of physics could evolve naturally from a more general notion he calls “world machinery.”

On his Web site, Random Dynamics, he writes, “The ambition of Random Dynamics is to ‘derive’ all the known physical laws as an almost unavoidable consequence of a random fundamental ‘world machinery.’”

Dr. Wheeler has suggested that the laws of nature could emerge “higgledy-piggledy” from primordial chaos, perhaps as a result of quantum uncertainty. It’s a notion known as “it from bit.” Following that logic, some physicists have suggested we should be looking not so much for the ultimate law as for the ultimate program..

Anton Zeilinger, a physicist and quantum trickster at the University of Vienna, and a fan of Dr. Wheeler’s idea, has speculated that reality is ultimately composed of information. He said recently that he suspected the universe was fundamentally unpredictable.

I love this idea of intrinsic randomness much for the same reason that I love the idea of natural selection in biology, because it and only it ensures that every possibility will be tried, every circumstance tested, every niche inhabited, every escape hatch explored. It’s a prescription for novelty, and what more could you ask for if you want to hatch a fecund universe?

But too much fecundity can be a problem. Einstein hoped that the universe was unique: given a few deep principles, there would be only one consistent theory. So far Einstein’s dream has not been fulfilled.Cosmologists and physicists have recently found themselves confronted by the idea of the multiverse, with zillions of universes, each with different laws, occupying a vast realm known in the trade as the landscape.

In this case there is meta law — one law or equation, perhaps printable on a T-shirt — to rule them all. This prospective lord of the laws would be string theory, the alleged theory of everything, which apparently has 10500 solutions. Call it Einstein’s nightmare.

But it is soon for any Einsteinian to throw in his or her hand. Since cosmologists don’t know how the universe came into being, or even have a convincing theory, they have no way of addressing the conundrum of where the laws of nature come from or whether those laws are unique and inevitable or flaky as a leaf in the wind.

These kinds of speculation are fun, but they are not science, yet. “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds,” goes the saying attributed to Richard Feynman, the late Caltech Nobelist, and repeated by Dr. Weinberg.

Maybe both alternatives — Plato’s eternal stone tablet and Dr. Wheeler’s higgledy-piggledy process — will somehow turn out to be true. The dichotomy between forever and emergent might turn out to be as false eventually as the dichotomy between waves and particles as a description of light. Who knows?

The law of no law, of course, is still a law.

When I was young and still had all my brain cells I was a bridge fan, and one hand I once read about in the newspaper bridge column has stuck with me as a good metaphor for the plight of the scientist, or of the citizen cosmologist. The winning bidder had overbid his hand. When the dummy cards were laid, he realized that his only chance of making his contract was if his opponents’ cards were distributed just so.

He could have played defensively, to minimize his losses. Instead he played as if the cards were where they had to be. And he won.

We don’t know, and might never know, if science has overbid its hand. When in doubt, confronted with the complexities of the world, scientists have no choice but to play their cards as if they can win, as if the universe is indeed comprehensible. That is what they have been doing for more than 2,000 years, and they are still winning.

By Ben Hirschler

LONDON (Reuters) - A sticky molecule previously linked to inflammation also helps seal vital insulation around peripheral nerves, making it a potential target for new drugs against nerve disorders, scientists said on Thursday.

The latest research suggests the molecule, known as JAM-C, could be a key player in regulating the way nerves work.

In genetically modified mice without the adhesion molecule, the myelin insulation sheath protecting nerves deteriorates and the animals experience faulty nerve firing, muscle weakness and a shortened stride, researchers reported in the journal Science.

The team also found that nerves of patients with certain peripheral nerve disorders had defective JAM-C.

Taken together, the findings suggest the molecule is a key player in regulating the structure and function of peripheral nerves and its malfunction may cause a number of illnesses.

JAM-C, which was discovered only recently, is already being studied as a target for new medicines involved in inflammation and as a possible route to fight cancer, since it seems to help tumors form new blood vessels.

"This finding opens up yet another area that this molecule should be investigated in -- but it's very early days," Sussan Nourshargh, professor of microvascular pharmacology at Barts and The London School of Medicine, said in an interview.

Nourshargh made the discovery of the molecule's role in peripheral nerves by accident, while investigating blood vessels. Her team then collaborated with scientists at Imperial College London, University College London, Cancer Research UK and the University of Geneva to advance the work further.

There are more than 100 kinds of peripheral nerve disorders affecting approximately one in 20 people. They often afflict people with existing diseases like diabetes and lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease.

Symptoms include numbness, pain, tingling, muscle weakness and sensitivity to touch. Problems often start gradually and steadily get worse.

Nourshargh said the new molecule was not found in the central nervous system and was therefore unlikely to play a role multiple sclerosis.

JAM-C seems to work by sealing off the insulation in the critical gaps between so-called Schwann cells, which produce the myelin layers that wrap around nerve cells.

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler, editing by Paul Casciato)

Five studies presented today during the American Association for Cancer Research's 4th annual Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research meeting in Baltimore, Md., add to the arsenal of research that shows adding certain vegetables and herbs to the diet can prevent or, in some cases, halt the growth of cancer.

Moreover, it is not just a matter of mechanical prevention, such as adding fiber to the diet to maintain digestive health. This research deals with the chemical interactions between compounds found in foods and the body's cells and DNA, and it shows that the addition of these foods to the diet can reap benefits at any stage of life.

Broccoli Sprouts Relieve Gastritis in H. pylori Patients; May Help Prevent Gastric Cancer (Abstract #3442)

Broccoli sprouts may not be a culinary favorite for some, but their chemical properties are becoming increasingly popular among those interested in preventing cancer.

In the latest series of studies, a team from Japan has found that a diet rich in broccoli sprouts significantly reduced Helicobacteri pylori (H. pylori) infection among a group of 20 individuals. H. pylori is known to cause gastritis and is believed to be a major factor in peptic ulcer and stomach cancer.

"Even though we were unable to eradicate H. pylori, to be able suppress it and relieve the accompanying gastritis by means as simple as eating more broccoli sprouts is good news for the many people who are infected," said Akinori Yanaka from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, lead investigator of the study.

Scientists are focusing on the anti-cancer properties of a chemical derived from broccoli sprouts called sulforaphane. Among other things, this chemical has the ability to help cells defend against oxidants, the highly reactive and toxic molecules that damage DNA and kill cells, leading potentially to cancer. Previously, researchers working with H. pylori discovered that sulforaphane acts against the bacterium in vitro, alleviating gastritis in H. pylori-infected mice through its antioxidant activity.

None of these findings had been tested in people, however, until the Yanaka-led team added broccoli sprouts (the plant at its youngest and most sulforaphane-rich, just two or three days old) to the diet of 20 individuals infected with H. pylori. Another group of 20 infected with the bacterium received alfalfa spouts instead of broccoli sprouts. Each received 100 grams of fresh sprouts daily for two months.

"We wanted to test alfalfa spouts together with broccoli sprouts," Yanaka explained, "because the chemical constituents of the two plants are almost identical."

However, the way in which they differ is significant. Broccoli sprouts contain 250 milligrams of sulforaphane glucosinolate per 100 grams per serving, whereas alfalfa sprouts contain neither sulforaphane nor sulforaphane glucosinolate.

Glucosinolates occur in cruciferous vegetables, like broccoli and cabbage, and are broken down enzymatically into sulforaphane and a variety of other, biologically active compounds when damage occurs to the plant--that is, by cutting or chewing it.

The presence of H. pylori was assessed by performing urea breath tests and evaluating H. pylori-specific stool antigen. The degree of gastritis was evaluated by measuring the level of pepsinogen in the blood. Pepsinogen is also an indicator of gastric atrophy. These tests were performed just before adding broccoli and alfalfa sprouts to the diet, and at one and two months after starting the dietary regimen. Following two months' consumption of 100 grams of broccoli sprouts per day, patients showed significantly less H. pylori and markedly decreased pepsinogen. Alfalfa sprouts had no effect, and the broccoli failed to eliminate H. pylori completely. Two months after eliminating broccoli sprouts from the diet, H. pylori and pepsinogen returned to pre-test levels in the subjects.

"The data suggest strongly that a diet rich in sulforaphane glucosinolate may help protect against gastric cancer, presumably by activating gastric mucosal anti-oxidant enzymes that can protect the cells from H. pylori-induced DNA damage," Yanaka concluded.

Broccoli Sprout-extract Protects Against Skin Cancer from UV Light in High-risk Mice (Abstract #2597)

Eat it or wear it? That is the question.

If you ask Albena T. Dinkova-Kostova, Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, she will likely answer "both."

In the laboratory of Paul Talalay, M.D., who first reported the indirect antioxidant properties of sulforaphane, the compound derived from cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, Dinkova-Kostova and her colleagues applied broccoli sprout extract to the skin of hairless mice, and found it counteracted the carcinogenic response to ultraviolet light exposure.

Mice from a strain characterized by post-weaning hair loss were exposed to a dose of UV light comparable to what a person would get sunbathing at the beach on a clear day, twice a week for 20 weeks. After irradiation, broccoli sprout extracts containing either a low or high dose of sulforaphane were applied to the backs of the mice, five days a week for 11 weeks. Acetone (known commonly as the ingredient in nail polish remover) was used as the vehicle for delivering the sulforaphane, and it alone was applied on the control group. At the conclusion of the study period, 100 percent of the control mice had developed cancerous skin tumors.

The incidence and number of tumors was reduced by half, however, in the mice receiving the high dose of broccoli sprout extract. The rate of tumor reduction was less among the low-dose recipients, but even in their case, some benefit was observed.

"We weren't looking for a sunscreen effect," Dinkova-Kostova is quick to point out. "The sulforaphane-containing extract was applied after the period of regular exposure to ultra-violet light. That's more relevant, since most people receive some sun damage to their skin in childhood, particularly adults who grew up before effective sunscreen lotions were developed."

Previous research has shown that sulforaphane boosts protective and detoxifying reactions in cells, inactivating carcinogens and reactive oxygen intermediates that contribute to the disease by damaging DNA. As in other studies involving the anti-cancer potential of sulforaphane, Dinkova-Kostova's group notes that broccoli sprouts contain much more of the compound than adult broccoli.

"Our findings suggest a promising strategy for skin cancer prevention after exposure to UV light," Dinkova-Kostova said.

Change in Diet at Any Age May Help Protect Against Breast Cancer (Abstract #3697)

Many find it to be the perfect companion to hot dogs and sausage, but new studies suggest that sauerkraut may have another beneficial side effect -- it may protect women from breast cancer.

Results from the U.S. component of the Polish Women's Health Study are showing an association between cabbage and sauerkraut consumption, and a constituent called glucosinolate, and a lower risk of breast cancer. The influence seemed to be highest among women who consumed high amounts beginning in adolescence and throughout adulthood.

"The observed pattern of risk reduction indicates that the breakdown products of glucosinolates in cabbage may affect both the initiation phase of carcinogenesis--by decreasing the amount of DNA damage and cell mutation--and the promotion phase--by blocking the processes that inhibit programmed cell death and stimulate unregulated cell growth," said Dorothy Rybaczyk- Pathak, Ph.D., from the University of New Mexico.

Pathak, along with colleagues from Michigan State University and the National Food and Nutrition Institute of Warsaw, Poland, evaluated the diet of Polish immigrants to the United States, living in Chicago and surrounding Cook County, Ill., and the Detroit, Mich., metropolitan area. Women with higher rates of raw- or short-cooked cabbage and sauerkraut consumption, three or more servings per week, compared to those who consumed less than one serving a week, had a significantly reduced breast cancer risk.

Like broccoli, cabbage is a cruciferous vegetable--its flowers are in the shape of a cross--and a member of the Brassica family, which includes broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, collard greens and cauliflower. These plants contain glucosinolates and the enzyme myrosinase which, when broken down by chewing or cutting, release several biologically active products which previous studies have shown to possess anti-carcinogenic properties.

Pathak began the study by wondering why the breast cancer risk of Polish women rose three-fold after they immigrated to the United States. She hypothesized that dietary changes were among the environmental factors contributing to this rapid increase in risk. In Poland, where abundance of food is a recent phenomenon, women traditionally eat an average of 30 pounds of cabbage and sauerkraut per year, as opposed to just 10 pounds per year among American women. Moreover, Polish women traditionally eat more raw cabbage and sauerkraut, in salads, or short-cooked, as a side dish.

She observed the lowest rate of breast cancer among women who consumed high amounts of raw- or short-cooked cabbage during adolescence, but found that high consumption during adulthood provided a significant protective effect for women who had eaten smaller quantities of this vegetable during adolescence. Cabbage cooked a long time, such as in hunter's stew, cabbage rolls and pierogi, had no bearing on breast cancer risk.

Possible Chemoprevention of Ovarian Cancer by the Herbal, Ginkgo Biloba (Abstract #3654)

Researchers in Boston, led by Drs. Bin Ye and Daniel Cramer of Brigham and Women's Hospital, have developed new laboratory and epidemiological evidence that demonstrates, for the first time, that ginkgo biloba appears to lower the risk of developing ovarian cancer.

In a population-based study which involved more than 600 ovarian cancer cases and 640 healthy, matched controls, women who took ginkgo supplements for six months or longer were shown to have a 60 percent lower risk for ovarian cancer.

Ye and his colleagues found that ginkgo, echinacea, St. John's Wort, ginseng, and chondroitin were the most commonly used herbals among study participants. A further analysis of the data showed that ginkgo was the only herb linked to ovarian cancer prevention. The preventive effect was more pronounced in women with non-muncious ovarian cancers, with data showing that ginkgo may reduce the risk of this type of ovarian cancer by 65-70 percent. "Among the mixture of ginkgo chemicals," said Ye, "we found laboratory evidence that ginkgolide A and B--terpene compounds--are the most active components contributing to this protective effect."

Ye's team, which included scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School, Boston University and Linden Bioscience, next took the evidence demonstrated by their population studies to the laboratory. In vitro experiments showed that a low dosage of ginkgolide caused ovarian cancer cells to stop growing. They observed significant cell cycle blockage in non-mucinous ovarian cancer cells. Ginkgolides appeared to be less effective against the mucinous type of ovarian cancer cells.

"While the detailed mechanism of ginkgo action on ovarian cancer cells is not yet well understood," Ye explained, "from the existing literature it most likely that ginkgo and ginkgolides are involved in anti-inflammation and anti-angiogenesis processes via many extra- and intra-cellular signal pathways. In the future, these findings could potentially offer a new strategy for ovarian cancer prevention and therapy, using the active forms of ginkgolides."

Ovarian cancer is the most deadly of all gynecological cancers. It is called a "silent killer" because most cases are discovered only in very advanced stages.

Changing Genes: Garlic Shown to Inhibit DNA Damaging Chemical in Breast Cancer (Abstract #2543)

Legend suggests that garlic may ward off evil spirits, such as vampires. Now scientists are finding that garlic, or a flavor component of pungent herb, may help ward off carcinogens produced by meat cooked at high temperatures.

Cooking protein-rich foods like meats and eggs at high temperatures releases a chemical called PhIP, a suspected carcinogen. Epidemiological studies have shown that the incidence of breast cancer is higher among women who eat large quantities of meat, although fat and caloric intake and hormone exposure may contribute to this increased risk.

Diallyl sulfide (DAS), a flavor component of garlic, has been shown to inhibit the effects of PhIP that, when biologically active, can cause DNA damage or transform substances in the body into carcinogens.

Ronald D. Thomas, Ph.D., and a team of researchers at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee hypothesized that PhIP enhances the metabolism of the enzymes linked to carcinogenesis. They further suggested that the diallyl sulfide derived from garlic might counter this activity.

"We treated human breast epithelial cells with equal amounts of PhIP and DAS separately, and the two together, for periods ranging from three to 24 hours," said Thomas. "PhIP induced expression of the cancer-causing enzyme at every stage, up to 40-fold, while DAS completely inhibited the PhIP enzyme from becoming carcinogenic."

The finding demonstrates for the first time that DAS triggers a gene alteration in PhIP that may play a significant role in preventing cancer, notably breast cancer, induced by PhIP in well-done meats.

Thomas noted that no studies have shown a link between cooking vegetables and fruits and PhIP, regardless of the method used.

Founded in 1907, the American Association for Cancer Research is a professional society of more than 24,000 laboratory, translational, and clinical scientists engaged in all areas of cancer research in the United States and in more than 60 other countries. AACR's mission is to accelerate the prevention and cure of cancer through research, education, communication, and advocacy. Its principal activities include the publication of five major peer-reviewed scientific journals: Cancer Research; Clinical Cancer Research; Molecular Cancer Therapeutics; Molecular Cancer Research; and Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. AACR's Annual Meetings attract nearly 16,000 participants who share new and significant discoveries in the cancer field. Specialty meetings, held throughout the year, focus on the latest developments in all areas of cancer research.

Adapted from materials provided by American Association for Cancer Research.

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APA

Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists described by one expert as "one of the most important developments in the history of science".

The parallel universe theory, first proposed in 1950 by the US physicist Hugh Everett, helps explain mysteries of quantum mechanics that have baffled scientists for decades, it is claimed.

In Everett's "many worlds" universe, every time a new physical possibility is explored, the universe splits. Given a number of possible alternative outcomes, each one is played out - in its own universe.

A motorist who has a near miss, for instance, might feel relieved at his lucky escape. But in a parallel universe, another version of the same driver will have been killed. Yet another universe will see the motorist recover after treatment in hospital. The number of alternative scenarios is endless.

It is a bizarre idea which has been dismissed as fanciful by many experts. But the new research from Oxford shows that it offers a mathematical answer to quantum conundrums that cannot be dismissed lightly - and suggests that Dr Everett, who was a Phd student at Princeton University when he came up with the theory, was on the right track.

Commenting in New Scientist magazine, Dr Andy Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California at Davis, said: "This work will go down as one of the most important developments in the history of science."

According to quantum mechanics, nothing at the subatomic scale can really be said to exist until it is observed. Until then, particles occupy nebulous "superposition" states, in which they can have simultaneous "up" and "down" spins, or appear to be in different places at the same time.

Observation appears to "nail down" a particular state of reality, in the same way as a spinning coin can only be said to be in a "heads" or "tails" state once it is caught.

According to quantum mechanics, unobserved particles are described by "wave functions" representing a set of multiple "probable" states. When an observer makes a measurement, the particle then settles down into one of these multiple options.

The Oxford team, led by Dr David Deutsch, showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes.
© Copyright Press Association Ltd 2007, All Rights Reserved.

Somewhere along the way in the last century, an idea entered the world – an erroneous idea – that man was capable of screwing around with Mother Nature and getting it right. This idea is captured in the slogan “better living through chemistry,” a slogan given to us by DuPont* in 1939, a time when it seemed that fledgling science really might help solve the problems of this planet, feed the masses, cure diseases, make our lives better. Scientists have certainly experimented away on us, “progressing” from creating our foods in the laboratory to now gene-tampering with our foods, so that with each decade we have moved further and further away from natural food sources. Foods on our supermarket shelves contain lists of chemicals, not real food. They contain non-food additives, preservatives, fillers, colors, false tastes and smells which, taken together, look like food, but are not food and do not nourish us.

[*DuPont is a multi-product chemical company, making everything from explosives and munitions to Teflon, herbicides, refrigerants, high-tech coatings, nonwoven fibers, and much more. The phrase “better living through chemistry” was dropped from their company slogan in 1980. The use of that phrase in this essay does not specifically reference DuPont, but all modern industrial activity based on similar thinking.]

Today, some 60 or 70 years later, it is very clear that “better living through chemistry” has actually turned out to be one of the worst ideas ever conceived. We have poisoned the planet with our industrial chemicals, in exchange for which we now have more “stuff,” but we are not living better (although we are living longer). We are actually very unhealthy through much of that longer lifespan. We are far more unhealthy than our grandparents. Our obese, autistic, ADD, allergic, asthmatic and diabetic populations are enormous, way out of proportion to our total population. We are cancerous, hypertensive, mentally ill, prone to heart disease, ulcers, and new mystery neurological conditions which are likely the result of enviro-toxins created by synergistic combinations of chemicals in our environment that have been ignorantly unleashed upon us by those “better living through chemistry” geniuses, who were so smart they didn’t have a clue what they were doing.

Somewhere along the way in this march to the scientific/chemical future we forgot that we are natural biological beings, that our bodies, our physical vehicles, are entirely natural to this earth, as natural – and in the SAME way – as a squirrel or a bird. Our bodies have an innate chemistry that cannot be successfully subjected to manipulation, although our “food scientists” and “chemists” have tried to manipulate it. The result of those manipulations is disease, imbalances in our guts, our blood, and our brains.

Where did we get the idea that our body, a natural biological system, could be fed unnatural, non-biological ingredients through our food, air, and water, and that it would somehow be able to transmute those unnatural substances, hundreds of which are poisons, into the ingredients that create health?

Where did we get the idea that we are somehow NOT natural? Even if one accepts the idea that we are genetically engineered beings, our biology is still Earth biology. We come out of this planet. We are in sync with this planet. We need the natural substances of this planet in order to survive in a state of health.

Where is the evidence that science has been able to achieve anything positive in regard to our physical beings, other than mechanical manipulations? Sure, medical science can give you a titanium hip, but it absolutely does not understand how the chemistry of the body works. Most doctors don’t know anything at all about nutrition. They don’t know what foods are good or bad for you. They don’t know what makes people healthy. They don’t know how the body heals itself. They invent products that will eliminate a woman’s menstrual cycle but have no idea how body chemistry will be affected by this disruption of natural hormone balances. The whole-body system is a precisely balanced mechanism that they don’t understand. Science now tells us that menopause is a “condition,” when it is actually a phase in the process of the body’s biological life, just as puberty is. Neither of those things is a “condition.” Both are natural periods of transformation, metamorphosis, when we move from one stage of life to another in the unfolding of our biological pattern that is millions of years old.

In our search for everlasting youth, an unnatural state, we deny the wisdom of the body and try to force it into unnatural chemical arrangements through drugs and therapies that are antagonistic to the body. In the end they all fail because the processes of nature are more intelligent, cohesive, balanced, and intricate than anything scientific tinkerers will ever be able to conceive. The tinkerers never get it right. That’s why there are so many ridiculous side effects to modern medicines – because they didn’t get it right, and they won’t get it right. It is unbelievable to think that a nasal spray, that is meant to relieve your allergy symptoms but may also give you a nasal fungus or cataracts, is the best our science can do! It is foolish to put faith in these experiments. That’s all they are: multi-million dollar experiments with our health.

Nature has it right. What we need to do is develop a holistic understanding of the wisdom of nature, not by taking it apart in the laboratory and thinking that by identifying the individual components we then understand what makes it work. That has never been the right answer. The complex synergies of natural chemistries are tossed out the window in that approach. No one understands them. We are only left with the mistakes of the laboratory, the partial solutions, and the terrible side effects, because this kind of chemistry always gets it wrong.

Despite the fact that scientists now know all this, as I look around I see us continuing to try to move further and further from nature. This is a mistake. There is nowhere to go, especially if what we have seen so far from “better living though chemistry” is any indication of our success in this regard. The further we move from nature, the more wrong we get it. Time has not improved the statistics. We don’t get it right in 2007 any more often than we did in 1939. Hasn’t anyone noticed this? There is something basically wrong with our scientific and chemical thinking. It’s the wrong road, which, of course, is why so many of science’s answers are wrong, meaning unsuccessful, partial or total failures – our “food science,” our pharmaceuticals, our industrial chemicals, etc., which only “succeed” by causing failures somewhere else – in the environment, our health, our minds and bodies.

Examples: The folderol and argument about whether Red Dye #2 is harmful to humans; all the arguments made by the “food industry” that preservatives, sodium nitrite, are good for you; mercury in our children’s vaccines; fluoride and chlorine in our water; aspartame; pesticide residues in food – clearly none of this is natural and cannot nourish a natural living system, i.e., a human body.

Has The Matrix and cyber-think mislead us into believing that we can put outlets in our heads, wire our brains, plug into our computers and become cyborgs? Well, OK, but what do cyborgs eat?

Our bodies are not garbage converters. Our bodies are not the DeLorian vehicle from Back to the Future that converts garbage to energy. It doesn’t work that way. That is pure fantasy. No amount of tinkering will make it work that way. The only thing that results from tinkering is imbalance. Our bodies have a precise chemistry that only works in pre-set ways, and only produces health when specific natural nutritional components are supplied to it. There is no other way it works. It baffles me why “chemists” and “scientists” don’t understand this. Nothing good has resulted for our physical beings from “better living through chemistry,” so why do we continue down this path? Why are there still arguments about any of this?

Every time one arrives at the big “Why?” question which seems to defy common sense, as in this case, the usual answer is that someone is heavily monetarily invested in an erroneous path and will continue on that path because it makes money, no matter how erroneous the path is or how much harm is done to humans. This of course is completely illogical, but money will always make its own rationalizations and excuses and is not very often traveling in company with common sense. So it is entirely up to the individual to understand this issue and make choices that defy the system, the science, and the chemists. Your great-grandmother understands it better than these geniuses do.

The best possible thing every person on this planet can do is to eat organic foods, grow your own if you can, buy them even though they are more expensive. Avoid GM foods of all kinds. Avoid all pre-packaged, time-saving foods whose ingredients you cannot pronounce or are not natural. Drink distilled water. Try not to breathe.

It is my hope that some individuals will revise their thinking on this issue, become natural humans again and think of themselves that way, which re-establishes a loving connection with the Earth rather than being divorced from and in conflict with it. It is my hope that these “new humans” will actively lobby against all governmental support of the unnatural substances that the food and pharmaceutical industries continue to come up with.

You are a natural biological being. Honor that. Do not follow any advice from anyone that violates this principle!

In health,

Francesca Caigatti

(Francesca has no credentials of any kind other than being an educated, intelligent, living being on this Earth.)

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Certain artificial food colorings and other additives can worsen hyperactive behaviors in children aged 3 to 9, British researchers reported on Wednesday.

Tests on more than 300 children showed significant differences in their behavior when they drank fruit drinks spiked with a mixture of food colorings and preservatives, Jim Stevenson and colleagues at the University of Southampton said.

"These findings show that adverse effects are not just seen in children with extreme hyperactivity (such as ADHD) but can also be seen in the general population and across the range of severities of hyperactivity," the researchers wrote in their study, published in the Lancet medical journal.

Stevenson's team, which has been studying the effects of food additives in children for years, made up two mixtures to test in one group of 3-year-olds and a second group of children aged 8 and 9.

They included sunset yellow coloring, also known as E110; carmoisine, or E122; tartrazine, or E102; ponceau 4R, or E124; the preservative sodium benzoate, or E211; and other colors.

One of the two mixtures contained ingredients commonly drunk by young British children in popular drinks, they said. They did not specify what foods might include the additives.

Both mixtures significantly affected the older children. The 3-year-olds were most affected by the mixture that closely resembled the average intake for children that age, Stevenson's team reported.

"The implications of these results for the regulation of food additive use could be substantial," the researchers concluded.

ONGOING DEBATE

The issue of whether food additives can affect children's behavior has been controversial for decades.

Benjamin Feingold, an allergist, has written books arguing that not only did artificial colors, flavors and preservatives affect children but so did natural salicylate compounds found in some fruits and vegetables.

Several studies have contradicted this notion.

Stevenson's team made up several batches of fruit drinks and carefully watched the children after they drank them. Some did not contain the additives.

The children varied in their responses but in general reacted poorly to the cocktails, Stevenson's team reported.

"We have found an adverse effect of food additives on the hyperactive behavior of 3-year-old and 8/9-year-old children," they wrote.

Dr. Sue Baic, a registered dietitian at the University of Bristol, said in a statement: "This is a well designed and potentially very important study."

"It supports what dietitians have known for a long time, that feeding children on diets largely consisting of heavily processed foods which may also be high in fat, salt or sugar is not optimal for health."

Others disagreed.

"The paper shows some statistical associations. It is not a demonstration of cause and effect," said Dr. Paul Illing, a registered toxicologist and safety consultant in Wirral, Britain.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Thousands of cases of breast and colon cancers might be averted each year if people in colder climates raised their vitamin D levels, researchers estimate in a new report.

A number of studies have suggested that vitamin D may be important in cancer risk. Much of this research is based on cancer rates at different latitudes of the globe; rates of breast, colon and ovarian cancer, for example, are lower in sunnier regions of the world than in Northern climates where cold winters limit people's sun exposure.

Sunlight triggers the synthesis of vitamin D in the skin, and people who get little sun exposure tend to have lower stores of the vitamin.

Complementing these studies are lab experiments showing that vitamin D helps prevent cancer cells from growing and spreading, as well as some clinical trials in which people given high doses of vitamin D showed lower cancer risks.

For the new study, researchers at the University of California used data on average wintertime blood levels of vitamin D and rates of breast and colon cancers in 15 countries.

They found that rates of the diseases tended to fall as average vitamin D levels climbed, according to their report in the journal Nutrition Reviews. The protective effect against colon cancer seemed to begin when blood levels of vitamin D reached 22 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL); for breast cancer, that number was 32 ng/mL.

The average late-winter vitamin D level among Americans is 15 to 18 ng/mL, according to the researchers.

They argue that, based on their data, if Americans were able to maintain a vitamin D level of at least 55 ng/mL, 60,000 cases of colon cancer and 85,000 cases of breast cancer could be prevented every year. Worldwide, those figures could be 250,000 and 350,000, respectively.

"This could be best achieved with a combination of diet, supplements and short intervals -- 10 or 15 minutes a day -- in the sun," lead study author Dr. Cedric F. Garland, a cancer prevention specialist at the University of California San Diego, said in a statement.

No one is recommending that people bake in the sun to reach high vitamin D blood levels. According to Garland, spending a matter of minutes in the midday sun, with 40 percent of the skin exposed, is enough. For fair-skinned people, the researchers estimate that just 3 minutes in the sun can be adequate, while darker-skinned people may need about 15 minutes.

A lifeguard in Southern California, Garland said, may have little need for extra vitamin D to reach potentially protective levels, whereas a Northerner who tends to stay indoors much of the year may need much more.

Garland and his colleagues recommend that, in addition to modest sun exposure, adults get 2,000 IU of vitamin D per day -- which is the "tolerable upper intake level" set by U.S. health officials.

That limit exists because of the risk of vitamin D toxicity, which causes elevated calcium levels in the blood and problems such as nausea, weight loss, fatigue and kidney dysfunction.

SOURCE: Nutrition Reviews, August 2007.

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A new porous material can soak up heavy metals from liquids like a sponge, U.S. researchers said on Thursday, offering a host of potential uses including removing pollutants such as mercury or lead from water.

The material is an aerogel, a type of rigid foam made from a gel in which most of the liquid has been replaced by gas.

"What we've made is a new kind of aerogel that is made of the same stuff that semiconductors are made of," said Mercouri Kanatzidis, a researcher with Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory.

Classical aerogels -- which are made of silica or carbon -- have been around for many decades. "They are white and colorless and don't absorb any light," Kanatzidis said in a telephone interview.

Kanatzidis has made aerogels from chalcogenides, which are used in semiconductors.

"These new aerogels absorb light and they can be changed in composition from one kind to another," said Kanatzidis, whose work appears in the journal Science.

He and colleagues placed this new gel in a solution containing smaller metal ions and larger, highly toxic metal ions such as mercury.

The aerogel removed almost all of the mercury from the solution and also a number of organic compounds.

"It is very much like a sponge, only the walls of this sponge have a surface that presents sulfur atoms to the solution," he said.

"Mercury likes to bind with sulfur," he said.

The solution used in the experiment contained platinum, which is far too expensive for widespread environmental use.

"We need to replace the platinum with cheaper elements," he said.

But Kanatzidis said he believed it was possible and his lab had already had some success with this.

In a general sense, we know what happened to Bondar. His doctor at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, Dr. Edward Gerstenfeld, later determined that Bondar's left anterior descending artery was 99 percent blocked by a coating of plaque, leaving a passage "the width of a hair." A blockage in that vessel, the largest artery feeding the heart, is known to cardiologists as the widowmaker. A tiny clot lodging there would have sent his heart into a brief burst of the ineffectual rhythm known as fibrillation, before it stopped altogether. Within 20 seconds the hundred billion neurons in Bondar's brain would have used up their residual oxygen, shutting down the ceaseless exchange of electrical charges that we experience as consciousness. His breathing stopped as he entered a quiescence beyond sleep.

One of the best books written on near death experiences "Eyes of an Angel"

How long has it been since you've read an article about heart attacks that didn't mention saturated fats? Our age is obsessed with "health," but when health fails, the last line of defense is in the emergency room, where doctors patrol the border between life and death—a boundary that they have come to see as increasingly uncertain, even porous. This is a story about what happens when your heart stops: about new research into how brain cells die and how something as simple as lowering body temperature may keep them alive—research that could ultimately save as many as 100,000 lives a year. And it's about the mind as well, the visions people report from their deathbeds and the age-old questions about what, if anything, outlives the body. It begins with a challenge to something doctors have always been taught in medical school: that after about five minutes without a pulse, the brain starts dying, followed by heart muscle—the two most voracious consumers of oxygen in the body, victims of their own appetites. The emerging view is that oxygen deprivation is merely the start of a cascade of reactions within and outside the cells that can play out over the succeeding hours, or even days. Dying turns out to be almost as complicated a process as living, and somehow, among its labyrinthine pathways, Bondar found a way out.

Monica tried to recall what she had learned in a CPR class decades earlier. She bent over Bondar and began pushing down on his chest, then rushed back to the kitchen to dial 911. "My husband is dying!" she gasped to the operator.

Compressing Bondar's chest would have sent a trickle of blood to his brain, supplying a fraction of its normal oxygen consumption, not enough to bring him back to consciousness. But the West Deptford police station was only three blocks away, and within two minutes of Monica's call three officers arrived with a defibrillator. They placed the pads on Bondar's chest, delivered two jolts of electricity to his heart, and got a pulse back. Soon paramedics arrived with oxygen and rushed him to a nearby community hospital. The report Monica received there after an hour was equivocal: Bondar was "stable"—his heart rate and blood pressure back to near normal—but he was still in a coma. It was then that Monica made a decision that may have saved his life. She asked that her husband be moved the 15 miles to Penn, the region's leading university hospital.

Dr. Lance Becker, director of Penn's year-old Center for Resuscitation Science, frequently dreams about mitochondria: tubular structures within cells, encasing convoluted membranes where oxygen and glucose combine to produce the energy the body uses in moving everything from molecules across cell membranes to barbells. Recently mitochondria have been in the news because they have their own DNA, which is inherited exclusively down the female line of descent, making them a useful tool for geneticists and anthropologists.

But Becker is interested in mitochondria for another reason: he believes they are the key to his audacious goal of tripling the time during which a human being can go without a heartbeat and still be revived. That the five-minute rule is not absolute has been known for a long time, and the exceptions seem to involve low temperatures. Children who fall through ice may survive unexpectedly long immersions in cold water. On Napoleon's Russian campaign, his surgeon general noticed that wounded infantrymen, left on the snowy ground to recover, had better survival rates than officers who stayed warm near the campfire. Becker is hoping to harness this effect to save lives today.

Becker is 53, slender and boyish in a way that belies his thinning hair; his typical greeting to colleagues is a jaunty "What's up, guys?" For his lab he has assembled a high-powered team from a wide range of specialties, including a brilliant young neuroscientist, Dr. Robert Neumar; an emergency-medicine specialist, Dr. Ben Abella; plus cardiologists, biochemists, bioengineers and a mouse-heart surgeon. His associate director, Dr. Vinay Nadkarni, comes from pediatrics. Becker has in effect re-created at Penn, on a more ambitious scale, the laboratory he founded in 1995 at the University of Chicago, with a grant of $50,000 from the philanthropist Jay Pritzker. Ten years earlier Pritzker had walked into the emergency room at Chicago's Michael Reese Hospital complaining of chest pains, and crumpled to the floor. Becker resuscitated him, the beginning of both a rewarding friendship (Pritzker lived for 14 more years) and a new direction for Becker's career. "Every day since then," he says, "I would go home and wonder why Jay Pritzker got a second chance and so many other people didn't."

Becker's interest in mitochondria reflects a new understanding about how cells die from loss of circulation, or ischemia. Five minutes without oxygen is indeed fatal to brain cells, but the actual dying may take hours, or even days. Doctors have known for a long time that the consequences of ischemia play out over time. "Half the time in cardiac arrest, we get the heart going again, blood pressure is good, everything is going along," says Dr. Terry Vanden Hoek, director of the Emergency Resuscitation Center at the University of Chicago, "and within a few hours everything crashes and the patient is dead." It took some time, though, for basic research to supply an explanation. Neumar, working with rats, simulates cardiac arrest and resuscitation, and then examines the neurons at intervals afterward. Up to 24 hours later they appear normal, but then in the next 24 hours, something kicks in and they begin to deteriorate. And Dr. James R. Brorson of the University of Chicago has seen something similar in neural cells grown in culture; deprive them of oxygen and watch for five minutes, or even much longer, and not much happens. "If your car runs out of gas, your engine isn't destroyed, it just needs fuel," he says.

Cell death isn't an event; it's a process. And in principle, a process can be interrupted. The process appears to begin in the mitochondria, which control the cell's self-destruct mechanism, known as apoptosis, and a related process, necrosis. Apoptosis is a natural function, destroying cells that are no longer needed or have been damaged in some way. Cancer cells, which might otherwise be killed by apoptosis, survive by shutting down their mitochondria; cancer researchers are looking for ways to turn them back on. Becker is trying to do the opposite, preventing cells that have been injured by lack of oxygen from, in effect, committing suicide.

It's a daunting problem. "We're asking the questions," says one leading researcher, Dr. Norm Abramson of the University of Pittsburgh. "We just haven't found the answers." Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that apoptosis couldn't be stopped once it was underway. It proceeds by a complex sequence of reactions—including inflammation, oxidation and cell-membrane breakdown—none of which seems to respond to traditional therapies. Becker views cell death in cardiac arrest as a two-step process, beginning with oxygen deprivation, which sets up the cell for apoptosis; then the heart starts up again and the patient gets a lungful of oxygen, triggering what is called reperfusion injury. The very substance required to save the patient's life ends up injuring or killing him.

One of the best books written on near death experiences "Eyes of an Angel"

Researchers have also been looking into the way patients get oxygen during resuscitation, and afterward. The treatment goal in cardiac arrest has been to rush oxygen to the heart and brain at maximum concentration; the mask the paramedic pops on your mouth supplies it at 100 percent. "The problem with that," says Dr. Ronald Harper of UCLA, "is it does some very nasty things to the brain." Harper believes a mixture containing 5 percent carbon dioxide would buffer those negative effects, but the idea is still controversial. At the University of Maryland, Dr. Robert Rosenthal and Dr. Gary Fiskum have been looking into whether oxygen concentrations should be dialed down much more aggressively. In their lab, dogs with induced cardiac arrest recovered better when they were taken off full oxygen after just 12 minutes, compared with an hour in the control group. Rosenthal says in practice patients sometimes are left on pure oxygen for much longer than an hour—in one hospital he studied, for as much as 121 hours.

At Penn, Becker's Resuscitation Center coordinates with the Emergency Department on a protocol for cooling patients in cardiac arrest. "We look at their prior mental state," says Dr. Dave Gaieski. "If someone was in a coma in a nursing home, we're not going to cool them." The same goes for patients whose hearts stopped for longer than an hour. Since 2005 just 14 patients have met Penn's criteria for hypothermia. Eight survived, six of them with complete recovery. No one knows how many others were saved by cooling around the country.

Bondar arrived at Penn at about 1:30 a.m., still comatose, minutes ticking away while he was evaluated for cooling. Once the decision was made, the team sprang into action, injecting him with an infusion of chilled saline—two liters at about 40 degrees—then wrapping him in plastic tubes filled with chilled, circulating water. Becker believes, based on animal work, that cooling patients even sooner—ideally, on their way to the hospital—would be even more effective, and part of the work of his lab involves perfecting an injectable slurry of saline and ice that could be administered by a paramedic. Bondar was kept at about 92 degrees for about a day, then allowed to gradually return to normal temperature. He remained stable, but unresponsive, over the next three days, while Monica stayed at his bedside. She finally went home Sunday evening, and was awakened Monday by a call from the hospital that she was sure meant bad news.

"Guess what?" said the voice on the other end. "Bill's awake."

Bondar's first words were, "How did I get here?" He had lost track of a full week, from about two days before his heart attack until he woke up. That's not unusual; short-term memory is often the first casualty of cardiac arrest. Neumar says certain cells in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that forms new memories, are for unknown reasons especially sensitive to ischemia. Another Penn patient, Sean Quinn, was 20 and a student at Drexel University when he went into unexplained cardiac arrest in 2005. He was one of the earliest patients cooled at Penn, and there's reason to believe that it saved his life, but the continuing memory deficit has prevented him from returning to college.

Certainly, people do not form memories while they're in a coma. Exactly one year before Bondar had his heart attack, Brian Duffield, then 40, a salesman in Tucson, collapsed in the shower after a swim. Luckily for him, he was on the campus of the University of Arizona, whose hospital uses a cooling protocol similar to Penn's. "I was there one minute and the next thing I know, it's a few days later and people are telling me I was dead and came back," says Duffield. But Duffield's memory and intellect and personality all returned intact from his brush with death, as did Bondar's. This is, on some level, deeply mysterious. We experience consciousness embedded in time, a succession of mental states continually re-created in our brains, even during sleep. But when the brain shuts down, where does the mind go?

That is the crux of one of the oldest debates in philosophy. The materialist view is that Bondar's memories resided in the physical state of the cells and synapses of his brain, a state that is preserved for some period after the heart stops beating. Becker has pronounced perhaps a thousand deaths in his career, but often with the feeling that—despite the lack of pulse, breathing or discernible brain function—something vital remains in the body on the bed. He felt it most strongly when his own father died of cardiac arrest at the very hospital where Becker was working in 1993. When Becker saw him, he was already dead, but something seemed preserved. "I just had the sense he wasn't really dead yet," Becker says. "He was dead. He had been pronounced. But he hadn't left."

One of the best books written on near death experiences "Eyes of an Angel"

But there's another answer to the question of where Bondar's mind was during the last week of May. This is the view that the mind is more than the sum of the parts of the brain, and can exist outside it. "We still have no idea how brain cells generate something as abstract as a thought," says Dr. Sam Parnia, a British pulmonologist and a fellow at Weill Cornell Medical College. "If you look at a brain cell under a microscope, it can't think. Why should two brain cells think? Or 2 million?" The evidence that the mind transcends the brain is said to come from near-death experiences, the powerful sensation of well-being that has been described by people like Anthony Kimbrough, a Tennessee real-estate agent who suffered a massive coronary in 2005 at the age of 44. Dying on the table in the cath lab during angioplasty, he sensed the room going dark, then lighter, and "all of a sudden I could breathe. I wasn't in pain. I felt the best I ever felt in my life. I remember looking at the nurses' faces and thinking, 'Folks, if you knew how great this is, you wouldn't be worried about dying'." Kimbrough had the odd sensation of being able to see everything in his room at once, and even into the next room. He is one of about 1,200 people who have registered their experiences with a radiation oncologist named Dr. Jeffrey Long, who established the Near Death Experience Research Foundation in 1998 to investigate the mystery of how unconscious people can form conscious memories.

That's also what motivates Parnia, who has begun a study of near-death experiences in four hospitals in Britain, aiming for 30 by the year-end. The study will test the frequently reported sensation of looking down on one's body from above, by putting random objects on high shelves above the beds of patients who are likely to die. If they later claim to have been floating near the ceiling, he plans to ask them what they saw. Parnia insists he's not interested in validating anyone's religious beliefs; his idea is that death can be studied by scientists, as well as theologians.

One of the best books written on near death experiences "Eyes of an Angel"

We are, Becker believes, at the forefront of a revolution in emergency medicine destined to save millions of lives in the years ahead. This is doctoring at its most basic, wresting people back from death. "I have been fighting with death for 20 years," he says. "And I'll keep doing it, I think, until I meet him in person."

With Matthew Philips, Joan Raymond and Julie Scelfo

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc. | Subscribe to Newsweek

One of the best books written on near death experiences "Eyes of an Angel"

As the first trial in Vaccine Court explores the relationship between vaccines and autism, a new survey released today indicates a strong correlation between rates of neurological disorders, such as ADHD and autism, and childhood vaccinations.

The survey, commissioned by Generation Rescue, compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children in nine counties in Oregon and California. Among more than 9,000 boys age 4-17, the survey found vaccinated boys were two and a half times (155%) more likely to have neurological disorders compared to their unvaccinated peers. Vaccinated boys were 224% more likely to have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and 61% more likely to have autism.

For older vaccinated boys in the 11-17 age bracket, the results were even more pronounced. Vaccinated boys were 158% more likely to have a neurological disorder, 317% more likely to have ADHD, and 112% more likely to have autism. Complete survey results are available at http://www.generationrescue.org/.

Generation Rescue commissioned the phone survey. Data was gathered by SurveyUSA, a national market research firm, which surveyed parents by phone on more than 17,000 children, ages 4-17, in five counties in California (San Diego, Sonoma, Orange, Sacramento, and Marin) and four counties in Oregon (Multnomah, Marion, Jackson, and Lane).

The survey asked parents whether their child had been vaccinated, and whether that child had one or more of the following diagnoses: Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), ADHD, Asperger's Syndrome, Pervasive Development Disorder -- Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS), or Autism. The phone survey was chosen to mirror the methodology the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) uses to establish national prevalence for neurological disorders in their national phone survey.

Timed to the release of the survey results, Generation Rescue also ran full-page advertisements in Washington's Roll Call, The Oregonian, and The Orange County Register today. The ad compares the 36 pediatric vaccines the CDC recommends today to the 10 recommended in 1983, and asks, "Are We Over- Vaccinating Our Kids?"

"No one has ever compared prevalence rates of these neurological disorders between vaccinated and unvaccinated children," said J.B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, whose son was diagnosed with autism. "The phone survey isn't perfect, but these numbers point to the need for a comprehensive national study to gather this critical information."

In Washington, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) has been advocating for such a survey. Co-sponsored by Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), the "Comprehensive Comparative Study of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Population Act of 2006," or H.R. 2832, was introduced on June 22, and would require the National Institutes of Health to complete this research.

"Generation Rescue's study is impressive and forcefully raises some serious questions about the relationship between vaccines and autism. What is ultimately needed to resolve this issue one way or the other is a comprehensive national study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children," said Congresswoman Maloney. "The parents behind Generation Rescue only want information. These parents deserve more than road blocks, they deserve answers. We can and should move forward in search of those answers. That's why I have introduced a common sense bill that would require the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct a comprehensive, comparative study on the possible link between autism and thimerosal."

From 1983 to 2007, autism rates have climbed from 1 in 10,000 children to 1 in 150 children, a growth rate of 6,000% (boys are significantly more affected by neurological disorders, accounting for approximately 80% of all cases). ADHD currently affects 1 in 13 children. In the same period, the CDC's recommended vaccine schedule more than tripled. The simmering debate over the cause of childhood neurological disorders shows no sign of cooling, but no study had ever been done to look at unvaccinated children.

Lisa Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, adds, "Everyone working with autism wants to identify the cause so we can focus on treatment and prevention. A national study like HR 5940 could help end this debate and focus all of our resources on helping our kids. Its time has come, and we hope Congress will choose to put our children first."

More time in front of the television and use of other electronic media, decreased physical activity, increased time spent indoors, increased consumption of fast foods and sugar-sweetened beverages, and changes in parenting are all likely to blame, the researchers said.

Writing in an issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association devoted to childhood chronic disease, researchers tracked rising rates of obesity, asthma and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, among U.S. children.

In the early 1970s, about 5 percent of children ages 5 to 18 were obese, compared to about 18 percent now, the researchers said. Asthma rates are estimated at 9 percent among these children, doubling since the 1980s, they said.

About 6 percent of school-age children currently report an ADHD diagnosis, also a dramatic increase in recent decades, the researchers said.

“The expanding epidemics of child and adolescent chronic health conditions will likely lead to major increases in disability among young and then older adults in the next several decades, with major increases in public expenditures for health care and income support,” the researchers wrote.

They based their estimates on government data and previously published research in scientific journals.

Focus on prevention
“One of the most important messages is that we really need to focus on prevention,” said Steven Gortmaker of the Harvard School of Public Health, who worked on the report.

“Genetic bases have been described for obesity, asthma and ADHD. Nonetheless, gene pool changes cannot explain the recent dramatic growth of these conditions,” the researchers wrote, pointing instead to a host of behavioral and environmental changes.

Gortmaker said while prevention sounds simple — eating a more healthful diet, getting more exercise and cutting down on TV — making it happen is not.

In many children, chronic health conditions continue into adulthood and can be expected to raise health care costs while driving down quality of life, the researchers said.

Obesity is recognized as a growing public health problem worldwide. Obese people are at greater risk for diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure and some cancers.

ADHD persists into adulthood roughly half the time, putting people at higher risk of other mental health problems, the researchers said. Asthma persists to adulthood in at least a quarter of childhood cases, they said.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19441193/

Famous scientists have said that their discoveries seem to be merely following up the revelations of mystics from the past, and even the arrogantly sceptical Freud wrote, “everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me”. The poets and mystics have always known that true intelligence is a blending of head and heart, of thought and feeling and now psychology is moving towards a definition of what EI might be.

Goleman defines EI as including self-awareness, impulse control, zeal and motivation, empathy and social deftness; these are the qualities he identifies as prerequisites for success in career and in relationships. However the term EI was first formally defined in 1990 by the psychologists Mayer and Salovey as: “1) Knowing how you feel, how others feel and what to do about it. 2) Knowing what feels good, what feels bad and how to get from bad to good. 3) The emotional awareness, sensitivity and management skills which help us maximise our long term happiness and survival.” More recently they have updated their definition: “Emotional intelligence involves the ability to perceive accurately, appraise, and express emotion: the ability to access and or generate feelings when they facilitate thought; the ability to understand emotion and emotional knowledge; and the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth.”

Emotional Intelligence and Yoga

It has been argued that Goleman’s definition is confusing because he has included variables which might be better called ‘personality traits’ than components of EI, and that the included areas reflect his personal biases and interests which include meditation and Eastern philosophy. Goleman’s book, however, contains very little reference to these areas and, considering the failure of western science to grasp the workings of the psyche, it might be worthwhile looking at EI from the perspective of Yoga. The yogic tradition of India, which has profoundly influenced the whole of the Orient through its absorption into Buddhism, posits the existence of three nadis or energy channels in the subtle body of the human being. The right channel (solar, yang energy) contains the qualities which would commonly be identified, in the West, with reasoning or intelligence or adaptation to the external world. The left channel (lunar, yin energy) contains the emotional half of our being and is concerned with internal things. The central channel has the quality of spiritual evolution. Therefore in terms of the three channels (nadis) and the three qualities that go with them (gunas), the word ‘emotional intelligence’ appears to be a combination or balance of left and right channels, which is the purpose of all the techniques of yoga. Yoga/ meditation, then, could be seen as a practice which aims to develop EI.

In Hindu tradition the deity which governs the central channel, where this subtle balance of left and right occurs, is Mahalakshmi, the goddess who is known as the giver of intelligence and also presides over the human brain. The Mahalakshmi power is considered to be more than just a balance between emotion and rationality; a case not of 1+1 =2 but 1+1 = 1000, or more.

The real meaning of yoga is the process of Self-realisation (Self with a big ‘s’, referring to a superpersonal sense of self). Goleman identifies self-awareness as the most important aspect of EI because it allows self-control. When this self-awareness becomes Self-awareness it automatically leads to genuine empathy- seeing the Self in others.

Perhaps EI should be understood as a quality of the infinite Self, beyond the ego (the small self with a small ‘s’) and the superego (conditioning, habituation), not just as a counterweight to IQ. The left brain (which controls the right side of the body) is credited with rational ability, while the right brain ( corresponding to the left side of the body) is said to be the area of intuitive feeling; however, EI is not really the opposite of IQ, and should not be seen as a wholly right brain quality. Some people have a lot of both forms of intelligence, some have little of either. Researchers are trying to understand how EI and IQ complement each other. Emotional life grows out of an area of the brain called the limbic system, specifically the amygdala. The limbic area is where we experience joy beyond the duality of happiness and unhappiness, and intelligence beyond the blinkers of ego and conditioning; this is the Sahasrara or seventh centre of consciousness.

Maternal Intelligence

The great Arab philosopher Ibn al ‘Arabi (12th-13th centuries) may have drawn from Sufism’s contact with India and with the Gnostic traditions closer to hand, when he wrote that intelligence emanates from Allah as a primordial feminine principle: “This primordial nature is the breath of the Merciful God in his aspect as Lord. It flows throughout the universe and manifests Truth in all its parts. It is the first mother through which Truth manifests itself to itself and generates the universe”. This is very close to descriptions of Kundalini- the reflection within created beings of the primordial Shakti (manifest power of the unmanifest Self), which flows through the central channel of the subtle body nourishing and enlightening the energy centres like a mother. Kundalini is considered to have its own intelligence independent of the mind, and it is credited with the power to raise consciousness to intelligent states beyond thought, which has its origin in either emotion or rationality. The notion of intelligence without thought is quite foreign to most of us, particularly in the West.

The Hindu idea that intelligence is the gift of the mother goddess makes it inseparable from the maternal qualities of empathy, forbearance, compassion, reflection, and selfless nurturing. Motherhood demands a high level of EI&Mac254;, yet Western society, the so-called developed world, may be increasingly undervaluing the role of the mother, which has also been attacked by Freudian sexualisation, to the point where society is becoming emotionally underdeveloped and risks civic decay. Social institutions are much more fragile than we like to think; they require constant nurturing. Societies in which the mother’s role is respected and sanctified tend to be much more stable, producing civilisations that last millennia. Goleman’s book is more than just an abstract thesis; he is looking for antidotes to restore ‘civility to our streets and caring to our communal life’.

A mother must have the emotional brilliance to know how to discipline her children without inhibiting them. Goleman quotes Aristotle at the beginning of ‘Emotional Intelligence’: “Anyone can become angry- that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way- this is not easy.”

In traditional and tribal societies individuals have developed a high degree of EI to function within the close environment of extended families and village units, this ability to get on with one another has become invaluable in the overcrowded conditions of Asian cities. EI seems to be a characteristic of the older cultures of the world in which cooperation has long taken precedence over egoistical competitiveness. European writers of the age of expansionism, (even many of those who were otherwise very liberal and forward thinking such as H.G. Wells) took it as a given that the intelligence of the European was superior to that of the non-European. The horrors of fascism, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, in the twentieth century, have substantially shaken this idea, producing a sense that something is missing, perhaps in the area of EI. European culture now seems to be looking to non-European cultures, and to its own neglected spirituality, for a sense of wholeness. Interest in other forms of intelligence is a part of this trend.

Emotional Learning and the Intellect of Love

Goethe said “we are shaped and fashioned by what we love”, and perhaps intelligence is given form by the heart. Emotional intelligence is true understanding of what is learned. Once learning is embedded in the heart, as well as the head, the lesson is converted to wisdom.

It is common knowledge that we learn much more easily, subjects for which we have a passion. In his spiritual biography of humanity ‘The Face of Glory’, the writer William Anderson calls this the ‘intellect of love’ which gave him a breakthrough in learning French, after reading a particularly evocative phrase in a novel by Balzac: “-I was responding to the atmosphere and the emotions in the novel. It was the arousal of my emotions that enhanced both my fluency in reading French and my comprehension of it. Such experiences of the sudden grasping of an idea or a mathematical technique are very common. There would be no real education without it because it marks the point when the knowledge in the book or the mind and words of the teacher have become the possession of the pupil.” Anderson writes that this ‘moment of knowing’ is a ‘marriage of the waking and dreaming states but with an efficiency and power of coordination far beyond the sum of possibilities of the conjoined states’, which is like the idea from yoga, mentioned earlier, that the balance of left and right, rational and emotional is much more than just an equilibrium, or a mere concession to the heart by the intellect.

Though he doesn’t use the term EI, Anderson’s understanding of poetic experience lends it a useful perspective: “The Sufis s