Be mindful, of the benefits of mindfulness:

Mindfulness has gotten a lot of press coverage over the last few years, and may well represent an extremely beneficial, cost effective, long term, low side effect treatment for a whole range of common stress, motivation, focus and affective related disorders. Here is a compilation of a few articles on the subject:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130604114001.htm

"Although we've known that meditation can reduce anxiety, we hadn't identified the specific brain mechanisms involved in relieving anxiety in healthy individuals,"
For the study, 15 healthy volunteers [TOOO SMALL!!!!! ] with normal levels of everyday anxiety were recruited for the study. These individuals had no previous meditation experience or anxiety disorders. All subjects participated in four 20-minute classes to learn a technique known as mindfulness meditation. In this form of meditation, people are taught to focus on breath and body sensations and to non-judgmentally evaluate distracting thoughts and emotions… Researchers found that meditation reduced anxiety ratings by as much as 39 percent.

The study revealed that meditation-related anxiety relief is associated with activation of the anterior cingulate cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain involved with executive-level function. During meditation, there was more activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that controls worrying. In addition, when activity increased in the anterior cingulate cortex -- the area that governs thinking and emotion -- anxiety decreased.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130619195139.htm

Mindfulness meditation can increase wellbeing and reduce stress in school children

Mindfulness = a mental training that develops sustained attention that can change the ways people think, act and feel

522 pupils, aged between 12 and 16 years, from 12 secondary schools [took] part in the study. 256 pupils at six of the schools were taught the Mindfulness in Schools Project's curriculum, a nine week introduction to mindfulness designed for the classroom." The other 266 pupils at the other six schools did not receive the mindfulness lessons, and acted as a control group.

Our mindfulness curriculum aims to engage even the most cynical of adolescent audience with the basics of mindfulness. We use striking visuals, film clips and activities to bring it to life without losing the expertise and integrity of classic mindfulness teaching."

All the pupils were followed up after a three month period. The follow-up was timed to coincide with the summer exam period -- which is a potential time of high stress for young people. The researchers found that those children who participated in the mindfulness programme reported fewer depressive symptoms, lower stress and greater wellbeing than the young people in the control group. Encouragingly, around 80% of the young people said they continued using practices taught in MiSP's mindfulness curriculum after completing the nine week programme. Teachers and schools also rated the curriculum as worthwhile and very enjoyable to learn and teach.

We found that those young people who took part in the programme had fewer low-grade depressive symptoms, both immediately after completing the programme and at three-month follow-up. This is potentially a very important finding, given that low-grade depressive symptoms can impair a child's performance at school, and are also a risk factor for developing adolescent and adult depression."

"These findings are likely to be of great interest to our overstretched schools who are trying to find simple, cost effective and engaging ways to promote the resilience of their students -- and of their staff too -- at times when adolescence is becoming increasingly challenging, staff under considerable stress, and schools under a good deal of pressure to deliver on all fronts...The next step is to carry out a randomised controlled trial into the MiSP curriculum, involving more schools, pupils and longer follow-ups."

Farmed fish overtake beef - bad news for the environment

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23719-farmed-fish-overtakes-farmed-beef-for-first-time.html

For the first time in modern history, the world has been producing more farmed fish than farmed beef. But instead of being a boon for the environment, many fish farms are damaging it because of the types of fish they breed.

A report by the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC has found that farmed fish production is rising rapidly, reaching a record 66 million tonnes in 2012. Cattle farm output, by contrast, has levelled off, with just 63 million tonnes of beef produced in the same year.

If current trends continue, humans are set to consume more farmed fish than wild-caught fish by 2015, 

Some farmed fish are good for the environment. Chinese aquaculture, which accounts for 62 per cent of the world's farmed fish, relies heavily on species such as silver carp. These can be grown on rice paddies and feed on grass, plankton and detritus. This relatively sustainable way of farming fish boosts rice yields and produces little pollution.

However, other popular farmed species such as salmon are carnivorous. They must be fed on smaller fish like anchovies, caught from the wild. As a result, salmon can only be farmed by further depleting wild fish stocks. "It would be preferable to shift the balance back in favour of farmed fish raised without feeds based on protein from other animals,"

Current Global Food Production Trajectory Won't Meet 2050 Needs

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130619195135.htm
Previous studies estimate that global agricultural production may need to increase 60-110 percent to meet increasing demands and provide food security.

agricultural statistics from across the world and found that yields of four key crops -- maize, rice, wheat and soybean -- are increasing 0.9-1.6 percent every year. At these rates, production of these crops would likely increase 38-67 percent by 2050, rather than the estimated requirement of 60-110 percent. The top three countries that produce rice and wheat were found to have very low rates of increase in crop yields. [ probably a diminishing returns things? Land is largely maxed out?/or labour/ or technology?]

"The good news is, opportunities exist to increase production through more efficient use of current arable lands and increased yield growth rates by spreading best management practices. If we are to boost production in these key crops to meet projected needs, we have no time to waste."

And if not, well, then the world population might finally start to stagnate? While I don't think hunger and poverty are good things by any means, if they stagnate the worlds populations when for years we have been ignoring the fact of world population growth and its in-sustainability, perhaps we have asked for it?

Voluntering reduces the risk of hypertension in older adults

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130613092344.htm

older adults who volunteer for at least 200 hours per year decrease their risk of hypertension, or high blood pressure, by 40 percent.

Hypertension affects an estimated 65 million Americans and is a major contributor to cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S.

The specific type of volunteer activity was not a factor -- only the amount of time spent volunteering led to increased protection from hypertension.

"As people get older, social transitions like retirement, bereavement and the departure of children from the home often leave older adults with fewer natural opportunities for social interaction," Sneed said. "Participating in volunteer activities may provide older adults with social connections that they might not have otherwise. There is strong evidence that having good social connections promotes healthy aging and reduces risk for a number of negative health outcomes."

Genetic basis for dyslexia and language impairment?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130613124318.htm

Dyslexia and language impairment are common learning disabilities that make reading and verbal language skills difficult. Both disorders have a substantial genetic component, but despite years of study, determining the root cause had been difficult.

In previous studies, Gruen and his team found that dopamine-related genes ANKK1 and DRD2 are involved in language processing. In further non-genetic studies, they found that prenatal exposure to nicotine has a strong negative affect on both reading and language processing. They had also previously found that a gene called DCDC2 was linked to dyslexia.

analyzed data from more than 10,000 children born in 1991-1992 who were part of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC)… They found that some variants of a gene regulator called READ1 (regulatory element associated with dyslexia1) within the DCDC2 gene are associated with problems in reading performance while other variants are strongly associated with problems in verbal language performance… these variants interact with a second dyslexia risk gene called KIAA0319. "When you have risk variants in both READ1 and KIAA0319, it can have a multiplier effect on measures of reading, language, and IQ," he said. "People who have these variants have a substantially increased likelihood of developing dyslexia or language impairment."

We now hope to be able to offer a pre-symptomatic diagnostic panel, so we can identify children at risk before they get into trouble at school. Almost three-quarters of these children will be reading at grade level if they get early intervention, and we know that intervention can have a positive lasting effect."

Cutting post surgical infection rate:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130613092016.htm

Three in ten people in the U.S. unwittingly carry staph in their noses, where they reside benignly as the alpha bacterium in a warm, moist olfactory world. While harmless in the nose, staph can wreak major havoc if introduced within the body, such as a wound healing from surgery. In fact, the researchers found that 78 percent to 85 percent of surgical-site infections involving staph come from the patients' own bacteria. In those cases, the infecting agents were traced to bacteria in the patients' noses by comparing the DNA profile of the bacteria at the surgical site with those in the patients' noses. Most likely, people touched their noses and then touched the wound, freeing the bacteria to roam.

In heart surgeries and knee and joint-replacement procedures, up to 85 percent of staph infections after surgery come from patients' own bacteria… a team of researchers led by the University of Iowa is recommending guidelines that will cut the infection rate by 71 percent for staph bacteria and 59 percent for a broader class of infectious agents known as gram-positive bacteria

the researchers recommend three steps to reduce post-surgical staph infections:

• Swab patients' noses for two strains of staph (MRSA and MSSA) before surgery

• For the 30 percent of patients who have staph naturally in their noses, apply an anti-bacterial nose ointment in the days before surgery

• At surgery, give an antibiotic specifically for MRSA to patients who have the MRSA strain in their noses; for all others, give a more general antibiotic

"We now know we can target staph where it exists naturally in some patients, which is in the nose," she says. "That's the bull's-eye , and we can wipe it out. What we are recommending is a really simple, cheap solution to a big problem."

Those post-surgery staph infections mean pain, personal and financial, with two studies estimating treatment to cost between 40,000 and $100,000, most of it due to follow-up surgeries.

Despite the risks and repercussions, the team found that 47 percent of hospitals reported in a survey that they don't use the nose ointment for staph carriers.

Holographic video could enable 2D displays with higher resolution and less power consumption

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130619132450.htm

Media Labis building a prototype color holographic-video display whose resolution is roughly that of a standard-definition TV and which can update video images 30 times a second, fast enough to produce the illusion of motion. The heart of the display is an optical chip, resembling a microscope slide, that Smalley built, using only MIT facilities, for about $10.

"Until now, if you wanted to make a light modulator for a video projector, or an LCD panel for a TV, or something like that, you had to deal with the red light, the green light and the blue light separately," he says. "If you look closely at an LCD panel, each pixel actually has three little color filters in it. There's a red subpixel, a green subpixel and a blue subpixel."

"First of all," he continues, "that's inefficient, because the filters, even if they were perfect, would throw away two-thirds of the light. But second, it reduces either the resolution or the speed at which the modulator can operate."

According to Smalley, on the other hand, "What's most exciting about [the new chip] is that it's a waveguide-based platform, which is a major departure from every other type of spatial light modulator used for holographic video right now."