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."

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."

Adding silver to antibacterials could increase their efficacy?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130619164754.htm

Treating bacteria with a silver-containing compound boosted the efficacy of a broad range of widely used antibiotics and helped them stop otherwise lethal infections in mice. It helped make an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria sensitive to antibiotics again. And it expanded the power of an antibiotic called vancomycin that is usually only effective in killing pathogens called Gram-positive bacteria, such as Staph and Strep. Silver allowed vancomycin for the first time to penetrate and kill Gram-negative bacteria, a group that includes microbes that can cause food poisoning and dangerous hospital-acquired infections.

silver compounds cause bacteria to produce more reactive oxygen species -- chemically reactive molecules that damage the bacterial cell's DNA and enzymes, as well as the membrane that encloses the cell. Silver also made the bacteria's cell membrane leakier.

Although silver was used alone as a therapy in the past, the scientists suspected that both changes might make cells more vulnerable to conventional antibiotics -- and they did. A small amount of silver made E. coli bacteria between 10 and 1000 times more sensitive to three commonly used antibiotics: gentamycin, ofloxacin, and ampicillin.

And it allowed vancomycin to save the lives of 90 percent of mice with life-threatening cases of peritonitis -- inflammation caused by infections of the abdominal space surrounding the internal organs. Without silver, only 10 percent of the mice survived. [!!!!!!!!!!!]

The scientists also did a series of toxicity studies, showing that the doses of silver needed to help antibiotics kill bacteria were far below what could harm the mice. Nor did they harm cultured human cells, suggesting that oral and injectable silver could be safe for humans as well.

Why we should all eat insects - cricket bars for the win

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23536-to-save-the-planet-chow-down-on-a-caterpillar.html

eating insects is a far more efficient than conventional domesticated animals –

“Conventional meat is not an efficient way to get nutrients because animals must be fed on crops, and much of the energy that goes into cultivating the crops is wasted. To produce 1 kilogram of beef, for example, you need 10 kg of feed, whereas 1 kg of crickets requires just 1.7 kg. What's more, 80 per cent of a cricket is edible compared with just 40 per cent of a cow.”

http://cricket-breeding.com/new-u-s-protein-bar-made-with-crickets/

“It was then that he discovered that insects are 10 times more efficient at  converting grains into protein, than cows and other farm animals.  Additionally, crickets are low in fat and high in omega-3 fatty acids. What better ingredient for a healthy energy bar?”

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21829190.300-let-them-eat-crickets--its-more-sustainable.html?cmpid=RSS|NSNS|2012-GLOBAL|online-news

let them eat cricket bars – its more sustainable:
“How's business? Have you sold many bars?
We've grown every month since we started. We sold 6000 bars last month, and expect to sell more this month. But we're aiming for controlled growth. Originally I was looking at what it would take to farm crickets, but it just didn't make sense to do that without any consumer demand. So we decided to create a product to create that demand.

What does your company name mean?
Chapul is the Aztec word for cricket. The Aztecs used to collect crickets en masse, dry them out in the sun and then grind them down to a flour, which they used to make a very dense protein bread. That inspired the method we use to create the flour for the energy bars.

Where do you get the crickets from?
There are already large operations farming crickets for the pet food industry. I reached out to farmers about raising them for human consumption, and they tweaked rearing practices to meet health code standards for food grade products.”

You can see the kickstarter the fellow used to start this whole project here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/466721916/the-worlds-first-cricket-bar/comments

 Amazing really how kickstarter has this ability to make tiny good ideas boom. Not sure if the cricket thing will take off, but I hope so. If cricket protein can be harnessed into a protein powder with minimal side taste it could be employed in thousands of products and be a far more sustainable and environmentally friendly option than say, raising cattle for beef, which, coincidentally as I said in another post, may be behind a good chunk of global warming:

 http://buyabiggerhammer.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/cows-to-blame-for-global-warming.html