Is Believing In God Evolutionarily Advantageous?

August 31, 2010 NPR.org

1831 - English survey ship HMS Beagle in the Straits of Magellan during its circumnavigation of the globe with Captain Robert Fitzroy and scientist Charles Darwin aboard. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

For decades, the intellectual descendants of Darwin have pored over ancient bones and bits of fossils, trying to piece together how fish evolved into man, theorizing about the evolutionary advantage conferred by each physical change. And over the past 10 years, a small group of academics have begun to look at religion in the same way: they've started to look at God and the supernatural through the lens of evolution.

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Interest in Reincarnation Is Growing

August 31, 2010 New York Times

In one of his past lives, Dr. Paul DeBell believes, he was a caveman. The gray-haired Cornell-trained psychiatrist has a gentle, serious manner, and his appearance, together with the generic shrink décor of his office – leather couch, granite-topped coffee table – makes this pronouncement seem particularly jarring.

In that earlier incarnation, "I was going along, going along, going along, and I got eaten," said Dr. DeBell, who has a private practice on the Upper East Side where he specializes in hypnotizing those hoping to retrieve memories of past lives. Dr. DeBell likes to reflect on how previous lives can alter one's sense of self. He, for example, is more than a psychiatrist in 21st-century Manhattan; he believes he is an eternal soul who also inhabited the body of a Tibetan monk and a conscientious German who refused to betray his Jewish neighbors in the Holocaust.

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Oil Spill Health Hazards?

August 31, 2010 by Dr. Andrew Weil Drweil.com

Question: I haven't heard much about the health impact of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. What are the dangers of visiting or living in the area or working on the clean-up? I did hear that almost all the workers on the Exxon Valdez clean-up in 1989 are now dead. True?


Answer: At this writing, the gushing well is apparently no longer flowing, but I wish we knew more about how the oil spill will ultimately affect the health of people who live in the area and those who are working on the clean-up. Unfortunately, we know very little about the long-term effects of contact with crude oil.

I also heard the rumor that most of the clean-up workers on the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill were now dead, but I doubt it's true. Kerry Kennedy, president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, made that claim during an appearance on CNN. I haven't been able to track down the source of her statement, and I can find no scientific studies documenting the long-term physical health effects on human beings of that oil spill in Alaska. However, a 1993 study on the mental health impact of the Exxon Valdez spill showed increased rates of anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder among area residents.   continued »

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The Seven Secrets of a Happy Life

August 30, 2010 Financial Times

Palm trees and tropical lagoon

Many of us struggle to find real happiness. Why is that? Studies in psychology suggest that part of the reason is that most of us are very bad at predicting how we’ll react when faced with many of life’s experiences. Consequently, we end up making choices that are potentially harmful to our emotional well-being. According to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, we tend to overestimate, by a long way, the extent and duration of the emotional impacts of, say, a pay rise, the death of a loved one, or even moving to an area that’s sunny all year round. This is simply because, when we’re trying to imagine how an experience will affect us emotionally, we tend to focus too much of our attention on the most salient features of the experience in question.

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Infinite doppelgängers may explain quantum probabilities

August 30, 2010 NewScientist.com

This new Hubble Space Telescope photo released by NASA shows a portion of one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. Captured here are the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and the dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks like arrows sailing through the air. UPI/NASA Photo via Newscom

An identical copy of you is also reading this story. This twin is the same in every way, living on an Earth and in a universe that looks exactly like our own. And there may be an infinite number of them. Such doppelgängers could be a natural consequence of our present conception of the universe. Now, some physicists say they could pose a serious problem for quantum mechanics. But a possible fix may also be in sight, and it could help tie abstract quantum concepts to concrete physical causes.

At issue is the possibility that there could be a multiplicity of copies of any particular experiment floating about the universe, just as there could be a multiplicity of yous. There could even be an infinite number of them if, as is thought, the early universe underwent a period of exponential growth, called inflation.

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Zen and the art of protecting the planet

August 30, 2010 UK Guardian

CANNES, FRANCE - MAY 22:  Exiled Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh attends a photocall promoting the film 'Buddha' during the 59th International Cannes Film Festival on May 22, 2006 in Cannes, France.  (Photo by Peter Kramer/Getty Images)

84-year-old Vietnamese zen master Thich Nhat Hanh ("Thay"), a prolific author with more than 85 titles under his belt, has taken a particular interest in climate change and recently published the best-selling book 'The World We Have – A Buddhist approach to peace and ecology.'

In it, he writes: "The situation the Earth is in today has been created by unmindful production and unmindful consumption. We consume to forget our worries and our anxieties. Tranquilising ourselves with over-consumption is not the way."

In his only interview in the UK, Thay calls on journalists to play their part in preventing the destruction of our civilisation and calls on corporations to move away from their focus on profits to the wellbeing of society.

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NASA/NOAA Study Finds El Niños are Growing Stronger

August 28, 2010 NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

Deviations from normal sea surface temperatures (left) and sea surface heights (right) at the peak of the 2009-2010 central Pacific El Niño, as measured by NOAA polar orbiting satellites and NASA's Jason-1 spacecraft, respectively. The warmest temperatures and highest sea levels were located in the central equatorial Pacific. Image credit: NASA/JPL-NOAA
A relatively new type of El Niño, which has its warmest waters in the central-equatorial Pacific Ocean, rather than in the eastern-equatorial Pacific, is becoming more common and progressively stronger, according to a new study by NASA and NOAA. The research may improve our understanding of the relationship between El Niños and climate change, and has potentially significant implications for long-term weather forecasting.

Lead author Tong Lee of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Michael McPhaden of NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, measured changes in El Niño intensity since 1982. They analyzed NOAA satellite observations of sea surface temperature, checked against and blended with directly-measured ocean temperature data. The strength of each El Niño was gauged by how much its sea surface temperatures deviated from the average. They found the intensity of El Niños in the central Pacific has nearly doubled, with the most intense event occurring in 2009-10.   continued »

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5 Unusual Health Industries

August 28, 2010 San Francisco Chronicle

Amethyst Crystals

Whether they're miracle cures or just plain strange, the alternative health industry is rapidly growing. Some patients swear by their naturopaths and holistic treatments, sometimes condemning conventional medicine. From fish that are purported to aid skin ailments to rocks said to be infused with healing powers, we have the low-down on some of the more unusual, emerging alternative health treatments promising big benefits – for a price, of course.

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Time to blame climate change for extreme weather?

August 27, 2010 NewScientist.com

SINDH, PAKISTAN - AUGUST 24:  A flooded village is sen from a Pakistan Army helicopter flying over the flood zone during an aid mission August 24, 2010 in Sindh, Pakistan. The country's agricultural heartland has been devastated, with rice, corn and wheat crops destroyed by floods. Officials say as many as 20 million people have been affected during Pakistan's worst flooding in 80 years. The army and aid organizations are struggling to cope with the widespread scale of the disaster that has killed over 1,600 people and displaced millions. The UN has described the disaster as unprecedented, with over a third of the country under water. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

IT IS time to start asking the hard questions. Countless people in flood-stricken Pakistan have lost families and livelihoods. Who can they hold responsible and turn to for reparations?

Less than a decade ago, these questions would have been dismissed outright. "Many scientists at the time said that you can never blame an individual weather event on climate change," says Myles Allen of the University of Oxford. But a small meeting of scientists in Colorado last week – organised by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, among others – suggests the tide is turning.

The aim of the Attribution of Climate-Related Events workshop was to discuss what information is needed to determine the extent to which human-induced climate change can be blamed for extreme weather events – possibly even straight after they have happened.

Assigning blame in this way is not without precedent. In 2004, Allen and his colleagues showed to a high level of confidence that human greenhouse gas emissions had at least doubled the risk of the European heatwave of 2003 occurring.

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The Story of Cosmetics

August 27, 2010 SafeCostmetics.org

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