My video for the International Bipolar Foundation’s “I am more than Bipolar Disorder” campaign.
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Justin Trudeau’s impressive core strength will make you say ‘namaste’ (and Dreamboat 😄)
Sigh, what a dreamboat!!! Gosh, can we import him and export that &@$$ Drumpf? Please!
http://mashable.com/2016/03/29/justin-trudeau-yoga-namaste/#ch8K0DDqs5qoBY HEIDI MOORE
We know many things about Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau: his inclusiveness on gender and race, his strong faith in the American people, his warmth toward refugees, his ability to ignite the world’s best bromance with President Obama.
Less well-known about Trudeau is his impressive upper-body strength.
The slim Trudeau, who is 6’2″, balanced only on his wrists on a table, achieving a yogi-approved “peacock pose,” or mayurasana.
The pose is a powerful one — even besides the biceps required — because the peacock represents “big things, like immortality and love,” in Hindu lore, according to Yoga Journal.
The pose has a rich mythology based on the theme of peacocks destroying snakes that represent human flaws and attachments. It also has an extensive range of detoxifying physical benefits, according to athletic wear brand Athleta, which says “this pose strengthens the digestive system, stimulates metabolism, and purges your body of toxins by massaging the digestive organs, increasing the blood circulation, and strengthening the core.”
While it’s not clear when or where the picture of Trudeau was taken — the blurriness suggests it’s a bit old — it was given viral new life by a Facebook post by Canadian yoga teacher David Gellineau.
Trudeau tweeted it himself in 2013.
Naturally, it also shows off the polymath abilities of Trudeau, a Renaissance man whose personal traits seem all the more appealing to many Americans given the dire state of the 2016 election.
There are other examples of Trudeau’s aptitude for Eastern movements.
In 2015, he and his wife Sophie did tree pose — with Trudeau in a full suit — impressing Canadians and yogis alike by maintaining excellent form, keeping their feet away from their knees.
Trudeau has also showed off his physical abilities by dancing to bhangra, or Indian music, credibly enough to impress some Canadians of Indian descent and become a sensation in India. (The full video is at this link, with Trudeau entering at around 9:25 minutes in).
Trudeau’s abilities run in the family, it seems. There is a popular, widely circulated picture of his late father, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, doing the same peacock pose.
There’s a long history of world leaders showing off their physical prowess, from Vladimir Putin’s shirtless hunting and workouts to Barack Obama’s jogging video with vice president Joe Biden, not to mention his beachgoing pictures.
The strongman displays tend to be a bit retro, however — weights, shirtlessness — and Putin seems to avoid yoga, losing out on an opportunity to get a little more zen.
Once again, Trudeau shows himself to be on the right side of history. We say namaste.
BONUS: How to move to Canada
Fearlessly
I have decided to stop being afraid. Afraid of what, you ask? Well, afraid of everything! I may not act afraid, but inside I have mostly always been afraid. Also many of my actions have been fueled by fear. The fear of loss. The fear of abandonment. And really, that is no way to act or live.
Does my decision mean I am healing from the past? Yes. It does. I am healing from all that happened in the past. The surest sign is that I can say I will not live in fear anymore! Fear of people leaving me, because that fear causes me to hang on too tightly and ironically causes people to really leave me. Yes, ironic and a little sad that friends who I want to stay in my life get annoyed and leave. So if I’m not afraid, I don’t hang on too tightly, no one feels constricted and leaves.
I will not live in fear of bad things happening. Also known as anxiety, your brain, my brain, when I wake up in the morning, hits me with a jolt of horrible anxiety. I have been meditating every day and hopefully, and by all accounts, it will help me with my anxiety.
I am afraid of learning my lines for my play, actually of not learning my lines. But I’m putting this phone down and starting to learn them in the next few minutes. I am the female lead in this play so I have quite a few lines. But I’ve easily learnt 10 times as many lines. So no fear, just get er done.
I will not be afraid of examining where I’m going with my life. I have many options, a PhD in the molecular biology of bipolar disorder. How amazing is it that I have the opportunity to do this! Other options are perhaps getting a real estate license, I love houses and I think I would be good at selling them. Since very fortunately, we are fine financially, I could even get a job at Macy’s and just work there. I’d done that once in Buffalo and had so much fun working there, helping little old ladies find anything they were looking for. Yet another option I have is writing my book. I really do have a book inside me just waiting to make a grand entrance into the world.
So no fear. Not even about my soon to be 21 year old baby Fluffin cat. She’s lived a long and happy life, and I love her to pieces, but… you know at her age there’s a but, I will be sad. Ok let’s not talk about this anymore.
No fear. Only possibilities, making some of them into reality, living fearlessly and positively. Amen.
Oscar-Winning Actress Patty Duke Dies At 69
Actress Patty Duke in 2014 in Los Angeles.
Ryan Miller/Invision/AP
Actress Patty Duke, who shot to fame as a teenager in the film The Miracle Worker,died Tuesday morning of sepsis from a ruptured intestine at age 69, her agent said.
“She was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a friend, a mental health advocate and a cultural icon,” the agent’s statement said. “She will be greatly missed.”
When Duke was 12, she starred as Helen Keller in the Broadway play The Miracle Worker, NPR’s Mandalit del Barco reports.
She reprised her role in the 1962 film version, winning an Academy Award for best supporting actress when she was 16 — then the youngest person to have won an Oscar.
Anne Bancroft holds Patty Duke’s hand to teach her a new word in a scene from the 1962 film The Miracle Worker.
United Artists/Getty Images
In 1963, Duke took the starring roles in a popular sitcom called The Patty Duke Show,in which she played identical cousins. NPR reported that she was the youngest actress in television to have a prime-time series built around her.
The Los Angeles Times notes that “after her successful stint as Patty and Cathy Lane on television, Duke tried to transition back to film with a controversial performance as Neely O’Hara in ‘Valley of the Dolls,’ in which the actress portrayed an alcoholic, drug-addled star.”
But Duke’s outward success belied her private struggles.
“The success … masked personal misery which included depressions that led to suicide attempts and a string of failed marriages,” NPR reported in 2000.
Duke, whose real name was Anna Pearce, wrote an autobiography in 1987 titled Call Me Anna that addressed some of these struggles.
Mandalit says Duke served as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1980s and adds: “After she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she became an advocate for mental health issues.”
In 2011, Duke made news by applying for Social Security benefits online and encouraging other seniors to do the same. She talked to NPR’s Renee Montagne about it at the time.
The Devastation of Inner Emptiness (Brilliant article!)
One of the sad truths in our society is how empty many people feel, and the devastation their emptiness causes others through their resulting addictive behavior.We have all heard about the sexual acting-out of Anthony Weiner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton and John Edwards. We all know about the many famous people who end up in treatment centers for alcohol and drug addiction.
The question is: why? Why would someone who seemingly has everything destroy their own life, and the lives of those they are close to, with their addictions to sex, alcohol or drugs?
It’s true that these high-profile people seem to have everything that our society deems important for happiness and self-esteem – money and all that money can buy, relationships and fame. What is it that creates the desperate need to act out addictively when they have so much?
While they have much externally, internally they are bereft – empty. And the cause of this inner emptiness is one thing only – a lack of love. But it is not a lack of love from others. These people often have the love of many people, such as spouse, children and friends.
Inner emptiness is caused by the lack of love that comes from a narcissistic, entitled mindset. The lack of love that results from trying to get love, rather than be loving to oneself and with others. When a person’s intention is to get love, attention, and approval externally, they create their own inner emptiness. While the sex or the alcohol or the drugs might fill them temporarily, or give them a feeling of aliveness and wellbeing temporarily, it can never truly fill them in any deep and consistent way.
The thing that all of these people lack is an intent to take responsibility for loving themselves – for filling themselves with love so they have love to share with others. They have learned to substitute their various addictions – sex and other processes, alcohol and other substances – in place of genuine love. But because sex and alcohol, drugs, food, and other addictions are not love, the person never feels full inside. And because they are not loving themselves, their hearts are closed to others’ love.
When our intent is to take responsibility for our own feelings and learn to be loving to ourselves, our heart opens. When our heart is open, we can genuinely experience love from others, and, more importantly, from our Source.
Our Source IS love. Love is what we live in. Love is the intelligence of the universe, and is available to all of us when we open to it. But love from your Source cannot fill you when your heart is closed.
What Opens the Heart to Love and Fills the Emptiness?
Whether your heart is open or closed to love depends on your intent. At any given moment you are either intent on:
Protecting against your painful feelings with some form of addictive, controlling behavior, or
Learning about what is loving to yourself and others – about what is in your own highest good, and the highest good of others.
The intent to protect against painful feelings closes the heart, leaving you feeling empty and alone inside. It takes courage to be willing to compassionately feel your painful feelings of life – your loneliness and heartbreak – but unless you have the courage to learn to feel and lovingly manage these painful feelings, you will turn to addictions as a way of avoiding them.
The intent to learn about what is loving opens your heart to love. The intent to learn and love leads to taking loving action in your own behalf and in behalf of others, such as being kind and compassionate toward yourself and others.
When your intent is to get something from others – sex, approval, caring or compassion – you will feel empty.
When your intent is to give love, caring and compassion to yourself and others, you will feel full. This is what heals addictions and fills the emptiness.
Margaret Paul, Ph.D.
Fact or Fiction?: People Swallow 8 Spiders a Year While They Sleep. (Hint: Phew, thank goodness!)
Rod Crawford has heard plenty of firsthand accounts of spider-swilling slumberers. “Once or twice a year, someone tells me they once recovered a spider leg in their mouth,” says Crawford, the arachnid curator at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle.Luckily for all of us, the “fact” that people swallow eight spiders in their sleep yearly isn’t true. Not even close. The myth flies in the face of both spider and human biology, which makes it highly unlikely that a spider would ever end up in your mouth.
Three or four spider species live in most North American homes, and they all tend to be found either tending their webs or hunting in nonhuman-infested areas. During their forays, they usually don’t intentionally crawl into a bed because it offers no prey (unless it has bed bugs, in which case that person has bigger problems). Spiders also have no interest in humans. “Spiders regard us much like they’d regard a big rock,” says Bill Shear, a biology professor at Hampden–Sydney College in Virginia and former president of the American Arachnological Society. “We’re so large that we’re really just part of the landscape,”
More than anything, spiders probably find sleeping humans terrifying. A slumbering person breathes, has a beating heart and perhaps snores—all of which create vibrations that warn spiders of danger. “Vibrations are a big slice of spiders’ sensory universe,” Crawford explains, “A sleeping person is not something a spider would willingly approach.”
From the standpoint of human biology, the oral spider myth also seems ridiculous. If someone is sleeping with her mouth open, she’s probably snoring—and thus scaring off any eight-legged transgressors. Plus, many people would likely be awakened by the sensation of a spider crawling over their faces and into their mouths. Shear can attest: once, while camping, he awoke to find a daddy longlegs crawling on his face.
Spider experts concede that a sleeping person could plausibly swallow a spider, but “it would be a strictly random event.” People who claim they’ve swallowed spiders never seem to have any concrete evidence. “People tell me this happened to them, but they threw it (the evidence) away—flushed it down the toilet, usually,” Crawford says. There’s also a sore lack of eyewitnesses for such a frequent event as eight spiders a year. So even if you heard or read this spider statistic from a trustworthy source (such as a Snapple cap), you can rest assured that it doesn’t have a leg, or eight legs, to stand on.
Oooh gorgeous flowering spring trees!
And my favorite creek, Bear Grass Creek!
Editing HIV out of our genome with CRISPR
This is very cool! CRISPR is the system that excises foreign DNA out of bacterial genomes. It’s the equivalent of a bacterial immune system. Where we have a very complicated and extensive immune system that protects us from foreign pathogens (viruses, bacteria and others), it protects us even form poison, venom, foreign things and it is instrumental in healing us when we get cut or injured in some way. For a long time it was thought that bacteria had no such defense mechanism, then surprisingly CRISPR was found! It is the system that protects bacteria form bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect bacteria. If a virus successfully inserts its DNA into the chromosome of a bacterium, it will use the bacterial enzyme systems to make millions of copies of it self, eventually lysing and killing the bacterium to release all those copies of virus, and these viruses will then infect other bacteria. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. There are other viruses which infect animals or people, such as the chicken pox virus, aka varicella, the AIDS virus aka HIV (human immunodeficiency virus,) Herpes virus, Hepatitis virus, many many viruses. Retroviruses such as the HIV (AIDS) virus also incorporate themselves into the DNA of in this case T cells, and they incapacitate T cells which are part of our immune system. Thereby we get acquired immunodeficiency or AIDS. Now researchers have developed a new technique using CRISPR, the bacterial “immune system” to excise the HIV virus out of the DNA of human cells that it had infected. Although at this time, this technique can only be used in vitro, CRISPR isn’t specific enough to use in humans. It can cut large regions of DNA in cells, in a nonspecific manner. So CRISPR has to be made more specific before it can be used as a therapy, for HIV or anything else.
Read the article, it is really cool!
http://www.umassmed.edu/news/news-archives/2015/04/editing-hiv-out-of-our-genome-with-crispr/
The virus that causes AIDS is an efficient and crafty retrovirus. Once HIV inserts its DNA into the genome of its host cells, it has a long incubation period, and can remain dormant and hidden for years. And while physicians can mix a cocktail from a variety of antiretroviral drugs to keep it in check, the virus can reactivate if treatment is stopped.
In an attempt to render latent HIV completely harmless, UMass Medical School researchers are using CRISPR/Cas9, a powerful gene editing tool, to develop a novel technology that can potentially cut the DNA of the latent virus out of an infected cell.
“On the simplest level, we’re employing a very precise pair of scissors to go in and clip out all, or part of, the HIV genome and reattach the severed ends of the human genome,” said principal co-investigator Scot Wolfe, PhD, associate professor of molecular, cell & cancer biology. “If we could do that, the hope is that this would be a step on the road to getting a functional cure for HIV.”
CRISPR is a component of the immune system found in normal bacteria. In its natural state, it protects bacteria from viral invasion. Since its discovery, researchers have been seeking ways to program this system to quickly and selectively edit specific genetic sequences for study.
For all its versatility, applications for the CRISPR system remain confined to the lab. Despite recent advances showing that CRISPR/Cas9 can edit HIV from an infected cell in culture, this technique remains too imprecise to be used clinically because of its tendency to cut into random regions of the genome, producing deleterious, off-target effects.
To improve the fidelity and precision of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing system for this project, Dr. Wolfe has proposed fusing it with an additional domain that improves its specificity. This would conceivably allow the CRISPR system to edit out only the HIV DNA without the potential for stray cuts in the human genome.
The other hurdle to using current CRISPR/Cas9 technology against HIV is that while researchers have some notions where the virus might be hiding, they still don’t know how to find the virus in latently infected cells.
“Cells that are infected with HIV are permanent carriers of the viral genome. They are a kind of time bomb that can be reactive at any time if a patient stops taking their antiretroviral treatment,” said principal co-investigator Jeremy Luban, MD, the David J. Freelander Professor in AIDS Research and professor of molecular medicine. “In order to attack the virus in its latent state, we really need to understand where the virus lives and what it needs to survive.”
Dr. Luban and Wolfe will use a combination of innovative technologies to describe and model HIV DNA integrated into the genome of reservoir cells, also known as provirus. Characterizing the genomic landscape of these latently infected cells will allow the researchers to identify vulnerable and accessible genetic sequences that can be potentially cut out of the HIV virus to make it permanently inactive.
“Many scientists are looking for tools that will activate the virus so it will be visible to the immune system or drugs. We’ve chosen a different approach that looks to isolate and excise the provirus directly from resting cells,” said Luban.
With a model of the latently infected cells’ genome from which to work, Wolfe hopes to use his precise gene editing tool to excise the latent virus from cells. Part of the project will be to assess whether the precision of the system has improved enough to allow for selected removal of the HIV genome in humanized mouse models and cells from infected patients without causing collateral damage to the human genome.
“The underlying premise of this project that Scot has pushed forward using new technologies that he has developed, is to genetically engineer a system that can potentially remove the HIV genome from infected cells,” said Luban. “The hope is that one might develop the tools to deliver these agents to cells of the human immune system and actually eliminate the virus from where it is hiding.”
Joining Luban and Wolfe on the five-year, $4.6 million National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded project are Dale Greiner, PhD, the Dr. Eileen L. Berman and Stanley I. Berman Foundation Chair in Biomedical Research and professor of molecular medicine; Oliver J. Rando, MD, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular pharmacology; Job Dekker, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular pharmacology; and Manuel Garber, PhD, associate professor of molecular medicine. Each will lend their respective expertise in developing humanized mouse models; mapping chromatin structure; modeling 3D chromosome organization; and computational biology. Additionally, Katherine Luzuriaga, MD, professor of molecular medicine, pediatrics and medicine, and Thomas C Greenough, MD, assistant professor of medicine, will provide clinical expertise on the project.
“We’ve assembled a team of researchers here at UMass Medical School with the goal of better understanding the intricate structure of the latent HIV virus when integrated into immune cells because we believe that will allow us to better target it with CRISPR for gene editing,” Wolfe explained.
Prozac in the Water Makes Fighting Fish More Mellow (What?!?!?!)
Prozac in the Water Makes Fighting Fish More Mellow
Had Teresa Dzieweczynski chosen to publish her recent findings as an updated children’s classic, rather than as a research paper, she could have titled it If You Give a Fish an Antidepressant. The book would probably be less charming than If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. But it would also be, unfortunately, more realistic. Our pharmaceuticals are steadily trickling into the homes of fish and other animals. And—as the hero of the original book could have told us, his house in disarray after fulfilling the whims of a hungry rodent—there are consequences.
Dzieweczynski, a psychologist at the University of New England, looked at just one of the drugs that’s crept into American waterways: fluoxetine, better known as Prozac. It’s an antidepressant that makes the hormone serotonin linger in the brain for a longer time. Antidepressants of this type are commonly prescribed, and they commonly get into the water as a result. They’ve turned up in wastewater, drinking water, and other aquatic environments.
She tested fluoxetine on male Siamese fighting fish, or Betta splendens. No one knows how much Prozac is in the water in Thailand, where these fish live naturally. But they make a good model, Dzieweczynski explains, because scientists already understand a lot about their brains, behavior and hormones.
Dzieweczynski and her coauthors put the fighting fish into three different lab environments. Some of the fish swam in tanks with clean water. Others swam in water with a low concentration of fluoxetine—0.5 micrograms per liter, which is at the higher end of what’s been found in U.S. waterways. The third group of fish swam in a stronger dose of fluoxetine, 5 micrograms per liter.
The researchers gave the fish behavioral tests to see how bold they were. In one test, they put a fish into a big empty tank and watched how far it roamed. In another test, they dropped a fish into a tank with rocks and artificial plants it had never seen before, and observed it again. How much did the fish explore? Was it curious about its new environment, or cautious and still? Finally, researchers put a fish into a clear tank adjacent to one that held three other fighting fish. Did the subject approach the strangers, or stay at the opposite end of its tank?
After getting baseline behavioral scores for all their fish, the researchers started dosing them with fluoxetine. They retested the fish after a day of drug exposure. After a week of drug exposure, they tested them again. Then they put all the fish into clean water for a week and tested them a final time.
Across all the behavioral tests, fish exposed to the antidepressant were less bold. They stayed in one place, explored their environment less, and were more hesitant to approach other fish. Their behavior was also more erratic. A higher dose of the drug caused a more dramatic effect.
“Perhaps most importantly and alarmingly,” the authors write, they could still see these effects after the fluoxetine was gone. Even after a week of swimming in clean water, drugged fish behaved less boldly than normal.
In an earlier study, Dzieweczynski drugged female fighting fish with fluoxetine and saw similar results. The effect was a bit stronger in male fish, she says—maybe because they have higher levels of serotonin or testosterone to begin with.
Dzieweczynski didn’t test her “fighting” fish to see how much they actually fought each other. She says other studies have shown that fluoxetine makes them less aggressive. When the fish in this study approached strange fish from across their tank, they may have been seeking a fight, a potential mate, or just safety in numbers.
But no matter what the fishes’ intentions, acting less boldly could hurt their odds of survival in the wild. If fish are less eager to explore their environments, they might have trouble searching for food. Shyer behavior could also make it harder for fish to defend their environments, migrate, or escape predators.
That means letting our drugs get into the water could have a cascade of consequences throughout an ecosystem. And if even temporary drug exposures can have lasting effects, it might be hard to turn the story back to page one. (Can someone bring that mouse back now?
Shimmering Springtime
Palestine WILL Be Free 