Unseen World!

A little-known island continent of floating toxic plastic garbage, TWICE the size of Texas, is growing in the pacific between California and Hawaii. Officially known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, until it can be taxed, U.S. officials will continue to ignore it. I heard of it once many years ago, but it apparently has been growing tenfold each decade since the 1950’s, and now consists of 80% plastic. It has also been called Gilligan’s Island, from the trashy TV sitcom that won’t go away.

The enormous stew of trash – which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers – floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.

I had no idea that there is a 3.5 million ton island of plastic and garbage floating in the Pacific ocean between Hawaii and San Francisco.  I found this out last night when I was marveling at the ridiculous petroleum-based packaging that housed my Oscar Meyer Center Cut Bacon. Not only was the plastic container over the top, but the shrink wrapped bacon inside was “freshness overkill.” I made the comment about just another example of our dependence on oil and petroleum products when my daughter asked me if I had heard about garbage island?

So I did some digging.  What I found is that “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” or the “Trash Vortex,” has been around since the 1950s. Circular wind and ocean currents in the North Pacific Gyre have collected trash that originates onshore and has made its way into the Pacific.  Greenpeace has a nice animation on how the gyre works.

The garbage island has been growing tenfold every decade and is now twice the size of Texas.  Plastic makes up 80% of the waste, the majority of which is non-recyclable and highly toxic Bisphenol A.  The world produces 7 billion pounds of Bisphenol A per year for hard, clear plastic called polycarbonate.

I’m pretty sure we can find better ways to save our collective bacon than continuing to use polycarbonates in our packaging, and to think twice about how we dispose of the non-recyclable plastics that are thrust into our lives.

A Sedona sweat lodge called Angel Valley Resort has become a scene of horror Friday. The Angel Valley sweat lodge is described as a sauna like retreat in Sedona across 70 acres.

The scene Friday is frantic -50 people in sweat boxes, people filling ill after 1 hour sessions in the boxes, 21 airlifted or transported to local area hospitals, and now news that two persons are dead.

Here is the latest.

Flagstaff Medical Center lists 3 more persons in critical condition of the remaining 19 persons transported. The 2 persons found dead were middle aged.

Homicide investigators are on scene. Hazardous materials officials are on scene but report nothing unusual.  Results are pending. AP reports testing for potential carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.The resort is in Sedona 115 miles north Phoenix.

Complete News click here

More about “Angel Valley”

Many people spend thousands per year on products to prevent acne, or stop existing acne but there’s one simple technique that will blow you away and keep your skin looking beautiful! Most people don’t realize that the simple act of changing your pillowcase every week will help reduce the risk of pimples and acne, no matter what age. Read on to find out exactly what is living in your pillow case and why it will affect your teenage or adult acne.

Everyone sleeps on their pillow night after night until they finally decide wash it. But what most people don’t realize is that their pillow case can become filled with bacteria and oil from their hair, their skin and anything that is expelled out of their body through your ears, nose, eyes or mouth while they are sleeping. You might say that you wash your face every night and every morning, so you should be able to remove any of those unclean particles from your skin, but the truth is that once these bacteria and oil particles start to stick to your skin they will try to make a home on your skin. Bacteria can survive for a long time on the surface of someone’s skin, and usually it’s not a problem since we have stable bacteria living there usually.

Letting bacteria from your skin live on your pillow case will probably allow the number of bacteria to multiply. Another side effect of the pillow being "dirty" by our definition is that it will continue to allow more harmful little creatures to develop over time. Think about it – do you really want your skin to meet with old and dirty cell particles, oil and bacteria every single night for roughly eight hours? No! But changing your pillow case might seem like a drag, so there are a few more things to keep in mind.

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Success with an AIDS vaccine is giving researchers some hope:

"An experiment in Thailand involving 16,000 men and women has demonstrated for the first time a small but measurable protective effect of an AIDS vaccine. The vaccine, a complicated mixture of six ‘prime’ and ‘booster’ shots, reduced a person’s risk of becoming infected by about one-third compared to people getting placebo injections. The results were barely significant on statistical grounds, perplexing for scientific reasons and unanticipated by most researchers. Nevertheless, the first positive results for an AIDS vaccine after two decades of experimentation was being called a milestone."

The NYT reports: "Results of the trial of the vaccine, known as RV 144, were released at 2 a.m. Eastern time Thursday in Thailand by the partners that ran the trial, by far the largest of an AIDS vaccine: the United States Army, the Thai Ministry of Public Health, Dr. Fauci’s institute, and the patent-holders in the two parts of the vaccine, Sanofi-Pasteur and Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases. Col. Jerome H. Kim, a physician who is manager of the army’s H.I.V. vaccine program, said half the 16,402 volunteers were given six doses of two vaccines in 2006 and half were given placebos. They then got regular tests for the AIDS virus for three years. Of those who got placebos, 74 became infected, while only 51 of those who got the vaccines did. Although the difference was small, Dr. Kim said it was statistically significant and meant the vaccine was 31.2 percent effective. Dr. Fauci said that scientists would seldom consider licensing a vaccine less than 70 or 80 percent effective, but he added, ‘If you have a product that’s even a little bit protective, you want to look at the blood samples and figure out what particular response was effective and direct research from there.’"

Said Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition: "This is a hugely exciting and, frankly, unexpected result. It changes our thinking in ways we hadn’t anticipated. We often talk about whether a vaccine is even possible. This is not the vaccine that ends the epidemic and says, ‘O.K., let’s move on to something else.’ But it’s a fabulous new step that takes us in a new direction."

Compared to your average pregnant mother, a woman named Ani in Indonesia had a seriously rough delivery after going into the hospital to give birth to her son.  She was a high risk pregnancy due to being 41 years old.  She has diabetes, which puts her at risk for all kinds of problems.  And, of course, there’s the fact that the bouncing baby boy she gave birth to weighed in at a staggering 19 pounds.  (That ought to scare the pants off every expectant mother!)  Ani’s still-nameless 19-pound son is the largest child born in Indonesia, passing a 15-pound baby was born in 2007.

The world’s largest baby weighed in at 23 pound, was born in Canada in 1879, and lived only 11 hours after birth.  Meanwhile, Ani’s new son is as healthy (and hungry) as a horse.  He is also 24 inches long, but that is only slightly taller than normal. 

“This heavy baby made the surgery really tough, especially the process of taking him out of his mum’s womb,” Dr. Binsar Sitanggang told Agence France-Presse. “His legs were so big.”

Still, the wide-mouthed male proved to be a handful and then some upon his first few hours in the world. “He’s got a strong appetite, it’s almost nonstop feeding,” Dr. Sitanggang told the news agency.

“This baby boy is extraordinary; the way he’s crying is not like a usual baby. It’s really loud.”

An already pregnant woman who gets pregnant again! Shocking? Amazing? This is called Superfetation. Julia Grovenburg is a pregnant woman in Arkansas who has been diagnosed today as being pregnant with another baby again while she is still pregnant with a first baby.

Superfetation is fertilization of a second ovum after a pregnancy has begun; results in two fetuses of different ages in the uterus at the same time.

An Arkansas couple received a rather huge surprise at their most recent ultrasound visit – turns out the Julie Grovenburg is pregnant again!! And they’re not twins! That’s right, the 2 babies were conceived 2 and 1/2 weeks apart from each other. Doctors noticed a second tiny sack during the ultrasound and heard a second heartbeat. They say that the two babies aren’t twins because their developmental stages are both at different rates. Both babies also have separate expected due dates. The first one is expected in December of 2009 while the second is due in January of 2010. Hey, at least they’ll have different birth years!

“When the woman had her ultrasound initially, they saw one sack, one baby developing, and that baby had a certain gestational age; then they noticed a second heartbeat in a child that was much, much younger developmentally,” Dr. Karen Boyle of the Greater Baltimore Medical Center said.

There are many angles and goals of physical fitness. However, there are five components of fitness that create a well rounded and truly “fit” person. If you concentrate on these five aspects you will find that your overall health and wellness improves. While focusing on one and not the others can provide benefits, your fitness potential isn’t truly realized until you are addressing all five.

The first of the five components of fitness is one that has often received the most attention, cardiovascular endurance. Exercise, particularly for women, has centered around cardio health for a long time. This refers to how well your heart and lungs work together to provide oxygen to the body, particularly during workouts.

The second in the five components of fitness is muscular endurance. This refers to how long your muscles can do a repeated action before tiring. Things that require repetitive movement like cycling and running are both cardio and muscular endurance activities.

Muscular strength is next in the five components of fitness. It’s obvious that this refers to the ability of the muscles to lift, pull, or maintain control over weight. Things like strength training provide good gains in muscular strength.

Often overlooked is the fourth in the five components of fitness, stretching or flexibility. Flexibility keeps the muscles loose and can prevent injury. Things like regular stretching, yoga, an pilates are good tools to use when trying to improve flexibility.

Last in the five components of fitness is body composition or the ratio of fat within the body. This is a good indicator of overall physical health and can also determine the risk of other diseases. By keeping your body fat within an acceptable range, you can ensure optimum health.

The five components of fitness are each unique and each provide you with health benefits beyond measure. By addressing all five aspects of fitness you ensure you are taking care of your body in a well rounded manner.

For the first time in the U.S., a blind woman’s sight was restored by fitting a plastic lens into a tooth from her mouth, and implanting the combination into her eye. The patient, a 60-year-old who had been blind for nine years, now has 20/70 vision that might further improve as she recovers from the surgery, according to the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, part of the University of Miami’s medical school, where the surgeries were conducted.

The procedure was developed in Italy in 1963 and has been used successfully in Europe and Japan, according to the Miami Herald. It’s a last-ditch procedure for people with problems with their cornea — where the lens would normally sit — because of trauma, corneal disease or scarring, but whose optic nerve and structures beneath the cornea are still healthy.

The patient’s eyetooth (as a canine tooth from the upper jaw is called)
was selected because it had a decent amount of jawbone and ligament attached, which are essential for the tooth to heal into the eye after implantation, notes the Herald.

“If there isn’t any infection, I’m optimistic we can preserve at least 20/70 vision for the next 10 years,” Victor Perez, a cornea specialist at Bascom, told the Miami Herald.

Sharron "Kay" Thornton, blind since 2000 has regained sight.

In 1972 a shocking image traveled around the World. The Kim Phuc Phan Thai photo gave us only a glimpse of the horrors of the war. In the picture we could see young Kim Phuc Phan Thai running on a highway, naked and in pain from napalm burn. This photo was also known as the “Napalm Girl” picture.

The girl in the 1972 photo — 46-year-old Kim Phuc Phan Thai (known to many as Kim Phuc) — recently shared her story with victims at the Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors and shared a message of hope, according to HealthDay .

"Sixty-five percent of my body got burned," Phuc told HealthDay. Her face wasn’t touched by the napalm, but she had third-degree burns on her back and left arm, which left her with scars and pain.

Phuc said she was in a burn unit in Saigon for 14 months and had 17 operations.

"I should be dead," Phuc said, "But I was spared…so now I think, ‘I cannot change something that happened to me already. But I can change the meaning.’"

While Phuc said she still suffers from pain from her damaged nerves in her body, she called her pain her "protection."

"It humbles me, and helps me to never take my life for granted," she said. "And to share my story."

Phuc, who currently lives in Toronto, Canada, and has two children, has become a public speaker and United Nations Goodwill Ambassador and hopes to become a living inspiration to the world.

Phuc and her family lived in the village of Trang Bang north of Saigon when the bombs were dropped by the Vietnamese Air Force. Two of her cousins were killed in the attack, but Phuc was helped by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut who shot the photo. Ut won a Pulitzer Prize for the photo.

Napalm is a mixture of gasoline and a thickening agent and was widely used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Victims usually suffer severe second-degree burns or third-degree burns due to the adhesive properties of napalm.

The war ended and Kim Phuc Phan Thai’s life continued and now she is 46 years old and lives in Canada. She recently appeared on the news talking about these burns that marked her life, and the photo that became part of history. Although her face was left untouched by napalm burns, she suffered third degree burns on her arms and back.

Have you guys ever wondered when, who, how & where the health technology has evolved? Even I was wondering and pulled this article it has helped me knowing about it better. I hope even you can brush over them!! Let me know if this has been useful!

Recent news says that The Obama administration unveiled $1.2 billion in federal grants for electronic health records systems on Thursday, the first wave of funding under a health-care reform plan to create vast records-sharing networks aimed at cutting costs and improving care in the coming decade.

You can find below the timeline/history of evolutions in Healthcare Technology 

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