By Jonathan Benson
(NaturalNews) A new scare study intended to deter people from taking calcium supplements only further reinforces the fact that calcium is actually safe, at least when taken with cofactor nutrients that aid in its proper absorption. The poorly-designed study, which was published in the journal Heart, claims that taking unidentified “calcium supplements” in unknown doses can increase risk of heart attack, and many mainstream media outlets are using these ridiculous claims to push pharmaceutical bisphosphonates…

• Every dog owner at some point deals with a bout of doggy diarrhea. It’s not a matter of IF it will happen, just when! Knowing what to do ahead of time can give you peace of mind the next time your pet has a problem.
• Causes of diarrhea are wide ranging and can include dietary indiscretion (your dog eats something he shouldn’t), a sudden change in diet, poor quality diet (we see lots of kibble-related diarrhea), parasites, infection … even stress.
• Symptoms of diarrhea can be obvious, like an urgent need to get outside followed by a loose, watery stool — or they can be confusing, like straining as if the problem is actually constipation.
• If other symptoms accompany watery stool – symptoms like lethargy, loss of appetite, fever or a change in behavior – it’s time to make an appointment with your vet.
• Home care for otherwise healthy dogs with a bout of diarrhea should include a bland diet of cooked ground turkey and 100 percent canned pumpkin. Slippery elm bark is also an excellent, all-natural anti-diarrheal.

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Dog does sit up exercise with it’s  human

 

 

 

 

Is Your Cat the Boss of You?

 

By Dr. Becker

 

Sri Lanka’s main elephant orphanage staged its biggest mass christening Sunday by naming 15 baby elephants born in captivity, an official said.

Thirteen babies born last year and two in 2010 were given names chosen from among thousands suggested by visitors to the Pinnawala orphanage, director Nihal Senaratne said.

“An astrologer looked at the time of birth of each elephant. He then decided on the first letter of each baby’s name according to its horoscope,” Senaratne told AFP when contacted by telephone.

“The lucky letters were published and visitors were asked to suggest names accordingly,” he said, adding that Sunday’s ceremony was the biggest ever at the facility since it opened in 1975.

Foreign visitors to the orphanage named two of the babies Trinky and Elvina, while the others were given popular Sinhalese names including Mangala (meaning ceremonial), Singithi (small) and Ahinsa (innocent).

The orphanage, in a coconut grove about 80 kilometres (50 miles) east of Colombo, is a major tourist attraction and large crowds were present for Sunday’s ceremony.

Babies are fed gallons of milk in public and the entire herd is taken across a main road to a nearby river at bathtime in a ritual that has become hugely popular with visitors.

Formally established in 1975, the orphanage shelters 83 elephants, most of whom were abandoned or separated from their herds when they were babies. Many have also been born at the orphanage.

Elephants are considered sacred animals and a number of the babies born at Pinnawala have been gifted to Buddhist temples to be paraded during annual pageants.

Sri Lanka’s elephant population remains healthy despite decades of fighting between government and rebel forces in the island’s north-east, the first survey since the end of the bloody civil war showed last year.

The survey showed the country had 7,379 elephants living in the wild, despite fears that the population had dwindled to an estimated 5,350. The country boasted 12,000 elephants in 1900.

The survey carried out in August last year counted 1,107 baby elephants in the wild, officials said.

The 15 babies were named: Singithi, Ahinsa, Themiya, Wanamali, Trinky, Elvina, Nandi, Mangala, Annuththara, Jeevaka, Kadol, Isira, Bimuthi, Aithi and Gagana.

How to correct for a bias that stop us learning from our mistakes.

Going into business for yourself is scary. Despite all the potential rewards, compared with getting a safe job with a big firm, being an entrepreneur means accepting huge risks.

All entrepreneurs know that there are no guarantees and that new businesses fail at a frighteningly high rate. Still many manage to convince themselves that their venture will be different.

As you might expect, as a group entrepreneurs are remarkably optimistic about their chances of succeeding (otherwise why bother?).

One study asked 705 entrepreneurs who were about to start up a new business how they estimated their chances of success (Casser & Craig, 2009). When the researchers got back to them a while later about 40% had quit their new business. This 40% were then asked: what did you think your chances of success were before you started?

The first time they estimated their chances of success, before their business failed, they guessed, on average, 77.3%. Afterwards they recalled this figure to be 58.8%.

In other words the failure of their business had made them revise their original estimate downwards. With hindsight, then, the actual outcome had become more predictable.

Hindsight is always 20/20

This research into entrepreneurs demonstrates a widespread bias in human thought. The hindsight bias is our tendency towards thinking that things must have turned out the way they actually have.

It’s one example of a whole range of studies going back decades. Research carried out on professionals and lay people alike has confirmed the finding. Time and again, the outcomes of medical diagnoses, legal decisions, elections and sporting events seem more likely after the answer is known.

We display this bias across many different areas of life. The things that happen to us seem more like they were meant to happen. This is partly because of our drive to make sense of the world; it’s comforting to feel we can predict what is happening to us and why.

Under some circumstances, the hindsight bias is particularly strong:

1. The impression of inevitability. The hindsight bias is stronger when you can easily identify a possible cause of the event. For example, your bag was stolen because you’re a tourist.
2. The impression of foreseeability. The hindsight bias is stronger when you are you less surprised by what happened.

The hindsight bias can be a problem when it stops us learning from our mistakes. If the entrepreneurs knew how biased their estimates of success were, would they have done things differently? If trainee doctors think a diagnosis was obvious all along, how will they learn to consider alternatives?

So psychologists have looked at ways in which we can correct for the hindsight bias. The main one is forcing people to justify their judgements and think about alternative ways in which things could have turned out. This normally makes people see that things could easily have turned out differently.

Of course, now you know about the hindsight bias, and how it can be corrected, it seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it?

Comment: A good way to get a handle on your thinking processes is to do writing exercises. For more information, see this Sott article:Writing to Heal

Roughly 100,000 years ago, human evolution reached a mysterious bottleneck: Our ancestors had been reduced to perhaps five to ten thousand individuals living in Africa. In time, “behaviorally modern” humans would emerge from this population, expanding dramatically in both number and range, and replacing all other co-existing evolutionary cousins, such as the Neanderthals.

The cause of the bottleneck remains unsolved, with proposed answers ranging from gene mutations to cultural developments like language to climate-altering events, among them a massive volcanic eruption.

Add another possible factor: infectious disease.

In a paper published in the June 4, 2012 online Early Edition of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers, led by scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, suggest that inactivation of two specific genes related to the immune system may have conferred selected ancestors of modern humans with improved protection from some pathogenic bacterial strains, such as Escherichia coli K1 and Group B Streptococci, the leading causes of sepsis and meningitis in human fetuses, newborns and infants.

“In a small, restricted population, a single mutation can have a big effect, a rare allele can get to high frequency,” said senior author Ajit Varki, MD, professor of medicine and cellular and molecular medicine and co-director of the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny at UC San Diego.

“We’ve found two genes that are non-functional in humans, but not in related primates, which could have been targets for bacterial pathogens particularly lethal to newborns and infants. Killing the very young can have a major impact upon reproductive fitness. Species survival can then depend upon either resisting the pathogen or on eliminating the target proteins it uses to gain the upper hand.”

In this case, Varki, who is also director of the UC San Diego Glycobiology Research and Training Center, and colleagues in the United States, Japan and Italy, propose that the latter occurred. Specifically, they point to inactivation of two sialic acid-recognized signaling receptors (siglecs) that modulate immune responses and are part of a larger family of genes believed to have been very active in human evolution.

Working with Victor Nizet, MD, professor of pediatrics and pharmacy, Varki’s group had previously shown that some pathogens can exploit siglecs to alter the host immune responses in favor of the microbe.

In the latest study, the scientists found that the gene for Siglec-13 was no longer part of the modern human genome, though it remains intact and functional in chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary cousins.

The other siglec gene – for Siglec-17 – was still expressed in humans, but it had been slightly tweaked to make a short, inactive protein of no use to invasive pathogens.

“Genome sequencing can provide powerful insights into how organisms evolve, including humans,” said co-author Eric D. Green, MD, PhD, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

In a novel experiment, the scientists “resurrected” these “molecular fossils” and found that the proteins were recognized by current pathogenic strains of E. coli and Group B Streptococci. “The modern bugs can still bind and could potentially have altered immune reactions,” Varki said.

Though it is impossible to discern exactly what happened during evolution, the investigators studied molecular signatures surrounding these genes to hypothesize that predecessors of modern humans grappled with a massive pathogenic menace between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.

This presumed “selective sweep” would have devastated their numbers. Only individuals with certain gene mutations survived – the tiny, emergent population of anatomically modern humans that would result in everyone alive today possessing a non-functional Siglec-17 gene and a missing Siglec-13 gene.

Varki said it’s probable that humanity’s evolutionary bottleneck was the complex result of multiple, interacting factors. “Speciation (the process of evolving new species from existing ones) is driven by many things,” he said. “We think infectious agents are one of them.”

Co-authors of the paper include Xiaoxia Wang, Ismael Secundino, Nivedita Mitra, Kalyan Banda, Vered Padler-Karavani, Andrea Verhagen and Chris Reid, Victor Nizet and Jack D. Bui, Departments of Medicine, Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Pathology and Pediatrics, UC San Diego and the UC San Diego Glycobiology Research and Training Center; the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and UC San Diego /Salk Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny; Martina Lari, Carlotta Balsamo and David Caramelli, Department of Evolutionary Biology, Laboratory of Anthropology, University of Florence; Ermanno Rizzi, Giorgio Corti, Gianluca De Bellis, Institute for Biomedical Technologies, National Research Council, Italy; Laura Longo, Department of Environmental Science, University of Siena, Italy; William Beggs and Sarah Tishkoff, Departments of Genetics and Biology, University of Pennsylvania; Toshiyuki Hayakawa, Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University; Pedro Cruz, Eric D. Green and James C. Mullikin, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health.