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Instinctive sleeping and resting postures
Michael Tetley presents an anthropological and zoological approach to the treatment of low back and joint pain, based on instinctive sleeping and resting postures:
If you are a medical professional and have been trained in a "civilised" country you probably know next to nothing about the primate Homo sapiens and how they survive in the wild. You probably do not know that nature has provided an automatic manipulator to correct most spinal and peripheral joint lesions in primates. In common with millions of other so called civilised people you suffer unnecessarily from musculoskeletal problems and are discouraged about how to treat the exponential rise in low back pain throughout the developed world. Humans are one of 200 species of primates.1 All primates suffer from musculoskeletal problems; nature, recognising this fact, has given primates a way to correct them.
The study of animals in the wild has been a lifelong pursuit. I grew up with tribal people and in 1953-4 commanded a platoon of African soldiers from nine tribes, who taught me to sleep on my side without a pillow so that I could listen out for danger with both ears. I have organised over 14 expeditions all over the world to meet native peoples and study their sleeping and resting postures. They all adopted similar postures and exhibited few musculoskeletal problems. I must emphasise that this is not a comparison of genes or races but of lifestyles. I tried to carry out surveys to collect evidence but they were meaningless, as tribespeople give you the answer they think you want. They often object to having their photographs taken, so I have demonstrated the postures.
Tetley was born in Kenya, where he encountered much worse Mau-Mauing than what Tom Wolfe described:
Mike, who was born and raised in Kenya speaking its native language Swahili, was conscripted to command indigenous troops in the King's African Rifles as unrest began to spread throughout his homeland.
It was after Mau Mau militants ambushed a police truck that a battle erupted between the rivals.
A clash Mike so vividly recalls as it marked the last time he could appreciate the gift of sight before it was lost.
Remembering the battle, Mike said: "One of the Mau Mau threw a grenade at me and it landed by my foot. I jumped away from it and threw myself on the ground hoping that when it went off I wouldn't get hit.
"The next thing I remember I was running flat out and I got a bullet in my right ear which came out of my right eye.
"My dad always said I didn't have anything between my ears and now he's got definite proof.
"The next thing I remember I fell over and as I picked myself up everything went black. I sat down and I can't remember much more than that — not in a logical sense anyway."
Dissatisfied with blasting their victim with a rifle — nearly killing him — the Mau Mau rebels returned armed with machetes to cut up Mike, who lay helpless on the ground nursing his wound. Powerless to defend himself, Mike has always owed his survival to an ally soldier, Reguton — with whom he still has regular contact — who shot dead the seven rebels.
"I was on the ground and they came forward with guns and knives and they tried to cut me up," he said "Reguton had his gun and shot them and killed them. He killed seven of them from 25 yards — that's very good shooting, particularly when you've only got 28 bullets in a magazine. From 25 yards he would have had three bullets for each person until they were on top of him — I'm very indebted to him."
For Mike, vivid scenes of massacre and torture remain poignant in his memory. Images of bloodshed to which Mike was repeatedly exposed before he lost his sight have proved impossible to dispel from his mind.
More than 1,800 Kenyan civilians are known to have been murdered by the Mau Mau. Many of the murders of which they were guilty were brutal in the extreme and Mike recalled just one of the savage killings.
"I was walking back to my tent and there was a 12-year-old girl in the middle of the road with her throat cut. There was a note next to her which read 'We're not frightened of you, we'll take you on, the army and the police. It was signed Corporal Kanwemba of the Mau Mau."
Mike was transferred to a military hospital in England after the attack where he received the devastating news that he would never see again.
He enrolled in a physiotherapy course with the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) — which brings us back to his paper:
Figure 1 shows a mountain gorilla lying on the ground on his side without a pillow — a position in which I have also seen chimpanzees and gibbons sleeping — and a Kenya African in a similar position on a palm leaf mattress on a concrete floor. Note how he uses his laterally rotated arm as a pillow and can listen out for danger with both ears.
When lying on one side you do not even need the arm as a pillow: when the lower shoulder is fully hunched, the neck is completely supported. I think the neck should deviate towards the ground as gravity then shuts the mouth, preventing insects from entering, and a little traction is applied to the cervical spine (fig 2, top). When the head is down, the vertebrae are stretched between two anchors and every time the ribs move through breathing the tension is increased, the vertebrae realign themselves, and the movement keeps the joints lubricated. Current thinking is to keep the spine straight by use of a pillow. Has anyone ever seen a gorilla shinning up a tree with a pillow? Note also the plantar flexed foot. A dorsiflexed foot rotates the knee and alters the Q angle (between the resultant pull of the quadriceps muscle and the patella tendon), producing uneven wear and, in time, pain.
Tribal people do not like lying on the ground in the recovery position while wearing no clothes as the penis dangles in the dust and can get bitten by insects. When the legs are in the reverse recovery position (fig 2, bottom), the penis lies on the lower thigh and is protected. In this position the Achilles tendon of the leading foot can be inserted in the gap between the big toe and the first lesser toe to help correct a bunion.
When sleeping in the open in very cold climates and when the ground is wet, humans often resort to sleeping on their shins, like the Tibetan caravaneers photographed by Peter, Prince of Greece and Denmark, in 1938 (fig 3). Nature has not covered the anterior border of the tibia and the medial border of the ulna with muscle, so in this position there is only skin and bone in contact with the cold ground and heat loss is reduced. The body is also folded to conserve heat; both ears can listen for danger, be it lion or terrorist; and when the head is down gravity shuts the mouth and it is impossible to snore.
Figure 4 shows the "lookout posture," another position using the arm as a pillow to reset shoulder, elbow, and wrist: accessory joint movement is regained because the weight of the head resting on the arm is at right angles to the line of movement, producing a lateral glide. I have seen Howler monkeys using this position in Costa Rica
Quadrupedal lying (fig 5) is ideal for stretching collagen fibre throughout the body. In the penis protect position, with the pelvis locked, the spine is rotated and flexed. With the elbows out sideways and the chest on the ground, many spinal lesions can be corrected gently using nature's automatic manipulator. Animals are clever because they use the radiant heat from the sun to encourage relaxation of their muscles when they adopt this posture. In this photograph note that the dog's sternum is in full contact with the ground but that of the human is not: this can be easily corrected by rotating the right arm medially to lower the sternum. It has been noted that guide dogs working in towns breathe the same pollutants as humans yet do not have asthma. Could this be because when they lie on their chests the kickback from the upper ribs keeps the corresponding vertebrae mobile, allowing the sympathetic system to work efficiently?
Arabs in the Sahara will sit in the position shown in figure 6 for hours and it keeps the forefoot aligned on the hindfoot, as the ischia rest directly on the calcanea and the feet point straight backwards. People who sit like this do not seem to get much osteoarthritis in their knees in old age. Cross legged sitting prevents arthritic hips. A flying doctor from Kenya remarked to me that over the years as local tribesmen became more civilised he more often saw arthritis of hips and knees.
The full squat, with the heels on the ground (fig 7) resets the sacroiliac joints; takes hips, knees and ankles through the full range; and can be very useful in treating backs. To start with, some Westerners have to hold on to a door frame.
Largely anecdotal evidence has been collected by "old timers" for over 50 years from non-Western societies that low back pain and joint stiffness is markedly reduced by adopting natural sleeping and resting postures. This observation must be recorded to allow further research in this direction as these primitive societies no longer exist and the great apes living in the wild are heading for extinction. All we have to do is to be good primates and use these preventive techniques.
(Hat tip to Gwern.)
Posted in Fitness, Policy, Science, War | 1 Comment »
Two simple strategies for breaking bad habits are creating friction and changing cues
Two simple strategies for breaking bad habits are creating friction and changing cues:
Physical distance is a simple source of friction. A 2014 study involved a bowl of buttered popcorn and a bowl of apple slices. One group of participants sat closer to popcorn than the apple slices, and the other sat closer to the apple slices. The first group ate three times more calories. The second group of participants could see and smell the popcorn, but the distance created friction, and they were less likely to eat it.
For example, researchers looked at the GPS data of people with gym memberships. Those who traveled about 3.7 miles to a gym went five or more times a month. However, those who had to travel around 5.2 miles went only about once a month.
Cues change naturally when you start new relationships, change jobs, or move. These offer a window of opportunity to act on your goals and desires without being dragged down by the cues that trigger your old habits.
For example, researchers found in a 2017 study that professional athletes whose performance had declined often improved after being traded to or signing with a new team. Another study found new residents of a small British town with strong environmental values mostly took the bus or cycled to work. But people who were not recent movers mostly drove even though they held similar values.
When cues change, it becomes easier to switch up your habits and routines.
Posted in Fitness | 6 Comments »
It doesn't collect data on how hard body parts are hitting the ground or other players
Amazon-analyzed big data may not be enough to predict injuries in the NFL :
The Amazon Web Services partnership will try to close the gap with league-level data from the NFL's Next Gen Stats, which capture location data, speed, and acceleration for every player on the field hundreds of times a minute through microchips in their pads. It also includes video footage of games, information on playing surface and environmental factors, and anonymized player injury data, according to the NFL. It doesn't collect data on how hard body parts are hitting the ground or other players, which is one limitation, Binney says. But it can see, with granular detail, how and at what speed a player ran a play, changed direction, or made a tackle. The goal is to find out if any common elements of football are more likely than others to lead to any injury.
This stat caught my eye:
Currently, the injury count per game is holding steady at an average of six or seven.
That's…high.
Posted in Fitness, Technology | 2 Comments »
Heat training can boost your cool-weather performance
A 2010 study from the University of Oregon found that 10 days of training in 104 degrees Fahrenheit boosted cyclists' VO2max by 5 percent, Alex Hutchinson notes, even when the subjects were later tested in cool temperatures, and a new study out of Swansea University supports this finding:
The study involved 22 cyclists (all male, alas), all of whom were serious amateur cyclists training an average of 14 hours a week and competing regularly. The adaptation protocol was 10 consecutive days of cycling in the lab for 60 minutes at an intensity equal to 50 percent of their VO2max, with half of them in the heat group at a room temperature of 100.4 F (38 degrees Celsius) and the other half in a control group at 68 F (20 C). They also continued with their normal training outside the lab, subtracting their lab rides to maintain roughly the same training volume as usual. The outcome measure on the test days was VO2max, a marker of aerobic fitness that has a reasonably good correlation with race performance, tested at 68 F (20 C).
If you looked at the data right after the heat adaptation period, or even a couple of days later, you'd conclude that it makes you worse. The VO2max readings were lower. But three days after the heat adaptation, VO2max readings started to climb, and four days afterwards, they peaked at 4.9 percent higher than baseline, strikingly similar to the 2010 Oregon study. The control group, meanwhile, hardly saw any change.
Posted in Fitness, Science | 2 Comments »
CR is unpleasant to most humans
Rapamycin is an immunosuppressant for transplant patients, but it's also been found to increase lifespan in lab animals. Dr. Alan Green, who prescribes rapamycin for anti-aging purposes, recommends Blagosklonny's paper, Disease or not, aging is easily treatable:
Is aging a disease? It does not matter because aging is already treated using a combination of several clinically-available drugs, including rapamycin. Whether aging is a disease depends on arbitrary definitions of both disease and aging. For treatment purposes, aging is a deadly disease (or more generally, pre-disease), despite being a normal continuation of normal organismal growth. It must and, importantly, can be successfully treated, thereby delaying classic age-related diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, and neurodegeneration.
As the simplest example, calorie restriction (CR) slows aging in diverse organisms, including primates [43-50]. Similarly, intermittent fasting (IF) and ketogenic diet (severe carbohydrate restriction) extend life span in mammals [48, 51-54]. CR (as well as carbohydrate restriction and IF fasting) improves health in humans [45, 48, 53, 55-62]. However, CR is unpleasant to most humans and its life-extending capacity is limited. Nutrients activate the mTOR (molecular Target of Rapamycin) nutrient-sensing pathway [63-65] and, as we will discuss mTOR drives aging, inhabitable by rapamycin. Rapamycin-based anti-aging therapies have been recently implemented by Dr. Alan Green (https://rapamycintherapy.com).
There's a bit of circularity there.
Posted in Fitness, Science | 1 Comment »
See obstacles as opportunities
The PK Silver program sounds ludicrous at first, but parkour for seniors makes perfect sense, if your goal is to train up balance to prevent falls:
Mejia helps break down traditional Parkour moves into versions that are safe and manageable for the older crowd, and also challenge their balance, strength, and flexibility.
Nancy Lorentz, 56, who can effortlessly swing off a tree branch and go right into a somersault, created the program, called PK Silver, in 2016, hoping to share her love of Parkour while helping other people over 50 stay safe.
"We're a fitness-and-falls prevention program that is Parkour-based," she said, noting that 27,000 people die from falls every year and that using modified Parkour moves could help address that problem. Plus, she likes the Parkour philosophy.
"You just see obstacles as being opportunities," she said. "Yes, there is an element of risk in it, but you can't improve someone's balance by keeping them on the couch all the time."
A chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day
Chess is physically demanding:
The 1984 World Chess Championship was called off after five months and 48 games because defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. "He looked like death," grandmaster and commentator Maurice Ashley recalls.
In 2004, winner Rustam Kasimdzhanov walked away from the six-game world championship having lost 17 pounds. In October 2018, Polar, a U.S.-based company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found that 21-year-old Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov had burned 560 calories in two hours of sitting and playing chess — or roughly what Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis.
Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters' stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.
"Grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners," Sapolsky says.
It all combines to produce an average weight loss of 2 pounds a day, or about 10-12 pounds over the course of a 10-day tournament in which each grandmaster might play five or six times.
Do the work, and push pretty hard
Wednesday, September 4th, 2019
Lifting to failure is generally better, but not always:
Amid the confusing torrent of advice about the best ways to build strength, I've taken comfort from a series of reassuringly simple studies from McMaster University over the past decade. Researcher Stuart Phillips and his colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated that if you do a series of lifts to failure — that is, until you can't do another rep — then it doesn't much matter how heavy the weight is or how many reps you do. As long as you're maxing out, you'll gain similar amounts of strength with light or heavy weights.
But there's an interesting caveat to this advice, according to a new study from a team at East Tennessee State University led by Kevin Carroll, published in Sports: just because you can lift to failure doesn't mean you always should.
Researchers have previously pointed out that it takes longer to recover from a strength training session when you go to failure than when you stop a few reps short, with negative neuromuscular effects lasting 24 to 48 hours. You also recover more quickly even if you do the exact same number of reps but take a little extra rest halfway so that you don't quite hit failure. On the surface, this is a trivially obvious point: of course it takes longer to recover if you work harder! The question, though, is whether there's something particularly damaging or exhausting about going all the way to failure that outweighs the positive training effect you get from working harder.
So, in summary, two groups doing almost the same training, except one group was hitting failure on the last set of each exercise in every workout. The initial results from this study were published last year, showing that the relative intensity group had greater improvements in maximum strength and vertical jump. The new paper adds a bunch of information based on muscle biopsies and ultrasound, showing a greater increase for the relative intensity group in overall muscle size, the size of individual muscle fibers, and the presence of several key molecular signals of muscle growth.
Before we conclude that failure is bad, there's one other detail of the training program that's worth mentioning. While the failure group was hammering away three times a week, the relative intensity group was doing two harder (though not to failure) workouts and one easier workout each week. For example, a max strength workout of three sets of five reps might start at 85 percent for the two hard workouts, but then drop to 70 percent for the easier one.
This seems like a whole different variable thrown into the mix, and it reminds me of a study from Marcas Bamman's group at the University of Alabama at Birmingham a couple of years ago. In a big study of older adults, he found that doing two harder workouts and one easier workout each week produced better strength gains that just two hard workouts or just three hard workouts a week. He suggested that lingering inflammation in the muscles made the subjects unable to fully benefit from three hard workouts a week. Instead, doing a third easier workout added some fitness gains compared to just two weekly workouts, but still allowed the muscles to recover.
So to me, the message from the new study isn't necessarily that lifting to failure is bad. It's that lifting to failure all the time might be counterproductive (and especially so as you get older, Bamman's results suggest). The point Phillips has been trying to make is that, for the vast majority of us, all the variables that make your head spin — sets, reps, one-rep max percentages, and so on — are utterly minor details compared to the main goal of simply doing the work, and sometimes pushing pretty hard.
You have your parents' tendons
Monday, September 2nd, 2019
You have your parents' tendons:
A study from Ritsumeikan University, home to one of the top collegiate running programs in Japan, looked at injury risk in 24 elite long-distance runners. The researchers weren't concerned with mileage levels, shoe type, stretching routines, or any of the usual factors we associate with running injuries. Instead, they were focused on spit.
Over the past decade or so, a series of studies have suggested that certain gene variants can affect the structure of your collagen fibrils, the basic building blocks of tendons and ligaments. Some versions of these genes make you less likely to develop problems like Achilles tendinopathy; others make you more likely. Researchers have found, for example, that rugby players who make it to the elite level are more likely to have the tendon-protective gene variants, presumably because those who don't are more likely to have their careers derailed by injury.
In the new Japanese study, the athletes were asked about their history of tendon and ligaments inflammations and injuries during their university career, then gave a spit sample for DNA analysis. The injury data was compared to five specific variants in four different genes that have previously been associated with tendon and ligament structure. For three of the five variants, those with the "bad" version were indeed significantly more likely to have suffered tendon and ligament injuries. (The fourth variant didn't have any predictive value in this group, and the fifth didn't yield any information because all the runners in the study had the same version of the gene.)
Given previous research, these results aren't particular surprising. The question is what you do with this information. There are companies that offer personal genetic testing that includes some of these gene variants (COL5A1 was the best predictor in this study), so you can find out your status and…do what, exactly?
In a review of the field a few years ago, some of the leading researchers suggested that, rather than getting a DNA test, you should simply be aware of whether you have a personal or family history of tendon and ligament injuries. Either way, it's worth thinking about what you would change in your training if you suddenly discovered that your tendons were, say, 10 or 20 percent more likely to get inflamed compared to the average person. If you think you would start doing more stretching or strengthening or icing or "listening to your body" or whatever, then my question is simple: why aren't you doing that already?
Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »
Do ice baths suppress muscle gains?
Sunday, September 1st, 2019
Fuchs and his colleagues had 12 volunteers do a strength-training session, then hop into an ice tub—or actually, half an ice tub. One leg was submerged in cold water at 46 degrees Fahrenheit (8 Celsius), while the other leg was submersed in tepid water at 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Celsius), for 20 minutes. Then they chugged a recovery shake with 45 grams of carbohydrate and 20 grams of protein, the latter of which contained a tracer that allowed the researchers to determine how much of the protein was incorporated into new muscle. Over the following two weeks, the researchers took frequent blood samples and muscle biopsies to track their progress.
Sure enough, the rate of muscle protein synthesis was significantly lower in the cooled leg than in the leg that got the lukewarm bath, with a difference over the course of two weeks of about 13 percent. Now, lab measures like muscle protein synthesis are still not the same as measuring actual differences in strength over a longer period of time. It's awfully suggestive, though, and bolsters the case that ice baths—and, presumably, other recovery enhancers—may come with a hidden cost to fitness gains.
The higher a subject's anxiety, the more intense their subsequent muscle soreness
Muscle soreness is in you head — at least partly:
The usual explanation of delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) is something like this: when you do exercise that's unfamiliar or harder than usual, you inflict microscopic tears in your muscle fibers. Over the next 24 to 48 hours, a cycle of inflammation and repair leads to soreness that can persist for several days. But it has long been clear that this explanation doesn't tell the whole story. For example, if you exercise your right leg only, your left leg will be less likely to get sore after future workouts, which suggests that the perception of soreness isn't just about what's happening in your muscle fibers.
In this spirit, an ACSM presentation from a team led by Einat Kodesh of the University of Haifa in Israel explores the potential role of mental traits in post-exercise soreness. They had 32 volunteers complete a series of psychological questionnaires and pain tests, then perform an exercise designed to induce DOMS. A day later, another questionnaire found that 17 of the subjects had developed DOMS, while 15 hadn't.
Sure enough, there were some notable psychological differences between those who did and didn't get sore. The DOMS sufferers had reported higher levels of anxiety, depression and stress before any exercise took place. The higher a subject's anxiety, the more intense their subsequent muscle soreness was likely to be. Less surprisingly, the pre-exercise pain tests, which basically involved poking the subjects with a blunt needle to see how much pressure it took to make them hurt, also successfully predicted who was likely to develop DOMS.
The message here isn't that pain and soreness are all in your head, or that admitting you feel sore is a sign of weakness. But it is a reminder that recovery is a murkier and less objective concept that we like to think. When we try to understand athletes' obsession with things like ice baths, if we focus only on what's happening in the muscle fibers, then we're not necessarily seeing the whole picture.
The people who gain lots of muscle do so regardless of the exact workout routine they follow
A recent study put 20 men through an eight-week training program involving single-leg presses and extensions, with the catch that they did a different workout routine with each leg:
With one leg, they did a plain-vanilla progressive training program involving four sets of each exercise with a two-minute rest, with the load chosen to reach failure between 9 and 12 repetitions. With the other leg, they did a variable routine that systematically switched up some of the parameters. Some workouts had a lighter load enabling 25 to 30 repetitions before failure; some involved six sets of each exercise rather than four; some involved eccentric contractions only; and some had four minutes of rest between sets rather than two.
So the main result of the study is that following a complicated variable weight-training routine rather than a simple unvarying one doesn't seem to make any significant difference to how much muscle you accrue.
But there's a further analysis that the single-leg design enables: you can look at the variation in results from two legs in the same person following different training plans, and see how that compares to the variation between two legs in different people following the same training plan. That analysis is pretty eyebrow-raising: there's 40 times more variability between people than there is between training plans. The people who gain lots of muscle do so regardless of the exact workout routine they follow; and it's the same for the people who don't.
He favors a motorcentric view of the brain
Neuroscientist Shane O'Mara has written an entire book In Praise of Walking:
He favours what he calls a "motor-centric" view of the brain — that it evolved to support movement and, therefore, if we stop moving about, it won't work as well.
This is neatly illustrated by the life cycle of the humble sea squirt which, in its adult form, is a marine invertebrate found clinging to rocks or boat hulls. It has no brain because it has eaten it. During its larval stage, it had a backbone, a single eye and a basic brain to enable it to swim about hunting like "a small, water-dwelling, vertebrate cyclops", as O'Mara puts it. The larval sea squirt knew when it was hungry and how to move about, and it could tell up from down. But, when it fused on to a rock to start its new vegetative existence, it consumed its redundant eye, brain and spinal cord. Certain species of jellyfish, conversely, start out as brainless polyps on rocks, only developing complicated nerves that might be considered semi-brains as they become swimmers.
"Our sensory systems work at their best when they're moving about the world," says O'Mara. He cites a 2018 study that tracked participants' activity levels and personality traits over 20 years, and found that those who moved the least showed malign personality changes, scoring lower in the positive traits: openness, extraversion and agreeableness. There is substantial data showing that walkers have lower rates of depression, too. And we know, says O'Mara, "from the scientific literature, that getting people to engage in physical activity before they engage in a creative act is very powerful. My notion — and we need to test this — is that the activation that occurs across the whole of the brain during problem-solving becomes much greater almost as an accident of walking demanding lots of neural resources."
O'Mara's enthusiasm for walking ties in with both of his main interests as a professor of experimental brain research: stress, depression and anxiety; and learning, memory and cognition. "It turns out that the brain systems that support learning, memory and cognition are the same ones that are very badly affected by stress and depression," he says. "And by a quirk of evolution, these brain systems also support functions such as cognitive mapping," by which he means our internal GPS system. But these aren't the only overlaps between movement and mental and cognitive health that neuroscience has identified.
I witnessed the brain-healing effects of walking when my partner was recovering from an acute brain injury. His mind was often unsettled, but during our evening strolls through east London, things started to make more sense and conversation flowed easily. O'Mara nods knowingly. "You're walking rhythmically together," he says, "and there are all sorts of rhythms happening in the brain as a result of engaging in that kind of activity, and they're absent when you're sitting. One of the great overlooked superpowers we have is that, when we get up and walk, our senses are sharpened. Rhythms that would previously be quiet suddenly come to life, and the way our brain interacts with our body changes."
From the scant data available on walking and brain injury, says O'Mara, "it is reasonable to surmise that supervised walking may help with acquired brain injury, depending on the nature, type and extent of injury — perhaps by promoting blood flow, and perhaps also through the effect of entraining various electrical rhythms in the brain. And perhaps by engaging in systematic dual tasking, such as talking and walking."
One such rhythm, he says, is that of theta brainwaves. Theta is a pulse or frequency (seven to eight hertz, to be precise) which, says O'Mara, "you can detect all over the brain during the course of movement, and it has all sorts of wonderful effects in terms of assisting learning and memory, and those kinds of things". Theta cranks up when we move around because it is needed for spatial learning, and O'Mara suspects that walking is the best movement for such learning. "The timescales that walking affords us are the ones we evolved with," he writes, "and in which information pickup from the environment most easily occurs."
Essential brain-nourishing molecules are produced by aerobically demanding activity, too. You'll get raised levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which, writes O'Mara, "could be thought of as a kind of a molecular fertiliser produced within the brain because it supports structural remodelling and growth of synapses after learning … BDNF increases resilience to ageing, and damage caused by trauma or infection." Then there's vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which helps to grow the network of blood vessels carrying oxygen and nutrients to brain cells.
Posted in Education, Fitness, Science | 9 Comments »
You can't be healthy unless the animals you eat are healthy
The New York Times looks at the vegetarians who turned into (ethical) butchers:
As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved," she said. "My mental acuity stepped up, I lost weight, my acne cleared up, my hair got better. I felt like a fog lifted." All of the meat was from healthy, grass-fed animals reared on the farms where she worked.
Other former vegetarians reported that they, too, felt better after introducing grass-fed meat into their diets: Ms. Kavanaugh said eating meat again helped with her depression. Mr. Applestone said he felt far more energetic.
Grass-fed and -finished meat has been shown to be more healthful to humans than that from animals fed on soy and corn, containing higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, conjugated linoleic acid, beta carotene and other nutrients. Cows that are fed predominantly grass and forage also have better health themselves, requiring less use of antibiotics.
"There's one health for animals and humans," Ms. Fernald said. "You can't be healthy unless the animals you eat are healthy."
There's another benefit to grass-fed and -pastured meat: It can be absolutely delicious, as that steak in Denver reminded me.
Mr. Applestone vividly remembers that first bacon sandwich (made with pasture-raised pork) in his post-vegetarian life, served on a soft Martin's potato roll: "I thought it was the greatest thing that ever hit my mouth."
Injury rates across sports can be surprising
Injury rates across sports can be surprising:


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Reassigning to me, he's booting from a USB flash media and it probably hangs in usb_disk somewhere. Might be a duplicate of other existing bugs, haven't checked yet.
Thanks .. in the meantime try other flash disk!
In fact this is most probably a duplicate of bug #2344.


text:
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
[[missing key: search-facet.tree.open-section]] Nineteenth-Century Art (6)
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (6)
Oceanic/Australian Art (6)
Central Europe (1)
Australasia (6)
Artist, Architect, or Designer (5)
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism x
Oceania x
Bryans, Lina
Jan Minchin
(b Hamburg, Aug 26, 1909; d 2000).
Australian painter of German birth. Untrained, she took up painting in 1936 at the suggestion of William Frater (1890–1974), a pioneer of modernist art in Melbourne who had been much influenced by Post-Impressionism. Over the next decade she developed a close working relationship with Frater. From 1943 to 1948 she lived at Darebin Bridge House, a converted hotel, which became a meeting place for artists and writers and was known as the 'painter's pub': Frater, Ambrose Hallen (1886–1943) and Ian Fairweather had studios there. It was a stimulating and productive period. Her working method was rapid and intuitive. The vitality of her work derives most from the vigorous handling of paint and the strongly felt and immediate response to the subject. Colour was her main interest, and she used it to express mood and emotion. Subjects include cityscapes and a number of fine portraits: one of the best, the ...
Heidelberg school
Jane Clark
Group of artists active in the late 19th century in Heidelberg, a suburb of Melbourne, who introduced plein-air Impressionism to Australia. The most important members were Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder.
Most of the group began their careers at the National Gallery of Victoria's School of Art in Melbourne; several later studied overseas. Roberts, Streeton and Conder painted in each other's company both at their various outer suburban plein air camps (Box Hill, mainly 1885–6; Mentone, Port Phillip Bay, 1887–8; for illustration see Conder, Charles; the 'Eaglemont' estate at Heidelberg 14 km from Melbourne, 1888–90; for illustration see Streeton, Sir Arthur; and in Sydney) and in Melbourne where they often shared or occupied adjoining studios. McCubbin often worked with them. When apart they corresponded regularly, recalling their artistic camaraderie with great nostalgia. Davies and many lesser-known figures, such as Jane Sutherland, Clara Southern, John Mather (...
McCubbin, Frederick
Leigh Astbury
(b Melbourne, Feb 25, 1855; d Melbourne, Dec 20, 1917).
Australian painter and teacher. A baker's son, he trained from 1869 at the local Artisans' School of Design in Carlton and by 1872 was at the School of Design, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. It was not until the Munich-trained George Folingsby (1828–91) was appointed master of the Gallery Art School in 1882 that McCubbin received a thorough academic training in figure painting. Folingsby evoked McCubbin's interest in large-scale history pieces with a pronounced national flavour. From the colonial artist and Swiss émigré Abram-Louis Buvelot, McCubbin absorbed a more intimate, Barbizon-style vision of the Australian landscape. Julian Ashton directed his attention to subjects from contemporary life and introduced him to plein-air painting. In the mid-1880s McCubbin's growing adherence to plein-air Realism was strengthened by the influence of Portugueseborn Arthur Loureiro (1853–1912) and, more dramatically, by the impact of Tom Roberts, recently returned from Europe in 1885...
Roberts, Tom
[Thomas] (William)
(b Dorchester, March 9, 1856; d Kallista, Victoria, Sept 14, 1931).
Australian painter of English birth. A leader of the Heidelberg school and pioneer of plein-air Impressionism in Australia, he has been described as 'the father of Australian landscape painting'. Having moved to Melbourne in 1869, he studied at the East Collingwood and Carlton Schools of Design and the National Gallery of Victoria's School of Art (1874–81) while working as a photographic assistant. He led sketching expeditions with Frederick McCubbin and initiated student requests for reforms at the school. Returning to England, he enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools, London, on 6 December 1881, officially recommended by Edwin Long. In the summer of 1883 he toured Spain with the painter John Peter Russell. He learnt something of French Impressionism from Spanish art students Ramon Casas and Loreano Barrau (b 1864), and then followed the latter's advice to visit the Académie Julian in Paris. He returned to Melbourne in ...
Sutherland, Jane
(b New York, Dec 26, 1853; d Melbourne, July 25, 1928).
Australian painter. She was the eldest daughter of George Sutherland (1829–85), a carver, music teacher and artist who moved with his family to Australia from Glasgow in 1864, settling in Melbourne in 1870. She attended the National Gallery School from 1871 to 1885 and was awarded the R. Wallen Prize in 1883. From mid-1888 she occupied a studio with Clara Southern and gave art lessons in Grosvenor Chambers, Collins Street, where Tom Roberts also had a studio.
From 1887 Sutherland joined sketching trips to Alphington and Diamond Creek and to the artists' plein-air camps established by Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and other members of the Heidelberg group at Box Hill and Templestowe, near Melbourne. She was one of the most important female artists of the Heidelberg school. Her poetic, Impressionist landscapes often contain figure studies of children or women engaged in such gentle rural activities as mushroom picking and bracken gathering (e.g. ...
Withers, Walter
( Herbert )
(b Aston, Warwicks, Oct 22, 1854; d Eltham, Victoria, Oct 13, 1914).
Australian painter of English birth. He studied at the Royal Academy and South Kensington Schools (1870–82) in London and arrived in Melbourne on 1 January 1883 to work on the land for 18 months. He joined the life classes at the National Gallery of Victoria (1884–7), while employed as a lithographic draughtsman, and returned to Europe in 1887–8 to attend the Académie Julian in Paris. Back in Australia, he exhibited with the Victorian Artists' Society and painted with the Heidelberg school artists, based at Eaglemont from October 1889 to June 1890. He was nicknamed 'the orderly colonel' for his organized habits. He leased the south end of the Heidelberg mansion 'Charterisville' from September 1890, painting prolifically, teaching and accommodating numerous fellow artists. The critic Sidney Dickinson named him, with Arthur Streeton, as a leader of 'the "Heidelberg School" … for out-of-door painting' ('Two exhibitions of paintings', ...

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
SD's Noem says Trump, his 70.6M backers deserve day in court
Gov. Noem I think is a series contender for a 2024 run for the GOP nod.
But, that's a long way off. For now it's Georgia and the mid terms to get back the House and make Joe Biden just a seat warmer.
NY Post reports South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem urged the country to "afford the 70.6 million Americans that voted for President Trump the same consideration" provided to former vice president Al Gore in the 2000 legal battle that resulted in a Supreme Court decision and a George W. Bush victory.
In a Sunday interview on ABC's "This Week", the Republican governor argued that President Trump should be allowed "his day in court," pointing to Gore's 37-day legal effort to challenge the results of an election too close to call on Election Night.
Doctor Weasel November 9, 2020 at 1:20 PM
I love her bravery and her clarity. Also, her beauty.


From Eric Schmidt to Danny Meyer: How super successful, super busy entrepreneurs organize their day.
1. Have a single purpose focus.
One thing many successful entrepreneurs have in common is the ability to focus on what matters most. Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, says, "I keep things focused. The speech I give every day is: 'This is what we do. Is what we are doing consistent with that, and can it change the world?'" Jason Goldberg, CEO of Fab.com, has this piece of advice: "Pick one thing and do that one thing—and only that one thing—better than anyone else ever could." We can derive a great deal of power from developing a laser focus on our top business priorities. It's one of the attributes that sets apart the average businessperson from the more successful one.
2. Ruthlessly block out distractions.
3. Set a strict time limit on meetings.
Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault and Nissan, is strict on the timing allotted for single-topic, non-operational meetings: He allows a maximum of one hour and 30 minutes. Fifty percent of the time is for the presentation, and 50 percent is for discussion. Gary E. McCullough, former U.S. army captain and now CEO of Career Education Corp., gives people half of the time they ask for a meeting or appointment. This forces them to be brief, clear and to the point. "By doing that, I am able to cram a number of things in the day and move people in and out more effectively and more efficiently," McCullough says. People generally don't need as much time as they ask for. Meetings are time vampires. Be ruthless in managing this endemic productivity drain so you can focus on high value tasks.
4. Set up productivity rituals.
Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project, provides four tips for setting up rituals to automate behaviors that will make us more productive, without depleting our energy reservoir. One of them is prioritizing one key task to accomplish per day, and starting your day focused on that task. "Force yourself to prioritize so that you know that you will finish at least that one critical task during the period of the day when you have the most energy and the fewest distractions," Schwartz says.
Research shows that mornings can make or break your day. It's not uncommon for successful CEOs to start their day well before 6 a.m. In 27 Executives Who Wake Up Really Early, we see how incredibly busy people—from Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, to Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo—use their mornings to seize the day. Use the mantra "mind over mattress" to motivate yourself to get out of bed to pursue your goals. As Laura Vanderkam says in What Successful People Do Before Breakfast: A Short Guide To Making Over Your Morning—And Life, while many are sleeping in, successful people are already up and getting a lot done. If this is not your preference, Vanderkam advises to start with small steps, such as getting up just 15 minutes earlier every day and gradually increasing the time.
This idea comes from restaurateur Danny Meyer. He has his assistant group all questions that come up during the day in one list so she doesn't have to interrupt him repeatedly during office hours. Take a cue from this and see how you can ask others on your team to group questions, requests and other non-urgent inquiries so you're not distracted by interruptions that don't add value.
Highly productive people are selective about how they expend their energy. They don't waste it on tasks that others can do. For example, Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, uses services such as Fancy Hands, an army of virtual assistants. Others automate grocery shopping with sites such as Amazon's Subscribe and Save, or services that deliver groceries to your doorstep. Others even use services such as Plated, which delivers perfectly measured ingredients for chef designed meals at home. Do a cost/benefit analysis of how you spend your time and see if it's worth offloading some repetitive tasks so you can focus on what will bring value to your company.
8. Set up email rules to maintain sanity.
Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barna, founders of Birchbox, insist that team members indicate when they need a response in all emails. This simple tip helps with prioritization. Designer Mike Davidson has set up an email policy that limits any email he sends to five sentences. As he explains, many email messages in his inbox take more time for him to answer than they did for the sender to write. Analyze your email habits and institute time-saving policies that work for your particular situation.
9. Capture all creative ideas.
10. Increase your effectiveness through technology.
There's a wealth of programs to make a small-business owner more effective in increasing productivity. A few popular tools—some of which are free—include Dropbox to store files online; Any Meeting to host a webinar; Basecamp for project management; Trello for keeping track of projects and deadlines, and Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule your social media postings.
11. Don't lose it: Read it later.
Don't miss out on important information because you're in a rush and have no time to read. Two programs help you scoop information to read later. Get Pocket allows you to put articles, videos and any other information into a virtual pocket, saved directly from any site. Another worthwhile program is Instapaper, which allows you to save long Web pages to read later when you have time.
Consider subscribing to Lifehacker's How I Work series, which asks highly successful people to share their best time-saving tips. For example, Eric Koger, founder of ModCloth, shares his nerdiest way to save time: His keyboard layout is Colemak. Learning Colemak is a one-time investment that allows for much faster typing. This site provides an abundance of advice on how super busy, successful entrepreneurs salvage time.


text:
How Cheerleading Keeps You Fit
How to Get Stronger for Stunting in Cheerleading
What Do Guy Cheerleaders Do?
by Christy Mitchinson
A Workout & Physical Conditioning Plan for Gymnasts
Good Exercises for Cheerleading and Tumbling
History of Gymnastics Equipment
Female Gymnastic Workouts
Cheerleading was invented in the 1880s at Princeton University, with one man leading the crowd of spectators in unified yells and chants which he termed "cheers." Soon, "pep clubs" became popular in many colleges and universities around the United States. Cheerleading became a recognized, all-male activity and remained all-male for 25 years. The first female cheerleaders emerged in the 1920s, but the sport remained male-dominated. That changed in the 1940s, when young men were called off to war and young women joined cheerleading clubs to fill the vacancies left behind. By the 1960s, the addition of gymnastics and stunting to cheerleading routines brought a need for strong athletes on cheerleading teams. In the 1980s cheerleading competitions gained popularity. Many university teams strove to recruit male members who provided strength, power and a much needed competitive edge. That continues to be the case today.
Group Stunts
Stunting requires a great deal of upper body strength. Male cheerleaders are known for providing the strength necessary to make stunt groups more successful and increase the level of skills which can be executed. For example, at United States All Star Federation Level 6, which requires all athletes on the team to be 17 years of age or older, it is legal to stack pyramids up to 2.5 persons high. An example of this stunt is a 2-2-1, where two stunt groups hold their flyers, facing in, at prep level and a third flyer is placed in the hands of those flyers and held waist high. The bases supporting this stunt are lifting the weight of approximately one and a half persons. These bases must have exceptional upper body strength. Males, in general, are known to possess a high level of upper body strength, and without male cheerleaders, it is unlikely that a team would be able to execute such skills.
Partner Stunts
Partner stunts are stunts where a single base is responsible for lifting the entire weight of his flyer on his own. This requires an enormous amount of strength, mostly in the upper body and legs. While girls may base other girls in partner stunts, it is more often male cheerleaders who hold a flyer in the air during partner stunting. In addition to strength, it is a skill which requires balance, confidence and control. Partner stunting is one of the most difficult aspects of cheerleading to learn and often takes years of training to master.
Basket Tosses
Basket tosses are the skill most likely to amaze an audience. In a basket toss, the flyer is thrown up to 18 feet into the air where she executes a skill or position, for example a toe touch, before coming down to be caught in a cradle. Baskets increase in difficulty as they increase in USASF level. By level 5, a flyer is expected to complete a kick followed by two full twists before landing in the cradle. The higher a basket is thrown, the more time a flyer has to execute a number of skills. Guy cheerleaders have the upper body strength to add the explosive power and ensure high baskets.
Floor gymnastics skills, or tumbling, have become a vital part of cheerleading. Many cheerleading programs, whether university or all star, require their athletes to tumble to a high level for competition and performance. Mastering these skills takes full body strength. Male cheerleaders often have well-developed muscles not only in their upper body and chest, but also in their legs and abdominals. These muscles allow male cheerleaders to run into passes with power, push off the ground with good height and control their body positions while in the air. They are often quicker to learn new gymnastics skills than their female counterparts.
Varsity: Male Cheerleaders- Making the Transition to College Cheerleading
Arizona All-Stars
American Elite Cheer
University of Arizona Wildcats Official Athletic Site Cheerleading
An American writer living in the United Kingdom, Christy Mitchinson began writing professionally in 2000, during her career in laboratory science, pathology and research. She has authored training materials, standard operating procedures and patient/clinician information leaflets. Mitchinson is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in English literature and creative writing with The Open University.
Jupiterimages/liquidlibrary/Getty Images
Football Shotgun Snap Technique for Kids
Hardest Uneven Bar Tricks
Gymnastics Equipment Names
Drills for Volleyball Tryouts


text:
In optics, stimulated emission refers to the process by which, when perturbed by a photon, matter may lose energy resulting in the creation of another photon. The perturbing photon is not destroyed in the process (cf. absorption), and the second photon is created with the same phase and frequency as the original. The process can be thought of as optical amplification, and it forms the basis of the laser and maser.
Stimulated emission can be modelled mathematically by considering an atom which may be in two electronic energy states, the ground state (1) and the excited state (2), with energies E1 and E2 respectively.
If the atom is in the excited state, it may decay into the ground state by the process of spontaneous emission, releasing the difference in energies between the two states as a photon. The photon will have frequency ν and energy hν, given by:
E2 - E1 = hν ,
where h is Planck's constant.
Alternatively, if the excited-state atom is perturbed by the electric field of a photon with frequency ν, it may release a second photon of the same frequency, in phase with the first photon. The atom will again decay into the ground state. This process is known as stimulated emission.
An energy level diagram illustrating the process is shown below:
Before             During           After emission
------O-------     ------O-------     -------------- E2
Atom in excited state    |
~~~>                    ~|~>                    ~~~>
Incident                  |                   Photon hν
photon                    |
hν                      |                      ~~~>
|                   Photon hν
--------------     ------O-------     ------O------- E1
Atom in ground state
In a group of such atoms, if the number of atoms in the excited state is given by N, the rate at which stimulated emission occurs is given by:
∂N / ∂t = - B21ρ(ν)N ,
where B21 is a proportionality constant for this particular transistion in this particular atom (refered to as an Einstein B co-efficient), and ρ(ν) is the radiation density of photons of frequency ν. The rate of emission is thus proportional to the number of atoms in the excited state, N, and the density of the perturbing photons.
The critical detail of stimulated emission is that the emitted photon is identical to the stimulating photon in that it has the same frequency, phase and polarisation (thus the two photons are totally coherent). It is this property that allows optical amplification to take place.
See also absorption, spontaneous emission, laser science.
Retrieved from "https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stimulated_emission&oldid=86313"
This page was last edited on 8 October 2001, at 18:28. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.


text:
Back to Issue Thirteen.
ON IMMIGRANT MODEL by Mihaela Moscaliuc
REVIEW BY PATRICK STEIN
As the title suggests, Mihaela Moscaliuc's brilliant Immigrant Model is centered around experiences of leaving and of looking back. It posits a world in which the boundaries between time and space are not drawn arbitrarily — where a person and a setting define each other so fully that the movement from one to another means a life completely divorced from the ways of the past, where the feelings of an old home are only accessible through memory. In this way, Immigrant Model posits the question of what, if anything, keeps a person the same through the crossing of borders.
A useful metaphor might be the change from one room to another. The process of going through a door causes the memories of the past room to be forgotten and replaced with a new set; in this case, it's likely to lead you to forgetting the reason or reasons you moved. Expressed more powerfully, we have the embarrassment of looking back on the ideas of a few years past, that feeling of what was I thinking. Extended across decades and continents, the effect amplifies into a total alienation from past experience. Immigrant Model is a valiant attempt to ferry us across these barriers of memory, with the infectious curiosity of Moscaliuc's poetry propelling us forward.
That curiosity is expressed as a kaleidoscopic swirl of fluid colors and snatches of dialogue. Every poem is relayed by the adult Moscaliuc as an impression of earlier experience; in keeping with both youth and memory, no scene stays still long enough to be explained. Some new image or association always arises to take the place of the old one. Especially in the first few of the book's semi-chronological sections, all we have to hold on to are a few intensely felt visual motifs — rotting fruit, old women, trampled flowers, scraping stones, and even, in one particularly visceral section, irradiated and bubbling bodies:
In his mouth, on cheeks, tongue,
they bloom. Black petunias, black
to smell, black to touch. At night,
petals hover below the bulb
like miniature kites, speckled with blood.
They are of flesh, these flowers
that channel poison away from the heart ("Radioactive Wolves: A Retelling" 19-25).
This passage comes from an extended meditation on the Chernobyl disaster, which takes up the book's fourth and most powerful section. Placed in the very middle, this difficult selection of poems gives real weight to the more abstract malaise around them; as the radiation spreads to the countryside of Romania, the illness and rot that blooms there comes to represent the inadequacies of the Ceausescu regime. It is no accident that the poems on nuclear meltdown, a potent symbol of the breakdown of progress, are followed by sections of increasing disillusionment with Romania, ending with the revolution of 1989 and the violence it presaged. While the actual act of immigration is never depicted, the emotions set loose by Chernobyl allow us to fill in the gaps.
Ultimately, it seems, Moscaliuc's is a freeform and impressionistic style, concerned not necessarily with offering an "objective" historical account, but rather with conveying the subjective experience of a place and time. This focus on the visual and the subjective allows Moscaliuc to imprint herself on her world without ever appearing to touch it. Although her poems tend to focus externally, her presence is intrinsic to all of them; more than most works of art, they represent their creator largely through what she leaves out. As she says in "Memoir," "the story of a people is the story of their denials" (1); in Immigrant Model, Moscaliuc has proved that the same goes for individuals: the only way to express the lived qualities she has lost is to omit herself from the telling.
Moscaliuc's collection is proof that people rarely notice themselves unless they're made to — and her existence in America makes her notice. In fact, it is only after leaving home that Moscaliuc really becomes a character in her own poems, as she loses the privilege of simply fading away into her background. The most sustained of these looks at Moscaliuc's life today is the poem "Clawed Soleares with Strong Sun and Suitcase," which is steeped in the guilt of abandonment. Specifically, the six-part poem starts on a beach in Spain and ends with Moscaliuc entering a new apartment in America, othered into the second person:
I know so little about your arrival: you stepped down onto a platform
stubbed with syringes and dried sheets of flattened swallows,
then what? Was the sun strong enough, nourishing?
Strong in the night, your departure,
the apartment in quarantine for months to clear out the odor of sin (98-102).
The 'promotion' in these sections from a third-tense 'she' to a 'you' highlights the primary difference between being at home and being an immigrant: you are no longer allowed your anonymity. To simply be, in the easy-going, affectless way of Moscaliuc's childhood, is impossible when your act of being disagrees with the setting you find yourself in. The eponymous final poem symbolizes this powerfully: in posing for a college art class, Moscaliuc finds herself becoming uncomfortably aware of herself as an immigrant model, seen not just as an unknown body but as the given example of a well known type. It's this assumed familiarity that rankles her; she feels 'their eye' turning her into someone foreign; you as opposed to us. This is the significance of a simple tense change: she is no longer the Romanian seeing America, but the Romanian being seen by America.
In the end, Moscaliuc sneaks into the art room at night, "to see herself in various stages of completion" ("Immigrant Model," 18-19). When she sees her depictions she freezes for a moment, comparing the images in front of her with the memories of her childhood. Then she tears the sketches from their easels, hearing the babble of her village's creek and singing, for the first time in many pages, in Romanian.
Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collection Father Dirt and translator of Carmelia Leonte's The Hiss of the Viper. Her poems, reviews, and translations of Romanian poetry have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and Mississippi Review, among others. Moscaliuc is the recipient of two Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Awards and a fellowship from the New Jersey Arts Council. She is an assistant professor of English at Monmouth University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program in poetry and poetry in translation at Drew University.
Immigrant Model
by Mihaela Moscaliuc
$15.95 paperback, ISBN: 978-0822963349
Patrick Stein is a recent high school graduate from Champaign, Illinois, who plans to eventually go to college by the water. His work has been published in Polyphony H.S. and Unique. Writing seriously is still a new concept for him, and he is often unsure what to make of his own sparse biography.
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text:
List of Female Ancestors Enters the Order's Liturgy
June 02 · Beyond Fear of Differences, Sangha News
post by Shannon Shinko Hayes, MRO
photo credit: Photo Dharma
On Sunday, May 29th, the Mountains and Rivers Order sangha was formally introduced to our women ancestors. For several years, our Sunday morning program has included a service at the Mahapajapati altar, in which we chant a short list of some of the women ancestors' names. This was the first time we began a new tradition—of chanting a long list of the names of women ancestors. This will take place at the Monastery and Temple every other Sunday, alternating with chanting the long list of the male ancestors in our lineage that has been part of the Sunday service for the past 35 years.
The list of women ancestors begins with Prajna Paramita—Perfect Wisdom, frequently embodied in female form and known as "the Mother of all Buddhas"—and goes through 57 names from India, China, Japan, ending with Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Jiyu Kennett—two of the first Western women to receive transmission in a Zen lineage and establish Zen training in the United States. While the list of male ancestors we chant reflects the long line of teacher/disciple relationships that the dharma has passed through, the list of women ancestors does not reflect a continuous line of dharma transmission (nothing like that exists in the historical records that we know of) but does reveal a body of powerful and deeply influential women teachers whose names and reputations have survived over hundreds and thousands of years.
To create this list, our sangha drew on the work of Sallie Jiko Tisdale and the Dharma Rain Zen Center in Portland, OR, and on the Zen Peacemakers Order, both of whom chant similar lists in their sanghas. A few of the senior women in our sangha worked with Shugen Sensei to cull the 57 on the list from a larger body of distinguished nuns and women lay practitioners. The names we chant were selected because they were teachers, many of whom established monasteries and temples and all of whom worked with students, passing along the dharma and helping to ensure that it would find its way into our lives.
What does it mean to chant this lineage and bring these women into our lives? Why is this necessary in this time and place when we already seem to have so much equality? I entered Zen training in the MRO in 2010, and have always felt that I never really needed to ask any questions about gender or where I belonged as a woman in this Order, because all of those questions were already being asked and answered. What a privileged place I have found myself in! For me, Zen practice has been about coming into myself fully—as a woman here and now, fully embodying my present self, the past life of all women, and what I aspire to as a woman with no fixed form. I have not felt many barriers in this sangha to that practice because of my gender.
Several weeks ago, I was given an assignment during caretaking of researching the lives of some of the women who now make up our list of women ancestors. I found myself in them, in their pain, their struggle, their joy and determination for practice, their not being held back by the conditions they found themselves in as they searched for enlightenment. I cried as I read about the number of women who had to scar their faces, deemed too beautiful and therefore distracting, to train with men. I felt myself a bit ashamed as I empathized with the women who had to work to overcome attachment to their own beauty before they could really begin to practice. I held the hands of the many women who entered training through the gate of loss, most often of their children, and set themselves free through that deep pain.
Why were these women forced to fight so hard to practice the teachings of the Buddha, who clearly stated that women and men and all beings are inherently equal, and that women have no inherent barriers, hindrances or differences from men in their ability to achieve enlightenment? Why do women all over the world continue to have to struggle to be seen and allowed to live their lives freely? Our list of women ancestors makes clear that women have been present from the very beginning of Buddhism, practicing alongside the Buddha as his disciples, ordaining, teaching, practicing their lay lives. So why has it taken so long to restore these women to our lineage, to their place in history?
In his talk on Sunday, Shugen Sensei drew from the work of modern scholars, especially Alan Sponberg, to describe the historical context and conditioning that has traditionally kept women in a subordinate position in Buddhist institutions. Even as the Buddha realized and taught the fundamental reality of the equality between women and men, he felt bound by the gender norms of his time and place. His monastic sangha depended on the support of the lay community. Gender discrimination became worse and was further institutionalized through the years and centuries following the Buddha's death, as Buddhism spread through India, into China and Japan. Women teachers were systematically erased and officially forgotten about, even though they appear in so much of Buddhist history. Now that Buddhist teaching and practice have come to us in a time when we have also inherited the teachings of the civil rights movement, women's movement, LGBTQ movement and many other movements for equality, we are in a position to atone for the ways in which the fundamental truths of the Buddha's teachings have been subordinated to cultural and societal norms.
In the Metta Sutta we chant, "just as a mother protects with her life her child, her only child so…should one cherish all living beings." And in the Identity of Relative and Absolute, "the four elements return to their nature as a child to its mother." I think of these expressions of a very natural love, often labeled feminine or maternal, that we can all relate and aspire to. In his talk, Shugen Sensei made clear that ultimately, "woman" and "man" are just ideas in our minds, empty of reality. And yet they are also the forms in which we appear, and those forms have been the basis for discrimination since, seemingly, the beginning of time. The work of our time, Shugen said, is to pull out that discrimination by its roots—delusion, desire, attachment—and to embody the reality that the Buddha awakened to and that has been passed down to us by our male and female ancestors. "Woman" and "man" are not just the basis for discrimination, that are also the forms through which we realize ourselves.
May we continue to find our full selves through our relationships with each other, and through the lives and teachings of our many ancestors, our fathers and our mothers.
NextHow to Let Go of the World


text:
Ijeoma Oluo
You are previewing: So You Want to Talk About Race
Facing the Rising Sun : African Americans, Japan, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity
Closer To Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South
When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
Feminism is for Everybody
In this New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a hard-hitting but user-friendly examination of race in America
Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy — from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans — has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair — and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend?
In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to "model minorities" in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life.
Category: Society, Politics & Philosophy Tag: Ethnic & Demographic Studies
Ijeoma Oluo is a Seattle-based writer, speaker, and Internet Yeller. She's the author of the New York Times Best-Seller So You Want to Talk about Race, published in January by Seal Press. Named one of the The Root's 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2017, one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine, one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Seattle by Seattle Met, and winner of the of the 2018 Feminist Humanist Award by the American Humanist Society, Oluo's work focuses primarily on issues of race and identity, feminism, social and mental health, social justice, the arts, and personal essay. Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, NBC News, Elle Magazine, TIME, The Stranger, and the Guardian, among other outlets.
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Black & Gay in the UK: An Anthology
John R Gordon, Rikki Beadle-Blair
The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series Three: Correspondence, Volume 2: 1853-1865 by Frederick Douglass


text:
package org.efaps.ui.wicket.components.classification;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

import org.apache.wicket.markup.ComponentTag;
import org.apache.wicket.markup.MarkupStream;
import org.apache.wicket.markup.html.WebComponent;
import org.apache.wicket.model.IModel;
import org.efaps.ui.wicket.models.objects.UIClassification;
import org.efaps.util.EFapsException;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

/**
 * TODO comment!
 *
 * @author The eFaps Team
 * @version $Id$
 */
public class ClassificationPath
    extends WebComponent
{

    /**
     * Logging instance used in this class.
     */
    private static final Logger LOG = LoggerFactory.getLogger(ClassificationPath.class);

    /**
     * Needed for serialization.
     */
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

    /**
     * @param _wicketId wicket id of this component
     * @param _model model for this component
     */
    public ClassificationPath(final String _wicketId,
                              final IModel<UIClassification> _model)
    {
        super(_wicketId, _model);
    }

    /**
     * @see org.apache.wicket.Component#onComponentTagBody(org.apache.wicket.markup.MarkupStream,
     *      org.apache.wicket.markup.ComponentTag)
     * @param _markupStream MarkupStream
     * @param _openTag      open tag
     */
    @Override
    public void onComponentTagBody(final MarkupStream _markupStream,
                                   final ComponentTag _openTag)
    {
        super.onComponentTagBody(_markupStream, _openTag);
        final StringBuilder html = new StringBuilder();
        final UIClassification uiclass = (UIClassification) getDefaultModelObject();
        if (!uiclass.isInitialized()) {
            try {
                uiclass.execute(uiclass.getInstance());
            } catch (final EFapsException e) {
                ClassificationPath.LOG.error("Error for execute", e);
            }
        }
        final List<UIClassification> leafs = new ArrayList<UIClassification>();
        for (final UIClassification clazz : uiclass.getChildren()) {
            if (clazz.isSelected()) {
                findSelectedLeafs(leafs, clazz);
            }
        }
        for (final UIClassification leaf : leafs) {
            html.append("
");
            buildHtml(html, leaf);
            html.append("
");
        }
        replaceComponentTagBody(_markupStream, _openTag, html);
    }

    /**
     * @param _leafs        classification leaf
     * @param _uiclass      current classification
     */
    private void findSelectedLeafs(final List<UIClassification> _leafs,
                                   final UIClassification _uiclass)
    {
        boolean add = true;
        for (final UIClassification child : _uiclass.getChildren()) {
            if (child.isSelected()) {
                findSelectedLeafs(_leafs, child);
                add = false;
            }
        }
        if (add) {
            _leafs.add(_uiclass);
        }
    }

    /**
     * @param _bldr     StringBUilder for the snipplet
     * @param _uiclass  classifcation
     */
    private void buildHtml(final StringBuilder _bldr,
                           final UIClassification _uiclass)
    {
        UIClassification tmp = _uiclass;
        String path = "";
        while (!tmp.isRoot()) {
            path = "" + tmp.getLabel() + "" + path;
            tmp = tmp.getParent();
        }
        _bldr.append(path);
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


During ovulation, the ovaries release an egg from a fully mature follicle. Follicles are round structures associated with the ovary that form and release a new egg just once a month, coinciding with the menstrual cycle. If, for some reason, the follicle does not fully mature, it will not rupture to release the egg. The immature follicle itself will instead remain associated with the ovary, appearing on an ultrasound as a "cyst." Should these cysts continue to form through successive cycles, the ovaries will enlarge due to all the extra follicles, hence the term polycystic ovaries.
Some women with polycystic ovaries additionally develop polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). PCOS is a hormonal disorder characterized by irregular ovulation and menstruation, with an accompanying increase in male hormones. It is not entirely understood why some women with polycystic ovaries develop PCOS while others don't, though PCOS seems to coincide health conditions such as obesity or diabetes. PCOS is fairly common, occurring in approximately 5% of women of reproductive age, and is the leading cause of female infertility.
Some women with PCOS will experience amenorrhea, a lack of menstruation, sometimes for many years. Others may menstruate, but their cycles are usually irregular due to periodic lack of ovulation. Menstruation may also vary significantly in heaviness from cycle to cycle. Women with PCOS also experience difficulties conceiving due to the unpredictable nature or complete absence of ovulation.
The hormonal imbalances associated with PCOS may lead to other physical symptoms, as well, including acne and obesity. Some women note physical changes possibly caused by increased testosterone, including excessive hair growth on the face and body, thinning of the hair on the head, and deepening of the voice. Ovarian hormone balance can also influence mood, so PCOS can also lead to depression and mood swings.
Because women with PCOS do not menstruate and shed the uterine lining as frequently, they are at risk for developing uterine cancer. Decreased estrogen secretion from the ovaries may also lead to premature osteoporosis, reducing the density of the bones and increasing the possibility of developing fractures.
There are also indications that PCOS can lead to insulin resistance, meaning that much more insulin than normal is required to maintain balanced blood sugar. A blood sugar imbalance can lead to diabetes, obesity, and put the patient at risk for all the complications that accompany both. If untreated, the metabolic and hormonal imbalances associated with PCOS can result in high blood pressure and unhealthy cholesterol levels, potentially leading to heart disease and stroke.
Polycystic ovaries develop during the course of hormonal imbalances that result in "cysts" on the ovaries. These "cysts" are actually follicles that remained associated with the ovary because they were incompletely developed. This can occur in women producing excessive amounts of testosterone, excessive luteinizing hormone (LH, which, at normal levels triggers ovulation), or high levels of blood insulin. As these follicles accumulate on the ovaries, they are visible by ultrasound.
Not all women that have polycystic ovaries develop PCOS, which is defined by the collection of symptoms described above. Why some women with polycystic ovaries develop symptoms while others don't is unclear, though the symptoms appear to stem from a shift in proper hormonal balance. Obesity, for example, often coincides with insulin resistance and blood sugar imbalance, which can lead to improper stimulation of LH production, which interferes with ovulation. Without ovulation, additional cysts can form and the overall interference of proper ovary function can lead to imbalances of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone, creating additional symptoms. Human physiology is defined by a series of interconnected, delicately balanced feedback loops, and disruption of any one of them could cause a cascade of effects.
Conventional medical treatment of PCOS varies from patient to patient depending on the symptoms. Overcoming obesity is nearly always the priority, as it can often completely restore normal ovulation and menstruation, thus relieving the other symptoms of PCOS by re-establishing hormonal balance. Regular exercise and a healthy diet can reduce adipose tissue and improve blood sugar and insulin balance. Medications that can help increase insulin sensitivity may also be prescribed if insulin resistance appears to be a factor. Metformin, for example, is a drug typically used to treat diabetes that is often prescribed for PCOS.
To reduce unwanted hair growth and acne, oral contraceptives may also be prescribed. These symptoms are thought to be caused by an excess of testosterone, so birth control pills containing anti-androgens (such as cyproterone acetate) which suppress testosterone activity are sometimes recommended. Facial creams that inhibit hair growth are also available.
Oral contraceptives are also commonly recommended to attempt regulation of the menstrual cycle. By supplementing the hormones necessary to promote regular shedding of the uterine wall, patients with PCOS can significantly reduce their risk of developing uterine cancer.
Because PCOS is a many-layered syndrome, your treatment program at Patients Medical will be designed in collaboration with specialists appropriate to your symptoms and concerns. Through this integrative approach, we will help alleviate your symptoms, re-establish a healthy hormonal balance, and return you to optimal reproductive health. During your initial consultation, our doctors will perform a medical interview to get a complete picture of your current health, lifestyle, and any factors that may be contributing to your PCOS. They may also order ultrasounds and other diagnostic tests to assess the severity of the hormonal imbalance you're experiencing.


text:
Literature Search Results for Gene MYT1L
Am. J. Hum. Genet. 2008 Oct 83: 504-10
Title Recurrent CNVs disrupt three candidate genes in schizophrenia patients.
Abstract schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disease with complex etiology, affecting approximately 1% of the general population. Most genetics studies so far have focused on disease association with common genetic variation, such as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), but it has recently become apparent that large-scale genomic copy-number variants (CNVs) are involved in disease development as well. To assess the role of rare CNVs in schizophrenia, we screened 54 patients with deficit schizophrenia using Affymetrix's GeneChip 250K SNP arrays. We identified 90 CNVs in total, 77 of which have been reported previously in unaffected control cohorts. Among the genes disrupted by the remaining rare CNVs are MYT1L, CTNND2, NRXN1, and ASTN2, genes that play an important role in neuronal functioning but--except for NRXN1--have not been associated with schizophrenia before. We studied the occurrence of CNVs at these four loci in an additional cohort of 752 patients and 706 normal controls from The Netherlands. We identified eight additional CNVs, of which the four that affect coding sequences were found only in the patient cohort. Our study supports a role for rare CNVs in schizophrenia susceptibility and identifies at least three candidate genes for this complex disorder.
SCZ Keywords schizophrenia, schizophrenic
Mol. Psychiatry 2010 Jan 15: 29-37
Title Replication of association between schizophrenia and ZNF804A in the Irish Case-Control Study of Schizophrenia sample.
Abstract A recent genome-wide association study reported association between schizophrenia and the ZNF804A gene on chromosome 2q32.1. We attempted to replicate these findings in our Irish Case-Control Study of schizophrenia (ICCSS) sample (N=1021 cases, 626 controls). Following consultation with the original investigators, we genotyped three of the most promising single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from the Cardiff study. We replicate association with rs1344706 (trend test one-tailed P=0.0113 with the previously associated A allele) in ZNF804A. We detect no evidence of association with rs6490121 in NOS1 (one-tailed P=0.21), and only a trend with rs9922369 in RGRIP1L (one-tailed P=0.0515). On the basis of these results, we completed genotyping of 11 additional linkage disequilibrium-tagging SNPs in ZNF804A. Of 12 SNPs genotyped, 11 pass quality control criteria and 4 are nominally associated, with our most significant evidence of association at rs7597593 (P=0.0013) followed by rs1344706. We observe no evidence of differential association in ZNF804A on the basis of family history or sex of case. The associated SNP rs1344706 lies in approximately 30 bp of conserved mammalian sequence, and the associated A allele is predicted to maintain binding sites for the brain-expressed transcription factors MYT1L and POU3F1/OCT-6. In controls, expression is significantly increased from the A allele of rs1344706 compared with the C allele. Expression is increased in schizophrenic cases compared with controls, but this difference does not achieve statistical significance. This study replicates the original reported association of ZNF804A with schizophrenia and suggests that there is a consistent link between the A allele of rs1344706, increased expression of ZNF804A and risk for schizophrenia.
Am. J. Med. Genet. A 2011 Nov 155A: 2739-45
Title MYT1L is a candidate gene for intellectual disability in patients with 2p25.3 (2pter) deletions.
Abstract A partial deletion of chromosome band 2p25.3 (2pter) is a rarely described cytogenetic aberration in patients with intellectual disability (ID). Using microarrays we identified deletions of 2p25.3, sized 0.37-3.13 Mb, in three adult siblings and three unrelated patients. All patients had ID, obesity or overweight and/or a square-shaped stature without overt facial dysmorphic features. Combining our data with phenotypic and genotypic data of three patients from the literature we defined the minimal region of overlap which contained one gene, i.e., MYT1L. MYT1L is highly transcribed in the mouse embryonic brain where its expression is restricted to postmitotic differentiating neurons. In mouse-induced pluripotent stem cell (iPS) models, MYT1L is essential for inducing functional mature neurons. These resemble excitatory cortical neurons of the forebrain, suggesting a role for MYT1L in development of cognitive functions. Furthermore, MYT1L can directly convert human fibroblasts into functional neurons in conjunction with other transcription factors. MYT1L duplication was previously reported in schizophrenia, indicating that the gene is dosage-sensitive and that shared neurodevelopmental pathways may be affected in ID and schizophrenia. Finally, deletion of MYT1, another member of the Myelin Transcription Factor family involved in neurogenesis and highly similar to MYT1L, was recently described in ID as well. The identification of MYT1L as candidate gene for ID justifies further molecular studies aimed at detecting mutations and for mechanistic studies on its role in neuron development and on neuropathogenic effects of haploinsufficiency.
Psychiatr. Genet. 2012 Aug 22: 206-9
Title Microduplications disrupting the MYT1L gene (2p25.3) are associated with schizophrenia.
Abstract Childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS) is a rare severe form of schizophrenia that may have greater salient genetic risk. Despite evidence for high heritability, conclusive genetic causes of schizophrenia remain elusive. Recent genomic technologies in concert with large case-control cohorts have led to several associations of highly penetrant rare copy number variants (CNVs) and schizophrenia. We previously reported two patients with COS who carried a microduplication disrupting the PXDN and MYT1L genes at 2p25.3. This rate of duplications within our COS population (N=92) is significantly higher than that in 2026 healthy controls (P=0.002). As a replication, we report a meta-analysis of four recently published studies that together provide strong evidence for an association between variably sized microduplications involving the MYT1L gene and schizophrenia. None have reported this separately. Altogether, among 5325 patients and 9279 controls, 10 microduplications were observed: nine in patients and one in a control (odds ratio=15.7, P=0.001). Further, the 2% rate observed in our COS patients is also significantly higher than the rate in adult-onset cases (0.14%, odds ratio=16.6, P=0.01). This report adds to the growing body of literature implicating rare CNVs as risk factors for schizophrenia and shows that some risk CNVs are more common among extreme early-onset cases.
Psychiatr. Genet. 2012 Jun 22: 137-40
Title Germline mosaic transmission of a novel duplication of PXDN and MYT1L to two male half-siblings with autism.
Abstract Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder with a strong genetic component to susceptibility. In this study, we report the molecular characterization of an apparent de-novo 281 kb duplication of chromosome 2p25.3 in two male half-siblings with autism. The 2p25.3 duplication was first identified through a low-density microarray, validated with fluorescent in-situ hybridization, and duplication breakpoints were delineated using an Affymetrix 6.0 single-nucleotide polymorphism microarray. The fluorescent in-situ hybridization results validated the novel copy number variant and revealed the mother to be mosaic, with ?33% of her lymphoblast cells carrying the duplication. Therefore, the duplication was transmitted through the mechanism of germline mosaicism. In addition, duplication breakpoints were refined and showed that PXDN is fully duplicated, whereas seven exons of the terminal portion of the 25 exon gene MYT1L are within the duplicated region. MYT1L, a gene predominately expressed in the brain, has recently been linked with other neuropsychiatric illness such as schizophrenia and depression. Results from this study indicate that the 2p25.3 duplication disrupting PXDN and MYT1L is a potential autism-causing variant in the pedigree reported here and should receive further consideration as a candidate for autism.
Genes Brain Behav. 2012 Feb 11: 87-93
Title Association study of myelin transcription factor 1-like polymorphisms with schizophrenia in Han Chinese population.
Abstract schizophrenia (SZ) is characterized by a variety of complex positive, negative and cognitive symptoms that are differentially expressed in individual patients. Variability in symptom presentation indicates that multiple genes, many involved in neurodevelopment, contribute to the etiology of SZ. The myelin transcription factor 1-like (MYT1L) gene encodes the MYT1L protein that participates in several neurodevelopment pathways. The copy number variant of MYT1L gene is associated with SZ, and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of MYT1L contribute to major depressive disorder. To explore the association of MYT1L polymorphisms with SZ, we examined six SNPs of MYT1L in a Han Chinese population consisting of 528 paranoid schizophrenic patients and 528 healthy subjects. Our results showed that rs17039584 was significantly associated with SZ (A>G), even after Bonferroni correction. When subjects were divided by gender, the rs10190125 allele and genotype remained significantly associated with SZ in female patients. Moreover, we found that rs6742365 was associated with a family history of SZ in females. Other SNPs did not achieve statistical significance for SZ but were associated with individual phenotypes, as measured by the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) inventory. Our findings suggest that MYT1L may represent a susceptibility gene for SZ in the Han Chinese population and show that a specific SNP may increase susceptibility in females.
Am. J. Med. Genet. B Neuropsychiatr. Genet. 2013 Apr 162B: 273-82
Title Identification of rare copy number variants in high burden schizophrenia families.
Abstract Over the last years, genome-wide studies consistently showed an increased burden of rare copy number variants (CNVs) in schizophrenia patients, supporting the "common disease, rare variant" hypothesis in at least a subset of patients. We hypothesize that in families with a high burden of disease, and thus probably a high genetic load influencing disease susceptibility, rare CNVs might be involved in the etiology of schizophrenia. We performed a genome-wide CNV analysis in the index patients of eight families with multiple schizophrenia affected members, and consecutively performed a detailed family analysis for the most relevant CNVs. One index patient showed a DRD5 containing duplication. A second index patient presented with an NRXN1 containing deletion and two adjacent duplications containing MYT1L and SNTG2. Detailed analysis in the subsequent families showed segregation of the identified CNVs. With this study we show the importance of screening high burden families for rare CNVs, which will not only broaden our knowledge concerning the molecular genetic mechanisms involved in schizophrenia but also allow the use of the obtained genetic data to provide better clinical care to these families in general and to non-symptomatic causal CNV carriers in particular.
BBA Clin 2015 Jun 3: 36-43
Title Genetic variants in Nogo receptor signaling pathways may be associated with early life adversity in schizophrenia susceptibility.
Abstract schizophrenia is a severe neuropsychiatric disorder thought to result from abnormal brain development. Nogo, an oligodendrocyte bound molecule, signals by binding to the Nogo receptor (NgR) located on axonal membranes. The NgR co-receptors include p75 neurotrophin receptor or TNF receptor orphan Y (TROY). Nogo signaling is responsible for central nervous system myelin regulation and neurite outgrowth during neurodevelopment, and plasticity in the mature brain.
We examined single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in NgR, p75, and TROY receptor genes and downstream signaling partner With No Lysine (K) (WNK1) and Myelin transcription factor 1-like (MYT1L) genes in an Australian case-control schizophrenia cohort (n = 268/group). High-throughput SNP genotyping was performed using the MassARRAY® genotyping assay.
Analysis revealed a significant association between the MYT1L SNP rs2304008 and female schizophrenia subjects. The WNK1 SNP rs1468326 and the MYT1L SNP rs3748988 showed significant associations with schizophrenia in subjects with a maternal mental history and in subjects who experienced childhood trauma respectively. Following Bonferroni correction, all significance was lost.
Despite the lack of positive findings in our population after correction for multiple testing, previous gene expression and association studies in schizophrenia suggest the implication of NgR signaling pathway genes in the etiology of schizophrenia remains topical and timely.
Further investigations will be necessary to fully assess the role of these genes in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. However these genes may prove useful in further understanding the mechanism by which negative experiences early in life can affect myelin-related processes in the context of schizophrenia.


Nickel demand is set to increase up to 19 times if under-construction lithium-ion production facilities come online as planned.
Speaking before the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on Tuesday (February 5), Managing Director at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence Simon Moores delivered a sobering view of where the US ranks in the battery metals space.
In his testimony on outlook for energy and minerals, Moores said that as of 2019, "we are in the midst of a global battery arms race in which the US is presently a bystander" in both the control of raw materials and the manufacturing process in the creation of lithium-ion batteries for the electric vehicle market.
While he touched on the classics; cobalt, lithium and graphite — it was nickel that Moores tipped as set to be the fastest-growing battery metal raw material.
"As lithium-ion battery manufacturers reduce the amount of cobalt used in battery cells, nickel consumption rises and it does so in a major way," said Moores.
He highlighted China racing ahead in the construction of battery metal megafactories that bring all the raw materials together into the final product — though he said that the largest in the world was in US hands — Tesla's (NASDAQ:TSLA) Gigafactory 1.
Moores said that overall the US was falling behind, as 46 additional factories were under construction in China — and only 5 in the US.
According to Moores testimony, US import dependency for nickel is currently pegged at 59 percent — meaning 59 percent of all nickel used in US facilities must be imported from overseas. That number looks good compared to lithium at 92 percent, and cobalt and graphite — which both have an import dependency of 100 percent.
"Nickel's use in lithium-ion batteries accounted for 85,000 tonnes in 2018 yet this was only 4 percent of total nickel demand. However, nickel demand from EV batteries is set to grow by between 30-40 percent a year, making it the fastest-growing battery raw material," said Moores.
Unlike cobalt, nickel production around the world is spread more evenly between more countries — with Indonesia and the Philippines accounting for 43 percent of production, with New Caledonia, Russia, Canada, Australia and China rounding out 75 percent of global output.
Moores said the US must do more to secure its control of the supply chain though.
The recently announced plans from China's Tsingshan to construct an HPAL (high-pressure acid leach) plant in Indonesia to refine lower grade nickel laterite ore into class 1 battery-grade nickel will also be closely watched, though Moores' opinion and that of Benchmark appeared pessimistic on that front.
Moores' message was clear in that the battery metals 'arms race' was one that the US must turn more attention to.
While Senators who listened to Moores on Tuesday may have reacted well to his remarks, time will tell whether the US can shift into a more dominant position in the battery metal space.
Important to remember for EV supply chain.