Natural Cures
I deliberately avoided two key elements that are relevant in the discussion of long life of the monks and ascetics.
One is sex life or absence of it.
Majority of working people have some form of sexual orientation unlike the monks. There is no attempt to change the sex life of an individual in this book or try to convert somebody to an ascetic life.
It is an individual’s decision to enter priesthood. What I am against is ordaining very young into priesthood. They have not adequately developed adult concepts and do not have the maturity to make such a decision, which they might repent sometime later.
Equally, they are not mature sexually.
I also have reason to believe when ordained young some religious sectors make them to become homosexual at and early life.
Two is the use of ancient medicinal ingredients as psychedelic or mood changing drugs in addition to their putative medicinal properties.
Instead of claiming their putative benefits or absence of the benefits, I have reproduced below some of the claimed benefits.
I must say, I have never used them or encouraged anybody to take them or have case records to prove or disprove the claims.
The same information applies to the long life of elderly monks, except a very few, I have associated with.
I have no case records and not recorded their secrets to success in one to one interview.
The impressions created in this book are general impressions that are true in many respects but not scientifically validated.
What is called the gut feeling as it were.
The reader should be mindful and should not try to adopt any method (except moment meditation) or secret medications, ill advised by the converts, which they are many in the East. He or she is at his or her own peril or misadventure.
Below are some of them vigorously promoted in the world wide web.
Mushroom
Kombucha mushroom is well known for its medicinal properties while its name is of Japanese origin. Therefore it is called and Japanese mushroom. Many experiences show that Kombucha tea has many health benefits for the human organism.
Kombucha mushroom tea is a sour drink of Mongol origin, obtained through the symbiosis of bacteria and yeast in herbal tea. On Asian continent, Kombucha tea is used as a therapeutic drug for two thousand years ago. It is traditionally prepared in Russia and China with green tea or black tea.
Kombucha health benefits
Experience shows that Kombucha tea can lower blood pressure, cholesterol and sugar levels in the blood. This curative drink favorably affects the operation of glands, speeds up the circulation, stimulates the metabolism and encourages fat burning and thus weight loss. It regulates function of the stomach, liver and kidney, helps in cases of rheumatism and arthritis, facilitates the mobility of joints. Kombucha tea has a beneficial effect for all skin diseases and arteriosclerosis. It helps in the treatment of constipation, increases immunity, purifying the body, lowers blood urea, relieves insomnia and stress, stimulates hair growth.
Eastern peoples believe that Kombucha mushroom can restore youth, vitality, and extend the life span. The nations who daily drank kombucha tea have no wrinkles on the face or other visible signs of aging, such as white hair or the age spots on hands.
So, kombucha mushroom actually has great health benefits.
How to Prepare Kombucha Tea?
Bring 3 qts. of distilled water to a boil on the stove top.
Pour in 1 cup of white sugar once the water comes to a rolling boil. Stir the sugar until it dissolves, and then boil the sugar and water mixture for 5 minutes.
Turn the heat off on the stove top.
Add 5 black or green tea bags.
Allow the tea bags to steep for 15 minutes. Remove the tea bags and discard them. Let the tea cool completely.
Pour the cooled tea into a gallon sized glass container.
Add a Kombucha mushroom to the glass container. The smooth and shiny surface needs to face upwards. Add a cup of distilled white vinegar.
Cover the opening of the glass jar with cheesecloth. Secure the cheesecloth to the jar with a rubber band.
Place the glass jar in a well-ventilated location away from direct sunlight. The ideal temperature range to store the tea is between 74 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Leave the Kombucha tea for six to 15 days.
Brew the Kombucha tea until it reaches your desired taste. It will have a sparkling apple cider taste and then the longer it brews the more you will be able to taste the vinegar.
Remove the Kombucha mushroom from the tea with tongs carefully. Store the Kombucha mushroom in individual glass bowls. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and place them in the refrigerator. The Kombucha mushroom will last for four months.
Pour the tea through a coffee filter into quart sized plastic bottles. Place the tea in the refrigerator.
And finally, how to drink Kombucha tea?
Kombucha tea drink three times a day, a small cup in the morning on an empty stomach, then after lunch, and at night just before bedtime.
Tibetan Cure
Old Tibetan cure is written from more than 2000 years. It was found in the old Tibetan monastery inscribed on clay tablets. This Tibetan cure with garlic and lemon is used for treatment of high blood cholesterol, triglycerides, lime deposits in blood vessels, as well as for long life. Besides which it successfully clears the blood vessels, it improves elasticity of blood vessels, prevents heart attacks, strokes and angina pectoris. Moreover, Tibetan cure improves eyesight, prevents cancer and rejuvenates the body.
Cashew
Cashew, also known as Indian nuts, is a rich source of antioxidants, vitamins, minerals and other essential nutrients.
Did you know that cashew contain five times more vitamin C than oranges?
In addition, cashew is rich in proteins, cellulose, potassium, magnesium, vitamins B1, E, K.
Today we know that cashew has antiseptic, antibacterial and anti-inflammatory effect.
Did you know that cashew is an excellent natural means to lose weight?
A handful of cashews increase the secretion of hormones that send a signal to brain that we are not hungry. Indian nuts are very tasty, so it can be a real treasure for those who are on a diet. Although the cashews are rich in fat, this nuts are not dangerous for health because they contains so-called "good fats ".
It is also a good natural diuretic. Good for the nerves and useful for the health of joints and bones, thanks to the calcium and magnesium. Besides, it can regulates blood pressure, lowers blood sugar and acts as a mild aphrodisiac.
Cashew is most popular in Brazil and the Caribbean islands, where it is considered a delicacy.
You need to know that cashews is not only delicious, but nutritious and healthy food, which brings many health benefits. It can be bought at almost any supermarket throughout the year and here are some ideas how to include cashews in nutrition.
1. Towards the end of cooking, add the cashews in the meals from vegetables.
2. Decorate the cabbage salad with Indian nuts.
3. You can also add the cashews in a fruit salad.
Ginkgo Biloba is the oldest tree on the planet. Today, the Ginkgo tree grows naturally only in China. The Chinese people this tree considered as a sacred tree. It is used in oriental medicine for centuries.
Ginkgo Biloba
Ginkgo Biloba has a very medicinal leaves that are a great natural remedy for improving brain function and for memory loss.
Ginkgo leaves contain many active ingredients, such as: quercetin, kaempferol, isorhamnetin, proanthocyanidins, tannic acid and essential oils. Besides, Ginkgo Biloba contains ginkgolides and bilobalide, which prevents the formation of thrombus.
Ginkgo is particularly useful for treatment of disorders of peripheral and cerebral circulation. This means that it is recommended to people who have survived a brain stroke.
In our modern world, Ginkgo Biloba is known as an effective natural agent that improves brain activity, especially memory and concentration. Excellent cure for memory loss.
It is important to say that this plant stimulates microcirculation of the brain, so it is recommended for older people and those with bad memory, tinnitus, vertigo and headaches. Ginkgo plant can alleviate symptoms in Alzheimer's disease, migraine, circulatory disorders, phlebitis (prevents thrombosis), impotence.
This herb also helps in the fight against free radicals.
Ginkgo Biloba can be bought in pharmacies in the form of tea, tablets, capsules or as a tincture.
Note: Long-term excess of the recommended dosage, as side effects can occur anxiety, insomnia, nausea, diarrhea and dermatitis. Ginkgo Biloba is not recommended for people who suffer from epilepsy because it may increase the risk of developing new epileptic seizure and for people who use anticoagulants.
Each of these two world renowned herbs are often use together with enhanced effects as a powerful brain tonic. Ginkgo Biloba benefits include circulatory and memory augmentation which works perfectly alongside Gotu kola benefits as a brain booster and nervous system relaxer. Certain medicinal extracts are now available that combined the two healing properties of both these amazing herbs.
Benefits of Ginkgo and Gotu Kola Herbal Extracts:
Increases blood flow to the brain
Promotes longevity and anti-aging effects
Protects the brain against dangerous free radicals
Advances capillary utilization
Gives the brain the ability to handle stress more effectively
The uses Gotu kola (Centella asiatica) have been used as medicine since prehistoric times in India and in the science of Ayurveda. It was used both internally and externally in Indonesia, with its known effects to heal wounds and relieve leprosy.
Ginkgo Biloba can be traced back to ancient China and the traditions of using ginkgo to treat the brain and alleviate symptoms of coughs and allergies. Standardized extracts are still used widely today in medical establishments in France and Germany.
In China it is one of the reported "miracle elixirs of life". Gotu kola extract holds the reputation as an herb that promotes longevity. This stems from the report of Chinese herbalist Li Ching Yun, who lived to be 256 years of age. Li Ching Yun's longevity was supposedly a result of his regular use of an herbal mixture chiefly composed of Gotu kola.
The brain requires basically two things to provide energy: glucose and oxygen. A Ginkgo Biloba extract is extraordinary in its ability to prevent metabolic disturbances in the experimental models of insufficient blood supply to the brain. This is achieved by an enhanced utilization of oxygen and an increased cellular uptake of glucose, thus restoring energy production.
Gotu kola or is an herbaceous perennial plant native to Asian and Indonesia. This viney, creeping plant flourishes in and around water, although it grows best in damp, swampy areas. Gotu kola is often found growing along stone walls or other rocky, sunny areas at elevations of approximately 2,000 feet in regions of the world.
It is also beneficial to:
Wound healing
Mental function
Varicose veins
The primary active constituents of Gotu kola are known to be the triterpenoid compounds. Its extracts were incorporated into the Indian pharmacopeia, where it was recommended for treatment of various skin conditions such as lupus, varicose ulcers, eczema and psoriasis. It was also used to treat diarrhea, fever, amenorrhea, and diseases of the female urinary tract.
Why They Are Good For The Brain
A significant increase in the mental abilities in a number of case studies using Gotu kola benefits has been reported. It's triterpenes have demonstrated mild tranquilizing, anti-stress and anti-anxiety action via enhancement of cholinergic mechanisms. Presumably this mechanism is responsible for the enhancement of mental function as well.
Ginkgo Biloba benefits the brain include membrane stabilization, free radical scavenging, and antioxidant advantages. It is a most effective inhibitor of lipid per-oxidation of cellular membranes. This results in the health enhancement of brain and nerve cells to function optimally.
Both Ginkgo Biloba extract and Gotu kola are well tolerated when taken orally. They work well together and seem to promote and increase the healing properties of one another.
Friday, July 11, 2025
Natural Cures
Benefits of Ginkgo and Gotu Kola Herbal Extracts
Benefits of Ginkgo and Gotu Kola Herbal Extracts
Increases blood flow to the brain
Promotes longevity and anti-aging effects
Protects the brain against dangerous free radicals
Advances capillary utilization
Gives the brain the ability to handle stress more effectively
The uses Gotu kola (Centella asiatica) have been used as medicine since prehistoric times in India and in the science of Ayurveda. It was used both internally and externally in Indonesia, with its known effects to heal wounds and relieve leprosy.
Ginkgo Biloba can be traced back to ancient China and the traditions of using ginkgo to treat the brain and alleviate symptoms of coughs and allergies. Standardized extracts are still used widely today in medical establishments in France and Germany.
In China it is one of the reported "miracle elixirs of life". Gotu kola extract holds the reputation as an herb that promotes longevity. This stems from the report of Chinese herbalist Li Ching Yun, who lived to be 256 years of age. Li Ching Yun's longevity was supposedly a result of his regular use of an herbal mixture chiefly composed of Gotu kola.
The brain requires basically two things to provide energy: glucose and oxygen. A Ginkgo Biloba extract is extraordinary in its ability to prevent metabolic disturbances in the experimental models of insufficient blood supply to the brain. This is achieved by an enhanced utilization of oxygen and an increased cellular uptake of glucose, thus restoring energy production.
Gotu kola or is an herbaceous perennial plant native to Asian and Indonesia. This viney, creeping plant flourishes in and around water, although it grows best in damp, swampy areas. Gotu kola is often found growing along stone walls or other rocky, sunny areas at elevations of approximately 2,000 feet in regions of the world.
It is also beneficial to:
Wound healing
Mental function
Varicose veins
The primary active constituents of Gotu kola are known to be the triterpenoid compounds. Its extracts were incorporated into the Indian pharmacopeia, where it was recommended for treatment of various skin conditions such as lupus, varicose ulcers, eczema and psoriasis. It was also used to treat diarrhea, fever, amenorrhea, and diseases of the female urinary tract.
Why They Are Good For The Brain
A significant increase in the mental abilities in a number of case studies using Gotu kola benefits has been reported. It's triterpenes have demonstrated mild tranquilizing, anti-stress and anti-anxiety action via enhancement of cholinergic mechanisms. Presumably this mechanism is responsible for the enhancement of mental function as well.
Ginkgo Biloba benefits the brain include membrane stabilization, free radical scavenging, and antioxidant advantages. It is a most effective inhibitor of lipid per-oxidation of cellular membranes. This results in the health enhancement of brain and nerve cells to function optimally.
Both Ginkgo Biloba extract and Gotu kola are well tolerated when taken orally. They work well together and seem to promote and increase the healing properties of one another.
Training my Virtual Medical Secretaries (V.M.A)
Training my Virtual Medical Secretaries (V.M.A)
I love the idea of using a Virtual Medical Assistant (V.M.A for short.).
Thank god I am in my twilight years and listening to birds singing is one of my natural pastimes and trying to figure out which bird is calling and which bird is answering is not an easy task.
But the idea of voice activated cellphone is a welcome addition to an armory of medically offensive gadgets that are springing by numbers.
Dictaphone was in my armory when working abroad. I could do a very good dictation without punctuation marks and my secretaries never bothered to phone back and ask me for any clarifications. That was a very positive effort on my part and my superiors very much like my approach except a few, since I did not try to show off any accent but pure and simple Queen's English, I dictated.
Mind you I was taking to a voice machine and not a person.
The idiot, the Dictaphone does not have any emotions and only records my voice.
I tell them that putting fullstops, commas, semicolons and apostrophes are her job and not mine.
When things were difficult unlike S.M.S. I wrote down the specific stuff clearly to save their time.
I hope and prey that smart-phone becoming intelligent and telling me back you are creepy and some sort of a sob.
Advantages.
1. After some time smart-phone will instantly know what you are trying to do.
2. Unlike human secretaries who make the same mistakes over over again smart-phone would never repeat mistakes.
3. One can take home the Virtual Secretary unlike the human with bizarre consequence at home boundary.
4. One can switch off the VMA with just a push of a button unlike a jabbering soul with money / home problems.
5. At worse I can thrash it on the floor.
I have to think of the 6 to 10 as and when my lateral thinking make me to do so.
For me it is a smart innervation.
6. If I see a guy/girl I hate (on my war-path) to meet or talk or exchange any greetings I can pretend I am very busy talking to it (of cause switched off and with so many adversaries including politicians I do not want to run dry the battery life) and escape harmlessly. I see this happening every day of my life since I do not still carry a smartphone.
Radio Frequency Radiation
Friday, July 4, 2025
Update on Radio Frequency Radiation
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Update on Radio Frequency Radiation
Reproduction
New Studies Link Cell Phone Radiation with Cancer
Does cell phone radiation cause cancer? New studies show a correlation in lab rats, but the evidence may not resolve ongoing debates over causality or whether any effects arise in people.
The ionizing radiation given off by sources such as x-ray machines and the sun boosts cancer risk by shredding molecules in the body. But the non-ionizing radio-frequency (RF) radiation that cell phones and other wireless devices emit has just one known biological effect: an ability to heat tissue by exciting its molecules.
Still, evidence advanced by the studies shows prolonged exposure to even very low levels of RF radiation, perhaps by mechanisms other than heating that remain unknown, makes rats uniquely prone to a rare tumor called a schwannoma, which affects a type of neuron (or nerve cell) called a Schwann cell.
The studies are notable for their sizes.
Researchers at the National Toxicology Program, a federal inter-agency group under the National Institutes of Health, tested 3,000 rats and mice of both sexes for two years—the largest investigation of RF radiation and cancer in rodents ever undertaken in the U.S. European investigators at the Ramazzini Institute in Italy were similarly ambitious; in their recent study they investigated RF effects in nearly 2,500 rats from the fetal stage until death.
Also noteworthy is that the studies evaluated radiation exposures in different ways. The NTP looked at “near-field” exposures, which approximate how people are dosed while using cell phones. Ramazzini researchers looked at “far-field” exposures, which approximate the wireless RF radiation that bombards us from sources all around us, including wireless devices such as tablet and laptop computers. Yet they generated comparable results: Male rats in both studies (but not mice or female animals) developed schwannomas of the heart at statistically higher rates than control animals that were not exposed.
Taken together, the findings “confirm that RF radiation exposure has biological effects” in rats, some of them “relevant to carcinogenesis,” says Jon Samet, a professor of preventive medicine and dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, who did not participate in either study. Samet, however, cautioned the jury is still out as to whether wireless technology is similarly risky to people. Indeed, heart schwannomas are exceedingly rare in humans; only a handful of cases have ever been documented in the medical literature.
When turned on, cell phones and other wireless devices emit EF radiation continually, even if they are not being actively used, because they are always communicating with cell towers. The dose intensity tails off with increasing distance from the body, and reaches a maximum when the devices are used next to the head during phone calls or in front of the body during texting or tweeting.
Launched at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s request 10 years ago, the NTP study dosed rats and mice of both sexes with RF radiation at either 1.5, 3 or 6 watts of radiation per kilogram of body weight, or W/kg. The lowest dose is about the same as the Federal Communications Commission’s limit for public exposure from cell phones, which is 1.6 watts W/kg. The animals were exposed nine hours a day for two years (about the average life span for a rat), and the exposures were cranked up steadily as the animals grew, so the absorbed doses per unit body weight remained constant over time.
Initially leaked in 2016, results from that $25-million study provided the most compelling evidence yet that RF energy may be linked to cancer in lab rodents. The strongest finding connected RF with heart schwannomas in male rats, but the researchers also reported elevated rates of lymphoma as well as cancers affecting the prostate, skin, lung, liver and brain in the exposed animals. Rates for those cancers increased as the doses got higher but the evidence linking them with cell phone radiation specifically was weak by comparison, and the researchers could not rule out that they might have increased for reasons other than RF exposure. Paradoxically, the radiation-treated animals also lived longer than the nonexposed controls. The study results were reviewed by a panel of outside experts during a three-day meeting that ended on March 28. They concluded there was "clear evidence" linking RF radiation with heart schwannomas and "some evidence" linking it to gliomas of the brain. It is now up to the NTP to either accept or reject the reviewer's conclusions. A final report is expected within several months.
Limited to rats only, the Ramazzini study tested three doses expressed as the amount of radiation striking the animal’s bodies: either 5, 25 or 50 volts per meter. The exposure measures therefore differed from the absorbed doses calculated during the NTP study. But the Ramazzini scientists also converted their measures to W/kg, to show how the doses compared with RF limits for cell phones and cell towers set by the FCC and the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection; they ranged down to a 1,000 times lower. The exposures began when the rats were fetuses and continued for 19 hours a day until the animals died from natural causes.
As in the NTP study, Ramazzini investigators detected statistically elevated rates of heart schwannomas in male rats at the highest dose. They also had weaker findings linking RF exposure to cancer of glial cells in the brain, which were limited to females. Ronald Melnick, a retired NTP toxicologist who designed the NTP study, says a measure of consistency between the two studies is important, because “reproducibility in science increases our confidence in the observed results.”
Just why Schwann and glial cells appear to be targets of cell phone radiation is not clear. David Carpenter, a physician who directs the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, S.U.N.Y., explained the purpose of these cells is to insulate nerve fibers throughout the body. These are electrical systems, so that may be some sort of factor, he wrote in an e-mail. “But this is only speculation.”
A few epidemiology studies have reported higher rates of tumors inside the skull among people who use cell phones heavily for 10 years or more. Of particular concern are benign Schwann cell tumors called acoustic neuromas, which affect nerve cells connecting the inner ear with structures inside the brain. These growths can in some instances progress to malignant cancer with time. But other studies have found no evidence of acoustic neuromas or brain tumors in heavy cell phone users.
Samet adds a major challenge now would be to draw a biologically relevant connection between acoustic neuromas and other glial tumors in the brains of humans with Schwann tumors in rat hearts. “The mechanism is uncertain,” he says. “There’s a lot of information we still need to fill in.”
Since 2011 RF radiation has been classified as a Group 2B “possible” human carcinogen by the International Agency on Cancer (IARC), an agency of the World Health Organization. Based on the new animal findings, and limited epidemiological evidence linking heavy and prolonged cell phone use with brain gliomas in humans, Fiorella Belpoggi, director of research at the Ramazzini Institute and the study’s lead author, says IARC should consider changing the RF radiation designation to a “probable” human carcinogen. Even if the hazard is low, billions of people are exposed, she says, alluding to the estimated number of wireless subscriptions worldwide. Véronique Terrasse, an IARC spokesperson, says a reevaluation may occur after the NTP delivers its final report.
Stephen Chanock, who directs the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute, remains skeptical, however. Cancer monitoring by the institute and other organizations has yet to show increasing numbers of brain tumors in the general population, he says. Tracking of benign brain tumors, such as acoustic neuromas, was initiated in 2004 by investigators at the institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results program, which monitors and publishes statistics on cancer incidence rates. According to Chanock’s spokesperson, the acoustic neuroma data “haven’t accumulated to the point that we can say something meaningful about them.”
Asked if brain cancer’s long latency might explain why higher rates in the population have not appeared yet, Chanock says, “Cell phones have been around a long time. We are by no means dismissing the evidence, and the Ramazzini study raises interesting questions. But it has to be factored in with other reports, and this is still work in progress.”
Epidemiology studies investigating cell phone use patterns with human cancer risk have produced inconsistent results. Some studies enrolled people who already had tumors with suspected links to RF radiation, such as gliomas, acoustic neuromas and salivary gland tumors. Researchers compared the self-reported cell phone use habits of the cancer patients with those of other people who did not have the same diseases. Other studies enrolled people while they were still healthy, and then followed them over time to see if new cancer diagnoses tracked with how they used cell phones. All the epidemiology studies, however, have troubling limitations, including that enrolled subjects often do not report their cell phone use habits accurately on questionnaires.
In a February 2 statement, Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, wrote that despite the NTP study’s results, the combined evidence on RF exposure and human cancer—which by now amounts to hundreds of studies—has “given us confidence that the current safety limits for cell phone radiation remain acceptable for protecting the public health.” Chonock says that for him, evidence from the Ramazzini study does not alter that conclusion. “We continue to agree with the FDA statement,” he says.
This is for Quorora writer to read;
This should be read in conjunction with the experimental evidence of brain tumour Schwanoma in rats and mice!
Radiation From Cell Phones and WiFi Are Making People Sick-
Are We All at Risk?
We are now exposed to electromagnetic radio frequencies 24 hours a day. Welcome to the largest human experiment ever.
December 2, 2011
Consider this story:
It's January 1990, during the pioneer build-out of mobile phone service. A cell tower goes up 800 feet from the house of Alison Rall, in Mansfield, Ohio, where she and her husband run a 160-acre dairy farm. The first thing the Rall family notices is that the ducks on their land lay eggs that don't hatch. That spring there are no ducklings.
By the fall of 1990, the cattle herd that pastures near the tower is sick. The animals are thin, their ribs are showing, their coats growing rough, and their behavior is weird -- they're agitated, nervous.
Soon the cows are miscarrying, and so are the goats.
Many of the animals that gestate are born deformed. There are goats with webbed necks, goats with front legs shorter than their rear legs. One calf in the womb has a tumor the size of a basketball, another carries a tumor three feet in diameter, big enough that he won't pass through the birth canal.
Rall and the local veterinarian finally cut open the mother to get the creature out alive. The vet records the nightmare in her log: "I've never seen anything like this in my entire practice... All of [this] I feel was a result of the cellular tower."
Within six months, Rall's three young children begin suffering bizarre skin rashes, raised red "hot spots." The kids are hit with waves of hyperactivity; the youngest child sometimes spins in circles, whirling madly. The girls lose hair. Rall is soon pregnant with a fourth child, but she can't gain weight. Her son is born with birth defects -- brittle bones, neurological problems -- that fit no specific syndrome. Her other children, conceived prior to the arrival of the tower, had been born healthy.
Desperate to understand what is happening to her family and her farm, Rall contacts the Environmental Protection Agency. She ends up talking to an EPA scientist named Carl Blackman, an expert on the biological effects of radiation from electromagnetic fields (EMFs) -- the kind of radiofrequency EMFs (RF-EMFs) by which all wireless technology operates, including not just cell towers and cell phones but wi-fi hubs and wi-fi-capable computers, "smart" utility meters, and even cordless home phones. "With my government cap on, I'm supposed to tell you you're perfectly safe," Blackman tells her.
"With my civilian cap on, I have to tell you to consider leaving."
Blackman's warning casts a pall on the family. When Rall contacts the cell phone company operating the tower, they tell her there is "no possibility whatsoever" that the tower is the source of her ills. "You're probably in the safest place in America," the company representative tells her.
The Ralls abandoned the farm on Christmas Day of 1992 and never re-sold it, unwilling to subject others to the horrors they had experienced. Within weeks of fleeing to land they owned in Michigan, the children recovered their health, and so did the herd.
Not a single one of the half-dozen scientists I spoke to could explain what had happened on the Rall farm. Why the sickened animals? Why the skin rashes, the hyperactivity? Why the birth defects? If the radiofrequency radiation from the cell tower was the cause, then what was the mechanism?
And why today, with millions of cell towers dotting the planet and billions of cell phones placed next to billions of heads every day, aren't we all getting sick?
In fact, the great majority of us appear to be just fine. We all live in range of cell towers now, and we are all wireless operators. More than wireless operators, we're nuts about the technology. Who doesn't keep at their side at all times the electro-plastic appendage for the suckling of information?
The mobile phone as a technology was developed in the 1970s, commercialized in the mid-80s, miniaturized in the '90s. When the first mobile phone companies launched in the United Kingdom in 1985, the expectation was that perhaps 10,000 phones would sell. Worldwide shipments of mobile phones topped the one billion mark in 2006. As of October 2010 there were 5.2 billion cell phones operating on the planet. "Penetration," in the marketing-speak of the companies, often tops 100 percent in many countries, meaning there is more than one connection per person. The mobile phone in its various manifestations -- the iPhone, the Android, the Blackberry -- has been called the "most prolific consumer device" ever proffered.
I don't have an Internet connection at my home in Brooklyn, and, like a dinosaur, I still keep a landline. But if I stand on my roof, I see a hundred feet away, attached to the bricks of the neighboring parking garage, a panel of cell phone antennae -- pointed straight at me. They produce wonderful reception on my cell phone. My neighbors in the apartment below have a wireless fidelity connection -- better known as wi-fi -- which I tap into when I have to argue with magazine editors. This is very convenient. I use it. I abuse it.
Yet even though I have, in a fashion, opted out, here I am, on a rooftop in Brooklyn, standing bathed in the radiation from the cell phone panels on the parking garage next door. I am also bathed in the radiation from the neighbors' wi-fi downstairs. The waves are everywhere, from public libraries to Amtrak trains to restaurants and bars and even public squares like Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, where the Wall Street occupiers relentlessly tweet.
We now live in a wireless-saturated normality that has never existed in the history of the human race.
It is unprecedented because of the complexity of the modulated frequencies that carry the increasingly complex information we transmit on our cell phones, smart phones and wi-fi systems. These EMFs are largely untested in their effects on human beings. Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson, who teaches at the world-renowned Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, tells me the mass saturation in electromagnetic fields raises terrible questions. Humanity, he says, has embarked on the equivalent of "the largest full-scale experiment ever. What happens when, 24 hours around the clock, we allow ourselves and our children to be whole-body-irradiated by new, man-made electromagnetic fields for the entirety of our lives?"
We have a few answers. Last May, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a branch of the World Health Organization), in Lyon, France, issued a statement that the electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones would henceforth be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The determination was based in part on data from a 13-country study, called Interphone, which reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell phone use, the risk of getting a brain tumor -- specifically on the side of the head where the phone is placed -- goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Israeli researchers, using study methods similar to the Interphone investigation, have found that heavy cell phone users were more likely to suffer malignant tumors of the salivary gland in the cheek, while an independent study by scientists in Sweden concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. According to a study published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, people living for more than a decade within 350 meters of a cell phone tower experience a four-fold increase in cancer rates.
The IARC decision followed in the wake of multiple warnings, mostly from European regulators, about the possible health risks of RF-EMFs. In September 2007, Europe's top environmental watchdog, the EU's European Environment Agency, suggested that the mass unregulated exposure of human beings to widespread radiofrequency radiation "could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking and lead in petrol." That same year, Germany's environmental ministry singled out the dangers of RF-EMFs used in wi-fi systems, noting that people should keep wi-fi exposure "as low as possible" and instead choose "conventional wired connections." In 2008, France issued a generalized national cell phone health warning against excessive cell phone use, and then, a year later, announced a ban on cell phone advertising for children under the age of 12.
In 2009, following a meeting in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, more than 50 concerned scientists from 16 countries -- public health officials, biologists, neuroscientists, medical doctors -- signed what became known as the Porto Alegre Resolution. The signatories described it as an "urgent call" for more research based on "the body of evidence that indicates that exposure to electromagnetic fields interferes with basic human biology."
That evidence is mounting. "Radiofrequency radiation has a number of biological effects which can be reproducibly found in animals and cellular systems," says David O. Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the State University of New York (SUNY). "We really cannot say for certain what the adverse effects are in humans," Carpenter tells me. "But the indications are that there may be -- and I use the words 'may be' -- very serious effects in humans." He notes that in exposure tests with animal and human cells, RF-EMF radiation causes genes to be activated. "We also know that RF-EMF causes generation of free radicals, increases production of things called heat shock proteins, and alters calcium ion regulation. These are all common mechanisms behind many kinds of tissue damage."
Double-strand breaks in DNA -- one of the undisputed causes of cancer -- have been reported in similar tests with animal cells. Swedish neuro-oncologist Leif Salford, chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Lund University, has found that cell phone radiation damages neurons in rats, particularly those cells associated with memory and learning. The damage occurred after an exposure of just two hours. Salford also found that cell phone EMFs cause holes to appear in the barrier between the circulatory system and the brain in rats. Punching holes in the blood-brain-barrier is not a good thing. It allows toxic molecules from the blood to leach into the ultra-stable environment of the brain. One of the potential outcomes, Salford notes, is dementia.
Other effects from cell phone radiofrequencies have been reported using human subjects. At Loughborough University in England, sleep specialists in 2008 found that after 30 minutes of cell phone use, their subjects required twice the time to fall asleep as they did when the phone was avoided before bedtime. EEGs (electroencephalograms) showed a disturbance of the brain waves that regulate sleep. Neuroscientists at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia discovered in 2009 a "power boost" in brain waves when volunteers were exposed to cell phone radiofrequencies. Researchers strapped Nokia phones to their subjects' heads, then turned the phones on and off. On: brain went into defense mode. Off: brain settled. The brain, one of the lead researchers speculated, was "concentrating to overcome the electrical interference."
Yet for all this, there is no scientific consensus on the risks of RF-EMFs to human beings.
The major public-health watchdogs, in the US and worldwide, have dismissed concerns about it. "Current evidence," the World Health Organization (WHO) says, "does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields." (The WHO thus contradicts the findings of one of its own research units.) The US Federal Communications Commission has made similar statements. The American Cancer Society reports that "most studies published so far have not found a link between cell phone use and the development of tumors." The cell phone industry's lobbying organization, CTIA-The Wireless Association, assures the public that cell phone radiation is safe, citing studies -- many of them funded by the telecom industry -- that show no risk.
Published meta-reviews of hundreds of such studies suggest that industry funding tends to skew results. According to a survey by Henry Lai, a research professor at University of Washington, only 28 percent of studies funded by the wireless industry showed some type of biological effect from cell phone radiation. Meanwhile, independently funded studies produce an altogether different set of data: 67 percent of those studies showed a bioeffect. The Safe Wireless Initiative, a research group in Washington, DC that has since closed down, unpacked the data in hundreds of studies on wireless health risks, arraying them in terms of funding source. "Our data show that mobile phone industry funded/influenced work is six times more likely to find 'no problem' than independently funded work," the group noted. "The industry thus has significantly contaminated the scientific evidence pool."
The evidence about the long-term public health risks of exposure to RF-EMFs may be contradictory. Yet it is clear that some people are getting sick when heavily exposed to the new radiofrequencies. And we are not listening to their complaints.
Take the story of Michele Hertz. When a local utility company installed a wireless digital meter -- better known as a "smart" meter -- on her house in upstate New York in the summer of 2009, Hertz thought little of it. Then she began to feel odd. She was a practiced sculptor, but now she could not sculpt. "I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't even finish sentences," she told me. Hertz experienced "incredible memory loss," and, at the age of 51, feared she had come down with Alzheimer's.
One night during a snowstorm in 2010 her house lost power, and when it came back on her head exploded with a ringing sound -- "a terrible piercing." A buzzing in her head persisted. She took to sleeping on the floor of her kitchen that winter, where the refrigerator drowned out the keening. There were other symptoms: headaches and nausea and dizziness, persistent and always worsening. "Sometimes I'd wake up with my heart pounding uncontrollably," she told me. "I thought I would have a heart attack. I had nightmares that people were killing me."
Roughly one year after the installation of the wireless meters, with the help of an electrician, Hertz thought she had figured out the source of the trouble: It had to be something electrical in the house. On a hunch, she told the utility company, Con Edison of New York, to remove the wireless meter. She told them: "I will die if you do not install an analog meter." Within days, the worst symptoms disappeared. "People look at me like I'm crazy when I talk about this," Hertz says.
Her exposure to the meters has super-sensitized Hertz to all kinds of other EMF sources. "The smart meters threw me over the electronic edge," she says. A cell phone switched on in the same room now gives her a headache. Stepping into a house with wi-fi is intolerable. Passing a cell tower on the street hurts. "Sometimes if the radiation is very strong my fingers curl up," she says. "I can now hear cell phones ringing on silent. Life," she says, "has dramatically changed."
Hertz soon discovered there were other people like her: "Electrosensitives," they call themselves. To be sure, they comprise a tortured minority, often misunderstood and isolated. They share their stories at online forums like Smartmeters.org, the EMF Safety Network, and the Electrosensitive Society. "Some are getting sick from cell phones, some from smart meters, some from cell towers," Hertz tells me. "Some can no longer work and have had to flee their homes. Some are losing their eyesight, some can't stop shaking, most cannot sleep."
In recent years, I've gotten to know dozens of electrosensitives. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, I met a woman who had taken to wearing an aluminum foil hat. (This works -- wrap a cell phone in foil and it will kill the signal.) I met a former world record-holding marathoner, a 54-year-old woman who had lived out of her car for eight years before settling down at a house ringed by mountains that she said protected the place from cell frequencies. I met people who said they no longer wanted to live because of their condition. Many of the people I talked to were accomplished professionals -- writers, television producers, entrepreneurs. I met a scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratories named Bill Bruno whose employer had tried to fire him after he asked for protection from EMFs at the lab. I met a local librarian named Rebekah Azen who quit her job after being sickened by a newly installed wi-fi system at the library. I met a brilliant activist named Arthur Firstenberg, who had for several years published a newsletter, "No Place to Hide," but who was now homeless, living out of the back of his car, sleeping in wilderness outside the city where he could escape the signals.
In New York City, I got to know a longtime member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) who said he was electrosensitive. I'll call him Jake, because he is embarrassed by his condition and he doesn't want to jeopardize his job or his membership in the IEEE (which happens to have for its purpose the promulgation of electrical technology, including cell phones). Jake told me how one day, a few years ago, he started to get sick whenever he went into the bedroom of his apartment to sleep. He had headaches, suffered fatigue and nausea, nightsweats and heart palpitations, had blurred vision and difficulty breathing and was blasted by a ringing in the ears -- the typical symptoms of the electrosensitive. He discovered that his neighbor in the apartment building kept a wi-fi transmitter next door, on the other side of the wall to his bedroom. When Jake asked the neighbor to shut it down, his symptoms disappeared.
The government of Sweden reports that the disorder known as electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS, afflicts an estimated 3 percent of the population. A study by the California Department of Health found that, based on self-reports, as many as 770,000 Californians, or 3 percent of the state's population, would ascribe some form of illness to EMFs. A study in Switzerland recently found a 5 percent prevalence of electrosensitivity. In Germany, there is reportedly a 6 percent prevalence. Even the former prime minister of Norway, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, until 2003 the director general of the World Health Organization, has admitted that she suffers headaches and "strong discomfort" when exposed to cell phones. "My hypersensitivity," she told a Norwegian newspaper in 2002, "has gone so far that I react to mobile phones closer to me than about four meters." She added in the same interview: "People have been in my office with their mobile hidden in their pocket or bag. Without knowing if it was on or off, we have tested my reactions. I have always reacted when the phone has been on -- never when it's off."
Yet the World Health Organization -- the same agency that Brundtland once headed -- reports "there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure." WHO's findings are corroborated by a 2008 study at the University of Bern in Switzerland which found "no evidence that EHS individuals could detect [the] presence or absence" of frequencies that allegedly make them sick. A study conducted in 2006 at the Mobile Phone Research Unit at King's College in London came to a similar conclusion. "No evidence was found to indicate that people with self-reported sensitivity to mobile phone signals are able to detect such signals or that they react to them with increased symptom severity," the report said. "As sham exposure was sufficient to trigger severe symptoms in some participants, psychological factors may have an important role in causing this condition." The King's College researchers in 2010 concluded it was a "medically unexplained illness."
"The scientific data so far just doesn't help the electrosensitives," says Louis Slesin, editor and publisher of Microwave News, a newsletter and website that covers the potential impacts of RF-EMFs. "The design of some of these studies, however, is questionable." He adds: "Frankly, I'd be surprised if the condition did not exist. We're electromagnetic beings. You wouldn't have a thought in your head without electromagnetic signals. There is electrical signaling going on in your body all the time, and the idea that external electromagnetic fields can't affect us just doesn't make sense. We're biological and chemical beings too, and we know that we can develop allergies to certain biological and chemical compounds. Why wouldn't we also find there are allergies to EM fields? Shouldn't every chemical be tested for its effects on human beings? Well, the same could be said for each frequency of RF radiation."
Dr. David Carpenter of SUNY, who has also looked into electrosensitivity, tells me he's "not totally convinced that electrosensitivity is real." Still, he says, "there are just too many people with reports of illness when chronically near to EMF devices, with their symptoms being relieved when they are away from them. Like multiple chemical sensitivity and Gulf War Syndrome, there is something here, but we just don't understand it all yet."
Science reporter B. Blake Levitt, author of Electromagnetic Fields: A Consumer's Guide to the Issues, says the studies she has reviewed on EHS are "contradictory and nowhere near definitive." Flaws in test design stand out, she says. Many with EHS may be simply "too sensitized," she believes, to endure research exposure protocols, possibly skewing results from the start by inadvertently studying a less sensitive group. Levitt recently compiled some of the most damning studies of the health effects from cell towers in a report for the International Commission on Electromagnetic Safety in Italy. "Some populations are reacting poorly when living or working within 1,500 feet of a cell tower," Levitt tells me. Several studies she cited found an increase in headaches, rashes, tremors, sleep disturbances, dizziness, concentration problems, and memory changes.
"EHS may be one of those problems that can never be well defined -- we may just have to believe what people report," Levitt says. "And people are reporting these symptoms all over the globe now when new technologies are introduced or infrastructure like cell towers go into neighborhoods. It's not likely a transcultural mass hallucination. The immune system is an exquisite warning mechanism. These are our canaries in the coal mine."
Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson was one of the first researchers to take the claims of electrosensitivity seriously. He found, for example, that persons with EHS had changes in skin mast cells -- markers of allergic reaction -- when exposed to specific EM fields. Other studies have found that radiofrequency EMFs can increase serum histamine levels -- the hallmark of an allergic reaction. Johansson has hypothesized that electrosensitivity arises exactly as any common allergy would arise -- due to excessive exposure, as the immune system fails. And just as only some people develop allergies to cats or pollen or dust, only some of us fall prey to EM fields. Johansson admits that his hypothesis has yet to be proven in laboratory study.
One afternoon not long ago, a nurse named Maria Gonzalez, who lives in Queens, New York, took me to see the cell phone masts that irradiate her daughter's school. The masts were the usual flat-paneled, alien-looking things nested together, festooned with wires, high on a rooftop across from Public School 122 in Astoria. They emitted a fine signal -- five bars on my phone. The operator of the masts, Sprint-Nextel, had built a wall of fake brick to hide them from view, but Maria was unimpressed with the subterfuge. She was terrified of the masts. When, in 2005, the panels went up, soon to be turned on, she was working at the intensive care unit at St. Vincent's Hospital. She'd heard bizarre stories about cell phones from her cancer-ward colleagues. Some of the doctors at St. Vincent's told her they had doubts about the safety of their own cellphones and pagers. This was disturbing enough. She went online, culling studies. When she read a report published in 2002 about children in Spain who developed leukemia shortly after a cell phone tower was erected next to their school, she went into a quiet panic.
Sprint-Nextel was unsympathetic when she telephoned the company in the summer of 2005 to express her concerns. The company granted her a single meeting that autumn, with a Sprint-Nextel technician, an attorney, and a self-described "radiation expert" under contract with the company. "They kept saying, 'we're one hundred percent sure the antennas are safe,'" Maria told me as we stared at the masts. "'One hundred percent sure! These are children! We would never hurt children.'" She called the office of Hillary Clinton and pestered the senator once a week for six months -- but got nowhere. A year later, Gonzalez sued the US government, charging that the Federal Communications Commission had failed to fully evaluate the risks from cell phone frequencies. The suit was thrown out. The judge concluded that if regulators for the government said the radiation was safe, then it was safe. The message, as Gonzalez puts it, was that she was "crazy ... and making a big to-do about nothing."
I'd venture, rather, that she was applying a commonsense principle in environmental science: the precautionary principle, which states that when an action or policy -- or technology -- cannot be proven with certainty to be safe, then it should be assumed to be harmful. In a society thrilled with the magic of digital wireless, we have junked this principle. And we try to dismiss as fools those who uphold it -- people like Gonzalez. We have accepted without question that we will have wi-fi hotspots in our homes, and at libraries, and in cafes and bookstores; that we will have wireless alarm systems and wireless baby monitors and wireless utility meters and wireless video games that children play; that we will carry on our persons wireless iPads and iPods and smart phones. We are mesmerized by the efficiency and convenience of the infotainment appendage, the words and sounds and pictures it carries. We are, in other words, thoughtless in our embrace of the technology.
Because of our thoughtlessness, we have not demanded to know the full consequences of this technology. Perhaps the gadgets are slowly killing us -- we do not know. Perhaps they are perfectly safe -- we do not know. Perhaps they are making us sick in ways we barely understand -- we do not know. What we do know, without a doubt, is that the electromagnetic fields are all around us, and that to live in modern civilization implies always and everywhere that we cannot escape their touch.
1. Training my Virtual Medical Secretaries (V.M.A)
I love the idea of using a Virtual Medical Assistant (V.M.A for short.).
Thank god I am in my twilight years and listening to birds singing is one of my natural pastimes and trying to figure out which bird is calling and which bird is answering is not an easy task.
But the idea of voice activated cellphone is a welcome addition to an armory of medically offensive gadgets that are springing by numbers.
Dictaphone was in my armory when working abroad. I could do a very good dictation without punctuation marks and my secretaries never bothered to phone back and ask me for any clarifications. That was a very positive effort on my part and my superiors very much like my approach except a few, since I did not try to show off any accent but pure and simple Queen's English, I dictated.
Mind you I was taking to a voice machine and not a person.
The idiot, the Dictaphone does not have any emotions and only records my voice.
I tell them that putting fullstops, commas, semicolons and apostrophes are her job and not mine.
When things were difficult unlike S.M.S. I wrote down the specific stuff clearly to save their time.
I hope and prey that smart-phone becoming intelligent and telling me back you are creepy and some sort of a sob.
Advantages.
1. After some time smart-phone will instantly know what you are trying to do.
2. Unlike human secretaries who make the same mistakes over over again smart-phone would never repeat mistakes.
3. One can take home the Virtual Secretary unlike the human with bizarre consequence at home boundary.
4. One can switch off the VMA with just a push of a button unlike a jabbering soul with money / home problems.
5. At worse I can thrash it on the floor.
I have to think of the 6 to 10 as and when my lateral thinking make me to do so.
For me it is a smart innervation.
6. If I see a guy/girl I hate (on my war-path) to meet or talk or exchange any greetings I can pretend I am very busy talking to it (of cause switched off and with so many adversaries including politicians I do not want to run dry the battery life) and escape harmlessly. I see this happening every day of my life since I do not still carry a smartphone.
We have a few answers. Last May, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a branch of the World Health Organization), in Lyon, France, issued a statement that the electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones would henceforth be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The determination was based in part on data from a 13-country study, called Interphone, which reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell phone use, the risk of getting a brain tumor -- specifically on the side of the head where the phone is placed -- goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Israeli researchers, using study methods similar to the Interphone investigation, have found that heavy cell phone users were more likely to suffer malignant tumors of the salivary gland in the cheek, while an independent study by scientists in Sweden concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. According to a study published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, people living for more than a decade within 350 meters of a cell phone tower experience a four-fold increase in cancer rates.
2. Training my Medical Secretaries
Oh, for the Good Old Days of Rude Cellphone Gabbers
Also noteworthy is that the studies evaluated radiation exposures in different ways. The NTP looked at “near-field” exposures, which approximate how people are dosed while using cell phones. Ramazzini researchers looked at “far-field” exposures, which approximate the wireless RF radiation that bombards us from sources all around us, including wireless devices such as tablet and laptop computers. Yet they generated comparable results: Male rats in both studies (but not mice or female animals) developed schwannomas of the heart at statistically higher rates than control animals that were not exposed.
Taken together, the findings “confirm that RF radiation exposure has biological effects” in rats, some of them “relevant to carcinogenesis,” says Jon Samet, a professor of preventive medicine and dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, who did not participate in either study. Samet, however, cautioned the jury is still out as to whether wireless technology is similarly risky to people. Indeed, heart schwannomas are exceedingly rare in humans; only a handful of cases have ever been documented in the medical literature.
When turned on, cell phones and other wireless devices emit EF radiation continually, even if they are not being actively used, because they are always communicating with cell towers. The dose intensity tails off with increasing distance from the body, and reaches a maximum when the devices are used next to the head during phone calls or in front of the body during texting or tweeting.
Launched at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s request 10 years ago, the NTP study dosed rats and mice of both sexes with RF radiation at either 1.5, 3 or 6 watts of radiation per kilogram of body weight, or W/kg. The lowest dose is about the same as the Federal Communications Commission’s limit for public exposure from cell phones, which is 1.6 watts W/kg. The animals were exposed nine hours a day for two years (about the average life span for a rat), and the exposures were cranked up steadily as the animals grew, so the absorbed doses per unit body weight remained constant over time.
Initially leaked in 2016, results from that $25-million study provided the most compelling evidence yet that RF energy may be linked to cancer in lab rodents. The strongest finding connected RF with heart schwannomas in male rats, but the researchers also reported elevated rates of lymphoma as well as cancers affecting the prostate, skin, lung, liver and brain in the exposed animals. Rates for those cancers increased as the doses got higher but the evidence linking them with cell phone radiation specifically was weak by comparison, and the researchers could not rule out that they might have increased for reasons other than RF exposure. Paradoxically, the radiation-treated animals also lived longer than the nonexposed controls. The study results were reviewed by a panel of outside experts during a three-day meeting that ended on March 28. They concluded there was "clear evidence" linking RF radiation with heart schwannomas and "some evidence" linking it to gliomas of the brain. It is now up to the NTP to either accept or reject the reviewer's conclusions. A final report is expected within several months.
Limited to rats only, the Ramazzini study tested three doses expressed as the amount of radiation striking the animal’s bodies: either 5, 25 or 50 volts per meter. The exposure measures therefore differed from the absorbed doses calculated during the NTP study. But the Ramazzini scientists also converted their measures to W/kg, to show how the doses compared with RF limits for cell phones and cell towers set by the FCC and the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection; they ranged down to a 1,000 times lower. The exposures began when the rats were fetuses and continued for 19 hours a day until the animals died from natural causes.
As in the NTP study, Ramazzini investigators detected statistically elevated rates of heart schwannomas in male rats at the highest dose. They also had weaker findings linking RF exposure to cancer of glial cells in the brain, which were limited to females. Ronald Melnick, a retired NTP toxicologist who designed the NTP study, says a measure of consistency between the two studies is important, because “reproducibility in science increases our confidence in the observed results.”
Just why Schwann and glial cells appear to be targets of cell phone radiation is not clear. David Carpenter, a physician who directs the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, S.U.N.Y., explained the purpose of these cells is to insulate nerve fibers throughout the body. These are electrical systems, so that may be some sort of factor, he wrote in an e-mail. “But this is only speculation.”
A few epidemiology studies have reported higher rates of tumors inside the skull among people who use cell phones heavily for 10 years or more. Of particular concern are benign Schwann cell tumors called acoustic neuromas, which affect nerve cells connecting the inner ear with structures inside the brain. These growths can in some instances progress to malignant cancer with time. But other studies have found no evidence of acoustic neuromas or brain tumors in heavy cell phone users.
Samet adds a major challenge now would be to draw a biologically relevant connection between acoustic neuromas and other glial tumors in the brains of humans with Schwann tumors in rat hearts. “The mechanism is uncertain,” he says. “There’s a lot of information we still need to fill in.”
Since 2011 RF radiation has been classified as a Group 2B “possible” human carcinogen by the International Agency on Cancer (IARC), an agency of the World Health Organization. Based on the new animal findings, and limited epidemiological evidence linking heavy and prolonged cell phone use with brain gliomas in humans, Fiorella Belpoggi, director of research at the Ramazzini Institute and the study’s lead author, says IARC should consider changing the RF radiation designation to a “probable” human carcinogen. Even if the hazard is low, billions of people are exposed, she says, alluding to the estimated number of wireless subscriptions worldwide. Véronique Terrasse, an IARC spokesperson, says a reevaluation may occur after the NTP delivers its final report.
Stephen Chanock, who directs the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute, remains skeptical, however. Cancer monitoring by the institute and other organizations has yet to show increasing numbers of brain tumors in the general population, he says. Tracking of benign brain tumors, such as acoustic neuromas, was initiated in 2004 by investigators at the institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results program, which monitors and publishes statistics on cancer incidence rates. According to Chanock’s spokesperson, the acoustic neuroma data “haven’t accumulated to the point that we can say something meaningful about them.”
Asked if brain cancer’s long latency might explain why higher rates in the population have not appeared yet, Chanock says, “Cell phones have been around a long time. We are by no means dismissing the evidence, and the Ramazzini study raises interesting questions. But it has to be factored in with other reports, and this is still work in progress.”
Epidemiology studies investigating cell phone use patterns with human cancer risk have produced inconsistent results. Some studies enrolled people who already had tumors with suspected links to RF radiation, such as gliomas, acoustic neuromas and salivary gland tumors. Researchers compared the self-reported cell phone use habits of the cancer patients with those of other people who did not have the same diseases. Other studies enrolled people while they were still healthy, and then followed them over time to see if new cancer diagnoses tracked with how they used cell phones. All the epidemiology studies, however, have troubling limitations, including that enrolled subjects often do not report their cell phone use habits accurately on questionnaires.
In a February 2 statement, Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, wrote that despite the NTP study’s results, the combined evidence on RF exposure and human cancer—which by now amounts to hundreds of studies—has “given us confidence that the current safety limits for cell phone radiation remain acceptable for protecting the public health.” Chonock says that for him, evidence from the Ramazzini study does not alter that conclusion. “We continue to agree with the FDA statement,” he says.
This is for Quorora writer to read;
This should be read in conjunction with the experimental evidence of brain tumour Schwanoma in rats and mice!
Radiation From Cell Phones and WiFi Are Making People Sick-
Are We All at Risk?
We are now exposed to electromagnetic radio frequencies 24 hours a day. Welcome to the largest human experiment ever.
December 2, 2011
Consider this story:
It's January 1990, during the pioneer build-out of mobile phone service. A cell tower goes up 800 feet from the house of Alison Rall, in Mansfield, Ohio, where she and her husband run a 160-acre dairy farm. The first thing the Rall family notices is that the ducks on their land lay eggs that don't hatch. That spring there are no ducklings.
By the fall of 1990, the cattle herd that pastures near the tower is sick. The animals are thin, their ribs are showing, their coats growing rough, and their behavior is weird -- they're agitated, nervous.
Soon the cows are miscarrying, and so are the goats.
Many of the animals that gestate are born deformed. There are goats with webbed necks, goats with front legs shorter than their rear legs. One calf in the womb has a tumor the size of a basketball, another carries a tumor three feet in diameter, big enough that he won't pass through the birth canal.
Rall and the local veterinarian finally cut open the mother to get the creature out alive. The vet records the nightmare in her log: "I've never seen anything like this in my entire practice... All of [this] I feel was a result of the cellular tower."
Within six months, Rall's three young children begin suffering bizarre skin rashes, raised red "hot spots." The kids are hit with waves of hyperactivity; the youngest child sometimes spins in circles, whirling madly. The girls lose hair. Rall is soon pregnant with a fourth child, but she can't gain weight. Her son is born with birth defects -- brittle bones, neurological problems -- that fit no specific syndrome. Her other children, conceived prior to the arrival of the tower, had been born healthy.
Desperate to understand what is happening to her family and her farm, Rall contacts the Environmental Protection Agency. She ends up talking to an EPA scientist named Carl Blackman, an expert on the biological effects of radiation from electromagnetic fields (EMFs) -- the kind of radiofrequency EMFs (RF-EMFs) by which all wireless technology operates, including not just cell towers and cell phones but wi-fi hubs and wi-fi-capable computers, "smart" utility meters, and even cordless home phones. "With my government cap on, I'm supposed to tell you you're perfectly safe," Blackman tells her.
"With my civilian cap on, I have to tell you to consider leaving."
Blackman's warning casts a pall on the family. When Rall contacts the cell phone company operating the tower, they tell her there is "no possibility whatsoever" that the tower is the source of her ills. "You're probably in the safest place in America," the company representative tells her.
The Ralls abandoned the farm on Christmas Day of 1992 and never re-sold it, unwilling to subject others to the horrors they had experienced. Within weeks of fleeing to land they owned in Michigan, the children recovered their health, and so did the herd.
Not a single one of the half-dozen scientists I spoke to could explain what had happened on the Rall farm. Why the sickened animals? Why the skin rashes, the hyperactivity? Why the birth defects? If the radiofrequency radiation from the cell tower was the cause, then what was the mechanism?
And why today, with millions of cell towers dotting the planet and billions of cell phones placed next to billions of heads every day, aren't we all getting sick?
In fact, the great majority of us appear to be just fine. We all live in range of cell towers now, and we are all wireless operators. More than wireless operators, we're nuts about the technology. Who doesn't keep at their side at all times the electro-plastic appendage for the suckling of information?
The mobile phone as a technology was developed in the 1970s, commercialized in the mid-80s, miniaturized in the '90s. When the first mobile phone companies launched in the United Kingdom in 1985, the expectation was that perhaps 10,000 phones would sell. Worldwide shipments of mobile phones topped the one billion mark in 2006. As of October 2010 there were 5.2 billion cell phones operating on the planet. "Penetration," in the marketing-speak of the companies, often tops 100 percent in many countries, meaning there is more than one connection per person. The mobile phone in its various manifestations -- the iPhone, the Android, the Blackberry -- has been called the "most prolific consumer device" ever proffered.
I don't have an Internet connection at my home in Brooklyn, and, like a dinosaur, I still keep a landline. But if I stand on my roof, I see a hundred feet away, attached to the bricks of the neighboring parking garage, a panel of cell phone antennae -- pointed straight at me. They produce wonderful reception on my cell phone. My neighbors in the apartment below have a wireless fidelity connection -- better known as wi-fi -- which I tap into when I have to argue with magazine editors. This is very convenient. I use it. I abuse it.
Yet even though I have, in a fashion, opted out, here I am, on a rooftop in Brooklyn, standing bathed in the radiation from the cell phone panels on the parking garage next door. I am also bathed in the radiation from the neighbors' wi-fi downstairs. The waves are everywhere, from public libraries to Amtrak trains to restaurants and bars and even public squares like Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, where the Wall Street occupiers relentlessly tweet.
We now live in a wireless-saturated normality that has never existed in the history of the human race.
It is unprecedented because of the complexity of the modulated frequencies that carry the increasingly complex information we transmit on our cell phones, smart phones and wi-fi systems. These EMFs are largely untested in their effects on human beings. Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson, who teaches at the world-renowned Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, tells me the mass saturation in electromagnetic fields raises terrible questions. Humanity, he says, has embarked on the equivalent of "the largest full-scale experiment ever. What happens when, 24 hours around the clock, we allow ourselves and our children to be whole-body-irradiated by new, man-made electromagnetic fields for the entirety of our lives?"
We have a few answers. Last May, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a branch of the World Health Organization), in Lyon, France, issued a statement that the electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones would henceforth be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The determination was based in part on data from a 13-country study, called Interphone, which reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell phone use, the risk of getting a brain tumor -- specifically on the side of the head where the phone is placed -- goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Israeli researchers, using study methods similar to the Interphone investigation, have found that heavy cell phone users were more likely to suffer malignant tumors of the salivary gland in the cheek, while an independent study by scientists in Sweden concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. According to a study published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, people living for more than a decade within 350 meters of a cell phone tower experience a four-fold increase in cancer rates.
The IARC decision followed in the wake of multiple warnings, mostly from European regulators, about the possible health risks of RF-EMFs. In September 2007, Europe's top environmental watchdog, the EU's European Environment Agency, suggested that the mass unregulated exposure of human beings to widespread radiofrequency radiation "could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking and lead in petrol." That same year, Germany's environmental ministry singled out the dangers of RF-EMFs used in wi-fi systems, noting that people should keep wi-fi exposure "as low as possible" and instead choose "conventional wired connections." In 2008, France issued a generalized national cell phone health warning against excessive cell phone use, and then, a year later, announced a ban on cell phone advertising for children under the age of 12.
In 2009, following a meeting in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, more than 50 concerned scientists from 16 countries -- public health officials, biologists, neuroscientists, medical doctors -- signed what became known as the Porto Alegre Resolution. The signatories described it as an "urgent call" for more research based on "the body of evidence that indicates that exposure to electromagnetic fields interferes with basic human biology."
That evidence is mounting. "Radiofrequency radiation has a number of biological effects which can be reproducibly found in animals and cellular systems," says David O. Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the State University of New York (SUNY). "We really cannot say for certain what the adverse effects are in humans," Carpenter tells me. "But the indications are that there may be -- and I use the words 'may be' -- very serious effects in humans." He notes that in exposure tests with animal and human cells, RF-EMF radiation causes genes to be activated. "We also know that RF-EMF causes generation of free radicals, increases production of things called heat shock proteins, and alters calcium ion regulation. These are all common mechanisms behind many kinds of tissue damage."
Double-strand breaks in DNA -- one of the undisputed causes of cancer -- have been reported in similar tests with animal cells. Swedish neuro-oncologist Leif Salford, chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Lund University, has found that cell phone radiation damages neurons in rats, particularly those cells associated with memory and learning. The damage occurred after an exposure of just two hours. Salford also found that cell phone EMFs cause holes to appear in the barrier between the circulatory system and the brain in rats. Punching holes in the blood-brain-barrier is not a good thing. It allows toxic molecules from the blood to leach into the ultra-stable environment of the brain. One of the potential outcomes, Salford notes, is dementia.
Other effects from cell phone radiofrequencies have been reported using human subjects. At Loughborough University in England, sleep specialists in 2008 found that after 30 minutes of cell phone use, their subjects required twice the time to fall asleep as they did when the phone was avoided before bedtime. EEGs (electroencephalograms) showed a disturbance of the brain waves that regulate sleep. Neuroscientists at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia discovered in 2009 a "power boost" in brain waves when volunteers were exposed to cell phone radiofrequencies. Researchers strapped Nokia phones to their subjects' heads, then turned the phones on and off. On: brain went into defense mode. Off: brain settled. The brain, one of the lead researchers speculated, was "concentrating to overcome the electrical interference."
Yet for all this, there is no scientific consensus on the risks of RF-EMFs to human beings.
The major public-health watchdogs, in the US and worldwide, have dismissed concerns about it. "Current evidence," the World Health Organization (WHO) says, "does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields." (The WHO thus contradicts the findings of one of its own research units.) The US Federal Communications Commission has made similar statements. The American Cancer Society reports that "most studies published so far have not found a link between cell phone use and the development of tumors." The cell phone industry's lobbying organization, CTIA-The Wireless Association, assures the public that cell phone radiation is safe, citing studies -- many of them funded by the telecom industry -- that show no risk.
Published meta-reviews of hundreds of such studies suggest that industry funding tends to skew results. According to a survey by Henry Lai, a research professor at University of Washington, only 28 percent of studies funded by the wireless industry showed some type of biological effect from cell phone radiation. Meanwhile, independently funded studies produce an altogether different set of data: 67 percent of those studies showed a bioeffect. The Safe Wireless Initiative, a research group in Washington, DC that has since closed down, unpacked the data in hundreds of studies on wireless health risks, arraying them in terms of funding source. "Our data show that mobile phone industry funded/influenced work is six times more likely to find 'no problem' than independently funded work," the group noted. "The industry thus has significantly contaminated the scientific evidence pool."
The evidence about the long-term public health risks of exposure to RF-EMFs may be contradictory. Yet it is clear that some people are getting sick when heavily exposed to the new radiofrequencies. And we are not listening to their complaints.
Take the story of Michele Hertz. When a local utility company installed a wireless digital meter -- better known as a "smart" meter -- on her house in upstate New York in the summer of 2009, Hertz thought little of it. Then she began to feel odd. She was a practiced sculptor, but now she could not sculpt. "I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't even finish sentences," she told me. Hertz experienced "incredible memory loss," and, at the age of 51, feared she had come down with Alzheimer's.
One night during a snowstorm in 2010 her house lost power, and when it came back on her head exploded with a ringing sound -- "a terrible piercing." A buzzing in her head persisted. She took to sleeping on the floor of her kitchen that winter, where the refrigerator drowned out the keening. There were other symptoms: headaches and nausea and dizziness, persistent and always worsening. "Sometimes I'd wake up with my heart pounding uncontrollably," she told me. "I thought I would have a heart attack. I had nightmares that people were killing me."
Roughly one year after the installation of the wireless meters, with the help of an electrician, Hertz thought she had figured out the source of the trouble: It had to be something electrical in the house. On a hunch, she told the utility company, Con Edison of New York, to remove the wireless meter. She told them: "I will die if you do not install an analog meter." Within days, the worst symptoms disappeared. "People look at me like I'm crazy when I talk about this," Hertz says.
Her exposure to the meters has super-sensitized Hertz to all kinds of other EMF sources. "The smart meters threw me over the electronic edge," she says. A cell phone switched on in the same room now gives her a headache. Stepping into a house with wi-fi is intolerable. Passing a cell tower on the street hurts. "Sometimes if the radiation is very strong my fingers curl up," she says. "I can now hear cell phones ringing on silent. Life," she says, "has dramatically changed."
Hertz soon discovered there were other people like her: "Electrosensitives," they call themselves. To be sure, they comprise a tortured minority, often misunderstood and isolated. They share their stories at online forums like Smartmeters.org, the EMF Safety Network, and the Electrosensitive Society. "Some are getting sick from cell phones, some from smart meters, some from cell towers," Hertz tells me. "Some can no longer work and have had to flee their homes. Some are losing their eyesight, some can't stop shaking, most cannot sleep."
In recent years, I've gotten to know dozens of electrosensitives. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, I met a woman who had taken to wearing an aluminum foil hat. (This works -- wrap a cell phone in foil and it will kill the signal.) I met a former world record-holding marathoner, a 54-year-old woman who had lived out of her car for eight years before settling down at a house ringed by mountains that she said protected the place from cell frequencies. I met people who said they no longer wanted to live because of their condition. Many of the people I talked to were accomplished professionals -- writers, television producers, entrepreneurs. I met a scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratories named Bill Bruno whose employer had tried to fire him after he asked for protection from EMFs at the lab. I met a local librarian named Rebekah Azen who quit her job after being sickened by a newly installed wi-fi system at the library. I met a brilliant activist named Arthur Firstenberg, who had for several years published a newsletter, "No Place to Hide," but who was now homeless, living out of the back of his car, sleeping in wilderness outside the city where he could escape the signals.
In New York City, I got to know a longtime member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) who said he was electrosensitive. I'll call him Jake, because he is embarrassed by his condition and he doesn't want to jeopardize his job or his membership in the IEEE (which happens to have for its purpose the promulgation of electrical technology, including cell phones). Jake told me how one day, a few years ago, he started to get sick whenever he went into the bedroom of his apartment to sleep. He had headaches, suffered fatigue and nausea, nightsweats and heart palpitations, had blurred vision and difficulty breathing and was blasted by a ringing in the ears -- the typical symptoms of the electrosensitive. He discovered that his neighbor in the apartment building kept a wi-fi transmitter next door, on the other side of the wall to his bedroom. When Jake asked the neighbor to shut it down, his symptoms disappeared.
The government of Sweden reports that the disorder known as electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS, afflicts an estimated 3 percent of the population. A study by the California Department of Health found that, based on self-reports, as many as 770,000 Californians, or 3 percent of the state's population, would ascribe some form of illness to EMFs. A study in Switzerland recently found a 5 percent prevalence of electrosensitivity. In Germany, there is reportedly a 6 percent prevalence. Even the former prime minister of Norway, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, until 2003 the director general of the World Health Organization, has admitted that she suffers headaches and "strong discomfort" when exposed to cell phones. "My hypersensitivity," she told a Norwegian newspaper in 2002, "has gone so far that I react to mobile phones closer to me than about four meters." She added in the same interview: "People have been in my office with their mobile hidden in their pocket or bag. Without knowing if it was on or off, we have tested my reactions. I have always reacted when the phone has been on -- never when it's off."
Yet the World Health Organization -- the same agency that Brundtland once headed -- reports "there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure." WHO's findings are corroborated by a 2008 study at the University of Bern in Switzerland which found "no evidence that EHS individuals could detect [the] presence or absence" of frequencies that allegedly make them sick. A study conducted in 2006 at the Mobile Phone Research Unit at King's College in London came to a similar conclusion. "No evidence was found to indicate that people with self-reported sensitivity to mobile phone signals are able to detect such signals or that they react to them with increased symptom severity," the report said. "As sham exposure was sufficient to trigger severe symptoms in some participants, psychological factors may have an important role in causing this condition." The King's College researchers in 2010 concluded it was a "medically unexplained illness."
"The scientific data so far just doesn't help the electrosensitives," says Louis Slesin, editor and publisher of Microwave News, a newsletter and website that covers the potential impacts of RF-EMFs. "The design of some of these studies, however, is questionable." He adds: "Frankly, I'd be surprised if the condition did not exist. We're electromagnetic beings. You wouldn't have a thought in your head without electromagnetic signals. There is electrical signaling going on in your body all the time, and the idea that external electromagnetic fields can't affect us just doesn't make sense. We're biological and chemical beings too, and we know that we can develop allergies to certain biological and chemical compounds. Why wouldn't we also find there are allergies to EM fields? Shouldn't every chemical be tested for its effects on human beings? Well, the same could be said for each frequency of RF radiation."
Dr. David Carpenter of SUNY, who has also looked into electrosensitivity, tells me he's "not totally convinced that electrosensitivity is real." Still, he says, "there are just too many people with reports of illness when chronically near to EMF devices, with their symptoms being relieved when they are away from them. Like multiple chemical sensitivity and Gulf War Syndrome, there is something here, but we just don't understand it all yet."
Science reporter B. Blake Levitt, author of Electromagnetic Fields: A Consumer's Guide to the Issues, says the studies she has reviewed on EHS are "contradictory and nowhere near definitive." Flaws in test design stand out, she says. Many with EHS may be simply "too sensitized," she believes, to endure research exposure protocols, possibly skewing results from the start by inadvertently studying a less sensitive group. Levitt recently compiled some of the most damning studies of the health effects from cell towers in a report for the International Commission on Electromagnetic Safety in Italy. "Some populations are reacting poorly when living or working within 1,500 feet of a cell tower," Levitt tells me. Several studies she cited found an increase in headaches, rashes, tremors, sleep disturbances, dizziness, concentration problems, and memory changes.
"EHS may be one of those problems that can never be well defined -- we may just have to believe what people report," Levitt says. "And people are reporting these symptoms all over the globe now when new technologies are introduced or infrastructure like cell towers go into neighborhoods. It's not likely a transcultural mass hallucination. The immune system is an exquisite warning mechanism. These are our canaries in the coal mine."
Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson was one of the first researchers to take the claims of electrosensitivity seriously. He found, for example, that persons with EHS had changes in skin mast cells -- markers of allergic reaction -- when exposed to specific EM fields. Other studies have found that radiofrequency EMFs can increase serum histamine levels -- the hallmark of an allergic reaction. Johansson has hypothesized that electrosensitivity arises exactly as any common allergy would arise -- due to excessive exposure, as the immune system fails. And just as only some people develop allergies to cats or pollen or dust, only some of us fall prey to EM fields. Johansson admits that his hypothesis has yet to be proven in laboratory study.
One afternoon not long ago, a nurse named Maria Gonzalez, who lives in Queens, New York, took me to see the cell phone masts that irradiate her daughter's school. The masts were the usual flat-paneled, alien-looking things nested together, festooned with wires, high on a rooftop across from Public School 122 in Astoria. They emitted a fine signal -- five bars on my phone. The operator of the masts, Sprint-Nextel, had built a wall of fake brick to hide them from view, but Maria was unimpressed with the subterfuge. She was terrified of the masts. When, in 2005, the panels went up, soon to be turned on, she was working at the intensive care unit at St. Vincent's Hospital. She'd heard bizarre stories about cell phones from her cancer-ward colleagues. Some of the doctors at St. Vincent's told her they had doubts about the safety of their own cellphones and pagers. This was disturbing enough. She went online, culling studies. When she read a report published in 2002 about children in Spain who developed leukemia shortly after a cell phone tower was erected next to their school, she went into a quiet panic.
Sprint-Nextel was unsympathetic when she telephoned the company in the summer of 2005 to express her concerns. The company granted her a single meeting that autumn, with a Sprint-Nextel technician, an attorney, and a self-described "radiation expert" under contract with the company. "They kept saying, 'we're one hundred percent sure the antennas are safe,'" Maria told me as we stared at the masts. "'One hundred percent sure! These are children! We would never hurt children.'" She called the office of Hillary Clinton and pestered the senator once a week for six months -- but got nowhere. A year later, Gonzalez sued the US government, charging that the Federal Communications Commission had failed to fully evaluate the risks from cell phone frequencies. The suit was thrown out. The judge concluded that if regulators for the government said the radiation was safe, then it was safe. The message, as Gonzalez puts it, was that she was "crazy ... and making a big to-do about nothing."
I'd venture, rather, that she was applying a commonsense principle in environmental science: the precautionary principle, which states that when an action or policy -- or technology -- cannot be proven with certainty to be safe, then it should be assumed to be harmful. In a society thrilled with the magic of digital wireless, we have junked this principle. And we try to dismiss as fools those who uphold it -- people like Gonzalez. We have accepted without question that we will have wi-fi hotspots in our homes, and at libraries, and in cafes and bookstores; that we will have wireless alarm systems and wireless baby monitors and wireless utility meters and wireless video games that children play; that we will carry on our persons wireless iPads and iPods and smart phones. We are mesmerized by the efficiency and convenience of the infotainment appendage, the words and sounds and pictures it carries. We are, in other words, thoughtless in our embrace of the technology.
Because of our thoughtlessness, we have not demanded to know the full consequences of this technology. Perhaps the gadgets are slowly killing us -- we do not know. Perhaps they are perfectly safe -- we do not know. Perhaps they are making us sick in ways we barely understand -- we do not know. What we do know, without a doubt, is that the electromagnetic fields are all around us, and that to live in modern civilization implies always and everywhere that we cannot escape their touch.
1. Training my Virtual Medical Secretaries (V.M.A)
I love the idea of using a Virtual Medical Assistant (V.M.A for short.).
Thank god I am in my twilight years and listening to birds singing is one of my natural pastimes and trying to figure out which bird is calling and which bird is answering is not an easy task.
But the idea of voice activated cellphone is a welcome addition to an armory of medically offensive gadgets that are springing by numbers.
Dictaphone was in my armory when working abroad. I could do a very good dictation without punctuation marks and my secretaries never bothered to phone back and ask me for any clarifications. That was a very positive effort on my part and my superiors very much like my approach except a few, since I did not try to show off any accent but pure and simple Queen's English, I dictated.
Mind you I was taking to a voice machine and not a person.
The idiot, the Dictaphone does not have any emotions and only records my voice.
I tell them that putting fullstops, commas, semicolons and apostrophes are her job and not mine.
When things were difficult unlike S.M.S. I wrote down the specific stuff clearly to save their time.
I hope and prey that smart-phone becoming intelligent and telling me back you are creepy and some sort of a sob.
Advantages.
1. After some time smart-phone will instantly know what you are trying to do.
2. Unlike human secretaries who make the same mistakes over over again smart-phone would never repeat mistakes.
3. One can take home the Virtual Secretary unlike the human with bizarre consequence at home boundary.
4. One can switch off the VMA with just a push of a button unlike a jabbering soul with money / home problems.
5. At worse I can thrash it on the floor.
I have to think of the 6 to 10 as and when my lateral thinking make me to do so.
For me it is a smart innervation.
6. If I see a guy/girl I hate (on my war-path) to meet or talk or exchange any greetings I can pretend I am very busy talking to it (of cause switched off and with so many adversaries including politicians I do not want to run dry the battery life) and escape harmlessly. I see this happening every day of my life since I do not still carry a smartphone.
We have a few answers. Last May, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a branch of the World Health Organization), in Lyon, France, issued a statement that the electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones would henceforth be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The determination was based in part on data from a 13-country study, called Interphone, which reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell phone use, the risk of getting a brain tumor -- specifically on the side of the head where the phone is placed -- goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Israeli researchers, using study methods similar to the Interphone investigation, have found that heavy cell phone users were more likely to suffer malignant tumors of the salivary gland in the cheek, while an independent study by scientists in Sweden concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. According to a study published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, people living for more than a decade within 350 meters of a cell phone tower experience a four-fold increase in cancer rates.
2. Training my Medical Secretaries
Oh, for the Good Old Days of Rude Cellphone Gabbers
By NICK WINGFIELD
Published: December 2, 2011
Is talking to a phone the same as talking on it?
Illustration by The New York Times
Jimmy Wong, of Los Angeles, called an overheard conversation with Siri on an iPhone “creepy.”
Readers’ Comments
The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is part of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us have learned when to be quiet — no talking in “quiet cars” on trains, for example.
But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more precisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri, in the new iPhone 4S — has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are becoming annoyed.
In part, that is because conversations with machines have a robotic, unsettling quality. Then there is the matter of punctuation. If you want it, you have to say it.
“How is he doing question mark how are you doing question mark,” Jeremy Littau of Bethlehem, Pa., found himself telling his new iPhone recently as he walked down the street, dictating a text message to his wife, who was home with their newborn. The machine spoke to him in Siri’s synthesized female voice.
Passers-by gawked. “It’s not normal human behavior to have people having a conversation with a phone on the street,” concluded Mr. Littau, 36, an assistant professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University.
The technology behind voice-activated mobile phones has been around for a few years — allowing people to order their phones around like digital factotums, commanding them to dictate text messages, jot down appointments on their calendars and search for nearby sushi restaurants. Apple, though, has taken it to another level with Siri.
“Happy birthday smiley face,” was what Dani Klein heard a man say to his phone on the Long Island Rail Road, using the command to insert a grinning emotion into a message.
“It sounded ridiculous,” said Mr. Klein, 28, who works in social media marketing.
Talking to your phone is so new that there are no official rules yet on, say, public transportation systems.
Cliff Cole, a spokesman for Amtrak, said the train line’s quiet-car policy applied to any use of voice with cellphones, though it explicitly bans only “phone calls,” not banter with a virtual assistant. “We may have to adjust the language if it becomes a problem,” Mr. Cole said.
Voice-activated technology in smartphones first appeared a few years ago when mobile phones running Google’s Android operating system and other software began offering basic voice commands to do Web searches and other tasks.
Apple’s Siri, introduced this fall, is a more sophisticated iteration of the technology; it responds to natural-sounding phrases like, “What’s the weather looking like?” and “Wake me up at 8 a.m.”
Apple gave Siri a dash of personality, too, reinforcing the impression that the iPhone’s users were actually talking to someone. Ask Siri for the meaning of life, and it responds, “I find it odd you would ask this of an inanimate object.”
Technology executives say voice technologies are here to stay if only because they can help cellphone users be more productive.
“I don’t think the keyboard is going to go away, but it’s going to be less used,” said Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellular phone while at Motorola in the 1970s.
Another irritant in listening to people talk to their phones is the awareness that most everything you can do with voice commands can also be done silently. Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at the service department of a car dealership in Los Angeles recently, when a woman broke the silence of the room by dictating a text message into her iPhone.
“You’re unnecessarily annoying others at that point by not just typing out your message,” said Mr. Brooks, a visual effects artist in the film industry, adding that the woman’s behavior was “just ridiculous and kind of sad.”
James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers, said people who use their voices to control their phones are creating an inconvenience for others — noise — rather than coping with an inconvenience for themselves — the discomfort of having to type slowly on a cramped cellphone keyboard. Mr. Katz compared the behavior with that of someone who leaves a car’s engine running while parked, creating noise and fumes for people surrounding them.
While Apple has tried to enable natural-sounding conversations with Siri, they are often anything but. Nirav Tolia, an Internet entrepreneur, was riding a crowded elevator down from his office in San Francisco recently when a man tried to use Siri to find a new location of a cafe, Coffee Bar. The phone gave him listings for other coffee houses — the wrong ones — forcing him to repeat the search several times.
“Just say ‘Starbucks,’ dude,” another passenger said, pushing past the Coffee Bar-seeker when the elevator reached the ground floor.
When talking to their cellphones, people sometimes start sounding like machines themselves. Jimmy Wong, 24, was at an after-hours diner with friends in Los Angeles recently when they found themselves next to a man ordering Siri to write memos and dictate e-mails. They found the man’s conversation with his phone “creepy,” without any of the natural pauses and voice inflections that occur in a discussion between two people.
“It was very robotic,” he said.
Yet the group could not stop eavesdropping.
People who study the behavior of cellphone users believe the awkwardness of hearing people in hotels, airports and cafes treating their phones like administrative assistants will simply fade over time.
“We’ll see an evolution of that initial irritation with it, to a New Yorker cartoon making fun of it, and then after a while it will largely be accepted by most people,” said Mr. Katz from Rutgers.
But, he predicted, “there will be a small minority of traditionalists who yearn for the good old days when people just texted in public.”
Posted by Asoka at 12:29 PM
Published: December 2, 2011
Is talking to a phone the same as talking on it?
Illustration by The New York Times
Jimmy Wong, of Los Angeles, called an overheard conversation with Siri on an iPhone “creepy.”
Readers’ Comments
The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is part of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us have learned when to be quiet — no talking in “quiet cars” on trains, for example.
But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more precisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri, in the new iPhone 4S — has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are becoming annoyed.
In part, that is because conversations with machines have a robotic, unsettling quality. Then there is the matter of punctuation. If you want it, you have to say it.
“How is he doing question mark how are you doing question mark,” Jeremy Littau of Bethlehem, Pa., found himself telling his new iPhone recently as he walked down the street, dictating a text message to his wife, who was home with their newborn. The machine spoke to him in Siri’s synthesized female voice.
Passers-by gawked. “It’s not normal human behavior to have people having a conversation with a phone on the street,” concluded Mr. Littau, 36, an assistant professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University.
The technology behind voice-activated mobile phones has been around for a few years — allowing people to order their phones around like digital factotums, commanding them to dictate text messages, jot down appointments on their calendars and search for nearby sushi restaurants. Apple, though, has taken it to another level with Siri.
“Happy birthday smiley face,” was what Dani Klein heard a man say to his phone on the Long Island Rail Road, using the command to insert a grinning emotion into a message.
“It sounded ridiculous,” said Mr. Klein, 28, who works in social media marketing.
Talking to your phone is so new that there are no official rules yet on, say, public transportation systems.
Cliff Cole, a spokesman for Amtrak, said the train line’s quiet-car policy applied to any use of voice with cellphones, though it explicitly bans only “phone calls,” not banter with a virtual assistant. “We may have to adjust the language if it becomes a problem,” Mr. Cole said.
Voice-activated technology in smartphones first appeared a few years ago when mobile phones running Google’s Android operating system and other software began offering basic voice commands to do Web searches and other tasks.
Apple’s Siri, introduced this fall, is a more sophisticated iteration of the technology; it responds to natural-sounding phrases like, “What’s the weather looking like?” and “Wake me up at 8 a.m.”
Apple gave Siri a dash of personality, too, reinforcing the impression that the iPhone’s users were actually talking to someone. Ask Siri for the meaning of life, and it responds, “I find it odd you would ask this of an inanimate object.”
Technology executives say voice technologies are here to stay if only because they can help cellphone users be more productive.
“I don’t think the keyboard is going to go away, but it’s going to be less used,” said Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellular phone while at Motorola in the 1970s.
Another irritant in listening to people talk to their phones is the awareness that most everything you can do with voice commands can also be done silently. Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at the service department of a car dealership in Los Angeles recently, when a woman broke the silence of the room by dictating a text message into her iPhone.
“You’re unnecessarily annoying others at that point by not just typing out your message,” said Mr. Brooks, a visual effects artist in the film industry, adding that the woman’s behavior was “just ridiculous and kind of sad.”
James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers, said people who use their voices to control their phones are creating an inconvenience for others — noise — rather than coping with an inconvenience for themselves — the discomfort of having to type slowly on a cramped cellphone keyboard. Mr. Katz compared the behavior with that of someone who leaves a car’s engine running while parked, creating noise and fumes for people surrounding them.
While Apple has tried to enable natural-sounding conversations with Siri, they are often anything but. Nirav Tolia, an Internet entrepreneur, was riding a crowded elevator down from his office in San Francisco recently when a man tried to use Siri to find a new location of a cafe, Coffee Bar. The phone gave him listings for other coffee houses — the wrong ones — forcing him to repeat the search several times.
“Just say ‘Starbucks,’ dude,” another passenger said, pushing past the Coffee Bar-seeker when the elevator reached the ground floor.
When talking to their cellphones, people sometimes start sounding like machines themselves. Jimmy Wong, 24, was at an after-hours diner with friends in Los Angeles recently when they found themselves next to a man ordering Siri to write memos and dictate e-mails. They found the man’s conversation with his phone “creepy,” without any of the natural pauses and voice inflections that occur in a discussion between two people.
“It was very robotic,” he said.
Yet the group could not stop eavesdropping.
People who study the behavior of cellphone users believe the awkwardness of hearing people in hotels, airports and cafes treating their phones like administrative assistants will simply fade over time.
“We’ll see an evolution of that initial irritation with it, to a New Yorker cartoon making fun of it, and then after a while it will largely be accepted by most people,” said Mr. Katz from Rutgers.
But, he predicted, “there will be a small minority of traditionalists who yearn for the good old days when people just texted in public.”
Posted by Asoka at 12:29 PM
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Revisiting 22 July, 2022 Conspiracy in Ceylon
This post is for future reference.
Gotabaya had lot of good military habits and several bad political habits.
Management of Coronavirus with a few exceptions was excellent.
We had the lowest death rate in Southeast Asia.
Lowering the VAT as promised during campaign crippled our economy. That was a political suicide.
Those "Viath Maga" University Clan including their Health Minister were crooks by all means.
Countries involved in destabilizing Ceylon were USA, UK, European Union and India.
The Day 22-07-2022 was the day it culminated. It started in January, 2022.
Aragalaya is the wrong term. This was a doctored colour revolution started by a hitherto unknown female local actress.
She was stage crafted and she just disappeared.
It was a Grand Conspiracy to oust the sitting government by illegal means.
It was the biggest failure of the judiciary in Ceylon.
No lawyer raised a single objection.
In fact, lawyers were part of the conspiracy they were blatant hindrance to good governence protocol.
Good Governence itself was stage crafted for particular purpose.
It has created a very bad precedence in Ceylon.
Rump LTTE was behing this secretly.
It was not a peaceful protest.
One sitting MP was brutality murdered.
Uptil now no proper investigation was done except the doctor's postmortem examination.
There were many more brutal incidents over a short period of time.
No Truth Commission would spring up on the lines of Nelsan Mandela style.
Everybody has forgotten what Coronavirus did to us. I projected that it would take 20 years for us to recover from the economic crisis. This tragedy came on top "Bond Scam" and financial mismanagement.that ensued.
America has a strategic military plan for Ceylon (Ranil was the self appointed Golden Boy for America).
He said Yes, to this project without reservation and has signed most of what America needed.
India is doing the rest of the bidding using Presdent of the current government.
He was the first president who only got 44.5% of the popular vote.
Mahinda Deshapriys Second cound Saga could not be verified. It was certified under mysterious setting.
No legal luminary contesting the outcome.
Shady deal.
Only thing Ranil did was to delay payment of debt till 2028.
That is not a big economic golf stroke.
Kindergarten Stuff.
His plan is to put the current government into crisis by 2028.
This is actually, two years before the scheduled election.
We should not let Ranil come back to power when current government fails, in due course.
He should not be made a sitting MP by means of the List MP Saga.
He is an ace crook.
Ideal combo for CIA.
He was a rejected guy by all means.
A political pest.
Moment if, he comes to power, Mihintale would be donated to America fot an Air Base.
Already Hambantota is handed over to China on 99 year lease, just like Hong Kong was given to Britain by China.
China is the fiddler on the roof playing the tune (second innings of the British game in reverse) which British would be proud of.
India is trying to dominate Trincomale with the help of rump LTTE.
This Ranil guy is all out to ruin our Universities and start Private Fee Paying Universities. He unceremonially disposed our UGC Chairman Professor Ranjith Mendis.
He was Jewel of of University Crown.
What a loss?
I have already left the country having contributed all my working life to Ceylon except for 6 years.
Peradeniya University was only one place out of many.
My contribution to Private Medical Institutions in Ceylon was significant including the "National Quality Award" for Navaloka Hospital.
This piece is for guys left in Ceylon to revisit.
I have no current or future interest in Ceylon.
I am M.B.B.S (Ceylon) guy.
I was proud of the name Ceylon and Ceylon Tea.
I continue promote Ceylon Tea.
Ceylon Tea is my daily driver.
Mesna Tea tops the list.
That is why I resist using Sri-Lanka or Sir-Lanka in practical terms.
Just a shift of r and i not a spelling mistake.
This includes my contribution to creating the new Faculty of Dental with the help of JICA. This was a gift from Japan to Doing Bloody Well, D.B. Wijetunge. He did not stay long enough for the opening. It was completed within 18;months. Chandrika Kumaranatunge did the opening of this new premise and as usual she came 6 hours late. I was used to her coming late.
I did a project for her in Nittambuwa and she came 6 hours late.
Knowing this, I feed the girls who came for "Jayamangala Gatha" well in advance and released the girls no sooner the official ceremony was over.
There was a Gate Crash.
She was very popular.
I could not get in.
I stayed out knowing very well she would call me in.
She did.
Another official guest (me) entered in and ushered her to the food table. She politely said NO for Milk Rice and spend a little time chatting with her loyals.
By nature, she was very polite to professionals unlike current guys holding high posts.
Of course I had some milk rice, oil cakes and cokkis.
They were delicious.
Soon after, I jumped into a Kandy bus.
There was no ragging made possible in the Faculty of Dental Science, for the entire period of 15 years of my stay.
But I was told it was not so in the Halls of Residences. Never bothered to venture into them off duty.
I never talked about these things at home.
A family member sarcastically asked me what I have done, all my life during my academic years.
I enumerated several things.
Get rid of politics from universities was Number One.
Universities are for higher education and not for politics.
If undergraduates want to do politics they ought to enter a University that promote ONLY politics.
By the way Politics is not Scientific.
When I was in the Students Council I went with PSU leader to meet the then Vice Chancellor.
We had Rs.60,000 in the PSU account.
Student leaders used to take money from this acvount without giving receipts.
The money was put in a fixed deposit and only the interest was used for student activities.
We requested VC to pass a By Law to produce a valid receipt for all the expenses of PSU, above Rs.100/=.
There wasn't a single student strike for a very long time.
The money swindling (opportunities) loopholes were virtually closed.
Professor E.O.E. Peraira (1969 to 1971) was the VC. He was a very nice Burgher Gentleman with broken Sinhala vocabulary.
I entered the University in 1968.
I captained University Hockey Team in 1973. I used appear only for the tournament games and my deputy 3 years younger, a medical student managed all the matches but I decided the team on the day of the match.
Plan is to win the game.
With only a handful of medical students we came third behind Faculty of Engineering and Science in athletics.
We beat the Engineering Faculty in the final hockey game.
If I remeber right I got the highest score (did not matter) for athletics in six events which included relays.
Worst experience was running 400 meters Hurdle but I finished third. I had done 200 in school and never 400.
I used to do the "Army Obstacle - Warmup- Race" daily as the warm up before playing one hour of hockey.
I came first with the best timing.
This was outside the 6 events allowed for one individual.
This is to highlight that Peradeniya had all the sporting facilities except swimming pool.
However we collected Rs.100,000/= for the swimming pool fund. During my stay in UK UNP government added some money and built the swimming pool. It was leaking from the veey first day due to shoddy construction. When I joined the University again as a permanent staff member we did the relayering of concrete with enormous cost.
I could not have a dip in this facility. Swimming is not my fancy sport.
It is very hard sport.
Regarding Buddhist activities, for the first time in the history of Faculty of Medicine we had a Pirith Ceremony in the Medical Library. We only had a room for the library in the Dean's Office. Within a short time period, two story library was built.
Pirith was to me very boring but I had to be up for all the rituals for the monks.
After mid night and "Ata-Natiya Pirith", I got our Billiard Banda to open the billiard room and I got him to teach me all the tricks till Pirith Ceremony was over. Subsequently, I improved my game with my Dental Friend Laxamn Denipitiya (very successful in America) at the Faculty Club, famous for liqueur. Patrick Denipitiya the singer is his relation. We only had beer to calm our nerves. I was his best man. I met him once after that, in one of our Internation Symposiums.
He was invited to give a guest lecture.
Markan Marker was the billiard boy at the Faculty club. We used to walk from Kandy to the Ra Kade near Mahaiyawa cemetery.
I climb up alone to Aruppola. He waits till I reach the top and jump into a bus to go to Wattegama. He used to point and show me Kola Diviya or the Jungle Cat.
Eyes beeming, the guy disappears in a flash. If a dog comes out there is no escape. Because of this jungle cat my walk is never interrupted by dogs.
Early days I did not have a car but Taxi Hire was Rs. 2.50 to 5.00.
There were no Taxis after 11PM but midnight bus services were regular.
Billiards is my favorite game and I haven't played a game for over 3 years.
I could find a place in Australia.
I joined the University within seven months of the Internship as seconded officer from Health Department. During this period I put a trap for undergraduates coming from a particular School from Kurunegala, cheating at examinations. None of them got higher classes for the last 3 years.
Of course these students hated me.
I was very particular about ragging during students days and as teacher.
I would say it was bit of a failure.
Then there was sinister operation to introduce drugs to students.
This was discovered by accident.
I found a few students dosing off during my lecture. They have to show 80% attendance. I had a strict attendance register. They have to sign not tick off on a box. I checked all the signatures myself.
They were told five year prison sentence for forging somebody else's signature.
I did a head count and match with the signatures. This simple protocol made it easier for late comers. They have to eat some food.
Mornings Lectures the doors are closed exactly five minutes past 8.00AM.
I confronted a student and said I am going to send you to University Doctor for drug testing.
He begged me not to and I obliged.
Any more doping, I would punish YOU was my response.
Then I quietly investigated how the drugs are brought to the University. Guys who bring lunch packets to the University were involved.
I reported this to the VC who was 15 years younger who was a political appointee.
He said he cannot do that, due to fear of recrimination by the drug pedlars.
Only thing he did was to close one entry point (out of many) which I discovered.
That was the last time I visited the University.
I send a message later to the VC, "Do not bother to send me any invitation for any university function".
I am sad to say within 5 years of me leaving the University, all the bad habits have resurfaced.
I categorically say NPP/JVP guys were involved in these sordid activities.
Worse part is now these guys are running our country.
Tuesday, July 8, 2025
Nobel Peace Prize for Donald Trump is the Joke of This Century
Yes, it is the Joke of This Century.
Giving this honour to a guy who tacitly supported Israel's "Preemptive Strike" on Iran, one which was quickly followed by the bombardment of Iran by American Air Force.
Which he himself publicly admitted.
The varasity of this joke is, it is proposed by the guy who violated the UNO protocols at nightlight, if not daylight.
These guys are either paranoids, if not suffering from subtle form of dementia.
Other possibility is, like that of Zelensky guy who is a confimed drup addict, these two personalities are dosed by their own doctors with new form of sedative drugs which I have not heard of.
Ayahuasca comes to my mind, where those who consume ayahuasca become Godly like figures, transiently though.
What a world we are living in?
Vanila
Vanila
Vanilla planifolia
Vanilla originated from Mesoamerica, specifically Mexico and Central America. The primary species, Vanilla planifolia, is native to this region. While it is now grown in many tropical areas, its origins trace back to the jungles of Mexico and Central America. The Totonac people of Mexico were among the first to cultivate vanilla. Vanilla plant, is a tropical climber known for its fragrant pods used in flavoring, comes from the Vanilla orchid. The orchid produces greenish yellow, waxy, and fragrant flowers that bloom for only a single day. These flowers must be hand pollinated to produce the vanilla pods, which are the fruit of the vine. The pods, initially green, develop over several months and are then cured to develop their characteristic aroma and flavor.
The vanilla pods, also known as beans, are the fruit of the vanilla vine. They develop from the pollinated flowers and can take 6 to 9 months to mature, reaching about 18-20cm in length. Initially green, the pods gradually turn yellow and then brown as they mature. They have no aroma at this stage and require a complex curing process to develop their characteristic vanilla flavour. The curing process involves sweating, drying and exotic treatments to bring out the vanillin. Vanilla is the second most expensive spice after saffron due to the labour intensive cultivation process.
Saffron
Saffron
Crocus sativus
Saffron is a spice derived from the dried stigmas of the saffron crocus flower (Crocus sativus). It's vibrant crimson colour and has a distinct, slightly bitter, and earthy flavour. Saffron is known for its use as a flavouring and colouring agent in various cuisines and has potential health benefits.Saffron comes from the stigmas (the female part) of the saffron crocus flower.Each flower produces only three stigmas, and it takes a large number of flowers (around 150,000 for one kilogram) to produce a small amount of saffron. This labor intensive process is why saffron is the world's most expensive spice.
Saffron has a unique, slightly bitter and earthy taste with a subtle floral aroma. It imparts a vibrant yellow orange colour to food, thanks to its rich content of carotenoid pigments. Saffron is used in various dishes, including pilafs, risottos, paellas, and various meat, seafood, and vegetable dishes.
Saffron is rich in antioxidants and has been studied for its potential mood boosting and other health-promoting properties. Saffron contains an impressive variety of plant compounds. These may act as antioxidants, molecules that protect your cells against free radicals and oxidative stress.
Safranal is a naturally occurring organic compound, specifically a monoterpene aldehyde, that is a major component of saffron, responsible for its distinctive aroma. It is also been studied for its potential medicinal properties, including anti-inflammatory, antidepressant and antioxidant effects.
Some powerful saffron antioxidants include:
Crocin
Crocetin
Safranal
Picrocrocin
Kaempferol
Crocin is perhaps the most notable antioxidant in saffron. It is responsible for saffron’s red colour, and research suggests it may have antidepressant properties and could protect brain cells against progressive damage.
Research shows that safranal may have benefits for several health conditions, such as:
Inflammation
Asthma
Hypertension
Cancer
Depression
Lastly, kaempferol is found in saffron flower petals. This compound may help boost your immune system and protect your body against several viruses, includingTrusted Source:
Hepatitis B
Flu
HIV
Respiratory Syncytial Virus
Monday, July 7, 2025
Israel has it hands all over including Azerbaijan
Israel has its hands all over.
It includes Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan has a long border with Iran.
It is believed it allowed Israel planes to fly over its air space when Iran was bombed.
With Israelist's military backbone weakened and military help from Israel not coming to Azerbaijan, it is trying to pay cool, now.
Moment the Ukrainian Saga comes to a logical conclusion, Russia may feel free to use it's Soviet era influence reactivated in the Baltic Sea.
Baltic theater is very complicated.
It goes back to Mongal empire.
World War I was initiated to dismantle the Mongol Empire. European countries have lost interest in this region except for import of oil from Azerbaijan.
Turkey is currently looking after European interests.
Turkey by nature is like India, a double dealer in real politics. While trying to project as the modern Mogal reincarnation President of Turkey is selling oil to Israel.
Iran is currently identifying it true friends, Azerbaijan is not one.
Israel has only one friend left.
That is United States.
All these time Israel did the dirty work for America.
Now that Israel is begging help from America, CIA has to spring a surprise.
I am not sure what it is going to be.
It is going to blow up any moment.
This temporary ceasefire is the red herring.
Keep fingers crossed.
Sunday, July 6, 2025
Revisiting my Dhamma Web Site
Revisiting my Dhamma Web Site
My WordPress Dhamma Web Site.
It is not in public domain but can be accessed by using https://dhammawithasokaplus.wordpress.com
One is free to visit this site with niragamikayos in power in Ceylon.
https://dhammawithasokaplus.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/3/
Mind you I forgot its name and accidentally found it today.
It is not on public domain use the link above.
One is free to visit this site with niragamikayos in power in Ceylon.
https://dhammawithasokaplus.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/3/
Mind you I forgot its name and accidentally found it today.
It is not on public domain use the link above.
Jon Hall and Peter Parfait were my Linux Gurus
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Linux Gurus, Jon Hall and Peter Parfait
Reproduction
Jon Hall and Peter Parfait were my Linux Gurus
I read a book by them called "Joy of Linux" in the same Style as "Joy of Sex".
Having read that I got rid of the "Fear Psychosis" I had on Linux.
I am reproducing on of his "Wisdom Thoughts" here.
I am using Linux utilities and figuring out to put his photo here.
Hope I will be successful.
The Raspberry Pi computer has rekindled interest in tinkering with hardware and created a market for products combining the tiny computer with customized software.
By Jon "maddog" Hall
The format of the Photo was not accepted by Google, unfortunately.
Those of you who know me know that I designed electronics circuits in high school and then studied Electrical Engineering at Drexel University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). Unfortunately during that career I was almost electrocuted by 13,600 volts and 800 amps (twice!). Fortunately I found software as much fun and a lot safer, other than paper cuts from ripping printouts. Back in those days electronic components were very expensive (US$ 128,000 for 64KB of core memory), so I took the software route and let someone else pay for the hardware.
I continued to be interested in hardware, and I even assembled my own computer from chips and prototype digital circuits with the use of breadboards, sometimes with wire-wrapping. Soldering tens of thousands of pins perfected my soldering technique, and you really don't want to know about the wire-wrapping.
About two years ago, I became involved with the Arduino, which has been a lot of fun, but my time with it was limited, and to me it was not a "real" computer because it did not run GNU/Linux.
Then I heard about the Raspberry Pi (RPi). This was what I had been waiting for: a US$ 35 computer that ran a real operating system and allowed you to tinker with electronics just as you could with the Arduino.
In fact, people were using the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino together, which was even cooler.
The founders of the Raspberry Pi Foundation are modest people who thought that only 1,000 very low priced computers would be enough for the world, and in doing so, they unfortunately created an imbalance between supply and demand. (Alas, many great visionaries underestimate their influence.) In fact, they took 100,000 orders before they shipped a single Raspberry Pi, and for many months, people who wanted them could only order one at a time with a 12-week delivery lead time.
Last September, just before Campus Party Europe in Berlin, I contacted the Raspberry Pi Foundation and asked if they would be willing to attend and perhaps give a talk or two about their wonderful machine. Not only did they send Alan Mycroft, one of the original founders, but they sent three enthusiastic graduate students and lots of RPis and bread boarding gear, and they even gave three hands-on workshops. I attended one of them and worked with a young "Campusero" from Spain who I thought was going to go berserk over the fact that his software could make an LED blink Morse code. Then, I taught him that pushing a button was not as simple as he thought when the button has key bounce.
Over the past several months, I have had the privilege to work closer with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, learning more about their history and dreams for the computer. I have seen people create the most interesting projects with it, and in some cases move beyond projects to selling actual products based on a Raspberry Pi with some customized software (e.g., a three-person ERP system for small companies).
At Campus Party Brazil, I also met another of the product's founders, Pete Lomas, whose tales of bringing the RPi to market reminded me a lot of my days back at Digital.
I also gave two talks at Campus Party Brazil on the RPi: one about the RPi in general and another about how to make a media center out of the RPi from really inexpensive components. Attaching an RPi to a VESA-equipped monitor could create a very powerful, low-cost thin client/media center for digital inclusion. It has no fan noise, uses very little electricity (3W when idle), and has no moving parts to wear out.
Most refreshing was the real desire to keep the price of the RPi as low as possible yet still deliver enough compute power to students who want to experiment. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has now shipped more than 1 million units, and they are set to deliver another million this year; however, I think they might need to manufacture 2 or 3 million.
Another thing I like about the RPi is the number of different Free and Open Source operating systems that have been ported to it (including Firefox OS) and the number of cottage industries that are building up around it – cases, an online magazine driven by the community, bread-boarding packages, and other add-ons.
Every once in a while there is a "step function in fun" for computing, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation has hit a home run. If you have not investigated it, particularly if you are part of a school or university, I suggest you visit their website
There is nothing called Safe Limit for Alcohol
Thursday, June 9, 2016
There is nothing called Safe Limit for Alcohol
Reproduction
Here’s How Many People Fatally Overdosed On Marijuana Last Year
With marijuana now legal in some form throughout 23 states, the number of Americans who fatally overdosed on the drug last year was significant:
A total of 17,465 people died from overdosing on illicit drugs like heroin and cocaine last year, while 25,760 people died from overdosing on prescription drugs, including painkillers and tranquilizers like Valium, according to CDC figures.
Opioid overdose levels rose so sharply in 2014—spiking 14 percent from the previous year— the CDC described the levels as “epidemic.
”
“More persons died from drug overdoses in the United States in 2014 than during any previous year on record,” the CDC reported earlier this month.
Alcohol, an even more accessible substance, is killing Americans at a rate not seen in roughly 35 years, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data.
The more than 30,700 Americans who died from alcohol-induced causes last year doesn’t include alcohol-related deaths like drunk driving or accidents; if it did, the death toll would be more than two and a half times higher.
According to a widely cited 2006 report in American Scientist, “alcohol is more lethal than many other commonly abused substances.”
The report further puts the lethality of various substances in perspective:
Drinking a mere 10 times the normal amount of alcohol within 5 or 10 minutes can prove fatal, whereas smoking or eating marijuana might require something like 1,000 times the usual dose to cause death.
Though marijuana has yet to lead to a fatal overdose in the U.S., it does have the potential to be abused and lead to dangerous behaviors like drugged driving — but taking too much will likely lead to, if anything, a really bad trip.
Despite the changing tide in American attitudes toward marijuana for both therapeutic and recreational uses, legalization is still vigorously opposed by groups like the pharmaceutical lobby (who stand to lose big if patients turn to medical marijuana for treatment) and police unions (who stand to lose federal funding for the war on drugs).
Even among 2016 presidential contenders, Democratic hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate from either party to support outright legalization of marijuana by removing it from the federal list of Schedule 1 drugs, which includes substances like heroin and LSD.
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