replication cycle

HIV is a member of the group of viruses known as retroviruses, which share a unique life cycle (Fig. 4). Once HIV binds to a host cell, the viral envelope fuses with the cell membrane, and the virus's RNA and enzymes enter the cytoplasm. HIV, like other retroviruses, contains an enzyme called reverse transcriptase. This allows the single-stranded RNA of the virus to be copied and double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) to be generated. The enzyme integrase then facilitates the integration of this viral DNA into the cellular chromosome. Provirus (HIV DNA) is replicated along with the chromosome when the cell divides. The integration of provirus into the host DNA provides the latency that enables the virus to evade host responses so effectively.

Production of viral proteins and RNA takes place when the provirus is transcribed. Viral proteins are then assembled using the host cell's protein-making machinery. The virus's protease enzyme allows for the processing of newly translated polypeptides into the proteins, which are then ultimately assembled into viral particles. The virus eventually buds out of the cell. A cell infected with a retrovirus does not necessarily lyse the cell when viral replication takes place; rather, many viral particles can bud out of a cell over the course of time.

hiv structure and life cycle

HIV is an enveloped RNA virus:
As HIV buds out of the host cell during replication,
it acquires a phospholipid envelope.
Protruding from the envelope are peg-like structures
that the viral RNA encodes.
Each peg consists of three or four gp41 glycoproteins (the stem),
capped with three or four gp120 glycoproteins.
Inside the envelope the bullet-shaped nucleocapsid of the virus
is composed of protein, and surrounds two single strands of RNA.
Three enzymes important to the virus's life cycle -
reverse transcriptase, integrase, and protease -
are also within the nucleocapsid.

The Central Role of Helper T Cells

This is a great link:
http://www.learner.org/channel/courses/biology/textbook/hiv/hiv_3.html

Healing VS Curing

http://www.cancerstory.com/servlets/tcm.jsp

Chinese herbal medicine has been used along with conventional treatment such as radiation therapy and chemotherapy. It helps to ease the side effects of conventional treatment, control pain, improve quality of life, strengthen the immune system and in some cases, stop tumour growth and spread.

(Adapted from Choices in Healing written by Michael Lerner)

Healing Goes Beyond Curing

There is a fundamental distinction between healing and curing that lies at the heart of all genuinely patient-centred approaches to cancer treatment and care. This is not some "flaky" New Age distinction, but one rooted in the greatest and oldest continuous traditions of medicine. It is a distinction yet to be fully recognized and honored in mainstream medicine today. But while the distinction between curing and healing is widely recognized, the significance of these two complementary approaches to recovery from cancer is rarely explained to people with cancer.

As the term is generally used, a cure is a successful medical treatment. In order words, a cure is a treatment that removes all evidence of the disease and allows the person who previously had cancer to live as long as he would have lived without cancer. A cure is what the physician hopes to bring to the patient. Curing is what the doctors hope to do, the external medical process of effecting an outcome in which the disease disappears.

Healing, in contrast, is an inner process through which a person becomes whole. Healing can take place at the physical level, as when a wound or broken bone heals. It can take place at an emotional level, as when we recover from terrible childhood traumas or from a death or a divorce. It can take place at mental level, as when as we learn to reframe or restructure destructive ideas about ourselves and the world that we carried in the past. And it can take place at what some would call a spiritual level, as when we move toward God, toward a deeper connection with nature, or toward inner peace and a sense of connectedness.

Although curing and healing are different, they are deeply entwined. For any cure to work, the physical healing power of the organism must be sufficient to enable recovery to take place. When a physician sets a bone or prescribes an antibotic for an infection, he is doing his part for recovery by offering curative therapy. Yet when the inner healing power of the organism is insufficiently strong, the bone will not knit or the infection will not subside. Healing is thus a necessary part of curing - a fact with profound implications for medicine, since the authentically holistic physician is deeply aware of the essential role his patient's recuperative powers play and will do everything he can to encourage the patient to enhance those recuperative powers.

Healing, however, goes beyond curing and may take place when curing is not at issue or has proved impossible. Although the capacity to heal physically is necessary to any successful cure, healing can also take place on deeper levels whether or not physical recovery occurs. I have had many friends with cancer whom curative treatment ultimately proved impossible. Yet, even as their disease progressed, the inner healing process - emotional, mental and spiritual - was astonishingly powerful in their own lives and in those of their families and friends.

That you can participate in the fight for life with cancer - by working to enhance your own healing and recuperative resources - is a profoundly important discovery for many people. Cancer patients often experience themselves losing all control of their lives. They become the passive objects of all kinds of decisions and treatments by their medical teams. They feel they must do what their physicians tell them. They may feel that they can do nothing to help themselves. Often, no one has offered them the opportunity to consider the distinction between healing and curing.

It is not yet known scientifically how much difference personal efforts at healing can mean in terms of life extension. However, it is clinically known by most psychotherapists who work with cancer that a patient engaged in personal healing work can make a transformative difference in his quality of life. An ever-increasing body of scientific evidence now suggests that a strong desire to live - a willingess to engage in the struggle for life - and a continuous movement toward a healthy relationship with life, do help some people in their fight for physical recovery. Conversely, long-term chronic depression, hopelessness, cynicism, and similar characteristics tend to diminish resilience and increase physical vulnerability.

how sophisticated is our understanding of cancer

I was suprised at how much "we" actually do know about cancer. I thought these doctors were just shooting in the dark but it sounds like they have much more knowledge.

“A true healer cultivates a compassionate heart and practices it in the art of medicine.”
(or teaching)

terminator GM crops

That article about the starvation v-gurts and t-gurts...what kind of evil genious would do this!?

disgusting......I guess it is afterall some sort of master plan for population control.

even monsanto opted out though....

mandalas

http://www.mandalazone.com

somehow i missed your links from last week - wow! some amazing mandalas...... and I loved reading the lengthy words with each one......

hundredth monkey phenomenon

http://skepdic.com/morphicres.html

that is a cute monkey!

I live and work alone and travel light, relying largely on my memory and making a point of letting intuition guide my way. --Lyall Watson*

The hundredth monkey phenomenon refers to a sudden spontaneous and mysterious leap of consciousness achieved when an allegedly "critical mass" point is reached. The idea of the hundredth monkey phenomenon comes from Dr. Lyall Watson in his book Lifetide (1979). Watson, who has a Ph.D. in ethology for work done at the London Zoo with Desmond ("The Naked Ape") Morris, was writing about several studies done in the 1960's by several Japanese primatologists of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata). Watson alleged that the scientists were "reluctant to publish [the whole story] for fear of ridicule." He writes that he had "to gather the rest of the story from personal anecdotes and bits of folklore among primate researchers, because most of them are still not quite sure what happened." So, wrote Watson:

I am forced to improvise the details, but as near as I can tell, this is what seems to have happened. In the autumn of that year an unspecified number of monkeys on Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea. . . . Let us say, for argument's sake, that the number was ninety-nine and that at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning, one further convert was added to the fold in the usual way. But the addition of the hundredth monkey apparently carried the number across some sort of threshold, pushing it through a kind of critical mass, because by that evening almost everyone was doing it. Not only that, but the habit seems to have jumped natural barriers and to have appeared spontaneously, like glycerine crystals in sealed laboratory jars, in colonies on other islands and on the mainland in a troop at Takasakiyama.

Yes, according to Watson, one monkey taught another to wash sweet potatoes who taught another who taught another and soon all the monkeys on the island were washing potatoes where no monkey had ever washed potatoes before. When the "hundredth" monkey learned to wash potatoes, suddenly and spontaneously and mysteriously monkeys on other islands, with no physical contact with the potato-washing cult, started washing potatoes! Was this monkey telepathy at work or just monkey business on Watson's part?

It makes for a cute story, but it isn't true. At least, the part about spontaneous transmission of a cultural trait across space without contact is not true. There really were some macaque monkeys who washed their sweet potatoes. One monkey started it and soon others joined in. But even after six years not all the monkeys saw the benefit of washing the grit off of their potatoes by dipping them into the sea. Watson made up the part about the mysterious transmission. The claim that monkeys on other islands had their consciousness raised to the high level of the potato-washing cult is a myth (Amundson 1985, 1987; Pössel and Amundson, 1996).

Ron Amundson wrote a very critical article of Watson's claim in 1985. In 1986, in a response to Amundson's critique of the hundredth monkey claim, Watson said his data came from "off-the-record conversations with those familiar with the potato-washing work." Markus Pössel contacted Masao Kawai, one of the senior researchers working on the original macaque project, and asked him about Watson's claims. Kawai said he was not "aware of any sweet potato washing or other skills that propagated more rapidly than would be expected by normal, individual, 'pre-cultural' propagation." When asked about "spontaneous and rapid spread of sweet potato washing from Koshima to groups of macaques on other islands and on the mainland," Kawai responded: "Individual monkeys in other groups or in zoos may have accidentally learned washing behavior, but it hasn't been observed anywhere on Koshima that washing behavior has spread to other group members."

When asked if there were "anecdotes or bits of folklore" among his primatologist colleagues regarding rapid behavior propagation, Kawai said "No." And when asked were there any contacts between Lyall Watson and his (Kawai's) colleagues, Kawai said "No." Thus, I repeat: Watson created the hundredth monkey phenomenon. Amundson refers to Watson's "myth-making" rather than his confabulation. Watson's response to Amundson's critique was published in the Fall 1986 issue of Whole Earth Review. Watson wrote: "I accept Amundson's analysis of the origin and evolution of the Hundredth Monkey without reservation. It is a metaphor of my own making, based—as he rightly suggests—on very slim evidence and a great deal of hearsay. I have never pretended otherwise. . . ." Watson has apparently made no effort to contact the researchers to inquire about the hearsay he claims he heard. In any case, Watson did not put forth the idea as a metaphor; he put it forth as a fact for which there was some unspecified hearsay evidence.

It should be noted that Watson is the author of some 25 books, and the hundredth monkey nonsense involves only a few paragraphs of his total output. Watson is unrepentant about it, however, and writes on his website: "I still think it's a good idea!" As a metaphor? Or as a fact? I wonder.

The notion of raising consciousness through reaching critical mass is being promoted by a number of New Age spiritualists. Ken Keyes, Jr. has published a book on the Internet that calls for an end to the nuclear menace and the mass destruction which surely awaits us all if we do not make a global breakthrough soon. The title of his treatise is The Hundredth Monkey. In his book he writes such things as "there is a point at which if only one more person tunes-in to a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness is picked up by almost everyone!"

It seems to be working for spreading the word about the hundredth monkey phenomenon.

Even though there is no evidence for the hundredth monkey phenomenon, Rupert Sheldrake has claimed that his theory of morphic resonance explains "the increasing ease with which new skills are learned as greater quantities of a population acquire them."*

http://skepdic.com/morphicres.html

http://www.mayatulum.com

YOGA AND THE YUCATÁN PENINSULA — AN UNLIKELY PAIRING — WERE MEANT TO BE TOGETHER SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME

BARRELING UP THE YUCÁTAN PENINSULA on Mexico's Highway 307, I have to confess that, while I'm not a very spiritual guy, I'm feeling the thrill of a little mystique in the air. Scientists tell us the Yucatán was the epicenter of the great “K-T Extinction” - a prehistoric catastrophe so sweeping in its consequences that it might make this sprawling slab of limestone the most important place on earth.

I'm riding shotgun in a minivan, along well-tended asphalt that cuts through the horizon-spanning jungle of Yucatán's Caribbean coast, in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. This is the fabled and much fawned-over “Mayan Riviera,” south of Cancún, and I've just spent the better part of a week here, immersed in an intensive introduction to what I once would have thought to be a very non-Mayan practice.

Yoga.

Ten thousand miles from where the ancient Hindu practice originated, yoga has become something of a local passion and a vigorous little industry. Yoga “experiences” of every stripe - hatha, kundalini, vinyasa flow, “power yoga” - are woven into the fabric of tourism on this sunny Caribbean expanse of jungle and sparkling, sandy playas, including yoga-dedicated hotels, spas, retreats, and classes. Cruising north, with the brooding ruins of Tulum receding in the distance behind me, I'm beginning to sort out why yoga melds so well with the sensual ethos of this land of the Maya.

THE CATACLYSM

Imagine this crucial moment, 65 million years ago: A huge, barren chunk of space debris has lurched into our planet's magnetic field and is about to collide with the edge of the peninsula's limestone shelf. Creatures within sight of what will soon be ground zero, many of them enormous, loose-jointed reptiles, may not even see the object's approach. They don't scan the skies for weather changes or interstellar rocks, let alone this monster - one of the most gigantic outer space intruders to ever smash into the surface of our young blue planet.

Students

The local heritage is on display at Maya Tulum Wellness Retreat & Spa.

of this cataclysm will tell you that if you could have stopped the meteor's descent and held it in place on the ground for a moment, an airplane flying at 30,000 feet would have had to climb upward to avoid it. But the idea of stopping it is pure fantasy. The meteor obliterated the area that now surrounds Chicxulub Pueblo, gouging a crater roughly 110 miles wide in the earth's surface and creating the geologic event known as the K-T Extinction.

K-T is scientific shorthand for the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. In the long, twilight darkness that followed the impact, 75 percent of all species on earth - including the dinosaurs, who had reigned as masters of the planet for 160 million years - withered into oblivion.

With the end of the great lizards' dominion, a group of tiny, resilient creatures began to emerge from the undergrowth and flourish. They were the mammals, and the door was now open for the laborious process of natural selection to eventually produce the forerunners of our own race. In short, humanity is probably a direct, if distant, by-product of the K-T meteor collision.

This is powerful mojo for some serious yoga practitioners. It confers the anointed status of a “power vortex” on this vast Caribbean promontory. I'm personally not big on ideas like power vortexes, but I'll readily concede that this place makes a seductive locale for a meditative discipline like yoga.

CIRCLES AND RHYTHMS

Flash

Relaxing on the beach at the Maya Tulum Wellness Retreat & Spa.

forward about 10 geologic epochs, give or take a million years. My companion on my return drive from Tulum to coastal Playa del Carmen is Keith Christoffersen, a Canadian emigré to the Yucatán. Keith is general manager of the elegant, but earthy Maya Tulum Wellness Retreat & Spa (mayatulum.com) and a student of yoga and Mayan lore. With thousands of hectares of photosynthesizing greenery - zacate grasses and almond, ceiba, ramón, and toxic chechim trees - emanating oxygen around us, our conversation turns philosophical on the subject of breathing. Pranayama, or breath control, is one of the bedrock notions of yoga. Prana - embodied by our breath - is seen by Yogis as a universal life force. In the cosmology of ancient Mayans, the similar concept of ik was believed to be the force that animated the universe.

After a weeklong immersion, I have become profoundly conscious of how breath control affects the state of your body and your sense of well-being. This perception might just be the greatest benefit I've derived so far from yoga.

“Respire

Sunrise is a peaceful time to practice yoga.

profundo,” purrs the soft voice of Carla Robert, a sleek, raven-haired yoga instructor. “Breathe ... deeply.” As she pads among the participants in her afternoon class under the soaring thatched roof of Maya Tulum's open-air yoga pavilion, Carla's voice is a soft obligato against the sounds of birds and the rhythm of the nearby surf. This particular session is a vinyasa flow class that links together a continuous series of postures and stretches, called asanas. The effect is more kinetic than some other, more meditative styles of yoga. A glance around the floor at my startlingly limber fellow yogis confirms that my flexibility is maybe a 3 on a scale of 10. Either that, or most of these people are from another planet.

Yoga instructors, I'm finding, are uniformly gentle and supportive of my effort. Their advice, to a guy who isn't exactly supple, is pretty much along the lines of, “Don't worry. It takes time.” I'm still fairly clumsy with many of these postures - my self-image conjuring up the frightening vision of a linebacker in a tutu - but they seem to get a little easier at every session. With my body struggling to hold a pose called trikonasana, the triangle, I (barely) rotate my head upward to complete the asana and gaze at the spectacular circle of ceiling: interlaced fronds supported in the center by the hefty, towering trunk of a ceiba, the Mayans' sacred tree.

Arielle Thomas Newman helps in the search for samadhi.

Like most of the buildings at Maya Tulum (including the airy individual cabañas) the yoga palapa has a circular motif. This invokes another of those yoga/Maya connections. One yogic fundamental posits that the body's “psychospiritual” energy resides in centers called chakras, from the Sanskrit word for wheels. Circular imagery also governs the act of meditation. Mandalas are circular geometric figures used to help focus the mind during meditation, and often they

The door of the Alhambra Hotel.

suggest actual repetitive patterns in the physical world - rotating galaxies, solar systems, atomic orbits. One significant shape reflected by mandalas is the circular Mayan calendar, which still puzzles scientists with its precocious astronomical accuracy.

My final encounter with a circle motif at Maya Tulum is indirectly Mayan in origin: the temescal or “sweat lodge.” The structure itself, which can accommodate about six people, is a low, round brick dome with a well in the center that holds glowing, fiery hot stones, and a small vent in the ceiling. In other words, a large oven. If the temescal experience were yoga, it could be promoted as yoga with the side benefit that you can bake bread in your bare hands.

YOGA BY THE SEA

As the van peels out of the jungle and onto the streets of lively Playa del Carmen, I feel a distinct tingle of homecoming. This sun-washed little town is where, five days earlier, I began my personal voyage of discovery to Yoga-land. On the surface, it's a model Mexican beach city,

Taking a dive into Grand Cenote, near Tulum

a tiny fringe of suburban commerce surrounding the immaculate sun-and-surf district - open-air palapas, restaurants, hotels, souvenir shops, and the perennial clusters of quite obviously healthy young people.

In Playa, near the whitewashed courtyard of the Alhambra Hotel, I reunite with Arielle Thomas Newman, who's been my yoga mentor and guide since I first arrived. An intimate gem of a beachfront hotel, with a sparkling ambiente somewhere between South Asian and Moorish, the Alhambra (alhambrahotel.net) is home to Arielle's popular Yoga by the Sea program (morethanyoga.com).

As an incorrigible skeptic, with some admittedly negative preconceptions about yoga, I couldn't have gotten luckier than finding Arielle in my search for an intelligent, articulate instructor. A UCLA graduate with a professional dance background and the rangy physique of an athlete, she is superbly equipped to launch me on my personal quest for samadhi (a Hindu state of bliss).

My personal goal is to experience the perceptible physical and emotional benefits of this practice, sans the quasicerebral new age prattle of what I call “leotard yoga.” This usually involves lots of murky talk about “universal oneness” and “energy pathways.” Arielle's teaching technique mostly skims over all that. It's direct, rational, and straightforward. If she's got some unspoken design to connect you with a “higher earthly power,” you'll probably recognize on your own when you've achieved that state.

Yoga by the Sea classes are

An artisian shop near the Na Balam, open for business

conducted in the Alhambra's penthouse studio, overlooking the Caribbean. We begin with a sort of entry-level version of hatha yoga, which is built around the union of opposing forces, symbolically reflecting the sun on one hand, the moon on the other. A forward bend is followed by a backward bend and an extension by a contraction, and so on, all of it governed by the ubiquitous engine of the breath, guiding the body toward a sense of balance. To my relief, none of this involves the frightening ramrod headstands I've seen, or that fearsome standing half-lotus pose, with the body supported on one leg, and the other leg torqued up beside the opposite hip. That's not to say that the biophysics of even the simpler asanas are easy for me. I'm a prisoner of my weight lifting- and roadbike-tensed musculature. But with the slow, rhythmic retraining of my breathing reflex, the gentle relaxation of my joints starts to sink in after a couple of back-to-back sessions. I'm definitely in the right place for some serious exposure to yoga.

Later in the day, I join another class at the tony Ikal del Mar (“Poetry of the Sea”) resort in nearby Xcalacoco (ikaldelmar.com). Ikal is an intensely private hotel and epicurean spa with individual cabañas spaced throughout thick, carefully tended jungle accented with draecena and garish red flowering bromelias. You can explore the grounds and scarcely encounter another guest, even though the hotel is often filled close to capacity. The menu of massage options (including a nocturnal moon massage, a chocolate massage, and a gravity-free hammock massage) and exotic herbal and aquatic wellness treatments is copious. Ikal is quite obviously the ultimate voluptuous honeymoon destination and a perfect self-indulgent “chill-out” escape for harried high-end executives.

Newlyweds make up most of the hour-long class Arielle conducts here. This is more of a power yoga class, an Americanized version of vinyasa flow that gives participants the exertion of a conventional workout along with the relaxation component and other benefits of Hatha yoga.

THE ISLAND OF WOMEN

Isla Mujeres is a short ferry ride from the bustling docks of Cancún, 45 minutes by car from Playa del Carmen. Centuries ago, the Mayans made the little island a sanctuary for the fertility goddess Ixchel. When 16th-century Spanish explorers arrived for their customary looting and plundering, they found so much statuary depicting Ixchel that they named the place the “Island of Women.”

The Na Balam hotel.

Today, it's another favorite Quintana Roo beach destination, with a dollop of geographic hoodoo that's got to thrill the local yogis: this is the very easternmost point in Mexico. The small stone ruins of a Mayanobservatory that stand at Isla Mujeres' southernmost tip are the first Mexican real estate to feel the sun every morning. Which makes this colorful little island the ideal spot in Mexico for performing the kinetic vinyasa known as surya namaskar - the sun salutation. This short routine, part of every yoga class I've thus far experienced, works practically every muscle and joint in the body, beginning and ending with the hands in the familiar prayer position.

At the island's opposite end is the elegant beachfront hotel Na Balam (nabalam.com), the “House of the Jaguar.” Here, I join yet another yoga session with the resident instructor, Sabina Tamm (sundreamers.com), a jovial expatriate from Cologne, Germany. Some of Sabina's specialties - astrological charts, tarot card reading, and “rebirthing” ceremonies - lean toward the ethereal. But her yoga sessions, using rhythmic sounds of the nearby sea to help participants contemplate their breath and heartbeat, are physically energizing. Again, she stresses breathing as a healing and relaxation tool. “When the body feels tension,” she advises, “breathe into the area of the tension. Direct your breath to that spot.”

Na Balam's general manager, Manuel Gosende, is a dedicated Yogi and a serious free diver. Understandably, he reveres his Cuban countryman, Pipin Ferreras, holder of several underwater breath-holding records. Manuel understands better than most of us the extraordinary benefits of yoga breath control. Every night, before retiring, he lights a few candles in his home and performs a private yoga session. “It helps me sleep,” he says. “It aids my digestion and, most importantly, it increases my underwater time.”

THE SERPENT AND THE WIZARD

Enjoying the Jungle Room at the Ikal Resort.

Back on the mainland, in the Alhambra's yoga studio, I'm ready to amp up my yoga exposure with a session of kundalini yoga - a notch beyond the gentler disciplines I've experienced so far. Waning light on the sea outside the window and the soft collective humming of a mantra - Ong namo, guru dev namo - suggest that what's coming is some serious stuff. The instructor is a delicate French woman named Monique dressed in ceremonial white - a Sikh turban and a flowing Kurta pajama outfit. Her routine is far more static than the vinyasa flow workouts I've gotten used to.

We proceed from one asana to the next with studied deliberation, and the individual postures are intense. As I understand kundalini yoga, its goal is to concentrate your mind on summoning energy from your spine - aficionados like to call it “serpent power” - then releasing it through your breath. The poses are controlled and surprisingly taut. The archer pose is a good example - a muscular, Brad Pitt-style photo op, with legs and arms firmly tensed as if you're aiming your longbow at the infidels, all the time breathing through your nose.

Breathing, as always, is the guiding motif, and it reaches an exhaustive climax with the “breath of fire” exercise. Here, you're seated, back straight, drawing and releasing breath deep from your stomach muscles as fast as you can. You'll never be more acutely aware of the machinery of your own respiration.

Downstairs,

A clay massage at Maya Tulum Wellness Retreat & Spa soothes any sore spots after yoga.

I'm treated to one of the Alhambra's truly wondrous offerings - a Mayan massage at the hands of a wizard named Abel. This is a luxury tour of your own senses that lavishes the body with cold oils, heated stones, and strokes with branches of powerfully aromatic eucalyptus and rosemary, artfully accompanied by a kind of sonic hologram that Abel creates with a little tape player, moving from one ear to the other. His Mayan ancestors would be impressed. When he comes to the almost imperceptible touching of his palms against your skin, his rap is now familiar to me. “Respire profundo,” he whispers, before pulling his hands back rapidly in a gesture symbolizing the extraction of your body's pains.

With my body by now in a contented semi-liquid state, I attempt a farewell dinner in Playa del Carmen. I'm the guest of Alberto Lizaola, a saber-lean devotee of kundalini yoga and the owner of Yaxche Maya Cuisine Restaurant (mayacuisine.com), a Mayan-themed spot that's also something of a local center for cultural revival. The garden dining area is patterned after a Mayan temple, and the cuisine consists of elegantly embellished versions of native Mayan dishes: epazote shrimp, tikin xic (marinated fish), broiled lobster with flambéed xtabentuncenotes - crystalline subterranean springs that lace the peninsula. They're popular with snorkelers and serious cave divers.) fruits. My evening ends with one of those bizarre “small world” encounters that makes me wonder about the mystic power of this part of the planet. An old scuba diving buddy from California wanders by on the street and drops over to say hello. (I'm sure he's in Yucatán to explore the famed

“How's it going?” he chimes. “You down here to dive some cenotes?”

“No.” I tell him. “I've been learning to breathe.”

– Jim Cornfield

Cancún's Beaches Are Back

Hurricane Wilma barreled through Cancún almost one year ago, leaving the hot spot in need of some serious fixing. Nine months and more than $20 million later, Cancún's beautiful beaches and top-notch hotels are up and running, and better than ever.

The seven-mile strip of beach that Wilma's winds swept away has been replaced with 96 million cubic feet of Cancún's signature soft sand, dredged from the ocean floor. The project finished up in mid-April, surprisingly ahead of schedule. City leaders say that rebuilding that beach was an opportunity to revamp others that were damaged by years of erosion and other natural problems. From El Pueblito Beach to Avalon Bay, Cancún's beaches are now wider, whiter, and even more pristine - beckoning new and returning tourists to visit.

Beaches weren't the only spots getting a facelift - many hotels and resorts along the coast were refinished, upgraded, and enhanced. The Gran Meliá Cancún Resort features a newly restored beachfront, a pool area with Balinese-style huts, and a completely renovated Mexican restaurant with a sushi lounge. Its sister hotel, Paradisus Riviera Cancún, has revamped its Reef Grill restaurant, adding a new deck.

With Wilma's remnants disappearing and the opening of newly refined and restored resorts, Cancún's rebirth is promising. Many hotels are offering deals to celebrate the reopenings, in the hope of luring vacationers back to the area. In addition, Continental has reinstated flights between the U.S. and Cancún and is operating at 100 percent of the available capacity pre-Wilma.

– Kristin Burnham

have you seen this movie?

http://www.shellmoundthemovie.com

Emeryville: Filmmaker tells story of forgotten Indian burial ground disrupted by quest for retail
- Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, March 25, 2005

The sensory onslaught was bad enough.
The grief was worse. Those involved won't soon forget it, though some wish they could.

The event was the discovery of American Indian remains during the clearing of a site for a regional shopping center in Emeryville from 1997 to 2002. As recounted in "Shellmound," a short documentary by Oakland filmmaker Andr�s Cediel, the find was extraordinary. Hundreds of bodies were uncovered, many of them having been buried with obvious reverence by the rich and peaceable Ohlone culture that thrived on San Francisco Bay for thousands of years before California was colonized by people of European descent.

The 21-minute movie focuses on how various participants handled the challenge of managing what became a construction site atop a cemetery. It would have been a delicate task under any conditions, but consider that the ground in which the remains were embedded was saturated with a singularly vile toxic brew left behind by the acid vats of an abandoned paint factory.

Thrown together in a triple ordeal, workers had to weigh the foul and the sacred, progress and memory, and decide whether to hurry up or to pray.

Contractors performed the necessary task of removing the poisons so that future users of the land -- shoppers, diners, moviegoers and residents of new apartments and townhomes with Golden Gate views -- would be protected. American Indian representatives also had a vital task to carry out: trying to ensure that the ancient users of the land, their nameless ancestors, would be able to rest with dignity.

In the film, Ohlone descendant Kathy Perez recalls finding a jawbone and reburying it on the spot. Over the remains she simply said, "Forgive me."

Cediel's goal when he started filming was to tell the history of a central spot on the Bay Area landscape: the shoreline at the mouth of Temescal Creek near the eastern approach to the Bay Bridge. He was interested in exploring the various transformations the place has undergone over the millennia.

The 29-year-old filmmaker had a sense that with a 400,000-square-foot shopping and entertainment center having just opened, the location had come full circle back to the busy and diverse crossroads it had been before modern times.

For thousands of years, the shoreline at the creek was the salubrious meeting ground for one of the most densely populated and linguistically diverse communities on the Pacific Rim. It was a food hub and trading center - - a "flea market," one speaker in the movie says -- with bay views from atop a 60-foot-high cone of discarded shells that spread out over the equivalent of a football field.

The mound-building culture had gone by the time the Spanish arrived in the 18th century, but the towering shell mound remained undisturbed for another 100 years. Modernity came in 1876 when the top of the man-made hill was lopped off for the dance pavilion for Shellmound Park, San Franciscans' playground till the 1920s.

It was literally a case of dancing on the grave, a historian says in the movie, yet the amusement park also preserved the base of the mound and most of the remains buried deep within it.

In the 1920s, archaeologists were able to save more than 600 remains before the amusement park gave way to a plant making pigment for red paint. The bones are still stored at the Hearst Anthropology Museum on the UC Berkeley campus, awaiting repatriation to the Ohlone.

As he began shooting, Cediel knew he had more on his hands than a story about the past. He was surprised by the intensity of the emotions still felt by people who had worked on the cleanup and recovery of remains, which had been sealed off below the floor of the mound when the paint factory was built.

He found that although the land had been cleaned up and transformed into a vibrant urban space, memory remained a powerful force. The shopping center, Bay Street Emeryville, was open and busy, but the conflict was unresolved.

Every one of the native people and archaeologists who worked on the site told Cediel that they won't go back. Two seemed almost scarred by the experience.

"I personally don't shop here," Cediel said while walking the site recently. "I do feel conflicted about the whole situation. There are unresolved issues here. This is a place of transition, and it's a transition that usually happens once in a thousand years.

"There's a lot of volatile energy here," said Cediel, who made the film for his journalism master's project at UC Berkeley last year. "Most of the people I talked to in the film were very emotional. People were very upset about what had happened."

Some 300 bodies were reburied in an unmarked grave on the mall site. About 100 were taken from what later became the parking lot behind a Victoria's Secret store.

It's estimated that hundreds more lie beneath the center's concrete floor. Nobody knows how many remains were scooped up and taken to landfills or incinerated during the toxic cleanup. Chuck Striplen, an Ohlone descendant and archaeologist who worked on the excavation, estimates dozens.

No sign exists to indicate the Emeryville spot was and remains a burial site. But the workers saw everything.

Glimpsing thousands of years back in time inside the most intimate part of the largest of the hundreds of shell mounds that once dotted the Bay Area, they saw adults with limbs intertwined, women with babies, bodies in groups, bodies laid to rest under a large grinding stone mortar and uncovered during the digging of a hole for a french-fry grease pit, bones rubberized by exposure to arsenic-laced goo, skeletons broken by time and the backhoe.

"Inside, I was feeling this emotion of wanting to scream and wanting to cry at the same time," Ohlone descendant Perez says on camera. A consulting archaeologist appears equally upset, calling the place toxic.

"When you're the person uncovering it, you've released what energy is there," said Cediel, who has a 20-month-old son with his wife, Nives Wetzel de Cediel, the director of a nonprofit youth program in Oakland. "That's why a lot of the people who worked on this site were so conflicted."

Cediel, whose ancestry goes back to the Chibcha people of the high mountain plains of Colombia, doesn't take sides in the movie, which he presents in sober PBS-like style. He acknowledges the efforts made by the developer, Madison Marquette, to pay homage to the past, including a memorial walk that tells the story of native life on Temescal Creek.

However, Cediel said in an interview that the memorial could have gone further. "There's no mention that we found over 1,000 people buried here," he said.

"Apparently a lot of time and effort went into the design of the memorial -- the detail of the symbolism, the use of native plants and motifs," he said. "It's too bad that a similar effort hasn't been made to outreach and educate the community about the significance of the land they walk on." The memorial is a sensitive point among some Ohlone. "If the Ohlone people who worked on the site can't even stomach going there, why have a memorial in the first place?" Striplen asked.

Also touchy is how the recovery of the remains was handled. A company representative says in the film that he is proud of how sensitively the task was done. Ohlone descendant Striplen strongly disagrees.

Berkeley resident Stephanie Manning, publisher of the Shellmounder News and an advocate for preserving native burial sites, points blame at no one. In an interview, she said the Emeryville experience showed that when the interests of development and history clash, the odds are stacked against history.

"The city of Emeryville scrupulously followed (California Environmental Quality Act) regulations, and they really covered themselves," she said. "And even still we lost the most valuable of shell mounds to the shopping mall. It kind of speaks to the failure of CEQA to protect sites."

Cediel is considering filming a postscript that would enlarge on the complicated emotions and politics still swirling around the Emeryville shell mound. The views range from an Ohlone leader who did his Christmas shopping at the mall last year to protesters who gather at the start of the Christmas shopping season to demonstrate against what they call the "dead mall."

The retelling of the Emeryville story comes at a time when Ohlone representatives are concerned about possible development in nearby West Berkeley on the base of what is an even older shell mound. Striplen, who believes the mound also contains burials, hopes that if development occurs the soil will not be seriously disturbed.

"Shellmound" has played at several small film festivals. Cediel also is distributing it to schools and libraries and hopes to work out a local television deal.

"People have been coming here for thousands of years," he said. "There's something special about this place that's drawn different people for a long time. Certain bad things happened here. It's kind of a force of human nature. What I see as my role and my task is to at least let people know where they are."

As Cediel looked west from the mall, shore birds wheeled above the mudflats and a spring breeze from the Golden Gate blew softly over Shellmound Street. People were pouring in for another day of shopping and relaxation.

liquid trust - testimonials

You've GOT to see this little animation on the top right:
http://www.verolabs.com
[interesting who they quote here]

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Could you sell more, love more and accomplish more if people trusted you more?

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specially formulated to increase TRUST in YOU.

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It all starts with Trust.

yes we can raise the dopamine levels!

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The human brain is very capable of automaticallymanufacturing the quantity of chemicals it needs if it is given the raw materials (Nutrients From Foods) to do so!

I give it to my son, who is 12 years old. Brian started taking beCALM'd in August, right about the time school started. I cannot tell you HOW MANY people (who know both of us) have noticed a difference in him! He used to anger VERY quickly, and now he stops - most of the time - and thinks before he reacts. My mother is the one who REALLY has noticed the difference in Brian (in fact, she spent FOUR DAYS with us at Thanksgiving, and never once wished she was elsewhere!). It's not so much that he is changed as the fact that he handles stress and pressure more easily. He takes two in the morning before breakfast, and two when I pick him up at school in the afternoon. We 'played' with the dosage a little when we first started, and this seems to work best for us. Of course, I signed up to be a distributor, which you likely already know. Please stay in touch, and have wonderful Holidays! Terry Ann Linley Free Information By Email!

When we have enough Dopamine we have . . .

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Dopamine is widespread in the brain as well as the rest of the nervous system. This neurotransmitter plays a critical role in the control of movement.

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It helps to modulate brain activity, control coordination and movement, and regulate the flow of information to different areas of the brain.

Dopamine is believed to release chemicals that allow us to feel pleasure (e.g., endorphins).

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Doctor changes his thoughts . . . Our doctor, who was totally against the beCALM'd or anything else, is now telling others about the beCALM'd. Why are some doctors so closed minded to things such as this? K. Broussard

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Statements relating to these products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, mitigate or prevent any disease.

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Copyright © 2005 - Neuro-Info-Plus.com

tools and chimps

That article seemed so strangely from the past and the discoveries seemed so obvious. I was suprised that they were so amazed at intonations regarding different types of food treats alerting others etc. Also, that they use tools to get the ants. Even cats and dogs can do these things. They communicate to each other their finding new ways of solving problems - and are influenced by peer pressure even.

chicken or egg?

I vote for EGG - "even though the egg did not come from chickens"

living systems

If life is supple adaptation, then virus and clay crystallite populations, autocatalytic chemical networks, and human intellectual and economic systems all deserve to be thought of as living if they exhibit supple adaptation.

the moose

Larry - why the moose link? just curious

it's amazing

this - is all so new!

In the 1970s, scientists for the first time had powerful high-speed computers that could help them tackle and solve nonlinear equations. In doing so, they devised a number of techniques, a new kind of mathematical language that revealed very surprising patterns underneath the seemingly chaotic behavior of nonlinear systems, an underlying order beneath the seeming chaos. Indeed, chaos theory is really a theory of order, but of a new kind of order that is revealed by this new mathematics.

This is very important for a theory of living systems, because the networks that are the basic pattern of all living systems are also very complex. To describe these networks mathematically, you need nonlinear equations and techniques, and since the 1970s we have these techniques at our disposal. During the the 1970s, the strong interest in nonlinear phenomena generated a whole series of new and powerful theories that describe various aspects of living systems. These theories, which I discuss in some detail in the book, form the components of my own synthesis of the new conception of life.

God & the Environment

http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/10/05/gate/index.html?source=weekly

also: is god green? The second part -- Is God Green?, airing Oct. 11 -- traces the growing environmental consciousness of conservative evangelical Christians.

bioneers

http://foodandfarming.bioneers.org/node/64
this link is about food - above

Bioneers

Fighting the Flu

Homeopathic remedies may take the bite out of the flu.

by Tijn Touber and Kim Ridley

Not only is the avian flu front-page news, but clinics and doctors are warning us about the dangers of the common flu. Posters and leaflets, ads and articles urge us to get our shots, the pressure greater than usual with the ominous bird flu looming.

In Great Britain, a National Health Service leaflet says, “If you knew about the flu, you’d get the jab.” But the British environmental magazine The Ecologist (October 2005) can’t help wondering if that’s really the case: “If people truly knew about flu, and the lack of effectiveness of the vaccine being offered as protection, would they really be so obedient about getting the jab?”

Last September, a report in the American Medical Association journal Archives of Internal Medicine dropped a bombshell: Although immunization rates in those over 65 have increased 50 percent in the past 20 years, there has been no decline in flu-related deaths. One reason is that hundreds of flu viruses can be circulating at any time.

Nevertheless, every February, scientists at the World Health Organization meet to define the three that are likely to cause the most misery the following winter. The viruses they choose are included in that year’s vaccine. But in the months between formulating the vaccine and administering it, the viruses—which constantly evolve and mutate—may have changed, or new ones may emerge.

Flu experts often get it wrong. In 1994, for example, they predicted that Texas, Shangdong and Panama viruses would be prevalent, so millions of people were vaccinated against those strains. However, when winter arrived, entirely different strains were circulating through schools, offices and households worldwide.

Even if the vaccine contains the right strains, not everyone responds by producing the antibodies that fend off the flu. As many as 40 percent of people over age 65, for example, do not respond to vaccination. Last year the U.S. Centers for Disease Control funded research on health-care workers in Colorado. Results showed virtually the same percentage of people suffered from influenza-like illnesses whether they were vaccinated or not, leaving researchers to conclude that the vaccine “was not effective or had very low effectiveness.”

Ineffectiveness is not the only thing to worry about when getting a flu shot. Alternative Medicine (October 2005) lists the typical ingredients in a vaccine: Aluminum hydroxide (associated with Alzheimer’s and seizures), thimerosal (a mercury-based neurotoxin linked to ADHD and autism) and phenol (a human carcinogen) are among the substances added. This has caused some people to ask whether vaccines might do more harm than good.

Do we have alternatives? During Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which killed up to 50 million people worldwide, homeopathic physicians in the U.S. reported very low mortality rates among their patients, while flu patients treated by conventional physicians faced mortality rates of around 30 percent. W.A. Dewey, MD, gathered data from homeopathic physicians treating flu patients around the country in 1918 and published his findings in the Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy in 1920. Homeopathic physicians in Philadelphia, for example, reported a mortality rate of just over one percent for the more than 26,000 flu patients they treated during the pandemic.

Today, a number of homeopathic remedies for the flu are available, including oscillo, or oscillococcinum, which has been shown to shorten the duration of symptoms when taken within 48 hours of onset. Homeopaths have been given this remedy since 1925. Interestingly, it’s made from the heart and liver of ducks, which carry flu viruses in their digestive tracts.

“Based on clinical studies, homeopathy produces some of the fastest results in relieving flu symptoms,” says Dana Ullman, MPH, the author of nine books on homeopathic medicine. In addition to trying oscillo, Ullman suggests considering influenzinum 9C, a homeopathic preparation of the three newest flu viruses obtained from the Pasteur Institute in France. Although not definitively shown to prevent the flu, it is a popular protocol in Europe. Finally, Ullman advises visiting a homeopath for a specific constitutional remedy in preparation for flu season. Other homeopathic flu remedies, depending upon one’s symptoms, include gelsemium, bryonia, aconitum, monkshood, nux vomica, eupatorium perfoliatum, rhus toxicodendron (poison ivy), and arsenicum album.

While there’s no evidence yet that homeopathic remedies can prevent the flu, they seem to be very useful in treating the flu. And they’re less aggressive that the usual injections. The people now targeted for shots—the elderly, young and immune compromised—are those least able to withstand a systemic chemical assault.

Research also consistently shows that people of lower socio-economic status are at higher risk for a wide range of infectious diseases. The Ecologist wonders whether “vaccines are endorsed as a remedy for so many things that are too complicated (like better hygiene) or too expensive (like winter-proof housing) for the government to fix.”

So, now that the flu season is here, what should you do? Homeopathic remedies might help. But Alternative Medicine offers the most startling solution of all: get sick. “From a naturopathic point of view, getting the actual flu may not be such a bad thing—that is, if you are relatively healthy—because it will make you more resistant to the flu later in life. Also, getting the flu is an opportunity for the body to detoxify.”

For those who are less healthy—with conditions like diabetes, asthma, pulmonary disease, emphysema, frequent pneumonia or impaired immunity—less invasive, more natural ways to “fight” the flu might be prescribed. Sometimes the simplest preventive actions yield the most immediate results: Wash your hands, get enough sleep, eat your fruits and vegetables, exercise and avoid stress.

Reprinted with kind permission from Ode, an independent magazine about the people and ideas that are changing the world. For more information on homeopathic remedies, visit www.homeopathic.com/articles/using_h/flu.php.