How vulnerable are planes to virtual hijacking
Mar. 19, 2015 - 4:07 - In-flight TVs and WiFi could allow hackers to turn off lights and shut off jet engines midair, analysts fear
Friday, March 20, 2015
The Guardian "Why the modern world is bad for your brain"
Why the modern world is bad for your brain
In an era of email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter, we’re all required to do several things at once. But this constant multitasking is taking its toll. Here neuroscientist Daniel J Levitin explains how our addiction to technology is making us less efficient
Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting. At the same time, we are all doing more. Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salespeople helped us find what we were looking for in shops, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. We are doing the jobs of 10 different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favourite TV shows.
Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebookupdater, and flashlight. They’re more powerful and do more things than the most advanced computer at IBM corporate headquarters 30 years ago. And we use them all the time, part of a 21st-century mania for cramming everything we do into every single spare moment of downtime. We text while we’re walking across the street, catch up on email while standing in a queue – and while having lunch with friends, we surreptitiously check to see what our other friends are doing. At the kitchen counter, cosy and secure in our domicile, we write our shopping lists on smartphones while we are listening to that wonderfully informative podcast on urban beekeeping.
But there’s a fly in the ointment. Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.” So we’re not actually keeping a lot of balls in the air like an expert juggler; we’re more like a bad amateur plate spinner, frantically switching from one task to another, ignoring the one that is not right in front of us but worried it will come crashing down any minute. Even though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new – the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens. The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: the very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted. We answer the phone, look up something on the internet, check our email, send an SMS, and each of these things tweaks the novelty- seeking, reward-seeking centres of the brain, causing a burst of endogenous opioids (no wonder it feels so good!), all to the detriment of our staying on task. It is the ultimate empty-caloried brain candy. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.
In the old days, if the phone rang and we were busy, we either didn’t answer or we turned the ringer off. When all phones were wired to a wall, there was no expectation of being able to reach us at all times – one might have gone out for a walk or been between places – and so if someone couldn’t reach you (or you didn’t feel like being reached), it was considered normal. Now more people have mobile phones than have toilets. This has created an implicit expectation that you should be able to reach someone when it is convenient for you, regardless of whether it is convenient for them. This expectation is so ingrained that people in meetings routinely answer their mobile phones to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t talk now, I’m in a meeting.” Just a decade or two ago, those same people would have let a landline on their desk go unanswered during a meeting, so different were the expectations for reachability.
Just having the opportunity to multitask is detrimental to cognitive performance. Glenn Wilson, former visiting professor of psychology at Gresham College, London, calls it info-mania. His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points. And although people ascribe many benefits to marijuana, including enhanced creativity and reduced pain and stress, it is well documented that its chief ingredient, cannabinol, activates dedicated cannabinol receptors in the brain and interferes profoundly with memory and with our ability to concentrate on several things at once. Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot‑smoking.
Russ Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve. MIT’s Earl Miller adds, “People can’t do [multitasking] very well, and when they say they can, they’re deluding themselves.” And it turns out the brain is very good at this deluding business.
Then there are the metabolic costs that I wrote about earlier. Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviour. By contrast, staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain’s need for glucose.
To make matters worse, lots of multitasking requires decision-making: Do I answer this text message or ignore it? How do I respond to this? How do I file this email? Do I continue what I’m working on now or take a break? It turns out that decision-making is also very hard on your neural resources and that little decisions appear to take up as much energy as big ones. One of the first things we lose is impulse control. This rapidly spirals into a depleted state in which, after making lots of insignificant decisions, we can end up making truly bad decisions about something important. Why would anyone want to add to their daily weight of information processing by trying to multitask?
In discussing information overload with Fortune 500 leaders, top scientists, writers, students, and small business owners, email comes up again and again as a problem. It’s not a philosophical objection to email itself, it’s the mind-numbing number of emails that come in. When the 10-year-old son of my neuroscience colleague Jeff Mogil (head of the Pain Genetics lab at McGill University) was asked what his father does for a living, he responded, “He answers emails.” Jeff admitted after some thought that it’s not so far from the truth. Workers in government, the arts, and industry report that the sheer volume of email they receive is overwhelming, taking a huge bite out of their day. We feel obliged to answer our emails, but it seems impossible to do so and get anything else done.
Before email, if you wanted to write to someone, you had to invest some effort in it. You’d sit down with pen and paper, or at a typewriter, and carefully compose a message. There wasn’t anything about the medium that lent itself to dashing off quick notes without giving them much thought, partly because of the ritual involved, and the time it took to write a note, find and address an envelope, add postage, and take the letter to a mailbox. Because the very act of writing a note or letter to someone took this many steps, and was spread out over time, we didn’t go to the trouble unless we had something important to say. Because of email’s immediacy, most of us give little thought to typing up any little thing that pops in our heads and hitting the send button. And email doesn’t cost anything.
Sure, there’s the money you paid for your computer and your internet connection, but there is no incremental cost to sending one more email. Compare this with paper letters. Each one incurred the price of the envelope and the postage stamp, and although this doesn’t represent a lot of money, these were in limited supply – if you ran out of them, you’d have to make a special trip to the stationery store and the post office to buy more, so you didn’t use them frivolously. The sheer ease of sending emails has led to a change in manners, a tendency to be less polite about what we ask of others. Many professionals tell a similar story. One said, “A large proportion of emails I receive are from people I barely know asking me to do something for them that is outside what would normally be considered the scope of my work or my relationship with them. Email somehow apparently makes it OK to ask for things they would never ask by phone, in person, or in snail mail.”
There are also important differences between snail mail and email on the receiving end. In the old days, the only mail we got came once a day, which effectively created a cordoned-off section of your day to collect it from the mailbox and sort it. Most importantly, because it took a few days to arrive, there was no expectation that you would act on it immediately. If you were engaged in another activity, you’d simply let the mail sit in the box outside or on your desk until you were ready to deal with it. Now email arrives continuously, and most emails demand some sort of action: Click on this link to see a video of a baby panda, or answer this query from a co-worker, or make plans for lunch with a friend, or delete this email as spam. All this activity gives us a sense that we’re getting things done – and in some cases we are. But we are sacrificing efficiency and deep concentration when we interrupt our priority activities with email.
Until recently, each of the many different modes of communication we used signalled its relevance, importance, and intent. If a loved one communicated with you via a poem or a song, even before the message was apparent, you had a reason to assume something about the nature of the content and its emotional value. If that same loved one communicated instead via a summons, delivered by an officer of the court, you would have expected a different message before even reading the document. Similarly, phone calls were typically used to transact different business from that of telegrams or business letters. The medium was a clue to the message. All of that has changed with email, and this is one of its overlooked disadvantages – because it is used for everything. In the old days, you might sort all of your postal mail into two piles, roughly corresponding to personal letters and bills. If you were a corporate manager with a busy schedule, you might similarly sort your telephone messages for callbacks. But emails are used for all of life’s messages. We compulsively check our email in part because we don’t know whether the next message will be for leisure/amusement, an overdue bill, a “to do”, a query… something you can do now, later, something life-changing, something irrelevant.
This uncertainty wreaks havoc with our rapid perceptual categorisation system, causes stress, and leads to decision overload. Every email requires a decision! Do I respond to it? If so, now or later? How important is it? What will be the social, economic, or job-related consequences if I don’t answer, or if I don’t answer right now?
Now of course email is approaching obsolescence as a communicative medium. Most people under the age of 30 think of email as an outdated mode of communication used only by “old people”. In its place they text, and some still post to Facebook. They attach documents, photos, videos, and links to their text messages and Facebook posts the way people over 30 do with email. Many people under 20 now see Facebook as a medium for the older generation.
For them, texting has become the primary mode of communication. It offers privacy that you don’t get with phone calls, and immediacy you don’t get with email. Crisis hotlines have begun accepting calls from at-risk youth via texting and it allows them two big advantages: they can deal with more than one person at a time, and they can pass the conversation on to an expert, if needed, without interrupting the conversation.
But texting suffers from most of the problems of email and then some. Because it is limited in characters, it discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail. And the addictive problems are compounded by texting’s hyperimmediacy. Emails take some time to work their way through the internet and they require that you take the step of explicitly opening them. Text messages magically appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. Add to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the sender, and you’ve got a recipe for addiction: you receive a text, and that activates your novelty centres. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you 15 seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out “More! More! Give me more!”
In a famous experiment, my McGill colleagues Peter Milner and James Olds, both neuroscientists, placed a small electrode in the brains of rats, in a small structure of the limbic system called the nucleus accumbens. This structure regulates dopamine production and is the region that “lights up” when gamblers win a bet, drug addicts take cocaine, or people have orgasms – Olds and Milner called it the pleasure centre. A lever in the cage allowed the rats to send a small electrical signal directly to their nucleus accumbens. Do you think they liked it? Boy how they did! They liked it so much that they did nothing else. They forgot all about eating and sleeping. Long after they were hungry, they ignored tasty food if they had a chance to press that little chrome bar; they even ignored the opportunity for sex. The rats just pressed the lever over and over again, until they died of starvation and exhaustion. Does that remind you of anything? A 30-year-old man died in Guangzhou (China) after playing video games continuously for three days. Another man died in Daegu (Korea) after playing video games almost continuously for 50 hours, stopped only by his going into cardiac arrest.
Each time we dispatch an email in one way or another, we feel a sense of accomplishment, and our brain gets a dollop of reward hormones telling us we accomplished something. Each time we check a Twitter feed or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird, impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones. But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.
© Daniel J. Levitin. Extracted from The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, published by Viking (£20). Click here to buy it for £16.
Do people get charged up and then discharge it ?
Do people get charged up and then discharge it ?
That happens all the time to me. My friend drives over to see me in their car that has bluetooth going and their cell phone is on. When I hug them hello I can feel the charge on them almost the same as if they had a device on, except it's until they themselves discharge and it doesn't pulse like a cell phone that is trying to connect.
M - EHS
Exposure to a 900 MHz electromagnetic field for one hour a day over 30 days does change the histopathology and biochemistry of the rat testis
Exposure to a 900 MHz electromagnetic field for one hour a day over 30 days does change the histopathology and biochemistry of the rat testis
Odacı E, Özyılmaz C. Exposure to a 900 MHz electromagnetic field for one hour a day over 30 days does change the histopathology and biochemistry of the rat testis. Int J Radiat Biol. 2015 Mar 19:1-20. [Epub ahead of print]
Abstract
PURPOSE: This study investigated the effect of exposure to a 900-megahertz (MHz) electromagnetic field (EMF) on the rat testicle.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: Twenty-four adult male rats were divided into control, sham and EMF groups. The EMF group rats were exposed to 900-MHz EMF (1 h / 30 day), and testicles were extracted at the end of the experiment. Malondialdehyde, superoxide dismutase, catalase and glutathione levels and apoptotic index and histopathological damage scores were compared.
RESULTS: Histopathologically, EMF group rats exhibited vacuoles in seminiferous tubules basal membrane and edema in the intertubular space. Seminiferous tubule diameters and germinal epithelium thickness were both smaller, and apoptotic index was higher, in the EMF group than in the other groups. Malondialdehyde, superoxide dismutase, catalase and glutathione values in the EMF group decreased significantly compared to those of the control group.
CONCLUSIONS: The results show that exposure to 900-MHz EMF causes alterations in adult rat testicular morphology and biochemistry.
http://1.usa.gov/1MVhoLY
The same system was employed as described in our previous studies in order to expose EMFG rats to EMF (Baş et al., 2013; Hancı et al., 2013; İkinci et
al., 2013; Odacı et al., 2013; 2014; Topal et al., 2014; Türedi et al., 2014) ... with an output power of approximately 300 mW and a frequency adjusted to 900-MHz. The oscillator was used to establish a 900-MHz EMF similar to the frequency of a mobile phone.
... On the basis of measurements taken every day throughout the study with the jar empty, positional mean EMF intensity was 6.4 V/m beneath the jar and 11.5 V/m inside it. The figures with rats inside the jar were 4.2 V/m beneath the jar and 14 V/m inside it (Table 1). The whole-body specific absorption rate (SAR) was calculated at 0.025 W/kg (RadHaz SAR Equivalency Calculator Version 1.0, ©2000 Richard Tell Associates, Inc, Mesquite, USA). According to these measurements, rats were exposed to a mean electrical field intensity of 10 V/m inside the jar (0.265 W/m2). This value is regarded as equivalent to the intensity of EMF that mobile phones in speak mode can create in their immediate surroundings (mean 1–10 V/m for variables i.e. mobile phone model, distance from base station). These values are the limit values set out for a single source in the GSM-900 base station systems (Baş et al., 2013; Hancı et al., 2013;
İkinci et al., 2013; Odacı et al., 2013; 2014; Topal et al., 2014; Türedi et al., 2014).
Several studies have reported that EMF leads to interruption of spermatogenesis, impairment of sperm quality, degeneration of germinal epithelium cells, impaired testosterone levels, infertility, premature birth in rats and a decrease in testicular biopsy scores (Li et al., 2010; Dasdag et al., 1999; Al-Akhras et al., 2001; Svedenstal and Johanson, 1995; Ozguner et al., 2005; Mailankot et al., 2009; Kumar et al., 2013). In contrast, however, other studies have reported that EMF has no effect on male fertility or else that the effect of EMF depends on intensity, length of exposure, wavelength and distance from EMF (Margonato et al., 1995; Cecconi et al., 2000; Dasdag et al., 2003; Kim et al., 2006; Çelik et al., 2012; Gye and Park, 2012).
Exposure to 900 MHz caused some damage in the testicular seminiferous tubule in this study. Analysis revealed irregularities, vacuoles and occasional dehiscence in the seminiferous tubular epithelium of the EMFG and germinal epithelial cells in the lumen of the seminiferous tubule.These findings suggest that the spermatogenic cycle in the epithelium of the seminiferous tubule was compromised in the EMFG. Previous studies on the subject have reported that injury occurring in the epithelium of the seminiferous tubule may compromise the spermatogenic cycle (Al-Damegh 2012).
On the basis of all these studies and our own findings we think that long-term exposure to EMF causes pathological changes in testicular tissue and that these may have irreversible consequences. We employed an EMF of 900 MHz. That was because GSM-900, one of the cellular communications systems widely used in Europe, has an operating frequency of 880-960 MHz. For that reason, we exposed rats to 900 MHz EMF, within the GSM-900 operating range. We used a fixed EMF frequency in this study, the purpose of which was to investigate the effect on the rat testis of exposure to 900 MHz EMF for 1 hour a day over 30 days. In conclusion, exposure of adult rats to 900 MHz EMF for 1 hour a day over 30 days led to injury in testicular tissues and compromised testicular morphology and biochemical markers.
--
Joel M. Moskowitz, Ph.D., Director
Center for Family and Community Health
School of Public Health
University of California, Berkeley
Electromagnetic Radiation Safety
Website: http://www.saferemr.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SaferE
News Releases: http://pressroom.prlog.org/
Twitter: @berkeleyprc
Study: Vaccinated Children Have 2 to 5 Times More Diseases and Disorders Than Unvaccinated Children
From Gary Kohls
http://healthimpactnews.com/
Study: Vaccinated Children Have 2 to 5 Times More Diseases and Disorders Than Unvaccinated Children
A German study released in September 2011 of about 8000 UNVACCINATED children, newborn to 19 years, show vaccinated children have at least 2 to 5 times more diseases and disorders than unvaccinated children.
The results are presented in the bar chart below; the complete data and study results are here. The data is compared to the national German KIGGS health study of the children in the general population. Most of the respondents to the survey were from the U.S.
The results are presented in the bar chart below; the complete data and study results are here. The data is compared to the national German KIGGS health study of the children in the general population. Most of the respondents to the survey were from the U.S.
The data was collected from parents with vaccine-free children via an internet questionnaire by vaccineinjury.info and Andreas Bachmair, a German classical homeopathic practitioner. The website is not a pretty one (including Google ads for vaccines) but the actual data is what counts. The independent study is self-funded and is not sponsored by a large “credible” non-profit or government health organization with political and financial conflicts of interest. Each one of the 8000 cases are actual cases with medical documentation. Three other studies had similar results according to Bachmair and are reported below.
No study of health outcomes of vaccinated people versus unvaccinated has ever been conducted in the U.S. by CDC or any other agency in the 50 years or more of an accelerating schedule of vaccinations (now over 50 doses of 14 vaccines given before kindergarten, 26 doses in the first year). Most data collected by CDC is contained in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database. The VAERS is generally thought to contain only 3 to 5 percent of reportable incidents. This is simply because only some immediate reactions are reported by doctors; but many are not admitted to be reactions to the vaccine. Most importantly, the VAERS numbers are only immediate reactions, which I would place with a few hours to a few weeks. Long-term vaccine-induced diseases and disorders are not recognized by parents or doctors when these conditions develop perhaps a few months to five years or more and would never be realized to come from multiple vaccinations. In other words, many children and adults have diseases and disorders that are vaccine induced and they never suspect they are from the vaccines, as this study indicates.
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Increased Susceptibility to Thimerosal-Induced Mitochondrial Dysfunction in a Subset of Autism Lymphoblastoid Cell Lines
(Mitochondria Protected by Pre-treatment with the Glutathione Precursor, N-Acetyl Cysteine)
Journal of Toxicology
Volume 2015 (2015), Article ID 573701, 13 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/
Volume 2015 (2015), Article ID 573701, 13 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/
Research Article
Department of Pediatrics, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute, 13 Children’s Way, Slot 512-41B, Little Rock, AR 72202, USA
Accepted 13 December 2014
Academic Editor: Maria Teresa Colomina
Copyright © 2015 Shannon Rose et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
The association of autism spectrum disorders with oxidative stress, redox imbalance, and mitochondrial dysfunction has become increasingly recognized. In this study, extracellular flux analysis was used to compare mitochondrial respiration in lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) from individuals with autism and unaffected controls exposed to ethylmercury, an environmental toxin known to deplete glutathione and induce oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction. We also tested whether pretreating the autism LCLs with N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) to increase glutathione concentrations conferred protection from ethylmercury. Examination of 16 autism/control LCL pairs revealed that a subgroup (31%) of autism LCLs exhibited a greater reduction in ATP-linked respiration, maximal respiratory capacity, and reserve capacity when exposed to ethylmercury, compared to control LCLs. These respiratory parameters were significantly elevated at baseline in the ethylmercury-sensitive autism subgroup as compared to control LCLs. NAC pretreatment of the sensitive subgroup reduced (normalized) baseline respiratory parameters and blunted the exaggerated ethylmercury-induced reserve capacity depletion. These findings suggest that the epidemiological link between environmental mercury exposure and an increased risk of developing autism may be mediated through mitochondrial dysfunction and support the notion that a subset of individuals with autism may be vulnerable to environmental influences with detrimental effects on development through mitochondrial dysfunction.
1. Introduction
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are defined as a heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by impairments in communication and social interactions along with restrictive and repetitive behaviors [1]. The incidence of ASD in the United States is currently estimated to be 1 in 68 individuals, and it continues to rise [2]. While the etiology of ASD remains unknown, multiple interacting genetic and environmental factors are thought to contribute to the development of ASD. In addition to behavioral impairments, recent studies indicate that many children with ASD also exhibit impairments in energy production and redox homeostasis [3–5].
Multiple studies have demonstrated the presence of glutathione-mediated redox imbalance and oxidative stress in individuals with ASD [5–11]. Our group has consistently reported decreased concentrations of glutathione (GSH) and several of its metabolic precursors as well as increased oxidized glutathione disulfide (GSSG) and a decreased glutathione redox ratio (GSH/GSSG) in plasma, immune cells, and postmortem brain from children with ASD [4, 5, 11–13]. Oxidative stress and damage have been documented in blood and brain of individuals with ASD including reports of decreased levels and activities of antioxidant enzymes and elevated levels of oxidized lipids, proteins, and DNA [4, 7, 8, 11, 14, 15]. In primary lymphocytes and in lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) derived from children with autistic disorder (AD), we have found that the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) is elevated as compared to controls [12, 13, 16]. The imbalance between glutathione-mediated antioxidant capacity and ROS production in autism LCLs may cause these cells to be more susceptible to oxidative stress and damage from any exogenous sources of ROS as compared to control LCLs.
Recent evidence indicates that the incidence of mitochondrial dysfunction in ASD may be very high, affecting up to 30% or more of children with ASD [17]. While the etiology of mitochondrial dysfunction in ASD is not known, evidence suggests that oxidative stress may be a key factor driving mitochondrial dysfunction in individuals with ASD [16, 18]. Recently, we demonstrated that LCLs derived from children with AD exhibit abnormal mitochondrial respiration at baseline as well as a more rapid decline in mitochondrial function upon exposure to increasing ROS as compared to LCLs from control children [16]. Importantly, we found that these abnormal mitochondrial parameters were driven by a subgroup consisting of 32% of the AD LCLs (termed AD-A for abnormal), whereas the other autism LCLs (termed AD-N for normal) had mitochondrial parameters similar to controls. Furthermore, we also demonstrated that pretreatment of the AD LCLs with N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) increased intracellular GSH and the GSH/GSSG redox ratio and, in the AD-A subgroup, conferred protection from mitochondrial dysfunction when ROS was increased [18].
Mitochondria are both the primary producers and targets of intracellular ROS due to the continuous low-level production of superoxide that accompanies electron transfer across the inner mitochondrial membrane during oxidative phosphorylation [19]. ROS are also generated from other sources such as activated immune cells [3,17] and prooxidant environmental toxicants such as pesticides, diesel exhaust, and mercury [20–29].
Mercury is one of several environmental toxicants that have been found to have an association with the development of ASD [28, 30–34]. Ethylmercury is an established a sulfhydryl reagent that rapidly binds to and depletes intracellular glutathione and increases intracellular ROS in a dose-dependent manner [12, 35]. We have previously demonstrated that AD LCLs have increased susceptibility to oxidative stress from exposure to ethylmercury such that exposure to ethylmercury resulted in lower intracellular GSH and GSH/GSSG and increased ROS production in AD LCLs as compared to control LCLs [12].
In the present study we tested the hypothesis that the subset of AD LCLs previously found to exhibit mitochondrial dysfunction when challenged with ROS would also exhibit mitochondrial dysfunction when exposed to ethylmercury (i.e., ethylmercury-induced mitochondrial dysfunction). Furthermore, we hypothesized that pretreatment with NAC to increase the intracellular glutathione concentration would confer protection from ethylmercury-induced mitochondrial dysfunction. To this end, we used extracellular flux analysis to measure mitochondrial oxygen consumption in AD and control LCLs transiently exposed to ethylmercury. The AD LCLs were also tested after pretreatment with NAC to determine whether changes in mitochondrial bioenergetics after exposure to ethylmercury could be prevented by NAC-induced increase in intracellular glutathione-mediated redox capacity.
<<>>
In conclusion, we have determined that a subgroup of AD LCLs exhibits abnormal mitochondrial respiratory function at baseline and increased vulnerability to mitochondrial dysfunction when exposed to the environmental toxin, ethylmercury. This subgroup of AD LCLs has previously been shown to exhibit increased mitochondrial susceptibility to ROS, suggesting that these cells may be inherently vulnerable to a wide variety of oxidative insults. Pretreatment of this subgroup with NAC improved mitochondrial function at baseline and decreased the loss of mitochondrial reserve capacity in response to ethylmercury. Our data suggest that the abnormal mitochondrial function and increased susceptibility to ethylmercury in the AD-A LCLs may be related to impaired glutathione-mediated antioxidant capacity and chronic oxidative stress, since NAC pretreatment, which could improve glutathione status, appears to partially correct the atypical mitochondrial function in the AD-A LCLs and protect the cells against the toxic effects of ethylmercury. Other prooxidant environmental toxicants associated with ASD such as pesticides and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) should be tested to determine whether these autism LCLs exhibit hypersensitivity to a wide range of prooxidant environmental toxicants as our findings support the notion that a subset of individuals with autism may be vulnerable to environmental influences with detrimental effects on development through mitochondrial dysfunction.
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Full article and references available at: http://www.hindawi.com/
http://healthimpactnews.com/
Thursday, March 19, 2015
Surveillance Valley: Why Google Is Eager to Align Itself With America's Military Industrial Complex
Has Silicon Valley Lost Its Ethics? Or did it every really have them? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And in my humble opinion some of the EMF Activists coming from the Silicon Valley mindset seem to be having a difficult time losing their own Silicon Valley amorality and narcissism.
Paul Doyon
EMF Refugee
Surveillance Valley: Why Google Is Eager to Align Itself With America's Military Industrial Complex
Is it wise for us to hand over the contents of our private lives to private companies?
By Yasha Levine / AlterNet
The following is an excerpt from Yasha Levine's ongoing investigative project, Surveillance Valley, which you can help support on KickStarter.
Oakland, California: On February 18, 2014, several hundred privacy, labor, civil rights activists packed Oakland’s city hall.
It was a rowdy crowd, and there was a heavy police presence. The people were there to protest the construction of a citywide surveillance center that would turn a firehouse in downtown Oakland into a high-tech intelligence hub straight out of Mission Impossible — a federally funded project that linking up real time audio and video feeds from thousands of sensors across the city into one high-tech control hub, where analysts could pipe the data through face recognition software and enrich its intelligence with data coming in from local, state and federal government and law enforcement agencies.
Residents’ anger at the fusion surveillance center was intensified by a set of internal documents showing that city officials were more interested in using the surveillance center monitor political protests rather than fighting crime: keeping tabs on activists, monitoring non-violent political protests and tracking union organizing that might shut down the Port of Oakland. It was an incendiary find — especially in Oakland, a city with a large marginalized black population, a strong union presence and a long, ugly history of police brutality aimed at minority groups and political activists.
But buried deep in the thousands of pages of planning documents was another disturbing detail. Emails that showed Google — the largest and most powerful corporation in Silicon Valley — was among several other defense contractors vying for a piece of Oakland’s $11 million surveillance contract.
What was Google doing there? What could a company known for superior search and cute doodles offer a controversial surveillance center?
Turns out, a lot.
Most people still think that Google is one of the good guys on the Internet, that it’s a goofy company that aims only to provide the best and coolest tools on the web — from search, to cool maps to endless email space to amazing mobile maps and a powerful replacement for Microsoft Office.
But the free Google services and apps that we interact with on a daily basis aren’t the company’s main product. They are the harvesting machines that dig up and process the stuff that Google really sells: for-profit intelligence.
Google isn’t a traditional Internet service company. It isn’t even an advertising company. Google is a whole new type of beast that runs on a totally new type of tech business model.
Google is a global for-profit surveillance corporation — a company that tries to funnel as much user activity in the real and online world through its services in order to track, analyze, and profile us: It tracks as much of our daily lives as possible: who we are, what we do, what we like, where we go, who we talk to, what we think about, what we’re interested in. All those things are seized, packaged, commodified, and sold on the market.
It's an amazingly profitable activity that takes bits and pieces and the most intimate detritus of our private lives — something that never really had any commercial value and turns it into billions of pure profit. It's like turning rocks and gravel into gold. And it nets Google nearly $20 billion in annual profits.
At this point, most of the business comes from matching the right ad to the right pair of eyeballs at jus the right time. But who knows how the massive database Google’s compiling on all of us will be used in the future?
What kind of intel does Google compile on us? The company is very secretive about that info. But here are a few data points that could go into its user profiles, gleaned from two patents Google filed a decade ago, prior to launching its Gmail service:
- Concepts and topics discussed in email, as well as email attachments
- The content of websites that users have visited
- Demographic information—including income, sex, race, marital status
- Geographic information
- Psychographic information—personality type, values, attitudes, interests
- Previous searches users have made
- Information about documents users viewed and edited
- Browsing activity
- Previous purchases
If Google's creepy for-profit surveillance for you, then there are Google's deep ties to the NSA and the U.S. military-surveillance complex.
Googles ties to military-intelligence industrial complex go back to 1990s, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page were still run of the mill computer science PhD students at Stanford. Their research into web search and indexing, which they spun off into a private company in 1998, was part of a Stanford project partially funded by DARPA, a research and development appendage to the DoD. The two nerdy inventors even gave the DoD’s research arm a shout out in a 1998 paper that outlined Google’s search and indexing methodology.
Computer science research is frequently funded with military and defense money, of course. But Google’s ties to the military-intelligence world didn’t end after they Brin and Page privatized their research and moved their startup operation off campus. If anything, the relationship deepened and got more intimate after they left Stanford.
Google's intel and military contracting started with custom search contracts with the CIA and NSA in the early 2000s (the CIA even had a customized Google's logo on its Google-powered intranet search page) and hit a much more series phase in 2004, with Google’s acquisition of a tiny and unknown 3-D mapping startup called Keyhole.
Google purchased the company in 2004 for an undisclosed sum and immediately folded the company’s mapping technology into what later became known as Google Earth. The acquisition would have gone unnoticed if it wasn’t for one tiny detail: Keyhole was part owned by the CIA and NSA.
A year before Google bought the company, it had received a substantial investment from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital fund run by the CIA on behalf of the military and intelligence community. The exact amount that In-Q-Tel invested into Keyhole is classified, but its new spook backers didn’t sit idle — they became intimately involvement in running the company. This was no secret. The CIA publicly discussed its hands-on approach, bragging in its promotional materials that the agency “worked closely with other Intelligence Community organizations to tailor Keyhole’s systems to meet their needs.” And the CIA guys worked fast: Just a few weeks after In-Q-Tel invested in Keyhole, an NGA official bragged that its technology was already being deployed by the Pentagon to prepare U.S. forces for the invasion of Iraq.
This close collaboration between Keyhole/Google Earth and the U.S. National Security State continues today.
Over the years, Google's reach expanded to include just about every major intel and law enforcement agency in the United States. Today, Google technology enhance the surveillance capabilities of the NSA, FBI, CIA, DEA, NGA, the U.S Navy and Army, and just about every wing of the DoD.
If you take a look at the roster of Google's DC office — Google Federal — you'll see the list jammed with names of former spooks, high-level intelligence officials and assorted revolving door military contractors: US Army, Air Force Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, Director of National Intelligence, USAID, SAIC, Lockheed.
Take the CV of Michele R. Weslander Quaid, Google’s Chief Technology Officer of Public Sector and “Innovation Evangelist."
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Weslander Quaid felt a patriotic duty to help fight the War on Terror. So she quit her private sector job at a CIA contractor called Scitor Corporation and joined the official world of US government intelligence. She quickly rose through the ranks, serving in executive positions at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (sister agency to the NSA), National Reconnaissance Office and at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She toured combat zones in both Iraq and Afghanistan in order to see the tech needs of the military first-hand. All throughout her intel career, she championed a “startup” mentality and the benefits of cloud-based services. Which made her a perfect candidate to head up Google's federal contractor-lobbying operation...
In the past few years, Google has aggressively intensified its campaign to grab a bigger slice of the insanely lucrative military-intelligence contracting market.
It’s been targeting big and juicy federal agencies — the U.S. Naval Academy signed up for Google Apps, the U.S. Army tapped Google Apps for a pilot program involving 50,000 DoD personnel, Idaho’s nuclear labwent Google, the U.S. Department of the Interior switched to Gmail, and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy went with Google, too. Google even entered into a partnership with the NGA, a sister agency to NSA to launch its very own spy satellite called GeoEye-1 — a spy satellite that it would share with the U.S. military intelligence apparatus.
In some cases, Google sells its wares to government intel agencies directly — like it did with the NSA and NGA. It’s also been taking the role of subcontractor: selling its tech by partnering with established military contractors and privatized surveillance firms like SAIC, Lockheed and smaller boutique outfits like the Blackwater-connected merc outfit called Blackbird.
In short: Google’s showing itself willing to do just about anything it can to more effectively hitch itself to America’s military-intelligence-
Google has also been hard-selling its intel technology to smaller local and state government agencies as well — which is why Google was trying to bid on a police surveillance center in Oakland, California.
A company that monopolizes huge swaths of the Internet, makes billions by surveilling and profiling its users and is very deliberately angling to become the Lockheed-Martin of the Internet Age?
Should we be so trusting towards Google? And is it so wise for us to hand over the contents of our private lives — without demanding any control or oversight or care?
Excerpted from Yasha Levine's ongoing investigative project, Surveillance Valley, which you can help support on KickStarter.
by Taboola
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