How to stop Oil pollution... by president Obama..

  Canada's new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, would be wise to listen to U.S. president Obama. I also have a positive suggestion for Canada's new government. Take the time to study global warming and the effect it is having on our world glaciers and on the Arctic and Antarctic ice fields, and then act to help stop the melting.

THE WHITE HOUSE

You should read the President's full Keystone XL remarks: This morning, speaking from the Roosevelt Room, the President announced that the State Department determined that the Keystone XL Pipeline would not serve the national interest of the United States. For years, this topic has occupied a huge portion of our country's climate discourse. And after explaining why this pipeline "would not serve the national interest of the United States," the President called attention to the broader climate challenges facing America and the global community heading into international climate negotiations in Paris this December: "…we’ve got to come together around an ambitious framework to protect the one planet that we’ve got while we still can. If we want to prevent the worst effects of climate change before it’s too late, the time to act is now. Not later. Not someday. Right here, right now." Here's the full text of his remarks -- they're worth a read. THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody. Several years ago, the State Department began a review process for the proposed construction of a pipeline that would carry Canadian crude oil through our heartland to ports in the Gulf of Mexico and out into the world market. This morning, Secretary Kerry informed me that, after extensive public outreach and consultation with other Cabinet agencies, the State Department has decided that the Keystone XL Pipeline would not serve the national interest of the United States. I agree with that decision. This morning, I also had the opportunity to speak with Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada. And while he expressed his disappointment, given Canada’s position on this issue, we both agreed that our close friendship on a whole range of issues, including energy and climate change, should provide the basis for even closer coordination between our countries going forward. And in the coming weeks, senior members of my team will be engaging with theirs in order to help deepen that cooperation. Now, for years, the Keystone Pipeline has occupied what I, frankly, consider an overinflated role in our political discourse. It became a symbol too often used as a campaign cudgel by both parties rather than a serious policy matter. And all of this obscured the fact that this pipeline would neither be a silver bullet for the economy, as was promised by some, nor the express lane to climate disaster proclaimed by others. To illustrate this, let me briefly comment on some of the reasons why the State Department rejected this pipeline. First: The pipeline would not make a meaningful long-term contribution to our economy. So if Congress is serious about wanting to create jobs, this was not the way to do it. If they want to do it, what we should be doing is passing a bipartisan infrastructure plan that, in the short term, could create more than 30 times as many jobs per year as the pipeline would, and in the long run would benefit our economy and our workers for decades to come. Our businesses created 268,000 new jobs last month. They’ve created 13.5 million new jobs over the past 68 straight months -- the longest streak on record. The unemployment rate fell to 5 percent. This Congress should pass a serious infrastructure plan, and keep those jobs coming. That would make a difference. The pipeline would not have made a serious impact on those numbers and on the American people’s prospects for the future. Second: The pipeline would not lower gas prices for American consumers. In fact, gas prices have already been falling -- steadily. The national average gas price is down about 77 cents over a year ago. It’s down a dollar over two years ago. It’s down $1.27 over three years ago. Today, in 41 states, drivers can find at least one gas station selling gas for less than two bucks a gallon. So while our politics have been consumed by a debate over whether or not this pipeline would create jobs and lower gas prices, we’ve gone ahead and created jobs and lowered gas prices. Third: Shipping dirtier crude oil into our country would not increase America’s energy security. What has increased America’s energy security is our strategy over the past several years to reduce our reliance on dirty fossil fuels from unstable parts of the world. Three years ago, I set a goal to cut our oil imports in half by 2020. Between producing more oil here at home, and using less oil throughout our economy, we met that goal last year -- five years early. In fact, for the first time in two decades, the United States of America now produces more oil than we buy from other countries. Now, the truth is, the United States will continue to rely on oil and gas as we transition -- as we must transition -- to a clean energy economy. That transition will take some time. But it’s also going more quickly than many anticipated. Think about it. Since I took office, we’ve doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas by 2025; tripled the power we generate from the wind; multiplied the power we generate from the sun 20 times over. Our biggest and most successful businesses are going all-in on clean energy. And thanks in part to the investments we’ve made, there are already parts of America where clean power from the wind or the sun is finally cheaper than dirtier, conventional power. The point is the old rules said we couldn’t promote economic growth and protect our environment at the same time. The old rules said we couldn’t transition to clean energy without squeezing businesses and consumers. But this is America, and we have come up with new ways and new technologies to break down the old rules, so that today, homegrown American energy is booming, energy prices are falling, and over the past decade, even as our economy has continued to grow, America has cut our total carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth. Today, the United States of America is leading on climate change with our investments in clean energy and energy efficiency. America is leading on climate change with new rules on power plants that will protect our air so that our kids can breathe. America is leading on climate change by working with other big emitters like China to encourage and announce new commitments to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions. In part because of that American leadership, more than 150 nations representing nearly 90 percent of global emissions have put forward plans to cut pollution. America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change. And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership. And that’s the biggest risk we face -- not acting. Today, we’re continuing to lead by example. Because ultimately, if we’re going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky. As long as I’m President of the United States, America is going to hold ourselves to the same high standards to which we hold the rest of the world. And three weeks from now, I look forward to joining my fellow world leaders in Paris, where we’ve got to come together around an ambitious framework to protect the one planet that we’ve got while we still can. If we want to prevent the worst effects of climate change before it’s too late, the time to act is now. Not later. Not someday. Right here, right now. And I’m optimistic about what we can accomplish together. I’m optimistic because our own country proves, every day -- one step at a time -- that not only do we have the power to combat this threat, we can do it while creating new jobs, while growing our economy, while saving money, while helping consumers, and most of all, leaving our kids a cleaner, safer planet at the same time. That’s what our own ingenuity and action can do. That's what we can accomplish. And America is prepared to show the rest of the world the way forward. Thank you very much. -- President Barack Obama Watch the President deliver his statement here. Learn more about the President's Climate Action Plan here. Follow @FactsOnClimate to get the facts on how the President is combating climate change in the United States and mobilizing the world to take action.

This email was sent to human4us@bell.net. Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111

Gene editing, a promising cure for leukaemia.

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DAILY NEWS

 

5 November 2015

Gene editing saves girl dying from leukaemia in world first

For the first time ever, a person’s life has been saved by gene editing.

One-year-old Layla was dying from leukaemia after all conventional treatments failed. “We didn’t want to give up on our daughter, though, so we asked the doctors to try anything,” her mother Lisa said in a statement released by Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, where Layla (pictured above) was treated.

And they did. Layla’s doctors got permission to use an experimental form of gene therapy using genetically engineered immune cells from a donor. Within a month these cells had killed off all the cancerous cells in her bone marrow.

It is too soon to say she is cured, the team stressed at a press conference in London on 5 November. That will only become clear after a year or two. So far, though, she is doing well and there is no sign of the cancer returning. Other patients are already receiving the same treatment.

Experimental therapy

Layla was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia when she was just three months old, a disease in which cancerous stem cells in the bone marrow release vast numbers of immature immune cells into the blood. She was immediately taken to Great Ormond Street to start the standard treatment of chemotherapy followed by a bone marrow transplant to restore the immune system.

In older children, this treatment is usually successful, says Sujith Samarasinghe, a leukaemia specialist at the hospital and one of Layla’s doctors. But for children as young as Layla, the cure rates are only 25 per cent.

Layla was one of the unlucky ones. Cancerous cells were still detectable after the chemotherapy. Despite this, it was decided to go ahead with a bone marrow transplant. “We hoped for a graft-versus-leukaemia reaction,” says Paul Veys, head of bone marrow transplants at the hospital. This is where immune cells in the donor bone marrow attack the cancer – but this failed too.

Within two months, Layla had relapsed. “At this stage, it is usually hopeless,” says Veys. Her parents Ashleigh and Lisa were told nothing more could be done. But they insisted the doctors did not give up. So the team emailed Waseem Qasim of University College London, who is developing a form of gene therapy to treat cancer.

Cell attack

The basic idea is to remove immune cells from a patient’s body, genetically engineer them to attack cancerous cells and place them back in the body. Several human trials are already underway around world. Some trials involve adding a gene for a receptor called CAR19, which sits on the outside of the T-cells. This programs the T-cells to seek out and kill any cells with a protein called CD19 on their surface – which is found on the cells that cause acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.

But engineering bespoke T-cells for every cancer patient is not cheap. And in Layla’s case, it would not have worked because she didn’t have enough T-cells left to modify. “She was too small and too sick,” says Qasim.

Qasim’s team, however, has been developing “off-the-shelf” treatments, in which T-cells from a healthy donor are modified so they could potentially be given to hundreds of patients. Normally if T-cells from another person were injected into a recipient who was not a perfect match, they would recognise all of the recipient’s cells as foreign and attack them. To prevent this, Qasim’s team used gene editing to disable a gene in the donor cells that makes a receptor that recognises other cells as foreign.

Molecular scissors

Conventional gene therapy can only be used to add genes to DNA. But with gene editing, specific DNA sequences can be cut with “molecular scissors”, introducing mutations that disable a particular gene. Qasim’s molecular scissors were of a kind known as TALEN proteins.

But there was still another problem to overcome. The recipient’s immune system also recognises non-matched T-cells as foreign and will attack them. In leukaemia patients, this is not a problem because they are given drugs that destroy their immune system. Except, one of these drugs – an antibody – also destroys donor T-cells. So Qasim’s team also disabled a second gene in the donor T-cells, which made them invisible to the antibody.

At the time that Qasim was contacted by Layla’s doctors, his engineered T-cells, called UCART19 cells and developed in collaboration with New York biotech company Cellectis, had only ever been tested in mice. “It was scary to think the treatment had never been used in a human before,” said Layla’s father Ashleigh, “but there was no doubt we wanted to try the treatment. She was sick and in lots of pain, so we had to do something.” And it worked within weeks.

This is only the second time that gene-edited cells have been used in people. The first ever trial involved modifying T-cells in people with HIV to make them more resistant to the virus, although these participants were not in immediate danger of dying.

Chop and change

The molecular scissors used to disable genes do sometimes make cuts in the wrong place, which carries a small risk of causing adverse effects such as turning cells cancerous.

But after three months, Layla was given a second bone marrow transplant to restore her immune system. These healthy immune cells recognised the UCART19 cells as foreign and destroyed them, so Layla no longer has any genetically modified cells in her body.

Layla will continue to have regular tests until her doctors are sure the cancer is gone. “It is too early to say she is cured,” says Samarasinghe, but she is alive and well.

Cellectis plans to start full clinical trials early in 2016. Qasim says other patients in the UK are already being treated with these cells, although he would not reveal any details. The team will present the case study at the American Society of Hematology meeting in Florida in December.

We will have to wait for the results of those trials to be sure this was not a one-off, but if they are successful, it would be a huge step forward for treating leukaemia and other cancers, Qasim says. “It’s incredibly encouraging,” he says. “There are a whole bunch of other disorders we can now create fixes for.”

Image credits: Top image: Sharon Lees/GOSH; Second image: GOSH

A message from wonderful Michelle Obama, first lady of the world.

THE WHITE HOUSE

Join me on this journey: This week, I will be traveling to Qatar and Jordan -- countries located in a part of the world known as the “Middle East” (if you look on a map, it’s just to the east of Africa) -- and I want young people like you all across America to join me on this journey! On this trip, just like on previous international trips, I’ll be focusing on global girls’ education, an issue I care deeply about as a First Lady, a mother of two daughters, and a woman whose life was transformed by my education. You see, neither of my parents went to college, and they didn’t have much money. But they pushed me to work as hard as I could in school, and thanks to a lot of financial aid, I was able to go to college and law school and have all kinds of exciting jobs and opportunities. Unfortunately, so many girls around the world never have the opportunities I had to get an education and fulfill their dreams. In fact, right now, 62 million girls across the globe aren’t going to school at all. Many of them simply can’t afford it because, unlike here in the U.S., in some countries, parents actually have to pay for their kids to attend school. Sometimes the nearest school is miles away, and parents are afraid their daughters will be hurt or kidnapped while walking to or from school. Some schools don’t have adequate bathrooms for girls, so they have to stay home when they have their periods, and they may fall behind and even wind up dropping out. Imagine what it would be like for you if you had to stop your own education. Imagine being told, at the age of 12 or 13, “That’s it, you’re done with school. You’ve gotten all the education you’re ever going to get -- you won’t do any more science projects, or read any more books for English class, or have any more music, or art, or sports, or time with your friends in the lunchroom. And any dreams you have for what you want to be when you grow up -- a teacher, an astronaut, a nurse, a writer -- you have to give them up because you’ll never get the knowledge and skills you need to do those jobs.” Pretty awful, right? And I don’t think any young person should ever have to give up their dreams like this. I think every child on this planet -- boys and girls -- should be able to get an education. That’s why, last spring, President Obama and I launched Let Girls Learn, a new initiative to help adolescent girls across the globe go to school. Through Let Girls Learn, we’ll be helping communities around the world create girls’ leadership and mentorship projects, build school bathrooms for girls (because sometimes, schools don’t have adequate bathroom facilities for girls, which is one of the reasons why they can’t attend school), and more. We’ll also be funding girls’ education programs in countries that are torn apart by war or violence, and we’ll be working to address issues like poverty that make it hard for girls to get an education (because their families can’t afford to send them to school). And this week, I’m heading to Qatar to speak at a global education conference attended by people from 120 countries around the world. I’ll be urging other countries to invest more in girls’ education and to challenge cultural beliefs and practices that make people think girls are less worthy of an education than boys. In Jordan, I’ll be visiting a school and speaking to several hundred middle school-aged girls. Like the U.S., Jordan is committed to educating every child in their country -- both boys and girls, including many children whose families have fled from Syria, a neighboring country that’s in the midst of a horrific civil war (millions of Syrians have had to leave their country because of the violence). Many of the girls at the school I’m visiting are Syrian refugees, and even though they’ve faced all kinds of challenges and hardships in their lives, they’re working hard in school and making their families proud. I’m excited to meet these girls -- and I’m excited to share their stories with all of you. I’ll also be visiting a military base in Qatar to spend time with some of our extraordinary men and women in uniform and tell them how thankful I am for their service. And I’ll be visiting an amazing historical and archeological site in Jordan called Petra -- a beautifully preserved city that’s thousands of years old! I want to share this journey with you, because I think it’s important for young people like you to be global citizens -- to connect with other young people around the world and learn about their lives. I also want you to be inspired and motivated by the girls I meet and to realize that if they can succeed in school even in the face of so many challenges, so can you. That’s why I’ll be using social media to share my trip with you. I hope you’ll join me! Here’s how: Check out my daily travel blog on go.wh.gov/FLOTUSMidEast and on Medium. Follow me on Twitter @FLOTUS and on Instagram @MichelleObama for the latest updates from the road. So stay tuned. -- Michelle Obama

This email was sent to human4us@bell.net. Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111

The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111

On the subject of Time.

Time.
  Recently we Canadians adjusted our clocks and put them back one hour. Next summer, when the days become longer, we will again adjust our Time to match the reality of the changing energy we call Nature.
 The question is why not simply get rid of the clocks and live in the reality of timeless changing energy?

  The answer to that question is the fact that our economic industrial systems depend on individuals giving up portions of their individual freedom in exchange for power coupons...or Dollars.

 In the past and in order to make sure that individuals gave up most of their basic individual freedom, religious leaders struck large Bells or climbed up in towers and shouted or sang at the top of their lungs. They needed hard laboring peasant workers to toil in the farms and fields in order to provide food for the community, and they indoctrinated hard working people with the fear of God! This still goes on today, but the religiously motivated bells and incantations have modernized and changed into computerized clocks that ring and sing for schools and industrial corporate groups. The fear of God has been replaced by the fear of authority and the reason authorities now ring and sing is to indoctrinate children and adults into waking up early and going to study or to work or to religious gatherings. Our industrial economic and political systems depend on indoctrinated workers who respond in historic order to Church Bells, and School Bells and industrial Time Clocks. Most of the economic benefits of individual labor, however, is no longer distributed equitably within the community! That has to change!

 Because many religious groups are receding into history, industrial groups have filled the vacuum and taken the concept of energy stealing indoctrination to a whole new level! They are using a constant bombardment of television commercials to indoctrinate people into working for and buying their products. This form of indoctrination uses actors to sing and dance and smile at people while introducing products that perpetuate the economic system and does little to improve the health of the community, nor does it give more time and freedom to individuals, nor does it do a good job of protecting the natural environment! An economic system that uses power coupons or Dollars as a means of exchanging work for worthless industrial products is not natural. Money should be used for preserving and enhancing Life. All Life!

 Without governing: moral, religious or ethical principals, corporate groups are stealing our individual freedoms with blatant attempts to indoctrinate us into giving up our Time. They are attempting to force us into working for them and they are using the mass Media to do it! With television and computers, commercialism has replaced past religious indoctrination. The beneficiaries of this intense commercial advertising are the industrial  group leaders with their political government allies. They are taking huge chunks of our individual energy and basic natural freedom to benefit themselves. Our human liberty and energy would be better served saving and helping Nature and all Life on Earth!

The concept of allowing individuals to sleep as long as they want and doing exactly what they want when they want goes against the religious and political and industrial economic group mentality. It goes against the need for indoctrinated obedient followers and workers. Thank you for reading this article and now I am going back to bed.
Signed: Joseph Raglione.

This is my first encounter with Dr. David Amerland's writing and I like his article dealing with Apathy. I often feel impotent in the face of over-whelming problems but when I fall down I always pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again.

David Amerland originally shared:

Look Back in Anger

“Do not go gentle into the night…” begins Dylan Thomas’ epic poem (https://goo.gl/mi2KHF) a statement of rage against too short a time on the planet, too little to do with as much as we may wish. A villanelle (https://goo.gl/VjAEBa), the poem takes Thomas’ pain at the loss of his father and adds to it his railing at our frailty which he reiterates in his Death Shall Have No Dominion (http://goo.gl/NsB2Z).

Cited, both in Interstellar (https://goo.gl/YOywGV) and the latest Dr Who (“The Magician’s Apprentice) - https://goo.gl/Kbvgqs, it is a battlecry against, not so much death or the passing of life, even, but apathy (http://goo.gl/LL9eCL).

Of all the negative emotions we can possibly experience, apathy has to be the most insidious, leeching from us (https://goo.gl/KWm7Mt) not just a sense that we care, but also any reason to. Apathy can, of course, come about as a result of a pathology but it can also be a state of mind induced by a sense of overwhelming impotence.

A sense that “The world is too big for us” (http://goo.gl/UkWRUs), Too complex. Too entrenched. Locked deep into its inertia (https://goo.gl/tzhq5f) for so long that it will take more energy and effort than any of us can muster to make it change.

When a young Clark Kent says “the world’s too big mum” (https://goo.gl/SKxJUv) at the very awakening of his powers, he articulates the self-evident fact that even a Superman cannot be enough to save the world from itself, or us. “Then make it small” says his mum, back.

It’s good advice. How do we do that, exactly? How do we do it, who have no Krypton-induced superpowers?

We can’t suggest a solution if we don’t completely understand the problem. And part of the problem is the intentional exclusion we project in almost every part of life as Dave Meslin points out in his TED Talk: https://goo.gl/Ez2dfi. Even when lip-service is paid to “engagement” and “transparency” actions speak otherwise.

Governments act in ways which then require greater, not less secrecy (https://goo.gl/9WkJvL). The “alien tech” claim of the video notwithstanding the fact remains that many governments work in ways that create a ‘system’ that not even those who want to do something about it from the inside (https://goo.gl/5yUgcQ) are capable of doing so. As John Glennon says the real problem is “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”, without really questioning the system they work for.

One casualty of systemic obfuscation is engagement at an early stage: http://goo.gl/tH61X1. When we are creating a generation that feels unable to act, we responsible for creating disengagement at a time when we have more tools for engagement than ever before:http://goo.gl/mgGZY9. Becoming involved does not have to be about storming castle walls and constantly championing causes:http://goo.gl/iWNsMN.

As a recent Pew Research poll suggested it can be about engagement in small ways: http://goo.gl/zOPIrz. A driving of awareness, a raising of the global IQ through questions and questioning that do not simply accept that we are passive vessels, incapable of doing anything beyond being force-fed by ‘authority’ the information it deems we are capable of safely absorbing.

In the 50s a post-war generation questioned and found wanting the regime of its time, leading to the “Angry Young Men” (https://goo.gl/v6rejg) label that in itself became the means through which their actions could, conveniently, be pigeonholed, sanitized and marginalized, their efforts sang about by Billy Joel:https://goo.gl/lCxz7v, their passion used to sell songs and books and theatrical plays.

Each of us, here, is a child of the post-industrial society (https://goo.gl/kWRbWw). We’re brought together now not as a generation sharing a birthtime but a group of individuals sharing attitudes and ideas, seeking answers to questions, asking why do things not change fast enough?

Even when made small, the world is pretty big. None of us can hope to change it fast, acting alone. But working together, adding incremental insights, interests and passion to the project that must now be labelled “Global Change”, we can find ways to actually bring about positive change to a world that is designed to resist it.

In doing so, we will play a small but important part in shaping its future, add further meaning to our lives and become deeper involved in the world that contains us. All we need to do is get a little angry, get a little impassioned, become a little more questioning and do it together.

I hope you’ve had the foresight to prepare with coffee pot within reach and trays of croissants, donuts, cookies and chocolate cake. Weekends certainly call for that if nothing else. Have an awesome Sunday, wherever you are.  

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Are Liberals serious about protecting the environment? The Oil Pipeline People are laughing!

Need an answer, Joseph?

Jason Marshall (Info Liberal) (info@email.liberal.ca)...Add to contacts ...10/13/15
RealChange.ca | DuVraiChangement.ca...Jason Marshall (Liberal / Assistance)

To: Human4us:
Oct 13, 13:36

Good Afternoon,

Thank you for writing to the Liberal Party of Canada regarding our policies on the protection of the environment.

Liberals understand that the environment and creating a more sustainable future are among the most pressing challenges we face as Canadians. Action against climate change is a key inter-generational responsibility that we owe to our children and grandchildren. That is why we have created a plan to create clean jobs, grow the economy, and protect the environment.
A Liberal government will take a medicare approach to fight climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This means provincial and territorial governments will have the flexibility to design their own policies to meet these commitments, including their own carbon pricing policies. We will provide targeted federal funding to help achieve these goals, in the same way the federal government supports health care in Canada.

Further, a Liberal government would hold a First Ministers meeting within 90 days to work together on a framework for combating climate change. Central to this would be the creation of national emissions-reduction targets as well as a new Low Carbon Economy Trust that will provide funding to projects that reduce carbon emissions under the new pan-Canadian framework. Provincial and Territorial leaders would be also be invited to attend the upcoming Paris climate conference along with the Prime Minister.

Finally, Liberals will fulfil our G20 commitment to phase out subsidies for the fossil fuel industry as well as support our communities through significant new investments in green infrastructure.

In addition to combatting climate change our agenda will focus on: investing in clean technologies; creating clean jobs and investment; restoring credibility to environmental reviews; preserving and promoting our National Parks; and protecting our water. We will phase out fossil fuel subsidies; expand investment in the clean tech sector; remove admission fees to our National Parks for the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation; expand protection of waterways and species at risk; and reinstate funding for science and monitoring.

The Liberal Party has a sweeping agenda to deliver real change. We will tap into the economic opportunities of our environment and create the sustainable prosperity middle class families deserve.

For more information and to share your ideas, visit us at RealChange.ca.

Thank you again for writing.

Kind regards,

Jason Marshall
Liberal Party of Canada

Tell us about what issues you care about.
-------------------------------------------------
OK Mr. Marshall.  Here are some issues I care about!

Gentle People:
 The Liberals have won the federal election in Canada and the new young prime minister, Justin Trudeau, will need some economic ideas to help bolster his new government.
 Now let's see, what can we imagine that will boost the Canadian economy?

 How about:
1. An electric computer regulated small, not long, city bus equipped to help an aging population of elderly people who will need help getting in and out of buses. I can see a city full of small Buses quickly picking up passengers and when full, the driver presses a button to notify a central computer to send another small Bus. The empty small bus quickly replaces the full bus at the stop where the button was pushed. Small Buses can be stationed and waiting  periodically along city Bus routes.
2. How about helping Quebec city finance a new Hockey team to help fill Quebec's new Videotron Arena? Owning a percentage of a Hockey team is not bad business for the federal government.
3. How about helping Canadian farmers establish pesticide and  Monsanto free crops? Federal grants will help farmers hire and train Canadian high school and college and even university students during the summer months. If the pay is good, the students will accept the jobs.
4. How about paying students and unemployed people to plant and care for fruit Trees in every city and small town in Canada? Specifically, fruit trees such as Apple and Pear and Plum trees. You then invite tourists visiting Canada to help themselves to the fruit. Our national Parks also need Tree planting projects and so does the Tar Sands project. Plant several million Evergreen Trees in the Tar Sands and send the Bill to the people who created the ecological disaster in the first place.
5. How about creating community gardens all across Canada and paying unemployed people to work the         gardens? The fresh vegetables can then be sold to local restaurants.
6. How about asking the car companies such as Ford and Toyota and General Motors to create all Electric       vehicles to help stop global warming? They can also create Hydrogen / Electric hybrids. A small amount of Hydrogen is created on board the car and immediately used. It is not stored in a tank like Gasolene.
7. How about creating thousands of water filtration and purification plants to clean our drinking water and remove raw sewage from our lakes and rivers? How about creating a company to clean up the Tar Sands in Alberta? Plant millions of Fir Trees in the Tar Sands and send the bill to Harper.
8. How about helping the Maritime Provinces build offshore wind or under water Turbine Farms?
9. How about helping millions of homeowners place Solar Panels on their roofs? Ask Elon Musk for information and push him to bring out cheap but fast long distance Electric cars. Tell him Mars can wait!
10. How about taxing the high tech computer and telephone industries? These companies are making billions of Dollars and could well afford to pay higher taxes especially Bell Canada who just raised my phone Bill.
11. How about creating small town music festivals across Canada? 
12.How about creating new School buildings that seem less like prisons and more like Geodesic Domes filled with computers and small animals and flower gardens? 

Gentle People:

 The Liberals have won the federal election in Canada and the new young prime minister, Justin Trudeau, will need some economic ideas to help bolster his new government.
 Now let's see, what can we imagine that will boost the Canadian economy?

 How about:
1. An electric computer regulated small, not long, city bus equipped to help an aging population of elderly people who will need help getting in and out of buses. I can see a city full of small Buses quickly picking up passengers and when full, the driver presses a button to notify a central computer to send another small Bus. The empty small bus quickly replaces the full bus at the stop where the button was pushed. Small Buses can be stationed and waiting  periodically along city Bus routes.
2. How about helping Quebec city finance a new Hockey team to help fill Quebec's new Videotron Arena? Owning a percentage of a Hockey team is not bad business for the federal government.
3. How about helping Canadian farmers establish pesticide and  Monsanto free crops? Federal grants will help farmers hire and train Canadian high school and college and even university students during the summer months. If the pay is good, the students will accept the jobs.
4. How about paying students and unemployed people to plant and care for fruit Trees everywhere in Canada? Specifically, fruit trees such as Apple and Pear and Plum trees. You then invite tourists visiting Canada to help themselves to the fruit. Our national Parks also need Tree planting projects and so does the Tar Sands project. Plant several million Evergreen Trees in the Tar Sands and send the Bill to the people who created the ecological disaster in the first place.
5. How about creating community gardens all across Canada and paying unemployed people to work the         gardens? The fresh vegetables can then be sold to local restaurants.
6. How about asking the car companies such as Ford and Toyota and General Motors to create all Electric       vehicles to help stop global warming? They can also create Hydrogen / Electric hybrids. A small amount of Hydrogen is created on board the car and immediately used. It is not stored in a tank like Gasolene.
7. How about creating thousands of water filtration and purification plants to clean our drinking water and         our raw sewage? How about creating a company to clean up the Tar Sands in Alberta?
8. How about helping the Maritime Provinces build offshore Wind Turbine Farms?
9. How about helping millions of homeowners place Solar Panels on their roofs? Ask Elon Musk for information and push him to bring out cheap but fast long distance Electric cars. Tell him Mars can wait!
10. How about taxing the high tech computer and telephone industries? These companies are making billions of Dollars and could well afford to pay higher taxes especially Bell Canada who just raised my phone Bill.
11. How about creating small town music festivals across Canada?
12.How about creating new School buildings that seem less like prisons and more like Geodesic Domes filled with computers and small animals and flower gardens? 

They say the holes in the Sun are not dangerous!

THEY SAY THE HOLES IN THE SUN ARE NOT DANGEROUS.


https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/coronal-hole-front-and-center

The human Brain is still ahead of computers, but for how long?

Gentle readers, there is so much talk about faster and more intelligent computers that I thought I would search through our human brain to make a comparison study. It turns out that the human brain has still a few trillion neurons more than super computers but with quantum gates arriving on the scene and with the lighting fast ability of computers to remember almost everything in detail on the planet, computers are closing the intelligence gap. How long will it be before intelligent Robots walk the Earth? At the current pace of technological progress I ascertain within my life time and I am an old guy.
Meanwhile, the human brain continues to be the most interesting computer on Earth.

Introduction

The Human Memory

Retrospective & Prospective

The core component of the nervous system in general, and the brain in particular, is the neuron or nerve cell, the “brain cells” of popular language. A neuron is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electro-chemical signalling. Unlike other cells, neurons never divide, and neither do they die off to be replaced by new ones. By the same token, they usually cannot be replaced after being lost, although there are a few exceptions.

The average human brain has about 100 billion neurons (or nerve cells) and many more neuroglia (or glial cells) which serve to support and protect the neurons (although see the end of this page for more information on glial cells). Each neuron may be connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, passing signals to each other via as many as 1,000 trillion synaptic connections, equivalent by some estimates to a computer with a 1 trillion bit per second processor. Estimates of the human brain’s memory capacity vary wildly from 1 to 1,000 terabytes (for comparison, the 19 million volumes in the US Library of Congress represents about 10 terabytes of data).

Diagram of a neuron
Picture from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron)

??? Did You Know ???

Unlike other body cells, most neurons in the human brain are only able to divide to make new cells (a process called neurogenesis) duringfetal development and for a few months after birth. These brain cells may increase in size until the age of about eighteen years, but they are essentially designed to last a lifetime. Interestingly, the only area of the brain where neurogenesis has been shown to continue throughout life is the hippocampus, an area essential to memory encoding and storage.

Information transmission within the brain, such as takes place during the processes of memory encoding and retrieval, is achieved using a combination of chemicals and electricity. It is a very complex process involving a variety of interrelated steps, but a quick overview can be given here.

A typical neuron possesses a soma (the bulbous cell body which contains the cell nucleus), dendrites (long, feathery filaments attached to the cell body in a complex branching “dendritic tree”) and a single axon (a special, extra-long, branched cellular filament, which may be thousands of times the length of the soma).

Every neuron maintains a voltage gradient across its membrane, due to metabolically-driven differences in ions of sodium, potassium, chloride and calcium within the cell, each of which has a different charge. If the voltage changes significantly, an electrochemical pulse called an action potential (ornerve impulse) is generated. This electrical activity can be measured and displayed as a wave form called brain wave or brain rhythm.

Synaptic transmission Picture from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_synapse)

This pulse travels rapidly along the cell's axon, and is transferred across a specialized connection known as a synapse to a neighbouring neuron, which receives it through its feathery dendrites. A synapse is a complex membrane junction or gap (the actual gap, also known as the synaptic cleft, is of the order of 20 nanometres, or 20 millionths of a millimetre) used to transmit signals between cells, and this transfer is therefore known as a synaptic connection. Although axon-dendrite synaptic connections are the norm, other variations (e.g. dendrite-dendrite, axon-axon, dendrite-axon) are also possible. A typical neuron fires 5 - 50 times every second.

Each individual neuron can form thousands of links with other neurons in this way, giving a typical brain well over 100 trillion synapses (up to 1,000 trillion, by some estimates). Functionally related neurons connect to each other to formneural networks (also known as neural nets or assemblies). The connections between neurons are not static, though, they change over time. The more signals sent between two neurons, the stronger the connection grows (technically, the amplitude of the post-synaptic neuron’s response increases), and so, with each new experience and each remembered event or fact, the brain slightly re-wires its physical structure.

The interactions of neurons is not merely electrical, though, but electro-chemical. Each axon terminal contains thousands of membrane-bound sacs called vesicles, which in turn contain thousands of neurotransmitter molecules each. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers which relay, amplify and modulate signals between neurons and other cells. The two most common neurotransmitters in the brain are the amino acids glutamate and GABA; other important neurotransmitters include acetylcholine, dopamine, adrenaline,histamine, serotonin and melatonin.

??? Did You Know ???

During childhood, and particularly duringadolescence, a process known as "synaptic pruning" occurs. Although the brain continues to grow and develop, the overall number of neurons and synapses are reduced by up to 50%, removing unnecessary neuronal structures and allowing them to be replaced by more complex and efficient structures, more suited to the demands of adulthood.

When stimulated by an electrical pulse, neurotransmitters of various types are released, and they cross the cell membrane into the synaptic gap between neurons. These chemicals then bind to chemical receptors in the dendrites of the receiving (post-synaptic) neuron. In the process, they cause changes in the permeability of the cell membrane to specific ions, opening up special gates orchannels which let in a flood of charged particles (ions of calcium, sodium, potassium and chloride). This affects the potential charge of the receiving neuron, which then starts up a new electrical signal in the receiving neuron. The whole process takes less than one five-hundredth of a second. In this way, a message within the brain is converted, as it moves from one neuron to another, from an electrical signal to a chemical signal and back again, in an ongoing chain of events which is the basis of all brain activity.

The electro-chemical signal released by a particular neurotransmitter may be such as to encourage to the receiving cell to also fire, or to inhibit or prevent it from firing. Different neurotransmitters tend to act asexcitatory (e.g. acetylcholine, glutamate, aspartate, noradrenaline, histamine) or inhibitory (e.g. GABA, glycine, seratonin), while some (e.g. dopamine) may be either. Subtle variations in the mechanisms of neurotransmission allow the brain to respond to the various demands made on it, including the encoding, consolidation, storage and retrieval of memories.

As has been mentioned, in addition to neurons, the brain contains about an equal mass of glial cells (neuroglia or simply glia), the most common types being oligodendrocytes, astrocytes and microglia. Because they are so much smaller than neurons, there are up to 10 times as many in number, and different areas of the brain have higher or lower concentrations of glia. It used to be thought that the role of glial cells was limited to the physical support, nutrition and repair of the neurons of the central nervous system. However, more recent research suggests that glia, particularly astrocytes, actually perform a much more active role in braincommunication and neuroplasticity, although the extent and mechanics of of this role is still uncertain, and a substantial amount of contemporary brain research is now focused on glials cells.

----------------------------------------------------Source of information...Wikipaedia.