Scented naps can dissipate fears

People unlearned an odor's unpleasant accompaniment when they smelled it in their sleep

By Laura Sanders in Science News

A nap can ease the burden of a painful memory. While fast asleep, people learned that a previously scary situation was no longer threatening, scientists report September 22 in Nature Neuroscience.

The results are the latest to show that sleep is a special state in which many sorts of learning can happen. And the particular sort of learning in the new study blunted a fear memory, a goal of treatments for disorders such as phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“It’s a remarkable finding,” says sleep neuroscientist Edward Pace-Schott of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Researchers led by Katherina Hauner of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine first taught 15 (awake) volunteers to fear the combination of a face and odor. 

Razing the Garden of Eden

A Texas police operation resorted to paramilitary force in its fruitless search for pot plants.

Hey, didn't Charlestown used to have one of these?

By Jim Hightower

The Bible tells us that the Garden of Eden was heaven on Earth — until Adam ate that apple. Then all Hell broke loose.

Now, Arlington, Texas, has updated this tale.

At about 7:30 in the morning of August 2, a SWAT team of armed police agents, code enforcement officers, and narcotics detectives stormed Shellie Smith’s little organic farm — which she named “Garden of Eden.”

They burst through the gate, handcuffed the terrified residents, and held them at gunpoint while the agents executed the raid’s mission.

Which was what, exactly? “The purpose was to improve the quality of life [and] to resolve life safety issues within neighborhoods,” a spokeswoman for the city said.

Prevent misdiagnosis

Screening for Minor Memory Changes Will Wrongly Label Many With Dementia, Warn Experts

ScienceDaily

A political drive, led by the UK and US, to screen older people for minor memory changes (often called mild cognitive impairment or pre-dementia) is leading to unnecessary investigation and potentially harmful treatment for what is arguably an inevitable consequence of ageing, warn experts.

Their views come as the Preventing Overdiagnosis conference opens in New Hampshire, USA today (10 September), partnered by BMJ's Too Much Medicine campaign, where experts from around the world will gather to discuss how to tackle the threat to health and the waste of money caused by unnecessary care.

Another thing to thank the Tea Party for

Aiming at Government and Hitting Big Business

By Phil Mattera, Dirt Diggers Digest

The tea party caucus calling the shots in the U.S. House of Representative is gloating about having shut down the federal government while simultaneously claiming that technical problems in the rollout of the Obamacare health exchanges are a sign of the failure of the public sector. On both fronts the truth is a lot more complicated.

What the critics of big government tend to overlook is that the public and private sectors are so intertwined that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. The tea party crowd may have no concern about the hardships they are imposing on 800,000 furloughed federal workers, yet their shutdown is also threatening the well-being of the much larger number of contractor employees—once estimated at more than 7 million—who often work alongside those directly on the federal payrolls. 

Three nasty items on the Monday agenda, maybe three and a half

Town Council preview: Council’s regular meeting held one week earlier due to Columbus Day

Town Council plans to vote on ordinances to severely curtail parking of
campers, work vehicles at home, plus detailed regulation of the shrubbery
and parking at town businesses, at least those that still remain.

By Will Collette

The Council meetings again this Monday, October 7, 2013 at 7:00 p.m. at the Charlestown Town Hall.

Close observers of the Council know that you can never know exactly where and when all hell will break loose – sometimes innocuous items turn into major wars – but there are at least three items on this agenda sure to cause a stir.

Two of them are ordinances to extend town control over residential property owners and town businesses

Planning Commissar Ruth Platner returns with her two latest proposed ordinances which would allow the Town, meaning her, to minutely regulate town businesses and, in some instances, town homeowners in the way that they place trees, shrubs, mulch, grasses, lights, parking spaces, cars and trucks, recreational equipment, work vehicles, etc. on their property.

Platner tried to sneak these two ordinances through the Council last month through deceptively advertising it to the public – failing to show how her proposal would change existing ordinance language – and then with the help of Town Council Boss Tom Gentz, to cut off debate and force a vote after the meeting time had expired.

Negotiating with Terrorists, Part 5

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Filaments of the Vela Supernova Remnant 

From NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day

How to follow APOD if the US government shuts down. EDITOR'S NOTE: These Astronomy Picture of the Day posts were down-loaded before the government shut-down. 

The explosion is over but the consequences continue. About eleven thousand years ago a star in the constellation of Vela could be seen to explode, creating a strange point of light briefly visible to humans living near the beginning of recorded history.

The outer layers of the star crashed into the interstellar medium, driving a shock wave that is still visible today. A roughly spherical, expanding shock wave is visible in X-rays.

The image below captures some of that filamentary and gigantic shock in visible light. As gas flies away from the detonated star, it decays and reacts with the interstellar medium, producing light in many different colors and energy bands.

Remaining at the center of the Vela Supernova Remnant is a pulsar, a star as dense as nuclear matter that rotates completely around more than ten times in a single second.

Saturday is the new Prince Spaghetti Day!

Coastal cities face $1 trillion floods by 2050

In less than 40 years from now the cost to the world’s biggest coastal cities from flooding is expected to have risen to $1 trillion – 0.7% of the value of the entire world economy in 2012.

By Tim Radford – Climate News Network

Sea level rise and Providence

LONDON – By 2050, flood damage in the world’s coastal cities is expected to reach $1 trillion a year as sea levels rise and global warming triggers new extremes of heat, windstorm and rain.

More than 40% of these prodigious costs could fall upon just four cities – New Orleans, Miami and New York in the US and Guangzhou in China.

Stephane Hallegatte of the World Bank in Washington and colleagues looked at the risks of future flood losses in the 136 largest of the world’s coastal cities.

Thank you, House Republicans

Federal shut-down nixes Ninigret Wildlife Refuge as workshop site

Saturday Fly-Fishing Program Will Be Held at South Kingstown Land Trust Barn

PROVIDENCE - The Department of Environmental Management's Division of Fish and Wildlife announces that the location for the "Introduction to Saltwater Fly-Fishing" workshop scheduled for Saturday, October 5 has been changed, due to the federal government closure. The workshop had been scheduled to take place at the US Fish and Wildlife Service's Kettle Pond Visitors Center in Charlestown.

The new location for the program is the South Kingstown Land Trust Barn, located at 17 Matunuck Beach Road in Matunuck. During the program, which runs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., fly-fishing instructors will teach participants fly-tying, casting techniques, and knot-tying.

Learning the ropes

Reflecting on my first year in the RI Senate

By Sen. Catherine Cool Rumsey

(A version of this essay ran in the Westerly Sun and Exeter Times Standard.)

My first session in the Rhode Island State Senate is over and the question I am often asked by family and friends, “So, is it what you expected?”

In early 2012, having just started a new job, being a foster parent of a 2-year-old and with a husband just starting a new business, I had no shortage of changes and challenges in my life already.

But I had attended a recent event featuring Rhode Island women in politics and I had listened to elected women at the national level who were talking about the need for more women to become involved in our political process. I decided to come off the sidelines to apply my skills and experience to help affect change in Rhode Island.

Outside of a day of freshman orientation, there isn’t a formal training on how to be a state senator. For the most part, it is all on-the-job training. Luckily Senate leadership and staff are always helpful and supportive. I am also very fortunate to share my district with Representatives Donna Walsh and Larry Valencia. They have been very supportive, showing me the ropes and working together to support legislation to benefit our towns.

There's always an up side

Government Shutdown

By Ted Rall

Click here to see other reasons why the shut-down isn't totally bad.

NOTE: not pictured, but definitely an upside - a branch of the KKK, the Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had received a special use permit to hold one of their hate-spewing rallies at the Gettysburg National Battlefield. On Day 1 of the shut-down. CANCELLED!

OMG PD

Incarceration Cupid, All Fired Up & More

Posted by Samantha Turner in the Narragansett-South Kingstown Patch

All Fired Up

We bet that South Kingstown firefighters aren’t a big fan of a 45-year-old man who kept interrupting their efforts to save his home last week.  The man repeatedly tried to re-enter his burning home and interrupt the firefighters’ work.

According to police, he also began to threaten members of the crowd that had gathered around the conflagration, even accusing one onlooker of starting the fire. Captain Confusion’s tirade did not end there, as he also kept screaming for his father and “Lori” whom he believed were still in the house. 

Debunking phony green labeling

Misleading "Natural" Food Labels May Soon Be History

From: Leon Kaye, Triple Pundit, More from this Affiliate

The only thing natural about the "natural" label is that such branding, naturally, often confuses consumers. But such misleading terms such as "natural" and "healthy" could soon become history, or at the very least score a makeover. 

Large food companies have hijacked such terms with dubious results—and never mind the fact "natural" is a loaded term. Is a food product only "natural" if it still has dirt on it after being yanked out of the ground? Is it still natural if ingredients, from whole wheat flour to goji berries to flax seeds, are pulverized, brominated, pasteurized and homogenized?

Millet Mexican Pilaf

EcoRI introduces new chef

Photo and text by LISA KELLY in ecoRI.org

Editor’s note: This recipe was created by Lisa Kelly, founder and personal chef at The Vegan Pact. We will be publishing her vegan recipes the first and third Friday of each month. For more information, visit her website or attend one of her upcoming cooking classes this fall in Bedford, Mass., at The Herbal Academy of New England. For a full list of her classes, click here.

This addictive Mexican pilaf is full of delicious, nutritious grains and vegetables, and is perfect as a main meal or for a side. Millet is a super grain, full of protein, fiber, magnesium and B vitamins.