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During his most recent interview while returning from Sri Lanka and the Philippines, here's what Pope Francis said about the gift of crying:
Elisabetta Pique, La Nacion: "Representing the Spanish language group, I have two questions. This was a moving voyage for everyone. We saw people crying the entire time in Tacloban, even we journalists cried. Yesterday you said the world needs to cry. We would like to ask you, what was – and it was all very moving – what was for you the most moving moment? That is the first question. The second, yesterday you made history, you surpassed the record set by John Paul II, in the same place, there were 6 or 7 million people. How does it feel to have seen - Cardinal Tagle was telling us that during the Mass in front of the altar you asked him, but how many people are here? How does it feel to have surpassed this record, to have entered into history as the Pope with the Mass with the highest attendance in history? Thank you."
Pope Francis: "The most moving moment: for me, the Mass in Tacloban was very moving. Very moving. To see all of God's people standing still, praying, after this catastrophe, thinking of my sins and those people, it was moving, a very moving moment. On the moment of the Mass there, I felt as though I was annihilated, I almost couldn't speak. I don't know what happened to me, maybe it was the emotion, I don't know. But I didn't feel another thing, it is something. And then, the moving moments: the gestures were moving. Every gesture. When I passed and a father would do this (gestures) and I blessed him, he would say thank you. But for them, a blessing was enough. I thought -- I who have so many expectations -- I want this and I want that. That was good for me, no? Moving moments. After I found out that in Tacloban we landed with winds at 70 kilometres per hour, I took it seriously the warning that we needed to leave no later than one o'clock because there was more danger. Regarding the great turnout, I felt annihilated. These were God's people, and God was present. And the joy of the presence of God which tells us, think on it well, that you are servants of these people, these people are the protagonists. Something like this. The other thing is the weeping. One of the things that is lost when there is too much wealth or when values are misunderstood or we have become accustomed to injustice, to this culture of waste, is the capacity to cry. This is a grace we must ask for. There is a beautiful prayer in the old missal (1962, editor's note) for tears. It went more or less like this: 'O Lord, you who have made it so that Moses with his cane made water flow from a stone, make it so from the rock that is my heart, that water of tears may flow.' It's a beautiful prayer. We Christians must ask for the grace to cry. Especially wealthy Christians. To cry about injustice and to cry about sins. Because crying opens you to understand new realities, or new dimensions to realities. This is what the girl said, what I said to her. She was the only one to ask that question to which there is no answer: why do children suffer? The great Dostoyevsky asked himself this, and he could not answer. Why do children suffer? She, with her weeping, a woman who was weeping. When I say it is important that women be held in higher consideration in the Church, it's not just to give them a function as the secretary of a dicastery -- though this would be fine. No, it's so that they may tell us tell us how they experience, and view reality. Because women view things from a different richness, a larger one. Another thing I would like to underscore is what I said to the last young man, who truly works well, he gives and gives and gives, he organizes to help the poor. But don't forget that we too need to be beggars – from them. Because the poor evangelize us. If we take the poor away from the Gospel, we cannot understand Jesus' message. The poor evangelize us. I go to evangelize the poor, yes, but allow them to evangelize you. Because they have values that you do not."


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Las Vegas Outlaws T-Shirt
Team Info
The Las Vegas Outlaws played one season in 2001 and hosted the first XFL game at Sam Boyd stadium. Their top rated defense in the league was known as the "Dealers of Doom". After only one season, the league folded and the Outlaws never played again.
Notable Players
- Rod Smart (aka He Hate Me)
- Kelly Herndon
- Mike Furrey
- Mark Grieb
- Yo Murphy
Product Info
- 100% Cotton T-Shirt
- Classic Fit
Ships in 3-5 business days

subset: commoncrawl


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26 Feb 2015 - Professionals Discuss Better Betting, Including Exotics
ChampionBets lined up three expert guests with differing backgrounds and opinions on the pro's and cons of the exotics:
Nathan Snow - NSW thoroughbred pro punter and former bookmaker
Greg Lethe - 25 years and counting as a professional greyhound punter
Greg Conroy - founder and inventor of RewardBet
If you've already watched the webinar replay, see below for more information on the topics discussed during the presentation.
NB: The first 5 mins (intro) was missed in the recording.
We present all the slides and the information from the discussion here for you to examine.
Slide 1 - Introduction to the webinar - outlining the topics we'll discuss.
Slide 2 - The history of exotics for the Australian punter was not so good.
As the technology of the TABs was limited, most punters were taught to play exotic betting by using the ubiquitous "box". This was super convenient, as it only required one ticket or one quick input by the Telephone Operator. However, just like fast-food, a diet of quick, super convenient food isn't always best for you!
Box betting - whether it's a standard 1 unit box (eg, $6 trifecta for 3 runners) or even "affordable" box betting - AKA "flexi betting" - still has the fundamental mathematical issue that every combination has the same stake placed on it. You are saying that every combination has the same chance of winning!
When you are win betting, and you have two selections, one at $3 and the other at $85, you'd be very silly to put the same amount on each win bet. But every-time a punter takes a box exotic, this is what they are doing.
So besides the mathematical disadvantage punters had, the TAB also left them in the dark regarding approximate dividends, estimates of their returns and even the interfaces they were provided to create their exotic bets. Many professionals with more sophisticated access to place bets reaped millions of dollars from the "mug exotic punter" during these years, and continue to do so.
Slide 3 - The five golden rules of Exotic Betting today.
1. Across exotics, many combinations are "overbet" meaning that your dividends are going to be less than you deserve. However, this means that many combinations are also "underbet" allowing you to receive more. It's like a see-saw. The easiest way to profit from exotic betting is to resist doing what "everyone else" is thinking. If the race looks to have only three strong chances then probably best to leave it alone rather than taking a box trifecta across those chances. Target the opportunities where others can't be bothered. If there are two very strong chances, equal favourites, don't you think most people would think that is an easy quinella combination? Maybe take the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th favourites as bankers for 1st with the two main favourites to get pipped and run into a place. You'll be well rewarded with such thinking!
2. RewardBet has a patented "market gauge" that quickly gives you an indication of the percentage of the field you've chosen for first. Use this as your guide as to how many runners to bank for 1st, rather than an arbitrary number where you say "I'll bank my top two". This doesn't make sense. If your top two are $10 chances you still have plenty of opportunity to add a few other selections - be guided by percentages rather than silly rules that you've developed bad habits about from your history of taking standout bets with the TAB.
3. This should come as no surprise. Box betting should generally be avoided (it is OK for very small stake outlays). You know it - if there's a photo-finish and you have both runners, you'll always hope the outsider gets up. That's because every punter that takes a box bet inherently knows that the only time they receive better than average returns is when the most improbable thing happens. You are hoping for the most unlikely event - Is that anyway to bet? By staking professionally according to every percentage chance for each combination, you will win more than box betting - the maths prove it - and it's why the professionals have been reaping such returns for so many years taking advantage of the TAB retail players.
4. Every time you take a "field" bet you are simply hoping that an outsider will get up to provide some value. This is simply silly, uneducated betting. Field betting is for mugs and you are just donating your money to the professionals.
5. The old habits of formulated rules for standout betting which many punters still have are now outdated. There is NO reason to bet like that anymore, other than bad habits.
Slide 4 - Some smart plays for Exotic betting.
1. Structure your total stake properly. Many punters have very bad habits. For example, you have $100 to bet on a race. You'll spend $50 on your win bets, $20 on a box Quinella and $30 on a flexi trifecta box. You'll repeat similar outlays every race no matter what! The best way to bet is to structure your outlays across your different bet types according to each individual race. For example, if you have a high market gauge (as RewardBet shows), then you may have 70% of the market covered by your picks. In this example you're not going to have much scope to win much on the win, so you are better advised to put all your money into your exotic bets - across Quinella, Exactas and Trifectas. Conversely, if you only have 10% of the market, then you are much better off concentrating on mainly the Win bet and having only a small amount (15% of our outlay) on exotics. RewardBet allows you to do this instantly in a single click by choosing a Reward Level. The estimated returns quickly show you what you can expect to get back if you win and you can let this guide you towards the best structure of outlays across the different bet types automatically and professionally.
2. Avoid first fours. Our models show they are not a very good bet type to bet - although many punters are VERY attracted to them as they dream and hope of massive dividends! Wagering is not a dream ... if you want to dream, take a lottery ticket. The great thing about race betting is that you can control your own destiny by staking correctly. Sure, you can have a little 'fun bet' once in a while to try and snare an impossible return but most of your betting should be better applied. First fours have the highest take out (so maths is working against you), have volatile returns and are extremely difficult to hit. RewardBet's designed to HELP the punter win more - so we've left first fours out of our mix to help you.
3. The favourite vs longshot bias you should be well aware of. Due to the prevalence of field betting and also flexi betting, many longshots are overbet and conversely favourites are underbet. RewardBet provides a simple interface to change the price of runners. If you put in a $50 shot into your RewardBet, consider if its "true" price should be $80 - with a few clicks you can structure your RewardBet so that the selection is bet like an $80 shot. Similarly, you can easily change the price of that $3 favourite to $2.40 so that you'll have more of your money on it and reap the rewards if you are right.
4. Think about what the person in "Tab land" is probably doing and try and avoid it. Are they standing out the obvious favourite? Maybe there's value in taking a reduced bet and taking that favourite to come 2nd/3rd instead? There are many examples everyday where you can work things in your favour. A tip? If you have the TV racing on, mute the volume until the race starts - that way you don't get conned into taking the spruik horses by the commentators and mounting yard "experts".
5. Some professionals we know deliberately bet about 10 mins before the race into the exotic pools. Their combinations then become underlays in the pools and the professionals that bet into the pools at the last seconds will take the overlays. Hence their most favoured selections end up moving from an underlay to right price or a small overlay whilst the pros having a bet in the last second are being left with the "second rate" pre-race overlays. This has been a smart trick exploited by a few for years.
Slide 5 - More plays for Exotic betting.
1. We use a couple of runners as bankers for 1st in our betting. If these runners come second, the Quinella dividend acts as a very important saver return - we don't always win on the race (depends on the price of our bankers) but it is often a significant return to keep our bank afloat and ready for the next race. It's a much better strategy than betting into the mathematically challenged place pool via an each-way or single place bet.
2. Exactas are targeted poorly by the general punter in the TAB. If they do attack an exacta they often have the same outlay on all their exacta combinations (via a standout exacta) which is poor staking. Using RewardBet to place your exotics, and especially exactas is a very profitable strategy. We see that in the returns to our customers.
3. Trifectas are by far the best exotic play - but keep in mind the run of outs. We structure our Quinella, Exacta and Trifecta bets expecting to hit one trifecta return every 15 to 20 races. So those other races you need to receive some good Quinella and Exacta dividends. Of course if you have a very good bank you can bet Trifectas exclusively using our Custom level - just beware of the run of outs, but the returns will be worth it in the long run!
4. Related to all betting is your bank size. If you have a $200 bank you should be betting about $10 total per race, maximum. We see too many customers deposit $100, have a $50 RewardBet - miss the winner. Repeat the next race - miss the winner - and then give up on RewardBet. That's absolutely crazy. We know RewardBet is by far the best edge any punter can have in the marketplace but you have to still have some respect for your own actions and be sensible with your outlays. If you do, RewardBet will look after you - by providing better returns and helping your bank last longer providing you more entertainment, more opportunity and much more engaging racing experience!
Slide 6 - Some Quaddie Thinking.
1. We generally avoid Quaddies because there is no convenient tool to stake them correctly. If you are betting Quaddies like most people, you are taking a 4 x 4 x 4 x Field or similar bet. This is just crazy on every level. Yes, they can be fun as an interesting "social bet" but that type of staking is simply crazy. The only time you'll win is when the outsiders of your runners get up - so again it's a hope bet which is not what successful punting is about. The psychology of punters wanting to put the field in the last leg "as they can't cope with hitting three legs and still missing out" is so apparent but utterly disappointing to see. Surely, you're a smarter punter than that?
2. We have plans for RewardBet Quaddies. They will be an amazing dimension to your Quaddie experience. Watch this space!
3. Instead of taking a silly constructed Quaddie like mentioned above - why don't you bet smarter? Sure, isolate each leg with the 2, 3 or more selections that you think have the best chance. But then bet EACH LEG as a RewardBet. Divide your total Quaddie outlay by four. So if you'll going to have a $200 Quaddie, now you're taking 4 x $50 RewardBets. On the first leg, you may have only two strong chances. Great - make it a $50 Bronze bet, putting most of your total stake into the WIN pool. The second leg, you may have 5 chances - this could be a GOLD RewardBet - providing you the safety or a return if you hit the winner, but more upside if you're lucky and get 2nd and/or 3rd as well. Similarly for the other legs. This is a much smarter way of betting a Quaddie. You have four separate legs running for you. You are never "out in the first leg" like in a traditional Quaddie. You have the opportunity for a multitude of different returns in each leg and you can structure your bets across legs depending on your confidence. This is what smart punting is all about!
Slide 7 - Mimic the professionals!
1. Never box bet or place the same stake on every selection again. This is not professional. You have RewardBet to allow every bet, be it Win, Quinella, Exacta or Trifecta to be staked properly - according to each individual chance - like a professional - to win you more.
2. Professionals don't "hope" they jag a good return in their field legs. They don't "hope" the outsider gets up in the trifecta photo-finish. Professionals have every combination staked so that it doesn't matter which of their runners hit the line for first - this is the way it should be. And you can then experience relaxing photo finishes!
3. Confidence is one of the most important aspects to punting successfully. RewardBet helps you maintain it.
Slide 8 - RewardBet's Additional Returns Illustrated
This analysis shows how much RewardBet can contribute to your additional returns. In this example over 34,000 races were analysed. We chose to take the top 4 selections in a rating system we were following.
1. As you can see, backing the top four for the Win provided a loss of -10.2% when they were equally flat staked.
That's actually not so bad ... so although it was a loss, theoretically it should have been more (if using a pin) so the ratings used in this analysis do have some merit which is good to see.
2. When RewardBet's staking according to price and probability was applied the additional returns were simply remarkable. Even with Win betting there was a 5% uplift in returns (albeit still a loss) but across the other bet types the increase using RewardBet's staking was sensational.
These are the types of uplift that our customers see every day across their betting - we even show customers now in their 'My Bets' history what this uplift is - we call it the RewardBet Advantage.
It's worth noting that across Greyhound and Harness betting the RewardBet Advantage can be even greater.
The take-away is this: if you are NOT using RewardBet for your betting - from Win to Exotics - you are essentially robbing yourself and just adding more to the coffers of the professionals. It's as simple as that.
Even if you are not an overall winning punter (and of course many aren't) RewardBet will provide you with more returns, allowing your bank to last longer and providing you more time to hit that great return you deserve.
Slide 9 - RewardBet's Win Betting.
RewardBet is not only about exotics. As we've seen - it even increases returns for Win betting. In fact one of our major customers bets purely win across a 100% Win Custom Reward Level that he setup.
1. RewardBet Galloping bets are Best Of Four (LuxDiv product from Luxbet) - and that is a very competitive product already. Combined with RewardBet's staking it is even better.
2. However, we also offer Fixed Win, Best Of Best, Top Fluc choices as well (we can offer whatever operators provide). This way your win component can be locked-in prior to any adverse price movements. Great for punters following tipping services.
3. These days, many punters want to place their bets as close to the jump as possible. And who could blame them - as there are many late price movements and other information disseminated from the mounting yard and on the racing broadcasts. There is no faster way to professionally stake all your bets for a race in a single transaction than RewardBet. Many customers wait until the horses are moving into the barriers to place their RewardBets - all staked properly with the last minute prices as the basis. It's really a terrific way to bet.
Slide 10 - Some RewardBet Secrets
1. Generally greyhound betting is dominated by a vast amount of "mug money" coming from the fact it's popular late evening in the pubs and clubs around the country. All these small, badly constructed and staked bets, add up to a very good opportunity for players who bet into these pools professionally. The RewardBet Advantage across greyhound racing is often three times what it is for galloping races. As one customer said: "It's the most fun I've had gambling" - and he played greyhounds with the same numbers every race. Something to consider.
2. Harness also has a sweet spot and it appears to be Exactas. These continue to show the greatest advantage to our customers mainly we believe because trifecta bets are well targeted by the professionals and the exacta bets are more the domain of the "mug money" with plenty of standout bets which are effectively poorly staked.
3. Using the "edit prices" feature to slightly adjust or "roll the board" for the prices of runners you think are not quite priced correctly by the market is a very favourable way to bet.
Slide 11 - RewardBet Summary
1. Fundamentally you can't argue with mathematics. In punting, maths in the guise of probability determines everything. RewardBet's staking that mimics that of professionals (and bets to the cent on exotics) has been proven over seven million bets. You can either go with the mathematics or try and go against it. If you do the latter, there is only one path you'll head down in the long run.
2. RewardBet doesn't choose the selections for you, of course. That is still up to you - however, our Market Gauge, Exotic Estimates and Reward Levels help you to structure your bets in such a way that you'll have the best chance of winning IF you hit that winner. Remember that many punters don't win over all of course but race betting and punting is all about the excitement, engagement and having the best run for your money. RewardBet certainly provides all those ingredients - you won't find a more engaging, exciting and powerful way to bet on racing - you may not end up a winner, but you'll have the best time taking up the challenge - and in the end - that is what it is all about for most punters: having a great time betting.
Remember not to over-bet - keep up your confidence - and enjoy the punting journey!


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Livestock Carrier Delivered by China Shipyard
COSCO (Guangdong) Shipyard Co. a subsidiary of the COSCO Shipyard Group say they have delivered a 4500 cu.m specialized livestock carrier, "Ganado Express" to the European buyer.
The new vessel measures 134.8 meters in LOA, 19.6 meters in breadth and 9.6 meters in depth.
COSCO Corporation has one of the largest ship repair, ship building and offshore marine engineering operations in China.
A diversified group with activities also in dry bulk shipping, shipping agency and other sectors, it is the SGX Mainboard-listed subsidiary of China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company ("COSCO Group"), China's largest shipping group.


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Ape (Hardback)With compelling illustrations and a conservationist slant, this look at four rare great apes and one very familiar one is a book to go ape over.
Ape (Paperback)"White makes an intense emotional connection between subject and reader. . . . The great apes have found their John Singer Sargent." Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Beware of the Crocodile (Hardback)Explore an informative, playfully illustrated story about one of the worlds most dangerous animals: the crocodile.
Bird Builds a Nest A First Science Storybook (Hardback)A gentle, sweetly illustrated concept book takes on physical forces as young children learn about pushing and pulling.
Bird Builds a Nest A First Science Storybook (Paperback)These illustrations, in their stylized beauty . . . highlight the texts focus on science. The entire reading experience indeed heralds a beautiful day. The Horn Book (starred review)
Can We Save the Tiger? (Paperback)A stunningly beautiful book as well as an eloquent appeal and a consciousness raiser. The Horn Book
Caterpillar and Bean A First Science Storybook (Hardback)Observe the ways plants and insects interact in a gentle introduction to growing for budding scientists.
Chameleons Are Cool (Trade Paperback)The ability to change color, a sharp-shooting tongue, and skin covering your eyes now that is cool.
Exploring Space: From Galileo to the Mars Rover and Beyond (Hardback)Launch into a truly out-of-this-world examination of the past, present, and future of humans in space.
Fabulous Frogs (Paperback)Rich in greens and browns and full of splattery textures, especially the frogs. Most frog books focus on life cycle, this one nicely highlights diversity instead. Kirkus Reviews
Fabulous Frogs (Hardback)There are so many kinds of frogs in the world more than 5,000! and all of them are fabulous.
Fox Explores the Night: A First Science Storybook (Hardback)Young readers are invited to join a determined fox as she sets out to find her dinner in this simple, stylish introduction to light and dark.
Grandma Elephant's in Charge (Paperback)Cheerfully informal. . . . Lighthearted and affectionate. Bulletin of the Center for Childrens Books
Gulliver's Travels: Voyage to Lilliput (Paperback)The first adventure in Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels, retold by Martin Jenkins and illustrated by British Childrens Laureate Chris Riddell.
Life: The First Four Billion Years The Story of Life from the Big Bang to the Evolution of Humans (Hardback)Award-winning childrens book creators Martin Jenkins and Grahame Baker-Smith team up for a large-scale look at our planet, from the big bang to the dinosaurs and beyond.
The Emperor's Egg (Trade Paperback)"Students who are wild about penguins and classrooms doing units on them will find The Emperor's Egg an action-packed read." School Library Journal
The Emperor's Egg (Trade Paperback)Fabulous facts about nature's most devoted dad, in an utterly charming picture book.
The Emperor's Egg (EBook)Fabulous facts about nature's most devoted dad, in an utterly charming picture book.
The History of Money From Bartering to Banking (Hardback)With clarity and humor, Martin Jenkins and Satoshi Kitamura take readers on a fascinating tour of the history of money.
The History of Money From Bartering to Banking (EBook)With clarity and humor, Martin Jenkins and Satoshi Kitamura take readers on a fascinating tour of the history of money.
The History of Money From Bartering to Banking (Paperback)A snappy course in the evolution of exchange. . . . Thoughtful and entertaining. Kirkus Reviews
The Squirrels' Busy Year A First Science Storybook (Hardback)Budding scientists will enjoy a gentle introduction to the seasons as squirrels scamper through the winter, spring, summer, and fall.
Titanic (Paperback)Explore the glory and tragedy of the Titanic in a fascinating book that traces the events leading up to her fateful end.
Under Threat An Album of Endangered Animals (Hardback)Travel the world in a stunning, informative book about animals under threat of extinction.


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GAINSWave Erectile Dysfunction Treatment in Mercer Island, Wa
As we grow older, our bodies change and different areas of our life are effected. Unfortunately for many men, one of the changes that comes with age is reduced sexual performance caused by erectile dysfunction.
Though reduction in sexual performance can impact all people, men in particular tend to suffer from a reduction in blood flow, caused by blocked or restricted blood vessels, which is the cause of erectile dysfunction. In the past, Mercer Island men with ED were forced to turn to painful surgery or medications with unpleasant side effects. Now, there's a new option: GAINSWave ED treatment. This innovative treatment is the first FDA-approved, noninvasive treatment for erectile dysfunction correction, and the high-frequency waves it uses to correct ED have left many men wondering how they hadn't heard of GAINSWave before.
GAINSWave Solutions for Mercer Island Men
The lack of treatment options for ED in Mercer Island and surrounding areas has been an ongoing problem. The only options were prescription medication or invasive surgical procedures – and neither of them had good track records, not to mention the fact that they could leave men with painful, lingering side effects.
Now, the innovative GAINSWave procedure uses high-frequency acoustical waves to break down blockages, widen narrowed blood vessels, and encourage the growth of new ones. The pulsating sound waves used by GAINSWave will revitalize blood flow and encourage lasting erections.
GAINSWave is suitable for men of all ages in Mercer Island since it doesn't require medication or surgery. This non-invasive, groundbreaking method has gained the attention of many U.S. doctors and is the first FDA-approved treatment option for ED.
Let GAINSWave Help You!
This revolutionary procedure is able to help with all forms of ED, even Peyronie's Disease. It restores the ability to have enjoyable and strong erections, while enhancing blood flow and breaking down scar tissue. Unlike most treatments on the market today, GAINSWave doesn't rely on surgery or medication.
Benefits of GAINSWave treatment include:
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There are a growing number of GAINSWave physicians in the United States, and Dr. Amanda Brimhall is one of them. She is the founder and head physician at Waterfront Wellness, and is pleased to offer this new treatment to Mercer Island men with ED. Contact her today to begin restoring your body and quality of life!
Other Areas we Serve
- Seattle
- Bellevue
- Kirkland
- Redmond
- Sammamish
- Bothell
- Renton
- Issaquah
- North Bend
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- Auburn
- Mercer Island


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In this update: More photos from NIWeek!
Today's Featured Sponsors
Click on the logos above and see some exciting stuff!
When Ed, Steve and Keith traveled to Austin TX to attend the National Instruments NIWeek convention, we met thousands of attendees; some were NI employees and we met a lot of families and students traveling to the event with their professors. Everything is big in Texas, and when the longest and fastest car shows up, folks even brought their parents in specifically to see the Eagle. With everyone carrying a smartphone except Ed, there were literally thousands of people taking photos. Whenever we saw hands lift up to take a photo, we would invite them over the fence to stand along side it. When time would allow, we took a few photos ourselves. Here are a few.
The Keynote Stage was over a football field long with five giganic screens
|Sam Leopold who does PR for NI, brought her dad in to see the Eagle.
|LabVIEW R&D Manager Jon Fournie
Kami Jenkins Senior Administration Assistant for LabVIEW R&D
|Future Scientists from New Mexico Tech showed us their Muon Detector.
Students from the University of Manchester show us their best roller coaster pose!
The University of Manchester Students had a lot of fun getting a tour of the Eagle.
Karine and Mélodie from AVERNA, from Montréal Canada
|Caroline from NI sitting in the front row seat
|Les Kiser did a radio interview with Ed. Check out Speed City on ESPN Austin
|Terry Weed, VP of Sales & Marketing from MEGGITT
|Keith Crawford, Regional Sales Manager for MEGGITT
|Omid Sojoodi, Director of Embedded Systems Software, NI
Wendy and Dave, Professors from New Mexico Tech talk to us about Muons
|Students and Professors were everywhere!
Team North American Eagle™ Partners with LeMay – America's Car Museum
We are happy to announce a partnership with the LeMay – America's Car Museum. ACM spotlights America's love affair with the automobile. Featuring a nine-acre campus – with a four-story museum as the centerpiece – ACM, situated atop Tacoma, Wash., 30 minutes south of Seattle and in the shadow of Mt. Rainier, became one of the world's largest auto museums and attractions when it opened in June 2012.
LeMay – America's Car Museum – Tacoma Washington
ACM is designed to preserve history and celebrate the world's automotive culture. The spacious facility houses up to 350 cars, trucks and motorcycles from private owners, corporations, and the LeMay collection, which amassed a Guinness Book record of more than 3,500 vehicles in the mid-'90s.
LeMay – America's Car Museum New Sponsor
"Everybody remembers their first car, family driving vacations, a sports car they fell in love with as a teenager," says ACM CEO David Madeira. "Personal experiences with cars are at the heart of the American experience, and we're going to showcase more than a century of automotive lifestyle and history as well as the future of transportation."
The Eagle will be attending auto shows all across America promoting this unique facility.
Mobile Apps Keep Improving!
We have been hard at work, making significant improvements and adding new features to our mobile apps. Both our iOS and Android (Android 4.0+) apps have been given new interfaces as well as some new pages. We hope that you like the upgrades that we have made. If you haven't already, be sure to download our mobile app to your Android or iOS powered phone or tablet.
Follow us on Twitter @landspeed763
Eric Wittler With His Lenovo Laptop
See more photos of the Eagle at ChasingClouds.net


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|You can see that it is Christmas because it is labeled as such.
|On Snapper, on Ripsaw, on Toothy and Chomper!
|Brownest of the brown malted beverages.
It certainly looks fantastic in the glass, however the scent says to me this will be quite hoppy. That's a shame because nowhere on this does it state that the Ale part is actually a Pale Ale variant. Son, I am disappoint. Eh, there is always the off chance that this is one of the few pale ales I can stand. Let's find out!
Well, the answer is a resounding "Go to hell". This is one of the bitterest beers I've had in a long time, and it also had a ton of sour notes to it. Just awful. I will admit I thought at first that the bottle was skunked, and I think I might be right, because I dumped this one and got a second one and it tasted a little better, but not by much. Less sour, but still with some sourness along with the bitterness. Ugh, not a great experience for me. Beer should never really be sour at all. Bitter, sure. A little bitter is pretty decent, but sour? It should never taste sour. Yeech. I feel that Pale Ale lovers might like this more than I did, but I don't know considering the sourness aspect. Christmas Ale? More like Shitmas Ale.
On the FACE Rating System, this gets 3 Frownie Faces. Not only is it sour, it costs an arm and a leg. If I wanted to drink shitty beer, I'd have paid a lot less and gotten some Coors. At least that is cheap and when cold, not terrible. Not even coldness could save this awful beer. Stay the fuck away, and have a Merry Christmas without it! Real shame though, because I love that artwork!


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BELLEVILLE, Ont. May 3, 2016/ Troy Media/ – It must be a huge relief for the members of a jury when an eight-week trial ends. Even so, it's not often that half-a-dozen jurors dissolve into tears immediately after their verdict is announced.
That's what happened on April 26 after a Lethbridge, Alta., jury found David and Collet Stephan guilty of failing to provide the necessaries of life for their son Ezekiel. The 19-month-old boy died in 2012 after contracting meningitis and spending eight minutes without air in an inadequately equipped ambulance taking him to hospital.
One courtroom observer (a friend of the Stephans) told me six of the 12 jurors cried, some quite loudly. Global News reported that "several jurors" cried. The Canadian Press said two. The CBC – the news source that consistently painted a negative portrait of the Stephans throughout the trial – didn't mention jurors crying, saying only that Collet Stephan and "people in the courtroom's gallery" cried.
My observer told me other details that went largely unreported: the jury foreman announced the verdict in a choked, hoarse voice. The judge, too, appeared emotionally affected. He looked shocked, appeared to wipe a tear from his cheek, and was similarly hoarse with emotion when he spoke. He refused the Crown's request that the Stephans be forced to immediately surrender their passports, reportedly saying he had come to know the couple.
This was clearly a sad case, but it seems unlikely that the jurors were crying over Ezekiel's death at this late stage. That happened earlier on, during the replaying of the Stephans' urgent calls to 911.
It's illegal for jurors to disclose what happened during their deliberations, so we'll never know for sure what distressed them so. However, my suspicion is that they cried for two reasons. First, like the judge, they had gotten to know the Stephans during the trial and felt enormous sympathy towards them, and for what will now happen to them and their three other children. They realized that the Stephans are not the callous ignoramuses who tried to cure their child's meningitis with maple syrup, as some reports keep repeating. They are caring, loving parents who have already paid mightily for any apparent failings.
Second, the jurors probably disliked the horrible feeling that they had been forced to convict this couple when they would have preferred not to.
Rare, controversial cases like this demonstrate a little-known void in Canada's criminal law. We lack two features that some jurisdictions have: the right for juries to judge not only the facts but also the law, and the right for juries to know about this power.
These concepts date back to Bushell's Case. In 1670 in England, a jury acquitted two men of offences related to the public preaching of Quakerism. However, the judge wanted a conviction. He locked the jurors in overnight without food, water or heat. Still they acquitted. He then fined them for contempt and imprisoned them until they paid their fines. One stalwart juror, Edward Bushell, refused to pay. A higher court eventually freed him, establishing the principle that jurors cannot be punished for their conscientiously held verdict.
Some U.S. states have even incorporated this principle into their state constitutions. For instance, Maryland's constitution says this: "In the trial of all criminal cases, the Jury shall be the Judges of Law, as well as of fact. . . ."
Often called "jury nullification," this process of judging the law and acquitting was widely used during Prohibition to invalidate alcohol control laws that jurors felt were unjust.
Canadian juries actually have a similar power to exercise their consciences and rebel against what they see as an unjust application of the law. Mandatory jury secrecy ensures this – provided a juror is sufficiently independent-minded and logical to figure it out. The problem is, jurors can't be told about it. Lawyers who tried to encourage such juror mutiny would be in contempt of court.
It's an interesting contradiction. Citizens are ultimately the source of our laws. We trust them to make new laws and change old ones by voting for representatives in Parliament, or becoming representatives themselves. But when it comes to making law in the courtroom, we deny them the knowledge of their power.
Karen Selick is a lawyer and commentator.
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Arc'teryx LEAF Talos LT HalfshellPosted in Arcteryx, GEAR, MANUFACTURER SECTIONS, MILITARY UNIFORMS / CLOTHING on May 17th, 2013 by M M
The Talos LT Halfshell from the LEAF (Law Enforcement and Armed Forces) division of Arc'teryx debuted earlier this year at the 2013 SHOT Show, and is based on the Talos Halfshell but with a low profile collar and no pit zips or 'roll and stow' sleeve system. Like the Talos Halfshell, the LT version is part of LEAF's Armour Compatible Layering system. It's a no-melt, no-drip lightweight long-sleeved work shirt that uses two different materials in its construction to provide hot weather comfort and durability.


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The mortgage-bond industry is taking steps toward creating standards meant to help kick-start sales as the government seeks to wean the housing market from its support.
The Structured Finance Industry Group, which represents firms from banks to money managers, plans to release the first in a series of papers today mapping out its effort to create recommended contract language for new securities to address the mistrust that's plagued the market since the 2008 financial crisis. About 200 individuals from 50 companies are working on the project, called RMBS 3.0.
Rebuilding confidence in the private mortgage-bond market will be needed for the government to shake off its dominant role in the $9.4 trillion home-finance system, said Eric Kaplan, who is helping lead the SFIG effort. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said in a June speech that his department was also starting an initiative to bolster the market for mortgage bonds without taxpayer backing, known as nonagency securities.
"Whether it's slowly or quickly, that day will come, and if we haven't solved the issues, we may not have the investors to provide that capital," Kaplan, an executive at Shellpoint Partners LP, the lender backed by mortgage-bond pioneer Lewis Ranieri, said yesterday on a conference call with reporters.
The SFIG has about 250 members including lenders from Bank of America Corp. to JPMorgan Chase Co., investors such as BlueMountain Capital Management LLC and Prudential Financial Inc., and issuers such as Redwood Trust Inc., as well as rating firms, trustees, lawyers and accountants.
In the paper to be released today, the group is seeking to address mortgage-bond terms ranging from representations that loans aren't fraudulent to disclosures of underwriting guidelines and criteria for triggering reviews of loan files for breaches. In some cases, they will recommend specific language, while in others they will offer a few options for those terms.
The RMBS 3.0 initiative, which won't attempt to create "one-size-fits-all" best practices, also calls for issuers to do a better job of explaining when and how the contracts are diverging from the standards, SFIG Executive Director Richard Johns said on the conference call. The recommendations are meant to evolve amid input from market participants not part of the group and regulators, he said.
Lew said in the June speech that he's directing senior Treasury staff to bring together institutional investors and issuers to develop guidelines to reassure both sides that they won't be saddled with unfair losses. The department also is seeking public feedback on a series of related questions, with comments due by Aug. 8.
The nonagency market, which financed 36% of new mortgages in 2006, accounted for about 1% last year, while government-backed programs represented 92%, according to a report last month by Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
A previous industry effort at setting mortgage-bond standards failed. The Project Restart initiative, undertaken by the American Securitization Forum that lost many of its members to the upstart SFIG last year over a governance dispute, unveiled model contract language in 2009, before fights between investors and banks escalated over boom-era loans.
After showing signs of a greater revival, sales of nonagency notes stalled as 2013 wore on, stunted by banks paying more for loans held on their balance sheets and bond investors paying less for the safest portions of deals. Issuance is also being hampered by lenders being offered higher prices when selling most types through government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose future remains undecided, Johns said.
Banks, which say they've been pushed to bear billions of dollars in costs for underwriting flaws unrelated to the causes of defaults, are seeking to better protect themselves before selling more securities. At the same time, bond investors including Pacific Investment Management Co. and BlackRock Inc. say it's been too hard to make issuers pay what they should.
Nonagency issuance tied to new loans, which jumped to $13.4 billion last year from $3.5 billion in 2012, totals about $3.3 billion this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Annual sales peaked at about $1.2 trillion during the housing bubble.
While the market may not get that big again, it "needs a little bit of a kick-start, and to do that you need some degree of standardization," SFIG's Johns said. An intervention by regulators to create standards would constrain the market, he said.


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To me, photography is an art of observation…I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. – Elliott Erwitt
Chicago wedding photographer Angela Renée is inspired by authentic moments between people, tiny details that tell a larger story, and the beauty of unscripted portraiture. She has two masters degrees in the fine arts that enrich and influence how she sees a wedding day. With an artistic eye for creative compositions coupled with photojournalism, she photographs weddings in a style that captures the unique story of each couple and their wedding day.
Named in Top Chicago Wedding Photographers by Brides. Printed in multiple magazines including the Knot, Chicago Style Weddings, Modern Luxury Brides. Featured on Style Me Pretty, Ruffled, Brides, Rustic Wedding Chic, Style Unveiled and more.
View recent posts here. Contact Angela Renée for event and portrait inquiries or to just say hi! Follow her on Facebook or Instagram to see peeks of current weddings and engagements.


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Here on allislanders.com, we've been trying to figure out who the Islanders would protect from the Vegas Golden Knights for nearly a year. Over that span, we came up with several different combinations of players but when the lists were publicized yesterday, there was an unexpected name among the nine the Isles protected. Due to their no-movement clauses, we knew that John Tavares, Andrew Ladd, and Johnny Boychuk had to be protected. We weren't surprised to see Anders Lee, Nick Leddy, Travis Hamonic, Ryan Pulock, and Thomas Greiss on the list as well but we were surprised to see Adam Pelech. Looking back at mock drafts from fans and experts, I couldn't find more than a handful of people that put Pelech's name among those protected by the Isles. Since the list was released over 24 hours ago, Isles fans and hockey fans have struggled to make sense of Pelech's name on the list. Let's try to make sense of things.
The Islanders opted to protect five defensemen. If you told me this anytime before the lists came out on Sunday, I would have assumed they went with Boychuk, Leddy, Hamonic, Pulock, and Calvin de Haan. de Haan is coming off his best NHL season and at 26 years old, one can only hope that he keeps on getting better. He's a physical, shot-blocking, shutdown defenseman who found his offensive touch with five goals and 20 assists through 82 games this season. So if you told me they protected five defensemen I'd be surprised but relieved that de Haan was safe from Vegas. However, even with five defensemen protected, the Isles left de Haan off the list and opted for 22 year old Adam Pelech. Sure, he's been a steady defenseman through his 53 NHL games but were the Isles even at risk of losing him? If they were truly afraid, wouldn't a second or third rounder keep Vegas away? I don't know. George McPhee, the Golden Knight's General Manager, worked in the Isles' organization last year, so maybe the Isles know that he's high on Pelech?
Not only does this make de Haan an option for Vegas but it makes forwards Brock Nelson, Ryan Strome, Josh Bailey, and Casey Cizikas available as well. Given his contract, Vegas might not be interested in paying Cizikas $3.35 million annually (through the 2020-2021 season) to play in a bottom-six role. However, Josh Bailey is certainly an option. It might be a direct result of playing alongside John Tavares but the 27 year old Bailey had 13 goals and 43 assists through an impressive 2016-2017 campaign. What about Ryan Strome or Brock Nelson? Strome's numbers aren't where they should be considering his draft position (5th overall in 2011) and his rookie season numbers (50 points during the 2014-2015 season) but why not take a chance on the 23 year old who still had 30 points (13G,17A) this past season? The same goes for Brock Nelson who has scored 20 or more goals in the past three seasons. If you were the GM for the Knights, would you pass up the opportunity to grab a a 20+ goal scorer for free? However, experts and insiders believe the Isles have this covered. Apparently, the Isles' first round pick (15th overall), will be enough to prevent Vegas from selecting any of these players. I simply don't believe that. The Blue Jackets are reportedly giving up the 24th overall pick and maybe even a prospect to keep Vegas away from Josh Anderson, goaltender Joonas Korpisalo and/or their veteran defensemen. If the Blue Jackets are offering that much to keep the Knights away from those players, how could the 15th overall pick cover all of those Isles forwards? So far, this makes no sense.
Thinking about it for over a day, I think I finally found a logical reason. Keep in mind, all of this is just speculation. Unfortunately I don't have access to the sources and other tools that beat writers and reporters have but here's my best guess for what the Isles are doing. I do believe they have a trade in place and I do believe it involves their first round pick. I think the Isles had a trade in place with Vegas before they handed their list in. I don't think the list they handed in matters because I believe that they agreed on what player the Knights would take from them beforehand. All of this could have been as simple as, "We'll give you our first round pick if you take ___________.", "Deal." If this is the case, then the list the Islanders handed in on Sunday morning didn't matter all along.
So let's say this is what happened. Then, all of this makes sense. Now, figuring out who this player is. We're going to assume that the Islanders aren't ready to part ways with Nelson, Strome, or de Haan. Maybe throw Bailey on that list too. Now we're probably talking about Cizikas, Cal Clutterbuck, Thomas Hickey, and Nikolay Kulemin. Kulemin's been a pretty good two-way forward throughout his three years with the Isles but he hasn't really lived up to the $4.1 million he's making annually. This upcoming season will be the final season on his four-year deal. Would Vegas be willing to take Kulemin for the 15th overall pick? I don't see why not. Vegas needs to spend 60%-100% of the $73 million salary cap ($43.8 million minimum). Kulemin's $4.1 million could defiently help them reach that number. At 30 years old, Kulemin had 12 goals and 11 assists (23 points) through 72 games. He's also a solid penalty-killer that could help out the (projected) relatively young Vegas players become better two-way players. Come trade deadline time, Kulemin could also be used as a player Vegas can ship off as a rental for a second or third round pick. Seems like a no-brainer for me.
The Expansion Draft will be held in Las Vegas this Wednesday, and nothing will make sense for sure until then. For now, the speculation and rumors continue.


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Crusading mycologist Paul Stamets says fungi can clean up everything from oil spills to nuclear meltdowns.
Pioppino mushrooms (Agrocybe aegerita) induced tumor regression, reversing cancer in lab mice. The species also controlled blood sugar in diabetic mice.
For Paul Stamets, the phrase "mushroom hunt" does not denote a leisurely stroll with a napkin-lined basket. This morning, a half-dozen of us are struggling to keep up with the mycologist as he charges through a fir-and-alder forest on Cortes Island, British Columbia. It's raining steadily, and the moss beneath our feet is slick, but Stamets, 57, barrels across it like a grizzly bear heading for a stump full of honey. He vaults over fallen trees, scrambles up muddy ravines, plows through shin-deep puddles in his rubber boots. He never slows down, but he halts abruptly whenever a specimen demands his attention.
This outing is part of a workshop on the fungi commonly known as mushrooms — a class of organisms whose cell walls are stiffened by a molecule called chitin instead of the cellulose found in plants, and whose most ardent scientific evangelist is the man ahead of us. Stamets is trying to find a patch of chanterelles, a variety known for its exquisite flavor. But the species that stop him in his tracks, and bring a look of bliss to his bushy-bearded face, possess qualities far beyond the culinary.
He points to a clutch of plump oyster mushrooms halfway up an alder trunk. "These could clean up oil spills all over the planet," he says. He ducks beneath a rotting log, where a rare, beehive-like Agarikon dangles. "This could provide a defense against weaponized smallpox." He plucks a tiny, gray Mycena alcalina from the soil and holds it under our noses. "Smell that? It seems to be outgassing chlorine." To Stamets, that suggests it can break down toxic chlorine-based polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.
Most Americans think of mushrooms as ingredients in soup or intruders on a well-tended lawn. Stamets, however, cherishes a grander vision, one trumpeted in the subtitle of his 2005 book, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Mushroom-producing fungi, he believes, can serve as game changers in fields as disparate as medicine, forestry, pesticides and pollution control. He has spent the past quarter-century preaching that gospel to anyone who will listen.
Paul Stamets shows off mushrooms in a growing room at Fungi Perfecti, his family business and farm. Work done there has inspired potential solutions to such global problems as radioactive waste, global warming, oil spills and cancer.
If his data were less persuasive, he might be dismissed as an eccentric myco-utopian. Stamets has no regular academic or institutional affiliation; his research is funded mostly by the profits from his private company, Fungi Perfecti, which sells gourmet and medicinal mushrooms (along with growing kits, mushroom-derived supplements and mushroom-related books and knickknacks) by mail order and at health food stores.
With his Woodstockian hirsuteness and frank enthusiasm for mushrooms of the psychoactive sort, Stamets often comes across more as a hippie mystic than a dispassionate scientist. "Our bodies and our environs are habitats with immune systems," he writes in Mycelium Running, and fungi "are a common bridge between the two." He describes mycelium, the web of fibrous tissue from which mushrooms spring, as "the neurological network of nature," a "sentient membrane" that has "the long-term health of the host environment in mind." To some, such language seems uncomfortably metaphysical.
Yet Stamets' ideas have gained an expanding audience among mainstream scientists, environmental engineers, federal officials and Silicon Valley investors. His 2008 talk at the TED Conference, the annual hajj of tech barons and thought leaders, has snagged more than 1.5 million hits since it was posted online; it also earned Stamets invitations to brainstorming sessions with Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the guys who run Google.
"It helps that he's brilliant," says Eric Rasmussen, a former Defense Department scientist and disaster expert collaborating with Stamets to decontaminate the zone around Japan's Fukushima nuclear reactor with mushrooms. Rasmussen compares Stamets to visionary entrepreneur-scientists like Thomas Edison or "some of the truly fine amateur naturalists or astronomers of the 17th and 18th centuries — people who were experts in their fields, but had other ways to occupy their days."
Mushroom cultures are propagated at the Fungi Perfecti farm and sold as part of its growing kits.
Stamets occupies some of his days teaching fungus aficionados and would-be mycotechnologists, both here at the eco-oriented Hollyhock Lifelong Learning Centre and at his mushroom farm in Washington state. He runs a business that has 47 employees and ships goods worldwide. Somehow, he also manages to juggle a diverse array of experiments — often in tandem with researchers at universities or nonprofit outfits — aimed at finding fungal solutions to global problems. "The path to the future," he likes to say, "is the path of the mycelium."
A Planetary Web
However poetically expressed, Stamets' notion that mushrooms bridge human and environmental immune systems is grounded in solid biology. On the evolutionary tree, the animal and fungal kingdoms sprout from the same branch, splitting from each other long after plants diverged. And fungi knit together the lives of plants, animals and the Earth itself in some very concrete ways.
There are an estimated 1.5 million species of fungi, comprising yeasts and molds along with mushroom-producing macrofungi. All these organisms share certain basic traits with animals: They inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, as we do, and they are susceptible to many of the same germs. Like us, they get their energy by consuming other life forms rather than by photosynthesis.
Although he's obsessed with finding new uses for mushrooms, Stamets is also a passionate scholar of ancient mycotechnology. He often wears one example: a traditional Transylvanian hat made of amadou, the spongy inner layer of horse's hoof fungus (Fomes fomentarius), which can be processed into a warm, feltlike fabric. Highly flammable, amadou has also served as tinder for flintlock guns and prehistoric campfires. (Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old "ice man" found in an Alpine glacier, was carrying the stuff in his pouch.) Its absorbent and antimicrobial properties made it ideal for dressing wounds and preserving foods. And amadou was the first medicinal mushroom on record: "Hippocrates described it in 450 B.C. as an anti-inflammatory," Stamets notes.
But a fungus's body is radically different from an animal's. Yeasts are unicellular, while molds and macrofungi take the form of mycelia, networks of threadlike membranes, each a single cell thick, that can infest a rotting orange, infiltrate acres of woodland or fuse together to make a mushroom. Mycelia absorb nutrients from their surroundings and can rapidly change their growth patterns and other behavior in response to the environment.
"They have cellular intelligence," Stamets says. "When you walk through the forest, they leap up in search of debris to feed on. They know you're there."
When fungi colonized land a billion years ago, some established a niche as Earth's great decomposers — key to the creation of soil. Their mycelia exude enzymes and acids that turn rock into biologically accessible minerals and unravel the long-chain molecules of organic matter into digestible form. Fungal mycelia hold soil together, help it retain water and make its nutrients available to vegetation.
Species known as mycorrhizal fungi use their mycelia to envelop or penetrate plant roots, contributing nitrogen compounds and mineral salts in exchange for sugars from the host organism. (When a sapling is languishing in the shade of a larger tree, these fungi can sense the problem and send the youngster extra nourishment.) Mushroom-producing fungi feed animals; animals return the favor by spreading fungal spores.
To ward off pathogens, fungi have developed an arsenal of antibacterial and antiviral compounds — a resource that traditional peoples harnessed in the form of mushroom teas and foodstuffs. Alexander Fleming exploited them in more modern fashion when he isolated penicillin from the Penicillium rubens mold in 1929. Fungi can also parasitize and kill insects, including those troublesome to us.
For millennia, humans have exploited microfungi (molds and yeasts) to create edibles such as cheese, bread, beer and wine. But in Western culture, Stamets observes, the powers of macrofungi have been largely ignored, an attitude he refers to as "mycophobia" or "biological racism." Mushrooms were relegated to the Campbell's can, or outlawed when they blew too many minds. They were discounted, devalued, shunted aside.
Just as Paul Stamets was, before he found his own mycelial path.
The Mycelial Path
To understand how Stamets came to believe mushrooms could save the world, it helps to know how they saved Stamets.
He was born in 1955 in Salem, Ohio, one of four brothers. His father, an engineer, owned a firm that oversaw construction projects for the U.S. Army. Stamets was a shy kid with a crippling stutter who dreamed of becoming a trailblazing scientist. "We lived in a big house with a lab in the basement," he recalls, "and I looked up every experiment I could find." He nearly blew the place up on several occasions while tinkering with chemicals.
Then, when he was 12, his father's business failed and the family splintered. Stamets' mother decamped with him and his twin brother to a small apartment in Columbiana, Ohio, where they lived in poverty. Eventually, she moved with the boys to her own parents' vacation home near Seattle and sent them on scholarship to a boarding school in Pennsylvania. Stamets felt like a misfit among preppies. He threw himself into martial arts (later earning black belts in both tae kwon do and hwa rang do) and identified with the counterculture that was reaching its crest.
During his senior year, Stamets and his brother were expelled for selling marijuana to fellow students. They hitchhiked back to Seattle, where they finished high school at a public institution. Stamets spent a summer toiling as a sawmill hand before enrolling at Kenyon College in Ohio. But he still felt out of place and spent hours wandering in the woods off campus.
That's where he headed the day he tried hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. He climbed a tree, but was too intoxicated to climb down. Soon a thunderstorm blew in, and he was lashed by rain and wind. As lightning struck nearby, he realized he could die at any moment, yet the scene was overwhelmingly beautiful. He felt part of the forest and the universe as never before. He reflected on his life and how to change it. "Stop stuttering now, Paul," he told himself, repeating the phrase like a mantra.
When the weather calmed, he climbed down and hiked home. On his street, he ran into a neighbor whose attractiveness had always intensified his stammer. "Hi," she said. "How are you today?"
"Fine, thanks," he answered, with an ease that astonished him. "And you?"
From that moment, Stamets' tongue began to come untied, and he devoted himself to learning about the fungi that he credited with the change. With the help of a mushroom-identification book, he found psilocybes growing wherever he looked, and he began to probe the mysteries of other species as well.
The following summer, he dropped out and took a logging job. But the more fascinated he became with mushrooms (hallucinogenic and otherwise), the worse he felt about helping to destroy their habitat. After three crew buddies were killed in logging-related accidents, Stamets decided to try school again, this time at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. He wanted to become a mycologist.
Evergreen didn't have a mycology department, but it encouraged independent study. An environmental chemist named Michael Beug offered a course on mushrooms, and Stamets badgered him into becoming his adviser. "I've never had a student who was more driven," says Beug, who intensified his mycology research to keep up with Stamets.
(Beug also secured a license from the Drug Enforcement Administration allowing him and his students to work with psilocybin mushrooms.) Stamets learned to run the school's scanning electron microscope — a rarity in the 1970s — and was soon photographing the cell structures of mushrooms, mycelia and spores for scientists nationwide.
By the time he graduated in 1979, Stamets had been tutored by some of America's leading academic mycologists. He was an accomplished field scientist, laboratory researcher and taxonomist. He had discovered several new Psilocybe species and published a book on the genus. He was an expert cultivator, too. Yet grad school seemed economically out of reach. Stamets had recently married a woman with three kids of her own, and the couple's first child was on the way. To support his family, he remained at Evergreen as an adjunct professor and started a business with a research arm on the side.
Fungi Perfecti's first lab and grow room occupied the basement of Stamets' rented house. He began selling exotic culinary mushrooms and holding seminars for the paying public. Then, after a 1983 trip to China with two of his mentors (mycologist Gary Lincoff and physician Andrew Weil, on his way to fame as a natural-health guru), Stamets became one of the first U.S. cultivators to branch into Asian medicinal varieties. Later that year, he published The Mushroom Cultivator, a book still widely considered essential for home and commercial growers.
In 1984 Stamets dove into his business full time. Aided by loans from relatives, he bought a 20-acre farm on Kamilche Point, a few miles northwest of Olympia. And it was there where he began to discover the macrofungi's planet-changing powers.
The Fungi Perfecti Farm
Stamets' land came with a sagging farmhouse, a half-dozen cows and 400 feet of waterfront overlooking Skookum Inlet off the Puget Sound. Soon after he moved in, the sheriff rang his doorbell. "I thought, that was quick, I haven't had a chance to do anything illegal yet," he recalls. The officer informed Stamets that E. coli from sewage runoff was contaminating the local oyster beds, and served him with a court order requiring landowners to install updated septic systems in two years.
Stamets couldn't afford a new system. But he had suspected that mushroom mycelium could function as a natural filter the first time he saw its microscopic structure. In college, he confirmed his theory by testing the mycelia of various common species for absorbency; they all beat cotton hands down. He also knew that mycelia exude antibacterial compounds. So he decided to conduct a (literal) field test.
Against a backdrop of evergreens in Shelton, Wash., Fungi Perfecti supplies mushrooms to a growing market.
A marshy depression called a swale followed the gentle slope of Stamets' property, running downhill for 800 feet and ending just above the inlet. At the top of the swale, he dumped several truckloads of wood chips, which he covered with mycelium-infused growing medium — known to cultivators as spawn. Within weeks, mycelia had fully enmeshed the bed. By summer, Stamets had his first harvest of tasty Garden Giant (Stropharia rugosoannulata) mushrooms. A year after the planting, when water quality inspectors checked his runoff, they found his septic system was no longer a source of pollution; fecal bacteria levels measured a hundred times less.
Technicians from a Seattle-based bioremediation company, Enviros, learned of Stamets' success and asked him for advice on using fungi to clean up oil-soaked soil. At the time, many experts were betting on hydrocarbon-eating bacteria as an eco-friendlier alternative to the conventional way of cleaning up such contamination — which was to truck the affected soil to a landfill and replace it with clean dirt. But bacteria can have trouble breaking down petroleum's largest molecules, and they're finicky about ambient temperature and oxygen levels.
Garden Giant mushroom: Mycelial wastewater filtration system and culinary delight.
A few researchers had begun experimenting with fungi instead. It had long been known that mold and mushroom species called "white rot" fungi could eat the lignin in wood, using enzymes to convert its complex hydrocarbons into nutritious carbohydrates. Molds also sometimes colonize fuel tanks, where they use those same enzymes to consume petroleum products.
In the lab, a white-rot mold called Phanerochaete chrysoporium had shown particular thoroughness at digesting oil, but it often failed to perform under outdoor conditions. The Enviros staff hoped to find a hardier fungus, and Stamets suggested they try oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus), an aggressive white-rotter that could grow practically anywhere. He sent them some oyster mushroom spawn. The technicians covered it with oil, most of which was consumed within three weeks; mushrooms were popping up through the muck. But Enviros went bankrupt before the work could proceed further.
Petroleum-eating oyster mushrooms resembling those above can remediate soil contaminated by oil spills.
Meanwhile, Stamets began installing experimental mycelial wastewater filtration systems for other farmers (eventually with funding from the county and the state), improving on his initial design by encasing Stropharia spawn and wood chips in burlap sacks and packing them into ditches placed to catch maximum runoff.
He began touting the method in environmental journals, and in 1996 he was approached by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, operated by the Battelle Memorial Institute, known for technological solutions to energy and environmental issues. Although initial interest was in Stamets' wastewater work, excitement grew when he mentioned his foray into oil-spill remediation.
Stamets and the Battelle team began lab work to maximize the mushroom's petroleum-eating efficacy. From his research on psilocybes, he knew that different strains of a single mushroom species can have wildly varying levels of chemical activity. So the team grew a few dozen strains of oyster mushroom, testing each for oil-digesting ability in petri dishes in the lab.
Growing room manager Justin Tulloss inspects Lion's Mane mushrooms (Hericium erinaceus) at Fungi Perfecti.
The strains that consumed oil fastest were selected for further trials, and in 1998, the team used the top performers in an experiment sponsored by the Washington State Department of Transportation at a maintenance yard in Bellingham. Soil at the site was contaminated with diesel fuel at up to 20,000 parts per million, similar to concentrations on Alaskan beaches after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. That spring, WSDOT scooped out four piles of dirt. Stamets' team added layers of myceliated wood chips to one pile and covered it with a shade cloth. Two of the piles were treated only with bacterial cultures or chemical fertilizers. One pile was left as a control.
Four weeks later, the myceliated sample was light brown, sweet-smelling and bursting with mushrooms — some more than 12 inches in diameter. Insects came to eat the fungi, and their larvae attracted birds, which likely deposited seeds. After nine weeks, the pile was covered with flourishing plants. Aromatic hydrocarbons had dropped to less than 200 ppm, suitable for freeway landscaping.
"The other piles," Stamets recalls, "remained dead, dark and stinky."
The mushrooms had won.
Ants succumb to the pesticide power of green Metarhizium fungus, grown in the petri dish at right and disguised as food.
How Mushrooms Can Save the World
By then, Stamets was obsessed with the possibilities of what he called "mycorestoration," a nascent field encompassing his own and other researchers' work in mycofiltration, mycoremediation, mycoforestry and mycopesticides (most of which are terms he coined). He began amassing a genetic library of hundreds of mushroom strains — gathered on hikes through the old-growth forests of the Northwest and on trips to Europe, Asia, South America and Australia — that could be used for environmental as well as medicinal healing.
The EPA asked Stamets to help the Coast Guard find ways to clean up waterborne oil spills. In response, he invented the mycoboom, a burlap tube filled with oyster mushrooms designed to break down petroleum while floating on a slick or barricading a beach. Battelle researchers tested his fungal strains against neurotoxins and found one potent variety of psilocybin mushroom highly effective at breaking down VX nerve gas.
Stamets collaborated with the Washington State Department of Natural Resources on another successful field experiment, planting mushrooms on old logging roads to prevent silt and pollutants from clogging streams. He improved crop yields on farms and sped up reforestation in woodlands by adding mycorrhizal fungi to soil. In one case he planted broccoli together with elm oyster mushrooms; in another, he dipped Douglas fir seedlings into a slurry of puffball mushroom spores.
He invented the Life Box, a cardboard carton impregnated with tree seeds and symbiotic fungi. After use (for shipping shoes bought online, for example), the box could be torn apart and planted to replace the trees used in its manufacture.
But the invention with the greatest immediate impact on Stamets' own environment grew out of his relationship with herbal medicine practitioner Carolyn "Dusty" Yao, which began in 1997 after his first marriage fell apart. (Stamets and Yao were married, with Andrew Weil officiating, four years later.) When Yao moved in, she was dismayed to find that Stamets' old farmhouse was infested with carpenter ants — attracted, ironically, by a white-rot fungus that was crumbling the floor joists. Stamets, who had ignored the problem for years, promised to take care of it.
He wanted to use a natural pesticide that was nontoxic to humans; unsurprisingly, he began looking for one derived from fungi. He knew that a few mold species could infect insects with their spores, killing them in the process. (In some cases, a tiny mushroom pops through the corpse's skull.) Yet existing mycopesticides worked poorly against social insects, which could smell the spores and stop workers carrying them from entering the nest.
Stamets smelled a challenge.
He sent away for a sample of Metarhizium anisopliae mold, known to kill termites and carpenter ants when its spores are sprayed on them directly. His idea was to train the fungus, which normally produces spores nonstop, to hold off until the ants had carried it into the nest. In its pre-sporulating form, he thought, the insects might be attracted to Metarhizium as a source of nutrition. Once they ate it, the mycelium would consume them in return.
When Stamets cultured the mold in his lab, a white circle of mycelium spread over the petri dish from the point of inoculation; it was soon covered with green spores. He transferred bits of the mold to other dishes, where they reproduced for several generations. Eventually, white stripes emerged amid the green in one dish, where the mycelium (perhaps due to a damaged gene) was lagging in its spore production. He then took some of the white material and cultured it over many more generations, breeding a mutant strain of Metarhizium whose sporulation cycle was delayed for days or longer.
Stamets grew his developmentally delayed mycelium on rice. When it was ready, he put a teaspoon of the spawn on a dollhouse dish belonging to his then-teenage daughter, LaDena, and placed it on the kitchen floor. That night, she ran to his bedroom yelling, "Wake up! You've got to see this!" The dish was swarming with ants, which were carrying grains of myceliated rice back inside the walls. Two weeks later, the house was ant-free, and remained that way from then on. After the insects died, Stamets hypothesized, the smell of their moldy bodies warned others away.
Reishi mushrooms are used to produce the antibiotic ganomycin.
Further testing showed that other strains of M. anisopliae and another mold, Beauvaria bassiana, could also be modified to attract and then exterminate a wide variety of bugs. In 2003, Stamets patented his method and licensed it to a company that planned to bring it to market.
He used the proceeds to tear down his decaying house and build a new one, with cedar walls, a soaring roofline and a geothermal heating system. A stained-glass window dominates the living room, depicting the cosmos entwined with a mycelium-like network of dark matter.
Mushrooms for Health
Across the meadow from Stamets' home sits a cluster of hangar-size white metal sheds and Quonset huts: Fungi Perfecti's offices, labs and grow rooms. Inside, workers tend to fruiting maitake mushrooms for medicinal teas, stuff plastic bags with oyster mushroom spawn for home-growing kits, or propagate fungal cultures in clean rooms equipped with airlocks and laminar-flow benches. These days, however, the company's fastest-growing product line (co-created by Yao, now his partner in virtually all enterprises) is a line of nutraceutical mushroom extracts, sold through another facility a few miles away.
Lion's Mane mushrooms might be useful for regenerating nerves and treating Alzheimer's.
According to FDA regulations, a nutraceutical manufacturer can't claim its products are able to treat any particular illness. So Fungi Perfecti markets its tinctures as general immune-system boosters and antioxidants. But mushrooms are known to contain a host of proven disease-fighting chemicals, including polysaccharides, glycoproteins, ergosterols and triterpenoids, as well as antimicrobial and antiviral compounds, all varying according to species and strain.
Indeed, a handful of pharmaceutical medications are derived from mushrooms, including the antibiotics ganomycin (from reishi mushrooms) and campestrin (from meadow mushrooms) and the chemotherapy drugs calvacin (from giant puffballs) and Illudin S (from the glow-in-the-dark jack-o'-lantern mushrooms).
Stamets is working aggressively to add to that list, and over the past decade, he has initiated or consulted on a dozen laboratory and clinical trials aimed at deriving novel mushroom-based drugs. After the 9/11 attacks, for example, he sent hundreds of samples to the federal Bioshield program, whose mission is to develop defenses against biological weapons. Several of his proprietary strains of Agarikon (Fomitopsis officinalis) showed strong activity against H1N1 swine flu and H5N1 bird flu, as well as viruses in the smallpox family.
Stamets furnished capsules of freeze-dried fungus for a seven-year, NIH-funded study by Bastyr University and the University of Minnesota to determine whether turkey tail mushrooms could help breast cancer patients whose immune systems had been compromised by radiation therapy. Last year, the researchers announced that natural-killer cell activity, CD8 T-cell counts and other immune functions improved significantly with the treatment.
Stamets' mother, by coincidence, was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic breast cancer in 2009, at age 83.
Turkey tail mushrooms: Stamets sent these to his mother when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Although she was ineligible for the trial, he put her on turkey tail capsules to supplement her conventional chemotherapy drugs, Taxol and Herceptin. After six months, Patricia Stamets' tumor disappeared, and today she remains cancer-free. Though a single anecdote falls far short of proof, the deeply religious woman credits prayer as well as mushrooms for her return to health.
Renewing a Nuclear Forest
Divine intervention notwithstanding, progress toward Stamets' mycotechnological promised land has been slow. His medical research has yet to produce a marketable drug. His mycopesticides are held up in product development. His mycorenewal ideas still haven't been applied on a large-scale basis. When he proposed using mycobooms to battle the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, officials never even responded.
Yet momentum may be building. Last year, the EPA awarded Stamets $80,000 to design a mycofiltration system for managing storm water runoff. A global environmental consulting firm, NewFields, has adapted some of the techniques Stamets pioneered to remediate polluted soil. In Ecuador, the nonprofit Amazon Mycorenewal Project, run by an alumna of Stamets' seminars, plans to use mushrooms to clean up oil waste left by drillers. In New York, another nonprofit is experimenting with mycobooms to help cleanse the Newtown Creek toxic-waste Superfund site. In Grafton, Mass., renowned environmental engineer John Todd is using a Stamets-designed mycofilter to scrub petrochemicals from an old mill canal.
And then there's Stamets' plan to redeem the devastated landscape around Fukushima. Shortly after the 2011 tsunami-driven meltdown, he posted an online manifesto called "The Nuclear Forest Recovery Zone," which was predicated on a little-known fact about mushrooms: Many species are able to remove and absorb heavy metals, including radioactive isotopes, from soil.
Stamets' proposal was simple. First, fence off the contaminated area around the reactors. Then chip the wood debris from ruined buildings and trees, and spread it over the area to make substrate. Replant native trees along with mycorrhizal fungi, which will help the trees grow while drawing radioactive material from the soil. Harvest the mushrooms as soon as they form, and dispose of them as nuclear waste. Repeat as necessary for several decades or even centuries until the Geiger counters stop screaming. The alternative, he pointed out, was to cart away millions of tons of soil and bury it as nuclear waste, taking up far more landfill space and depriving Japan of some of its best farmland and forestland forever.
The blog post went viral, although even many hardcore mycophiles assumed the plan was hypothetical. Eric Rasmussen, however, believed it was worth a try. The veteran disaster-relief coordinator had met Stamets nearly a decade earlier at a conference Rasmussen organized on environmental issues in refugee camps. "Paul had a lot of clever ideas that seemed both benign and effective, which is a rare combination," Rasmussen recalls. The two became close friends.
Last year, aiming to make the Nuclear Forest Recovery Zone a reality, Stamets partnered with Battelle researchers at the Energy Department's former nuclear production facility in Hanford, Wash., to test various mushroom species for their ability to take up cesium. Results are expected within the next few months.
Stamets, as usual, is optimistic. "I know some of my hypotheses sound rather extraordinary," he says. "I may be a little weird, but I'd rather be weird and right than normal and wrong."
Mushrooms are potential miracle workers, capable of cleaning up oil spills and radioactive contamination, filtering bacteria-tainted wastewater, speeding reforestation of clear-cut woodlands, boosting agricultural yields, controlling insect pests and treating ailments ranging from cancer and bird flu to diabetes and dementia.
This gallery is a companion piece to our July/August feature "How Mushrooms Can Save the World."
Based in Shelton, Wash., Fungi Perfecti sells gourmet and medicinal mushrooms, growing kits, extracts and other products online and in specialty shops. Each week, grow rooms, like the one pictured here, produce up to 4,400 pounds of mushrooms and mycelia, the cobweb-like membrane from which mushrooms sprout.
"I know of no other technology except computer science that can be as influential in the survival of human life on this planet than that of mushroom mycelium," says Stamets, who has been awarded six patents for mushroom-based inventions. "Yet the field of mycology is underappreciated, underpopulated and underfunded." By working as an independent scientist-entrepreneur, he can follow his mycological obsessions wherever they lead him.
Once a culture is established, it can be used to inoculate a growing medium known as spawn, which can be made from sawdust, rice, damp cardboard or other fungus-friendly material. Small quantities of mushrooms may be grown directly from spawn, in bags or pots. Spawn can be mixed with a bulkier substrate, such as wood chips or straw, to cover a larger area. In this way, the mycelium from a single petri dish can be cultivated to help provide food or medicine for thousands of people, or remove pollutants from soil or water.
Over his three decades of research, Stamets (at right, with Fungi Perfecti employee Bulmaro Solana) has learned that different strains within a single mushroom species can contain markedly different active compounds. Some strains of Agarikon, for example, show strong activity against influenza viruses; others do not. For this reason, Stamets maintains an ever-expanding gene library of mushroom strains — more than 500 at last count — in petri dishes at the Fungi Perfecti manufacturing plant.
Many of the species Stamets collects can be found only in forests where trees have been growing undisturbed for at least 120 years. Such woodlands are increasingly rare because of logging and development, and Stamets worries that potentially beneficial mushroom varieties, some of them not yet recognized, are being lost in the process. "Preserving mycodiversity is a huge argument for the preservation of old-growth forests," he says.
1) In a grow room at Fungi Perfecti, employee Justin Tulloss tends to a crop of Lion's Mane (Hericium erinaceus). This species tastes like lobster when cooked, but what excites scientists, including Stamets, is the mushroom's medical potential. In 1991, Japanese researchers discovered that Lion's Mane contains two novel classes of nerve growth factor — molecules called hericenones and erinacines — that stimulate the differentiation and re-myelination of neurons. Since then, several laboratory trials have confirmed that these chemicals affect nerve regeneration.
What's more, mice with amyloid plaques like those seen in the brains of Alzheimer's patients performed better on maze tests — and showed higher levels of curiosity about unfamiliar objects — when fed Lion's Mane. In one small study in Japan, human patients with mild cognitive impairments showed significant improvement when given the mushrooms in powdered form. None of this proves conclusively that Lion's Mane can improve mental function, but Stamets is working with university researchers to explore possible therapeutic uses for these and many other mushroom species.
Stamets and his wife, Carolyn "Dusty" Yao (in their home office), have run Fungi Perfecti longer than a decade. The two became a couple in the late '90s after Yao, an herbal medicine practitioner, took a temporary job as bookkeeper for the company. When Yao moved into Stamets' ant-infested farmhouse, Stamets was inspired to invent a fungal pesticide, for which he was eventually awarded several patents.
Yao also helped Stamets branch out into the nutraceutical mushroom extracts that now form a major part of the business. She co-wrote the book MycoMedicinals: An Informational Treatise on Mushrooms with Stamets, and she regularly accompanies him on foraging expeditions. "Dusty finds at least four times more mushrooms than I do," Stamets says. "I just follow her around, and she brings them to my attention."
Although his passion for mycology was sparked by his own experiences with psilocybin mushrooms as a young man, Stamets no longer advocates casual use of hallucinogens. "I'm conservative when it comes to psychedelics," he says. "I don't want to be around people who use them irresponsibly, or who deal them. It just feels unclean. When something is so powerful and sacred, it should be treated with the utmost respect."
Pioneered by Stamets, mycorestoration draws on the natural properties of mushroom-bearing fungi to fight human-made pollution. Oyster mushrooms, for example, can digest the complex hydrocarbons in wood, so they can also be used to break down petroleum byproducts. Garden Giants use their mycelia to trap and eat bacteria, so they can filter E. coli from agricultural runoff. Field experiments have shown that these applications work in principle; the challenge now, says Stamets, is making them practical on an industrial scale.
Stamets' latest inspiration is to use mushrooms to clean up contaminated soil around Japan's Fukushima meltdown zone. His idea is to seed the area with fungi like Gomphidius glutinosus, whose mycelia are known to absorb radioactive isotopes. When mushrooms sprout, workers in protective suits would dispose of them as nuclear waste. Stamets recently co-founded a company devoted to implementing the concept. "This is a project that's picking up steam very rapidly," he says.
The cottony mycelium of a Garden Giant mushroom grows on fermented wood chips.
Scanning electron microscope images of human brain cells.
Scanning electron microscope images of mushroom mycelium.
When you look at a mushroom, what you're seeing is a fungus's fruit. It emerges from a mass of fibrous tissue known as mycelium, which penetrates whatever material the mushroom is growing on. To the naked eye, mycelium resembles cottony fluff or cobwebs. Viewed through an electron microscope, however, it's an intricate weave of branching, threadlike membranes whose structure, Stamets notes, resembles a network of brain cells. And that, he argues, is evidence that fungi possess a kind of intelligence.
The analogies are striking. Brains and mycelia grow new connections, or prune existing ones, in response to environmental stimuli. Both use an array of chemical messengers to transmit signals throughout a cellular web. (One part of a mycelium, for example, can order another to send nutrients from hundreds of feet away.) The similar structures of fungal and neural networks, Stamets believes, reflect the fact that both systems evolved to do similar jobs — and do them with maximum efficiency.
But he doesn't stop there. Stamets perceives mycelium-like patterns in the information architecture of the Internet, in the matrices of string theory, in computer models of the web of dark matter suffusing the cosmos. Such recurrences, he believes, are signs of an evolutionary intelligence governing reality itself. "Nature tends to build on its successes," he writes in his book Mycelium Running. "The mycelial archetype can be seen throughout the universe."
Stamets is researching a wide variety of ways in which fungi could help solve human problems. Here is a partial list:
Environmental cleanup Mushrooms could be used to break down petrochemicals or absorb radiation from contaminated soil and water.
Wastewater filtration Mushroom mycelia could cleanse runoff from storm drains, farms or logging roads. They could be used to filter out the nitrates, endocrine disrupters and pharmaceutical residues that disrupt ecosystems and damage human health.
Pesticides Fungal bug-killers could be used to target troublesome species while remaining nontoxic to others.
Medicines Mushrooms could provide new antibiotic, antiviral and immune-boosting compounds and even chemotherapies.
Forestry Planting symbiotic mushroom species could speed reforestation in clear-cut woodlands.
Agriculture Adding mycorrhizal fungi to soil could improve crop yields without the need for toxic chemical fertilizers.
Famine relief Mushrooms could be grown rapidly in refugee camps and disaster zones, using just wood chips or saltwater-soaked straw.
Biofuels Growing mushrooms for biodiesel could require far less soil and other resources than commonly cultivated fuel crops.
Space travel Because of their usefulness in soil creation, and the tolerance of many species for radiation, mushrooms could be grown by interstellar voyagers and used to terraform other worlds.
Agarikon (Fomitopsis officinalus) mushrooms (left) could protect against bird flu, swine flu and smallpox. Slimy spike-cap mushrooms (Gomphidius glutinosus) (right) can uptake radioactive cesium-137.
Discover Magazine


text:
NORMAN – University of Oklahoma College of Law Professor Jonathan B. Forman recently completed a month-long research fellowship in Sydney, Australia. Forman was recently awarded an Abe Greenbaum Fellowship by the Australian School of Taxation and Business at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Forman, an OU law faculty member since 1985, is the Alfred P. Murrah Professor of Law and the author of Making America Work (Urban Institute Press, 2006).
Professor Forman spent most of his fellowship time working with UNSW Senior Lecturer Gordon Mackenzie on a paper and speech entitled Pension Reform: What Can the United States and Australia Learn from Each Other? Forman also gave a speech for the UNSW Centre for Pension Studies on An American Perspective on Optimal Retirement Age.
In addition, Professor Forman spoke on Tax Reform in the United States at the University of Sydney School of Law and at the University of Queensland's T.C. Beirne School of Law in Brisbane. Forman was also the keynote speaker for a program on "Work and Tax: Intersections and Conflicts" at the University of Melbourne Law School.
Of particular note, the Treasury of the Australian Government invited Professor Forman to present a seminar in Canberra on An American Perspective on Not-for-Profit Tax Concessions. Professor Forman also met with many other Australian Government officials including Australia's Inspector-General of Taxation and senior executives in the Australian Taxation Office.
For Immediate Release
Media Contact: Evie Holzer, (405) 831-0709
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