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Balanced Rock |
I published one blog post from our day at the Arches... IF you didn't see this post (or want to re-visit it), please click HERE. In that post (October 14, 2011), I mentioned another upcoming post from The Arches. WELL---I never did get around to doing that 'upcoming' post UNTIL now.... Hope you still enjoy it!!!!!
Today, I will share with you more from The Arches ---including some of the actual ARCHES we saw that day... As I mentioned in the October post, we visited here toward the end of our trip ---and it was hotter than blue blazes that day.... We hope to go back to The Arches someday when it's not as HOT and when we are not as tired...
Salt Valley |
Skyline Arch |
Ancient Sand Dunes (Note the snow on the mountains in the background!) |
Sand Dune Arch |
Broken Arch |
Delicate Arch |
Turret Arch |
Double Arch |
Parade of the Elephants |
It was fun going back through all of these photos and 're-living' that visit in 2011. That was special ---and now, I'm ready to go back there sometime. It's a gorgeous area ---SO--- go and see it --if you can!!!!
Have a great weekend. I am going to Georgia to attend a wedding shower for my future daughter-in-law... Should be fun!!!! Since George is going with me, we hope to find some time to do some waterfalling and hiking also!!!!! See you on Monday.


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Millions of years ago, a mountain range that would have dwarfed the Andes mountains in South America, stretched over what is currently the southern-most tip of Africa.
Remnants of these mountains – called the Gondwanides, after the massive supercontinent, Gondwana over which it stretched – once spanned the southern continents of South America, Antarctica, South Africa and Australia, and parts of it now form the mountains near Cape Town in South Africa.
It is in the shadows of these ancient mountains that Dr Pia Viglietti, a post-doctoral fellow at the Evolutionary Studies Institute (ESI) at Wits University, found the secrets of one of the biggest mass extinction events that Earth has ever seen.
"We've established that climatic changes related to the devastating end of the Permian mass extinction event about 250 Million years ago were beginning earlier than previously identified," says Viglietti.
The Permian-Triassic extinction was one of Earth's largest extinction events, in which up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species became extinct.
For her PhD, Viglietti studied the fossil-rich sediments present in the Karoo, deposited during the tectonic events that created the Gondwanides, and found that the vertebrate animals in the area started to either go extinct or become less common much earlier than what was previously thought. Her research was published in Scientific Reports.
"The Karoo Basin takes up a huge portion of South Africa and most of us who drive through it do not think much of it," says Viglietti. "But if you know what you're looking for, the Karoo represents a wealth of knowledge about the story of life on Earth."
The Karoo tells a 100 million-year long story of the supercontinent Gondwana, and if you can read this rock record you will find the story of the life and death of the animals it supported.
"The Gondwanides not only influenced how and where rivers flowed (depositing sediment), it also had a significant effect on the climate, and thus the ancient fauna of the Karoo Basin," says Viglietti.
Large mountain ranges put a lot of weight on the Earth's crust, creating a depression in the crust. This can be described by using the analogy of a person standing on the edge of a diving board. The person represents the "load" (or weight) of the mountain while the diving board is the earth's crust. The depression causes sediment to accumulate around the mountain's base. It is in this sediment, where rocks and fossils are preserved.
As mountains erode, they put less weight on the Earth's crust, and the depression decreases, just like the diving board would react to the diver jumping off it. This was the effect that the Gondwanides had on the sedimentation in the Karoo Basin over a 100 Million years. The traces of this tectonic dance are preserved by periods o
f deposition and non-deposition.
"During my PhD, I have identified a new tectonic "loading" event (mountain building event) that kick-started sedimentation in the Latest Permian Karoo Basin," says Viglietti.
The sediments during this loading event also provided evidence of climatic changes as well as evidence of a previously overlooked "faunal turnover", that points to the start of the end Permian mass extinction event.
"Within the last million years before this major biotic crisis, the animals had already started to react. I interpret this faunal change as resulting from climatic effects relating to the end-Permian mass extinction event – only occurring much earlier than previously identified," says Viglietti.

subset: commoncrawl


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Saturday night is date night Ms. Bunny calls, so Eli is turning the keys over to an evil bunny with nasty big pointy teeth, aka the Rabett of Caerbannog. He (well Eli was not going to get close enough to really tell, those nasty pointy teeth you know, and the lack of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch) spent his spare time learning Python to put the Wattsbuster package together. It displays global-average temperature estimates from
stations interactively selected by a user (on a global
map). The package (it is not yet totally user friendly) strips away the mystery behind the NASA/NOAA/CRU
global-temperature computations for non-technical folks. Being
able to *show* the non believers rather than just *telling* them seems to be
helpful... Instructions on downloading and installation can be found at the end of this post and a FAQ follows (btw this is Caerbannog's post)
Unlike many other aspects of climate-science (hockey-stick with
principal components, regressions, etc.), the global-temperature anomaly,
involving nothing more than simple averaging, is something that bunnies can
explain to non-technical friends/relatives in a way
that they actually *get it* (at least to some extent).
This seems to be the Watts-skeptic crowd's biggest vulnerability --
they've gone out on a limb by being consistently wrong about stuff that I
can explain to high-school/junior-college-educated folks...
###### 1. How we can know what the earth's temperature is ########
Basically, you average together a whole bunch of measurements over the Earth's surface.
But it should be made clear that the NASA/NOAA/CRU are more interested in quantifying
how average surface temperatures have *changed* than in just calculating the
"Earth's temperature".
Look at the Y-axis of one of the NASA global-temperature plots. What you will see
is a Y-axis range of on the order of -1 deg C to +1 deg C.
Obviously, the Earth's temperature does not lie between -1 and +1 degrees. What
the NASA plots show is how the average of the temperature measurements taken by GHCN
stations has *changed* over time.
It should be emphasized that we aren't interested so much in calculating the Earth's absolute
temperature as we are in estimating how it has *changed* over time.
Here is a basic summary as to how to compute average temperature changes from GHCN data.
1) For each station and month, calculate the average temperature over the 1951-1980 period.
i.e. for each station, average all the Jan temps over the 1951-1980 period to produce
the January baseline average temp for that station. Do the same for the
Feb, Mar, ... etc. temps.
For any given month, stations with insufficient data to compute 1951-1980 baselines
are thrown out (that will still leave you with many thousands of stations for
every month of the year). What constitutes "sufficient data" is a judgement call --
I require at least 15 out of 30 years in the baseline period. NASA requires 20 (IIRC).
Results are very insensitive to this (10, 15, 20, etc. years all produce very similar results).
You will end up with a 2-d array of baseline average temperatures,
indexed by GHCN station number and month.
2) For every temperature station, subtract that station's Jan baseline average from
the Jan temperatures for all years (1880-present). Do the same for Feb, Mar,
Apr, etc.
These are the station monthly temperature *anomalies*. "Anomaly"
is just a $10 word for the difference between a station's monthly
temperature for any given year and that station's baseline average
temperature for that month.
3) The crudest, most-dumbed-down procedure to compute global-average
temperature anomalies is simply to average together the monthly
anomalies for all stations for each year. This is a very crude
technique that will still give you not-too-bad "ballpark" global
average estimates.
4) The problem with (3) is that stations are not evenly distributed
around the globe. (If stations were uniformly spaced all over the
Earth, the method described in 3 would be ideal).
With method (3), regions with dense station coverage (like the continental
USA) would be over-weighted in the global average, while less densely-sampled
regions (like the Amazon region, Antarctica, etc.) would be under-weighted.
To get around this problem, we divide up the Earth's surface into grid-cells.
Then we compute the average temperature anomalies by applying (3)
just to stations in each grid cell to produce a single average
anomaly value per month/year for each grid-cell. Temperature values for all
stations in each grid-cell get merged into a single average value for that grid-cell.
Then we just average all the grid-cell values together for each year to
produce the global average temperature anomalies.
The surface areas of fixed lat/long grid-cells change
with latitude, so you will need to scale your results by the grid-cell
areas to avoid over-weighting high-latitude temperature stations.
An alternate approach is to adjust the grid-cell longitude dimensions
as you go N/S from the Equator to ensure that the grid-cell areas are
approximately equal. The grid-cell areas won't be identical (because your
grid-cell longitude sizes are limited to integer fractions of 360 degrees),
but they'll be close enough to identical to give very good results.
(i.e. good enough for "blog-science" work).
5) The gridding/averaging procedure in its most rudimentary, stripped-down
form is quite simple But it still produces surprisingly good global-average results.
The one pitfall of the above method is that if you use the NOAA/CRU standard
5deg x 5deg grid-cell size, you will end up with many more "empty" grid-cells
in the Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern Hemisphere. This will cause
the NH (where there has been more warming) to be over-weighted relative to
the SH (where there has been less).
So if you don't compute interpolated values
for the empty grid-cells, your warming estimates will be too high (i.e. higher
than the NASA results).
But you divide up the Earth into 20 deg x 20 deg (or so) grid-cells, you
will get results amazingly close to the official NASA results without having
to bother computing interpolated values for "empty" grid-cells (because
you made the grid-cells big enough that none of them will be empty). It's a
crude short-cut, but it's a lot less work than doing all the interpolations,
and it still gives you pretty darned-good global-average results.
######## 2 What sort of games Watts has been playing ###############
The big problem with the Watts approach is that he and his followers
have not bothered to perform any global-average temperature calculations
to test the claims they've been making (i.e. claims about UHI, homogenization,
"dropped stations", etc.)
IOW, they have failed to perform any serious data analysis
work to back up their claims.
Had they done so, they would have found what I have found, namely:
1) Raw and adjusted/homogenized station data produce very similar global average results.
2) Rural and urban station data produce nearly identical global-average results.
3) The "dropped stations" issue pushed by Watts is a complete non-issue. Compare results computed with all stations vs. just the stations still actively reporting data (separating them out is a very easy programming exercise), and you will get nearly identical results for all stations vs. just the stations that haven't been "dropped".
4) The GHCN temperature network is incredibly oversampled -- i.e. you can reproduce the warming trends computed by NASA/NOAA with raw data taken from just a **few dozen** stations scattered around the world. I was able to replicate the NASA long-term warming trend results very closely by crunching *raw* temperature data from as few as *32* rural stations scattered around the world.
####### 3 How real skeptics can beat him by reducing the data themselves ######
The best approach is to roll up their sleeves and compute their own global average temperature estimates for a bunch of different combinations of globally-scattered stations. Skeptics with sufficient programming experience should not have much trouble coding up their own gridding/averaging routines from scratch, in their favorite language. They can even use python -- it's amazingly fast for a "scripting" language. Skeptics without programming experience will just have to trust and run code written by others.
####### 4 Where to get that data ##########
NASA and NOAA have had long-standing policies of making all of the raw and adjusted temperature data they use freely available to the public.
The GHCN monthly data can be downloaded from here: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/
The GHCN daily data can be downloaded from here: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/
Note: Unless you are a masochist who wants to write a lot mind-numbing low-level data handling code, just use the monthly data.
The whole ball of wax (including GHCN V3 data) can be downloaded from tinyurl.com/WattsBusterProject
Need to give a shout-out to the authors of the socket code and the QGIS software package -- most of the "heavy lifting" was done by those guys. (QGIS and python are *really* cool, BTW -- this project was my first serious intro to python). Also, here's a quick summary (minus a lot of cluttering details) of the installation/operation procedure
1) Make sure that gcc/g++, gnuplot, X11 and QGIS are installed.
(Easiest on a Linux Box)
2) Unpack the WattsBuster zip files
3) Launch QGIS.
On the top menu bar, go to Plugins->Fetch Python Plugins
Find and install the Closest Feature Finder plugin.
4) Shut down QGIS
5) Copy the closest_feature_finder.py file supplied in the WattsBuster package
to the appropriate QGIS plugin folder (typically ~/.qgis/python/plugins/ClosestFeatureFinder/)
6) In the WATTSBUSTER-1.0.d directory, build the anomaly.exe executable as follows:
make clean; make
7) Launch the executable per the supplied script:
8) Launch QQIS
Load the supplied QGIS project file (GHCNV3.qgs)
Start up the Closest Feature Finder plugin and connect to the anomaly.exe
9) Select a GHCN station layer and start ctrl-clicking on random stations.
This is not a polished end product; think of it as a "proof of concept" prototype..


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Chinese police seize 3 tonnes of meth in village
Drummed out of town: Paramilitary policemen carry seized crystal meth in Boshe. Photo: Reuters
Beijing: Call it ''Breaking Bad: China Edition". More than 3000 police officers equipped with helicopters and motorboats and accompanied by dogs descended on a southern Chinese village notorious for making crystal meth, seizing almost three tonnes of the drug and 21 tonnes of raw materials and arresting 182 people.
The massive raid targeted Boshe village in Guangdong province, a difficult-to-reach hamlet of 14,000 people near the city of Lufeng. Pictures of December 29's raid published on Chinese news websites showed dozens of police vehicles massed in the village of traditional-style, single-story tile-roofed homes separated by narrow alleyways, many passable only by bicycle or on foot.
Traditional town: Police cars are seen during a raid of premises in Boshe village, Guangdong province. Photo: Reuters
Provincial anti-drug official Qiu Wei told the state-run Xinhua news agency that more than one-fifth of the village's 2000 households were connected to the drug trade and that the town had been providing a third of the crystal meth made in China over the last three years.
Police said they seized nine guns, ammunition, a homemade bomb and knives. Three officers were reportedly injured in the operation, including two who were shot and one who was struck by a car.
Use and production of crystal meth has been rising rapidly in China. A study published in November by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said of the more than 2 million drug users who have come into contact with Chinese authorities, 29 per cent were using amphetamine-type drugs, up from just 9 per cent in 2008.
Breaking bad: Paramilitary policemen guard suspects during the raid. Photo: Reuters
Meth, in both crystal and pill form, is the second most popular illicit drug in China, behind only heroin, the report said, and in 2012, 40 per cent of the total drug arrests - nearly 50,000 out of 121,000 cases - were related to meth.
Once known for its lychee fruit, Boshe village is an insular - some would say backward - place where all the residents are said to share a single surname, Cai.
In recent months, some inhabitants had taken to online forums, complaining that the extensive meth-making operations - a process that generates significant amounts of noxious waste - had contaminated the water and soil, rendering it impossible to grow crops. Piles of waste reportedly littered the town, and residents openly stored the raw ingredients beside their homes.
Other locals said the significant amount of electricity needed for the meth-making laboratories had led to frequent power outages in the village, driving many residents to buy generators.
Earlier attempts by authorities to stamp out drug activity in Boshe reportedly were thwarted by an extensive network of lookouts in the village's narrow streets, as well as even human barricades of women, children and the elderly.
Media reports identified Cai Lianghuo, 42, as the mastermind of the meth operation. He was arrested in November. His cousin and local party chief Cai Dongjia, who was arrested in this week's raid, was accused of trying to help free Cai Lianghuo from custody.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/chinese-police-seize-3-tonnes-of-meth-in-village-20140106-hv7jx.html#ixzz2pbGzQmqN


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Sympathy Flowers
Funeral Flowers
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Pay your last respects to a departed friend or loved one's family with an uplifting floral standing spray. The natural beauty of each flower offers comfort to all in attendance. Let Mountainside Florist help you choose the right standing funeral spray for your final tribute. If you would like something more personalized, give us a call or stop by our location in Boonsboro.Casket Flowers
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Offer your condolences to a friend or family member with a lovely sympathy arrangement for their home. You can send something that's as beautiful as the life of the one they lost. Our expert designers are here to create a funeral arrangement that is special and meaningful, just for you.


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Spanish Word for viscera
English Word: viscera
Spanish Word: vísceras
Now you know how to say viscera in Spanish. :-)
Spanish Word: vísceras
Now you know how to say viscera in Spanish. :-)
Interested in travelling to a Spanish-speaking country? Read the travel blog below:
Food experiences (Guadalajara, Mexico)
Hola! I cannot believe that I have been here for almost a month! Time flies even in this nice settle routine that I have become adapted quite well to. I had a hard time adjusting to the big breakfast of beans, eggs, fruit, yogurt and granola or sometimes taquitos. However, I do know what I'm going to do without it when I return home. : ( Lunch time is between 1-3 PM and our host mom...
[ view entire travel blog ]
Popular Phrase: conjugate exigir | English-Spanish Medical Dictionary | Conjugated Verb: retraer - to retract, to put off, to dissuade [ click for full conjugation ]


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Connected devices hooked up to the Internet are advancing home automation in a way that helps you make your new home a clean, energy efficient and welcoming place. The key to controlling the devices can be a smartphone, tablet or computer. As you bring devices under your control and make your home a Smart Home, get them to interact with one another, you can also help them work together to improve your living environment even more.
Voice automation, which involves controlling connected devices with your voice, makes it possible for you to direct many changes. Through a virtual assistant, the devices may be able to talk back, telling you everything from the weather outside to how you can order spare parts over the Internet if the device breaks.
How Do I Know What I Want?
The best way to get an idea of what items can be connected is to take a tour of a residence with home automation. This will allow you to understand how the devices communicate with your phone and one another and what the items can do for you. The key areas of home automation are lighting, energy management, safety and security, electronics and entertainment, and locks, from garage doors to front doors. There are also automation options for gardens, decks, storage areas, and items for pets.
The more innovative items on the market include solar panels to power a home, combined with occupancy sensors to make sure a person is in the home, and one-touch capability to lock the doors; and the assignment of unique codes to open the door, with alerts to your smartphone to tell you who is home and when they arrived. There's even an internal camera for an oven that takes a picture of the meat or pie you're cooking to help you decide when it's done.
Should I Get Help?
It's important to get some assistance to ensure connected devices are set up properly and are secure. One-third of homeowners who bought a house in 2015 are considering adding home automation systems to their residence. Creating an automated home is a process, especially if you're adding devices over time. You should start with a professional and contact him or her for further assistance as needed.
The first step of creating a smart home is installing a hub. This gadget connects all the devices. Hubs are not yet programmable to the point where the device will take certain actions when you express a concern. For example, if you say, "It's cold in here," the device may not know whether you want to turn on the heat and to what degree. Yet at this point, a hub should be able to schedule devices like thermostats and fans to turn on at a certain time. It may also be able to take actions such as shutting the lights and heat off when you leave the house.
Working with a professional, especially on significant devices like thermostats and security systems, helps you get a sense of how you can talk to the hub and connected devices. It also shows you what innovations may be coming and how to bring them under the hub's control.
If you're interested in a smart home that will make it easier for you to relax and save money, think of talking to a realtor about options for your new residence and how to begin the process. You'll find some of the devices are worth the investment.
The post Voice Control & Connected Devices Fuel Home Automation appeared first on Team Realty.
Source: Blog


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RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA
January 3, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan — For much of this country's history, the Hazara were typically servants, cleaners, porters and little else, a largely Shiite minority sidelined for generations, and in some instances massacred, by Pashtun rulers.
But increasingly they are people like Mustafa, a teenager who has traveled a rough road but whose future now looks as bright as any in this war-ravaged country. His course reflects the collective effort of the Hazara, who make up 10 to 15 percent of the population, to remake their circumstances so swiftly that by some measures they are beginning to overtake other groups.
Like many Hazaras of his generation, Mustafa, now 16, fled Afghanistan with his family in the mid-1990s. They settled in Quetta, Pakistan, living with other Hazara refugees outside the Taliban's reach and getting a taste of opportunities long out of their grasp.
After the 2001 American invasion, his family returned, not to their home in impoverished Daykondi Province, but to Kabul, where his uneducated parents thought Mustafa and his siblings would get better schooling. "There was no opportunity for studying in Daykondi," he said.
Mustafa is now a top student at Marefat High School in Dasht-i-Barchi, a vast, poor Shiite enclave in western Kabul of potholed dirt streets, unheated homes and tiny shops. Nearly every one of his graduating classmates will go on to college. Mustafa, an 11th grader who favors physics and mathematics, wants to study nuclear physics at a Western university.
"The Pashtun had the opportunities in the past, but now the Hazaras have these opportunities," said Mustafa, whose school director asked that his last name not be published. "We can take our rights just by education."
The Marefat school is a refuge for 2,500 Hazaras, many from families like Mustafa's who fled their homeland in central Afghanistan for Pakistan and Iran in the 1990s and returned after the fall of the Taliban, which had massacred thousands of Hazaras, to make their lives in Kabul.
Since the 2001 invasion, an influx of Hazaras has changed the composition of the capital. More than a million Hazaras now live here, making up more than a quarter of the city's population.
With a new generation of Hazaras attending school in relative security and motivated by their parents' dispossession, their success could alter the country's balance of ethnic power.
"The Hazara always wanted an open atmosphere to breathe, and now we have that," said Mohammed Sarwar Jawadi, a Hazara member of Parliament from Bamian Province.
If there is a recent parallel it is the Kurds of northern Iraq. Once dispossessed and abused, they created a thriving new society after the imposition of no-fly zones in the 1990s and the ouster of Saddam Hussein almost seven years ago.
The Hazara resurgence is not so geographically concentrated. The principal Hazara provinces, while relatively safe, remain impoverished and, their leaders complain, are bypassed by the foreign aid sent to Pashtun areas as a carrot to lure people from the insurgency.
Instead, it is a revival built largely on education, an asset Hazaras could carry with them during their years as refugees.
"With education you can take everything you want," says Qasim, one of Mustafa's classmates, a 15-year-old Hazara who moved to Kabul, the Afghan capital, from the northern city of Kunduz five years ago because his parents wanted better-educated children.
The old Afghan rulers "wanted to exploit Hazara people, and they didn't want us to become leaders in this country or to improve," he said. But that will change. "By studying we can dictate our future."
The Hazara gains have already been rapid. Two Hazara-dominated provinces, Bamian and Daykondi, have the highest passing rates on admissions exams for the country's top rung of universities, according to officials from the Ministry of Higher Education. In the high school graduating class of 2008, three-fourths of students in Daykondi who took the test passed, and two-thirds in Bamian, compared with the national rate of 22 percent.
In a country that has one of the world's lowest female literacy rates — just one in seven women over age 15 can read and write — the progress of Hazara women is even more stark, especially compared with Pashtun provinces.
Pashtuns, who are mostly Sunni, are the country's largest ethnic group. While the Taliban insurgency rages in Pashtun regions, and many schools are attacked or forced to close, the enrollment of girls in Bamian schools rose by nearly one-third the past two years, to 46,500, as total school enrollment there grew 22 percent.
Total enrollment in Daykondi rose almost 40 percent to 156,000 over the past two years, and girls now make up 43 percent of students, said Mohammad Ali Wasiq, the Daykondi Province education director. More girls passed the entrance exam for the country's top-rung universities from Bamian and Daykondi in 2008 than from 10 mainly Pashtun provinces combined.
The Hazaras' emphasis on educating girls as assiduously as boys, along with a stronger belief in gender equity than is common here, belies the perception of Afghan Shiites left by the passage last spring of a law for Shiites that condones marital rape. Its passage was seen as an effort by President Hamid Karzai to win support from Shiite clerics before elections.
But many Hazara men opposed the law, including officials at the school. A powerful Shiite ayatollah in Kabul condemned the school for its opposition, leading to violent, rock-throwing demonstrations, but only 22 of Marefat's students dropped out as a result of the pressure, administrators say.
College-educated Hazaras, including women clad in white head scarves, are a growing presence in Western offices in Kabul. And Hazaras have flooded the security forces, and now are a disproportionate fraction of soldiers, while Pashtun representation continues to lag.
Pashtun leaders worry about how their own students are faring even as Hazaras excel, and some even fret whether rising Hazara influence could lead to the largely Shiite Iran having greater sway within Afghanistan.
"The government should work hard to make the opportunity for other places in the country to also go forward," said Khalid Pashtoon, a Parliament member from Kandahar. He said he had no problem with Hazara gains in education, but added, "The only fear I have is if countries like Iran use it politically in their favor."
Continued Hazara gains, of course, depend on the Taliban never returning to official power. Aziz Royesh, director of the Marefat school, says he worries how groups that have long held power in Afghanistan will adapt as Hazaras fill more places within the government, military and other influential professions.
"It will be very difficult for them to see that a new generation is coming," said Mr. Royesh, 40, who fought the Soviet occupiers and never made it past the fifth grade. "Now they cannot use the force of government to prevent specific people from getting their civil rights and their human rights."
Source: NYTimes.com


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Beauty and the Beast is a story of repentance. The Beast's sin of pride and selfishness brought the curse upon himself and his whole household. He must repent and learn to love and to be loved before the last rose petal falls, or he will remain cursed forever.
Continue reading Repentance and Sacrifice in Beauty and the Beast


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FTC Disclosure: Some prizes were sponsored for a giveaway. I am not being paid to make this post.


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This custom Foredom handpiece is the durable, versatile tool Foredom is famous for, with an added plus: ours is threaded to fit our Precision Router Base and Plunge Router Base.
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Undernourishment in Early Childhood Linked to Hearing Loss, Johns Hopkins' Study Finds
Young adults who were undernourished as preschool children were approximately twice as likely to suffer from hearing loss as their better-nourished peers, a new study suggests. The study, led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, analyzed the relationship between the hearing of more than 2,200 young adults in Nepal and their nutritional levels as children 16 years earlier, the school announced on its website. The findings suggest that nutritional interventions in South Asia could help prevent hearing loss.
The study was published February 7 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
"Our findings should help elevate hearing loss as a still-neglected public health burden, and one that nutrition interventions in early childhood might help prevent," says Keith West Jr, a professor of international health at the Bloomberg School and the principal investigator of the study. The lead author was Susan Emmett, MD, MPH, an otolaryngologist who conducted the analysis and wrote the paper as a postdoctoral fellow at the Bloomberg School's Center for Human Nutrition.
From 2006 to 2008, researchers tested the hearing of more than 2,200 young adults. All study participants had been part of a nutrition trial conducted between 1989 and 1991 in the District of Sarlahi in Nepal that collected information to assess their nutritional status.
Results of the auditory tests show that young adults who were stunted in childhood were nearly twice as likely to show signs of hearing loss. Stunting, or being too short for one's age, is a chronic condition of undernourishment that often starts before birth, which is a critical time for the development of auditory function. Researchers suspect that impeded inner ear development caused by undernutrition, especially in the womb, may contribute to the increased risk of hearing loss found in the study.
Participants who were too thin as children were also at a twofold increase of hearing loss. Being too thin for one's age is typically caused by acute malnutrition, defined as shorter, more severe periods of undernutrition. Acute malnutrition raises children's susceptibility to infections, including in the ear. Repeated ear infections can lead to hearing loss.
"Our findings are not only important for low-resource areas of Nepal, but also for much of South Asia," says West. "The study site in Nepal is representative of much of the Gangetic region of South Asia. There are over 160 million undernourished children in this region, putting them at high risk for a range of health and developmental problems. We now have evidence that addressing this nutritional burden might also prevent hearing loss later in life."
Previous studies have linked deficiencies of micronutrients, including vitamin A, to hearing impairment. This is believed to be the first, however, to investigate the relationship between generalized undernutrition and hearing loss, and it is believed to be the first to identify early childhood nutritional status as a modifiable risk factor for later-life hearing loss.
The research was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Grant OPPGH 614), the US Agency for International Development (USAID) (Cooperative Agreement DAN 0045-A-5094), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (5T32DC000027-25).
Original Paper: Emmett SD, Schmitz J, Karna SL, et al.Early childhood undernutrition increases risk of hearing loss in young adulthood in rural Nepal. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2018;nqx022[February]. doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqx022
Source: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
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A Atlantic Hearing Aid Center opened its doors in January 1971 and has been serving the hearing community ever since! We have always been conveniently located in beautiful Fort Lauderdale, Florida at 2310 East Oakland Park Boulevard.
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