Here is a news article: A middle-school teacher who took to Facebook to vent her frustration with the perceived bad behavior of students and parents has struck a nerve with her now-viral post.

 “I have had responses from people literally all over the world,” Julie Marburger, who teaches in Cedar Creek, Texas, said in an interview that aired today on “Good Morning America.”

 Marburger wrote a lengthy post on Facebook last month after an incident with a parent left her, she said, “unable emotionally to continue for the day.”

 ABC News

 “I have already made the decision to leave teaching at the end of this year, and today, I don't know if I will make it even that long,” she wrote. “Parents have become far too disrespectful, and their children are even worse.”

 She continued, “Administration always seems to err on the side of keeping the parent happy, which leaves me with no way to do the job I was hired to do ... teach kids.”

 Marburger also shared seven photos that she said depict the disregard students have for the school and personal property. The photos show books astray, papers left on the floor and a book that appears to be torn apart.

 “We've had pictures drawn into books, books that I personally bought for myself, that students have drawn inappropriate pictures in, or inappropriate words in,” she said. “Sometimes I have students even coming and getting things off of my desk, just taking things that don't belong to them.”

 Marburger, 45, said the incident that compelled her to write the post included a mother who she believed was disrespectful to her in front of her class.

 ABC News

 “I had a student who I had an issue with and decided to call his mom while at school and she was disrespectful and rude to me on the phone in front of her son,” she said. “And I actually had the class right there with me too and they could hear what she was saying and it was quite embarrassing.”

 Marburger’s post has been shared more than 400,000 times and drawn dozens of comments.

 She also wrote on Facebook about expecting to hear from parents after sending out report cards, while not hearing from them during the weeks and weeks of assignments leading up to the progress reports.

 "People absolutely HAVE to stop coddling and enabling their children. It's a problem that's going to spread through our society like wildfire," she wrote. "It's not fair to society, and more importantly, is not fair to the children to teach them this is okay. It will not serve them towards a successful and happy life."

 Marburger said the attention paid to her Facebook post surprised her, but the reaction from parents, teachers and administrators at her school has been positive.

 Julie Marburger

 “I was worried after this kind of blew up all over Facebook that people would be offended by it, and what I found is that I'm getting more support now,” she said.

 Marburger told “GMA” she is still weighing her options when it comes to her future in teaching.

 Marburger's Facebook post went viral as teachers in several states are calling for more support in the classroom and increases in pay.

 Classes remain canceled today in Oklahoma's biggest school districts, for instance, as teachers walk out for a seventh day, according to The Associated Press.

 Teachers in West Virginia ended a nine-day strike last month after the governor signed a bill that gave the educators a 5 percent pay hike.

 Ericka Souter, the editor of mom.me, a parenting website, said parents should look at their relationship with their child's teacher as a "partnership."

 "We’re overworked. Some of us are juggling multiple kids, multiple jobs," Souter said of parents today. "It’s easy to say, ‘This is the teacher’s responsibility. This is their job those eight hours during the day,’ but that is not how it works."

 She added, "We have to take a part in our kids’ education as well."

 Souter offered three tips for parents to build stronger relationships with teachers to ensure their children gets "the best educational experience possible."

 1. You have to be involved: You have to ask children questions, making sure they’re doing everything they should be doing and that they know you are interested in their behavior at school and how they’re doing there .

 2. You also have to be proactive: When the teacher sends an email and says there is something wrong, schedule a conference and get involved and make sure you’re working together.

 3. Your kid should know there are consequences: You want to make sure your kid knows that bad behavior is unacceptable. ||||| See more of Julie Marburger on Facebook |||||
A summary of this is?

– Julie Marburger had had it—and then she reached a new level of fed-up. The 45-year-old Texas middle school teacher has decided to give up teaching at the end of the school year, but in a March 28 Facebook post, she writes that she didn't know if she would "make it even that long." She explains she had to leave work early that day "after an incident with a parent left me unable emotionally to continue." And it wasn't an anomaly. "Parents have become far too disrespectful," their kids are worse, and administrators just want to keep parents happy. Yet Marburger, who teaches in Cedar Creek, anticipated dealing with more super unhappy parents soon. Reports cards were being issued later in the week, and almost half her students are failing because of missing assignments. She called and emailed parents to try to turn things around, to no avail. "Now I'm probably going to spend my entire week next week fielding calls and emails from irate parents, wanting to know why I failed their kid." The root of the issue is that parents are "coddling and enabling their children," and it has to stop. Ditto the disrespect. "Most parents can't stand to spend more than a couple hours a day with their kid, but we spend 8 with yours and 140 others just like him. Is it too much to ask for a little common courtesy and civil conversation?" Her post has been shared more than 420,000 times, and she tells Good Morning America she was worried people might take offense. Instead, she's found "more support," as says she's exploring her options in terms of her teaching future. (This teacher's post about a broken chair also got a big reaction.)


– Ticks are out in force this year, and there's one species in particular you should watch out for if you'd ever like to eat meat again. Experts say the lone star tick appears to be spreading from its home base in the southeastern US. Whereas other ticks can spread ailments such as Lyme disease, the lone star tick is bothersome because it is believed to trigger a potentially life-threatening and apparently lifelong meat allergy with its bite. The tick doesn't technically make people allergic to meat, but rather to a sugar molecule found in red meat known as alpha-gal. This alpha-gal allergy has typically been limited to the southeastern US, where the lone star tick is prevalent, but no more, reports Wired. Cases—in which the consumption of meat can result in hives, difficulty breathing, or death—have been reported in Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and New York, per Inverse. Long Island has seen at least 100 cases in the last year. Researchers suspect the spread of the allergy coincides with the spread of lone star ticks, though it's also possible that other ticks are responsible. Either way, "the nuisance level [for lone star ticks] is much higher than the black-legged tick," an expert tells the Weston Forum. "It is aggressive and very abundant." Researchers are currently studying the effect of a lone star tick bite on mice to determine why it triggers the allergy. (A toddler died after a tick bite.)

Expand this summary.

It’s any barbecue-lover’s worst nightmare: You go to bed after enjoying a juicy burger or a smoky rack of ribs, only to awaken, covered in sweat and hives. You’ve become allergic to meat. An increasing number of meat lovers in the United States and around the world have had this horrific experience in recent years, and it’s all because of a tiny parasite.

 The culprit, the Lone Star Tick, spreads this potentially life-threatening allergy through its bites. Researchers don’t know exactly how the tick spreads the allergy, but they have identified which component of meat causes the allergic reaction. Mammal meat — pork and beef — contains a sugar called galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose (alpha-gal for short), and in people with the allergy, alpha-gal triggers an immune response that includes a massive release of histamines, much like your body would respond to other allergies.

 Wired reported that in 2004, University of Virginia immunologist Thomas Platts-Mills, Ph.D., identified the alpha-gal connection after examining blood work from people that experienced strange reactions not to meat but to a cancer drug called cetuximab. People in the southeastern U.S., they found, were 10 times more likely to be allergic to this effective cancer drug. Further investigation showed that the region was also home to people with meat allergies. Since cetuximab and mammal meat both contain alpha-gal, and the affected people’s blood contained alpha-gal antibodies, the researchers hypothesized that the sugar was behind the allergy.

 Most scientists agree that allergies occur when a foreign allergen — like alpha-gal — is mistakenly marked as an invader by the antibodies of the body’s immune system, which then releases chemical weapons to destroy it. One of those weapons is histamine, which triggers the inflammation necessary to deal with the allergen — but also causes the rest of your body to swell up, as well.

 Since cases of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which is spread by the Lone Star Tick, also arise in the same southeastern region, researchers are pretty sure that it’s the tick bites that are causing the allergies to meat and cetuximab. While the details of the allergy-spreading mechanism have yet to be understood, they’re likely involved in priming the body’s immune system to react badly to alpha-gal invasions.

 As far as scientists know, this condition is lifelong. Unfortunately, the reaction is life-threatening, too, as anaphylaxis can cause a person’s airway to swell shut.

 These cases have previously occurred mostly in the southern, southeastern, and central U.S., reports of new meat allergies have surfaced in the northeast, including Pennsylvania and New York. It’s unclear whether this means that the tick’s range is spreading or whether the ability to confer this allergy has spread to other tick species.

 Original Could Kratom Solve the Opioid Crisis?

 If you want to avoid developing this allergy, take basic precautions when going out in the woods or high grass. Check yourself thoroughly when you get home, especially in your body’s folds and near waistbands or elastic parts of clothes. And if you experience sweating, itching, or difficulty breathing a few hours after you eat meat, seek immediate medical attention. ||||| First comes the unscratchable itching, and the angry blossoming of hives. Then stomach cramping, and—for the unluckiest few—difficulty breathing, passing out, and even death. In the last decade and a half, thousands of previously protein-loving Americans have developed a dangerous allergy to meat. And they all have one thing in common: the lone star tick.

 Red meat, you might be surprised to know, isn’t totally sugar-free. It contains a few protein-linked saccharides, including one called galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, or alpha-gal, for short. More and more people are learning this the hard way, when they suddenly develop a life-threatening allergy to that pesky sugar molecule after a tick bite.

 Yep, one bite from the lone star tick—which gets its name from the Texas-shaped splash of white on its back—is enough to reprogram your immune system to forever reject even the smallest nibble of perfectly crisped bacon. For years, physicians and researchers only reported the allergy in places the lone star tick calls home, namely the southeastern United States. But recently it’s started to spread. The newest hot spots? Duluth, Minnesota, Hanover, New Hampshire, and the eastern tip of Long Island, where at least 100 cases have been reported in the last year. Scientists are racing to trace its spread, to understand if the lone star tick is expanding into new territories, or if other species of ticks are now causing the allergy.

 The University of Virginia is deep in the heart of lone star tick country. It’s also home to a world-class allergy research division, headed up by immunologist Thomas Platts-Mills. He’d been hearing tales of the meat allergy since the ’90s—people waking up in the middle of the night after a big meal, sweating and breaking out in hives. But he didn’t give it much thought until 2004, when he heard about another group of patients all suffering from the same symptoms.

 This time, it wasn’t a plate of pork chops they shared; it was a new cancer drug called cetuximab. The drug worked, but curiously, patients that lived in the southeast were 10 times as likely to report side effects of itching, swelling, and a dangerous drop in blood pressure.

 Platts-Mills teamed up with cetuximab’s distributor, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and began comparing patient blood samples. He discovered that all the patients who experienced an allergic reaction had pre-existing antibodies to alpha-gal, and cetuximab was full of the stuff, thanks to the genetically modified mice from which it was derived. With that mystery solved, Platts-Mills turned to figuring out what made patients so sensitive to alpha-gal.

 The best hint he had was the geographic overlap between the cetuximab patients and previously reported meat allergies. The area perfectly matched where people came down with Rocky Mountain spotted fever—a disease carried by the lone star tick. But it wasn’t until Platts-Mills and two of his lab members came down with tick-induced meat allergies of their own that they made the connection.

 Over the next few years Platts-Mills and his colleague Scott Commins screened more meat allergy patients and discovered that 80 percent reported being bitten by a tick. What’s more, they showed that tick bites led to a 20-fold increase in alpha-gal antibodies. Since ethics standards prevented them from attaching ticks to randomized groups of patients, this data was the best they could do to guess how meat allergy arises. Something in the tick’s saliva hijacks humans’ immune systems, red-flagging alpha-gal, and triggering the massive release of histamines whenever red meat is consumed.

 Researchers are still trying to find what that something is. Commins has since moved to the University of North Carolina, where he’s injecting mice with lone star tick extracts to try to understand which molecules are setting off the alpha-gal bomb. It’s tricky: Tick saliva is packed with tons of bioactive compounds to help the parasite feed without detection. One of them might be an alpha-gal analogue—something similar-but-different-enough in shape that it sets off the human immune system. But it could also be a microbe—like a bacteria or virus—that triggers the response. Some have even suggested that residual proteins from the ticks’ earlier blood meals could be the culprit.

 Whatever it is, allergy researchers will be paying attention. Because, as far as anyone can tell, alpha-gal syndrome seems to be the only allergy that affects all people, regardless of genetic makeup. “There’s something really special about this tick,” says Jeff Wilson, an asthma, allergy, and immunology fellow in Platts-Mills’ group. Usually a mix of genes and environmental factors combine to create allergies. But when it comes to the lone star tick it doesn’t matter if you’re predisposed or not. “Just a few bites and you can render anyone really, really allergic,” he says.

 In the meantime, Platts-Mills, Commins, and Wilson are busy communicating the scale of the public health problem. Every day they check local news headlines to log new cases of catastrophic hamburger aversion, and spend hours on the phone gathering the latest intel from allergy clinics and academic centers around the country. They’re building the first real red meat allergy incidence map of the US—because state health departments aren’t required to report alpha-gal syndrome to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And it’s still rare enough outside the southeastern US that many doctors don’t correctly diagnose it.

 Wilson is trying to get blood samples from all the new outbreaks, to figure out if the patients’ antibodies correspond to the saliva of lone star ticks or a different tick species. That will tell him if the increases in the allergy are the result of changing range patterns, or if other ticks have developed the capacity to rewire human immune systems in the same way. That information would also provide further clues to the mechanism itself. As for a cure? There’s not much science has to offer on that front, besides Epipens and veggie burgers. |||||


Article:

 President-elect Donald Trump answers questions from the media during transition team meetings at the Mar-a-Lago Club on Dec. 28. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

 After having repeatedly praised President Obama’s efforts to ensure a smooth transition, President-elect Donald Trump reversed course on Wednesday, accusing the current occupant of the Oval Office of putting “roadblocks” in his way.

 Trump took to Twitter shortly after 9 a.m., saying he was “doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks.”

 Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks.Thought it was going to be a smooth transition - NOT! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2016

 “Thought it was going to be a smooth transition — NOT!” the Republican president-elect wrote.

 The White House declined to comment on Trump's tweet and others that followed.

 President Obama and President-elect Donald Trump had kind words for each other in the aftermath of the election. Then things seemed to change after Christmas. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)

 Trump’s assessment comes amid days of verbal sparring between the outgoing and incoming president. During a ceremony Tuesday marking the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor 75 years ago, Obama cautioned against “the urge to turn inward” and stressed a need to “resist the urge to demonize those who are different” — remarks some thought were aimed partly at Trump.

 Trump also made it clear Wednesday that he is perturbed by a number of steps the Obama administration is taking in its final weeks related to Israel, including a speech that was planned Wednesday by Secretary of State John F. Kerry on Middle East policy.

 We cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect. They used to have a great friend in the U.S., but....... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2016

 not anymore. The beginning of the end was the horrible Iran deal, and now this (U.N.)! Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2016

 “We cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect,” Trump wrote in another series of tweets. “They used to have a good friend in the U.S., but … not anymore.”

 Trump said the “beginning of the end” was the “horrible” Iran nuclear deal reached last year that was supported by a coalition of world powers but vigorously opposed by Israel.

 Trump was also highly critical this week of the Obama administration’s refusal to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

 “Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!” Trump wrote on Twitter, referring to his inauguration date.

 During a conference call with reporters later Wednesday morning, transition spokesman Sean Spicer at first declined to elaborate on Trump's tweets, saying they “speak for themselves.” He later said that Obama and his administration officials have been generous with their time during the transition process and helpful with “mechanical” issues.

 On Wednesday afternoon, during a brief appearance before reporters at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., Trump was asked about whether he thinks the transition is going smoothly.

 “Oh, I think very, very smoothly,” he replied. “Very good. You don't think so?”

 Trump also sounded more conciliatory later in the afternoon, when he told reporters that Obama had called him earlier in the day.

 “He called me, we had a very nice conversation,” Trump said, without offering much elaboration.

 Trump’s view of his Democratic predecessor soured earlier this week when Obama said on a podcast hosted by his former adviser, David Axelrod, that he thought he could have prevailed in an election over Trump.

 [President Obama says he could have beaten Trump — Trump says ‘NO WAY!’]

 Those comments prompted two tweets in as many days from Trump contesting Obama’s assessment. On Tuesday, Trump chided Obama for the failure of his campaign efforts on behalf of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to bear fruit.

 “President Obama campaigned hard (and personally) in the very important swing states and lost,” Trump said in a tweet. “The voters wanted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

 Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report. ||||| (European Pressphoto Agency)

 John F. Kerry is nothing if not indefatigable, traveling to all corners of the world as America’s top diplomat over the last four years. But as he prepares to leave office, he confronts a mixed legacy: a handful of successes coupled with searing defeats, especially in the Middle East.

 His inability to halt the carnage in Syria, or to block Russia’s growing influence, ranks as the most serious blot on his record. But he also got nowhere trying to end the Israeli-Palestinian standoff, or to stop Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally, from bombing civilians in Yemen.

 Kerry’s greatest success was the historic accord to curtail Iran’s nuclear development program and a landmark climate change treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming. ||||| Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks.Thought it was going to be a smooth transition - NOT! ||||| President-elect Donald Trump said he had a "nice conversation" with President Barack Obama Wednesday following a string of tweets in which he went so far as to suggest that the sitting president was disrupting the smooth transition of power.

 Interested in Donald Trump? Add Donald Trump as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Donald Trump news, video, and analysis from ABC News. Add Interest

 "He phoned me, we had a very nice conversation," Trump told reporters today outside his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. "We had a general conversation."

 Later this evening, Trump stepped out again, this time with Don King by his side, and emphasized that he had a "good talk" with Obama. "I actually thought we covered a lot of good territory," he said.

 Trump also said he will hold a press conference in early January. The president-elect has not held a full press conference since the election.

 Tweeting earlier in the day from the Mar-a-Lago, where he's spending the holidays with his family, Trump wrote, "Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks. Thought it was going to be a smooth transition - NOT!"

 Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks.Thought it was going to be a smooth transition - NOT! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2016

 Trump's tweet followed an interview in which Obama claimed that he would have won with his message of hope if he had faced off against Trump in the 2016 election.

 "I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it," Obama said.

 Tonight, Trump addressed Obama's remark, saying, "Nobody's ever going to know because we're never going to be going against each other in that way."

 Asked on a morning conference call to clarify the roadblocks to which Trump referred, his pick for White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, said he would let Trump's tweets "speak for themselves."

 Trump briefly emerged from Mar-a-Lago this afternoon and fielded a question from ABC News about whether the transition of power was going smoothly.

 "I think very, very smoothly, very good," Trump said. "You don't think so?"

 The White House earlier this month notably defended a decision by the Energy Department not to comply with a request from the Trump transition team to provide names of employees who worked on the Obama administration's climate policy efforts.

 Obama has repeatedly committed to a peaceful and smooth transition of power, keeping with centuries of American tradition, and said that he will, despite his disagreements with Trump during the campaign, escort him to the Capitol and attend his inauguration on Jan. 20. |||||
What is a summary?

– It looks like the honeymoon is over between Trump and Obama. "Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks. Thought it was going to be a smooth transition—NOT!" Trump tweeted Wednesday. The Los Angeles Times notes Trump's use of "1990s-style sarcasm." Trump had previously commended Obama on his commitment to a smooth transition of power, but a number of things have changed since then, the Washington Post reports. Many saw comments made by Obama during Tuesday's Pearl Harbor anniversary as directed at Trump. The president urged the US not to "turn inward" and to "resist the urge to demonize those who are different." Trump is also upset with the Obama administration for allowing the UN to pass a resolution condemning Israeli settlements, as well as with Obama personally for saying in an interview he could have beaten Trump and won a third term. In addition, the White House is defending the Department of Energy for not complying with a request from Trump's transition team for the names of employees involved in climate policy, ABC News reports. Transition team spokesperson Sean Spicer at first said Trump's tweets "speak for themselves, very clearly," but later complimented members of the Obama administration for being "helpful and generous with their time."


The seed for Wide00014 was:

 - Slash pages from every domain on the web:

 -- a ranking of all URLs that have more than one incoming inter-domain link (rank was determined by number of incoming links using Wide00012 inter domain links)

 -- up to a maximum of 100 most highly ranked URLs per domain

 - Top ranked pages (up to a max of 100) from every linked-to domain using the Wide00012 inter-domain navigational link graph ||||| Have you ever had a voice in your head that didn't feel like your own? Or heard a voice speaking out loud that you know wasn't really there? Psychologists used to say these were signs of mental illness. But now it turns out that they aren't that unusual — and even people who hear a lot of voices have a wide range of experiences with them.

 Illustration by John T Takai

 A new study published this week in The Lancet Psychology is the result of an online survey and in-depth analysis of 153 people who have heard voices. What the researchers found was that there is huge variation in ways that people "hear things." For example, the stereotype of a person with schizophrenia is that they hear angry voices telling them to do terrible things — we've all seen this in countless bad movies. But many people who hear voices say that they aren't so much "voices" as they are characters, with personalities, who are trying to hold conversations. Often they are internal voices and don't say anything aloud. It's almost as if they are exaggerated of the kinds of internal dialogues we have in our heads every day, as we debate what to do after work or whether we should really blow a bunch of money on the new MacBook.

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 Indeed, Durham University researcher Angela Woods, who led the study, noted that as many as 15 percent of people who report hearing voices haven't been diagnosed with any psychological disorder. She and her colleagues believe that "hearing voices" is far more complicated than anyone had ever realized — sometimes they even involve physical sensations like tingling in the hands and feet. People who hear voices say that they can be troubling, but they can also be friendly. Often, therapies can help them understand the voices as parts of themselves, cluing them into subconscious concerns.

 In a release, Woods said:

 We call into question the presumed auditory quality of hearing voices and show that there is an unrecognised complexity in the 'character' qualities of some voices. It is crucial to study mental health and human experiences such as voice-hearing from a variety of different perspectives to truly find out what people are experiencing, not just what we think they must be experiencing because they have a particular diagnosis. We hope this approach can help inform the development of future clinical interventions.

 The implication here is that there are a wide range of experiences for people who hear voices, and that many of them don't fit the typical definitions. Woods and her colleagues believe that psychology researchers need to talk to more people who hear voices in order to understand the full range of what the experience is like — as well as how we can treat it, when needed.

 The entire study is available online at The Lancet Psychology. ||||| « A Bias in Field Goals and Penalty Kicks? | Blog Home Page | Review: 'Strongest' Research Shows No Link Between Gun Ownership Rates and Higher Crime »

 Posted by Ross Pomeroy

 In the Biblical story of Jacob told in Genesis 28, Jacob settled down for the night when trekking through the deserts of Canaan and fell asleep:

 “And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves.”

 Jacob thought he received a message from God, but most modern cognitive scientists would say that's unlikely. Instead, they would proffer that his mind had manufactured vivid images, emotions, ideas, and sensations. Jacob's apparent theophany was a dream, nothing more.

 In Ancient Greece and Rome, people believed that dreams were direct messages from deities. While the precise mechanism for dreams remains unknown, scientists have narrowed down their origin to somewhere in the brain, not the beyond.

 Sleep is divided into four distinct stages. In the final stage, called rapid-eye movement (REM), the brain lights up with electrical activity, almost as if awake. REM sleep is when most dreaming occurs, and when they are most vivid. During this phase, in our sleeping minds, we are transported. We see, hear, and feel. We experience things we would never experience in real life. We face the otherworldly and the supernatural.

 It is no wonder then that dreams have played a major role in the historical evolution of religions, says Patrick Mcnamara, a neurologist at Boston University, and Kelly Bulkeley, a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, in a new paper published to Frontiers in Psychology.

 Researchers working in many different parts of the world have found that people in traditional societies treat dreams as the sources of their religious ideas, including their concepts of their gods and other supernatural beings. It is likely that ancestral populations also treated them as such. Dreams were considered proof of the gods and a spirit realm since dreams were involuntary and emotionally vivid experiences that involved the dreamer’s soul encountering other beings including long deceased relatives and so on.

 Why do people occasionally prescribe sacred status to figures in our dreams? One theory from evolutionary psychology holds that humans are inclined to presume intelligence or agency in unlikely places, as doing so might help recognize patterns that might have been missed, thus granting a better chance of survival. As the intuitive argument goes, it's better to assume the sound of a snapping twig was caused by a bear or a tiger, rather than just a falling branch. And so in dreams, we might be more likely to assume that advice or warning from a talking tree or a burning bush comes from a higher being who's looking out for us -- it's not merely meaningless drivel.

 Dreams offer, perhaps, the perfect setting to "converse" with a deity, Bulkeley and Mcnamara say, for three major reasons. First, dreams bring forth "mental stimulations of alternate realities." Second, they are replete with theory of mind attributions, in which we attribute mental states to other beings or entities. And third, they allow us to give value or significance to our experiences. "The neurobiology of... sleep states is now understood to involve forebrain mesocortical dopaminergic systems that directly compute value and dis-value," Bulkeley and Mcnamara write.

 Considering these factors, Bulkeley and Mcnamara reach an intriguing conclusion.

 "All humans are endowed with brains innately primed to daily generate god concepts in dreaming."

 Source: Mcnamara P and Bulkeley K (2015). Dreams as a source of supernatural agent concepts. Front. Psychol. 6:283. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00283

 (Image: Shutterstock) |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– Religions throughout the world—and throughout history—have put dreams at the center of their belief systems, and researchers say there's a good reason for that. We do much of our intense dreaming during REM sleep, when the highly active brain acts almost like it's awake, writes Ross Pomeroy at Real Clear Science. All that activity can lead to dreamed situations that feel very real—in some cases, even religious. In a new paper in Frontiers in Psychology, a neurologist and theological scholar argue that dreams are well-suited to create experiences in which we believe we've spoken to a deity of some kind. That is in part due to the feeling of an alternative reality we get in dreams, the researchers say. What's more, in dreams, we often ascribe emotions and thoughts to those we believe we're encountering. We give them an "exaggerated degree of agency" because our dreaming brains have trouble understanding our thoughts as our own, the researchers write. The researchers also note that unclear boundaries between REM sleep and wakefulness can be linked to schizophrenia—but at Gizmodo, Annalee Newitz notes that the feeling of "hearing voices" may not necessarily mean a person is dealing with mental illness. A recent survey found that 15% of respondents who say they've heard voices have no diagnosis of disorder, and the "hearing" involved isn't necessarily auditory; the voices may not feel as though they're external at all, researchers say. (Researchers last year described schizophrenia as not one, but eight different illnesses.)


Article:

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Four things you should know about Antarctica

 Antarctica is shedding ice at an accelerating rate.

 Satellites monitoring the state of the White Continent indicate some 200 billion tonnes a year are now being lost to the ocean as a result of melting.

 This is pushing up global sea levels by 0.6mm annually - a three-fold increase since 2012 when the last such assessment was undertaken.

 Scientists report the new numbers in the journal Nature.

 Governments will need to take account of the information and its accelerating trend as they plan future defences to protect low-lying coastal communities.

 The researchers say the losses are occurring predominantly in the West of the continent, where warm waters are getting under and melting the fronts of glaciers that terminate in the ocean.

 "We can't say when it started - we didn't collect measurements in the sea back then," explained Prof Andrew Shepherd, who leads the Ice sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (Imbie).

 "But what we can say is that it's too warm for Antarctica today. It's about half a degree Celsius warmer than the continent can withstand and it's melting about five metres of ice from its base each year, and that's what's triggering the sea-level contribution that we're seeing," he told BBC News.

 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Andrew Shepherd: "The study incorporates 24 independent satellite assessments"

 Space agencies have been flying satellites over Antarctica since the early 1990s. Europe, in particular, has an unbroken observation record going back to 1992.

 These spacecraft can tell how much ice is present by measuring changes in the height of the ice sheet and the speed at which it moves towards the sea. Specific missions also have the ability to weigh the ice sheet by sensing changes in the pull of gravity as they pass overhead.

 Imbie's job has been to condense all this information into a single narrative that best describes what is happening on the White Continent.

 Glaciologists usually talk of three distinct regions because they behave slightly differently from each other. In West Antarctica, which is dominated by those marine-terminating glaciers, the assessed losses have climbed from 53 billion to 159 billion tonnes per year over the full period from 1992 to 2017.

 On the Antarctic Peninsula, the finger of land that points up to South America, the losses have risen from seven billion to 33 billion tonnes annually. This is largely, say scientists, because the floating ice platforms sitting in front of some glaciers have collapsed, allowing the ice behind to flow faster.

 East Antarctica, the greater part of the continent, is the only region to have shown some growth. Much of this region essentially sits out of the ocean and collects its snows over time and is not subject to the same melting forces seen elsewhere. But the gains are likely quite small, running at about five billion tonnes per year.

 And the Imbie team stresses that the growth cannot counterbalance what is happening in the West and on the Peninsula. Indeed, it is probable that an unusually big dump of snow in the East just before the last assessment in 2012 made Antarctica as a whole look less negative than the reality.

 Globally, sea levels are rising by about 3mm a year. This figure is driven by several factors, including the expansion of the oceans as they warm. But what is clear from the latest Imbie assessment is that Antarctica is becoming a significant player.

 "A three-fold increase now puts Antarctica in the frame as one of the largest contributors to sea-level rise," said Prof Shepherd, who is affiliated to Leeds University, UK.

 "The last time we looked at the polar ice sheets, Greenland was the dominant contributor. That's no longer the case."

 In total, Antarctica has shed some 2.7 trillion tonnes of ice since 1992, corresponding to an increase in global sea level of more than 7.5mm.

 Image copyright ESA Image caption Artwork: European satellites in particular have an unbroken record going back to 1992

 The latest edition of the journal Nature has a number of studies looking at the state of the continent and how it might change in a warming world.

 One of these papers, led by US and German scientists, examines the possible reaction of the bedrock as the great mass of ice above it thins. It should lift up - something scientists call isostatic readjustment.

 New evidence suggests where this process has occurred in the past, it can actually constrain ice losses - as the land rises, it snags on the floating fronts of marine-terminating glaciers.

 "It's like applying the brakes on a bike," said Dr Pippa Whitehouse from Durham University. "Friction on the bottom of the ice, which was floating but has now grounded again, slows everything and changes the whole dynamic upstream. We do think the rebound (in the future) will be fast, but not fast enough to stop the retreat we've kicked off with today's warming.

 "Ocean warming is going to make the ice too thin for this process to help."

 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Pippa Whitehouse: "Push a balloon filled with honey - it rebounds when you remove your hand"

 In Imbie's last assessment, the contribution of Antarctica to global sea-levels was considered to be tracking at the lower end of the projections that computer simulations had made of the possible height of the oceans at the end of the century. The new assessment sees the contribution track the upper end of these projections.

 "At the moment, we have projections going through to 2100, which is sort of on a lifetime of what we can envisage, and actually the sea-level rise we will see is 50/60cm," said Dr Whitehouse. "And that is not only going to impact people who live close to the coast, but actually when we have storms - the repeat time of major storms and flooding events is going to be exacerbated," she told BBC News.

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 In this 2011 photo provided by researcher Hamish Pritchard, summer clouds swirl around the Staccato Peaks of Alexander Island off the Antarctic Peninsula. In a study released Wednesday, June 13, 2018, an international team of ice experts said the melting of Antarctica is accelerating at an alarming... (Associated Press)

 WASHINGTON (AP) — The melting of Antarctica is accelerating at an alarming rate, with about 3 trillion tons of ice disappearing since 1992, an international team of ice experts said in a new study.

 In the last quarter century, the southern-most continent's ice sheet — a key indicator of climate change — melted into enough water to cover Texas to a depth of nearly 13 feet (4 meters), scientists calculated. All that water made global oceans rise about three-tenths of an inch (7.6 millimeters).

 From 1992 to 2011, Antarctica lost nearly 84 billion tons of ice a year (76 billion metric tons). From 2012 to 2017, the melt rate increased to more than 241 billion tons a year (219 billion metric tons), according to the study Wednesday in the journal Nature .

 "I think we should be worried. That doesn't mean we should be desperate," said University of California Irvine's Isabella Velicogna, one of 88 co-authors. "Things are happening. They are happening faster than we expected."

 Part of West Antarctica, where most of the melting occurred, "is in a state of collapse," said co-author Ian Joughin of the University of Washington.

 The study is the second of assessments planned every several years by a team of scientists working with NASA and the European Space Agency. Their mission is to produce the most comprehensive look at what's happening to the world's vulnerable ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.

 Outside experts praised the work as authoritative.

 Unlike single-measurement studies, this team looks at ice loss in 24 different ways using 10 to 15 satellites, as well as ground and air measurements and computer simulations, said lead author Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds in England.

 It's possible that Antarctica alone can add about half a foot (16 centimeters) to sea level rise by the end of the century, Shepherd said. Seas also rise from melting land glaciers elsewhere, Greenland's dwindling ice sheet and the fact that warmer water expands.

 "Under natural conditions we don't expect the ice sheet to lose ice at all," Shepherd said. "There are no other plausible signals to be driving this other than climate change."

 Shepherd cautioned that this is not a formal study that determines human fingerprints on climate events.

 Forces "that are driving these changes are not going to get any better in a warming climate," said University of Colorado ice scientist Waleed Abdalati, a former NASA chief scientist who wasn't part of the study team.

 In Antarctica, it's mostly warmer water causing the melt. The water nibbles at the floating edges of ice sheets from below. Warming of the southern ocean is connected to shifting winds, which are connected to global warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, Shepherd said.

 More than 70 percent of the recent melt is in West Antarctica.

 The latest figures show East Antarctica is losing relatively little ice a year — about 31 tons (28 metric tons) — since 2012. It was gaining ice before 2012.

 So far scientists are not comfortable saying the trend in East Antarctica will continue. It is likely natural variability, not climate change, and East Antarctica is probably going to be stable for a couple decades, said study co-author Joughin.

 Another study in Nature on Wednesday found that East Antarctic ice sheet didn't retreat significantly 2 million to 5 million years ago when heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels were similar to what they are now.

 Twila Moon, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center who wasn't part of the studies, said "ice-speaking, the situation is dire."

 ___

 Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter: @borenbears . His work can be found here .

 ___

 The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content. |||||
What is a summary?

– Scientists monitoring ice loss in Antarctica have chilling news: The melting rate has accelerated alarmingly and the ice sheet is now shedding more than 200 billion tons a year, according to a study involving 88 scientists published in the journal Nature. The researchers say the rate of ice loss has tripled over the last decade and the melting ice sheets are now pushing up sea levels around the world by around a half-millimeter every year, reports the BBC. Antarctica was losing around 49 billion tons of ice a year in the mid-1990s, which went up to an average 219 billion tons a year between 2012 and 2017, the study found. The researchers, who used satellite data going back more than 25 years, say most of the melting ice comes from the West Antarctic sheet, parts of which are in a "state of collapse"—and modest ice growth in the East Antarctic is nowhere near enough to offset it. "The increasing mass loss that they’re finding is really worrying, particularly looking at the West Antarctic, the area that’s changing most rapidly," University of Waterloo glaciologist Christine Dow tells the Washington Post. "And it’s the area that we’re most worried about, because it’s below sea level." Antarctica has lost a total of around 3 trillion tons of ice since 1992 and will be contributing more and more to sea level rise if the current trend continues, warn researchers, who say climate change is the only plausible explanation for the ice loss. "I think we should be worried. That doesn't mean we should be desperate," says study co-author Isabella Velicogna of the University of California Irvine, per the AP. "Things are happening. They are happening faster than we expected."


BERKLEY (WXYZ) - October 6, 1966.

 It was the day Roger Watson was drafted, and the day he met a friend who never quite left his memory - Dave Brown.

 Dave remembers Roger too.

 Both men were from northwest Detroit and went through basic Army training together in Fort Hood, Texas. They became fast friends. Then they went home for a month before serving in Vietnam.

 “After that, we never did see one another,” Dave recalls.

 Dave had heard that Roger was wounded early in his tour, but never learned if he had survived.

 After returning home, Roger got married, had kids and settled down on Franklin Road in Berkley. He would wonder, from time to time, whatever happened to his Army friend, Dave.

 About five years ago, Roger befriended a neighbor whose backyard lied kitty-corner to his. Her name was Peggy Brown.

 “We’d sort of wave and it went from a wave to coming up the fence to chatting a little bit,” Roger described.

 The two bird watched together and later exchanged emails to share pictures of birds.

 Little did Roger know, Peggy was married to Dave Brown.

 The pieces began falling together late October when Peggy noticed Roger was a wounded vet. She saw the Purple Heart logo on his license plate. Then she noticed the baseball cap visible from the back window of Roger’s car that read, “9th Infantry.” It was the same infantry Dave had served in.

 The rest unraveled quickly through a rapid series of emails between Peggy and Roger.

 “To tell you the truth, I was flabbergasted,” Dave said.

 “We’ve been neighbors for 18 years and didn’t realize, here we were,” Roger said.

 The odds are probably slimmer than the fence that separates their yards. A meeting - in the yard - was quickly arranged.

 “He came running out of the house, over to the corner, had to beat back the brush, we just shook hands and couldn’t believe it,” Roger said. “It was just an incredible feeling, just amazing,” he added.

 A long-lost friendship, reclaimed after almost half a century.

 “We’re going to share a beer every now and then, and we’re going to be seeing a lot more of each other,” Roger smiled.

 “Grow very old and watch our grandchildren grow up,” Dave said.

 When you have decades of catching up to do, it helps to live just 150 feet apart.

  ||||| Buy Photo Roger Watson, left, and David Brown have been neighbors in Berkley for 18 years, but didn’t realize until recently that they were friends in the Vietnam War, drafted on the same day, trained in the same places and served in the same company. (Photo: Ryan Garza Detroit Free Press)Buy Photo

 Dave Brown had scoured the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington looking for his Army basic training buddy Roger Watson's name.

 While in Vietnam in 1968, Brown ran into someone from Watson's company and heard that his friend had been injured.

 The word was true — Watson was shot March 8, 1968, seven months into his tour, losing a kidney and 3 feet of small intestine and suffering damage to his liver.

 But Brown never found out if his friend lived or died.

 The two men — who came from the same northwest Detroit neighborhood, were drafted on the same day in 1966, trained together at Ft. Hood in Texas, served in the 9th Infantry and were combat engineer demolition specialists — never saw or heard from each other again.

 Until right before Halloween this year.

 That's when the two men — more than 40 years older than the last time they saw each other as young soldiers in training — walked across their kitty-corner backyards in Berkley and met at the chain-link fence.

 For 18 years, the two Oakland County men had lived nearly back to back and didn't even know it.

 Weeks after reuniting, they still can't believe it.

 Vietnam vets and long-lost friends David Brown and Roger Watson of Berkley found out they have been neighbors for 18 years. Ryan Garza/Detroit Free Press

 "I was absolutely delighted," Brown, 68, a retired surveyor, said of learning about Watson, grateful his friend survived. "I wondered about you for 40 years."

 "I always wondered what happened to you," Watson, 67, a retired supervisor with the Michigan Department of Corrections, told Brown as the two sat in Watson's home recently, sipping coffee, sharing war stories and telling their amazing reunion story.

 That story is a story in itself.

 And it's thanks to Brown's wife, Peggy, who has been neighborly with Watson because of their common interest in birds.

 Peggy Brown was taking a walk one day when she noticed the Purple Heart license plate on Watson's car and mentioned it to her husband. On another occasion, she noticed the 9th Infantry Vietnam Veterans cap in the rear window of the car.

 Then, on Oct. 27, the revelation happened — during e-mail exchanges between her and Watson that began about a picture of a hawk.

 "On a different subject my husband Dave was in the ninth infantry 15th combat engineers' 1967-1968 Vietnam. Wondering if you were there at that time. … I saw that you were in the ninth," she wrote Watson.

 The back-and-forth e-mails that followed unraveled answers to questions pondered by both men for four decades.

 "Small World!!!!!!" and "Wow !!!!" and questions, such as whether Watson's nickname was Bunny (it wasn't) and if Dave Brown's hair was blond (it was), were sprinkled through the evolving exchanges.

 "I think we may have volunteered together," Watson wrote Peggy Brown. "Please don't believe any stories he may tell about me! Also let him know I've changed a lot since basic."

 After looking at photos of the men as soldiers via e-mail that day, Peggy Brown wrote: "This has to be coincidence of the century. Dave cannot believe all this and we've been here for 18 years in Berkley. What are the odds?"

 That's been the reaction of the men, their wives and the friends they've told since the long-lost Army buddies found each other again.

 "It takes one little piece of information to put the whole thing together," said Watson's wife, Edie.

 Roger Watson said he saw only glimpses of his neighbor from a distance now and then through the years.

 When the foliage is out, both couples said, it's impossible to see into each others' backyards. Roger Watson said he simply was friends with Peggy Brown "over the fence" as both of them fed the birds.

 "I was almost shaken," Roger Watson said of learning his Army buddy was his neighbor. "This is almost too wild."

 "This is incredible," Dave Brown said. "It's amazing. So much time has elapsed."

 But to hear the men — now longtime husbands, fathers and grandfathers — talk recently, it was like no time had passed at all.

 They recalled being drafted, training in Texas — running everywhere, cleaning the barracks and spit-shining shoes — and leaving for life-changing experiences in Vietnam while their hometown of Detroit was experiencing its own life-changing event in the 1967 riot.

 Watson talked about when he was shot; Brown recalled the first body he encountered as a soldier.

 The experiences are among many etched in the memories of both men — memories neither can shed, just like the smell of diesel or the sound of a helicopter.

 Now, they have another memory — discovering each other.

 "It's sort of amazing we've been neighbors this long," Watson said.

 Brown agreed.

 "It's just great to see him alive," he said. "It makes me happy."

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What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– A Detroit man who long pondered the fate of his old Army buddy found him in the oddest of places: living practically next door for the last 18 years. Dave Brown heard that his basic training buddy Roger Watson had been wounded in Vietnam, which was true—Watson lost a kidney and suffered other organ damage after being shot early in his tour in 1968, the Detroit Free Press reports. Brown even checked the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to see whether his fellow combat engineer demolition specialist, who trained with him at Ft. Hood in Texas, had died. Then Brown's wife, Peggy, befriended a kitty-corner neighbor over the back fence, chatting with him about their mutual interest in birds. She was also intrigued by the Purple Heart license plate on his car, and 9th Infantry Vietnam Veterans cap in his car's rear window. So she asked about them in an email. Soon, the exclamation points were flying: "Small world!!!!!!" and "Wow!!!!" are among the words in their email exchange as they figured out who was who. A backyard meeting was quickly arranged, and Brown "came running out of the house, over to the corner, had to beat back the brush, we just shook hands and couldn’t believe it," Watson tells WXYZ. "It was just an incredible feeling, just amazing." Reclaiming their friendship after nearly half a century, they plan to "share a beer every now and then" and see "a lot more of each other," says Watson. "Grow very old and watch our grandchildren grow up," adds Dave. "It's just great to see him alive. It makes me happy." (Read about a guy apparently outed as "fake" Army veteran.)