• News Home/Archives

 

 

 

If you would like to promote your product in any news iterm, call 828-254-6620

 

 

 

 

 

Asheville Magazine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See
Zeitgeist
A DVD exposing Christianity, the Banking System and 9/11

 

 

If you would like to promote your product in any news iterm, call 828-254-6620

from the London Times --
Four hundred years after Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for his belief in the "plurality of worlds" (aliens), scientists and religious leaders gathered this week at a seemingly more open-minded Vatican for a conference on astrobiology (aliens).

Paul Davies, a cosmologist from Arizona State University, addressed the conference. In his view, the possibility of other civilizations - potentially more intelligent than our own - puts Christians “in a real bind.” Specifically, he says that nobody's satisfactorily addressed the question of whether aliens get saved. “The Catholic church offers a very species specific brand of salvation. No one says that Jesus came to save the dolphins and certainly not little green men,” he said.

Although the Vatican does not have an official position on alien life forms, a number of its scientists have spoken out on the issue. Father Jose Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory told the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, that the possibility of “brother extraterrestrials” was not incompatible with Catholic theology.

William Stroeger, an astrophysicist at the Vatican Observatory Research Group and a Jesuit priest, agreed: “There might be fundamentalists for whom the two things are incompatible but mainline congregations - Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists - would have no problem with this,” he said.

Stroeger conceded that the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe would pose a challenge, but said that it would not be insurmountable. “There are some difficult issues to resolve, such as whether Jesus as savior is the one who saves everyone in the Universe or if there are other equivalent salvation events that take place elsewhere in the Universe,” he said.

President Obama Meets
Half Brother in China

From Google.com --
President Obama has one long-time connection with China. His half-brother lives there and is married to a Chinese woman.

The President’s maiden visit to China gave him a rare opportunity to meet Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo.

The younger Obama lives quietly teaching the piano and running a business in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen and had earlier said he hoped to introduce the President to his wife. “She is his greatest fan.”

The younger man, who shares the same father with the U.S. President, said they had a long chat and he took the occasion to introduce Mr. Obama to his wife, whom he married a year ago and who is a native of central Henan province.

The younger Obama was born in America and raised in Kenya. He graduated from Brown University in Rhode Island with two undergraduate degrees and obtained a masters in physics from Stanford. He also earned an MBA from Emory University in Atlanta

He moved to Shenzhen, a bustling commercial and industrial hub around an hour’s train ride from Hong Kong, seven years ago.

Consider the Questionable Efficacy
of Flu Vaccines

Evidence to date suggests that the H1N1 flu is not a major threat, and there is little evidence that flu vaccines are effective in preventing the flu, so says Tom Jefferson, MD, arguably the world's leading expert on influenza vaccines.

Dr. Jefferson has authored 10 reviews of research on the influenza vaccine for the Cochrane Collaboration, which is a widely recognized leading international science institution that evaluates clinical research.

Jefferson notes that Australia has just completed its wintertime, and only 131 deaths related to the flu occurred this year. Because Australia's population is 22 million people, this death rate is not significant. One does not need to predict the future when the future has already happened somewhere else.

Jefferson's previous detailed analyses of flu vaccines show very little efficacy in providing real health benefits. Jefferson's team asserted strongly, "There is not enough evidence to decide whether routine vaccination to prevent influenza in healthy adults is effective."(1) Jefferson's research confirmed that flu vaccination did reduce slightly the number of adults experiencing confirmed influenza, but there were increased numbers of adults experiencing "influenza-like illness" (its symptoms are similar to the flu, though are presumably causes by other viruses, not the flu viruses). The bottom line is that the number of adults needing to go to the hospital or take time off from work did not change between those adults giving the flu vaccine and those who did not.

Although the media commonly promotes the flu vaccine for children, Jefferson and his research group summarized their investigation on this subject by asserting, "National policies for the vaccination of healthy young children are based on very little evidence."(2) They expressed strongest concern about the lack of efficacy and safety of flu vaccination of infants two years of age and under. They found little evidence that the flu vaccine was even effective in reducing school absences. Further, they found "no convincing evidence that vaccines can reduce mortality, hospital admissions, serious complications and community transmission of influenza.

Resources:

• http://mdvaccinechoice.wordpress.com
• http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=354&bpid=24310
• http://medicalconsumers.org/2009/09/24/why-the-h1n1-virus-is-not-a-major-threat
   

Chicago Inmates Grow Organic

Inmates at the Cook County Jail in Chicago, IL, have the opportunity to participate in the jail's garden project, which produces an average of 8,000 to 10,000 pounds of produce per season. The project has supplied over 500 tons of fresh produce to area homeless shelters and non-profit organizations since its inception. Increasingly, efforts are being made to incorporate organic management practices, with plans to supply local restaurants with fresh, organic produce grown in the jail garden. Project directors are seeking funding to build a three-season greenhouse in which organic vegetables and herbs can be grown and later sold on the Chicago restaurant market

IBM Computer Simulates Cat’s Brain

from ChannelWeb --
At the SC09 supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., this week, Big Blue announced that it has made "significant progress" toward creating a computer that simulates a living organism's brain with abilities of sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition. Best of all, perhaps, is that IBM said such a computer system could rival "the brain's low power and energy consumption and compact size."

Specifically, scientists from IBM Research, along with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, have reportedly performed the first "near real-time cortical simulation" of a cat brain that contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. The simulation was performed on Lawrence Livermore National Lab's Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer, which has a whopping 147,456 CPUs and 144 terabytes of main memory.

If you read or hear of some interesting news for us, let us know.
Call 828-254-6620, or go to our website, viratolive.com and contact us.