Animal Tissues Quotes

His body was urgent against her, and she didn't have the heart anymore to fight...She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up...she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree, like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with haunted eyes...He too had bared the front part of his body and she felt his naked flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside her, turgid there and quivering. Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last. But it was over too soon, too soon, and she could no longer force her own conclusion with her own activity. This was different, different. She could do nothing. She could no longer harden and grip for her own satisfaction upon him. She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit and she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone. Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamouring, like a sea anenome under the tide, clamouring for him to come in again and make fulfillment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling til it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, til she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries.

But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. So that's us: processed corn, walking.

Usually I spare myself from the news, because if it’s not propaganda, then it’s one threat or another exaggerated to the point of absurdity, or it’s the tragedy of storm-quake-tsunami, of bigotry and oppression misnamed justice, of hatred passed off as righteousness and honor called dishonorable, all jammed in around advertisements in which a gecko sells insurance, a bear sells toilet tissue, a dog sells cars, a gorilla sells investment advisers, a tiger sells cereal, and an elephant sells a drug that will improve your lung capacity, as if no human being in America any longer believes any other human being, but trusts only the recommendations of animals.

The transpersonal experiences revealing the Earth as an intelligent, conscious entity are corroborated by scientific evidence. Gregory Bateson, who created a brilliant synthesis of cybernetics, information and systems theory, the theory of evolution, anthropology, and psychology came to the conclusion that it was logically inevitable to assume that mental processes occurred at all levels in any system or natural phenomenon of sufficient complexity. He believed that mental processes are present in cells, organs, tissues, organisms, animal and human groups, eco-systems, and even the earth and universe as a whole.

We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth- our larger body- to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours (the tensions and terrors of our individual days), stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles. We give ourselves over to the influence of the breathing earth. Sleep is the shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves that compose it- cells, tissues, and organs taking their prime directives now from gravity and the wind- as residual bits of sunlight, caught in the long tangle of nerves, wander the drifting landscape of our earth-borne bodies like deer moving across the forested valleys.

Reconstructions based on bone remains can only reveal the most general characteristics of the creature, since the really distinctive morphological features of any animal are soft tissues which quickly vanish after death. Therefore, due to the speculative nature of the interpretation of the soft tissues, the reconstructed drawings or models become totally dependent on the imagination of the person producing them.

Cats are true carnivores. While you may choose a vegetarian lifestyle, don't assume it's healthier for your cat also. Cats aren't able to convert beta-carotene into vitamin A the way we can. They must get vitamin A from animal tissue (called preformed A). Cats are also unable to convert linoleic acid (an essential fatty acid) to arachidonic acid the way dogs can so they must get preformed arachidonic acid from its only source—animal tissue.

But all organic matter must have cell structure,” Sara said. “Cell structure is virtually a definition of organic matter, a requisite of all living tissue, plant or animal.

Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation. In school classrooms children are shown anatomical charts, each depicting different aspects of the human body. One chart reveals the body as a skeleton, another the body as a network of blood vessels, another the nerves, another the muscles. If we made equivalent sets of diagrams to portray ecosystems, one of the layers would show the fungal mycelium that runs through them. We would see sprawling, interlaced webs strung through the soil, through sulfurous sediments hundreds of meters below the surface of the ocean, along coral reefs, through plant and animal bodies both alive and dead, in

I am plant as well as animal. My blood transports oxygen; my chlorophyll produces it. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus surge along tissue, torso, culm to my blades. Blood blends magnesium as well as iron. I am grass made flesh. Grassling.

When I watch my anime shows or read my books I cry. I genuinely honest to god cry. Because I feel upset or happy, or moved by the character. Thats the kind of person I am. Stop laughing at me for it. And word of advice, when I'm upset don't tell me its going to be okay, or say that its fiction. Because its not going to be okay and yeah maybe it is fiction. But its still ridiculously moving. And hell, I will cry over it. So shut up, get my chocolate, some damn tissues and just hold me. Because thats all I need at that moment okay?

What do think about abortion?” “I could feel the tension growing in the plane. I dropped my head, acknowledging that we had very different value systems for our lives. Then I thought of a way to respond to his question. “You’re Jewish, right?” I asked. “Yes,” he said defensively. “I told you I was!” “Do you know how Hitler persuaded the German people to destroy more than six million of your Jewish ancestors?” The man looked at me expectantly, so I continued. ”He convinced them that Jews were not human and then exterminated your people like rats.” I could see that I had his attention, so I went on. “Do you understand how Americans enslaved, tortured, and killed millions of Africans? We dehumanized them so our constitution didn’t apply to them, and then we treated them worse than animals.” “How about the Native Americans?” I pressed. “Do you have any idea how we managed to hunt Indians like wild animals, drive them out of their own land, burn their villages, rape their women, and slaughter their children? Do you have any clue how everyday people turned into cruel murderers?” My Jewish friend was silent, and his eyes were filling with tears as I made my point. “We made people believe that the Native Americans were wild savages, not real human beings, and then we brutalized them without any conviction of wrongdoing! Now do you understand how we have persuaded mothers to kill their own babies? We took the word fetus, which is the Latin word for ‘offspring,’ and redefined it to dehumanize the unborn. We told mothers, ‘That is not really a baby you are carrying in your belly; it is a fetus, tissue that suddenly forms into a human being just seconds before it exits the womb.’ In doing so, we were able to assert that, in the issue of abortion, there is only one person’s human rights to consider, and then we convinced mothers that disposing of fetal tissue (terminating the life of their babies) was a woman’s right. Our constitution no longer protects the unborn because they are not real people. They are just lifeless blobs of tissue.” By now, tears were flowing down his cheeks. I looked right into his eyes and said, “Your people, the Native Americans, and the African Americans should be the greatest defenders of the unborn on the planet. After all, you know what it’s like for society to redefine you so that they can destroy your races. But ironically, your races have the highest abortion rates in this country! Somebody is still trying to exterminate your people, and you don’t even realize it. The names have changed, but the plot remains the same!” Finally he couldn’t handle it anymore. He blurted out, “I have never heard anything like this before. I am hanging out with the wrong people. I have been deceived!

two or three million years ago our ancestors began a great escape from the here and now, and their getaway vehicle was a highly specialized mass of grey tissue, fragile, wrinkled and appended. This frontal lobe–the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature and the first to deteriorate in old age–is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens. No other animal has a frontal lobe quite like ours, which is why we are the only animal that thinks about the future as we do. But

How to make a good cry a GREAT CRY. Make sure you have an abundance of good tissues (so you don't have to end up using toilet paper, or worse, paper towels!). Put on the most comfortable clothes you own. Important - Drink lots of water afterward so you don't get a post-crying dehydrating headache! Find something to squeeze or cuddle, like a squishy pillow, animal friend, or consenting human. Now get ready for those sweet, sweet endorphins!

On the road all day, with no interest in the radio, we had not heard the news. Usually I spare myself from the news, because if it's not propaganda, then it's one threat or another exaggerated to the point of absurdity, or it's the tragedy of storm-quake-tsunami, of bigotry and oppression misnamed justice, of hatred passed off as righteousness and honor called dishonorable, all jammed in around advertisements in which a gecko sells insurance, a bear sells toilet tissue, a dog sells cars, a gorilla sells investment advisers, a tiger sells cereal, and an elephant sells a drug that will improve your lung capacity, as if no human being in America any longer believes any other human being, but trusts only the recommendations of animals.

the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer. How can we affect national policy—or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives—if we don’t grasp the underlying issues?

The mood of Mason throughout the entire direct examination was that of a restless harrier anxious to be off at the heels of its prey— of a foxhound within the last leap of its kill. A keen and surging desire to shatter this testimony, to show it to be from start to finish the tissue of lies that in part at least it was, now animated him. And no sooner had Jephson concluded than he leaped up and confronted Clyde, who, seeing him blazing with this desire to undo him, felt as though he was about to be physically attacked. Theodore Dreiser. An American Tragedy

The demands of the marketplace eventually outstripped the chicken’s physical capacity to support them. The bird’s breasts became too big for its legs and skeleton to support. The animals grew so fast they couldn’t supply oxygen to all their tissue and muscle, causing fluid to build up in their body cavity. The chicken’s immune system suffered, and some birds simply keeled over after a few weeks.

Even the most familiar of dinosaurs may hold great surprises in their life appearance. It seems that every time the soft tissue of a dinosaur is discovered, our views of that animal, and usually all of its relatives as well, are changed drastically. Such revelations show how artificial our images of even the most well-known dinosaurs can be. What we are drawing all the time may not be the "real" animals themselves, but artifacts of an artistic tradition.

The extracellular genesis of cells in animals seemed to me, ever since the publication of the cell theory [of Schwann], just as unlikely as the spontaneous generation of organisms. These doubts produced my observations on the multiplication of blood cells by division in bird and mammalian embryos and on the division of muscle bundles in frog larvae. Since then I have continued these observations in frog larvae, where it is possible to follow the history of tissues back to segmentation.

It is not just the different plants and animals that define the environment. There are all sorts of physical factors as well. Take the atmosphere, for instance. The oxygen levels became usable to us about 400 million years ago, but since then there has been a great variation in the oxygen levels. In the late Jurassic it is possible that the oxygen levels were about 35%, as opposed to 20% at the present day. Indeed this figure has been put forward to explain the survival of the very big dinosaurs, high oxygen concentrations in the breathing air being able to keep the great volumes of tissue oxygenated. On the other hand the proportion of carbon dioxide was also high. This may account for the prolific plant life at the time, carbon dioxide being essential for the good growth of plants. The difference between the composition of the Jurassic atmosphere and that of your own time may make it difficult for you to breathe when you first arrive, but your body will probably adapt to it before long.

American gynecology was built by torturing Black women and experimenting on their bodies to test procedures. J. Marion Sims, known as the father of American gynecology, developed his techniques by slicing open the vaginal tissues of enslaved women as they were held down by force. He refused to provide them with anesthesia. François Marie Prevost, who is credited with introducing C-sections in the United States, perfected his procedure by cutting into the abdomens of laboring women who were slaves. These women were treated like animals and their pain was ignored.

I don’t know to what extent ignorance of science and mathematics contributed to the decline of ancient Athens, but I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer.

In 2007, Jeffrey Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School and his wife and colleague in obesity research, Terry Maratos-Flier, published an article in Scientific American called “What Fuels Fat.” In it, they described the intimate link between appetite and energy expenditure, making clear that they are not simply variables that an individual can consciously decide to change with the only effect being that his or her fat tissue will get smaller or larger to compensate. An animal whose food is suddenly restricted tends to reduce its energy expenditure both by being less active and by slowing energy use in cells, thereby limiting weight loss. It also experiences increased hunger so that once the restriction ends, it will eat more than its prior norm until the earlier weight is attained. What the Fliers accomplished in just two sentences is to explain why a hundred years of intuitively obvious dietary advice—eat less—doesn’t work in animals. If we restrict the amount of food an animal can eat (we can’t just tell it to eat less, we have to give it no choice), not only does it get hungry, but it actually expends less energy. Its metabolic rate slows down. Its cells burn less energy (because they have less energy to burn). And when it gets a chance to eat as much as it wants, it gains the weight right back. The

Our bodies aren't adapted to absorb big loads of nutrients all at once (many supplements surpass RDA values by 200 percent or more), but tiny quantities of them in combinations--exactly as they occur in plants. Eating a wide variety of different plant chemicals is a very good idea, according to research from the American Society for Nutritional Sciences. You don't have to be a chemist, but color vision helps. By eating plant foods in all different colors you'll get carotenoids to protect body tissues from cancer (yellow, orange, and red veggies); phytosterols to block cholesterol absorption and inhibit tumor growth (green and yellow plants and seeds); and phenols for age-defying antioxidants (blue and purple fruits). [from an entry by Barbara Kingsolver's daughter Camille]

When fat is heated to frying temperatures, whether it be animal fat, such as lard, or plant fat, such as vegetable oil, toxic volatile chemicals with mutagenic properties (those able to cause genetic mutations) are released into the air.22 This happens even before the “smoke point” temperature is reached.23 If you do fry at home, good ventilation in the kitchen may reduce lung cancer risk.24 Cancer risk may also depend on what’s being fried. A study of women in China found that smokers who stir-fried meat every day had nearly three times the odds of lung cancer compared to smokers who stir-fried foods other than meat on a daily basis.25 This is thought to be because of a group of carcinogens called heterocyclic amines that are formed when muscle tissue is subjected to high temperatures.

Not all social animals are social with the same degree of commitment. In some species, the members are so tied to each other and interdependent as to seem the loosely conjoined cells of a tissue. The social insects are like this; they move, and live all their lives, in a mass; a beehive is a spherical animal. In other species, less compulsively social, the members make their homes together, pool resources, travel in packs or schools, and share the food, but any single one can survive solitary, detached from the rest. Others are social only in the sense of being more or less congenial, meeting from time to time in committees, using social gatherings as ad hoc occasions for feeding and breeding. Some animals simply nod at each other in passing, never reaching even a first-name relationship.

It is true that neural tissue imposes significant metabolic demands on organisms that natural selection will tend to shed if doing so is beneficial. It is also true that brain size has been reduced in many animal lineages for whom the metabolic costs of cognitive substrate outweigh the benefits of enhanced cognition. This is poignantly illustrated by secondarily herbivorous vertebrates (like panda's) whose calorie-frugal diet can no longer sustain their carnivorous clade's historical brain tissue expenditures. It is the case as well for lineages whose ecology calls for the reduction of neurologically demanding somato-sensory functions, such as 'cavefish' - several groups of freshwater fish adapted to lightless underground habitats that have repeatedly lost portions of the cortex dedicated to visual processing. The loss of a complex head is thus not totally inconceivable.

I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer. How can we affect national policy—or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives—if we don’t grasp the underlying issues? As I write, Congress is dissolving its own Office of Technology Assessment—the only organization specifically tasked to provide advice to the House and Senate on science and technology. Its competence and integrity over the years have been exemplary. Of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, rarely in the twentieth century have as many as one percent had any significant background in science. The last scientifically literate President may have been Thomas Jefferson.* So how do Americans decide these matters? How do they instruct their representatives? Who in fact makes these decisions, and on what basis? —

For the poverty in which my mother and father lived, for the failure of the mill, all the hard times, for the awful sheep, for constant tiredness, thank you, my God! For lips, which I was feeding too much, for the dirty noses of the children, for the guarded sheep, I thank you! Thank you, my God, for the prosecutor and the police commissioner, for the policemen, and for the harsh words of Father Peyramale! For the days in which you came, Mary, for the ones in which you did not come, I will never be able to thank you…only in Paradise. For the slap in the face, for the ridicule, the insults, and for those who suspected me for wanting to gain something from it, thank you, my Lady. For my spelling, which I never learned, for the memory that I never had, for my ignorance and for my stupidity, thank you. For the fact that my mother died so far away, for the pain I felt when my father instead of hugging his little Bernadette called me, “Sister Marie-Bernard”, I thank you, Jesus. I thank you for the heart you gave me, so delicate and sensitive, which you filled with bitterness. For the fact that Mother Josephine proclaimed that I was good for nothing, thank you. For the sarcasm of the Mother Superior: her harsh voice, her injustices, her irony and for the bread of humiliation, thank you. Thank you that I was the privileged one when it came to be reprimanded, so that my sisters said, “How lucky it is not to be Bernadette.” Thank you for the fact that it is me, who was the Bernadette threatened with imprisonment because she had seen you, Holy Virgin; regarded by people as a rare animal; that Bernadette so wretched, that upon seeing her, it was said, “Is that it?” For this miserable body which you gave me, for this burning and suffocating illness, for my decaying tissues, for my de-calcified bones, for my sweats, for my fever, for my dullness and for my acute pains, thank you, my God. And for this soul which you have given me, for the desert of inner dryness, for your night and your lightening, for your silences and your thunders, for everything. For you - when you were present and when you were not—thank you, Jesus.

Do you ever feel like you are giving far fewer fucks and yet still caring so much it sometimes feels like there is only the most tissue-thin layer separating your soul from this world? Like your heart may be broken but your spirit is still rising? Are you refusing to conform and somehow still fitting just right? Able to look people right in the eye without apology and also like you’re a teenager again, bashful and blushing and off-kilter, like that moment when lips unexpectedly pressed against your head and face buried in your hair fingers trailed down y our arm, the way your stomach can flip-flop like that, even now. Do you ever walk on purpose even when you have nowhere to go? Do you notice things deeply, like dark red lipstick prints on pristine white coffee mugs? Like the way whiskey burns and cool white sheets feel against your skin at the end of the day? Are you claiming your identity, clear and strong and true, and also sinking into the vast unknowable mystery of your all? Do your days feel like longing and acquiescence and learning to stop grasping at things that are ready to leave or that choose not to come closer? Are you making a home of your own skin and inviting the world inside? Are you learning that cultivating solid boundaries and driving into a wide open horizon both feel like freedom, like the harsh desert mountains and the soft ocean wisdom and the road to healing that joins the two? Does it all feels like solidity, like truth, like forgiveness and recklessness and heat and sexy and holy, all rolled up together? Do you crave the burn of heat from another and the for nothing to be louder than sound of your own heartbeat, all at once? Do you finally know that you can choose a love and a life that does not break you? That you can claim a softer beauty and a kinder want. That even your animal hunger can soften its rough edges and say a full-throated yes to what is good and kind and holy. Do you remember that insanity is not a prerequisite for passion and that there is another pathway to your art, one that does not demand your pain as payment for its own becoming? Are you learning to show up? To take up space? To feel the power? Is it full of contradiction, does it feel like fire underwater, are you rising to sing?

The gorgonians tend to grow in closely packed, branching masses, but they do not fuse to each other; if they did, their morphogenesis would doubtless become a shambles. Theodor, in a series of elegant experiments, has shown that when two individuals of the same species are placed in close contact, the smaller of the two will always begin to disintegrate. It is autodestruction due to lytic mechanisms entirely under the governance of the smaller partner. He is not thrown out, not outgamed, not outgunned; he simply chooses to bow out. It is not necessarily a comfort to know that such things go on in biology, but it is at least an agreeable surprise. The oxygen in the atmosphere is the exhalation of the chloroplasts living in plants (also, for our amazement, in the siphons of giant clams and lesser marine animals). It is a natural tendency for genetically unrelated cells in tissue culture to come together, ignoring species differences, and fuse to form hybrid cells. Inflammation and immunology must indeed be powerfully designed to keep us apart; without such mechanisms, involving considerable effort, we might have developed as a kind of flowing syncytium over the earth, without the morphogenesis of even a flower.

While there was still water in the middle of the pools, animals attempted to reach it through the silt but would get bogged. We spent day after day checking dams, finding about eight to ten animals hopelessly mired in the silt at each and every dam, primarily kangaroos and wallabies. We had to get to the dams early in the morning. Some of the kangaroos had been struggling all night. Steve engineered planks and straps to rescue the animals. The silt would suck us down just as fast, so we had to be careful going out to rescue the roos. Because of the lactic acid buildup in their tissues (a product of their all-night exertions to free themselves), some of the kangaroos were too far gone and couldn’t recover. But we saved quite a few. At one point, Bob came out to lend a hand. I was at the homestead, and the ovulation strip turned bright blue. I hustled over to the creek bed where Steve and his dad were working. I motioned to Steve. “The strip is blue,” I said. He looked around nervously. “I’m out here working with me dad,” he said. “What do you want me to do?” “Just come on,” I whispered impatiently. “But my dad’s right here!” I smiled and took his hand. We headed up the dry creek bed and spent some quality time with the biting ants and the prickles. It was after this trip to our conservation property in the Brigalow Belt that I discovered I was pregnant. I tried to let Steve know by sitting down at the table and tucking into a bowl of ice cream and pickles. “What are you doing?” asked a totally confused Steve. I explained, and we were both totally overjoyed, keeping our fingers crossed for a boy to go along with our darling daughter.

As respects its isolation and its indifference to the basic requirements of all organic activity, the pecuniary power complex discloses a startling resemblance to a newly discovered center in the brain-that which is called the pleasure center. So far as is known, this pleasure center performs no useful function in the organism, unless it should prove that in some still obscure way it plays a part in more functional pleasure reactions. But in laboratory monkeys this localized center can be penetrated by electrodes which permit a micro-current to stimulate the nervous tissue in such a fashion that the flow of current-and hence the intensity of pleasure-can be regulated by the animal himself. Apparently the stimulation of this pleasure center is so rewarding that the animal will continue to press the current regulator for an indefinite length of time, regardless of every other impulse or physiological need, even that for food, and even to the point of starvation. The intensity of this abstract stimulus produces something like a total neurotic insensibility to life needs. The power complex seems to operate on the same principle. The magical electronic stimulus is money. What increases the resemblance between this pecuniary motivation and that of the cerebral pleasure center is that both centers, unlike virtually all organic reactions, recognize no quantitative limits. What has always been true of money, among those susceptible to its influence, applies equally to the other components of the power complex: the abstraction replaces the concrete reality, and therefore those who seek to increase it never know when they have had enough. Each of these drives, for power, for goods, for fame, for pleasure, may-it goes without saying-have as useful a part to play in the normal economy of a community as in the human body itself. It is by their detachment, their isolation, their quantitative over-concentration, and their mutual re-enforcement that they become perverse and life-corroding.

Knock, knock. Who's there? A: Lettuce Q: Lettuce who? A: Lettuce in, it's freezing out here.. . 2. Q: What do elves learn in school? A: The elf-abet . 3. Q: Why was 6 afraid of 7? A: Because: 7 8 9 . . 4. Q. how do you make seven an even number? A. Take out the s! . 5. Q: Which dog can jump higher than a building? A: Anydog – Buildings can’t jump! . 6. Q: Why do bananas have to put on sunscreen before they go to the beach? A: Because they might peel! . 7. Q. How do you make a tissue dance? A. You put a little boogie in it. . 8. Q: Which flower talks the most? A: Tulips, of course, 'cause they have two lips! . 9. Q: Where do pencils go for vacation? A: Pencil-vania . 10. Q: What did the mushroom say to the fungus? A: You're a fun guy [fungi]. . 11. Q: Why did the girl smear peanut butter on the road? A: To go with the traffic jam! . 11. Q: What do you call cheese that’s not yours? A: Nacho cheese! . 12. Q: Why are ghosts bad liars? A: Because you can see right through them. . 13. Q: Why did the boy bring a ladder to school? A: He wanted to go to high school. . 14. Q: How do you catch a unique animal? A: You neak up on it. Q: How do you catch a tame one? A: Tame way. . 15. Q: Why is the math book always mad? A: Because it has so many problems. . 16. Q. What animal would you not want to pay cards with? A. Cheetah . 17. Q: What was the broom late for school? A: Because it over swept. . 18. Q: What music do balloons hate? A: Pop music. . 19. Q: Why did the baseball player take his bat to the library? A: Because his teacher told him to hit the books. . 20. Q: What did the judge say when the skunk walked in the court room? A: Odor in the court! . 21. Q: Why are fish so smart? A: Because they live in schools. . 22. Q: What happened when the lion ate the comedian? A: He felt funny! . 23. Q: What animal has more lives than a cat? A: Frogs, they croak every night! . 24. Q: What do you get when you cross a snake and a pie? A: A pie-thon! . 25. Q: Why is a fish easy to weigh? A: Because it has its own scales! . 26. Q: Why aren’t elephants allowed on beaches? A:They can’t keep their trunks up! . 27. Q: How did the barber win the race? A: He knew a shortcut! . 28. Q: Why was the man running around his bed? A: He wanted to catch up on his sleep. . 29. Q: Why is 6 afraid of 7? A: Because 7 8 9! . 30. Q: What is a butterfly's favorite subject at school? A: Mothematics. Jokes by Categories 20 Mixed Animal Jokes Animal jokes are some of the funniest jokes around. Here are a few jokes about different animals. Specific groups will have a fun fact that be shared before going into the jokes. 1. Q: What do you call a sleeping bull? A: A bull-dozer. . 2. Q: What to polar bears eat for lunch? A: Ice berg-ers! . 3. Q: What do you get from a pampered cow? A: Spoiled milk.

I do not believe that we have finished evolving. And by that, I do not mean that we will continue to make ever more sophisticated machines and intelligent computers, even as we unlock our genetic code and use our biotechnologies to reshape the human form as we once bred new strains of cattle and sheep. We have placed much too great a faith in our technology. Although we will always reach out to new technologies, as our hands naturally do toward pebbles and shells by the seashore, the idea that the technologies of our civilized life have put an end to our biological evolution—that “Man” is a finished product—is almost certainly wrong. It seems to be just the opposite. In the 10,000 years since our ancestors settled down to farm the land, in the few thousand years in which they built great civilizations, the pressures of this new way of life have caused human evolution to actually accelerate. The rate at which genes are being positively selected to engender in us new features and forms has increased as much as a hundredfold. Two genes linked to brain size are rapidly evolving. Perhaps others will change the way our brain interconnects with itself, thus changing the way we think, act, and feel. What other natural forces work transformations deep inside us? Humanity keeps discovering whole new worlds. Without, in only five centuries, we have gone from thinking that the earth formed the center of the universe to gazing through our telescopes and identifying countless new galaxies in an unimaginably vast cosmos of which we are only the tiniest speck. Within, the first scientists to peer through microscopes felt shocked to behold bacteria swarming through our blood and other tissues. They later saw viruses infecting those bacteria in entire ecologies of life living inside life. We do not know all there is to know about life. We have not yet marveled deeply enough at life’s essential miracle. How, we should ask ourselves, do the seemingly soulless elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, zinc, iron, and all the others organize themselves into a fully conscious human being? How does matter manage to move itself? Could it be that an indwelling consciousness makes up the stuff of all things? Could this consciousness somehow animate the whole grand ecology of evolution, from the forming of the first stars to the creation of human beings who look out at the universe’s glittering constellations in wonder? Could consciousness somehow embrace itself, folding back on itself, in a new and natural technology of the soul? If it could, this would give new meaning to Nietzsche’s insight that: “The highest art is self–creation.” Could we, really, shape our own evolution with the full force of our consciousness, even as we might exert our will to reach out and mold a lump of clay into a graceful sculpture? What is consciousness, really? What does it mean to be human?

From an essay on early reading by Robert Pinsky: My favorite reading for many years was the "Alice" books. The sentences had the same somber, drugged conviction as Sir John Tenniel's illustrations, an inexplicable, shadowy dignity that reminded me of the portraits and symbols engraved on paper money. The books were not made of words and sentences but of that smoky assurance, the insistent solidity of folded, textured, Victorian interiors elaborately barricaded against the doubt and ennui of a dreadfully God-forsaken vision. The drama of resisting some corrosive, enervating loss, some menacing boredom, made itself clear in the matter-of-fact reality of the story. Behind the drawings I felt not merely a tissue of words and sentences but an unquestioned, definite reality. I read the books over and over. Inevitably, at some point, I began trying to see how it was done, to unravel the making--to read the words as words, to peek behind the reality. The loss entailed by such knowledge is immense. Is the romance of "being a writer"--a romance perhaps even created to compensate for this catastrophic loss--worth the price? The process can be epitomized by the episode that goes with one of my favorite illustrations. Alice has entered a dark wood--"much darker than the last wood": [S]he reached the wood: It looked very cool and shady. "Well, at any rate it's a great comfort," she said as she stepped under the trees, "after being so hot, to get into the--into the--into what?" she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. "I mean to get under the--under the--under this, you know!" putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. "What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name--why to be sure it hasn't!" This is the wood where things have no names, which Alice has been warned about. As she tries to remember her own name ("I know it begins with L!"), a Fawn comes wandering by. In its soft, sweet voice, the Fawn asks Alice, "What do you call yourself?" Alice returns the question, the creature replies, "I'll tell you, if you'll come a little further on . . . . I can't remember here". The Tenniel picture that I still find affecting illustrates the first part of the next sentence: So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arm. "I'm a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight. "And dear me! you're a human child!" A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed. In the illustration, the little girl and the animal walk together with a slightly awkward intimacy, Alice's right arm circled over the Fawn's neck and back so that the fingers of her two hands meet in front of her waist, barely close enough to mesh a little, a space between the thumbs. They both look forward, and the affecting clumsiness of the pose suggests that they are tripping one another. The great-eyed Fawn's legs are breathtakingly thin. Alice's expression is calm, a little melancholy or spaced-out. What an allegory of the fall into language. To imagine a child crossing over from the jubilant, passive experience of such a passage in its physical reality, over into the phrase-by-phrase, conscious analysis of how it is done--all that movement and reversal and feeling and texture in a handful of sentences--is somewhat like imagining a parallel masking of life itself, as if I were to discover, on reflection, that this room where I am writing, the keyboard, the jar of pens, the lamp, the rain outside, were all made out of words. From "Some Notes on Reading," in The Most Wonderful Books (Milkweed Editions)

The Earth Speaks, clearly, distinctly, and, in many of the realms of Nature, loudly, to William Jennings Bryan, but he fails to hear a single sound. The earth speaks from the remotest periods in its wonderful life history in the Archaeozoic Age, when it reveals only a few tissues of its primitive plants. Fifty million years ago it begins to speak as 'the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life.' In successive eons of time the various kinds of animals leave their remains in the rocks which compose the deeper layers of the earth, and when the rocks are laid bare by wind, frost, and storm we find wondrous lines of ascent invariably following the principles of creative evolution, whereby the simpler and more lowly forms always precede the higher and more specialized forms. The earth speaks not of a succession of distinct creations but of a continuous ascent, in which, as the millions of years roll by, increasing perfection of structure and beauty of form are found; out of the water-breathing fish arises the air-breathing amphibian; out of the land-living amphibian arises the land-living, air-breathing reptile, these two kinds of creeping things resembling each other closely. The earth speaks loudly and clearly of the ascent of the bird from one kind of reptile and of the mammal from another kind of reptile.

The Everglades are dying. Nearly half of their 4 million acres have been swallowed up by sprawl and sugarcane. Almost 70 plant and animal species that reside there hover on the brink of extinction. The wading bird populations — egrets and herons and spoonbills and the like — have declined a staggering 90 percent. The saw grass prairies, for which the region is famous, have grown smaller with each passing year, and the once legendary game fish populations aren’t doing much better. Among the few fish that do remain, scientists have detected enough mercury in their fatty tissue to open a thermometer factory.

Brain Life began around 3.5 billion years ago. Multicelled creatures first appeared about 650 million years ago. (When you get a cold, remember that microbes had nearly a three-billion-year head-start!) By the time the earliest jellyfish arose about 600 million years ago, animals had grown complex enough that their sensory and motor systems needed to communicate with each other; thus the beginnings of neural tissue. As animals evolved, so did their nervous systems, which slowly developed a central headquarters in the form of a brain.

There are five pounds of undigested red meat in the average American’s gut. The digestive system was not built for this and can’t cope with this much meat. The meat actually begins to break down and decay. This causes the release of high amounts of nitrogen and other nasty chemical enzymes. What’s more, if this was all natural meat that would be one thing. But it isn’t. Almost all meat we consume nowadays has been injected full of growth hormones, antibiotics and steroids. What’s more, the fodder the slaughter animals eat is full of pesticides, which collect in their meat tissue. And when we eat meat, all these things collect in us, where they compromise our immune system and degrade our health.

In the nineteenth century, when Europeans were exploring North America, a few explorers and fur trappers made contact with the nomadic Indians of the northern plains, a people who, like many hunter-gatherers, lived almost exclusively off animals. The Europeans of necessity adopted that diet and soon found themselves quite ill, even to the point of sprouting open, running sores on their faces. They were like we are today and ate only muscle meat. But then the Indians showed them the choice parts, the bits of liver and spleen, bone marrow and brain and the fat, especially the fat. The Europeans ate as they were told and got better because the organ tissue contained some essential micronutrients lacking in the muscle meat.

With only their eyes for tools, through no fault of their own, naturalists were stuck at the surface level of biology for thousands of years. Although dissection allowed some progress in understanding large-scale internal anatomy, it too was often misleading. For example, arteries and veins could be seen in dissected animal bodies. Yet the fact that they connected to each other through tiny capillaries in a closed circulatory system escaped even the great Roman surgeon Galen, who thought blood was pumped out by the heart to sink into the tissues, much as water in irrigation canals in his day sank into the ground. His mistaken ideas were taught for thirteen hundred years.

Human intellects make sense of things and, if anything, err on the side of coherence. Geniuses of my acquaintance, who almost seem clever enough to make sense of the world if they so wished, are more likely to accept it as a muddle than the common man who invests it with a transcendent character of its own or recognizes it as filled with divine purpose in which nothing is out of place. Pluralism and chaos are harder to grasp – harder, perhaps, to understand and certainly to accept – than monism and order. For a whole society to accept an agreed world-picture as senseless, random and intractable, people seem to need a lot of collective disillusionment, accumulated and transmitted over many generations (see here). Moral and cognitive ambiguities are luxuries we allow ourselves which most of our forebears eschewed. Whether from an historical angle of approach, along which reconstruction is attempted of the thought of the earliest sages we know about, or from an anthropological direction, lined with examples from primitive societies which survived long enough to be scrutinized, early world-pictures seem remarkably systematic, like the ‘dreamtime’ of Australian aboriginals, in which the inseparable tissue of all the universe was spun. The ambitions these images embody betray the inclusive and comprehensive minds which made them. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ethnographers’ fieldwork seemed ever to be stumbling on confusedly atomized world-pictures, shared by people who reached for understanding with frenzied clutchings but no overall grasp. This was because anthropologists of the time had a progressive model of human development in mind: animism preceded polytheism, which preceded monotheism; magic preceded religion, which preceded science. Confusion came first and categories, schemes and systems came later. People of the forest saw trees before they inferred wood. Coherence, it was assumed, is constructed late in human history. It now seems that the opposite is true. Coherence-seeking is one of those innate characteristics that make human thought human. No people known to modern anthropology is without it. ‘One of the deepest human desires’, Isaiah Berlin has said, ‘is to find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience is symmetrically ordered.’ Two kinds of coherence seem to come easily to primitive cosmogonists: they can be called, for convenience, binarism and monism. (For binarism, ‘dualism’ is a traditional name, but this word is now used with so many mutually incompatible meanings that it is less confusing to coin a new term.) Binarism envisages a cosmos regulated by the flow or balance between two conflicting or complementary principles. Monism imagines an indivisibly cohesive universe; the first a twofold, the second an unfolded cosmos. Equilibrium and cohesion are the characteristics of the world in what we take to be its oldest descriptions: equilibrium is the nature of a binarist description, cohesion of a monist one. Truth, for societies which rely on these characterizations for their understanding of the world, is what contributes to equilibrium or participates in cohesion. They

I go to a children’s store in my neighborhood, pink, chirpy, cheerful, and buy the baby a book, The Giving Tree, a dire story about a selfish child sucking the life out of an enabling tree. (That tree has no agency, is what I’ve always thought.) But that is the book you buy a baby. I’m certain Indigo has five copies of it already. I’m too late to be the first at anything. I also buy a stuffed rabbit, its floppy ears draping softly in a sea of pastel tissue paper inside the gift bag. This, too, I know she has multiple versions of, more or less. There is nothing original I can offer this child. I am obligated to make an offering, however, a virgin to the gods, a stuffed animal to a new baby. If I lay this gift on the altar, will you promise me I’ll never get pregnant? I make sure to get gift receipts for both.

ERV envelope genes possess unique properties that make them suitable for use in forming the placenta: they are fusogenic proteins and they have immunosuppresive properties. Eutherian (placental) mammals distinguish themselves from nonplacental animals in the ability of the female to nurture the fertilized ovum and growing embryo within the body. The placenta is a transient tissue of embryonic origin whose evolution made it unnecessary to partition the embryo into a protective egg, which matured outside the mother's body. It serves two purposes for the maturing embryo: it is a conduit for respiratory gasses and nourishment supplied by the mother, and it provides an environment of immune tolerance. The fetus is necessarily half-foreign tissue, an allograft within the mother. It draws half of its genetic, and hence antigenic, identity from maternal and half from paternal genes. If the fetus is to mature within the mother, it must be isolated from the maternal immune system such that a graft-versus-host response does not reject it. The placenta forms early after implantation of the embryo. Syncytins mediate the formation of a continuous fused layer of cells around the embryo, isolating it from the mother, yet allowing essential nutrients to traverse from the mother's system. Although the observations on human syncytin-1 and -2 were compelling, it was left to scientists to definitively link syncytins to placental formation by studying mice. Here two syncytins (dubbed A and B) from murine ERVs were implicated, and genetic experiments with mice defective in these genes confirmed that their dysfunction disrupted placental formation. Notably, however, syncytin-A and -B were not syntenic with the human syncytins. That is, the human and mouse genes are not descended fron common ancestral syncytins; they have arisen by separate ERV gene capture events from different families of ERV in human and mouse ancestors.

This is your body’s unsung hero. For a long time, the fascia was believed to just be a filler in the body, but fortunately, in recent years, science has brought it more to the foreground. High-tech examination equipment such as ultrasound and micro-cameras yield more and more astounding knowledge about its important functions in your body. Fascia is now classified as its own organ. This means, if you separated out all other tissue of the body, the fascial tissue remains as a connected part. In other words, the fascia forms a suspense network that pervades the entire human and animal body. That’s what the name implies: fascia means “bind” or “band” and “binding together” is exactly what this important

In the early 1970s, a young researcher at the University of Massachusetts named George Wade set out to study the relationship between sex hormones, weight, and appetite by removing the ovaries from rats (females, obviously) and then monitoring their subsequent weight and behavior.* The effects of the surgery were suitably dramatic: the rats would begin to eat voraciously and quickly become obese. If we didn’t know any better, we might assume from this that the removal of a rat’s ovaries makes it a glutton. The rat eats too much, the excess calories find their way to the fat tissue, and the animal becomes obese. This would confirm our preconception that overeating is responsible for obesity in humans as well. But Wade did a revealing second experiment, removing the ovaries from the rats and putting them on a strict postsurgical diet. Even if these rats were ravenously hungry after the surgery, even if they desperately wanted to be gluttons, they couldn’t satisfy their urge. In the lingo of experimental science, this second experiment controlled for overeating. The rats, postsurgery, were only allowed the same amount of food they would have eaten had they never had the surgery. What happened is not what you’d probably think. The rats got just as fat, just as quickly. But these rats were now completely sedentary. They moved only when movement was required to get food.

The way Wade explained it to me, the animal doesn’t get fat because it overeats, it overeats because it’s getting fat. The cause and effect are reversed. Both gluttony and sloth are effects of the drive to get fatter. They are caused fundamentally by a defect in the regulation of the animal’s fat tissue. The removal of the ovaries literally makes the rat stockpile body fat; the animal either eats more or expends less energy, or both, to compensate.

When these obese rodents are starved to death—an experiment that fortunately not too many researchers have done—a common result reported in the literature is that the animals die with much of their fat tissue intact. In fact, they’ll often die with more body fat than lean animals have when the lean ones are eating as much as they like.

Proteins consist of twenty different amino acids, eleven of which can be synthesized naturally by our bodies. The remaining nine—what we call essential amino acids—must be ingested from the foods we eat. So technically, our bodies require certain amino acids, not protein per se. But these nine essential amino acids are hardly the exclusive domain of the animal kingdom. In fact, they’re originally synthesized by plants and are found in meat and dairy products only because these animals have eaten plants. I was myself surprised to learn they’re found in copious amounts in a wide variety of grains, nuts, seeds, vegetables, and legumes. Things like black, kidney, and pinto beans; almonds; lentils; a quirky seed called quinoa; and even spinach and broccoli. Who knew? I certainly didn’t. So in the most generalized sense, if your diet contains a well-rounded variety of these plant-based foods—high in the nine essential amino acids in varying degrees and proportions—it is essentially impossible to be deficient in your body’s ability to properly synthesize all the proteins it needs for proper tissue maintenance, repair, and functioning. In truth, only one out of about every ten calories we eat needs to come from protein, with a recommended daily allowance (RDA) of 0.8 grams per kilogram of bodyweight.*1 Meanwhile, studies suggest that the requirements of the athlete don’t far exceed the RDA recommendation.

For if Government is, so to speak, the outward SKIN of the Body Politic, holding the whole together and protecting it; and all your Craft-Guilds, and Associations for Industry, of hand or of head, are the Fleshly Clothes, the muscular and osseous Tissues (lying under such SKIN), whereby Society stands and works;—then is Religion the inmost Pericardial and Nervous Tissue, which ministers Life and warm Circulation to the whole. Without which Pericardial Tissue the Bones and Muscles (of Industry) were inert, or animated only by a Galvanic vitality; the SKIN would become a shrivelled pelt, or fast-rotting rawhide; and Society itself a dead carcass,—deserving to be buried.

She doesn't yet realize that love unreturned eventually transforms into a fierce, tangled mess, nerves and entrails exposed like split animal innards. She doesn't understand that sometimes the unrequited must demand reparations, that love can be a mean and spiteful process, that sometimes one loses patience with love. So, when nerves and guts have seemingly been packed away, sewn in and cleaned up so as not to make all the innocent bystanders uncomfortable, the carrier of this love becomes heavy with a toxic lump that grows, slowly and steadily, into a fierce ball of scarred tissue. Located two ribs below the heart, it is called hate.

Not only does turmeric reduce oxidative stress via its antioxidant effects, it reduces inflammation in osteo-cartilaginous tissue.69, 70 And animal models demonstrate that curcumin can help regenerate damaged nerves after injury.

The only ethical question about abortion becomes: At what point can a fetus feel pain? Doctor-assisted suicide becomes an obviously good thing: People who are suffering should be allowed to end their lives, and should be given medical help to do it painlessly. Same for stem cell research: Why not take tissue from all those embryos living in suspended animation in fertility clinics? They can’t feel pain, but their tissues could help researchers develop cures that would spare sentient people from pain.

that, instead of being fused to the skull, hangs loosely beneath the brain case. This enables the upper jaw to push forward and hyperextend open—wide enough to engulf, and crush, an adult bull elephant. As if the size and voraciousness of its feeding orifice were not enough, nature has endowed this monster with a predatory intelligence, honed by 400 million years of evolution. Six distinct senses expose every geological feature, every current, every temperature gradient … and every creature occupying its domain. The predator’s eyes contain a reflective layer of tissue situated behind the retina. When moving through the darkness of the depths, light is reflected off this layer, allowing the creature to see. In sunlight, the reflective plate is covered by a layer of pigment, which functions like a built-in pair of sunglasses. While black in normally pigmented members of the species, this particular male’s eyes are a cataract-blue—a trait found in albinos. As large as basketballs, the sight organs reflexively roll back into the skull as the creature launches its attack on its prey, protecting the eyeball from being damaged. Forward of the eyes, just beneath the snout, are a pair of directional nostrils so sensitive that they can detect one drop of blood or urine in a million gallons of water. The tongue and snout provide a sense of taste and touch, while two labyrinths within the skull function as ears. But it is two other receptor organs that make this predator the master of its liquid domain. The first of these mid-to-long-range detection systems is the lateral line, a hollow tube that runs along either flank just beneath the skin. Microscopic pores open these tubes to the sea. When another animal creates a vibration or turbulence in the water, the reverberations stimulate tiny hairs within these sensory cells that alert the predator to the source of the disturbance—miles away! Even more sensitive are the hunter’s long-range receptor cells, located along the top and underside

I harken to the call of my heart, embracing the depth that flows liquid ambered and animal soft within my cells. The dark abyss of denial has always been a poor mans trade for the guiding light of emotional wisdom. This crust of mortal skin is baptised with tear streaked holy waters. I rise to my heart with an uncommon courage and wade soul deep. Tissue thin ripples of redemption drift across the pain towards my future self, bathing me in hope. I rise and step closer to all that I AM. Kristin Granger

I harken to the call of my heart, embracing the depth that flows liquid ambered and animal soft within my cells. The dark abyss of denial has always been a poor mans trade for the guiding light of emotional wisdom. This crust of mortal skin is baptised with tear streaked holy waters. I rise to my heart with an uncommon courage and wade soul deep. Tissue thin ripples of redemption drift across the pain towards my future self, bathing me in hope. I rise and step closer to all that I AM.

Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?' he asked me suddenly. 'When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?

These findings completely defy the calorie-balance theory of obesity. According to standard advice, the best way to lose weight or avoid weight gain is to cut back on calories. And that’s exactly what we did with the fast-acting carbohydrate group—in essence, we put them on a low-calorie diet. But despite having consumed less food, they had more fat. They also had significantly increased heart disease risk factors. Consistent with the Fat Cell Theory of Obesity figure (see here), the fast-acting carbohydrate increased insulin levels, causing calories to be stored as fat at the expense of the animals’ lean tissues and overall health.

Pay attention to both experiments, though, and the conclusion is radically different. Removing the ovaries from a rat literally makes its fat tissue absorb calories from the circulation and expand with fat. If the animal can eat more to compensate for the calories that are now being stashed away as fat (the first experiment), it will. If it can’t (the second), then it expends less energy, because it now has fewer calories available to expend.

Is it the shadow itself that looks out through our eyes at midday? Small wonder that so many traditional peoples give themselves over to siesta, and sleep, for an hour or two at this time, letting their tissues and organs respond to this interior visitation by the night, allowing the many cells or souls within them to be tutored by the darkness that has taken temporary refuge within their flesh.

Everybody wants. Without that, what are you? Just an animal taking care of needs.

The arterial wall is an insulin sensitive tissue. Animal experimentation showed that chronic exposure to high concentrations of insulin resulted in the development of lipid-filled lesions similar to those of early atherosclerosis. Thus, insulin has the ability to promote changes in the artery, which in the long term, may progress to atherosclerosis” (The relationship of abnormal circulating insulin levels to atherosclerosis. 1977. Atherosclerosis 27:1-13.)

Think of it this way: we’re rock and tissue. K2 helps calcium and other minerals to go everyplace they should (bones and teeth), and no place they shouldn't (arteries).

The point is not that women necessarily fetishize these parts of men’s bodies, but that these parts can be measured easily and are good markers of overall symmetry. Men with symmetrical bodies also do well in their own sexual marketplace. They tend to have sex a few years earlier than other men. They also have sex earlier when courting a specific woman, and have two or three times as many partners than less symmetrical men. Their partners even experience them as better in bed! It turns out that a man’s physical symmetry can predict the likelihood of his female lover having an orgasm better than his earnings, investment in the relationship, or frequency of love-making [31]. Heterosexual men also prefer symmetrical women. This preference is evident in laboratory experiments as well as from behavioral observations. Physically symmetrical women have more sexual partners than less symmetrical women. It turns out that women with large and symmetrical breasts are more fertile than women with less symmetrical breasts. Women also become more symmetrical during ovulation. Symmetry in soft tissue as measured in women’s ears and third, fourth, and fifth fingers can increase up to 30 percent during ovulation [32]. We saw that sexual dimorphic features can drive attractiveness in male and female faces. Sexual dimorphic features also influence how animals and people

However, the morphogenetic field no longer has to account for every-thing. Acceptance of dedifferentiation lets us divide regrowth into two phases and better understand each. The first phase begins with the cleanup of wound debris by phagocytes (the scavenger race of white blood cells) and culminates in dedifferentiation of tissue to form a blastema. Redifferentiation and orderly growth of the needed part constitute the second phase. Simplifying the problem in this way should give biologists an immediate sense of accomplishment, for the first stage is now well under-stood. After phagocytosis, while the other tissues are dying back a short distance behind the amputation line, the epidermal cells divide and mi-grate over the end of the stump. Then, as this epidermis thickens into an apical cap, nerve fibers grow outward and subdivide to form individual synapselike connections the neuroepidermal junction (NEJ) - with the cap cells. This connection transmits or generates a simple but highly specific electrical signal in regenerating animals: a few hundred nanoamperes of direct current, initially positive, then changing in the course of a few days to negative.

Subspecialty : Botany Studies : plants Subspecialty : Zoology Studies : animals Subspecialty : Marine biology Studies : organisms living in and around oceans, and seas Subspecialty : Fresh water biology Studies : organisms living in and around freshwater lakes, streams, rivers, ponds, etc. Subspecialty : Microbiology Studies : microorganisms Subspecialty : Bacteriology Studies : bacteria Subspecialty : Virology Studies : viruses ( see Figure below ) Subspecialty : Entomology Studies : insects Subspecialty : Taxonomy Studies : the classification of organisms Subspecialty : Studies : Life Science : Cell biology What it Examines : cells and their structures (see Figure below ) Life Science : Anatomy What it Examines : the structures of animals Life Science : Morphology What it Examines : the form and structure of living organisms Life Science : Physiology What it Examines : the physical and chemical functions of tissues and organs Life Science : Immunology What it Examines : the mechanisms inside organisms that protect them from disease and infection Life Science : Neuroscience What it Examines : the nervous system Life Science : Developmental biology and embryology What it Examines : the growth and development of plants and animals Life Science : Genetics What it Examines : the genetic make up of all living organisms (heredity) Life Science : Biochemistry What it Examines : the chemistry of living organisms Life Science : Molecular biology What it Examines : biology at the molecular level Life Science : Epidemiology What it Examines : how diseases arise and spread Life Science : What it Examines : Life Science : Ecology What it Examines : how various organisms interact with their environments Life Science : Biogeography What it Examines : the distribution of living organisms (see Figure below ) Life Science : Population biology What it Examines : the biodiversity, evolution, and environmental biology of populations of organisms Life Science : What it Examines :

Beyond physical activity and estrogen, the other major factor that increases the risk of osteoporosis is diet, especially calcium. A body needs abundant calcium to function properly, and one of bone’s many jobs is to serve as a reservoir of this vital mineral. If calcium levels in the blood drop too much because of insufficient calcium from food, hormones stimulate osteoclasts to resorb bone, restoring calcium balance. This response, however, weakens bones if the tissue is not replaced. Consequently, both animals and people whose diets are permanently deficient in calcium develop flimsy bones, and they lose bone more rapidly as they age. Modern grain-based diets, moreover, tend to be woefully deficient in calcium—between two and five times lower than typical hunter-gatherer diets, and only a minority of adult Americans eat sufficient calcium.16 This problem, moreover, is often exacerbated by low levels of vitamin D, which helps the gut absorb calcium, and by low levels of dietary protein, which is also necessary to synthesize bone.

One would expect to find a comparatively high proportion of carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] in the flesh of people whose staple food of choice is corn - Mexicans, most famously. Americans eat much more wheat than corn - 114 pounds of wheat flour per person per year, compared to 11 pounds of corn flour. The Europeans who colonized America regarded themselves as wheat people, in contrast to the native corn people they encountered; wheat in the West has always been considered the most refined, or civilized, grain. If asked to choose, most of us would probably still consider ourselves wheat people, though by now the whole idea of identifying with a plant at all strikes us as a little old-fashioned. Beef people sounds more like it, though nowadays chicken people, which sounds not nearly so good, is probably closer to the truth of the matter. But carbon 13 doesn't lie, and researchers who compared the carbon isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn. 'When you look at the isotope ratios,' Todd Dawson, a Berkeley biologist who's done this sort of research, told me, 'we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.' Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. So that's us: processed corn, walking.

During its eighty-odd years my tree was likely sick several times. Unable to run away from the constant barrage of animals and insects eager to dismantle it for shelter and food, it preempted attacks by armoring itself with sharp points and toxic, inedible sap. Its roots were the most at risk, smothered and vulnerable within a blanket of rotting plant tissue.

According to microbiologist Robert Young, excess protein causes the pH of the body’s tissues to become too acidic. He emphasizes that this acidic condition is unhealthy and signals to bacteria in and around the body that the body is weak, decaying, and dying.16 When any animal dies, as the life ebbs out of it, its flesh becomes increasingly acidic, signaling microorganisms in the region that it is time for them to do their job and break the flesh down so that it can return to the earth and be recycled. According to his research, instead of harboring primarily beneficial bacteria that aid in the various life-support processes of the body, the bodies of human omnivores may tend to harbor primarily destructive bacteria that are simply trying to do their natural job of breaking the body down because it gives signals, by the high acid content of the tissues and the presence of putrefying animal flesh, that it is dying.

Just as woodpeckers specialise in extracting insects from the trunks of trees, the first humans specialised in extracting marrow from bones. Why marrow? Well, suppose you observe a pride of lions take down and devour a giraffe. You wait patiently until they’re done. But it’s still not your turn because first the hyenas and jackals – and you don’t dare interfere with them – scavenge the leftovers. Only then would you and your band dare approach the carcass, look cautiously left and right – and dig into the edible tissue that remained. This is a key to understanding our history and psychology. Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain. That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana-republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.

matured satisfactorily in that climate. Some green foods were available in the summer and some vegetables were grown and stored for winter. This diet, which included a liberal supply of fish, included also the use of livers of fish. One important fish dish was baked cod's head that had been stuffed with oat meal and chopped cods' livers. This was an important inclusion in the diets of the growing children. The oats and fish, including livers, provided minerals and vitamins adequate for an excellent racial stock with high immunity to tooth decay. For the Eskimos of Alaska the native diet consisted of a liberal use of organs and other special tissues of the large animal life of the sea, as well as of fish. The latter were dried in large quantities in the summer and stored for winter use. The fish were also eaten frozen. Seal oil was used freely as an adjunct to this diet and seal meat was specially prized and was usually available. Caribou meat was sometimes available. The organs were used. Their fruits were limited largely to a few berries including cranberries, available in the summer and stored for winter use. Several plant foods were gathered in the summer and stored in fat or frozen for winter use. A ground nut that was gathered by the Tundra mice and stored in caches was used by the Eskimos as a vegetable. Stems of certain water grasses, water plants and bulbs were occasionally used. The bulk of their diet, however, was fish and large animal life of the sea from which they selected certain organs and tissues with great care and wisdom. These included the inner layer of skin of one of the whale species, which has recently been shown to be very rich in vitamin C. Fish eggs were dried in season. They were used liberally as food for the growing children and were recognized as important for growth and reproduction. This successful nutrition provided ample amounts of fat-soluble activators and minerals from sea animal

There is a misapprehension with regard to the possibility that humans may obtain enough of the vitamin D group of activators from our modern plant foods or from sunshine. This is due to the belief viosterol or similar products by other names, derived by exposing ergosterol to ultraviolet light, offer all of the nutritional factors involved in the vitamin D group. I have emphasized that there are known to be at least eight D factors that have been definitely isolated and twelve that have been reported as partially isolated. Coffin has recently reported relative to the lack of vitamin D in common foods as follows: (5) 1. A representative list of common foods was carefully tested, by approved technique, for their vitamin D content. 2. With the remote possibility of egg yolks, butter, cream, liver and fish it is manifestly impossible to obtain any amount of vitamin D worthy of mention from common foods. 3. Vegetables do not contain vitamin D. It will be noted that vitamin D, which the human does not readily synthesize in adequate amounts, must be provided by foods of animal tissues or animal products. As yet I have not found a single

Many of the above groups use foods from two or more sources. Each of the groups has provided an adequate quantity of body-building material from both animal and plant tissues. It does not matter what the source of minerals and vitamins may be so long as the supply is adequate

of the growth of self-restraint. A starting point for Elias’s analysis was medieval treatises on polite manners such as the book On Civility in Children by the Renaissance scholar Erasmus. In the 16th century, Europeans’ everyday social behavior was beyond gross. It was a social world in which books on good etiquette had to advise people not to blow their noses on the tablecloth nor to snort or smack their lips while eating. People ate with their hands, the fork being a strange luxury. They blew their noses without the aid of a handkerchief or tissues. They performed many bodily functions in public. Their sensibility toward the pain of others was minimal. Public executions were common, often preceded by torture or dismemberment. People behaved with unthinking cruelty toward animals.

I raise my grease gun and I aim it at Cowboy's face. Cowboy looks pitiful and he's terrified. Cowboy is paralyzed by the shock that is setting in and by the helplessness. I hardly know him. I remember the first time I saw Cowboy, on Parris Island, laughing, beating his Stetson on his thigh. I look at him. He looks at the grease gun. He calls out: "I NEVER LIKED YOU, JOKER. I NEVER THOUGHT YOU WERE FUNNY--" Bang. I sight down the short metal tube and I watch my bullet enter Cowboy's left eye. My bullet passes through his eye socket, punches through fluid-filled sinus cavities, through membranes, nerves, arteries, muscle tissue, through the tiny blood vessels that feed three pounds of gray butter-soft high protein meat where brain cells arranged like jewels in a clock hold every thought and memory and dream of one adult maleHomo sapiens. My bullet exits through the occipital bone, knocks out hairy, brain-wet clods of jagged meat, then buries itself in the roots of a tree. Silence. Animal Mother lowers his M-60. Animal Mother, Donlon, Lance Corporal Stutten, Harris, and the other guys in the squad do not speak. Everyone relaxes, glad to be alive. Everyone hates my guts, but they know I'm right. I am their sergeant; they are my men. Cowboy was killed by sniper fire, they'll say, but they'll never see me again; I'll be invisible.

The Family must serve the Nation––But it is not enough that the family commune maintain neighbourly relations with other such communes, and towards the stranger within the gates. The family is the unit of the nation; and the nation is an organic whole, a living body, built up, like the natural body, of an infinite number of living organisms. It is only as it contributes its quota towards the national life that the life of the family is complete. Public interests must be shared, public work taken up, the public welfare cherished––in a word, its integrity with the nation must be preserved, or the family ceases to be part of a living whole, and becomes positively injurious, as decayed tissue in the animal organism.

U.S. policies restrict feeding cow tissue directly to other cows, but still allow cows to be fed to other animals (like chickens) and the waste from the chickens to be fed back to the cows.

With modern Western diets, the body must work hard to keep the blood from becoming overly acidic from the excess animal protein being eaten. To do this, it uses alkaline bone tissue substances such as bicarbonates and calcium. This can lead to the loss of bone density and helps explain the high rates of osteoporosis in cultures where people eat large quantities of acidifying animal foods. Osteoporosis rates among the Eskimo people, who eat an almost completely flesh-based diet, are among the highest in the world.18 Next are northern Europeans and North Americans, who eat high quantities of flesh, eggs, and dairy products.19 While there are other factors that may affect bone health, such as vitamin and mineral intake, levels of loadbearing exercise, and mental and emotional factors, there is evidence that brittle bones and osteoporosis are correlated with eating the large amounts of animal protein typical of our meals.

Turning hard material (e.g., bones) into fossils is easy in a lab setting, but in 1993, scientists were even able to make fossils from soft animal tissues! New York Times’ Science Watch reports: Scientists have for the first time produced fossils of soft animal tissues in a laboratory. In the process they discovered that most of the phosphate required for the fossilization of small animal carcasses comes from within the animal itself.

Fasting is by far the most effective method for purifying the blood, organs, and all bodily tissues, and in this age of pervasive pollution it is more important than ever in warding off premature degeneration of the body due to toxicity. In laboratory tests on rats and other animals, periodic fasting has proven to extend average life spans by up to 50 per cent.

Pomegranates inhibit breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer, and leukemia, and prevent vascular changes that promote tumor growth in lab animals.55 2. Pomegranates inhibit angiotensin-converting enzymes and naturally lower blood pressure. (Angiotensin, as you may recall, is a hormone that promotes angiogenesis.)56 3. The potent antioxidative compounds in pomegranates reverse atherosclerosis and reduce excessive blood clotting and platelet clumping, factors that can lead to heart attacks and strokes.57 4. Pomegranates have estrogen-like compounds that stimulate serotonin and estrogen receptors, improving symptoms of depression and helping build bone mass in lab animals.58 5. Pomegranates reduce tissue damage in those with kidney problems, reduce the incidence of infections, and prevent serious infections.59 6. Lastly but impressively, pomegranates improve heart health. Heart patients with severe carotid artery blockages were given a daily dose of less than an ounce of pomegranate juice for a year. Not only did their blood pressure decrease by over 20 percent, but there was a 30 percent reduction in atherosclerotic plaque.60

I reflect that the mitochondria that process energy from food to animate our tissues are inherited entirely from our mothers, passed down through millennia in an endless progression of nesting dolls along a matrilineal line. The mitochondria from the sperm essentially melt upon fertilization with an egg, while our mother’s mitochondria persist and create all the energy we need to do everything.

The brain has a preferred fuel, glucose. Normally, glucose is carried in the blood (where it is often referred to as “blood sugar”), from which it is taken up into muscle, the liver, and the brain as a fuel. For glucose to enter muscle and the liver, the hormone insulin is required, whereas it can enter most regions of the brain even when insulin is absent. The clever way animals respond to food shortage is by making insulin less effective at moving glucose into muscle and the liver. With less glucose going into these tissues, levels in the blood rise, thereby ensuring sufficient glucose for the brain. This phenomenon is called insulin resistance.

The physiology of TMS begins in the brain. Here repressed emotions like anxiety and anger set in motion a process in which the autonomic nervous system causes a reduction in blood flow to certain muscles, nerves, tendons, or ligaments, resulting in pain and other kinds of dysfunction in these tissues. The autonomic nervous system is a subsystem of the brain that has the responsibility for controlling all of the body's involuntary functions. It determines how fast the heart beats, how much acid is secreted into the stomach for digestive purposes, how rapidly one breathes, and a host of other moment-to-moment physiologic processes that keep our bodies functioning optimally under everyday circumstances or in emergencies. The so-called fight or flight reaction that all animals share, particularly important in lower animals, is directed by the autonomic system. In order to meet the emergency, every organ and system in the body is properly prepared. For some systems it means total cessation of activity so that the body's resources can be mobilized to deal with the danger more effectively. Typically, most of the body's nutritive and excretory activities are shut down, the heart beats more rapidly, and blood is shunted away from less important functions so as to be available in larger quantities for systems that are crucial to escape or fight, like the muscles. The critical importance of the autonomic system of nerves is obvious. (page: 71)

Although sponges have many different types of cells, most are not organized into organs with discrete functions, like kidneys, livers, or ovaries (although the choanocyte chambers could be considered simple organs). For this reason, sponges are sometimes described as having a ‘tissue-level’ organization. Some sponges have astonishing powers of regeneration, so extreme that they were the inspiration for regenerating aliens in the science-fiction television series Doctor Who. The defining experiments that revealed this property were published in 1907 by Henry Van Peters Wilson of the University of North Carolina, USA. Wilson mashed up a living sponge and passed it through a fine cloth, the sort used for sieving flour, thereby splitting most of it into individual cells. Wilson then observed that these cells gradually crawled back together and reassembled into a new sponge! Furthermore, if the cells of two different species were mixed together, they would sort themselves out and regenerate into the two original sponges again. Although regeneration is found in many branches of the Animal Kingdom, no other animals are as expert as some of the sponges.

Pulsed lasers produce incredibly short bursts of electromagnetic energy. For example, a pulsed femtosecond laser produces a flash of light that lasts for femtoseconds to a picosecond (a picosecond is one trillionth of a second, a femtosecond is one thousandth of a picosecond), instantly followed by another (and so on). These lasers brought about the possibility of exciting fluorophores with two photons of only half the necessary energy, but they need to arrive almost simultaneously to generate the ejection of a photon. Infrared pulsed lasers penetrate living tissue more effectively, with the advantage that fluorescence is achieved from much deeper in the tissue than normal fluorescence, where the depth of penetration is limited by multiple light scattering events. Multiphoton microscopy (mainly two photon in practice, but also feasible as three or more photons) allows imaging from as deep as a millimetre (one thousand micrometres), an improvement of several hundred micrometres over fluorescence confocal microscopy. A second advantage of two photon excitation is that it forms as a single spot in the axial plane (z axis) without the ‘hourglass’ spread of out of focus light (the point spread function) that happens with single photon excitation. This is because the actual two photon excitation will only occur at the highest concentration of photons, which is limited to the focal plane itself. Because there is no out of focus light, there is no need for a confocal pinhole, allowing more signal to reach the detector. Combined with the increased depth of penetration, and reduced light induced damage (phototoxicity) to living tissue, two photon microscopy has added a new dimension to the imaging of living tissue in whole animals. At the surface of a living brain, remarkable images of the paths of whole neurons over several hundred micrometres can be reconstructed as a 3D z section from an image stack imaged through a thinned area of the skull in an experimental animal. Endoscopes have been developed which incorporate a miniaturized two photon microscope, allowing deep imaging of intestinal epithelium, with potential to provide new information on intestinal diseases, as most of the cellular lining throughout our gut is thin enough to be imaged in this way. So far a whole range of conditions including virtually all the cancers of the digestive tract as well as inflammatory bowel disease have been investigated, reducing the need for biopsies and providing new insights as to the nature of these conditions.

For me, a real breakthrough occurred when I stopped thinking about and defining meat in terms of its animal origin (e.g., chicken, cow, pig), but instead in terms of its composition. At a very high level, meat is really five things: amino acids, lipids, small amounts of carbohydrates, trace minerals, and, of course, water. The animal eats plants and turns them into muscle tissue, or what we call meat. But with today’s technology, instead of using a biological bioreactor (animal), we can harvest those core inputs directly from plants themselves. We can use other systems to assemble them in the familiar architecture of meat.

Many scientists and researchers themselves now advocate these methods, most prominently the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. There is no longer any rational basis, they tell us, for the Draize test, dripping chemicals and personal-care products into the eyes of immobilized rabbits. We can now test for eye irritancy by use of human tissue systems mimicking characteristics of the eye. We can stop pouring commercial and industrial chemicals into animals. Acute toxicity is determined more accurately by in vitro methods using human cell cultures obtained from cadavers. Damage to DNA can be studied in bacteria, as in the Ames assay developed thirty years ago, adopted slowly by the EPA and yet now internationally accepted. Further experiments on animals for diseases of the heart, nicotine addiction, obesity, and many other disorders are unwarranted because we have already identified their primary causes by studying human populations.

Now there is no normal process except death which completely clears the brain from all past impressions; and after death, it is impossible to set it going again. Of all normal processes, sleep comes the nearest to a non-pathological clearing. How often we find that the best way to handle a complicated worry or an intellectual muddle is to sleep over it! However, sleep does not clear away the deeper memories, nor indeed is a sufficiently malignant state of worry compatible with an adequate sleep. We are thus often forced to resort to more violent types of intervention in the memory cycle. The more violent of these involve a surgical intervention into the brain, leaving behind it permanent damage, mutilation, and the abridgment of the powers of the victim, as the mammalian central nervous system seems to possess no powers whatever of regeneration. The principal type of surgical intervention which has been practiced is known as prefrontal lobotomy, and consists in the removal or isolation of a portion of the prefrontal lobe of the cortex. It has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier. However, prefrontal lobotomy does seem to have a genuine effect on malignant worry, not by bringing the patient nearer to a solution of his problems but by damaging or destroying the capacity for maintained worry, known in the terminology of another profession as the conscience. More generally, it appears to limit all aspects of the circulating memory, the ability to keep in mind a situation not actually presented. The various forms of shock treatment—electric, insulin, metrazol—are less drastic methods of doing a very similar thing. They do not destroy brain tissue or at least are not intended to destroy it, but they do have a decidedly damaging effect on the memory. In so far as this concerns the circulating memory, and in so far as this memory is chiefly damaged for the recent period of mental disorder, and is probably scarcely worth preserving anyhow, shock treatment has something definite to recommend it as against lobotomy; but it is not always free from deleterious effects on the permanent memory and the personality. As it stands at present, it is another violent, imperfectly understood, imperfectly controlled method to interrupt a mental vicious circle. This does not prevent its being in many cases the best thing we can do at present.

TO STRENGTHEN OUR IMMUNE SYSTEM AND COMBAT ITS AGE-RELATED DECLINE: The peptide thymosin alpha-1 (Zadaxin): As we age, our thymus gland gradually turns into fat tissue and stops producing the robust battalions of T cells that fight off infections or eliminate rogue cancer cells. If we had to choose a single peptide to help address immunological aging, according to Dr. Lopez, thymosin alpha-1 might be the one. TA-1 has proven its ability to stimulate the immune system in both animal and human studies.

the Chinese, almost three thousand years ago, saw the fungus sprouting from the exploded bodies of caterpillars and thought they had chanced upon a magical metamorphosis. A creature that was an animal in summer and a mushroom in winter! They prized Cordyceps as a treatment for heart disease and impotence, the distilled essence of life itself. Later generations found that the fungus could grow through damaged nerve tissue and partially repair it. There’s a prevailing theory that these medicinal uses of the fungus were the precursors to the hungry plague—the doorway through which Cordyceps infected human populations.

This premise can be applied to life on the planet today. The more oxygen life can consume, the more electron excitability it gains, the more animated it becomes. When living matter is bristling and able to absorb and transfer electrons in a controlled way, it remains healthy. When cells lose the ability to offload and absorb electrons, they begin to break down. “Taking out electrons irreversibly means killing,” wrote Szent-Györgyi. This breakdown of electron excitability is what causes metal to rust and leaves to turn brown and die. Humans “rust” as well. As the cells in our bodies lose the ability to attract oxygen, Szent-Györgyi wrote, electrons within them will slow and stop freely interchanging with other cells, resulting in unregulated and abnormal growth. Tissues will begin “rusting” in much the same way as other materials. But we don’t call this “tissue rust.” We call it cancer. And this helps explain why cancers develop and thrive in environments of low oxygen. The best way to keep tissues in the body healthy was to mimic the reactions that evolved in early aerobic life on Earth—specifically, to flood our bodies with a constant presence of that “strong electron acceptor”: oxygen. Breathing slow, less, and through the nose balances the levels of respiratory gases in the body and sends the maximum amount of oxygen to the maximum amount of tissues so that our cells have the maximum amount of electron reactivity. “In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy,” said Szent-Györgyi. The moving energy of electrons allows living things to stay alive and healthy for as long as possible. The names may have changed—prana, orenda, ch’i, ruah—but the principle has remained the same. Szent-Györgyi apparently took that advice. He died in 1986, at the age of 93. •

The reflex as it is defined in the classical conception does not represent the normal activity of the animal, but the reaction obtained from an organism when it is subjected to working as it were by means of detached parts, to responding not to complex situations but to isolated stimuli. Which is to say that it corresponds to the behavior of a sick organism--the primary effect of lesions being to break up the functional continuity of nerve tissues--and to "laboratory behavior" where the animal is placed in an anthropomorphic situation since, instead of having to deal with those natural unities which events or baits are, it is restricted to certain discriminations; it must react to certain physical and chemical agents which have a separate existence only in human science. Every organic reaction supposes a global elaboration of the excitations which confers properties on each one of them that it would not have singly. It is not surprising that, even in the laboratory, so few pure reflexes are found.

Types of Wounds 1. Contusion: A bruise. 2. Abrasion: A wound in which one or more layers of skin are partially or completely scraped away. 3. Laceration: A cut through the skin. A laceration produced by a sharp object, such as a knife, generally produces little damage to the surrounding skin. Lacerations from a blunt injury, however, typically result in a tearing or bursting of the skin, causing ragged wound edges or star-shaped patterns. Because damage to adjacent skin occurs, these wounds heal more slowly, result in larger scars, and are more prone to infection. 4. Avulsion: A partial amputation that leaves a “flap” of body tissue attached by skin, muscle, or tendon. 5. Amputation: A complete separation of a body part, such as an ear, finger, or foot, from the rest of the body. 6. Puncture: A wound that occurs when an object, such as a thorn, fang, or knife, penetrates the body. These wounds may introduce bacteria into deep tissues and are very difficult to clean adequately. As a result, they are particularly prone to infection. 7. Impaled object: A puncture wound with the puncturing object still stuck in. 8. Bite wound: A puncture wound caused by a bite from an animal or another human. 9. Burn: Tissue injury resulting from heat, electricity (lightning), radiation (sunburn), or chemicals.

Human Cloning: The Least Interesting Application of Cloning Technology One of the most powerful methods of applying life’s machinery involves harnessing biology’s own reproductive mechanisms in the form of cloning. Cloning will be a key technology—not for cloning actual humans but for life-extension purposes, in the form of “therapeutic cloning.” This process creates new tissues with “young” telomere-extended and DNA-corrected cells to replace without surgery defective tissues or organs. All responsible ethicists, including myself, consider human cloning at the present time to be unethical. The reasons, however, for me have little to do with the slippery-slope issues of manipulating human life. Rather, the technology today simply does not yet work reliably. The current technique of fusing a cell nucleus from a donor to an egg cell using an electric spark simply causes a high level of genetic errors.57 This is the primary reason that most of the fetuses created by this method do not make it to term. Even those that do make it have genetic defects. Dolly the Sheep developed an obesity problem in adulthood, and the majority of cloned animals produced thus far have had unpredictable health problems.58

We are mixing animal and human tissue in laboratory cultures, then injecting them into human beings in a way that bypasses their traditional defenses, such as stomach acid breaking down pathogens. Antibiotics, which we give with alarming regularity, are known to dysregulate the bacteria in our digestive system, and there’s strong evidence of harm from many of the chemicals used in vaccines.

Tissue Tissue is a group of cells in animals and plants that forms a definite kind of structural material with a specific function. Muscle Muscle is a tissue in the body, often attached to bones, that can tighten and relax to produce motion. Skeletal Muscle Skeletal muscle is muscle tissue connected to the skeleton to form part of the system that moves the limbs and other parts of the body.