Author Archives: Editors

Small Animals Live in a Slow-Motion World

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Small Animals Live in a Slow-Motion World

The following article is taken from the latest issue of Scientific American

Time seems to pass more slowly for lighter animals with faster metabolisms

One “dog year” supposedly equals seven human years. But does one year feel like seven years to a dog? Evidence suggests that distinct species do indeed experience passing time on different scales. A recent study in Animal Behavior reveals that body mass and metabolic rate determine how animals of different species perceive time.

Time perception depends on how rapidly an animal’s nervous system processes sensory information. To test this ability, researchers show animals a rapidly flashing light. If the light flashes quickly enough, animals (and humans) perceive it as a solid, unblinking light. The animal’s behavior or its brain activity, as measured by electrodes, reveals the highest frequency at which each species perceives the light as flashing. Animals that can detect the blinking at higher frequencies are perceiving time at a finer resolution. In other words, movements and events will appear to unfold more slowly to them—think slow-motion bullet dodging in an action movie.

For further details,  please click the following hyper-link:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/small-animals-live-in-a-slow-motion-world/?&WT.mc_id=SA_EVO_20140714

RAMADAN WITH NO DUSK OR DAWN

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An article from Aljazeera.

Shared by Tahir Mahmood

Kiruna, Sweden – During this year’s holy month of Ramadan, when consumption of food and water is prohibited between dawn and dusk, how do Muslims observing the fast manage in the far north of Scandinavia, where the sun never sets?

An estimated 700 Muslims are spending Ramadan in the mining town of Kiruna, located 145km north of the Arctic Circle and surrounded by snowcapped mountains throughout the summer. Many of them are recent asylum seekers, sent to Kiruna while their claims are processed.

The sun stays up around the clock from May 28-July 16, which constitutes half of the fasting period this year.

“I started Ramadan by having suhoor with the sun shining in my eyes at 3:30 in the morning,” said Ghassan Alankar from Syria, referring to the meal just before dawn.

“I put double curtains in my room and still, there’s light when I’m going to sleep.”

Since there is no central authority in Sunni Islam that could issue a definite religious ruling, or fatwa, Muslims in the north are using at least four different timetables to break the fast.

Alankar sticks to Mecca time, Saudi Arabia, “because it’s the birthplace of Islam”. But he is worried about whether his fast will be accepted by God.

“I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing,” said Alankar, who arrived in Kiruna seven months ago after a hazardous journey via Lebanon, Turkey, and Greece. “Only when I’m in God’s house, if I make it to heaven, I will know.”

No dusk, no dawn

The start of Ramadan is determined by the sighting of the new moon, which  moves about 11 days back in the Gregorian calendar each year. About every 33 years, Ramadan falls at the same time.

A majority of those who fast in Kiruna follow the timings of the capital Stockholm, 1,240km further south, after being advised by the European Council of Fatwa and Research (ECFR), a Dublin-based private foundation composed of Islamic clerics.

Zero, 15, 25 or 45 hours, it doesn’t matter as long as you believe in what you’re doing.

– Hussein Halawa, European Council of Fatwa and Research

“In Stockholm, there’s day and night,” Hussein Halawa, secretary-general of the council, told Al Jazeera, explaining the decision. He was personally invited to northern Sweden from Dublin this year to experience the lengthy daylight and give advice.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/07/ramadan-sweden-with-no-dusk-no-dawn-20147614423642407.html

FEUD BETWEEN IRAN AND SAUDIA

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Shared by Dr.Nasik Elahi

An article from Asia Times

The article in Asia Times is a study of the roles of Iran and Saudi Arabia to foment ancient feuds with modern means.  The so-called religious and social elites of the two countries are using their oil wealths and status to foment a historically  unprecedented Muslim fratricide that is changing the map of the region.  The two principal antagonists are waging their respective campaigns through agents of extreme nihilist violence.  What they are sponsoring is bound to blow back into their own countries.  The consequences for Muslim nations and global stability are profound

.Asia Times Online :: Iran, Saudis give battle on proxy stage

NAFTA THE BLUNDER OR A FRAUD

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An article in Huff-Post shared by Dr.Ehtisham
NAFTA promoters in the ’90s promised increased U.S. exports and jobs, with shrinking trade deficits. Senior Fellows of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), projected a NAFTA-induced trade surplus with Mexico, in turn, creating 170,000 new U.S. jobs by 1995. Within two years of NAFTA’s passage, PIIE prognosticators readjusted their projection of new NAFTA-created jobs downward to “zero.” The same group, created by billionaire corporate cheerleader Pete Peterson, is again forecasting increased exports and jobs if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is passed.
Referencing 19 serious pre-NAFTA economic studies projecting zero net job loss if NAFTA were to pass, President Bill Clinton estimated the creation of 200,000 U.S. jobs within two years, and 1 million within five years, based on a projected export boom to Mexico. Twenty years after Clinton signed NAFTA into law, Global Trade Watch reports a 450 percent increase in the U.S. trade deficit, resulting in the export of almost one million jobs, and downward pressure on wages.
In fact, the average annual U.S. agricultural trade deficit with Mexico and Canada ballooned to almost three times the pre-NAFTA level, to $975 million within two decades of NAFTA’s passage, eliminating an estimated one million net U.S. jobs by 2004, reports the Economic Policy Institute. As U.S. food processors moved to Mexico to take advantage of low wages, U.S. food imports soared. Public Citizen has tallied in a comprehensive report the promises by U.S. corporations to create specific numbers of jobs if NAFTA passed, and the consequent record of many of the same firms who relocated jobs to Mexico and Canada.
The export of subsidized U.S. corn did increase over NAFTA’s first decade, decimating the livelihoods of more than one million Mexican campesino farmers plus an additional 1.4 million agricultural workers, triggering mass dislocation, wage depression and a doubling of Mexican immigration to the United States.
Observed Bill Moyers recently, “The post-NAFTA era has been marked by growing inequality, declining job security and new leverage for corporations to attack government regulations enacted in the public interest.”
“Free Trade” Advocates Convene at Clinton Global Initiative
Echoing promises of lowered trade barriers, improved labor conditions and environmental protections made by NAFTA advocates two decades earlier, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Hanoi, Viet Nam in 2012 promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the most far-reaching trade agreement ever, encompassing 12 Pacific Rim countries. Secretary Clinton stated support for free expression online, and pronounced, “Democracy and prosperity go hand-in-hand,” even as the backroom dealings of hundreds of corporate lobbyists have engaged in writing the TPP to challenge everything from Net Neutrality to democratic process and state sovereignty. An amplification of NAFTA provisions, leaked segments of the secretive treaty reveal that wholesale powers granted by the TPP to corporations would permit them to sue governments for alleged lost profits in special international tribunals that bypass the U.S. court system, and to advocate overturn of regulatory laws intended to protect people and the environment.