It is said that we are a product of our environment and when we are young, lasting impressions are burned into our minds about what love is, how the world works and what we ought to do when we are older.

As if settling down, getting married and having children is the benchmark for success. But who is really to say what happiness is and what it looks like?

Maybe some of us are perfectly happy, just being alone…

1. Dogmas and social conditioning don’t phase you

You have navigated the emotional concourse of societal expectation and found that it just doesn’t resonate with you. Instead you listen to your heart and follow your inner voice, wherever it might lead.

2. You screen your phone calls.

If you find yourself waiting to respond to text messages and emails after they light up on your screen, this is a sure-fire sign that you prefer your privacy. Setting your own boundaries for what you allow into your personal zone and when. Continue reading →

When you think about purchasing a cotton pad, or gauze from your local drug store, you tend to think that it ought to be a sanitary product, right?

Wrong. According to a recent Argentinian study, they found that 85% of tested tampons, swabs, balls, wipes and other sanitary products, scored positive for none other than a probable carcinogen, typically found in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. 

“Eighty-five percent of all samples tested positive for glyphosate and 62 percent for AMPA, which is the environmental metabolite” Dr. Damian Marino told Télam news agency.

Among these shocking findings, the team at Socio-Environmental Interaction Space (EMISA) of the University of La Plata in Argentina, also found that 100% of the sterilized cotton gauze that was analyzed, showed evidence of glyphosate.
Continue reading →

I have to admit, I love the feeling of scrubbing down with those tiny beads, that open up the pores, exfoliating and really getting down into that tough dirt. Nothing feels better.

But did you know that those tiny beads are usually made of synthetic plastic? and that everyday, millions of these tiny beads are washed down the drain, contributing for a large percent of the plastic contamination in our oceans?

Researchers state that there are 360,000 pieces of plastic for every square mile of the ocean and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic find their way to the ocean every year.

While most of the plastic found in oceans is from waste products such as bottles and food waste wrapping, a study released in the journal of marine pollution bulletin states that micro-beads could result in 80 tons of micro plastic waste, as these tiny beads pass easily through sewage treatment plants. Continue reading →

Mother nature never lets us down, proving time and time again that everything we will always need is right in front of us, if we would only dig a little further.

In a recent media briefing, at the Australian Science and Medical Centre, Dr Justin Chalker from Flinders University announced that they have developed a “A brand new, dirt cheap, non-toxic polymer that literally sucks mercury out of water and soil is set to become a game changer in the battle against one of the world’s most reviled pollutants.”

The material is made from the industrial waste products sulphur and limonene a colorless liquid hydrocarbon extracted from the peel of citrus fruits such as lemons and oranges and is very inexpensive to produce given the amount of global waste. Making it affordable to produce in large-scale environmental clean ups.

Mercury contamination plagues many areas of the world, affecting both food and water supplies and creating a serious need for an efficient and cost-effective method to trap this mercury,” says Dr Chalker.

“Until now, there has been no such method, but the new sulphur-limonene polysulfide addresses this urgent need.”

Japan, known to be one of the countries who are at high risk of this toxic chemical, many contracting Minamata disease a neurological disorder that causes numbness in the hands and feet, muscle weakness, loss of peripheral vision and damage to hearing and speech upon severe exposure to mercury.

This toxin has significant implications for human health, whether ingested through eating contaminated fish or contracted through the skin, mercury exposure is proven to damage the central nervous system. Those at risk in particular are pregnant women and children.

As of March 2001, 2,265 victims had been officially recognized in Japan as having Minamata disease (1,784 of whom had died).

“So not only is this new polymer good for solving the problem of mercury pollution, but it also has the added environmental bonus of putting this waste material to good use while converting them into a form that is much easier to store so that once the material is ‘full’ it can easily be removed and replaced.” states Dr. Chalker

Dr. Chalkers polymer has also been found to remove toxic metals from water even in small amounts as the dark red material turns yellow when it absorbs mercury.

by LJ Vanier

Once again science fiction is becoming science faction, as the robot revolution is on the rise. Not only are they taking our jobs and driving our cars, now they can read our minds!

Using a mathematical algorithm that can predict what we are about to do, bio engineers in the US have developed a robot that can calculate our intentions based on prior activity even when an action is interrupted.

So for example, if you are reaching for a cup of coffee on your desk, but your hand collides with an unexpected object that prevents you from taking hold of the coffee, someone else would be able to make a fairly accurate guess of your intended motion, but could a robot?

In order to test this theory, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, experimented with this exact scenario.  Continue reading →