https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/07/30/why-nasa-still-believes-we-might-find-life-on-mars/

Why NASA still believes we might find life on Mars
By Sarah Kaplan July 30 at 11:20 AM

The day Gil Levin says he detected life on Mars, he was waiting in his lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, watching a piece of paper inch out of a printer.

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"I was sort of trembling, you know?" he recalled. It was July 30, 1976.

Forty years later, Levin and Straat still believe that their experiment was evidence of microbiotic Martians. But few people agree with them. To NASA, and to most scientists, the 1976 Viking mission was a technical triumph but a biological bust. Scientists, such as Carl Sagan, who had wagered that large organisms "are not only possible on Mars; they may be favored," were disappointed to see images the lander sent back of a dry, barren planet. Two experiments aimed at finding life turned up negative, and NASA concluded that the results of Levin's test, called the Labeled Release experiment, could be explained by chemical processes rather than biological ones.

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But hope was in the air at Langley Research Center last week, where NASA held a two-day conference to honor the 40th anniversary of the Viking landing. After decades of pointedly not looking for it, the space agency is more optimistic than it's been since 1976 that it might find life on Mars yet.

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The issue with the Viking experiments is that they expected to find too much too soon, speaker after speaker explained over the course of the conference. Detecting life with Viking would have been a breakthrough of unprecedented proportions, and science doesn't usually happen that way. Most "breakthroughs" come after years of accumulating incremental increases in knowledge.

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This kind of talk is frustrating for Levin, who has held for 30 years that life on Mars has already been detected. At the anniversary event Wednesday, he exhorted the audience, "there is no scientifically acceptable explanation to the Labeled Release experiments on Mars, except life."

Off stage, Levin admitted he was surprised he was invited to speak at the conference (when he announced his opinion at the 10th anniversary celebration, he says he was pelted with shrimp).

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What's in the WikiLeaks DNC Recordings
ABC News
Published on Jul 27, 2016

Voicemails show former ambassadors calling DNC officials for time with Obama.

http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2016/07/hold22_palisades_guards_on_pai.html

22 Palisades nuclear plant guards on paid leave, fire inspections forged

By Rosemary Parker
on July 19, 2016

COVERT, MI -- The exact details of why 22 security guards at the Palisades nuclear plant have been suspended remain murky, but an energy company official admitted that the employees are accused of fabricated fire inspection records.

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Neither Entergy nor the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will say what the guards are accused of doing wrong or how long the problem persisted before it was discovered. The company and federal agency each cited an ongoing investigation.

Prema Chandrathil, public affairs officer for the US NRC Region III, said the NRC identified an issue with fire tours at Palisades while conducting routine safety inspections.

"Our inspectors had questions about those tours and began looking further into the issue. The NRC has fire protection requirements that are specific to each plant and at Palisades there appears to be discrepancies as to how the procedures were being met," she said.

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That seems consistent with the claim of an unnamed source, reported by WWMT, that the plant's paper records "indicated that fire inspections had been completed by the plant's security officers, however, electronic records tracking movement in the plant showed the opposite."

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http://www.psychiatryadvisor.com/depressive-disorder/utility-of-neuroimaging-in-depression/article/507297/

What Neuroimaging Can Teach us About Depression
Theodore Henderson, MD, PhD
July 01, 2016

Neuroimaging studies have shown several neurophysiological substrates for depression: An overview by Theodore Henderson, MD, PhD.

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Neuroscience and neuroimaging have revealed much to provide evidence that depression is a biological disease. Indeed, depression is not just one thing, despite the efforts of mainstream psychiatry to classify it into a single illness category. Nassir Ghaemi, MD, noted expert on psychopharmacology recently wrote:4

“Psychiatry…practice(s) non-scientifically; we use hundreds of made-up labels for professional purposes, without really getting at the reality of what is wrong with the patient…We have a huge amount of neurobiology research now to conclude that the 20th century neurotransmitter theories of psychopharmacology basically are false. The dopamine and monoamine (serotonin) hypotheses of schizophrenia and depression are wrong...we now know that drugs have major second messenger effects which (cause) neuroplastic changes in the brain, including connections between neurons. The brain is literally re-sculpted.”

Neuroimaging studies have shown several neurophysiological substrates for depression. Functional brain scans, such as SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) or PET (positron emission tomography) have shown that while patients may present with the same symptoms of depression, they can have very different processes occurring in their brains.

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Future directions in Psychiatry might include anti-inflammatory agents,30 more extensive use of ketamine infusion therapy,33 ketamine analogs, and neuroimaging-based selection of medications,14,17 which some have shown improves outcomes.16 Recognition that depressive episodes can be precipitated by neural injury, such as TBI or toxic injury may lead to radically different, even non-pharmacological treatments for depression following brain injury. A barrier to these advances is the fundamental resistance on the part of psychiatrists to look at the organ they are treating and to open their eyes to possible alternative explanations for the depression the patient describes to them.

Theodore Henderson, MD, PhD, is a psychiatrist in Denver, Colo., who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of complex adult, child, and adolescent psychiatric cases. His website is www.childpsychiatristdenver.com.

Unions ask San Diegans to boycott Vons, Albertsons and Ralphs
ABC 10 News
Published on Jul 26, 2016

A UFCW Local 135 spokeswoman says 14,000 union members could go on strike in roughly two weeks.