A new study, led by researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and funded in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), analyzed more than 220 mother-child pairs, collecting data on fluoride levels during pregnancy and child behavior at age three. The researchers found that a 0.68 milligram per liter increase in fluoride exposure was associated with nearly double the chance of a child showing neurobehavioral problems in a range considered close to or at a level to meet the criteria for clinical diagnosis.
The findings were published on May 20 in the medical journal JAMA Network Open.
“Women with higher fluoride exposure levels in their bodies during pregnancy tended to rate their 3-year-old children higher on overall neurobehavioral problems and internalizing symptoms, including emotional reactivity, anxiety, and somatic complaints,” said Tracy Bastain, PhD, an associate professor of clinical population and public health sciences and senior author of the study.
These population-level findings add to existing evidence from animal studies showing that fluoride can harm neurodevelopment, as well as data from studies conducted in Canada, Mexico, and other countries showing that prenatal exposure to fluoride is linked with a lower IQ in early childhood. The researchers hope the new findings help convey the risks of fluoride consumption during pregnancy to policymakers, healthcare providers, and the public.
If you’ve ever read a story in the news about elver fishing season, you’ve probably seen some variation of this line: “Maine’s the only state in the U.S. with a significant fishery for elvers.”
Maybe you thought that’s because elvers don’t exist in large numbers outside of Maine — that would be a reasonable assumption. But the real reason is somewhat more complicated.
Let’s start at the beginning, in the Sargasso Sea. Although it sounds romantic, the Sargasso Sea is actually just an area of the North Atlantic that’s full of Sargassum, a kind of seaweed that floats in the ocean rather than existing close to land.
It’s a unique marine environment, and the Sargasso Sea provides a cozy place for many species to spawn or start out life, including baby turtles and some types of fish.
It’s also where the life cycle of the American eel both begins and ends. They’re born there, and after a few decades — eels are incredibly long-lived animals — they swim back in, spawn and die.
Outside of that, eels’ life cycle isn’t that well understood, but we know they start out there as tiny leptocephali, or larvae, which look like nothing more than a transparent willow leaf.
For the first few months of their lives, they float about with the ocean currents and are eventually carried by the Gulf Stream north along the continental shelf of the eastern U.S. Then, somehow — scientists don’t know quite how — they find their way out of the Gulf Stream and into coastal and fresh waters.
At this point, they’re about a year old and looking more eel-like, but still transparent. They’re now in the elver, or “glass eel,” stage, and as University of Maine marine biologist James McCleave puts it, they get “spit out everywhere” along the Atlantic Coast. Then they more or less stay put in estuaries, rivers and lakes near the coast for decades, getting bigger, fatter and more silvery.
This is a well-written article which explains why the price of Maine’s glass eels is typically over $1,000 per pound. The basic reason is Maine provides hard to get breed eels to Japan where eels are a popular dish. Be sure to read the whole story because it is interesting and much more complicated than that. ABN
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has allegedly been using US funds sent to the country for luxury acquisitions, including hundreds of millions spent in purchasing a hotel and casino worth over $191 million.
According to Turkish website OdaTV, Zelensky is rumored to have purchased the Vuni Palace hotel and casino in Northern Cyprus.
President of Cyprus Nikos Christodoulides states an investigation is underway.
According to reports, Belize-registered Film Heritage Inc. acquired the hotel for £150 million ($191 million), although this report has since been deleted.
Film Heritage Inc. which was originally owned by Zelensky, as revealed in an October 2021 investigation by OCCRP.
Olena Zelenskaya became the sole owner of the company around the time of Zelensky’s election in 2019.
The appearance of “Film Heritage Inc” in the Turkish press has been explained by the Oscar Group’s spokesperson as the company having developed the casino’s website.
Previous investigations revealed a network of firms based in the British Virgin Islands, Belize, and Cyprus linked to Zelensky and his partners, suggesting efforts to conceal offshore assets.
Reports also allege that Zelensky has made luxury purchases, including a $35 million house in Florida, two luxury yachts, and a UK mansion previously owned by King Charles III.
US and EU politicians have expressed concerns on the transparency of Kiev’s use of multi-billion-dollar funding.
In a shocking development, a juror was dismissed Monday morning after a woman showed up at her house on Sunday, offering a bag containing $120,000 in cash and promising a second bag if the juror voted to acquit the Islamic defendants involved in the largest U.S. pandemic-era fraud scheme.
In a dramatic and alarming development, a juror in the Feeding Our Future federal fraud trial was abruptly dismissed. This case, being actively suppressed by mainstream media, took a shocking turn when a woman arrived at the juror’s home on Sunday. The woman offered a bag containing $120,000 in cash and promised a second bag if the juror voted to acquit the defendants.
A reclusive tribe in the Amazon finally got hooked up to the internet, thanks to Elon Musk — only to be torn apart by social media and pornography addiction, elders complain.
Brazil’s 2,000-member Marubo tribe has been left bitterly divided by the arrival of the Tesla founder’s Starlink service nine months ago, which connected the remote rainforest community along the Ituí River to the web for the first time.
The Marubo are a chaste tribe, who even frown upon kissing in public — but Alfredo Marubo (all Marubo use the same last name) said he is anxious that the arrival of the service, which delivers super-fast internet to far-flung corners of the planet and has been billed as a game-changer by Musk, could upend standards of decorum.
Alfredo said many young Marubo men have been sharing porn videos in group chats and he has already observed more “aggressive sexual behavior” in some of them.
So a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on all thirty-four charges of having falsified business records in 2017 with the intent to cover up another crime. What was that other crime? I don’t know. Does anybody?
Forty counts in Florida for alleged mis-handling of government documents, trial date indefinitely postponed.
Four counts in Washington, D.C. of plotting to subvert the transfer of power following the 2020 election, trial currently held up by appeals.
Ten state felony counts in Georgia for plotting to overturn the 2020 election result in that state, trial date not yet set.
That’s fifty-four charges to add to the 34 Trump was found guilty of on Thursday. So not yet a hundred counts in total, but you can be sure we’ll get there. The Trump-hunters will never quit.
There are plenty of other jurisdictions where the D.A. and his prosecutors are plump from feeding at George Soros’ trough and the jury poo l is reliably Woke. The wound will never heal, the hunt will never end.
I wasn’t surprised by the result and I doubt it will much affect what will happen in November’s Presidential election. What will happen, in my opinion, is that the Ruling Class will rig the vote counts just as they did in 2020, and the Democratic Party’s candidate will win.
Honestly, I can accept some sort of elite ruling over us. It has ever been thus, and true democracy (which is impossible) almost anywhere in the world would yield terrible results. But the people ruling over us in USA and most of the West today, no matter how you look at, no matter from which angle, appear to be terrible people, and not just in the dithering and obstreperous ways they speak but even more so in their policies, their personal behaviors, their clubby corruption, arrogance, and what appears to be nothing more than greedy stupidity. To my eye, it’s clear we have been infiltrated and taken over by some of the shittiest people the world has ever seen. ABN
BREAKING: Ukraine Strikes Russia With Western Weapons.. -NY TIMES Here we go!
Just shortly following the Biden administration’s authorization for Ukraine to employ American weaponry against Russia, Kyiv swiftly acted on this newfound liberty by targeting a military installation across the border, utilizing a U.S.-manufactured artillery system, as indicated by a member of Ukraine’s Parliament.
Yehor Chernev, the deputy chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament’s committee on national security, defense, and intelligence, disclosed on Tuesday that Ukrainian forces had successfully neutralized Russian missile launchers with a strike in the Belgorod region, approximately 20 miles into Russian territory.
The operation employed a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), he affirmed.
This marks the inaugural instance of a Ukrainian official openly acknowledging the use of American weaponry to engage targets within Russia subsequent to President Biden’s rescindment of the prohibition on such actions.
NATO is drawing up plans to send American troops to the frontlines of Europe in the event of an all-out conflict with Russia, it has been revealed.
New ‘land corridors’ are being carved out to quickly funnel soldiers through central Europe without local bureaucratic impediments, allowing NATO forces to pounce in an instant should Putin‘s devastating war in Ukraine move further west.
The plans are said to include contingencies in case of Russian bombardment, letting troops sweep into the Balkans via corridors in Italy, Greece and Turkey, or towards Russia’s northern border via Scandinavia, officials told The Telegraph.
Tensions have ratcheted up in recent weeks, with Russian President Vladimir Putin openly acknowledging the ‘possibility’ of ‘a full-scale Third World War’ as he threatens ‘fatal consequences‘ for western allies allowing Ukraine use of their weapons on Russian soil.
From evening drives to navigating a house or a park in the dark, there are so many situations where it’d be handy to slip on a simple pair of night-vision lenses and the world that’s beyond human optical perception could be illuminated like never before. This vision could be a reality, with a technology breakthrough that could deliver this elusive view to everyday consumers, with an ultra-thin film or lens the width of cling wrap.
Researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) in Australia have been on a quest to make night vision accessible and wearable, doing away with bulky and expensive headsets and lens attachments.
Their new findings allow all the complex light processing to take place along a simpler, narrower pathway, which essentially means the tech can be packaged up as a night-vision film that weighs less than a gram and can be placed across existing lensed frames.
Having an everyday pair of night-vision spectacles, that look much the same as reading or driving glasses, could change the way we work and play after dark. There’s so much potential, from finding your off-leash dog in the park on a late-night walk, to enhanced safety behind the wheel and on foot.
American Buddhist Net 
