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POPSGirls entering puberty by the age of six - but are drugs the answer?
"Early puberty has even been linked to watching too much television. A few years ago, Italian scientists found that children who watched three hours a day produced less of the sleep hormone melatonin - low levels of the hormone play an important role in the timing of puberty. But perhaps more worrying is the theory that it's exposure to environmental chemicals which is causing the drop in the age of puberty. These chemicals mimic the effect of hormones, disrupting the normal timing of sexual maturing. Whatever the cause, growing numbers of children are being deprived of childhood and are turning, physically, into mini-adults at an increasingly young age. But without the emotional maturity to deal with these changes, they are vulnerable to exploitation. In Britain, it is now estimated that up to at least one in six children under ten is affected. Indeed, there is a belief that schoolgirls as young as six are entering puberty".
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POPSCould an Acid Trip Help to overcome anxiety ? This is an important article. I believe that psychedelic drugs not only have highly valuable therapeutic properties, but they can serve when responsibly used, to expand one's consciousness and boost intelligence and creativity in many aspects of life. The use of psychedelic drugs is one of those case where something which is highly beneficial to the individual is arbitrarily banned by the 'system' because the system do not want us too conscious, or too creative, not even too intelligence. All these threat the stability of the system while promoting independent thought. It is worth mentioning that the family of psychedelic drugs DO NOT contain dangerous addicting drugs such as opium, heroin, cocaine, crack, meth, etc.
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POPSSCIENTISTS SHOW HALLUCINOGEN CREATES UNIVERSAL “MYSTICAL” EXPERIENCE in the 1950s, showed signs of therapeutic potential or value in research into the nature of consciousness and sensory perception. “Human consciousness…is a function of the ebb and flow of neural impulses in various regions of the brain-the very substrate that drugs such as psilocybin act upon,” Schuster says. “Understanding what mediates these effects is clearly within the realm of neuroscience and deserves investigation.” “A vast gap exists between what we know of these drugs-mostly from descriptive anthropology-and what we believe we can understand using modern clinical pharmacology techniques,” says study leader Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor with Hopkins’ departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry and Behavioral Biology. “That gap is large because, as a reaction to the excesses of the 1960s, human research with hallucinogens has been basically frozen in time these last forty years.”
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POPSSolving the Mystery of the Vanishing Bees This is a fascinating story. It is not the life of bees which is fascinating, but the vast complexity and interconectedness of life it exposes. From humans to beehives to plants to microbes, fungi, viruses, genes, metagenomics and what not. All are partaking in one orchestrated intelligent whole. This is a must read
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POPSA New Drug Delivers “Fitness” Without the Workout What about athletes who want to use them for performance enhancement? “You can’t keep a drug that has obvious potential benefits to individuals away from them,” Evans says. “Athletes will definitely want to go for these drugs, as will other people.”
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POPSThe Inalienable Right to Get High The infamous President Nixon instigated this unwinnable war in 1971," Perigo recalls. "As with the equally misbegotten alcohol prohibition of 1919-1933, the only actual winner has been organized crime. The big loser has been the founding tenet of America: freedom. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness implies ownership of one's own body, which subsumes the right to ingest any substance of one's choosing, regardless of the moral status of such an action.