Did the Spiral Engravings in the Rock Art of our Distant Ancestors Portray Chakras ?

This paper characterizes the use of spirals in rock carvings and other artifacts by early mankind It formulates the hypothesis that these widely distributed symbols may represent chakras which are typically considered the route for out-of-body experiences documented in some current vital energy disciplines A characterization of the types of spirals commonly encountered in rock art such as those found recently in a cave in Sardinia modelled on the Earth Goddess Gaia and they suggested the hypothesis that Fermat spirals might also symbolize two-way communicatio

Criterio para una pesca sostenible de juveniles, tomando como ejemplo la merluza del Mediterráneo: control de la pesca de juveniles y preservación de refugios para reproductores, con el fin de rehacer la fecundidad de la población

The paper provides a broad overview of issues relevant to management of fisheries for juvenile fish in contrast to the many stock assessments following Beverton and Holt’s (1957) approach for rational exploitation of mature fishes. A perspective on assessing these fisheries is illustrated for juvenile European hake, Merluccius merluccius, in the northwestern Mediterranean. Here, a constant natural mortality (M) assumption is incorrect, as is the assumption that high fecundities are necessarily adequate for stock replacement. The high Ms-at-age for juveniles generated by the reciprocal model are shown to be a logical counterpart to the high fecundity of hake. Charnov’s criterion of intergenerational reproductive replacement is used to test for a sustainable population, analogous to a limit reference point warning of the dangers of overfishing beyond population replacement. Once peak mortality rates of age 2 hake exceed F(2)=1.1-1.2, which is currently the case, reproductive replacement may be at risk. Adult exploitation by inshore trawls is low, and maturing hake surviving the fine-mesh trawl fishery migrate offshore with a reduced vulnerability to fine-mesh gears. Early research suggested that rough bottom near the shelf edge once formed a refugium protecting offshore spawners from trawling, and led to abundant recruitment of juveniles nearer shore. It may not do so if offshore fishing effort by reinforced bottom trawls, gill nets and longlines is uncontrolled. Restoring offshore refugia to protect spawners and controlling peak fishing mortality of juveniles would be a precautionary strategy aimed at restoring previous levels of recruitment to the small-mesh trawl fishery.Este artículo presenta varios temas de relevancia para la gestión pesquera de juveniles que contrastan con las evaluaciones de estocs pesqueros basados en la aproximación de Beverton y Holt (1957) para una explotación racional de los peces maduros. En concreto, se presenta un ejemplo para la pesquería de juveniles de merluza europea, Merluccius merluccius, en el Mediterráneo noroccidental. En este caso, es incorrecto asumir la mortalidad natural (M) como constante, como lo es asumir que se necesitan fecundidades elevadas para la adecuada reposición de los estocs. Se demuestra cómo los elevados valores de M por edad para los juveniles generados con el modelo recíproco son la contrapartida lógica a la elevada fecundidad que presenta la merluza. El criterio de Charnov sobre el reemplazo intergeneracional del estoc reproductor se utiliza como test para una población sostenible, análogo a un punto límite de referencia que avisa sobre el peligro de sobrepescar a unos niveles que comprometen el reemplazo de la población. Una vez las mortalidades por edad de la merluza de edad 2 exceden F(2)=1.1-1.2, como ocurre actualmente, se pone en riesgo el remplazo del estoc reproductor. La explotación de adultos por los barcos de arrastre cerca de la costa es poco intensa, y las merluzas en proceso de maduración que sobreviven a la red de arrastre migran hacia fondos más profundos alejados de la costa, lo que permite reducir la vulnerabilidad de los juveniles a las redes de arrastre de malla pequeña, y por consiguiente un reclutamiento abundante en los fondos costeros. Las primeras investigaciones sugirieron que los fondos irregulares cerca del borde de la plataforma continental constituyeron un refugio que protegían del arrastre a los reproductores que vivían en aguas alejadas de la costa, permitiendo así un abundante reclutamiento de juveniles cerca de la costa. Esto no es posible si el esfuerzo de pesca en estas zonas alejadas de la costa se ve incrementado de manera incontrolada por el arrastre, las redes de enmalle y los palangres. En este caso, la restauración de estas zonas de refugio para reproductores, y el control de los picos de mortalidad por pesca de juveniles, podría ser una estrategia preventiva dirigida a restaurar los niveles previos de reclutamiento a las redes de arrastre de malla pequeña

Respuesta al comentario de H.-J. Rätz sobre mi artículo “Criterio para una pesca sostenible de juveniles, tomando como ejemplo la merluza del Mediterráneo: control de la pesca de juveniles y preservación de refugios para reproductores, con el fin de rehacer la fecundidad de la población”

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Extrapolating Back in Time to our Off-Planet Ancestors

Trying to guess what happened in the distant past and where we come from requires a juggling of unknowns and from most points of view that is what you are going to read here At the same time as we accumulate more information it begins to be clear that the few clues left for us exclude certain possibilities and point to constantly occurring processes such as Syntropy being involved It s always been a mystery to me why for example physical science is enamoured of the concept of Entropy Perhaps it is because a decline in structural complexity with time describes well the degradation of our world over time under the dominant philosophy of materialism Its opposing concept Syntropy implies an increase in complexity brought about by a mysterious force apparently acting from the future and this process is less easily fitted into a Newtonian universe Syntropy or the law of creative connecting is defined by the Free Dictionary as the force used by the universe to move us towards a brighter future and its action is described by vocabularies such as The will to become Intent Evolution These terms seem to describe the origin of life and intelligence but Syntropy has been largely shunned by science One of the most effective mechanisms of syntropy is that for past ages intelligent life forms h ave been arriving here and still are coming to our planet from somewhere else in the cosmos using their discoveries to speed up our evolutio

Some ‘Terrestrial’ and ‘Celestial’ Issues Encountered in Dowsing ‘Old World’ Historical Sites

In the following text I ve pulled together some observations on the effects of celestial and ground energies I have run into while dowsing in Italy But this Old World perspective comes from a Canadian who has been resident in Italy for almost 40 years I discuss dowsing the influences of ground and sky energy following a hypothesis often used by those sensitive to paranormal phenomena That is that potentially humans have access to much more information about their environment than is available to the conscious mind and that dowsing without equipment is also an option In fact it is necessary to go outside the usual boundaries of dowsing to make some important points For example Figure 1 suggested by Long 1948 should be borne in mind as my guiding hypothesis It is worth asking the subconscious mind his her opinion on events that are affecting the subjective or conscious mind In my case having spent the recent pandemic alone and since I became a widower last year I ve come to appreciate the viewpoint of my subconscious No doubt some would describe this as a mental aberration but I now have conversations with my subconscious whom I address as Frederick His answers to my questions when they come often later appear as spontaneous thoughts or in dreams and have proven their worth in practic

Modelling natural mortality with age in short-lived invertebrate populations: definition of a strategy of gnomonic time division

Most highly fecund marine fish show a steep decline in natural death rate from egg to first maturity, after which the natural mortality rate remains constant, or may even increase with age for old animals. Relatively few investigations have quantified early life-history mortality vectors for short-lived invertebrate stocks, but this overall picture is also true here for species with planktonic life stages such as penaeid shrimps, and for squids. If M decreases rapidly with age, one logical approach to demographic analysis is by subdividing the lifespan into intervals which increase in duration in proportion to the age up to the start of each interval. This time subdivision strategy is referred to as `gnomonic’. Earlier work (Caddy, 1990) showed that if a reciprocal mortality function applies with age, the product of the instantaneous annual rate of natural mortality and interval duration should be roughly constant for gnomonic intervals. This working hypothesis is shown to produce similar results to the reciprocal function for Mt, but allows a simpler approach to generating realistic life history Mt vectors in the absence of direct estimates of M for stock assessment. Values of a constant probability of death, G = Mt Δt, were used to generate vectors of M-at-age for a gnomonic series of intervals from hatching up to the mean parental age. The value of G is found by iteration that results in 2 survivors from the mean population fecundity by 1 year of age, under the assumption of steady-state population replacement for an unexploited stock. The natural mortality rate in the final, longest interval was assumed to correspond to the ‘constant adult M’ value used in stock assessment. Two extremes of reproductive strategy were chosen by comparison with data from for annual species of cephalopods or penaeid shrimps: cephalopods such as Sepia sp. and Rossia sp., with few, large yolky eggs (and/or parental care), occupy one extreme, and are contrasted with high fecundity penaeid shrimps and at least some Illex squids. The first category has a low fecundity (130–150 eggs, and a K-selected reproductive strategy). Values of ‘adult M’ of the order of 1.0–1.3 are predicted for the last 60–80% of the annual life span. The high fecundity category (200 000 eggs or more) are opportunistic spawners such as many penaeids and some oceanic squids, and follow an r-selected reproductive strategy. An instantaneous value for pre-spawning M of the order of 2.8–3.4 is predicted for the same period mentioned above. Neither range of values falls outside those in the literature, for which a brief summary is presented. An important research question relates to the order of magnitude of post-hatching mortality under population stability: it is suggested that irrespective of the specific model used for changes in M with age, this falls rapidly from an initial rate of some 50–75% per day for short-lived, high fecundity species in the 2 days following hatching, unless adult M values are much higher than above, and of the order of 25–40% for the low fecundity organisms over the same initial interval

Criteria for sustainable fisheries on juveniles illustrated for Mediterranean hake: control the juvenile harvest, and safeguard spawning refugia to rebuild population fecundity

The paper provides a broad overview of issues relevant to management of fisheries for juvenile fish in contrast to the many stock assessments following Beverton and Holt’s (1957) approach for rational exploitation of mature fishes. A perspective on assessing these fisheries is illustrated for juvenile European hake, Merluccius merluccius, in the northwestern Mediterranean. Here, a constant natural mortality (M) assumption is incorrect, as is the assumption that high fecundities are necessarily adequate for stock replacement. The high Ms-at-age for juveniles generated by the reciprocal model are shown to be a logical counterpart to the high fecundity of hake. Charnov’s criterion of intergenerational reproductive replacement is used to test for a sustainable population, analogous to a limit reference point warning of the dangers of overfishing beyond population replacement. Once peak mortality rates of age 2 hake exceed F(2)=1.1-1.2, which is currently the case, reproductive replacement may be at risk. Adult exploitation by inshore trawls is low, and maturing hake surviving the fine-mesh trawl fishery migrate offshore with a reduced vulnerability to fine-mesh gears. Early research suggested that rough bottom near the shelf edge once formed a refugium protecting offshore spawners from trawling, and led to abundant recruitment of juveniles nearer shore. It may not do so if offshore fishing effort by reinforced bottom trawls, gill nets and longlines is uncontrolled. Restoring offshore refugia to protect spawners and controlling peak fishing mortality of juveniles would be a precautionary strategy aimed at restoring previous levels of recruitment to the small-mesh trawl fishery

Measuring the patient perspective on latissimus dorsi donor site outcomes following breast reconstruction.

BACKGROUND: There is little evidence about the long-term donor site outcome of latissimus dorsi breast reconstruction and no patient-reported outcome measures designed specifically for the procedure. METHODS: A prospective cohort of breast cancer patients having latissimus dorsi reconstruction after a mastectomy was recruited from 270 hospitals in the United Kingdom. An 18-month follow up questionnaire containing two novel scales was sent to consenting patients. The prevalence of aesthetic and functional morbidity at the donor site was described. The two new scales were refined using the Rasch measurement model and subsequently validated. RESULTS: 1,096 women completed the new scales. 78% of patients reported that no back appearance issues had bothered them "most of the time" or "all of the time" in the past two weeks. The equivalent figure for functional morbidity was 60%. Four items were eliminated following initial psychometric testing. This produced an 8-item Back Appearance scale and an 11-item Back and Shoulder Function scale. Both scales showed adequate fit to the Rasch measurement model. Higher levels of aesthetic and functional bother were observed for completely autologous procedures versus those where latissimus dorsi reconstruction was used to cover an implant (p <0.05). Higher levels of aesthetic bother were observed in women who had suffered a perioperative complication at the donor site (p = 0.003). CONCLUSION: These results can inform patients of the morbidity associated with latissimus dorsi reconstruction. The new scales can be used to compare groups undergoing different variations of the procedure and to monitor individual patients

Introducing BASE: the Biomes of Australian Soil Environments soil microbial diversity database

Background: Microbial inhabitants of soils are important to ecosystem and planetary functions, yet there are large gaps in our knowledge of their diversity and ecology. The 'Biomes of Australian Soil Environments' (BASE) project has generated a database of microbial diversity with associated metadata across extensive environmental gradients at continental scale. As the characterisation of microbes rapidly expands, the BASE database provides an evolving platform for interrogating and integrating microbial diversity and function. Findings: BASE currently provides amplicon sequences and associated contextual data for over 900 sites encompassing all Australian states and territories, a wide variety of bioregions, vegetation and land-use types. Amplicons target bacteria, archaea and general and fungal-specific eukaryotes. The growing database will soon include metagenomics data. Data are provided in both raw sequence (FASTQ) and analysed OTU table formats and are accessed via the project's data portal, which provides a user-friendly search tool to quickly identify samples of interest. Processed data can be visually interrogated and intersected with other Australian diversity and environmental data using tools developed by the 'Atlas of Living Australia'. Conclusions: Developed within an open data framework, the BASE project is the first Australian soil microbial diversity database. The database will grow and link to other global efforts to explore microbial, plant, animal, and marine biodiversity. Its design and open access nature ensures that BASE will evolve as a valuable tool for documenting an often overlooked component of biodiversity and the many microbe-driven processes that are essential to sustain soil function and ecosystem services

Introducing BASE: the Biomes of Australian Soil Environments soil microbial diversity database

Microbial inhabitants of soils are important to ecosystem and planetary functions, yet there are large gaps in our knowledge of their diversity and ecology. The ‘Biomes of Australian Soil Environments’ (BASE) project has generated a database of microbial diversity with associated metadata across extensive environmental gradients at continental scale. As the characterisation of microbes rapidly expands, the BASE database provides an evolving platform for interrogating and integrating microbial diversity and function