Rid your home of negative energy

Have you ever been to a place where you feel uncomfortable but you can’t figure out why you’re feeling that way? If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. Many people feel uncomfortable in certain places and they can’t explain why.

People could offer you various explanations for this. But consider this possibility: Perhaps that particular space where you feel ill at ease is a repository of negative energy. Maybe somebody who died or who was ill had occupied that place for quite some time.

Homes and spaces often take on the energy of their previous occupants — and you don’t have to believe in Feng Shui or any Eastern philosophy or creed to realize this.

Okay, since we’re not debating about beliefs here, let’s forget about why this difficult-to-explain thing happens.

What is important is to make your space – which could be your own home — more comfortable so you can feel more at ease.

Reiki guru and Feng Shui master Gi Santos says in this case it is wise to perform space cleansing.

Okay, you don’t have to believe everything Gi says. But some of his pointers are quite practical.

For example, he says if you have a bunch of old items and junk in your office desk which were left by previous occupants of that desk, it is possible that some negative energy is coming from these old items. Better get rid of those trash.

On a larger scale, if you have had a spate of bad luck and find that your life has been a constant struggle, it’s possible that you have some negative energies hanging around that are making your house “yin” – or negative in energy.

In this case, you really have to do a thorough space cleansing. And the best time to do that is during the Lunar New Year on Feb. 7, 2008.

Even if you are a skeptic, it would do you no harm to try these six space cleansing techniques on or before Feb. 7.

STEP 1. Clear stale energies from the house.

If you recently moved, you might be feeling some of the residual energy from past residents. If that’s your case, then consider using this technique: open everything that is closed. In short, you should open all doors, all windows, all cabinets, all boxes, anything that is closed should be open.

Then, walking from the front door and in a clockwise pattern, circle each room and go into the next while ringing a bell. Be sure to ring the bell in the corners of rooms and in closets where negative energy can remain trapped. You may want to proceed through the other five steps before closing everything up again.

STEP 2. Use salt to cleanse an area.

Another tip is to use salt to remove negative energies. You can wipe the walls with salt or sprinkle salt into the corners of the room. Be sure to sweep up the salt and throw it into the trash outside of your house afterwards.

STEP 3. Feed your ghosts rice.

If you feel extreme negative energy, you can also try sprinkling rice around the perimeter of your home beginning at the front door and walking in a clockwise fashion until you come to the door again. The rice will draw the energy outside and away from the interior of your home.

STEP 4. Scent the air to rid negative energies.

Smoke from incense or from herbs such as lavender will drive away problems. Eucalyptus scent will be conducive for healing while mint will attract prosperity. The scents of incense or herbal essential oils are all excellent ways to introduce beneficial energy.

STEP 5. Light and sound.

Light and sound are two very effective “yang” treatments that help to dispel negative energies. Tinkling windchimes and bright crystal rainbows or lit chandeliers are both excellent ways to introduce beneficial — and cleansing — energy to your space. But do not overdo!

If you have done all five steps, it’s time to close up all the doors, windows, cabinets, and drawers, and then proceed to Step 6.

STEP 6. Take a salt bath.

In the process of cleansing your home, it might also be a good idea to cleanse yourself as well. It is possible that you are bringing negative energy home from work or from the outside world. Soak in a tub with sea salt or dry-scrub with aromatic, purifying sea salt and wash your body in the shower afterwards. Salt will purify you and remove negative energies from your body. This is especially helpful if you work in a hostile or gossipy environment and will help you rid the energy from your body.

Remember: Negative energy grows and grows. That’s why it’s important to stop it immediately. To ignore it is to cause more negative energy to build and this can affect your health, your career, your finances, and your relationships.

Regardless of your beliefs, if your space doesn’t feel quite right, consider these tips to help you clear out the negative energy in your house and invite the good energy back inside.

Holy Clone! They've Done It On Human Embryos

They have done it – make an extraordinary “xerox machine” that could virtually produce copies of real humans – with flesh and bones and all internal organs!

First, US scientists were able to make dead hearts beat again (see my previous blog on that). Now, they’ve gone beyond further – take the first step towards making human clones!

In a development that could rock the foundations of morality, ethics, religion and science, scientists in California have announced that they have produced five human embryos that are clones of two men.

Their work was published online Thursday by the journal “Stem Cells.”

If verified, the team at Stemagen Corp. of La Jolla, California, would be the first to prove they have cloned human beings as a source of stem cells, the master cells of the body — which scientists hope to harness to repair devastating injuries and cure diseases.

Dr. Samuel Wood, a co-author of the new paper and chief executive of Stemagen Corp., said he and his colleagues are now attempting to produce stem cell lines from the embryos.

The scientists say stem cells from cloned embryos could provide a valuable tool for studying diseases, screening drugs and, perhaps someday, creating transplant material to treat conditions like diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.

But critics are raising hell. The process “involves creating human lives in the laboratory solely to destroy them for alleged benefit to others,” said Richard Doerflinger, spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Other critics worry about the health risks and the exploitation of large numbers of women who would be asked to provide eggs for the embryos.

As to be expected, the Catholic Church wasted no time in condemning the cloning of human embryos, calling it the “worst type of exploitation of the human being.”

“This ranks among the most morally illicit acts, ethically speaking,” said Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Vatican department that helps oversee the Church’s position on bioethics issues.

Sgreccia said the cloning research was unjustifiable and unnecessary, given advances in similar research that bypasses the controversial use of embryos.

“There isn’t even — I won’t say the justification, because it’s never justified — but not even the pretext of finding something (new),” he told Vatican radio.

There are several types of stem cells. Embryonic stem cells, made from days-old embryos, are considered the most powerful because they can give rise to all the cell types in the body.

Other teams have made stem cells they believe are similar to embryonic cells using a variety of techniques, including reprogramming ordinary skin cells into what are called induced pluripotent stem cells.

Sgreccia said, given the alternatives, he could not understand why scientists wanted to use human embryos — which the Roman Catholic Church believes should be protected.

Stemagen Corp. said it used a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT, which involves hollowing out an egg cell and injecting the nucleus of a cell from the donor to be copied — in this case, the skin cells from the two US scientists.

It is the same technique used to make Dolly the sheep in 1996, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult.

Scientists are justifying cloning as a way to create a “human repair kit.” In other words, scientists could clone our cells and fix mutated genes that cause diseases.

With cloned human embryos, scientists can grow replacement organs, such as hearts, livers and skin. They can also be used to grow neurons to cure those who suffer from Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or Rett Syndrome.

Others see cloning as a way to aid couples with infertility problems, with the conceived child being a carbon copy of the husband. The procedure would involve injecting cloned cells from an infertile male into an egg, which would be inserted into the wife’s uterus.

Another use for human cloning could be to bring deceased relatives back to life. One family could clone their deceased daughter or son or any another member using preserved skin cells.

But as in all things that look too good to be true, human cloning has lots of dangerous loopholes.

For all the good things cloning may accomplish, opponents say that it will do just as much harm.

The dangers posed by human cloning are such that, although there’s no federal law banning cloning in the United States, several states have passed their own laws to ban the practice. In Japan, human cloning is a crime that is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The United Kingdom has allowed cloning human embryos but is working to pass legislation to stop total human cloning.

Ian Wilmut, one of co-creators of Dolly, has even said that human cloning projects would be criminally irresponsible. Cloning technology is still in its early stages, and nearly 98 percent of cloning efforts end in failure. The embryos are either not suitable for implanting into the uterus or they die sometime during gestation or shortly after birth.

Those clones that do survive suffer from genetic abnormalities. Some clones have been born with defective hearts, lung problems, diabetes, blood vessel problems and malfunctioning immune systems.

With the latest development on human cloning, expect the debate on the issue to intensify.

Scientists Make Dead Hearts Beat Again

Move over, Doctor Frankenstein. Today’s scientists can now bring back to life a dead heart – minus the nasty stitches and the monstrous-like character you made.

Yes, it’s true. In a discovery that could rock the foundations of medicine and religion worldwide, US scientists have announced that they have found a way to make a dead heart pump blood and beat again. In essence, Man has virtually conquered death!

In an Agence France Presse (AFP) story today, Jan. 14, reporter Marlowe Hood said “US scientists have coaxed recycled hearts taken from animal cadavers into beating in the laboratory after reseeding them with live cells.”

“If extended to humans, the procedure could provide an almost limitless supply of hearts, and possibly other organs, to millions of terminally ill people waiting helplessly for a new lease on life,” the AFP report said.

While man has tinkered with the human heart many times before to prolong life, this is the first time that scientists have succeeded in bringing life back to an already dead heart.

No, the latest experiment was not done on a human heart but rather on the heart of a laboratory mouse.

There were also reports that the same experiment has been done on a pig – whose heart closely resembles ours in size and complexity.

The scientists call the heart-reviving procedure “decellularisation.”

“The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells,” said lead researcher Doris Taylor, director of the Center or Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota.

In the experiment, the scientists stripped away the heart of the experimental rat using powerful detergents, leaving only a bleached-white matter composed of proteins secreted by the cells.

The “skeletal heart” was then injected with a mixture of cells taken from newborn rat hearts and placed in a sterile lab setting.

After only four days, contractions started, and on the eighth day, the hearts were pumping, according to the study, published in the British journal Nature Medicine.

Imagine, just eight days, and life was reborn!

Naturally, the scientists were stunned. “When we saw the first contractions, we were speechless,” said Harald Ott, a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“We certainly were surprised that it worked so well and so quickly,” Taylor told AFP. “There are so many places this could have gone wrong.”

In humans the objective would be to inject stemcells drawn directly from the recipient of the donated organ, thus eliminating the danger that the new heart would be rejected by the immune system.

Recent breakthroughs in stemcell research from non-embryo sources mean that new tissues should be easy to generate, according to the scientists.

They are now working on making revived hearts more efficient, and have even transplanted some of these hearts into the abdomens of rats and connected them to the animals’ aortas, a standard way of testing whether a donor organ can keep an animal alive.

And the wonder of it all is that this is just the first step in conquering new heights in medicine, in virtually reshaping the world we live in.

Decellularisation of the heart could lead to engineering other body organs, according to the study.

“It opens a door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas — you name it and we hope we can make it,” Taylor said.

Wow.

More Cosmic Villains and Weirdos

What a violent universe we live in!

It turns out that the invisible rogue black holes swirling around our very own galaxy, the Milky Way, and eating everything in their path are not the only villains in the universe. What I wrote earlier turned out to be just the 10-seconder teaser of an epic horror documentary on the universe.

Expounding more on the latest astronomical findings, Vanderbilt University astronomer Kelly Holley-Bockelmann said scientists have discovered an approaching gas cloud with a mass 1 million times that of the sun – and it’s heading right to our Milky Way galaxy at hyper-speed – 150 miles per second!

When the humongous gas cloud hits our galaxy, expect the Fireworks of all fireworks. It will “really light up the neighborhood,” says astronomer Jay Lockman at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia. The collision will cause the formation of news stars, he adds.

But, hey, don’t lock yourself in the closet just yet! The galactic danger is still 47 quadrillion miles away. Moreover, the gas cloud will hit a part of the Milky Way far from Earth and the biggest collision will be 40 million years in the future. In short, it’s too far to affect even the grandchild of the grandchild of the grandchild of the grandchild of your own grandchild!

The giant cloud has been known for more than 40 years, but only now have scientists realized how fast it’s moving. So fast, Lockman said, that “we can see it sort of plowing up a wave of galactic material in front of it.”

During their annual meeting this week, US astronomers also revealed other forms of cosmic brutalities.

They unveiled a giant map of mysterious dark matter in a supercluster of clashing galaxies. The gravitational force between the clashing galaxies can cause “slow strangulation,” in which crucial gas is gradually removed from the victim galaxy.

Then there’s the process the astronomers called as “stripping” which is a more violent process. Here the larger galaxy rips gas from the smaller one.

Another phenomenon is called “harassment,” which is a quick fly-by encounter, said astronomer Meghan Gray of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.

Aside from the thugs and villains roaming around the universe – the macroscopic equivalent of the terrorists plaguing our world – the astronomers also revealed other eye-popping discoveries:

• Photos of “blue blobs” that astronomers figure are orphaned baby stars. They’re called orphans because they were “born in the middle of nowhere” instead of within gas clouds, said Catholic University of America astronomer Duilia F. de Mello.

• A strange quadruplet of four hugging stars, which may eventually help astronomers understand better how stars form.

• A young star surrounded by dust, that may eventually become a planet. It’s nicknamed “the moth,” because the interaction of star and dust are shaped like one.

• A spiral galaxy with two pairs of arms spinning in opposite directions, like a double pinwheel. It defies what astronomers believe should happen. It is akin to one of those spinning-armed flamingo lawn ornaments, said astronomer Gene Byrd of the University of Alabama.

• The equivalent of post-menopausal stars giving unlikely birth to new planets. Most planets form soon after a sun, but astronomers found two older stars, one at least 400 million years old, with new planets.

“Intellectually and spiritually, it’s awe-inspiring,” said J. Craig Wheeler, president of the astronomy association. “It’s a great universe.”

As astronomers continue to unravel more and more of the mysteries of the Universe, I feel luckier every day that I spend life on Earth, regardless of the many challenges and conflicts and difficulties all around me. And we should all be. We’re alive to marvel at the spectacle of the Universe, while others who aren’t with us anymore cannot do so.

If only for this fact, we should all strive harder to keep ourselves healthy, so that we may witness more of the wonders of the universe in our lifetime.

Thank God, We're Not Food For Black Holes

We should all go down on our knees, and thank the Almighty, “Oh, thank you, dear Lord, we’re not in the path of those planet-chomping invisible rogue black holes.”

Yesterday, Jan. 9, US astronomers announced that hundreds of invisible rogue black holes may be roaming around our Milky Way galaxy – our own neighborhood in the Universe — waiting to engulf stars and planets that cross their path.

The astronomers believe these “intermediate mass” black holes are invisible except in rare circumstances and have been spawned by mergers of black holes within globular clusters — swarms of stars held together by their mutual gravity.

Lest they caused global panic, the astronomers hastened to add that these black holes are unlikely to pose a threat to Earth, although they may engulf nebulae, stars and planets that stray into their paths.

“These rogue black holes are extremely unlikely to do any damage to us in the lifetime of the universe,” said Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

“Their danger zone, the Schwarzschild radius, (or gravitational radius) is really tiny, only a few hundred kilometers. There are far more dangerous things in our neighbourhood.”

She didn’t elaborate what other “dangerous things” await planet Earth. Whew! They must be too scary to reveal.

Anyway, Holley-Bockelmann and her colleagues at the University of Michigan and Penn State University simulated what would happen if intermediate mass black holes combined with stellar-sized black holes, which are plentiful in globular clusters.

Using sophisticated computer modeling, they calculated that these mergers would generate hundreds of mid-size black holes, and that the force of their combinations would catapult them out of the globular cluster at speeds of up to 4,000 kilometers per second.

That would leave these black holes, each weighing several times the mass of the sun, to careen around interstellar space, unattached to any stellar system, at high speeds. Hence the term rogue.

Bockelmann presented her findings Wednesday at the 211th American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas.

Indeed, we can consider ourselves the luckiest creations of the Universe. We live in a self-sustaining world (at least for now) in a part of the universe quite far from where all sorts of riotous actions are taking place. Despite all the conflicts, all the sadness, all the miseries all around us – we still have I-Pods, cellphones, laptops, music, movies, caring families, and true friends to share our lives with. Aren’t we so lucky?