Incredible Facial Reenactment Technology Can Manipulate Trump & Putin Videos In Real Time (VIDEO)

Imagine what this could be used for.

The world of technology just got a little more interesting. Researchers have developed a pretty mind blowing new piece of video technology that allows a person the ability to transfer their facial expressions on to another person in real-time – creating a video that looks real enough to convince almost anyone.

The technology comes out of a collaborative effort between Germany’s University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, and Stanford University in California. The incredible technology has already being tested on George W Bush, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Vladimir Putin.

The study, Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos, “animates the facial expressions of the target video by a source actor and re-renders the manipulated output video in a photo-realistic fashion,” according to the researchers.

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New Cannabis Patch Treats Fibromyalgia & Diabetic Nerve Pain

Over the past 100 years, cannabis has gone from being legal, to illegal, to entering a strange legal grey area in our society. The stigma surrounding cannabis has pushed people to believe that it’s a “drug” that’s poor for your health, when in reality, it’s a plant that has incredible healing properties.

Cannabis can significantly help people suffering from anxiety or chronic pain, and can even kill cancer cells. Some of the more recent innovations using cannabis were two pain relieving patches created by Cannabis Science, designed for patients with fibromyalgia and diabetic nerve pain.

Medical Uses for Cannabis

Cannabis can and has been used for many years to treat a wide variety of illnesses including cancer. Cannabinoids refer to any of a group of related compounds that include cannabinol and the active constituents of cannabis.

Consuming cannabis activates cannabinoid receptors in the body, and the body itself creates compounds called endocannabinoids, which help to produce a healthy environment. Cannabinoids play a significant role in immune system generation and re-generation, which is why cannabinoids reduce cancer cells.

A study published in the British Journal of Cancer, conducted by the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Complutense University in Madrid, determined that Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and other cannabinoids inhibit tumour growth. Numerous organizations and universities, including Harvard Medical School, have also been studying the effects cannabis has on cancer cells, proving its success and recommending it to be used as cancer treatment for specific types of cancer.

Numerous cancer patients will smoke marijuana or take cannabis oil orally in order to mitigate the pain and nausea associated with chemotherapy. THC has been available in pill form for treating nausea and vomiting in cancer patients since the 1980s.

Even the U.S. government has unwittingly confirmed that cannabis kills cancer cells. A group of federal researchers commissioned by the government were selected to prove that cannabis has no accepted medical value, but their findings showed otherwise (read our article here).

Studies show that THC, the compound found in cannabis that gives it its “euphoric” effect, activates pathways in the central nervous system that work to prevent pain signals from being sent to the brain. Likewise, cannabis has been shown to be especially effective against neuropathic pain, or nerve-related pain. Cannabis is essentially an all-natural form of Advil!

Cannabis can also be used to decrease anxiety and mitigate symptoms from PTSD, as the high from THC is associated with temporary memory impairment. Recent studies confirm that oral doses of THC can help relieve a variety of PTSD-related symptoms including flashbacks, agitation, and nightmares.

Cannabis Science’s Innovative “Pain Patch” 

Two of the latest cannabis medical innovations were created by Cannabis Science, a U.S. company specialized in the development of cannabis-based medicine, particularly those meant for cancer treatment. Cannabis Science already has some products on the market in California, such as its “When Nature Meets Science” product line, which includes healing bombs, drops, and tinctures, all made with cannabis.

The company recently designed two new pain relieving medications for self-medicating patients with diabetic neuropathy nerve pain and fibromyalgia.

Diabetic neuropathy is a form of peripheral neuropathy, which is damage to or disease affecting the nerves. Side effects include impaired sensations, movement, and gland and organ function. Neuropathy can result in painful cramps, fasciculation (fine muscle twitching), muscle loss, bone degeneration, and changes in the skin, hair, and nails.

Fibromyalgia is a condition whereby patients have chronic, widespread pain and experience a greater pain response to pressure. Symptoms include fatigue, problems with sleep, memory, and bowel function, restless legs syndrome, numbness and tingling, and sensitivity to noise, lights, or temperature. Fibromyalgia can also have psychological effects including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The medications for both of these ailments will be offered in the form of an adhesive transdermal patch, allowing users to absorb a specific dose of medication through the skin, which then travels into the bloodstream. This method is favourable because it provides users with a controlled release of medication, which in this case is a large amount of cannabinoid (CBD) extract. As the CBD enters into the bloodstream, it then penetrates the central nervous system, allowing their pain to subside.

“As more states nationwide legislate for the legalization of Cannabis and Cannabis derived medications, we here at Cannabis Science are focused on developing pharmaceutical formulations and applications to supply the huge growing demand expected over the coming few years,” explains the company’s CEO, Raymond C. Dabney.

Even though the medical uses of cannabis have been proven time and time again through numerous accredited science institutions and universities, the stigma surrounding cannabis remains significant and contentious. Since it’s an illegal substance, numerous people shy away from it, including those who are suffering from illnesses cannabis could cure or seriously help treat.

It’s inevitable that once it becomes legalized in more places, it will become common practice for the medical industry to recommend its usage. I’m not a doctor, but I can envision people using cannabis-based pain patches for a variety of issues outside of fibromyalgia and diabetic nerve pain. Pharmaceutical pain patches have been designed in the past to treat localized pain in many areas of the body, so why couldn’t we do the same with cannabis?

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Hallucinations Are Much More Common Than We Think

When certain experiences fall outside of societal norms, people tend to keep their personal events to themselves. For instance, you probably don’t hear people walking down the street talking about their hallucinations as candidly as they do, say, their dreams.

But new research has found that the former is actually much more common among the general population than most people realize.

A study examining over 7,400 people in the UK discovered that 4.3% of participants had reported having experienced visual or auditory hallucinations in the past year, including people without mental disorders. This proves the phenomenon isn’t limited to people with psychosis.

“There is a general idea in psychiatry that hallucinations are a feature of psychosis,” explained lead researcher Ian Kelleher from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, “but when we looked at a whole range of mental health diseases we found that hallucinations are symptoms that occur in a wide range of mental health disorders such as depression or anxiety.”

Borderline personality disorder was used as an example of a psychotic disorder for this study, which, like many other mental issues, has a heavy stigma that sufferers see and hear things that aren’t there. The results of this recent study challenge the stigma, however, dismantling the idea of a divide.

The researchers reviewed data from the 2007 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity survey, and found that a significant amount of participants had been diagnosed with a mental health condition.

To determine if hallucinations were more common among people with a psychotic disorder as opposed to those without, the team looked at how many people with borderline personality disorder reported seeing or healing things that other people couldn’t over the last year compared to participants with non-psychotic depression or anxiety.

Their results showed that hallucinations weren’t greater or more apparent in those with borderline personality disorder than in those with a non-psychotic mental disorder. Additionally, more than 4% of every single respondent reported hearing or seeing things that others couldn’t, leading the team to suggest that hallucinations aren’t exclusively symptoms of psychosis.

“Hallucinations are more common than people realize. They can be frightening experiences, and few people openly talk about it,” Kelleher explained. “Our research is valuable because it can show them they are not alone and that having these symptoms is not necessarily associated with having a mental health disorder. It breaks the taboo.”

Such findings support the results of a bigger study published in 2015, which analyzed data for more than 31,000 people from 19 countries. Researchers found that about 5% of the general population reported experiencing hallucinations, regardless of having a mental illness or not.

“We used to think that only people with psychosis heard voices or had delusions, but now we know that otherwise healthy, high-functioning people also report these experiences,” explained lead researcher John McGrath, from the Queensland Brain Institute in Australia.

These studies reveal the potential inaccuracy of symptoms associated with mental health disorders, and highlight just one of many problems with stigmatizing people who suffer from mental illness, both from a scientific perspective and a moral one.

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Revealing Comic Sheds Light On Link Between Hard Work & Depression

It’s interesting how our self-awareness can sometimes lead us nowhere. We can look within and see our unhealthy habits, and yet we accept them. These unhealthy habits can lead us down a rabbit hole toward depression, and still, we admit our fault of not nourishing our self worth, but do little to shift our worlds.

But is it that simple to just … change?

Many of us can likely relate to the feeling of being trapped in a detrimental capitalist dichotomy in which using our work to measure of our self worth conflicts with our need to express who we are on our own terms and time.

It’s become a societal standard to assume our job is the most important thing in our life. But why? With money being such a driving force for motivation, and employers urging us to think their approval is a key component of our self worth, along with how our family and friends perceive us based on the job we hold, it seems we are pigeonholed into this way of thinking.

Can you make more money than others? Do things more efficiently than others? Have more enthusiasm about doing it all than anyone else? The pressure we put on ourselves is self-inflicted, but socially influenced. But if we were to peel back all these layers of materialism that separate us from who we are, we might just be able to realize that our worth isn’t based on results, or how quickly we can do something, or how late we stay up finishing a project. Our worth just is.

But even if we can come to that realization, how do we practice it? We still wake up every day and have jobs to do. We still have others telling us work is life. Is it easier to just go with the flow?

No. Because work can be depressing, and that is a very unhealthy reality. Research suggests that those working long hours are even twice as likely to experience a major depressive episode. A report published in the journal Plos ONE found that people working over 11 hours a day are at greatest risk. So while we tie our hard work to self-worth, we’re letting our mental health fall by the wayside.

We must start making a distinction between work and self worth. To help us realize the importance of this goal, autobiographical cartoonist Shing Yin Khor put together a comic that would expose her own struggles with doing just that.

“I wanted to write about how I’ve somehow managed to root my identity in productivity and the corresponding depression that comes when I do not feel I am being productive,” she said.

“I’ve tied my own worth and dignity to my ability to produce work,” one of the comics reads. “It’s not healthy, but there it is.”

It’s a double-edged sword, because when we tie our happiness to something external, we risk something so impermanent controlling our happiness. The good days at work can make you feel so good, but that only means the bad days at work make you feel so worthless. Neither should have such power.

Check out Khor’s website here.

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Why Heating Your Food With Microwave Radiation Might Be A Terrible Idea

A few decades from now, will it be common knowledge that using microwave radiation to heat food is harmful to human health? It’s certainly a possibility, and information is already emerging which shows cause for concern. Microwaves work by causing water molecules to resonate at very high frequencies, converting them into steam and thereby heating your food. While this might be a convenient way to prepare your food, using microwave radiation in this way actually changes the chemical structure of that food.

The fact that they are approved as safe doesn’t mean much these days, as we’ve seen with several other examples from Tobacco, PCBs and Asbestos and Glyphosate. Just because a government agency, like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), or a government health agency approves something as safe, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s safe.

You might be wondering how this is any different from heating your food on the stove or steaming it, and that’s a fair question. The difference is that microwaves deform and distort the molecules in food, while conventional heating methods do not.

This is problematic in the medical field as well. We know, for example, that during blood transfusions, microwaves are often used to heat the blood before it is transferred to the patient. But using microwave radiation to this actually damages components found in blood. In fact, one woman even died after receiving a blood transfusion of microwaved blood. (source)

It is starting to look like microwaving can completely rid your food of most essential nutrients, but more research on this phenomenon needs to be done. That being said, there are some publications we can refer to if you’d like to find out more information regarding the harmful effects of microwaves on nutrients.

One example comes from 2003. A study published in The Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture examined what microwaves do to broccoli, finding that broccoli, after being microwaved, lost up to 97 percent of its beneficial antioxidants. By comparison, when researchers steamed broccoli, they discovered that it only lost 11 percent or fewer of its antioxidants. (source)

A study out of Australia showed that microwaves cause a greater level of “protein unfolding” than conventional heating. It found that “microwaves cause a significantly higher degree of unfolding  then conventional thermal stress for protein solutions heating to the same maximum temperature.” (source)

A study using garlic found that just 60 seconds in a microwave can render its principle active ingredient (alliinase) as useless. Microwaves have also been found to destroy immune-boosting agents that are found in breast milk. These are disease fighting nutrients which are essential to the health and development of the child. For example, one study found that microwaving breast milk caused a decrease in lysozyme activity and antibodies, and aided the growth of more pathogenic bacteria. (source) The interesting thing about this study is that the researchers found that more damage was done to the milk from microwaving compared to any other method of heating.

“Microwaving appears to be contraindicated at high-temperatures, and questions regarding its safety even exist at low temperatures.” (source)

A Japanese study found that only 6 minutes of microwave heating turned approximately 40 percent of the B12 found in milk dead and completely void of any nutritional value. (source)

Three recent studies of historical food composition have shown up to 40 percent declines in some of the minerals commonly found in fresh produce, and another one found the same thing for their protein source. (source)

A Scandinavian study conducted in 1999 also found that cooking asparagus in the microwave results in a reduction in vitamins. (Kidmose U and Kaack K. Acta. Agriculturae Scandinavica B1999:49(2).110-117.)

What Type of Container Are You Using To Microwave Your Food?

Not heating your food in plastic containers should be a no brainer at this point. This is precisely why the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends that any plastic containers should be labelled for microwave use, but even if they are labeled as safe, it’s still probably not a good idea. For more more information on what happens when you microwave your food in plastic containers, you can check out this article.

Many studies have shown that multiple plastic products contain various hormone disrupting chemicals, and heat is the worst culprit when it comes to increasing the rate of chemical transfer from the container to your food.

As written in the journal Toxicology Letters:

Using a sensitive and quantitative competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, BPA was found to migrate from polycarbonate water bottle at rates ranging from 0.20 ng/h to 0.79/h. . . . At room temperature the migration of BPA was independent of whether or not the bottle had been perviously used. Exposure to boiling water increased the rate of BPA migration by up to 55-fold.

Again, heat increases chemical leaching, so be cautious of what you use to heat your food. Even plastic containers which are labelled as microwave safe (or even BPA free, which does not account for other worrisome chemicals) are still dangerous.  According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), “what the term ‘microwave-safe’ basically means is that any chemicals leaching from the container into food do so at levels far below those shown to have any health effects.  There is cause to be wary of this claim, however. In particular, #7 polycarbonate plastic should not be used in a microwave, even if it is labeled ‘microwave-safe,’ because it leaches hormone-disrupting bisphenol A (BPA), especially when heated.” (source)

This may be frightening to consider, but examining the products we choose to use on a daily basis is important. We have seen many examples in recent human history of information coming to light about a product or drug which completely changes our understanding and attitude towards it. We only have to look at cigarettes to see the proof of that.

Related CE Article:

Why You Shouldn’t Be A Part Of The 90% Percent Of Americans Who Still Use Microwaves

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Congested? Here’s How To Drain Your Lymphs Naturally (VIDEO)

While it’s summer for some people around the world, here in the Northern hemisphere Winter is in full swing, and with it comes a frustrating array of colds, flus, and other illnesses.

If you are experiencing a cold, particularly a head cold,  you may need some help draining the extra fluid that’s built up in your sinuses. And the following lymphatic massage may be just what the doctor ordered.

Simple and relaxing, you can do this technique all by yourself. The key is to go as slow as possible, and a very light touch is best. The whole thing may take you five to ten minutes to do, and really will help move things around, and down, and hopefully out. I tried the technique in the video yesterday and starting feeling movement in the back of my throat within just a few minutes.

Before you try, this please take note of this list of contraindications recommended by the RMT who made this video:

Contraindications for Lymphatic Drainage Massage

While it doesn’t feel invasive or deep, LDM can have a profound effect on the body because of its function within the immune system and its use of the circulatory system. If you have any of these conditions or problems, consult your physician before performing this on yourself:

1. Fever, acute infection, early onset inflammatory disease. You need to wait until the acute phase is over and the fever is broken.
2. Circulatory system problems, especially thrombosis. If there is any risk of embolism of phlebitis, do not use LDM and see your physician immediately.
3. Cardiac issues such as heart disease, acute angina pectoris or coronary thrombosis (heart attack). Using LDM increases the fluid load on the heart, and compromised cardiac systems should not be subjected to LDM.
4. Active bleeding, internal or external.
5. Active malignant cancers, undiagnosed lumps, or tumours whose origins have not been determined by your physician.
6. High risk pregnancy or late term pregnancy with complications

This likely won’t remove all the congestion in your head, but it can help to alleviate some of the pressure and stuffiness, letting you focus on other things. Heather said about 75% of the people that come to see her have benefitted from doing this massage. Give it a go and try it for yourself!

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