Info Briefs Part II

Day by day, academic discoveries continue to be made that establish the unassailable credibility of the Word of God.  For most of the researchers, this was not their intention.  I’m certain most are unaware of the correlation, but the association of these findings to the Word of God is unescapable to students of the scriptures.  This feature of brief scientific updates will again say that God is. 

Have you yet to surrender your life to Jesus Christ?  Would you like to know the peace that passes understanding?  Would you like to experience the absolute ultimate truth that God is and that His truth transcends all natural boundaries?  Click onto “Further With Jesus” for immediate entry into the Kingdom of God.  Hear the still small voice.  NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:1:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Dating, according to Biblical genealogy and chronology, places the earth’s beginning at just over 6,000 years ago.

MAN SAID: Ridiculous!  Everyone knows the earth is billions of years old.

Now THE RECORD.  Pseudo-science manufactures its “truth.”  Recent discoveries have challenged the creative reconstruction skills of the evolutionary community.  When researchers recently found soft, flexible blood vessels in the thighbone of a fossilized dinosaur supposedly 68-70 million years old, their position was not, “Here is proof that dinosaurs are not millions but just thousands of years old,” but instead that they would have to revisit their theory of fossilization.

The problems for fossils purported to be millions of years old just get worse.  This is shown in the January 2007 issue of Discover, under the heading “Paleontology.  Fossilized Frog Marrow Found.”  Until just recently, no one expected to find bone marrow in supposed ten million-year-old frog and salamander fossils, but the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid did.  The following excerpt is from the Discover article:

Because of the way the slabs containing the bones were fractured during preparation, they revealed a clean cross section of bone, in which the red of the bone marrow and the yellow of the fatty marrow were clearly visible.  Paleobiologist Maria McNamara of University College Dublin theorizes that the bones provided a protective environment for the marrow, preventing microbes from infiltrating and destroying the soft tissue.  Why has no one noticed this material—which may contain DNA and proteins—before?   [End of quote]

The long-age evolutionists are again headed for the tall grass.  Their problem is their unbelief.  The Scriptures are correct: It’s thousands and not millions and billions.  For more information on this subject, click onto the Young Earth Series.

GOD SAID, by His act of biological design, that infants should be breast‑fed.  Genesis 49:25:

Even by the God of thy father, who shall help thee; and by the Almighty, who shall bless thee with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lieth under, blessings of the breasts, and of the womb:      

MAN SAID: Baby formula concocted by science is equal to or even superior to mothers’ breast milk.  Starting in the late 1940s, breast‑feeding began to fall out of favor nationally.  By the 1950s, infant formula gained widespread endorsement from the pediatric community and breast-feeding for millions of children and mothers became a thing of the past.

Now THE RECORD.  As you should suspect, God and His Word are correct again.  I must note that breast-feeding, for the past decade or so, has been steadily gaining acceptance in the informed community.  All GodSaidManSaid can say is, “Welcome aboard!”

In a December 2006 issue of Science News, under the title “Milk Therapy,” the following paragraphs were found:

Catharina Svanborg thought that she already knew how remarkable breast milk is. The immunologist had logged hundreds of lab hours documenting ways in which human milk helps babies fight infections. But when the group decided to use cancerous lung cells to avoid the variability shown by normal cells in laboratory tests, Svanborg and her team at Lund University in Sweden were in for a surprise. They applied breast milk to the cancerous lung cells, and all the cells died. Breast milk killed cancer cells.

Research teams are now learning to exploit its tricks for purposes well beyond feeding babies. Components of breast milk are being developed as drugs that fight viruses and bacteria. A particular target is diarrhea, which kills about 2.2 million people every year, mostly children in developing countries. Other milk compounds may be added to food to improve digestion. Some milk components might fight medical conditions ranging from arthritis to septic shock.

Although some of these compounds are found in milk from other animals, others occur only in human milk, and the nonhuman versions are generally less potent in people.

When scientists started analyzing breast milk, they found that the third‑largest constituent of breast milk, making up about 1 percent by volume, is a mixture of indigestible sugars known as oligosaccharides. Many of these sugars occur only in human milk.

Initially, the scientists thought that these were useless by‑products of milk production. But why would mothers expend so much energy creating compounds that their babies can't use?

In the past few years, scientists have solved this puzzle. David Newburg, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown and his colleagues genetically engineered mice to produce oligosaccharides in their milk. He then gave their pups campylobacter, a bacterium that causes diarrhea. The pups that drank oligosaccharides didn't get sick.

Unlike the antibodies that mothers pass along to their infants through breast milk, oligosaccharides can protect the baby from pathogens to which the mother has never been exposed.

For a pathogen to infect a person via the digestive tract, it first has to latch on to the sugars that line the gut wall. Oligosaccharides have binding sites that are identical to the ones on the gut‑wall sugars, so the pathogens attach to the oligosaccharides instead of to the lining of the gut. Once bound to oligosaccharides, pathogens travel harmlessly through the intestinal tract.

He suggests that bacteria can't evolve a resistance to oligosaccharides because if they change in such a way that they no longer bind to the oligosaccharide, they also can't bind to the cell wall to infect their targets. "The mechanisms for protection in milk are so exquisite," Newburg marvels.

Lactoferrin is a dazzlingly multitalented protein. In breast‑fed babies, it can appropriately suppress inflammation or boost immune activity. It also fights viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Even after the protein has broken down in the gut, the fragments fight urinary‑tract infections as they are expelled from the body.

Because lactoferrin lowers the immune system's inflammatory overreactions, it may be useful against arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and septic shock.

The many claims for lactoferrin's capabilities "may look suspicious," admits Michal Zimecki, an immunologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wroclaw. Lactoferrin "seems like a golden bullet, but it really is so."

As outlandish as lactoferrin's potential may seem, it is perhaps even stranger to think that breast milk components could cure cancer.

Once Svanborg and her team had established that something in breast milk was killing human cancer cells in the lab, they isolated the assassin. It turned out to be the protein alpha‑lactalbumin. But the compound becomes lethal only when exposed to acid, as it is in a stomach and was in the lab. The acid unfolds the alpha lactalbumin protein into a havoc‑wreaking form.

Svanborg dubbed the acidified form of the protein HAMLET, for human alpha‑lactalbumin made lethal to tumors.

Cancer cells take up far more HAMLET than healthy cells do. The huge quantities of unfolded proteins destroy the cancer cells.

Svanborg found that HAMLET killed 40 kinds of tumor cells in lab dishes.

Svanborg has also found that HAMLET reduces warts in people. Warts and tumors share the property of growing without respect to normal controls. HAMLET reduced the volume of more than 95 percent of the warts to which it was applied, whereas only 20 percent of warts treated with a placebo decreased in size.

Whether or not breast milk turns out to be the source of a potent cancer therapy, its remarkable properties have led to a new view of its role. "My thinking on milk has changed totally," says Newburg. "I used to think of it as the best source of nutrients. Now, it's looking like milk is really designed to be protective."  [End of quote]

For more information, click onto the following subjects:

Lest He Reprove Thee, And Thou Be Found A Liar

Milk...Man Leads the World Astray...Again

Wisdom In The Inward Parts

Regular visitors to GodSaidManSaid are aware that many of today’s new discoveries are not all that new.  The list of related GodSaidManSaid subjects noted at the end of each of these info briefs testifies to this fact.  We bring information to your attention because is it again in the news.

GOD SAID, Philippians 4:13:

I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.

GOD SAID, Romans 8:28:

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

GOD SAID, I Thessalonians 5:18:

In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.

GOD SAID, Proverbs 15:13:

A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance: but by sorrow of the heart the spirit is broken.

GOD SAID, Proverbs 17:22:

A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.

The Scriptures abound with spirit/mood/attitude associations with physical health. 

MAN SAID: The Bible is just the writing of old, archaic men.  There is no God, therefore He has no words of value to offer.

Now THE RECORD.  Here we go again.  The December 16, 2006 issue of Science News printed an article titled “Sniffle-Busting Personalities.”  The following excerpts are from that article:

People with generally positive outlooks show greater resistance to developing colds than do individuals who rarely revel in upbeat feelings, a new investigation finds.

Frequently basking in positive emotions defends against colds regardless of how often one experiences negative emotions, say psychologist Sheldon Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and his colleagues. They suspect that positive emotions stimulate symptom‑fighting substances.

"We need to take more seriously the possibility that a positive emotional style is a major player in disease risk," Cohen says.

In a study published in 2003, his group exposed 334 healthy adults to one of two rhinoviruses via nasal drops. Those who displayed generally positive outlooks, including feelings of liveliness, cheerfulness, and being at ease, were least likely to develop cold symptoms. Unlike the negatively inclined participants, they reported fewer cold symptoms than were detected in medical exams.

The latest data also show that among people with a consistently positive mood, well‑being doesn't simply reflect physical vigor. All volunteers entered the study in comparably good health.

In that project, Cohen's team interviewed 193 healthy adults by phone each evening for 2 weeks. The participants reported their positive and negative emotions during that day. They then received nasal drops containing a rhinovirus or an influenza virus that causes a coldlike illness.

Each person was quarantined in a separate room and monitored for 5 or 6 days. Although a positive emotional style bore no relation to whether participants became infected, it protected against the emergence of cold symptoms. For instance, among people infected by the influenza virus, 14 of 50 (28 percent) who often reported positive emotions developed coughs, congestion, and other cold symptoms, as compared with 23 of 56 infected individuals (41 percent) who rarely reported positive emotions.  [End of quote]

The following GodSaidManSaid articles deal with this principle:

A Merry Heart or a Broken Spirit

Bones

Everything Made of Words

Give and You Shall Receive

Grudges vs. Forgiveness...Death vs. Life

It’s Not What Goes In But What Comes Out That Defiles

Language of Light

Shifting Stress

Some of the Greatest Principles of All Time, Part One, Brains and Words

Sowing and Reaping

The Power of Going to Church

GOD SAID, Genesis 7:11-23:

11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

13 In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark;

14 They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort.

15 And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life.

16 And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in.

17 And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.

18 And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters.

19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.

20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.

21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:

22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.

23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

MAN SAID: Fairy tales – just fairy tales!

Now THE RECORD.  Uninformed skeptics of Noah’s Ark challenge the credibility of God’s account in the Bible with questions such as “How could just eight people care for all the creatures on the ark?” or “How could they have gathered and stored all the needed foodstuffs to sustain them?”  Noah and his family were instructed to gather the necessary supplies, but there were other means God could have employed to lighten the load dramatically.  One in particular is hibernation, a state of torpor.  Again, unbelievers ridicule such a concept, but science continues to support it.  In Science News, January 27, 2007 under the title, “Perchance To Hibernate,” the following passages were found:

Biologists have been intrigued for decades about how animals go dormant during the winter and survive physiological conditions that would kill them at other times of the year. Hibernators spend most of the winter in torpor, a state of self‑induced reduction in body temperature and metabolic rate. Even some species that don't contend with harsh winters by hunkering down for months at a stretch, such as mice, enter torpor daily when food is in limited supply and temperatures are chilly. Many small birds spend nights year‑round in torpor.

In mammals, hibernation is so widespread that researchers reason that the ancestor of all mammals must have been a hibernator.

Recently, Cheng Chi Lee of the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston and his colleagues found that constant darkness elevated the concentration of a compound called 5'‑adenosine monophosphate (5'AMP) in the blood of lab mice. Blood concentrations of that chemical were also elevated in mice during torpor, which the researchers induced by temporarily depriving the animals of food.