A picture began circulating in November. It should be “The Picture of the Year,”… or perhaps, “Picture of the Decade.” It won’t be. In fact, unless you obtained a copy of the U.S. paper which published it, you probably would never have seen it. The picture is that of a 21-week-old unborn baby named Samuel Alexander Armas, who is being operated on by surgeon named Joseph Bruner. The baby was diagnosed with spina bifida and would not survive if removed from his mother’s womb. Little Samuel’s mother, Julie Armas, is an obstetrics nurse in Atlanta. She knew of Dr. Bruner’s remarkable surgical procedure. Practicing at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, he performs these special operations while the baby is still in the womb. During the procedure, the doctor removes the uterus via C-section and makes a small incision to operate on the baby. As Dr. Bruner completed the surgery on Samuel, the little guy reached his tiny, but fully developed hand through the incision and firmly grasped the surgeon’s finger. Dr. Bruner was reported as saying that when his finger was grasped, it was the most emotional moment of his life, and that for an instant during the procedure he was just frozen, totally immobile. The photograph captures this amazing event with perfect clarity. The editors titled the picture, “Hand of Hope.” The text explaining the picture begins, “The tiny hand of 21-week-old fetus Samuel Alexander Armas emerges from the mother’s uterus to grasp the finger of Dr. Joseph Bruner as if thanking the doctor for the gift of life.” Little Samuel’s mother said they “wept for days” when they saw the picture. She said, “The photo reminds us pregnancy isn’t about disability or an illness, it’s about a little person.” Samuel was born in perfect health, the operation 100 percent successful. Now see the actual picture, and it is awesome…incredible….and hey, pass it on! The world needs to see this one.
The following was written in 2006 by columnist Regina Brett for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. Brett says she wrote these 50 life lessons to celebrate growing older. It’s the most requested column she’s ever written, and here it is:
Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.
When in doubt, just take the next small step.
Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
Pay off your credit cards every month.
You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.
It’s OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.
When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.
It’s OK to let your children see you cry.
Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn’t be in it.
Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don’t worry; God never blinks.
Life is too short for long pity parties. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
You can get through anything if you stay put in today.
A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.
It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.
When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer.
Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don’t save it for a special occasion. Today is special.
Overprepare, then go with the flow.
Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.
The most important sex organ is the brain.
No one is in charge of your happiness except you.
Frame every so-called disaster with these words: “In five years, will this matter?”
Always choose life.
Forgive everyone everything.
What other people think of you is none of your business.
Time heals almost everything. Give time time.
However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.
Believe in miracles.
God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn’t do.
Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.
Growing old beats the alternative – dying young.
Your children get only one childhood. Make it memorable.
Read the Psalms. They cover every human emotion.
Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.
Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.
All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
The best is yet to come.
No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
Yield.
Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.
Planet discovered that can sustain life as we know it. That really sounds great and I would love to let out a big “HOORAY!” and all, but of course there is a catch…IT’S 20 LIGHT YEARS AWAY!!!
Alan Boyle writes: Astronomers say they've found the first planet beyond our solar system that could have the right size and setting to sustain life as we know it, only 20 light-years from Earth.
"My own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent," Steven Vogt, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told reporters today. "I have almost no doubt about it."
The discovery, published online in The Astrophysical Journal, is the result of 11 years of observations at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Astronomers participating in the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey detected the planet by tracking the faint gravitational wobbles it produced in its parent star. Now they say there may well be many more planets out there like this one.
"The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common," Vogt said in a news release.
One of Vogt's co-authors, Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution, reminded reporters during a teleconference today that the first exoplanet orbiting a normal star was detected 15 years ago. Since then, almost 500 other alien planets have been found. "We're at exactly that threshold now with finding habitable planets," Butler said.
The newfound planet, known as Gliese 581g, is estimated to be 3.1 to 4.3 times as massive as Earth, and makes a complete circuit around its sun in just under 37 days. If the planet has a rocky composition like Earth's, it would be 1.2 to 1.4 times as wide as our own planet, qualifying it as a "super-Earth."
Even more intriguingly, the red dwarf star's dimness and the planet's orbital distance (0.146 AU, less than half the distance between Mercury and our sun) suggest that the planet's average surface temperature is not that far below water's freezing point (somewhere between 10 and -24 degrees Fahrenheit, or -12 and -31 degrees Celsius).
Although that average may sound chilly, the astronomers say Gliese 581g appears to be tidally locked to its star, with one side perpetually in the sun and the other side perpetually dark. That means the highs on the day side would be hellishly hot. The lows on the night side would be unendurably cold. But there would be a livable zone along the line between shadow and light.
"Any emerging life forms would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude," Vogt said.
Based on this analysis, Vogt and his colleagues say Gliese 581g is in a planetary zone that is, in the words of the Goldilocks tale, "not too hot and not too cold, but just right" for water to exist somewhere in liquid form. Astrobiologists say that life seems to exist anyplace on Earth that has liquid water, and that such a Goldilocks zone should be conducive to alien life as well. Some astronomers have even proposed that super-Earths could be friendlier to life than our own home world.
The Gliese 581 system is already well-known to planet hunters. Gliese 581g is the sixth planet to be detected around the parent star. Two other planets in the system are on the edges of the Goldilocks zone: Gliese 581c (potentially "too hot") and Gliese 581d (potentially "too cold"). "Now we have one in the middle that's just right," Vogt said.
The method that was used to detect the latest member of Gliese 581's planetary family, known as radial velocity, requires painstaking observations over a number of years. As the method is currently practiced, it's not capable of finding Earthlike planets around sunlike stars. The Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey was able to spot this super-Earth because it could exert a relatively large pull on a relatively small star. But the observations weren't easy: It took 238 measurements, conducted over 11 years with the aid of the European-led HARPS team, to confirm Gliese 581g's existence.
Astronomers believe it will be easier in the future to find habitable planets — not only because they're building up a larger database of radial velocity measurements, but also because new space probes such as NASA's Kepler and Europe's CoRoT satellite are detecting hundreds of exoplanets using a different technique known as the transit method.
"The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20 percent, and when you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that's a large number," Vogt said. "There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy."
But how accessible would they be? Relatively speaking, Gliese 581g is in our celestial neighborhood, but it would take tens of thousands of years to get there using conventional rocket technologies. Vogt said it might be possible to send a robotic probe to the planet using an experimental nuclear propulsion system, such as the Project Orion system that was proposed a half-century ago but never built.
"If you're traveling at a tenth of the speed of light, you could reach this thing in 200 years," Vogt told reporters, "Now, you probably wouldn't send humans there, because that would be multiple generations and you'd need a big crew cabin and there wouldn't be much to do for 200 years. But you could send sophisticated robot cameras. Basically, the equivalent of a Droid cell phone would do pretty well. ... In 220 years, if we started now, you would be able to get close-up pictures and a sense of what kind of atmosphere was there, and radio communications, that sort of thing. And it would be a great thing to do with the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. Just put 'em up on a rocket and send 'em up there."
Too hot? As mentioned above, Gliese 581c might be on the edge of the Goldilocks zone, but astronomers are coming around to the view that it's too hot to sustain life. The planet is at least five times as massive as Earth.
Too cold? When Gliese 581c fizzled, astronomers suggested that Gliese 581d might be on the other side of the star system's habitable zone. Astronomers say life could be a possibility if the planet had a thick atmosphere to hold onto heat. Otherwise, it's probably too cold. It's also seven times as massive as Earth.
Ever had that dream that you were falling off a cliff? If you are like me, and you wondered what it could possible mean then check out www.dreammoods.com . There is a fully explanatory and very comprehendible dream dictionary that you can use for free on the site.
Beauty is eternal, as well as internal. Beauty is not something that can be taken away from you. What makes you beautiful is your happiness, your morals, your values. It’s not a physical feature.
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