Parkinsons from the Gut?

Let me preface this post with, I AM NOT A DOCTOR, but I would love to hear from one about my thoughts...

I've just got through reading this article, it's very brief, on the BBC... Which talks about the study of genetically identical mice being tested for Parkinsons, and that gut microbes played a huge part in making one set begin with the disease, indeed being one of the root causes above and beyond the genetic pre-disposition to developing the disease.

This is a huge break through, however, the article talks about this being "discovered for the first time a biological link between the gut microbiome and Parkinson's disease".  Which may very well be true, but it goes onto talk about the microbes in question were "break[ing] down fibre into short-chain fatty acids"...

So, this is not the first time such a link has been biologically established, we've already seen this in studies of adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), many people know this story from the Hollywood movie "Lorenzo's Oil", the story of the struggle of Augusto and Michaela Odone to find a cure, or therapy for ALD for their son Lorenzo.

Augusto undertook a mammoth research task himself to prove that using said "oil" worked to block the break down of Myelin (around nerve cells) in the body.

Surely therefore that this new research is related, the biology of the body is holistic after all, no system within is truly unconnected from the rest.  So, is there not a cross over, or a commonality between the research of the Myelin Project and their proven research that restricting the intake of long-chain fatty acids (perhaps so as bacteria have nothing to work on), flooding the system with non-harmful short-chain fatty acids, and the fact that the bacterial directly now proven to lead to the onset of Parkinsons are creating short-chain fatty acids as well?!?!

One could leap to a conclusion, or a link, and I hope I'm not giving the impression of that, but I find it so curious that there's no mentioned cross over here, or no seemingly holistic look at the action of bacteria or other digestive processes breaking (very-long chain fatty acids) down and that affecting changes in the brain & nervous system.  There might be such research that I'm simply not privy to...

As I said, get in touch if you know... I am literally all ears!

Hogwash - Coal & Oil to "Run Out"

No beating around the busy, what utter rubbish, I just read this from the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27435624

That "UK's oil, coal and gas' to be 'gone in five years', what utter rubbish, perhaps the current pits left open will run out of coal, but the myriad of mines closed in the 80's and 90's lots still had coal to extract, the colliery my father worked at, Gedling, in Nottinghamshire.

It closed, and I remember at the time it was a stated fact "There are 100 or more years of coal down there", I don't doubt the UK would chew through 100 years of coal from that one pit in 5 years, but add all the closed mines together, and there's decades if not millennia of coal down there.

And here in Britain our mines never went to extreme depth, they get down to the hundreds of meters sure, but they don't go down to 1km+ very often.  And we have to look to the history here, coal is just fallen tree's and brassica yes, its compressed and over the years the minerals removed the carbon remaining.  But coal comes from a specific period in history when there were no evolved bacteria which could break down wood.

So as tree's fell they lay layer upon layer to build up.

In the interceding few million of millions of years bacteria have evolved which do break down wood and fibrous plant material, hence why coal is deep, because the conditions to form it stopped occurring.  So higher in the Strata you get gas and oil from old sea beds, but no coal from old forests.

Now, if we go deeper, if we open up the mines Britain is sitting pretty, we could also look at extreme deep mineral recovery off of our seabed and the continental shelf out into the Atlantic, France, Belgium & Holland may even be amenable to collaborating in better exploring the North Sea.

The challenge is to open up those mines again though, and retrieve those minerals, and crucially find a way to use them cleanly, such as sulphur & carbon scrubbers on the outlets of power stations (a technology I still hear of as being "new" yet I was taut all about it in GCSE Chemistry - as if it were the future - in 1991).

So, people should word their reports better, there's not 5 years left, there's 5 years of what we're accessing left, we could access more, we could have hundreds of years of fuel, we just have to invest in it, we just have to get at it... And whilst ever its cheaper to drive the stuff on lorries from Russia, or haul it on barges over the oceans that investment will never happen.