Author Archives: RosalinPigott

Could This Be the Secret to Reef-Friendly Sunscreen?

Conventional sunscreens are having a detrimental impact on the environment and are a major culprit behind coral bleaching. Vast swaths of reef?including the majestic Great Barrier Reef?are turning bone white and dying, and certain chemicals in our sunscreen are partly at fault.

The chemicals oxybenzone and octinoxate, the FDA-approved active ingredients in most conventional sunscreens, are known to cause bleaching, deformities, DNA damage and death in thriving coral ecosystems. In fact, they are contributing to a great coral die-out. And our love of swimming in the ocean is the problem.

When you wear?sunscreen in the ocean, it?leaches into the water systems, where the chemicals have a havoc-wreaking half-life of about 2.5 years.

Even if you don?t visit coral reefs on a regular basis, the EWG confirms that these chemicals are also powerful endocrine disruptors that can throw hormone levels dangerously?out of whack. Unfortunately,?these chemicals can be detected in the bodies of almost all Americans?even in breast milk.

So what do we do? Is there a healthy sun solution that is safe for our bodies and the ocean? Well, the ocean may, in fact, hold the answer.

According to a study conducted by King?s College, London, a special compound in seaweed could protect our skin from sun damage without harming marine ecosystems.

Scientists extracted a mycosporine-like amino acid (MAA) from seaweed known as palythine. When testing on human skin cells, palythine was shown to block UV rays and protect the skin, even at very low concentrations. It also has powerful antioxidant activity, meaning it can actually protect the skin from cellular free radical damage and photo-aging.

And since it naturally comes from the ocean, it’s already ocean-safe.

“here are significant concerns that conventional sun protection products are having a negative impact on the environment,”?Professor Antony Young, senior author of the study, commented.?”Our data show that, with further research and development, marine derived sunscreens may be a possible solution that could have a significant positive impact on the health of our marine habitats and wildlife, whilst still providing the essential sun protection that human skin requires to guard against damage that causes diseases such as skin cancer.?

While seaweed-based sunscreens are unlikely to hit the market anytime in the immediate future, this research does bear promise for the development of a healthy, eco-friendly, natural sunscreen to replace the conventional disasters we are currently told to use.

In the meantime, look for non-nano-particle?mineral sunscreens with very simple formulations. Try hardy, natural surfer-developed sun pastes/cremes like Manda, or cover up with clothing during long bouts of intense sun exposure.

While you should definitely protect yourself from sunburns, the last thing you want to do at the beach is hurt yourself or the oceans.

Related on Care2

Why Endurance Runners Can Ignore Discomfort (and You Can, Too)
This New Wearable Tech Helps You Avoid Sunburns
Is Your Smartphone Prematurely Aging Your Skin?

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Could This Be the Secret to Reef-Friendly Sunscreen?

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Study: Pride Motivates Better Than Guilt for Green Choices

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A little shaming might seem like a good idea when you see someone skip the recycle bin and head straight for the trash, but you might want to reconsider that approach. A recent study from Princeton University finds that highlighting the pride people will feel if they take environmentally friendly actions may be a better way to change behavior.

Published in the journal PLOS ONE, “The Influence of Anticipated Pride and Guilt on Pro-Environmental Decision Making” asked people from a sample of nearly 1,000 diverse participants to think about either the pride they would feel after taking pro-environmental actions or the guilt they would feel for not doing so, just before making a series of decisions related to the environment. There were various ways to remind them of the pride or guilt they might feel, including a one-sentence reminder that remained at the top of the screen for some participants.

To look at what’s a better motivator, the respondents were asked to make five sets of choices, each with “green” (environmentally friendly) or “brown” (environmentally unfriendly) options. In one scenario, they could choose a sofa made from eco-friendly fabric but available only in outdated styles, or they could pick a more modern style of sofa made from fabric produced with harsh chemicals. In another example, they could pick any or all of 14 green amenities for an apartment, with the caveat that each one added $3 per month to the rent.

Across all the groups — those being reminded to feel pride for making eco-choices, those being reminded to feel guilt for non-eco-choices, and a control group — a pattern emerged. “Overall, participants who were exposed to anticipation of pride consistently reported higher pro-environmental intentions than those exposed to anticipated guilt,” said study author Elke U. Weber.

Why? Some people get defensive when they’re told they should feel guilty about something, which makes them less likely to want to comply with the requested course of action. Those well-intentioned but guilt-based environmental appeals may very well backfire.

So instead of warning people that they’re hastening climate change that will ruin the earth for generations to come, try patting them on the back when you see them make a good decision. Mother Earth will thank you for your kinder, gentler approach.

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Study: Pride Motivates Better Than Guilt for Green Choices

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Future President Ben Carson Wrote 6 Books. We Read Them So You Don’t Have To.

Mother Jones

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Former neurosurgeon Ben Carson rallied Republicans at the Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday, stirring up speculation once more that the conservative activist will seek his party’s presidential nomination next year. Carson has never run for office and only recently registered as a Republican, but as the author of six books over more than two decades, he does have a considerable paper trail—and it’s starting to get him into trouble.

In his 1992 book Think Big, for instance, Carson proposed a national catastrophic health care plan modeled on federal disaster insurance, which would be funded by a 10-percent tax on insurance companies. He also proposed re-thinking best practices concerning end-of-life care, advocating for a “national discussion that would help us all rethink our culture’s mind-set about death, dying, and terminal illness”—similar to the provisions of the Affordable Care Act that conservatives now dismiss as “death panels.” (A Carson spokesman told BuzzFeed last week that the health care proposal is “as relevant to his view today as our current military action in Afghanistan is compared to our military strategy in Afghanistan two decades ago.”)

Although filled with inspiring stories of medical miracles and his own rough-and-tumble roots, Carson’s books also reflect the views of a social-values warrior whose anti-gay comments recently caused him to withdraw as a commencement speaker at Johns Hopkins University, his longtime employer. A sampling:

On intelligent design (from Take the Risk):

From what I know (and all we don’t know) about biology, I find it as hard to accept the claims of evolution as it is to think that a hurricane blowing through a junkyard could somehow assemble a fully equipped and flight-ready 747. You could blow a billion hurricanes through a trillion junkyards over infinite periods of time, and I don’t think you’d get one aerodynamic wing, let alone an entire jumbo jet complete with complex connections for a jet-propulsion system, a radar system, a fuel-injection system, an exhaust system, a ventilation system, control systems, electronic systems, plus backup systems for all of those, and so much more. There’s simply not enough time in eternity for that to happen. Which is why not one of us has ever doubted that a 747, by its very existence, gives convincing evidence of someone’s intelligent design.

On the failing of the fossil record (from Take the Risk):

For me, the plausibility of evolution is further strained by Darwin’s assertion that within fifty to one hundred years of his time, scientists would become geologically sophisticated enough to find the fossil remains of the entire evolutionary tree in an unequivocal step-by-step progression of life from amoeba to man—including all of the intermediate species.

Of course that was 150 years ago, and there is still no such evidence. It’s just not there. But when you bring that up to the proponents of Darwinism, the best explanation they can come up with is “Well…uh…it’s lost!” Here again I find it requires too much faith for me to believe that explanation given all the fossils we have found without any fossilized evidence of the direct, step-by-step evolutionary progression from simple to complex organisms or from one species to another species. Shrugging and saying, “Well, it was mysteriously lost, and we’ll probably never find it,” doesn’t seem like a particularly satisfying, objective, or scientific response. But what’s even harder for me to swallow is how so many people who can’t explain it are still willing to claim that evolution is not theory but fact, at the same time insisting anyone who wants to consider or discuss creationism as a possibility cannot be a real scientist.

On abortion (from America the Beautiful):

This situation perhaps crystallizes one of the major moral dilemmas we face in American society today: Does a woman have the right to terminate another human life because it is encased in her body? Does ownership convey absolute power of life and death over the owned subject? If it does, then NFL quarterback Michael Vick was unfairly imprisoned for torturing and killing dogs in Atlanta.

On gay parents (from The Big Picture):

Recently a homosexual couple brought a child in to be examined on one of our neurosurgical clinical days. During lunch, after the couple had left, one of my fellow staff members commented favorably on the couple’s obvious love and commitment to the child. He said to me, “I know you don’t approve of homosexual relationships and wouldn’t consider their home a healthy atmosphere in which to raise a child. But I was impressed by that couple. I think their sexual orientation is their business. Think what you want, but it’s just your opinion.”

My response wasn’t nearly that politically correct. “Excuse me, but I beg to differ,” I said. “How I feel and what I think isn’t just my opinion. God in his Word says very clearly that he considers homosexual acts to be an ‘abomination.'”

On how gay marriage brought down the Roman Empire (from America the Beautiful):

I believe God loves homosexuals as much as he loves everyone, but if we can redefine marriage as between two men or two women or any other way based on social pressures as opposed to between a man and a woman, we will continue to redefine it in any way that we wish, which is a slippery slope with a disastrous ending, as witnessed in the dramatic fall of the Roman Empire.

On WashingtonRedacted owner Dan Snyder (from One Nation):

On the other hand, many of the greatest achievers in our society never finished college. That includes Bill Gates Jr., Steve Jobs, and Dan Snyder, who is the owner of the Washington NFL franchise.

(Carson elsewhere defended Snyder’s refusal to change his team’s name and called the oft-criticized owner “far from the demonic characterization seen in the gullible press that allows itself to be manipulated by those wishing to bring about fundamental change in America.”)

On Independence Day (from Think Big):

I do not get to see many movies, but when I watched the video of Independence Day with my sons, I was struck by the portrayal of the resistance efforts mounted against the alien invaders from outer space. The frail and arbitrary distinctions so often made between various segments of society, even between different countries and ideologies, instantly melted away as the people of the entire world focused not on their differences but upon a common threat and the common goal uniting them—the protection of the planet from alien invaders.

Unlike some of his fellow candidates, though, Carson has made little effort to sugar-coat his most polarizing views. Even before he revealed any political ambitions, he’d moonlighted as a traveling Creationism advocate, giving speeches on the subject and even debating skeptic Richard Dawkins on evolution in 2006:

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Future President Ben Carson Wrote 6 Books. We Read Them So You Don’t Have To.

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