The Theory of Water and the Power of Words

"Words are the vibrations of nature. Therefore beautiful words create beautiful nature. Ugly words create ugly nature. This is the root of the universe."
~ Masaru Emoto
Japanese researcher Dr. Masaru Emoto's experiments on water first gained worldwide attention when he was featured in the 2004 documentary "What the BLEEP Do We Know!?" His hypothesis seems simple and universal: water reacts to the vibrations of words. The phenomenon is called Hado (rhymes with shadow) and means 'wave' and 'move' in Japanese. Dr. Emoto studied water in its smallest unit of energy, the atom, and found its form changed dramatically with the suggestion of a word or phrase. This finding led him to wonder: if we are made up predominantly of water, how do words affect our basic atomic structure and health?
According to Dr. Emoto, Hado is a vibrational frequency resonance wave and the source of energy behind the creation of all things. Since a field of magnetic resonance is always present wherever Hado exists, Hado can be interpreted as the magnetic resonance field itself.
Dr. Emoto used a magnetic resonance analyzer (MRA) to observe and measure the effects of this magnetic resonance on the atomic particles in matter. He discovered that all substances and phenomena have their own unique magnetic resonance field. According to Dr. Emoto, modern medicine focuses on the body at a molecular level. However, in order to be able to understand the real cause of a disease so that we may cure it completely, he believes that we must look at the atomic level or even at the micro-particle level.
Through his study of Hado, Dr. Emoto has come to believe that people fall ill due to negative thinking, which triggers an imbalance of elements within the body. When our body is in this state of illness, the only way to heal it is to normalize immunity through a balanced peace of mind. Dr. Emoto feels that the most effective medicine for a serious disease is an awareness that we are living in cooperation with microorganisms throughout our lives. He encourages us to keep them in mind at all times and to convey our honest appreciation for their contribution.
Dr. Emoto has concluded that "all things lie within your own consciousness" and that we should do our best to raise our Hado level by doing things such as saying blessings over our food and water, drinking good water and not accumulating negative feelings.
To see the results of Dr. Emoto's experiments, click here.

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Brooding Squid Discovered

The mothering instinct is inherent in many animals, but completely absent in others. For instance, humans care for their children for 18 (or more!) years, while the giant tortoise lays her eggs on a moonlit beach and then abandons her progeny to make their own way in their watery world. Scientists have always considered the squid to be a follower of the latter style of parenting; however, deep-sea explorers were recently surprised to discover a female squid caring for a large sac of eggs.
This protective behavior was demonstrated by the female Gonatus onyx squid, a common species found in surface waters, and was caught on tape by marine biologist Brad Seibel of the University of Rhode Island and his colleagues. The video evidence of the squid puts to rest a long controversy, said squid expert Eric Hochberg of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History in California. Hochberg was part of a team of researchers that proposed the existence of brooding squid five years ago based on the retrieval of a trawl bucket in 1996 that contained a relatively small number of extraordinarily large eggs along with an adult Gonatus onyx squid. "We just always had assumed that octopuses carry eggs and squids lay them on the bottom," said Hochberg. But the discovery of the Gonatus onyx changes these previous assumptions and, according to Hochberg, "there may be other deep-sea squids that are carrying their eggs."
These particular squids care for their precious cargo between 5,000 and 7,000 feet below the surface off California's central coast, just above the inky abyss of the Monterey Canyon. Because surface waters and the ocean floor are considered the two most productive depths for marine life, this middle-depth location may explain why the squid's parenting behavior was not observed until now. According to Siebel, "Researchers tend to skip this zone." The squids are probably brooding in this area to hide from predatory whales and seals, which also tend to ignore the middle depths while hunting.
Most squids lay 10,000 to 100,000 small eggs and leave them on the ocean floor where only a few survive to adulthood. But by watching over their eggs for six to nine months until they hatch, the newly discovered brooding squid enhances the survival odds of each egg, thereby allowing them to lay fewer and larger eggs.
The female Gonatus onyx carries approximately two to three thousand eggs in an open-ended sac she holds with hooks in her arms and keeps oxygen flowing to the eggs by circulating water through the sac. But after the eggs are ready to hatch, the mother probably dies, said Seibel. "Most squids lay eggs and die in one season," said Seibel. Because the egg sac blocks the squid's mouth, it's very difficult to eat with it and there's no evidence she can release it to feed and then pick it up again. Scientists have compared squids that are carrying freshly laid eggs to those holding older eggs that are ready to hatch. The squids with mature eggs are physically wasted and ready to die, whereas those with younger eggs look much healthier. The female squids accumulate fat stores while they grow and then expend it during the brooding period, which may last up to nine months. Scientists theorize that the squids' metabolism slows considerably during brooding to conserve energy and that prolonged muscle degeneration gradually provides increased buoyancy to support the eggs. They also believe the high lipid content of the females' digestive gland provides the fuel necessary to survive the brooding period.
This discovery is a prime example of how an important food source for shallow-water species and birds can also require deep waters for its survival. For this reason, Siebel says, it's important for people to think twice before signing on to any disposal project or other plans that can pollute deep ocean waters.
Click here to watch a video of a squid carrying a tubular pouch of thousands of eggs.

Nature's Collective Intelligence

Ever wonder how anything gets accomplished within the apparent chaos of ant colonies and bee hives or how schools of fish and flocks of birds suddenly shift direction with such precision? These animals rely on collective thought, which scientists have dubbed swarm intelligence. This type of group thinking not only brings order to millions of creatures living closely together, it may have broader applications in our own world to increase efficiency, safety, and the way we live.
Ant colonies can range in size from hundreds to even millions of occupants, yet despite such density, they maintain highly organized communities and every ant knows his duty. This phenomenal management that enables the ants to allocate tasks, defend territory and find the optimal path for food is due, ironically, to a complete lack of centralized leadership and the ants' ability to communicate information and trust individual input. There is no single leader of an ant colony - the queen is just there to lay eggs - instead, the entire colony relies on the interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb, a system scientists call self-organizing.
Ants communicate mostly through touch and smell, so when they bump into each other they sniff antennae to confirm the other's identity, role in the colony, and other important information. For example, the return of patroller ants that are sent out of the colony each morning serves as a signal to the forager ants that it's time to go out. But the foragers also glean information about outside conditions, potential predators, and food availability based on how many and how frequently they run into patroller ants and other returning forager ants. According to Deborah Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University studying red harvester ants in the Arizona desert, "A forager won't come back until it finds something. The less food there is, the longer it takes the forager to find it and get back. The more food there is, the faster it comes back. So nobody's deciding whether it's a good day to forage. The collective is, but no particular ant is."
Honey bees also use individual input to make hive-wide decisions, such as where to construct a new hive when the current one grows too large. The bees scatter to search for the best real estate. When they return to the queen, they do a little dance called a waggle to show their enthusiasm for the new hive site they found. Other bees investigate based on the dance and congregate and dance near the best new home. The location with the most dancing bees becomes their new abode. The bees' ability to investigate and consider multiple options and then decide on a course of action based on popular vote leads them to the best choice.
Thomas Seeley, a biologist at Cornell University, has studied bees for more than 10 years and believes that their decision making could be applied to corporate meetings where decisions could be made by bringing all possibilities to the table, discussing the ideas and then voting by secret ballot.
The collective decision making process of swarms has also inspired some in the corporate world to integrate these methods to improve the way they do business. One such company, called American Air Liquide, which produces medical and industrial gases such as hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, developed a computer program that mimics an ant found in Argentina that uses a pheromone trail to communicate to other ants in the colony the quickest path to the best food source. The scent of the trial is reinforced each time an ant travels that path, further reinforcing the behavior. American Air Liquide uses virtual "ants" to mark the shortest and most reliable routes for their delivery trucks. Their artificial colony approach also uses genetic algorithms based on factory schedules, weather, estimated customer demand and costs to find the most efficient business model each day. Dairy, heating oil, grocery and telephone companies across Europe are also finding this artificial pheromone trail system useful in their industries.

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