Ten members of Texas Emergency Medical Task Force (EMTF) 6 are gearing up for a full-scale exercise in New Mexico later this month.

The volunteer team, based out of the southeast Texas area, will be partnering with personnel from each of Texas eight EMTF Regions to deploy a Mobile Medical Unit to support the 26th annual Bataan Memorial Death March at White Sands Missile Range, about an hour north of El Paso. The march is a 26.2-mile trek through the high desert terrain of the missile range, conducted in honor of the heroic service members who defended the Philippine Islands during World War II.

In prior years, the Mobile Medical Unit has treated upwards of 700 patients over the course of the daylong event.

The Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council, or SETRAC, is the lead agency for EMTF-6. Our EMTF teams regularly meet and train to be prepared for deployment to catastrophic emergency incidents, says Mark Sastre, EMTF Coordinator for SETRAC. This exercise is a great way to polish our skills as well as provide a valuable service to the men and women committing themselves to this intense course in memory of the fallen heroes from 1942.

The Texas EMTF program is a coordinated network of local medical resources that are rapidly deployable in the event of a regional or state disaster or large scale incident. When activated, the task force increases local medical surge capacity by providing emergency medical transport, hospital surge staffing, and mobile medical units. This is made possible in large part through Texas hospitals, fire departments, and emergency medical services departments, who maintain and house EMTF assets, and deploy personnel and resources when called upon. As the most intricate component of the EMTF program, the mobile medical units are modular, field-deployable facilities staffed by EMTF physicians, nurses, paramedics, and technicians capable of providing emergency medical care and stabilization in austere environments.

The member agencies and personnel of EMTF have really embraced the concept of One Team, says Brian Bayani, Chief of Northwest EMS in Tomball and a Task Force Leader for EMTF-6. Its a remarkable thing to be able to bring together resources from across the state to help our fellow Texans and our neighboring communities when needed.

For more information on EMTF-6, visit www setrac.org.

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Local Emergency Medical Task Force members prepare for New Mexico excercise

There is no better time than the present. Eckhart Tolles The Power of Now shows you how to move past pain, stress and anxiety with the help of ancient teachings and modern thought designed to balance your life by living it moment to moment.

The Power of Now is author Eckhart Tolles first book, but it made quite a splash when it appeared in the late 90s. It quickly built momentum and has since been translated into 33 languages and sold three million copies in North America alone. Now Tolle is one of the most popular spiritual authors out there, and he is constantly referenced in other books with interviews or excerpts. Inside the book youll find lessons and teachings from spiritual leaders, exercises for maintaining presence in the moment, and approaches to meditation that dont get hung up on mere positive thinking.

This book is for people who feel stuck in their past, people who cant get out of their own head, and people who feel like theyre waiting around for happiness to come to them. Its also for those that catch themselves complaining too often, and those that feel constant anxiety or worry on the daily. If you have interest in meditation as a practice, or have never tried it but want some of the benefits, this book might be right up your alley. This book is probably not ideal for people who have no interest in zen teachings, think meditation is silly (its really not), or find little value in philosophical lessons.

The book focuses on one major subject: how to be consciously present in the moment and what that can do for you in your everyday life. Youll find some exercises and examples as you go that can help you understand the concepts more and put them into practice. The book isnt terribly short, so here is some of what youll learn:

Its also important to mention how this book is structured. There are chapters, just like any other book, but the chapters are broken up into different questions being asked by an assumed proxy of the reader (as if youre at a presentation and Tolle is taking questions). Sometimes its a question youre already thinking as you read, and other times its not something youd think of asking at all. Its probably to your benefit to read every section, but if you feel you have a good understanding of what is being communicated, its not the worst thing to skip a section because you already get it.

There is also a symbol that shows up throughout the book. When you see it, youre meant to take a break from reading and stop to let what youve just read sink in, or practice an exercise. I took the breaks for every exercise and for every section that contained something I had never thought of before. It was helpful in understanding each lesson, personally. Whether you choose to take those breaks, is entirely up to you, but I will say that this isnt the kind of book you want to rush through anyway.

Its easy to get stuck dwelling on the past. Maybe you had a bad breakup, lost a job, or simply wish something had gone another way. Even worse, you might sit around waiting for the future to come along and save you. You hope that someone will find you, a great job will come knocking on your door, or things will just get better somehow. Combine both of those thought processes and suddenly the present moment in front of you has lost all of its value. To truly move on from your past and take control of your future, you have to take them out of your mind and focus on what you can do right now. Tolle suggests to only approach your past and future on the level of the present moment:

Whatever you need to know about the unconscious past in you, the challenges of the present will bring it out. If you delve into the past, it will become a bottomless pit: There is always more.

You dont want to deny your past or blow off your future, you just want to reach for them as tools when you need them instead:

Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation.

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The Power Of Now: A Meditative Approach To Living In The Moment

An unexpected leak of a chemical designed to tag complex organic molecules in samples collected by NASAs Mars rover Curiosity appears to have serendipitously done its job, scientists reported on Tuesday.

Curiositys onboard laboratory includes seven so-called wet chemistry experiments designed to preserve and identify suspect carbon-containing components in samples drilled out from rocks.

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None of the foil-capped metal cups has been punctured yet, but vapors of the fluid, known as N-methyl-N-tert-butyldimethylsilyl-trifluoroacetamide, or MTBSTFA, leaked into the gas-sniffing analysis instrument early in the mission.

Curiosity landed in a 96-mile wide impact basin known as Gale Crater in August 2012 to determine if the planet most like Earth in the solar system has or ever had the chemistry and environments to support microbial life.

Scientists quickly fulfilled the primary goal of the mission, discovering sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon in powder Curiosity drilled out of an ancient mudstone in an area known as Yellowknife Bay.

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That paved the way for a more ambitious hunt for complex organic molecules, an effort complicated by the MTBSTFA leak.

This caused us a lot of headache in the beginning, frankly, because it has a lot of carbon in it and other (chemical) fragments that can break apart, Curiosity scientist Danny Glavin, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said on Tuesday (March 17) at the Lunar and Planetary Science conference in Houston, Texas.

Weve turned this sort of bad thing into a good thing because weve learned how to work around this leak. Weve actually used this vapor from this leak to carry out derivitization, he said, referring to the technique to tag organics.

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Leak in Curiosity's Wet Chemistry Test Finds Mars Organics