Science News » World Leaders and Advocates Unite in Washington, D.C. for One Mission: Make Mental Health a Global Priority

World leaders and advocates gathered in Washington, D.C. on April 13-15, 2015 to discuss making mental health a global priority.

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Two Potamkin Prize Winners — On Finding the Gene for ALS and Frontotemporal Dementia

In this article in Neurology Today, two scientists – Rosa Rademakers, PhD, and Bryan Traynor, MD, PhD – who started their careers studying very different diseases, ended up at the same genetic address and making a discovery that has changed conventional wisdom about two seemingly disparate conditions: frontotemporal degeneration (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). They discuss their separate efforts and findings here.

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How Activity Level May Help People Living With FTD

Featured on BBC Sport, the activity level of people battling dementia is explored. Specifically, the story of Malcolm Watt, a professional tennis player prior to being diagnosed with dementia aged 42, is told. It explains how although he has lost his ability to communicate, he can still play tennis like a pro. Read the entire article here.

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Founding Member of The Beastie Boys, Passes Away From FTD

John Berry, an original member of hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, died Thursday morning, May 19th, at 7:30 a.m. at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts. He had been battling FTD, which had worsened in the previous months before his passing. He was 52. Berry is credited with naming the group, Beastie Boys when they were teenagers. The group formed in July 1981, with Berry and Diamond joined by Adam Yauch and Kate Schellenbach. Berry left the group soon after in 1983. Read the entire article here.

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A Half Million Prayers for Muslims

YWAM’s global prayer day, called The Invitation, will be a bit different in June. Instead of asking you to pray on the second Thursday of the month (or whatever works best for you) we are asking you to pray with us daily from June 6 to July 5 for 30 Days of Prayer for the Muslim World.

30 Days is a very important part of YWAM’s history. It was started in 1992 when a group of YWAM leaders sensed God asking them to make a greater commitment to Muslims. This year marks the 22nd year of 30 Days and it is expected that over a half million Christians will be participating, from many churches and organizations.

30 Days coincides every year with Ramadan (June 6 – July 5 this year) which is an important month of fasting and religious observance for Muslims. The purpose of 30 Days is to call Christians to make an intentional and respectful effort during this period to learn about, pray for and reach out to Muslim neighbors.

On the 30 Days website, prayer booklets are available in over 20 languages. To join the YWAM family in prayer in June, take a moment to download or order a booklet in your language. Also, go to the 30 Days Facebook page and like it. When you do so, you will receive short summaries of the prayer topics each day during the 30 Days of Prayer. You can share these summaries with others.

Join us in prayer for Muslims in June. As the 30 Days website says, “Through prayer, we engage in an act of love for Muslim people around the world—sharing their burdens, understanding their concerns and petitioning God to help them.”

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The Lauder and Newhouse Foundations Announce New Initiative to Find Treatments for FTD

AFTD is excited to share that The Lauder Foundation and the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation have each committed $5 million to create The Treat FTD Fund, which will accelerate clinical trials for FTD over the next decade. The fund, a joint program of AFTD and the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), has the potential to advance treatments for other neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, ALS and Parkinson’s. Read the press release, and see coverage of the announcement from NJ.com.

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Science News » NIMH Grantees Named Recipients of Prestigious Presidential Award

NIMH congratulates three NIMH grantees who received the 2016 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

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Minneapolis-based Children’s Author, Nancy Carlson to Give Keynote at AFTD Conference

On May 10th, AFTD announced they would hold their 2016 education conference in Minneapolis, MN, at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Minneapolis-Park Place, on Friday, May 13. It will run from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., followed by a dinner reception. Each year, AFTD hosts this important conference so that people impacted by FTD can meet in person and share resources and information. Hundreds of FTD experts, researchers, medical professionals, caregivers and persons diagnosed gather to make this annual event one of crucial importance for all impacted by FTD. The full press release can be seen here.

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Praying for Property

During the month of May, YWAM’s global prayer day, called The Invitation, will focus on YWAM’s campuses and ministry centers. You are invited to pray with YWAM on our prayer day, May 12, as well as throughout the month.

Growing to more than 1,100 locations in over 180 countries since 1960, YWAM properties range from rental spaces of a few meters to ownership of hundreds of acres of land with many buildings. From castles several hundred years old to just-finished construction, God has blessed YWAM abundantly. Some of these buildings give YWAM a ministry footprint right in the middle of impoverished communities. Others provide a quiet retreat setting for mission training programs.

Painting at YWAM Restenas, Sweden

Said YWAM leader Lynn Green, “What an extraordinary thing God has done in giving us city bases and training centers. It’s a gift we can’t take credit for.”

Those properties provide an enduring witness to answered prayer. John Briggs has seen many of these buildings firsthand in his role as leader of YWAM’s Mission Builder ministry, which helps construct and maintain YWAM properties. John said, “To this day and without exception, every YWAM property acquired and cared for has involved some level of prayer to the God who inspires us to dream, and usually reach for the impossible in order to know Him and make Him known throughout the world!”

In the prayer information below, we have offered several specific prayer points for praying for a local YWAM property, as well as for global YWAM property concerns and some specific YWAM properties in various parts of the world.

How to Pray for YWAM Properties

YWAM Jinja, Uganda building campaign

Preparation for prayer:

• If you are familiar with a YWAM location, find out about its history.
• Look at the map of YWAM locations around the world. Choose five locations for which you have little or no familiarity. Get a sense for their ministries. Pray for them using the points below or as you feel led.
• Consider Hebrews 3:4 (NASB): “For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.”

Clinic at YWAM Jinja, Uganda

Pray for local YWAM properties:

• Pray for your location to have the ability to clearly and simply communicate the call of your location.
• Pray for your location’s planning efforts and time spent with God so that the Lord’s purposes will prevail.
• Pray for wisdom for your location’s leadership and administration to help steward property acquisition and development in concert with ministry goals and to help identify and prioritize the issues of maintenance, repair or replacement before they become real problems.
• Pray for affordable, safe housing for YWAMers and their families.
• Pray for your ministry location to be debt free and offer thanksgiving for the ministry locations that are debt free!
• Pray for the Lord to lead the right people to the right occupations, particularly for harder “property” positions to fill such as maintenance leader, construction workers, groundskeepers, administrator, or operations/property manager.
• Pray for those who have responded by working behind the scenes or in service positions, such as: administration, maintenance, grounds, facilities, housekeeping, kitchen, accounting, and hospitality.
• Pray that all YWAMers at your location will have a heart of gratitude for those who have served in the past and for those who are currently serving in positions that have contributed to making your ministry location what it is today.
• Pray for your ministry location to give honor where honor is due by recognizing, appreciating and celebrating the gifts God has brought to us through the people He has sent.

Pray for the needs of YWAM properties around the world:

• YWAM Berlin, Germany where the ministry team is believing for the release workers and finances to rebuild a ministry center and an adjacent hotel to house hundreds of long-term staff and visiting teams from around the world to reach the heart of Germany for Christ.
• YWAM Riga, Latvia and their “Freedom 61” project believing for the finances and Mission Builder volunteers for building a transition center for housing women and girls caught in human trafficking.
• YWAM Battambang, Cambodia continues its campus development constructing a training center serving the four remaining Communist nations in the region. Pray for the continued release of workers and the finances for construction materials to continue.
• YWAM Jinja, Uganda. Praise God with this location as they celebrate receiving 40% (or $100,000) to buy the building they have been renting. They call this the Time2Own campaign. Pray for God to provide remaining funds.

Pray for global concerns regarding YWAM property:

• Obtaining properties in most cities is very difficult due to price, availability, regulations and other factors. Pray for the Lord to provide breakthroughs for YWAM ministries. As an example, that God would stir the hearts of owners to donate their properties, as opposed to keeping the property as an asset. Pray for churches or ministries with available property to be open to offering property to YWAM.
• Pray for the Holy Spirit to bring revelation and a heart of repentance where we have made our own plans without God or “used” people instead of waiting for the best God may have desired for our ministry location.
• Pray for the Lord to release tens of thousands of workers (with gifts of administration, maintenance, facilities management, housekeeping, kitchen service, accounting, and hospitality to name a few) into the fields white with harvest, and that He would direct them toward YWAM ministry locations and our partner ministries worldwide.
• Pray that short-term workers (like Mission Builders) would be positively impacted by serving alongside YWAM ministry locations worldwide so much so that they would return as students and long-term YWAMers. Pray for the ministry of Mission Builders (missionbuilders.org).
• Pray that YWAM locations and YWAMers with gifts of maintenance and construction skills will catch the vision to partner with other YWAM ministries by traveling to other locations needing short-term help. (In the USA, those events when family and friends gather to build a barn in a day or two, are called “barn raisers.”) Pray that YWAMers partner together to be “barn raisers” in their region.

Take Action:

• Learn more about Mission Builders International (MBI). MBI has been connecting Christians to frontline missions since 1978. MBI averages 900 to 1,000 volunteers placed in 85-120 locations each year. Refer someone not currently in YWAM to MBI.
• Talk to a YWAM location leader or other property leader. Identify a “property” project that you could plan, organize and execute with others.

Share how God spoke to you.

• Share on http://ift.tt/1Kxt2xZ, find the post for May 12, and add a comment about how you prayed.
• Go to twitter.com; search for #praywithywam and tweet about your prayer time/post a picture.

Praying for YWAM Ships

YWAM kids and their prayer map

In April, 2016, the YWAM family prayed for YWAM’s Ship-Equipped Ministries:

• Kids at YWAM Medical Ships Australia made cutout pictures of each of the vessels and sailed them around, praying for where they would go and the people they would see!
• YWAM – Georgia (republic of) prayed for a ship for the Black Sea.
• YWAM at Outpost Panama welcomed Making Waves last month: “What an amazing answer to prayer and the joint effort of 5 YWAM bases. We are asking God for workers for the harvest here at Outpost Panama for all departments including Making Waves.”
• A group of YWAM leaders prayed during the recent DNA conference in Missouri, USA. They watched videos about YWAM Ship ministries and then prayed based upon the prayer points in The Invitation for April. They also noted that the Pacific Hope ship was headed to do some fundraising before ending up in Vanuatu (republic of) where there are Bibleless people groups.
• YWAM – Togo, West Africa prayed for a new boat for the Amazon and a boat for West Africa. They also sensed God giving them Haggai 2:8 when praying for funds and Matthew 9:37-38 when praying for crew.
• YWAM – Chicago, Illinois prayed for the fleet (Habakkuk 2:14) and for Papua New Guinea, specifically for unity among leaders.
• YWAM Perth, Australia prayed for the resources and abundance of the Papua New Guinea ship to be multiplied to all the ships and for even MORE ships with different and unique purposes to be birthed.

YWAM Antigua prays for YWAM ships

YWAMers requested prayers for these ships:

• Please pray that we get the M/V Amazing Grace into the shipyard this month so we can get her to YWAM – Mazatlan, Mexico and begin ministering to the isolated.
• Next Wave needs short and long term volunteers to help in the boat and with the refugees. Please also pray for Finances.
• Pacific Link held their first ophthalmology clinic in the Karkar Island region in March. Pray for solid relationships with these people over time.
• Pray for new training vessel for YWAM Ships Kona.
• YWAM – Åland Islands (autonomous region of Finland, between Finland and Sweden, Baltic Sea) asked for prayer for their vision to start a ship ministry. They note that the Åland islands have a population of only 29 000 and still during the interwar period it had the world´s largest sailing ship fleet. The YWAMers say, “We do believe that this is a part of Ålands’ calling; travel to the unreached people groups by the ships and preach the gospel! So please pray, as we are right now taking our first steps to pioneer YWAM there.”
• One YWAMer noted on Facebook: “The need is obviously greater than I could imagine, and it is comforting to know that our God is much greater still! Thank you for ALL involved in this amazing ministry – for your precious time, love, obedience and willingness to GO!”

Upcoming topics for The Invitation

• June 2016 – Area Topic – 30 Days of Prayer for the Muslim World
• July 14 – Refugees.

The second Thursday is just a suggestion. Feel free to pray close to that date at a time that works well for your location’s schedule.

Don’t Miss The Invitation:

• Sign up for prayer updates. Go to ywam.org, find the “Stay Connected” box on the home page, put in your email address and click “Sign Up.”
• Download prayer updates in a specific language. Go to http://ift.tt/1UO8eZP. (Currently available in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Indonesian, or request other languages.)
• If you sense God giving you a word or a direction for YWAM’s prayer, please contact us.

 

 

 

 

 

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Science News » Ketamine Lifts Depression via a Byproduct of its Metabolism

A chemical byproduct, or metabolite, created as the body breaks down likely holds the secret to its rapid antidepressant action .

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Science News » Webinar: Analyzing and Using RDoC Data in Your Research

The NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Unit hosts a webinar featuring a conversation with three NIMH-funded researchers who have approached the issue of how to analyze and integrate data that illustrate RDoC principles.

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