Can an hour in a salt cave cure your ills or is it just a con(diment)? Adalex Clinic is a recently- opened  'salt grotto' in West London. Polish manager Grace Hart says it offers all manner of health benefits. Claims it can relieve asthma, improve circulation and lower blood pressure.

By. Alice Azania Jarvis. Published. 2. 3: 3. Vampire Diaries Season 7 Subtitles English Free Download more. GMT, 1. 1 June 2. GMT, 2. 6 July 2. The crisp white powder crunches under foot, stacks of crystalline rock sparkle and ‘icicles’ glitter from above. No, it’s not a secluded Alpine cave but a clinic in West London. The white powder isn’t snow, it’s salt.

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Join the NASDAQ Community today and get free, instant access to portfolios, stock ratings, real-time alerts, and more! Join Today. Can an hour in a salt cave cure your ills or is it just a con(diment)? Adalex Clinic is a recently-opened 'salt grotto' in West London; Polish manager Grace Hart says. The Pandora myth first appears in lines 560–612 of Hesiod's poem in epic meter, the Theogony (ca. 8th–7th centuries BC), without ever giving the woman a name. Slant Magazine's film section is your gateway to some of the web's most incisive and biting film criticism and features.

So are the icicles and the rocks piled in the corner. I am standing in the Adalex Clinic’s recently- opened ‘salt grotto’. The grotto (actually, it’s less of a ‘grotto’ than just a plain old room with assorted sun loungers) is the brainchild of Grace Hart, a psychologist. Magic grotto? A sceptical Alice- Azania Jarvis chills out in the salt cave in West London. She says that such grottos are commonplace in her native Poland, and claims that a spell in its salty confines — a typical session lasts an hour and costs £2. Above all, after an hour in the grotto I should experience, she says, a sense of ‘psycho physical comfort’. Which definitely sounds like a good thing — even if I’m not entirely sure what she means by it.

Actually, quite a lot of what clinic manager Grace says about the health benefits of the salt grotto doesn’t bear close scrutiny.‘It’s about feeling good, mentally and physically,’ she tells me. You will feel calm and refreshed, and you won’t have any anxiety.’Benefits: Salt is rich in minerals such as iodine, potassium and bromide. The apparently miraculous power of salt is all, she says, down to its ‘micro- elements’. Salt is rich in minerals such as iodine, potassium and bromide.

Usually, we get these by eating it — but Grace believes we can absorb them by sitting in a room full of the stuff. We are depleted of micro- elements because our water is polluted, our diet is bad. But micro- elements like bromide have a calming effect on the brain. If you are stressed out, you can become calm in a natural way.’As well as a new- found sense of calm, after an hour in the grotto, she promises, I should feel reinvigorated and healthy.‘The air is very clean inside the grotto — ten times cleaner than normal air,’ she continues.

Salt is anti- fungal and anti- bacterial. You start breathing slower and deeper as the salt opens up your bronchial airways. You breathe better and you feel better.’While it may sound like bunkum (OK, it definitely does sound like bunkum), in Central and Eastern Europe they have been using salt grottos — both natural and artificial — for donkey’s years. The first was set up 1. Dr Feliks Boczkowski, a Polish physician from Wieliczka, near Krakow, noted that local salt miners didn’t suffer from lung diseases. A natural grotto was carved out within the Wieliczka mines themselves, 4. It became popular with those suffering respiratory disease, and is still in use today.

Before I’m allowed into Grace’s grotto, she hands me a pair of blue plastic shoe covers to protect both the salt and my shoes. To keep the salt fresh, it is regularly topped up from the stash of enormous 2.

And it definitely is salt. After Grace closes the grotto’s outer door and leaves me alone, I taste a pinch just to be sure. The PA system in the corner plays a pan- pipes version of Just The Way You Are, while angled lamps make the salt look rosy pink, with blotches of blue on the ceiling and orange stripes along the walls. Watch Baby Boy Online Free HD. Believer: Former psychologist Grace Holt says an hour in the salt cave offers all manner of health benefits. It’s a little like being in a Seventies nightclub. Nevertheless, after 2. In fact, I’m starting to nod off.

I’m seated on a squishy sun lounger and wrapped up in a snuggly blanket which Grace has provided. Though there are magazines in the waiting room, in the grotto there’s nothing to do but drift in and out of sleep.

Clients are asked to leave their mobile phones behind. There is a soporific sound of gently trickling water coming from what looks like an enormous garden water feature. This, explains Grace, is the grotto’s ‘evaporation tower’. A good six feet high, it features an artfully- arranged fan of salt- encrusted twigs inside a giant wooden display case.

Water flowing from a tank concealed within the tower’s wardrobe- like structure is trickling over them. It’s brine, brought over from Poland, Grace tells me. It is one of the most healthy, healing waters,’ she says. It is a very special mineral water.

Sitting near it as it flows, many of your positive ions will change to negative ions, which always make you feel better. In the city, there are a lot of positive ions — which make you feel anxious, angry and agitated. Tranquil: Though there are magazines in the waiting room, in the grotto there¿s nothing to do but drift in and out of sleep. Negative ions make you feel refreshed and fantastic.’ From what I can remember of GCSE physics, ions are simply atoms or molecules with positive or negative electrical charges. Why they should leave you anxious or refreshed eludes me. The twigs, meanwhile, are birch — a ‘healing wood’ according to Grace.

But of course! The salt itself is equally exotic. The three tons which cover the floor have been brought from Poland, while the rocks lining the walls and piled at the corners are Himalayan salt imported from Pakistan. According to Grace: ‘Not every salt has all the special properties. Himalayan salt has 8. In total, the room contains more than 1.

Building it took a month and cost £3. There’s no doubt that lolling around in my sun lounger is a rather pleasant way to while away an hour — but how does the scientific evidence stack up? Unfortunately, there isn’t a huge amount.

I know of no good scientific evidence about this approach and see no reason why this should be any better than relaxing in any other quiet environment,’ says Professor Edzard Ernst, a physician and former Professor of Complementary Medicine at Exeter University. Wendy Sadler, of Science Made Simple, an independent organisation aimed at explaining scientific research to the public, agrees — and questions the idea that exposure to ‘micro- particles’ and ‘negative ions’ can make you feel calmer and more energised. She says: ‘There’s no reason at all you should feel calm because of exposure to negative ions.

Instagram Done Got Hacked. Instagram, Facebook’s hotter, snootier subsidiary, may have a massive data breach on its hands. This week, a security flaw within Instagram allowed hackers to assemble a database of what appeared to be verified users’ contact information—some of those affected purportedly being celebrities and politicians. According to the Verge, Instagram now says the known scope of the breach has expanded to include at least some unverified Instagrammers.“..

We recently discovered a bug on Instagram that could be used to access some people’s email address and phone number even if they were not public,” Instagram CTO Mike Krieger wrote in a blog post. No passwords or other Instagram activity was revealed. We quickly fixed the bug, and have been working with law enforcement on the matter. Although we cannot determine which specific accounts may have been impacted, we believe it was a low percentage of Instagram accounts.”“We are very sorry this happened,” Krieger added.

As the Daily Beast reported last week, the unknown hackers behind the breach claim to have compromised six million accounts and set up a website called “Doxagram,” which allegedly offered access to phone numbers, email addresses or both for 1,0. Instagram accounts at $1. While a few of the addresses were public information, “many did not return any relevant Google results, implying they were obtained from some private source.” The Beast was able to confirm some of the leaked accounts had valid contact information; the site was later taken offline. Per the Verge, cybersecurity firm Rep. Knight said supposed contact information for a number of celebrities featured on Doxagram was circulating on the dark web, ranging from Hollywood celebs like Emma Watson and Leonardo Di. Caprio to musician Harry Styles and boxer Floyd Mayweather. The Beast claimed the site even purported to have contact info behind President Donald Trump’s official Instagram profile, which was managed by White House social media director Dan Scavino.

In addition to potentially exposing users to harassment, the breach could allow hackers to target them for social engineering attacks which could compromise their accounts. Instagram’s security hole may be linked to an incident on August 2. Selena Gomez—the most- followed user on the site—and posted nude photographs of Justin Bieber.

Data breaches are not the only major problem reported at the social- media giant in recent days. On Friday, Mashable reported the site’s staff is rife with individuals willing to verify Instagram accounts for prices “anywhere from a bottle of wine to $1.