health
gregladen | January 3, 2008Daily alcohol use by males has been shown to increase sexual arousal and decrease sexual inhibition.
In Fruit Flies.
The current (Jan 2) issue of PLoS ONE includes a paper by Lee et al exploring thye physiological side of changes in sexual behavior under the influence of alcohol, with an eye towards understanding this process in humans, using an animal model.
Alcohol has a strong causal relationship with sexual arousal and disinhibited sexual behavior in humans; however, the physiological support for this notion is largely lacking and thus a suitable animal model to address this issue is…
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2008A stoner friend (who is also a dedicated father of two and a successful computer consultant) sent me a link to a sad and thought-provoking story.
A Seattle teen girl takes ecstasy with her friends, the drug apparently triggers undiagnosed diabetes, she dies from ketoacidosis. The girl's friends tend to her for hours before she dies, but nobody dares call an ambulance, because in most US legislatures a drug user runs a great risk of a jail sentence if she reports an overdose.
Another casualty in the War on Drugs. Danielle McCarthy was sixteen.
gregladen | January 1, 2008Beer May Cure Cancer; Prostrate Cancer Protein; Vomit Inducing Infection Strikes Cursed Cruise Ship;
Cancer-fighting agent found in beer from PhysOrg.com
A key ingredient of beer may contain a cancer-fighting substance, a German study indicated.
[...]
Scientists find protein potential drug target for treatment-resistant prostate cancer from PhysOrg.com
Scientists at Jefferson's Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia have found that a signaling protein that is key to prostate cancer cell growth is turned on in nearly all recurrent prostate cancers that are resistant to hormone therapy.…
gregladen | December 21, 2007A lectin is a funny little protein that seems to be used in a lot of biological systems. They bind to sugars, and one of the roles they play is inhibition of "agglutination" ... clumping, or gluing together ... of other molecules.
A sea cucumber is an echinoderm that lives in the ocean. It looks kind of like a cucumber, but if you saw a cucumber that looked and acted like an echinoderm you would probably not put it in your salad.
Malaria is a type of protozoan, a single celled organism that is not a bacteria. There are many kinds, and they complex life cycle with many different stages…
sb admin | December 20, 2007Fortune has announced the year's 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, including Prozac for dogs.
"Thank God. We've been so worried since Lucky dyed his hair jet black and started listening to the Smiths."
"Eli Lilly wins FDA approval to put Prozac into chewable, beef-flavored pills to treat separation anxiety in dogs."
It's not just dogs - cats are treated with SSRI antidepressants, along with psychotherapy. If treatment fails to calm behaviour, the next step is neutering. Imagine that veterinary approach integrating with current practices for humans. Patients who have trouble with adhering to…
gregladen | December 19, 2007African American children may have reduced verbal ability compared to other children to a degree that is roughly equivalent to missing a year in school, according to a recently published paper. Is this evidence of a racial difference?
The study by Sampson et.al., published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences included more than 200 children aged 6-12 living in Chicago, and followed these children over seven years. The study controlled for poverty, and interestingly, poverty was not found to be a good predictor of differences in verbal ability.
The researchers consider…
gregladen | December 19, 2007Popular Mechanics (one of those magazines that genteel people refuse to admit they read, but that is actually a blast) has published a thing called "Geek the Vote." According to an email from PM, this is:
...an online guide to all the candidates' stances on issues related to science and technology including energy policy and climate change, gun control, science education and infrastructure investment. The full chart, which can be navigated by candidate or issue, is [provided]
The site is here.
This is apparently in response to (maybe not, but there is evidence to suggest this) the Science…
gregladen | December 14, 2007And others who may wear mascara and other cosmetics. We've banned cosmetics with mercury. This makes Minnesota stricter in this regard than the Federal Government or any other state.
What I find amazing is that Mercury was not already banned from substances that you rub on yourself.
[source]
gregladen | December 11, 2007MIT researchers have successfully treated mice with sickle-cell anemia in a process that begins by directly reprogramming the mice's own cells to an embryonic-stem-cell-like state, without the use of eggs.
This is the first proof-of-principle of therapeutic application in mice of directly reprogrammed induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, which recently have been derived in mice as well as humans.
"This demonstrates that IPS cells have the same potential for therapy as embryonic stem cells, without the ethical and practical issues raised in creating embryonic stem cells," said MIT biology…
gregladen | December 11, 2007From an MIT press release:
A missing brain protein may be one of the culprits behind autism and other brain disorders, according to researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.
The protein, called CASK, helps in the development of synapses, which neurons use to communicate with one another and which underlie our ability to learn and remember. Improperly formed synapses could lead to mental retardation, and mutations in genes encoding certain synaptic proteins are associated with autism.
In work published in the Dec. 6 issue of Neuron, Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of…
gregladen | December 9, 2007Have you seen the Marumushi news map?
Here is an example of the output for the category Health, showing the relative "presence" of different categories of news on Health in the US:
Here is the same topic for Canada:
And here is the national news map. For Britain:
Go here to make your own news maps!
gregladen | December 9, 2007Ebola in Uganda:
New Ebola fatalities push Uganda toll to 25: official from PhysOrg.com
A dreaded Ebola outbreak has killed two people, bringing the toll to 25 in western Uganda, an official said Saturday, as health teams battled to contain the virulent strain in the region.
[...]
With the outbreak earlier in the year in DRC, and this outbreak, this is a big year for Ebola. Some time soon, someone is going to have to go and figure out where this disease resides in the wild. I'm betting on it being a plant virus that reaches human populations through a number of different routes,…
gregladen | December 8, 2007Coturnix points out that the following video of Dan Abrams speaking with two women about sex among teenagers is a good example of reporting about a scientific issue mired in a political quagmire.
Keywords and phrases:
Well, what that study actually reveals is...
Well, in a number of cases....
The study said it didn't work. So we need to do more of it to make it work.
I say, if the legislation doesn't work, screw it.
gregladen | December 5, 2007A court on Wednesday awarded $11,000 to a woman who said she woke up during major abdominal surgery but was unable to tell doctors she was in terrible pain. ... The 62-year-old retiree in the southern Austrian province of Carinthia had demanded more than $57,000 in compensation for mental and physical suffering during the October 2002 operation, public broadcaster ORF reported.
Then they spilled coffee on her... Ouch.
sciencetolife | November 29, 2007
This Chicago Sun-Times article tells of how (expensive) scientific techniques are being used to change the quality of life for one man and his children.
Art Kessler carries a mutant copy of the DYT1 gene and, as a result, suffers from a sometimes painful movement disorder called dystonia that makes muscles go haywire. Art and his wife wanted children and chose a technology called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), also known as embryo screening, to ensure that their children would not inherit the defective DYT1.
In PGD, the couple first undergoes in vitro fertilization. Eggs are…
gregladen | November 26, 2007A new study addresses the link betwen omega-3 acidss and brain function, in this case in gerbils.
These studies show that oral supplementation with DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid, increases dendritic spine density in adult gerbil hippocampus...). This effect of DHA is approximately doubled when animals also receive [uridine-5â²-monophosphate] and is accompanied by parallel increases in membrane phosphatides and in specific pre- and post-synaptic proteins. Supplementation with arachidonic acid (ARA), an omega-6 fatty acid, fails to increase spine density....
What does this mean?
Amyloid beta…
gregladen | November 26, 2007An international collaboration led by researchers in the US and South Africa announced Nov. 20 the first genome sequence of an extensively drug resistant (XDR) strain of the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, one linked to more than 50 deaths in a recent tuberculosis (TB) outbreak in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.*
As part of this work, genomes of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and drug sensitive isolates were also decoded. Initial comparisons of the genome sequences reveal that the drug-resistant and drug-sensitive microbes differ at only a few dozen locations along the four-million-letter DNA…
omnibrain | November 21, 2007Everyone has been talking about stem cells in the last couple days. Here's something to offend most of you - Christopher Reeve eating fetuses for their Stem Cells. Enjoy ;)
Now that you are probably horribly offended about something or other here's why I'm posting this video now:
Now paralyzed people can eat their own stem cells to become superpeople!
omnibrain | November 21, 2007One of the earliest references to a controlled experiment is from Daniel 1: 1-16 in the Old Testament of the Bible. In this 'experiment' Daniel pits his nutrition regime of "pulse" to eat and water to drink versus the best cuts of meat and the most highly rated wine. Check out the experimental methods and results below:
1:1 In the third yearof the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah came Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon unto Jerusalem, and besieged it.1:2 And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with part of the vessels of the house of God: which he carried into the land of…