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When one-year-old Layla Richards, from London, was diagnosed with an aggressive strain of leukaemia, the word 'incurable' struck like a hammer.
The household goblins have just about finished their bags of Halloween candy, so let’s talk about diabetes. Some countries (Canada, New Zealand) start November with Diabetes Awareness week while the entire world is asked to remember the disease on November 14. Diabetes is a brute of a disease – causing heart disease, kidney failure, blindness, […]
In what can only be called a medical oddity, doctors in Columbia found that a man's lung tumor wasn't actually caused by human cancer cells, but those of a parasite. Apparently, due to the patient's weakened immune system, cells from the parasite leached into the rest of the body and eventually developed into cancer. This is the very first reported case of a patient sick with cancer sourced from outside the body. It's literally alien cancer.
A meta-analysis of 53 weight-loss studies spanning over several decades and focusing on 68,000 people found that weight loss have a very low impact - if any.
Just like an ecosystem inhabits an area, so to is your skin inhabited by a swarm of micro-organisms - including viruses.
It's no secret that people nowadays spend most of their time indoors. In high-income countries, as many as 66% of jobs are in the service sector. If you fall in this category, you most likely work in an office environment, which might seem benign enough and boring, of course. However, not all office buildings are built the same. The various materials and furnishings can not only affect your performance at work, but also our health. A new study published in the journal Environmental Health Reports quantified the effects of air quality and found employees working in environments with minimum pollutants in the air performed up to twice as better on cognitive tests.
A new study from the University of California looks at the link between the bonding hormone oxytocin and the effect of marijuana in social contexts that improve interpersonal bonding. Their findings offer insight into how the hormone could make social interactions more fulfilling and satisfying by enhancing our natural cannabinoid receptors.
The world of robotics is extremely exciting. Everyday we come closer to building R2-D2, Terminators, and the Iron Giant. The days of having a Betamax, our “personal healthcare assistant” are even closer still, thanks to robotics in healthcare.
The concepts of biodiversity and evolution are generally thought of as something that occurs in thousands, maybe millions of years - but every once in a while, scientists catch a species red handed: evolving, becoming a new species.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, scientists from the universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania scanned the brains of 50 smokers while they viewed anti-smoking ads. They recorded their neural activity spikes as they watched the sample of 40 images one at a time, looking for increase activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the area that handles decision making processes.
After using relaxation-response technique, such as yoga, meditation and even prayer, participants involved in a study coordinated by the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) solicited health care services 43% less frequently. The researchers involved in the study say simply learning how to relax to fend off anxiety and depression -second only to cancer and heart diseases in terms of health care costs - might significantly reduce the strain on the health care system. As such, more wide spread use of relaxation-response techniques could free up immense resources that can be diverted for chronic diseases.
We're living in the future.
Science and medicine advances have stretched the life span further than ever. That's good news, but the quality of life is also important. People live longer now than ever, but they also live longer in sickness and suffering of both body and mind. Concerning the latter, a clear, sharp mind can be a rare thing once you pass a venerable age, but a team at the Paracelsus Medical University in Austria may be on to something. Working with mice, the researchers gave some of the elderly rodents a common drug called Montelukast that's used to treat asthma in children. To everyone surprise, the old rats started growing new brain cells and performed almost as well as the young in cognitive tests. If only the drug worked on people, too - we might find out soon.
With a simple brain scan, researchers can now see if you've been naughty or nice - on average.
Money. It makes the brain go nuts!
In what could become a monumental decision, the World Health Organization has decided to roll out pilot tests for a malaria vaccine.
An eagerly awaited report from the World Health Organization (WHO) states that processed meats such as bacon and sausages cause cancer, and red meat likely does so too.
Nobody wants to know how a hot dog is made, because you always know there's some crazy stuff inside. If you're one of those persons, stop reading now. Alright, time for a reality check. According to the "The Hot Dog Report" released by Clear Food, a company on a mission to demystify the black box that's the US food industry, many consumer brands add more ingredients in their sausages than you'd wished for, i.e. labeled. The company sequenced the genetic material from 345 samples of hot dogs across 75 brands and found around 15% were problematic. This means a deceiving label, whether exaggerating the protein content or finding pork in your chicken sausage. About 67% of the veggie samples had hygiene issues. Perhaps most disturbing is that 1 in 10 so-called veggie hot dogs had meat in them, and 2% of all samples had human DNA inside.
A preliminary study from Switzerland, published this month in the Annals of Neurology, proved the effectiveness of a new method of non-invasive brain surgery: using a newly-developed operating device that relies on ultrasound, in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), allowed neurosurgeons to precisely remove small pieces of brain tissue in nine patients suffering from chronic pain without removing skin or skull bone. Researchers now plan to test it on patients with other disorders, such as Parkinson's. Neal Kassell, neurosurgeon at the University of Virginia, not directly involved in the study.
Martin Shkreli, chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals, became over night one of the most despised figures in the pharmaceutical industry when just as suddenly he raised the price of the only treatment of a rare parasitic infection by 5,000 percent. The drug, Daraprim, was initially developed in 1953 and used to cost $1 a pill only a couple years ago. I have no idea what Shkreli thought would happen after he'd raise the price 500-fold in one go, but he got some serious backlash. "I think that it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people," he said while under the spotlight, but this promise made a month ago is still unfulfilled shattering whatever credibility Shkreli had left.
A new, extremely worrying study found that a third of meta-analyses related to antidepressant studies are written by pharma industry employees.
Marijuana use has doubled among American adults from 2001 to 2013. About 10% of the population or 22 million are believed to be recreational users, a steep rise driven by both cultural shifts and more permissive laws. About 1 in 3 users abuse the drug (continued use despite knowing it may be damaging health or causing depression or anxiety), though it's worth mentioning that this ratio was the same before the exponential rise in marijuana users.
"No amount of alcohol should be considered safe to drink during any trimester of pregnancy," wrote the the American Academy of Pediatrics in a report which identified ingesting alcohol during pregnancy as the leading cause of preventable birth defects.
Carbon nanotubes are a class of advanced materials that researchers think will transform electronics someday, but while great effort is expended trying to figure out the best way to make them, it appears that our lungs are already littered with them. American and French researchers collected both biological samples from randomly selected asthma patients and swabs from nearby buildings and busy intersections. Eventually they found carbon nanotubes, leading them to believe that the material is expelled throughout the city. The source? Vehicles, it seems, which act like carbon nanotube factories on wheels. Similar findings were detected in samples from Houston, in spider webs in India and in ice cores, suggesting carbon nanotubes are everywhere where automobiles are on the loose.
The current procedure for Ebola survivors is wait 42 consecutive days for the tests to come back negative, then the patients can be discharged from quarantine. More and more evidence is surfacing, however, showing that the virus can still linger on through various nooks and crannies in the human body, undetected from standard testing. For instance, one man was treated for Ebola, but the virus was still present in his eyes. It wasn't dormant either, since the inflammation caused his normally blue eyes to turn into green. Other evidence suggests Ebola can linger in the testes and be transmitted through sexual contact, but also in the uterus and joints. Only the case where Ebola was present in semen led to a transmission of the disease, so survivors aren't necessary contagious. These serious findings do suggest more quarantine measures are required, though.
Defecating outside comes at a great toll to the numerous, and often crowded Indian people. Lack of basic hygiene means hundreds of millions are exposed to bacterial pathogens and children are at the mercy of diarrhea. Economically speaking, this translated to $53.8 billion or 6.4 percent from India’s gross domestic product in 2006, says the World Bank.
What exactly makes you thirsty? Dehydration, obviously, but how does your brain know that your body needs water? And how does that grey, squishy lump resting in your cool and comfortable cranium, know when your body needs to heat up or cool off? Scientists at the McGill University Health Centre Research Institute (RI-MUHC) and Duke University have asked themselves just that, and being scientists, went ahead to find out.
Scientists have in the past toyed with the idea of using a disease to fight cancer. Now, after identifying a malaria protein that binds to cancer cells and kills 95% of tumor types, human trials are expected to start within four years. I doesn’t seem like it’s happening fast, but it is, in medical terms. Clinical […]
A research effort at Winship Cancer Institute recently identified a substance in orange lichen and rhubarb that has the potential to be used as a new anti-cancer drug. The substance, an orange pigment known as parietin or physcion, slows the growth and can even kill leukemia cells harvested from patients, without obvious toxic effects on human cells, the study authors report.
In the fight with cancer, we need any piece of help we can get. With this in mind, a group of researchers set out to investigate the animals that don't get cancer (or rarely do) - especially elephants and naked mole rats.
Researchers have discovered a new species of banana christened "nanensis", belonging to the Musa genus, sharing a place in the family Musaceae with more than 70 other species of bananas and plantains. It's scientific name honors the province of Nan where the type specimens were collected.
Prosthetics has come a long way from its humble beginnings – the crude wooden legs of yore are a far cry from the technological marvels we can create to replace our limbs today. However, there is one thing that, with all our know-how, we haven’t yet been able to incorporate in them: a sense of touch. A research team from Stanford University aims to fix this shortcoming, and has developed technology that can “feel” when force is exerted upon it, then transmit the sensory data to brain cells – in essence, they’ve created an artificial skin.
An unexpected correlation was discovered between the preference for bitter foods and everyday sadism an psychopathy, according to a new study published in the journal Appetite.
We've reported some good news about Ebola, after no new cases were reported for over a month, but the struggle is not over.
Chinese researchers discovered a chemical compound that works just as well as morphine -- without any of the negative side effects. The substance is derived from the venom of a centipede native to China. The discovery has huge medical applications, and could potentially reduce the country's military reliance on morphine for battlefield use.
Chronic inflammation of the colon has been recognized as a leading factor contributing to senescence and age-related diseases. Previously, scientists identified polyamines (PAs) levels, which are aliphatic low- molecular compounds, as being linked with systemic inflammation. The more PAs you have, the healthier your gut. But as we age, PAs levels fall and intestinal barrier dysfunction may occur. To test how significant is this contribution, researchers from Japan fed mice with probiotic supplements than compared them to a control. They found the mice lived longer, suggesting "ingestion of specific probiotics may be an easy approach for improving intestinal health and increasing lifespan."
Researchers stumbled upon a new tool to fight cancer in a rather unexpected place; while searching for a vaccine against malaria in pregnant women, a team of Danish scientists found that, simply put, armed malaria proteins are remarkably good at killing cancer cells. They hope to have a working prototype ready for human trials within four years' time. Their discovery has been published in the scientific journal Cancer Cell.
DNA – you either know is as deoxyribonucleic acid, or that stuff that somehow makes us what we are. DNA is the body’s way of storing information about yourself: how the cells arrange in your body, how hereditary material is organized, and how you function. DNA is classically thought of as a distinctive double helix structure, […]
With the variety of games available today varying from those designed to enhance mental fitness, solve real world problems all the way to ones meant for pure entertainment, they have diverse and profound effects on our brains. A new article published in the October 1st issue of Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences argues that the specific content, dynamics, and mechanics of individual games determine their effects on the brain and that the long-criticized action video games might have particularly positive benefits.
Capitalizing a more than a decade's worth of neuroscience and computer science research, an international team of 82 researchers from institutions around the world report one the most detailed digital reconstruction of a mammalian brain. The researchers simulated 30,000 neurons and almost 40 million synapses, part of a rat's brain measuring less than a third of a cubic millimeter. It's a small step that might one day help simulate the whole brain, not just of rats, but also of humans - the ultimate goal of the Human Brain Project (HBP), an ambitious project which the European Commission prioritized and awarded $1 billion in funding.
The complete genetic code book of a person who lived 4,500 years ago in Ethiopia was completed by US researchers. Although much older genomes have been sequenced, like those of 38,000 year-old Neanderthals, samples from African forefathers have proven difficult to sequence as the DNA is often destroyed by accelerated decay, driven by tropical conditions. As such, this is the first time a complete genome retrieval was performed from an ancient human in Africa. In this light, the findings are very important: they suggest even older DNA could be retrieved - maybe even millions of years back to the age of other species of the homo genus.
Are homosexuals hard wired this way or merely the product of their environment? Some argue that its both, but whether or not there's a 'gay gene' or more is up to debate. The fact that it's such a delicate subject, i.e. hard to get funding, means that progress is slow. One could argue that it wouldn't be worth researching anyway. If someone found a scientific causal-link, say some genes, that's responsible for homosexuality than it's possible to maybe reverse it. A 'cure' for homosexuality, if you will. Even this very prospect is enough to kill research out of politically correctness. At the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) in Baltimore, however, the audience might have been surprised to hear about the findings of a group from University of California (UC), Los Angeles that found there's reasons to believe homosexuality is rooted in epigenetics. The authors are quick to caution that their findings are far from being the final word, and hence should be taken with a grain of salt.
Among all the species with which we share the animal kingdom, pigs are the ones whose organs are best suited for transplant in human bodies -- they are approximately the same size as our organs and have similar structures, making reconnecting blood vessels much easier. Pigs tend to have large litters and reproduce quickly, making them a very large, very accessible source of "spare parts."
It's estimated that humanity will have to produce around 50% more food than we currently do to keep up with growing global demand....by 2050. It's an enormous challenge, especially as more and more countries face the effects of climate change, such as drought or toxic salinity levels. One of our best hopes is to rely more on crops that can flourish despite the vicissitudes of the environment, and plant cell biologists at the University of Oxford hope that their new breakthrough in climate-resilient agriculture will allow us to do just that.
The feel-good, floating sensation people get after a good run is analogous to smoking pot. Researchers came to the conclusion after they found mice released chemicals in the brain that bind to the same brain receptors which are triggered when one smokes the herb. The practical implications of the research are limited, but they do seem to suggest that evolution fostered running otherwise it wouldn't have been this pleasurable.
It's the first time since March 2014 that the three African countries at the heart of the Ebola epidemic have not reported a new case of the outbreak.
Scientists have developed devices that move us one step closer towards eliminating the need for animal testing. These working miniature artificial brains would be ideal for testing drugs research, neural tissue transplants, or experiments with stem cells.
The brain forms new thoughts using two adjacent brain regions that are the cornerstone of the process.
Chilly peppers: hate them or love 'em. Few could have imagined the impact of Columbus' discovery of a spice in the XXVth century so pungent that it rivaled the better known black pepper native to South Asia. In only a couple of years ago, the red chilly was planted all over the globe after being brought from South and Central America. Today, it's one of the most widely used spices in the world. But is chilly actually healthy? Many studies seem to contradict one another, so the debate is far from over. Some scientists claim chilly acts against cancer and helps us stay healthy, but at the same time chilly can hurt the inside of the stomach and esophagus and can even lead to internal bleeding. All foods have their good and bad sides, though, so probably people are more interested in the net effects of ingesting a certain food, chilly or otherwise - doesn't matter. And finally, there's a study that seems to suggest that, overall, chilly is our friend. That's according to Chinese researchers who tracked the eating and health habits of 500,000 individuals and found those who ingested chilly at least two times a week had a mortality rate 10% lower than those who only seldom ate chilly or not at all. Those who ate the devilish spice six or seven days a week had an even lower risk of dying.
For most people listening to music or playing an instrument is a great way to relax, unwind, have fun, and express themselves. But not everybody is able to perceive, appreciate or memorize music, to sing or to dance. Monica is one such person, and to her, any kind of music is just a bunch of noise that makes her head ache and feel stressed.
