Do blind people really have a sharpened sense of hear ing? What is theexplanation? This article reports the work of Ger man researchers who looked at blind people’s brains to try to answer these questions. They found out that indeed, blind peo ple can understand speech even if sped up beyond the maximum rate that sighted people can understand. This seemed pos sible because the brain areas devoted to vision in people with eye sight turned out to be responding to speech in blind people.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Armadillos Can Transmit Leprosy to Humans, Federal Researchers Confirm
Although I have seen many cases of leprosy overseas, I do remember a case of leprosy I saw in Texas, while in training at Baylor...
uvealblues
Using genetic sequencing machines, researchers were able to confirm that about a third of the leprosy cases that arise each year in the United States almost certainly result from contact with infected armadillos. The cases are concentrated in Louisiana and Texas, where some people hunt, skin and eat armadillos.
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Leprosy now joins a host of other infectious diseases — including flu, H.I.V./AIDS and SARS — that are known to have jumped from animals to humans. Flu is thought to have first crossed to humans from migratory waterfowl several hundred years ago. H.I.V./AIDS first crossed from a chimpanzee about 90 years ago.Dr. Fauci said that about 70 percent of new emerging infectious diseases were known to have animal origins.But one of the interesting aspects of leprosy is that transmission seems to have gone in both directions. Leprosy was not present in the New World before Christopher Columbus, and armadillos are indigenous only to the New World.“So armadillos had to have acquired it from humans sometime in the last 400 to 500 years,” said Dr. Richard W. Truman, a researcher at the National Hansen’s Disease Program in Baton Rouge, La., and an author of the armadillo study, which was published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
uvealblues
Using genetic sequencing machines, researchers were able to confirm that about a third of the leprosy cases that arise each year in the United States almost certainly result from contact with infected armadillos. The cases are concentrated in Louisiana and Texas, where some people hunt, skin and eat armadillos.
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Leprosy now joins a host of other infectious diseases — including flu, H.I.V./AIDS and SARS — that are known to have jumped from animals to humans. Flu is thought to have first crossed to humans from migratory waterfowl several hundred years ago. H.I.V./AIDS first crossed from a chimpanzee about 90 years ago.
Dr. Fauci said that about 70 percent of new emerging infectious diseases were known to have animal origins.
But one of the interesting aspects of leprosy is that transmission seems to have gone in both directions. Leprosy was not present in the New World before Christopher Columbus, and armadillos are indigenous only to the New World.
“So armadillos had to have acquired it from humans sometime in the last 400 to 500 years,” said Dr. Richard W. Truman, a researcher at the National Hansen’s Disease Program in Baton Rouge, La., and an author of the armadillo study, which was published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
World Malaria Day
Today is World Malaria Day. Malaria continues to kill over 1 million people a year (primarily women and children). It infects 220 million people per year.
Please consider a donation
Link
Please consider a donation
Link
Higher suicide rates in happy places
New research confirms a little known and seemingly puzzling fact: Many happy countries have unusually high rates of suicide.
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Hawaii, which ranks second in adjusted average life satisfaction, has the fifth highest suicide rate in the country. At the other end of the spectrum, for example, New Jersey ranked near the bottom in adjusted life satisfaction (47th) and had one of the lowest adjusted suicide risks (coincidentally, also the 47th highest rate).
“This result is consistent with other research that shows that people judge their well-being in comparison to others around them. These types of comparison effects have also been shown with regards to income, unemployment, crime, and obesity,” says Wu.
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Hawaii, which ranks second in adjusted average life satisfaction, has the fifth highest suicide rate in the country. At the other end of the spectrum, for example, New Jersey ranked near the bottom in adjusted life satisfaction (47th) and had one of the lowest adjusted suicide risks (coincidentally, also the 47th highest rate).
“This result is consistent with other research that shows that people judge their well-being in comparison to others around them. These types of comparison effects have also been shown with regards to income, unemployment, crime, and obesity,” says Wu.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Better Vision for the Poor
Several social enterprises are attempting to provide eyeglasses to the 500 million to 1 billion poor people in the world who need them. Some enterprises see the provision of trained optometrists as the key to solving the problem; others are focused on cost reduction; others still are focused on technological innovations. Why haven’t any of these approaches succeeded on a large scale?
Link
Estimates for the number of poor people worldwide who need eyeglasses are startling. The World Health Organization reports approximately 517 million people in developing countries are visually impaired because they do not have access to corrective treatment. The Centre for Vision in the Developing World at Oxford University has a higher estimate: More than 1 billion people need but do not get vision correction. There is a simple, old, and cost-effective technology to solve this problem— eyeglasses. Yet the problem persists on a vast scale. For the poor, eyeglasses often are either inaccessible or unaffordable, forcing hundreds of millions of people to live below their full potential.
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VisionSpring, founded in 2001 as a nonprofit dedicated to reducing poverty and generating opportunity in the developing world through the sale of affordable eyeglasses, uses a social entrepreneurship approach. In 2009, VisionSpring sold 201,000 pairs of readymade reading glasses. It is now trying to scale up its efforts and hopes to sell 1 million pairs of eyeglasses per year by 2012. Yet even if VisionSpring achieves this goal, the impact is too little, given that between 500 million and 1 billion people need eyeglasses—and the number is growing.Another approach to solving the vision problem emphasizes technological innovation to provide low-cost, self-adjustable spectacles. These eyeglasses are called AdSpecs, and they are being developed by Joshua Silver, a physics professor at Oxford University. At least two other organizations are also offering adjustable spectacles, but none has achieved significant scale, probably because they are not cost-effective and have not gained customer acceptance from a style perspective.
If the benefits of eyeglasses are so obvious, why has it been so difficult to solve such an apparently easy social problem?
Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?
People don’t need the experts to tell them that sitting around too much could give them a sore back or a spare tire. The conventional wisdom, though, is that if you watch your diet and get aerobic exercise at least a few times a week, you’ll effectively offset your sedentary time. A growing body of inactivity research, however, suggests that this advice makes scarcely more sense than the notion that you could counter a pack-a-day smoking habit by jogging. “Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting,” says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
Link
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Hamilton’s most recent work has examined how rapidly inactivity can cause harm. In studies of rats who were forced to be inactive, for example, he discovered that the leg muscles responsible for standing almost immediately lost more than 75 percent of their ability to remove harmful lipo-proteins from the blood. To show that the ill effects of sitting could have a rapid onset in humans too, Hamilton recruited 14 young, fit and thin volunteers and recorded a 40 percent reduction in insulin’s ability to uptake glucose in the subjects — after 24 hours of being sedentary.
Link
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Hamilton’s most recent work has examined how rapidly inactivity can cause harm. In studies of rats who were forced to be inactive, for example, he discovered that the leg muscles responsible for standing almost immediately lost more than 75 percent of their ability to remove harmful lipo-proteins from the blood. To show that the ill effects of sitting could have a rapid onset in humans too, Hamilton recruited 14 young, fit and thin volunteers and recorded a 40 percent reduction in insulin’s ability to uptake glucose in the subjects — after 24 hours of being sedentary.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Atlas Gives Scientists New View of the Brain
Scientists funded by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen unveiled a $55 million computerized atlas of the human brain Tuesday, offering the first interactive research guide to the anatomy and genes that animate the mind.
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"Until now, a definitive map of the human brain at this level of detail simply hasn't existed," said Allan Jones, the nonprofit institute's chief executive. "For the first time, we have generated a comprehensive map of the brain that includes the underlying biochemistry."
The institute is making the atlas freely available at www.brain-map.org as a resource for scientists studying brain diseases, along with a set of computational tools to help them analyze the data for clues to conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, autism and mental-health disorders like depression.
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"Until now, a definitive map of the human brain at this level of detail simply hasn't existed," said Allan Jones, the nonprofit institute's chief executive. "For the first time, we have generated a comprehensive map of the brain that includes the underlying biochemistry."
The institute is making the atlas freely available at www.brain-map.org as a resource for scientists studying brain diseases, along with a set of computational tools to help them analyze the data for clues to conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, autism and mental-health disorders like depression.
What's in your Belly Button?
The researchers report finding copious amounts of Staphylococcus epidermidis, the most common skin bacteria, as well as other forms of bacteria, molds, fungi and yeast.
To learn more, read the full article on MSNBC.com, “New Meaning to Navel Gazing,”
via NYtimes
Is Sugar Toxic?
On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.
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The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig’s impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a “toxin” or a “poison,” terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely “evil.” And by “sugar,” Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal — technically known as sucrose — but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig’s help what he calls “the most demonized additive known to man.”
How Old Viruses May Haunt Us
The human genome is littered with the genetic remains of ancient viruses that once infected people but now lie dormant. Until recently, scientists didn't believe they played a role in modern disease.
New research is causing many scientists to think again. Recent studies suggest these old virus shards may play a role in Hodgkin's lymphoma, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases.
How To Download Tons Of Free eBooks Online For Any eReader Device
There are a ton of free eBooks out there, no matter what eReader you own—Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, Sony's Reader, etc. And with those eReaders comes fantastic eBook stores for easy browsing and purchasing. They have tons of great digital literature for sell, but you shouldn't waste your money unless necessary (or want to). There's plenty of free options out there, so make sure you exhaust the free before you receive the fee.
The majority of the free eBooks available are either promotional items or older, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books, which account for nearly 2 million titles. And it doesn't matter what eReader you own, or if you prefer reading digital copies on your computer, because you can convert almost any of the common eBook files into the version you need using something like Calibre.
Okay, enough babbling—here's some of your options.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-download-tons-of-free-ebooks-online-for-any-ereader-device-2011-4?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Business%20Insider%20Select&utm_campaign=BI_Select_041311#ixzz1JVLbrgWv
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin
"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Growing Eyeballs
Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, began with clusters of about 3,000 mouse embryonic stem cells floating in a mix of chemicals designed to spur differentiation into retinal cells. After a week, several balloon-like sacs of cells began to protrude from the surface of each cluster. Over the next few days, those sacs pouched inward on themselves to form structures resembling the optic cup—the complex dual-layered structure that emerges early in development and eventually becomes the retina.
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The research may also have a more immediate impact on treatments for diseases in which the photoreceptor cells of the eye are damaged or destroyed. Sowden's group has found that transplanting photoreceptor precursors—a type of cell that appears early in development—could restore sight in these cases. But it has been difficult to obtain large numbers of these cells. Because the structures in the new study developed according to a predictable pattern and timeline, Sowden says, they could provide an ideal source of photoreceptor precursors for transplantation.
Sasai also believes the entire inner sheath of the optic cup-like structure—which contains photoreceptor cells arranged in the particular intricate layout that is necessary for sight—could be transplanted. His group has already had some success with this approach in mice, and they hope to have a human version of the system within two years.
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
What to Do When You Can’t Read the Fine Print
A good overview of various options for presbyopia...I myself am still fighting getting reading glasses :)
Uvealblues
EVERYTHING seems to stiffen up as people age, and our eyes are no exception. As the years go by, the lens of the eye becomes harder and less elastic. The result is a gradual worsening of the ability to focus on objects up close, called presbyopia.
Link
Uvealblues
EVERYTHING seems to stiffen up as people age, and our eyes are no exception. As the years go by, the lens of the eye becomes harder and less elastic. The result is a gradual worsening of the ability to focus on objects up close, called presbyopia.
Link
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
Food May Be Addicting for Some
A new study suggests that people who struggle to say no to chocolate, french fries or other junk food suffer from something more insidious than lack of willpower: They may actually have an addiction.
Using a high-tech scan to observe the brains of pathological eaters versus normal eaters, the study found that showing a milkshake to the abnormal group was akin to dangling a cold beer in front of an alcoholic.
Link
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Just as most people who abuse alcohol or smoke marijuana aren't addicts, this study suggests that no single explanation or solution exists for overeating. In cases where the underlying problem is addiction, psychiatrists say that neither gastric-bypass surgery nor lifestyle changes are likely to prove effective. Among addicted eaters, "the current emphasis on personal responsibility…may have minimal effectiveness," concluded the paper.
Using a high-tech scan to observe the brains of pathological eaters versus normal eaters, the study found that showing a milkshake to the abnormal group was akin to dangling a cold beer in front of an alcoholic.
Link
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Just as most people who abuse alcohol or smoke marijuana aren't addicts, this study suggests that no single explanation or solution exists for overeating. In cases where the underlying problem is addiction, psychiatrists say that neither gastric-bypass surgery nor lifestyle changes are likely to prove effective. Among addicted eaters, "the current emphasis on personal responsibility…may have minimal effectiveness," concluded the paper.
The Sleepless Elite
Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done
To date, Dr. Jones says he has identified only about 20 true short sleepers, and he says they share some fascinating characteristics. Not only are their circadian rhythms different from most people, so are their moods (very upbeat) and their metabolism (they're thinner than average, even though sleep deprivation usually raises the risk of obesity). They also seem to have a high tolerance for physical pain and psychological setbacks.
"They encounter obstacles, they just pick themselves up and try again," Dr. Jones says.
Some short sleepers say their sleep patterns go back to childhood and some see the same patterns starting in their own kids, such as giving up naps by age 2. As adults, they gravitate to different fields, but whatever they do, they do full bore, Dr. Jones says.
Regular Fasting May Boost Heart Health
The researchers found that people who fasted regularly had a 58 percent lower risk of coronary disease compared with those who said they didn’t fast, according to the report presented at the American College of Cardiology conference in New Orleans this week.
Link
Link
After Breach, Companies Warn of E-Mail Fraud
And the governement want your data as a patient in the amorphous cloud....in an electronic medical record???
EMR bad for doctors and patients....
uvealblues
The breach exposed the e-mail addresses of customers of some of the nation’s largest companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Target and Walgreens. In some cases customer names were also stolen.
While the number of people affected is unknown, security experts say that based on the businesses involved, the breach may be among the largest ever. And it could lead to a surge in phishing attacks — e-mails that purport to be from a legitimate business but are intended to steal information like account numbers or passwords.
“It is clearly a massive hemorrhage,” said Michael Kleeman, a network security expert at the University of California, San Diego.
Link
EMR bad for doctors and patients....
uvealblues
The breach exposed the e-mail addresses of customers of some of the nation’s largest companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Target and Walgreens. In some cases customer names were also stolen.
While the number of people affected is unknown, security experts say that based on the businesses involved, the breach may be among the largest ever. And it could lead to a surge in phishing attacks — e-mails that purport to be from a legitimate business but are intended to steal information like account numbers or passwords.
“It is clearly a massive hemorrhage,” said Michael Kleeman, a network security expert at the University of California, San Diego.
Link
Monday, April 04, 2011
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