Eating Dessert With Breakfast Helps Dieters

 

 

 

   

    Eating Dessert With Breakfast Helps Dieters (via redOrbit)

   

       Connie K. Ho for redOrbit.com Chocolate cake. Crème filled donuts. These are some of the options people can look forward to having for breakfast after a new study highlighted the role dessert has in breakfast for dieters. Researchers at Tel Aviv University recently found that a diet focused on dessert…

   

 

 

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Biologists grow human-eye precursor from stem cells

A stem-cell biologist has had an eye-opening success in his latest effort to mimic mammalian organ development in vitro. Yoshiki Sasai of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CBD) in Kobe, Japan, has grown the precursor of a human eye in the lab.

The structure, called an optic cup, is 550 micrometres in diameter and contains multiple layers of retinal cells including photoreceptors. The achievement has raised hopes that doctors may one day be able to repair damaged eyes in the clinic. But for researchers at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Yokohama, Japan, where Sasai presented the findings this week, the most exciting thing is that the optic cup developed its structure without guidance from Sasai and his team.

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The Mandate Can Stay, Supreme Court Says in Health Care Ruling

In a landmark ruling with wide-ranging implications, the Supreme Court today upheld the so-called individual mandate requiring Americans to buy health insurance or pay a penalty, the key part of President Obama's signature health care law.

The court ruled that the mandate is unconstitutional under the Constitution's commerce clause, but it can stay as part of Congress's power under a taxing clause. The court said that the government will be allowed to tax people for not having health insurance.

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Midnight in Harlem (Live from Atlanta)

An incredibly soulful couple--Susan Tedeschi on vocals and the incomparable Derek Trucks on slide guitar...Enjoy!
For the guitarists out there, Derek has a nice solo starting at 3:53
Uvealblues

Instagram inspires insta-resting Instaglasses concept

Instaglasses is a new product concept by German designer Markus Gerke. Influenced by Google's Project Glass, Gerke decided to combine the idea of a camera-capable pair of glasses with the various filters of the Instagram photo-sharing mobile app.
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The concept Gerke posted to Behance suggests a pair of Instagram-branded sunglasses with a 5-megapixel camera embedded in the frame. One eye views the world as it really is, while the other views the world through the filter selected by the wearer. If the wearer spots a scene worth shooting through the selected filter then they can take a photo right there and then with the single click of a button. Aside from the 5-MP pinhole camera Gerke's suggested specs include Wi-Fi and 4G connectivity, 2-GB of internal memory, and up to 7 hours of battery life.

Like recent versions of Instagram, Gerke suggests that the glasses will allow users to add filters while the shot is still being lined up, rather than simply applying filters retrospectively.

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Psychoacoustics: Where Sound Meets Your Brain

In this article, we’re going to have a close look at the tool we all use every day: the ear. This small organ has quite a few surprises in store for us. We’ll see that it’s literally crammed with equalizers and dynamic compressors, including a multi‑band one. It even includes an extremely efficient filter bank, as well as a highly sophisticated analogue‑to‑digital converter. Armed with this knowledge, sometimes referred to as ‘psychoacoustics’, we’ll discover numerous practical consequences for music production. Those include the choice of monitoring level, ideas for how to deal with bass frequencies in a mix, and a surprising antidote to frequency overlap.
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Melinda Gates On The Importance Of The Girl Effect

Melinda Gates has been a consistent voice for women around the world who are dealing with the wrenching circumstances of poverty. In an April 2012 TEDxChange talk, Gates called upon governments to establish universal access to birth control for women. The foundation plans to organize a world summit in London this summer to bring leaders together and raise $4 billion, the estimate of what it will cost to provide birth control to 120 million women in the developing world by 2020. “You simply cannot talk to real women about their lives and not hear the issue of family planning come up,” she says.

In a recent conversation, Fast Company discovered that Gates is a friend to, and supporter of, many of the other members of the League of Extraordinary Women.

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10 Countries Where Retirees Live Large

Retirement in the United States is nice and all, until they ask you to actually pay for stuff.

When retirees' nest eggs are a finite and dwindling resource, rising local and federal taxes can put even the staunchest, flag-draped patriotism to the test. If retirees are willing to leave the states behind, the savings can be substantial.
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Sold on the Feeling, if Not the Benefits to Health

And there are no good studies investigating why people keep exercising. Dr. Dishman and others suspect the motivation is sheer pleasure — feeling energized, a boost in mood, feeling restless and uncomfortable without exercise. And you may not be able to will yourself to have this response.
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Many scientists and doctors who are avid exercisers — and who know and understand the medical science — say they were never motivated by the thought of improving their heart risk factors.
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India in Race to Contain Untreatable Tuberculosis

MUMBAI—India's slow response to years of medical warnings now threatens to turn the country into an incubator for a mutant strain of tuberculosis that is proving resistant to all known treatments, raising alarms of a new global health hazard.
"We finally have ended up with a virtually untreatable strain" of tuberculosis in India, said Dr. Zarir Udwadia, one of the country's leading TB authorities.
In December, Dr. Udwadia reported in a medical journal that he had four tuberculosis patients resistant to all treatment. By January, he had a dozen cases, then 15.
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 Spread of the strain could return tuberculosis to the fatal plague that killed two-thirds of people afflicted, before modern treatments were developed in the 1940s, said Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of the Stop TB Department of the World Health Organization. The WHO is now assisting India to combat the strain.
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India has the largest number of the world's cases—2.3 million of the nearly nine million people afflicted annually—and it is the country's most fatal infectious illness. Government authorities estimated about 100,000 of India's patients have drug-resistant strains, which researchers say can mutate into forms increasingly immune to more and more medicines
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The Dirtiest Things in a Hotel Room Revealed

Want to stay away from germs during your next hotel stay? Then don’t turn on the TV or lights — new research shows that TV remotes and light switches are among the most contaminated items in hotel rooms.

Researchers from the University of Houston took bacteria samples from several items in hotel rooms in three regions of the United States. While the toilet and the sink were expected to have high levels of bacteria, researchers also found more surprising items with high contamination levels, such as the remote and the switch on the bedside lamp.

Hotel rooms “don’t have to have it ready for surgery,” said study researcher Jay Neal, a microbiologist at the University of Houston, but there certainly is room for improvement in their cleanliness.

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In Good Health? Thank Your 100 Trillion Bacteria

For years, bacteria have had a bad name. They are the cause of infections, of diseases. They are something to be scrubbed away, things to be avoided.

But now researchers have taken a detailed look at another set of bacteria that may play even bigger roles in health and disease: the 100 trillion good bacteria that live in or on the human body. 

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Finding A Place For Rwandan Orphans, Using A Model Created For Holocaust Survivors

It’s been almost 20 years since the Rwandan genocide, but its legacy still lives on in the parent-less children throughout the country.

There is currently no systemic solution to Rwanda’s orphan problem. But Heyman and her colleagues are trying to create one with the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, a residential community for orphaned high school students in rural Rwanda

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The Paleo Diet Moves From The Gym To The Doctor's Office

By now the paleo diet and lifestyle has inched from the fringe a little closer to the mainstream, thanks to some very passionate followers sold on the notion that our Paleolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors avoided modern day ailments like obesity and diabetes because they ate what some consider an "ideal" diet of meat, fruit and vegetables.

Maybe you've met paleo dieters through CrossFit, or seen them organizing MeetUpsonline, and been amazed that they've managed to swear off sugar, dairy, grains and beans.

But the paleo way is now moving beyond the gym and Web to an entirely new space — the doctor's office. There the somewhat amorphous idea of "evolutionary medicine" is taking shape

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Light-powered bionic eye invented to help restore sight

A retinal implant - or bionic eye - which is powered by light has been invented by scientists at Stanford University in California.
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A pair of glasses fitted with a video camera records what is happening before a patient's eyes and fires beams of near infrared light on to the retinal chip.
This creates an electrical signal which is passed on to nerves.
Natural light is 1,000 times too weak to power the implant.
The researchers said: "Because the photovoltaic implant is thin and wireless, the surgical procedure is much simpler than in other retinal prosthetic approaches.
"Such a fully integrated wireless implant promises the restoration of useful vision to patients blinded by degenerative retinal diseases."
The implant has not been tested in people, but has been shown to work in rats.

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For Some, Exercise May Increase Heart Risk

Could exercise actually be bad for some healthy people? A well-known group of researchers, including one who helped write the scientific paper justifying national guidelines that promote exercise for all, say the answer may be a qualified yes.
By analyzing data from six rigorous exercise studies involving 1,687 people, the group found that about 10 percent actually got worse on at least one of the measures related to heart disease: blood pressure and levels of insulin, HDL cholesterol or triglycerides. About 7 percent got worse on at least two measures. And the researchers say they do not know why.
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In Rat Experiment, New Hope for Spine Injuries

Rats with a spinal cord injury that left their hind legs completely paralyzed learned to walk again on their own after an intensive training course that included electrical stimulation of the brain and the spine, scientists reported on Thursday.

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In the study, a research team led by Grégoire Courtine of the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, known as EPFL, gave a group of 10 rats the same surgical injury, cutting all direct nerve connections to the hind legs but stopping short of severing the spinal cord. The rats lost the use of their hind legs, but not their front legs.

The rats then began a daily regimen. Outfitted with tiny vests, held upright on their back legs but left to bear their full weight, the rats tried to move toward a piece of cheese that beckoned nearby. They lurched forward like furry paratroopers, unsteady on their feet after a hard landing. 

The scientists provided stimulation in three places: electrically, in the motor area of the brain and in the spinal cord below the injury, and chemically, infusing the wound area with drugs thought to promote growth.

And growth is what they got. After two to three weeks of 30-minute daily sessions, the rats began to take their first voluntary steps. After six weeks, all of the rats could walk on their own, and some could run and climb stairs.