EyeMusic Sensory Substitution System to Help Navigate World in Audio

Researchers at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel have developed a new, more intuitive way for blind people to perceive and interact with objects in the environment around them.  EyeMusic is a sensory substitution device (SSD) that converts visual input into audio output, and many have been attempted before. According to a study just published in journalRestorative Neurology and Neuroscience, EyeMusic is an effective system that users can quickly learn to use and that may one day lead to an effective interface for blind people.

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To treat genes, apply directly to the skin

Scientists have shown that they can deliver gene-regulation technology directly through the skin with regular moisturizers.

This first-time demonstration of the method indicates its great potential for life-saving therapies for skin cancers, say the researchers, who were led by a physician-scientist and a chemist from the fields of dermatology and nanotechnology.

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A Life-Death Predictor Adds to a Cancer’s Strain

In May 2011, Cassandra Caton, an 18-year-old with honey-colored hair and the soft features of a child, suddenly went blind in her right eye. Five months later, an ophthalmologist noticed something disturbing. A large growth in the back of her eye had ripped her retina, destroying her vision.

He sent her to Washington University in St. Louis, a three-hour drive from her sparsely furnished apartment in the working-class town of Sedalia, Mo.

And there, Ms. Caton, mother of a 2-year-old daughter, wife of a chicken factory worker, got almost incomprehensibly bad news. The growth was cancer, a melanoma, and it was so huge it filled her eyeball.

“Am I going to die?” Ms. Caton asked. “Is my baby going to have a mommy in five years?”

It is a question that plagues cancer patients. Doctors try to give survival odds based on a tumor’s appearance and size, but often that is just an educated guess.

But Ms. Caton had a new option, something that became possible only in this new genetic age. She could have a genetic test of her tumor that could reveal her prognosis with uncanny precision. The test identifies one of two gene patterns in eye melanomas. Almost everyone in Class 1 — roughly half of patients — is cured when the tumor is removed. As for those in Class 2, 70 to 80 percent will die within five years. Their cancers will re-emerge as growths in the liver. For them, there is no cure and no way to slow the disease.

No test has ever been so accurate in predicting cancer outcomes, researchers said.

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Bees can 'turn back time,' reverse brain aging

Scientists at Arizona State University have discovered that older honey bees effectively reverse brain aging when they take on nest responsibilities typically handled by much younger bees. While current research on human age-related dementia focuses on potential new drug treatments, researchers say these findings suggest that social interventions may be used to slow or treat age-related dementia. In a study published in the scientific journal Experimental Gerontology, a team of scientists from ASU and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, led by Gro Amdam, an associate professor in ASU's School of Life Sciences, presented findings that show that tricking older, foraging bees into doing social tasks inside the nest causes changes in the molecular structure of their brains.

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Don't Indulge. Be Happy

The catch is that additional income doesn’t buy us any additional happiness on a typical day once we reach that comfortable standard. The magic number that defines this “comfortable standard” varies across individuals and countries, but in the United States, it seems to fall somewhere around $75,000. Using Gallup data collected from almost half a million Americans, researchers at Princeton found that higher household incomes were associated with better moods on a daily basis — but the beneficial effects of money tapered off entirely after the $75,000 mark.
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Yes, and it’s not even close. When we follow up with people who receive cash from us, those whom we told to spend on others report greater happiness than those told to spend on themselves. And in countries from Canada to India to South Africa, we find that people are happier when they spend money on others rather than on themselves.

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To be clear, having more goldfish (or more gold) doesn’t decrease our happiness — those first few crackers may provide a genuine burst of delight. But rather than focusing on how much we’ve got in our bowl, we should think more carefully about what we do with what we’ve got — which might mean indulging less, and may even mean giving others the opportunity to indulge instead.

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A New Treatment’s Tantalizing Promise Brings Heartbreaking Ups and Downs

Mrs. McDaniel, the 69-year-old wife of a retired corporate executive, had gambled on the ultimate in personalized medicine, an approach known as whole genome sequencing, and it seemed to be paying off.

Scientists had compared the entire genetic sequences of the tumor cells invading her body with those in her healthy cells, searching for mutated tumor genes that could be thwarted by drugs approved for other cancers or even other diseases. That had led them to give her an expensive drug approved just a month earlier formelanoma patients. It had never been given to anyone with a blood cell cancer like hers. In theory, the drug should have killed her. Instead, it seemed to have halted or even reversed her cancer.

But would it last? And what would it mean if it did not?

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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.

A Richer Life by Seeing the Glass Half Full

In one study, adults shown to be pessimists based on psychological tests had higher death rates over a 30-year period than those who were shown optimistic. No doubt, the optimists were healthier because they were more inclined to take good care of themselves.
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Not Just About Being Positive

Murphy’s Law — “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” — is the antithesis of optimism. In a book called “Breaking Murphy’s Law,” Suzanne C. Segerstrom, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, explained that optimism is not about being positive so much as it is about being motivated and persistent.

Dr. Segerstrom and other researchers have found that rather than giving up and walking away from difficult situations, optimists attack problems head-on. They plan a course of action, getting advice from others and staying focused on solutions. Whenever my husband, a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist, said, “It can’t be done,” I would seek a different approach and try harder — although I occasionally had to admit he was right.

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She wrote, “People can learn to be more optimistic by acting as if they were more optimistic,” which means “being more engaged with and persistent in the pursuit of goals.”

If you behave more optimistically, you will be likely to keep trying instead of giving up after an initial failure. “You might succeed more than you expected,” she wrote. Even if the additional effort is not successful, it can serve as a positive learning experience, suggesting a different way to approach a similar problem the next time.

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Framing Your Thoughts

It’s important not to neglect the power of positive thinking. Both Dr. Segerstrom and the Mayo researchers recommend taking a few minutes at the end of each day to write down three positive things that happened that day, ending the day on an upbeat note.

The Mayo researchers offered these additional suggestions:

Avoid negative self-talk. Instead of focusing on prospects of failure, dwell on the positive aspects of a situation.

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Women of Minyore

NAKURU, KENYA – ‘Here is where I come every morning to collect plastics from the garbage.’ Lucy Wambui is 50 and with a stick she grubs through the garbage in the Gioto Dumping Site in Nakuru in central Kenya. It is early morning and the stench of the waste   already abhors. Lucy stays here with 30 other women forming the Minyore Women’s Group that sustains itself by selling art works made from garbage. ‘It’s not healthy living here, but we have nowhere else to go.’
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Dr. Leslie Saxon's Quest: iTunes For The Quantified Self

Feeling under the weather? In the future, you'll take out your smartphone--not to call your doctor, but to check your own vitals.

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Type of viral infection of eye associated with disease causing blindness in the elderly

A team of researchers, including a scientist from the Viral Immunology Center at Georgia State University, have found that a type of herpesvirus infection of the eye is associated with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a disease that causes blindness in the elderly.
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First light: Scientists regenerate the optic nerve, restore some components of vision

Larry Benowitz, PhD, and colleagues at the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, showed that mice with severe optic nerve damage can regain some depth perception, the ability to detect overall movement of the visual field, and perceive light, allowing them to synchronize their sleep/wake cycles. Findings were published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week of May 21.
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Just What's Inside Those Breasts?

When writer Florence Williams was nursing her second child, she read a research study about toxins found in human breast milk. She decided to test her own breast milk and shipped a sample to a lab in Germany.
What came back surprised her.

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Coffee Drinkers May Live Longer

Your morning cup of coffee may start to taste even better after a major government study found that frequent coffee drinkers have a lower risk of dying from a variety of diseases, compared with people who drink little or no coffee.

The report, published online in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, analyzed the coffee-drinking habits of more than 400,000 men and women ages 50 to 71, making it the largest-ever study of the relationship between coffee consumption and health.

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Over all, the risk of dying during the 14-year study period was about 10 percent lower for men and about 15 percent lower for women who drank anywhere from two cups to six or more cups of coffee a day. The association between coffee and lower risk of dying was similar whether the coffee drinker consumed caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee.

Saving the Lives of Moms

THIS is a Mother’s Day tribute to a mighty woman and to the doctor who gave her back her life — and also a celebration of a grand new women’s hospital that you as readers helped to build.

The woman is Mahabouba Mohammed, an Ethiopian who was raped at about age 13. She gave birth alone: after many days of labor, the baby was stillborn and she suffered an obstetric fistula.

A fistula is just about the worst fate that can happen to a woman or girl. It’s a childbirth injury that causes her to leak urine or feces continuously through her vagina. In Mahabouba’s case, she also suffered nerve damage in both legs so that she couldn’t walk.

More than two million women and girls have fistulas worldwide. They are the lepers of the 21st century, among the most voiceless and shunned people on earth. Fistulas were once also common in America (a fistula hospital was once located in Manhattan where the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel is now), but today they normally afflict only people in poor countries of Africa and Asia.

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“People in America can’t believe I left urology to do this, but this is about changing lives,” which is better than “listening to men tell me about the quality of their erections,” he said. “I’ve had my family held at gunpoint, I’ve had malaria, I’ve had a serious exposure toH.I.V., I’ve been separated from family, and I’ve spent about a million hours crammed into coach class on airlines, but it’s worth it. I’d much rather live a meaningful life than a comfortable one.”

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For years, Dr. Arrowsmith has been dreaming — along with Dr. Lewis Wall, a fistula expert at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis — of establishing a fistula hospital in West Africa. After I wrote about their organization, the Worldwide Fistula Fund, a couple of years ago, Times readers responded with an outpouring of support — some $500,000.

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A Mathematical Challenge to Obesity

Carson C. Chow deploys mathematics to solve the everyday problems of real life. As an investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, he tries to figure out why 1 in 3 Americans are overweight.
We spoke at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where Dr. Chow, 49, gave a presentation on “Illuminating the Obesity Epidemic With Mathematics,” and then later by telephone; a condensed and edited version of the interviews follows.
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The Unknown Inventor Whose Work Is Saving The Developing World

Ashok Gadgil is a professor at UC Berkeley. But in his spare time, he’s come up with solutions for water, cooking, and energy quandaries, improving lives from the Sudan to India. How does he do it? He just likes a good puzzle.

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Africa Beats: Cape Verdean singer Carmen Souza performs her song Ind'feso

Perucussive Jazz from Cape Verde--

 Definitely tinges of Cesaria Evora, but with a funky bass accompaniment

There is a good video at the link

 Uvealblues

Carmen was born in Cape Verde, the tiny Atlantic ocean archipelago that punches above its weight musically, and was also home to the late international superstar Cesaria Evora.
As she grew up in Portugal she made a point of exploring other musical influences and now her music is infused with her love of jazz and the rhythms of Cape Verde.
She has released a new album - Duo - with long-time collaborator, bass player Theo Pas'cal.
Carmen's desire to improve society is reflected in the issues she tackles in her songs and the fact that 50% of the profits of Duo are going to charity.
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Put Away The Bell Curve: Most Of Us Aren't 'Average'

Human performance, by this account, does not often fit the bell curve or what scientists call a normal distribution. Rather, it is more likely to fit what scientists call a power distribution.

The study examined the performance of 633,263 people involved in four broad areas of human performance: academics writing papers, athletes at the professional and collegiate levels, politicians and entertainers.

"We looked at researchers, we looked at entertainers, we looked at politicians, and we looked at collegiate as well as professional athletes," Aguinis said in an interview. "In each of these kinds of industries, we found that a small minority of superstar performers contribute a disproportionate amount of the output."

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Aguinis said his findings were descriptive, not prescriptive. He said the findings should not be interpreted to mean that managers and teachers should only focus on the superstars and ignore everyone else.

At the same time, he said, successful companies and nations would do well to identify superstars, because such performers were disproportionately likely to register new discoveries and achievements.

How the Blind Are Reinventing the iPhone

At first many blind people thought that the iPhone would never be accessible to them, with its flat glass screen. But the opposite has proved true.

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How to Turn a Salad Spinner Into a Medical Centrifuge for $30

The necessary parts: one salad spinner, some hair combs, a yogurt container, plastic lids, and a glue gun. The finished product: a manual, push-pump centrifuge that could be a lifesaver in developing world medical clinics. Its name: the Sally Centrifuge.

A team of college students invented this low-cost centrifuge, which can be built for about $30, as a project for a global health class at Rice University. The teacher challenged them to build an inexpensive, portable tool that could diagnose anemia without access to electricity, and the tinkerers got to work.

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Crowdsourced Pathology, Thanks to Video Gamers

Specifically, using non-professional gamers we report diagnosis of malaria infected red-blood-cells with an accuracy that is within 1.25% of the diagnostic decisions made by a trained professional.
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Genes May Link Disparate Diseases

Diseases that strike different parts of the body—and that don't seem to resemble each other at all—may actually have a lot in common.

Scientists have identified the genetic basis for many separate diseases. Now, some researchers are looking at how the genes interact with each other. They are finding that a genetic abnormality behind one illness may also cause other, seemingly unrelated disorders. Sometimes diseases are tangentially linked, having just one gene in common. But the greater the number of shared genetic underpinnings a group of diseases has, the greater the likelihood a patient with one of the illnesses will contract another.

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Researchers have found evidence, for example, that there is a close genetic relationship between Crohn's disease, a gastrointestinal condition, and Type 2 diabetes, despite the fact the two conditions affect the body in very distinct ways. Other illnesses with apparently close genetic links are rheumatoid arthritis and Type 1 diabetes, the form of the disease that usually starts in childhood..

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Since all the DNA in the human body was first sequenced in 2000, some 4,000 diseases with a known genetic basis have been identified, according to the National Institutes of Health. But only about 250 of those diseases have treatments, leaving many genetic puzzles left to untangle.

Scientists have long known that proteins and other molecules in the body don't act alone. In order for the body to operate efficiently, biological substances must bind to or pass chemical messages to each other to start and stop working. The system is complex: Each gene is thought to produce, on average, five separate substances, mostly proteins, and these products interact with each other. When a protein, or group of proteins, malfunctions, it appears to give rise to a variety of distinct illnesses.

Don’t Just Sit There

We all know by now that being inactive is unhealthy. But far too many of us think that being inactive is something that happens to other people.

Studies of daily movement patterns, though, show that your typical modern exerciser, even someone who runs, subsequently sits for hours afterward, often moving less over all than on days when he or she does not work out.

The health consequences are swift, pervasive and punishing.

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Exercise only slightly lessened the health risks of sitting. People in the study who exercised for seven hours or more a week but spent at least seven hours a day in front of the television were more likely to die prematurely than the small group who worked out seven hours a week and watched less than an hour of TV a day.

If those numbers seem abstract, consider a blunt new Australian study. In it, researchers determined that watching an hour of television can snip 22 minutes from someone’s life. If an average man watched no TV in his adult life, the authors concluded, his life span might be 1.8 years longer, and a TV-less woman might live for a year and half longer than otherwise.

3 common misconceptions about doctors

Dr. Evans makes some excellent points here...
Uvealblues
In the current climate of health care reform, it is important to understand doctors and the work they do. I have found 3 common misconceptions, held even by doctors themselves, concerning the job of being a doctor
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Brian Greene: Why is our universe fine-tuned for life?

Starving in India: A Scribe Tries to Save a Life

Last fall, I conducted field research on starvation in India along with my colleague Ankita Aggarwal from the New Delhi-based Centre for Equity Studies, a think tank. As we traveled across several states, hearing tale after tale of families battling chronic hunger to stay alive, it became clear to us that the media play a critical role in holding public officials accountable. A powerful news report can generate a wave of public outrage over starvation – and can result in government action.
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Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argued long ago that independent India had successfully managed to prevent famine because of its democratic political structures. He was referring not just to electoral processes, but also the independent media that shines a light on government wrongdoing and galvanizes the public’s attention when starvation deaths happen.
“The government cannot afford to fail to take prompt action when large-scale starvation threatens. Newspapers play an important part in this, in making the facts known and forcing the challenge to be faced,” Mr. Sen wrote in a 1984 article in the journal Food and Nutrition.
Indeed, the catalyst for the “right to food” public interest litigation the Supreme Court has been hearing since 2001 was evidence of starvation deaths reported by several media outlets.

Saving Lives in a Time of Cholera

Cholera is on the rise around the world. Last year, according to Unicef, West and Central Africa had “one of the worst ever” cholera outbreaks. An outbreak in Haiti sickened 1 in 20 Haitians and killed more than 7,000 people. The World Health Organization estimates that there are between three million and five million cases of cholera each year, and between 100,000 and 120,000 deaths. New and more virulent strains are emerging in Asia and Africa, and the W.H.O. says that global warming creates even more hospitable conditions for the disease.
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With cholera, speed matters. It can kill very quickly — in a few hours if victims are already malnourished. And since the incubation period for the cholera bacteria can be as short as two hours, it spreads fast.
Until now, early action has been nearly impossible. Governments, fearing stigma and a loss of tourism, often cover up cholera, and international organizations sometimes go along with the fiction. Even when governments  do call cholera by its name and start inviting international help and expertise, the W.H.O. and Unicef are bureaucracies — and such invitations can come weeks after a widespread epidemic is under way.
A new partnership between two organizations that battle cholera will make it possible to get supplies and knowledge to cholera-stricken areas much faster.
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Their most important message is the importance of early and massive hydration — if a patient is too weak to drink, then IV solution is necessary. “The biggest mistake is that patients do not get enough hydration fast enough,” Mr. Pietroni said. “You have to give huge amounts of IV fluid in the first three hours — seven or eight liters. In Dhaka at the end of April you see people with IVs in each arm and leg. But as soon as the patient can drink, you switch them to oral rehydration.”
Flooding patients produces Lazarus-like effects.

How Exercise Can Prime the Brain for Addiction

Statistically, people who exercise are much less likely than inactive people to abuse drugs or alcohol. But can exercise help curb addictions? Some research shows that exercise may stimulate reward centers in the brain, helping to ease cravings for drugs or other substances. But according to an eye-opening new study of cocaine-addicted mice, dedicated exercise may in some cases make it even harder to break an addiction.
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New View of Depression: An Ailment of the Entire Body

Scientists are increasingly finding that depression and other psychological disorders can be as much diseases of the body as of the mind.
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Scientists are finding that the same changes to chromosomes that happen as people age can also be found in people experiencing major stress and depression.

The phenomenon, known as "accelerated aging," is beginning to reshape the field's understanding of stress and depression not merely as psychological conditions but as body-wide illnesses in which mood may be just the most obvious symptom.

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Scientists say more work needs to be done to figure out exactly how severe a psychological experience must be to affect telomere length. Some research suggests that as few as two episodes of major depression may be sufficient to affect cell structure. Other studies indicate that the more bouts of depression a person experiences, the more impact there is on telomere length.

The "holy grail" of this area of work is to try to find the molecular mechanisms by which depression or stress take their toll on the body, says P. Murali Doraiswamy, head of the division of biological psychiatry at Duke University, who isn't involved in telomere work. Such information could help provide clues about how much of age-related disease is due to genetics versus life experience, and whether it can be reversed, he says.

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Resistance spread 'compromising' fight against malaria

Scientists have found new evidence that resistance to the front-line treatments for malaria is increasing.

They have confirmed that resistant strains of the malaria parasite on the border between Thailand and Burma, 500 miles (800km) away from previous sites.
Researchers say that the rise of resistance means the effort to eliminate malaria is "seriously compromised".
The details have been published in The Lancet medical journal.

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Rise of the Medical Expertocracy

Excellent article...

Uvealblues

Both Democrats and Republicans want to introduce the paternalism of 'best practices' into health care

Should everyone take vitamin D, and if so, how much? At what age and how often should a woman have a mammogram? Should a healthy man be screened for prostate cancer, and if cancer is diagnosed, how should he be treated?
As the health-care debate heats up again in Washington, both Democrats and Republicans will try to convince us that they have the experts to answer all our health questions. President Barack Obama and the Democrats propose panels of government experts to evaluate treatments and, in the president's words, "Figure out what works and what doesn't." Republicans claim that the free market (that is, insurance companies with their own experts) will pay for value and empower consumers. Both sides insist that no one will come between us and our doctors.

Democrats and Republicans share a fundamental misconception about medical care. Both assume that, as in mathematics, there is a single right answer for every health problem.

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Social media campaign aims at fighting food crisis in Africa's Sahel

Vast portions of west and central Africa have become so dry that they can't support crops, livestock and the millions of people who live there.

The Sahel - a belt of arid land that stretches across Africa below the Sahara Desert - is a zone prone to cycles of drought, and eight countries are seeing the worst of it this time.
The United Nations estimates that more than 10 million people are in danger of starving to death. Aid workers on the ground say it's getting worse quickly.
In response, UNICEF is launching a 24-hour social media campaign on Tuesday to raise awareness about the food crisis in Africa.
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'Island of the Blind' Riles a Greek Public Facing Cutbacks

The island of Zakynthos, long known for its Venetian ruins and turquoise waters, lately has new fame in Greece—as "the island of the blind."
The Greek health ministry is investigating on Zakynthos after local officials flagged records showing what they said is an implausibly high number of disability claims for blindness.
About 1.8% of the island's population of 39,000 claimed the benefit last year, according to the health ministry. That is around nine times the prevalence of blindness estimated for many European countries in a 2004 study published in a World Health Organization journal.
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