Discover Magazine: Health and Medicine

Discover Health & Medicine

• Genetically Identical E. Coli Cells Show a Lot of Individuality | 80beats
  One might think that identical-twin bacteria—clones of each other—would grow up and live very similarly. But a study published today in Science that examined individual bacterial cells in detail found that genetically identical E. Coli cells actually seem to express their genes quite differently, simply because of the random accidents of how their molecular machinery [...]
  
  
• The Enemy Within: Deadly Viruses Show Up in Genomes of Humans & Other Animals | 80beats
  In a medical sense, you’d be wise to steer clear of filoviruses, a group that includes the deadly Ebola, and bornaviruses, which cause neurological diseases. But in a genetic sense, it may not be possible to avoid them. A new study in PLoS pathogens shows that bits and pieces of these viruses have been floating [...]
  
  
• Pocket Science: plague-running mice, and how to watch mutations in real time | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Not Exactly Pocket Science is a set of shorter write-ups on new stories with links to more detailed takes, where available. It is meant to complement the usual fare of detailed pieces that are typical for this blog. Plague-running mice create epidemics The bacterium behind bubonic plague – Yersinia pestis – has a notorious track [...]
  
  
• New Glucose Monitor Keeps Tabs on Diabetics From Inside | 80beats
  A new device may one day save those with diabetes from the frequent finger-pricking and cumbersome external monitors required to check glucose levels–by instead keeping tabs from inside their torsos. In a study published online today in Science Translational Medicine, researchers report that an implantable glucose sensor has worked in pigs. Ultimately, clinical trials and [...]
  
  
• AVN now routinely getting publicly humiliated | Bad Astronomy
  The Australian Vaccination Network, an antivax organization fronted by Meryl Dorey, has long been an antiscience group devoted to spreading any kind of nonsensical rhetoric they can. The good news? Now they’re being called out on it. As The Sceptic’s Book of Poo-Poo extensively documents, the media used to be pretty easy on the AVN, but [...]
  
  
• Study Finds BPA in Store Receipts; Health Effects as Yet Unclear | 80beats
  When you hear mention of BPA, or bisphenol-A, plastic bottles and food containers likely come to mind. Now, a report presented by activists at the Environmental Working Group says the chemical is also in some paper store receipts. In the study, which has not been peer reviewed, the environmental group looked for BPA in 36 [...]
  
  
• Wacky Theory: Bed Springs Reflect Radio Waves and Prevent Some Cancers | Discoblog
  Update, 9pm, July 29: Thanks to a tip from a commenter, we learned there was a crucial factual error in this post, so the text and headline have been altered to fix the problem. In the West, breast cancer occurs 10 percent more often in the left breast than in the right, and skin cancer also [...]
  
  
• Sniff-detector allows paralysed people to write messages, surf the net and drive a wheelchair | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  In Israel’s Loewenstein Rehabilitation Hospital, the patient known as LI1 is a prisoner of her own body. She is a 51-year-old woman who was paralysed by a stroke several months ago. Suffering from “locked-in syndrome”, she is completely aware but unable to move or speak. She cannot even control the blinks of her eyes. And [...]
  
  
• Government Sting Operation Finds Problems With Personal Genetics Tests | 80beats
  The summer of our government’s discontent (with personal genetics tests) continues. Yesterday an investigator with the Government Accountability Office reported back to Congress on its undercover investigation of the tests on the market, saying that testing the DNA of GAO staffers returned frequently contradictory and confusing answers. “Consumers need to know that today, genetic testing for [...]
  
  
• Using Urine to Make the Garden Grow | Discoblog
  They were perfectly lovely, the beets Surendra Pradhan and Helvi Heinonen-Tanski grew: round and hefty, a rich burgundy, their flavor sweet and faintly earthy like the dirt from which they came. Unless someone told you, you’d never know the beets were grown with human urine. Pradhan and Heinonen-Tanski, environmental scientists at the University of Kuopio in [...]
  
  
• Heart Device Keeps Dick Cheney Alive, but Takes Away His Pulse | 80beats
  Dick Cheney may not have a pulse, but part of his ticker is spinning at 9,000 RPM. The former Vice President provided an instant laugh line for comedians this week when it was revealed that during his latest heart surgery, doctors installed a new implant called left ventricular assist device, or LVAD. The pump runs something like [...]
  
  
• How I got my genes tested, and the birth of Science Writer Disease Risk Top Trumps | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Thanks to genetic testing, I now know that If it were biologically possible to have a baby with Mark Henderson, Science Editor of the Times, that baby would be certain to have wet earwax. And he or she would definitely not have cystic fibrosis. Science! This is all in aid of a session at the UK [...]
  
  
• The olm: the blind cave salamander that lives to 100 | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  In the caves of Slovenia and Croatia lives an animal that’s a cross between Peter Pan and Gollum. It’s the olm, a blind, cave-dwelling salamander, also called the proteus and the “human fish”, for its pale, pinkish skin. It has spent so long adapting to life in caves that it’s mostly blind, hunting instead with [...]
  
  
• Hope for the Needle-Phobic: A Painless Vaccine “Patch” | 80beats
  Replacing a traditional needle with a fingernail-sized patch may one day make some immunizations painless and possibly more effective. A study published in Nature earlier this week shows that a patch–a square of “microneedles” that are too short to register a typical shot’s sting and that dissolve in the skin–effectively immunized mice against a strain [...]
  
  
• Good News: Anti-Microbial Gel Cuts HIV Infection Rates for Women | 80beats
  There was a big step forward this week in the struggle to contain the spread of HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Reporting on a three-year study in the journal Science, scientists at the Centre for the Aids Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) say that a microbicidal gel reduced HIV infection rates in [...]
  
  
• Reprogrammed stem cells carry a memory of their past identities | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Imagine trying to rewind the clock and start your life anew, perhaps by moving to a new country or starting a new career. You would still be constrained by your past experiences and your existing biases, skills and knowledge. History is difficult to shake off, and lost potential is not easily regained. This is a [...]
  
  
• Proved By Science: Wearing High Heels Can Damage Leg Tendons | 80beats
  High heel wearers likely guessed it: Walking around on your tiptoes isn’t great for your calf muscles. Researchers looking at leg sonograms of women who frequently wear 2-inch or higher heels found that these women had calf muscle fibers that were an average of 13 percent shorter than their flat-wearing counterparts. The small study, published [...]
  
  
• My Excrement, Myself: The Unique Genetics of a Person’s Gut Viruses | 80beats
  Identical twins don’t share everything. The mix of viruses in a person’s gut, a new study says, is unique to each of us, even if we share nearly all our DNA with another person. That is, at least according to our poop. This year scientists have been working to decode the genetics of the beneficial microbes [...]
  
  
• Geology Fail: California Moves to Disown State Rock | Discoblog
  It’s an honor doled out by about half of the American states: the naming of an official state rock. West Virginia has bituminous coal. Florida has agatized coral. California has the olive-green beauty serpentine–for the moment. State legislators are moving to cast off the rock, saying it contains the mineral chrysotile asbestos. Exposure to chrysotile asbestos, [...]
  
  
• Ice-Loving Bacteria Could Give Humans a Vaccine Assist | 80beats
  Some like it hot. The bacteria Francisella tularensis is among them. It likes to live at the temperatures present inside human bodies, and give us the disease tularaemia. But Barry Duplantis figured out a way to make the body an unattractive destination for the bacteria: He injected it with the genes of a cold-lover. In a [...]
  
  
• The Vaccine Song | Bad Astronomy
  This is, quite simply, brilliant. The Vaccine Song: I have a hard time disagreeing with anything in that song*. I really wish everyone knew that at the same time Jenny McCarthy is railing against vaccines for their toxins, she was injecting botox — which contains botulin, one of the deadliest substances known to mankind — [...]
  
  
• Could an Oversized Noggin Help Stave Off the Effects of Alzheimer’s? | 80beats
  Finally, a big head comes in handy. For a study out this week in Neurology, scientists looked at 270 Alzheimer’s patients from the Multi-Institutional Research in Alzheimer’s Genetic Epidemiology study (MIRAGE) and found that a larger head size was correlated with better-preserved cognitive and memory skills. The team, led by Robert Perneczky, argues that a bigger [...]
  
  
• Legal, Synthetic Marijuana Pleases Pot-Heads, Upsets State Governments | 80beats
  Around the United States, state governments are rushing to enact bans on K2, the hot new (and still mostly legal) drug made with synthetic cannabinoids: lab-created compounds designed to mimic the effects of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Often marketed as incense, K2 — which is also known as Spice, Demon or Genie — is [...]
  
  
• Breaking: Australian antivax group slammed for “misleading and inaccurate information” | Bad Astronomy
  We can celebrate another victory for skeptics and reality! The antivax group Australian Vaccination Network has been found to give "misleading and inaccurate information" to its followers, according to an Australian government investigation. The investigation also concluded that despite their many denials, the AVN is in fact an antivaccination group and must make that clear [...]
  
  
• Mass-Produced Synthetic Blood Comes One Step Closer | Science Not Fiction
  While scientists may still be years away from delivering on some of the loftier promises made about stem cells—treating diseases like Parkinson’s and growing entire organs from scratch, to name a few—they are finally beginning to make good on some simpler, but far more practical, applications. Like growing blood from hematopoietic stem cells, or bone [...]
  
  
• New HIV Hope? Researchers Find Natural Antibodies That Thwart the Virus | 80beats
  You can’t defeat what you can’t identify. That’s part of the human body’s problem with HIV–a virus that mutates constantly. Most antibodies can identify, latch onto, and neutralize only certain variants of the virus, or none at all. But two new studies published in Science yesterday point to two antibodies that almost always hits their [...]
  
  
• Freezing Your Head May Anger Your Wife | Science Not Fiction
  Considering cryonics? Before you sign up to freeze yourself — or just your brain! the whole thing (you) might be overkill–after you die so that you can be unfrozen and then un-deadened in the future, you might want to consider your current relationships. As it turns out, a lot of those who plan to go [...]
  
  
• Vicious Hogweed Plant Could Star in “Little Shop of Horrors” Sequel | Discoblog
  It blinds; it burns; it looks kind of pretty. An invasive, poisonous plant known as giant hogweed, or Heracleum mantegazzianum, is attacking western Ontario. The plant is a member of the carrot or parsley family, and as described in a brochure (pdf) from the Michigan Department of Agriculture, 20th century gardeners cultivated the giant for [...]
  
  
• The Stress of a Busy Environment Helps Mice Beat Back Cancer | 80beats
  A little stress can do a mouse good, a new cancer study suggests. Matthew During wanted to see whether stressing out mice by messing with their environment would affect the rate of tumor growth. So, for a study that now appears in Cell, he and his team divided up their mice into two groups. Some mice [...]
  
  
• The short life expectancy of longevity genes (?) | Gene Expression
  When I first heard in the media there was a new study of longevity which had produced a model based on your SNP profile that was “77% accurate” as to whether you’d live to the age of 100 or not, I assumed this was confusion or distortion (perhaps The Daily Mail had broken embargo first [...]
  
  
• Don’t genetically profile yourself just yet…perhaps | Gene Expression
  Newsweek has a long piece up which reviews some major issues with the new study of centenarians that’s been all over the media right now. Ed Yong already covered the paper, but I’m going to look at the details myself. Here’s a update from the Newsweek post: Within an hour of this story’s publication, the Science [...]
  
  
• Malnutrition now, arthritis later? | Gene Expression
  Of Moose and Men: 50-Year Study Into Moose Arthritis Reveals Link With Early Malnutrition: “As the study entered its second decade there was increasing evidence of Osteoarthritis (OA) in the moose population,” said lead author Rolf Peterson from Michigan Technological University. “OA is a crippling disease and is identical to that found in humans. It is [...]
  
  
• Homeopathy made simple | Bad Astronomy
  Daryl Cunningham — the man who did this devastating comic strip about antivaxxers — has turned his sights on homeopathy. In just a few dozen panels he describes this alt-med nonsense, shows why it’s nonsense, shows why it’s dangerous, and then provides a dramatic and emotional example of just how and why belief in homeopathy [...]
  
  
• Genetic signatures for extreme old age accurately predict odds of living past 100 | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Warning: Since writing this article, it has become clear that the research in question has some serious flaws that came to light after it was published and widely reported. The conclusions here should be treated with caution. The developed world is an ageing one. In 2008, the number of pensioners in the UK exceeded the [...]
  
  
• Shocker: Inventor of DIY Holy Water Device Charged With Fraud | Discoblog
  You use a Brita filter to take metal out of your water. But what if you want to stir in divine powers? In that case, one South Korean man said, you run tap water through his special ceramic and paper filters. He now faces fraud charges. As the BBC reports, the man, identified as “Professor Kim,” [...]
  
  
• Does national IQ depend on parasite infections? Er… | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  [I was originally going to avoid this, but decided to do it for the critical analysis, because I suspect it will be widely but badly covered, and because I also suspect that very little of this coverage will point out the publication record of these authors. Which is worth pointing out. Have fun in the [...]
  
  
• Tick-tock biological clock | Gene Expression
  There will be an interesting presentation tomorrow at the European Society of Human Reproduction & Embryology. Basically the researcher is going to present on a method for predicting when a woman will hit menopause. This part from the press release is the important bit: “The results from our study could enable us to make a [...]
  
  
• Everybody Panic! Reusable Shopping Bags Harbor Bacteria | Discoblog
  So at some point you decided to do the right thing for the environment, and plonked down a couple of dollars for a reusable grocery bag. Bet you felt pretty good about yourself, huh? Well, some researchers have now come along to rain on your virtue parade. According to a new report (pdf), that bag [...]
  
  
• Lungs rebuilt in lab and transplanted into rats | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  In a lab at Yale University, a rat inhales. Every breath this rodent takes is a sign of important medical advances looming on the horizon, for only one of its lungs comes from the pair it was born with. The other was built in a laboratory. This transplanted lung is the work of Thomas Petersen and [...]
  
  
• Whooping cough now an epidemic in California | Bad Astronomy
  According to a statement just released by the California Department of Public Health, pertussis — whooping cough — is now officially an epidemic in California. That’s right: an almost completely preventable disease is coming back with a roar in California. There have been well over 900 cases of pertussis in that state this year, over four [...]
  
  
• National Pork Board to Unicorn Meat Purveyor: Lay Off Our Slogan | Discoblog
  Trying to cut back on beef, but tired of fish and chicken? Try unicorn. According to a joke advertisement on the website ThinkGeek, unicorn is the “new white meat.” But according to the National Pork Board, it had better not be. The Board’s lawyers sent the nerdy site–also sellers of Tauntaun sleeping bags (real) and Tribbles [...]
  
  
• Baby’s first bacteria depend on route of delivery | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  They are mum’s first gift to her newborn baby on the day of its zeroeth birthday – bacteria, fresh from her vagina. Vaginal bacteria are among the trillions of microscopic hitchhikers that share our bodies with us. Collectively known as the ‘microbiota’, these passengers outnumber our own cells by ten to one. Children partly inherit [...]
  
  
• E-focals: Electric Eyeglasses Are the New Bifocals | Discoblog
  Benjamin Franklin would be proud. The tinkerer who loved playing with electricity and allegedly invented the bifocals might have been glad to know that one company has now brought the two things together: PixelOptics has designed a pair of powered specs that can track users’ eyes and automatically adjust the glasses’ focal length, depending on [...]
  
  
• French Museum: Irradiate That Dead Mammoth, S’il Vous Plait | Discoblog
  You wash your hands before supper, and you irradiate your mammoths before public display. French customs requires the latter, so researchers plan to hit the world’s oldest baby mammoth with three days worth of gamma rays. In July 2009, a hunter found the mammoth, now known as Khoma, partially frozen in Siberia. Foxes had used the [...]
  
  
• Penn’s – and the syringe’s – point | Bad Astronomy
  Sure, you know Penn Jillette — the larger, louder half of Penn & Teller. Penn’s an interesting character — a vocal skeptic, to say the least, in that what’s on his mind is on his lips. He and I don’t always agree, but when we do, we do. Such is the case with antivaxxer Dr. [...]
  
  
• How to Make a Hospital Stay Even More Dehumanizing: Robot Workers | Discoblog
  Sure, you’ve seen doctors use robots to perform surgeries, but how about robots to bring you your Jello afterward? That’s the plan at one Scottish hospital. Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert, Stirlingshire is running final tests on a robot helper fleet that will deliver food, give drugs, and clean the OR–the first such system [...]
  
  
• When bacteria fight bacteria, we lose | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  There’s a war going on that you’re completely oblivious to, even though it’s happening right under your nose. Well, actually, inside your nose. Rival species of bacteria compete for precious real estate within the damp linings of your nasal passages. In some cases, this microscopic combat works in our favour, when harmless species repress the [...]
  
  
• Squirrel vs Dinosaur: Researchers Find Oldest Known Mammalian Bite Marks | Discoblog
  Seventy-five million years ago, mammals couldn’t compare to the big boy reptiles ruling the earth. Still, that didn’t stop one spunky, prehistoric squirrel-like creature. He wasn’t hungry for meat, but he needed his minerals. He eyed a dino bone, the equivalent of modern-day vitamin shop, and wrapped his teeth around it, his very own corn-on-the-cob-osaurus. Yesterday, [...]
  
  
• Vuvuzela vs Sound Engineer: Has the World Cup Stadium Horn Met Its Match? | Discoblog
  Though these multicolored horns might look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, World Cup followers can attest that the vuvuzela is a loud and droning reality. South Africa’s soccer stadiums are resounding with their buzzing calls, driving TV audiences to distraction and causing many a viewer to reach for the mute button. Some spectators [...]
  
  
• Can a Pill Keep Your DNA Young? | DISCOVER
  Telomeres—repeating DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes that become shorter with each cell division—have long tantalized biologists seeking to understand and control the aging process. When its telomeres become too short, a cell stops dividing and eventually dies. Stop that process and (just maybe) immortality beckons; hence the frenzy a decade ago when a group of researchers claimed they had figured out how to slow that winding-down. Now a second round of frenzy is under way. After years of research, the first telomere-targeting pills have hit the market, while other treatments are entering clinical trials.