Party hats out, everyone! Stephen Hawking turned 70 years old yesterday, 49 years after being told he had fewer than four left to live.

The Cambridge professor suffers from a motor neuron disease related to Lou Gehrig’s disease that has gradually taken from him his ability to move, feed himself, and speak, except through a synthesizer that he operates using a cheek muscle (unfortunately, his control of that muscle is also fading). But despite these handicaps, he has survived to an incredible ripe old age—the average for an Englishman is currently 77.2—and has continued his work as a cosmologist and physicist throughout. How has he managed to live so much longer than expected? (more…)

What’s the News: Scientific publishing is how researchers get the word out about what they’ve learned. It’s how people outside the lab learn whether a drug was safe or not, or whether a treatment had any effect. But a team of scientists looking at a sample of clinical trials funded by the US government found that 30 months after the trials were completed, more than half had not yet been published. And that means that other studies trying to assess whether those treatments are safe and effective are working with incomplete information, while the relevant trials, already paid for by the public, are gathering dust on a lab bench.

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Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, has speculated that the fact that he and four other South American leaders have all recently come down with various cancers could be a sign that the US has developed methods to give people cancer. Uh, is that even possible? Slate‘s Explainer does a thorough, interesting walk-through of all the reasons why the answer is, “Not reliably.”

Nodding syndrome, a disease that has sickened more than a thousand children in northern Uganda since the summer, is named for its most distinctive symptom: involuntary, at times violent bobbing of the head, like someone repeatedly nodding yes or snapping out of a doze. Outbreaks of nodding syndrome cropped up in South Sudan this summer, in the same region of Uganda two years ago, in southern Sudan—not yet an independent nation—in 2001, and periodically in remote mountain villages in Tanzania. Nearly half a century has passed since the first reported case, but epidemiologists still have only a rudimentary understanding of this mysterious disease. They’ve found few hints as to what might cause it, and no effective treatments.

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A neti pot in action.

As you may have heard by now, two people in Louisiana have died from infections of brain-munching microbes after making a small, but fatal, error. While filling their neti pots, devices that send water flowing through your nasal passages to clear them out during a cold, they used tap water instead of distilled or sterilized water. Just their luck, the tap water had a few Naegleria fowleri in it, and soon, as the microbes made their way through the nasal passages to the brain, those poor folks had a lot more than a cold to worry about. The mortality rate of human Naegleria fowleri infections is 98%.

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Methadone is commonly given to people trying to kick a heroin addiction. But the long-lasting opioid is also an inexpensive, effective pain-killer. With rising costs of prescription narcotics like OxyContin, doctors are increasingly prescribing methadone to treat pain, especially to patients on Medicaid or less generous health insurance plans. From 1999 to 2005, its use in the U.S. increased more than five-fold, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. But over the same time period, deaths associated with the drug have increased more than five times, climbing from 786 in 1999 to 4,462, according to the CDC. In Washington state alone, more than 2,100 people died after taking the drug since 2003, says says The Seattle Times.

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When we rip open a 100-calorie snack pack, few of us have an idea of how much energy that really is–or how much walking, biking, or schlepping groceries it will take to burn it off. But what if nutrition labels included descriptions of how much exercise you’d need to burn off that candy bar?

One recent study explored that possibility by testing the effects of signs describing in one of three different ways the energy contained in a sugary drink. Researchers found that a sign that said “Did you know that working off a bottle of soda or fruit juice takes about 50 minutes of running?” halved the number of drinks purchased from a drink cooler by African American teenagers, while signs that mentioned calorie count or percentage of total recommended calorie intake did not have a significant effect. Though the study was pretty small, and thus should be verified with larger studies, the effect seems plausible, given that exercise is a much more concrete measure of energy value than calories. Some health campaigns have in fact already taken up this tactic: if you’re a New Yorker, you may have noticed subway ads using exactly this strategy, linking the calories in a 20-oz soda with the three-mile walk between Yankee Stadium and Central Park. (more…)

Drugs have a habit of making their way from our bodies into the environment: they’ve frequently been found in waste water, drinking water, and rivers (not to mention on dollar bills). But they could also be rising into the air, and a new study suggests their aerial concentrations could give scientists a clue to what, exactly, is happening on the ground below. Following up on earlier research showing that cocaine was present in the air above the cities of Taranto and Rome, Italian researchers at the Institute of Atmospheric Pollution Research in Rome took about 60 samples of air in various regions and tested for a number of contaminants, including cocaine, cannabinoids (chemicals found in marijuana), and more common pollutants, like ozone and hydrocarbons. When they looked to see whether there was a correlation between cocaine concentration and addicts’ requests for treatment in particular geographical areas, they found a very strong relationship. Weaker correlations existed between cocaine concentration and police seizures of cocaine and concentration and seizure of all kinds of illicit substances.

The team is excited about the possibility of using aerial cocaine concentration to get a sense of drug use levels, a notoriously slippery thing to measure, and possibly other activities that sometimes occur in tandem with drug use, like robberies. However, their approach didn’t turn up any significant correlations between crime-related activities and cannabinoids, which is interesting—what does that mean about the social correlates of marijuana use (or, alternatively, about the fraction of cannabinoids that actually make into the air)? If you’re worried about getting high from the air, it seems unlikely that concentrations are high enough to have an effect. But who knows—that’s a question that has yet to be addressed.

[via ScienceNOW]

Image courtesy of Adam Swank / flickr

After seven months of deliberation, the US Institute of Medicine has released a report that marks a turning point in the use of chimpanzees, humanity’s closest relative, in medical research. An IOM panel found that chimpanzees were in the vast majority of cases no longer required for disease research and laid out three stringent rules against which all current and future chimp research should be judged. Within two hours, Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, announced he had accepted the group’s analysis and would set up a committee to apply the rules to proposed and ongoing research projects funded by the NIH.

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One of the most universally agreed upon facts in the world is that raw cookie dough is delicious. But it can also make you sick, though the ingredient to blame may be a surprise: In study published online in the journal Clinical Infectious Disease, researchers linked the 2009 outbreak of E. coli O157:H7  to tainted flour in Nestlé’s Toll House ready-to-bake cookie dough. Although they haven’t conclusively pinpointed the culprit, flour is the prime suspect after a detailed traceback investigation, since the other ingredients—including eggs—underwent a “kill step” to eliminate germs. In homemade cookie dough, eggs remain a possible source of contamination, particularly from Salmonella.

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Hemophilia, a disease whose victims can suffer serious internal bleeding and may bleed to death from injuries, has a long and eventful history. Caused by defective blood clotting factors, the disease has been with us since at least the second century, when a rabbi gave mothers whose first two sons had bled to death from circumcision wounds permission to leave the third sons uncircumcised. It also famously afflicted several members of European royal families. But a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine brings us a bit closer to a new kind of historic event: a cure.

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Anyone who’s watched a cat engage in a strenuous butt-licking session only to come over and start in on cleaning up your hand has probably wondered how healthy this can possibly be. Maryn McKenna over at Superbug has uncovered a paper that will probably terrify, but may, with its detailed descriptions of diseases contracted from pets (did you know you can get meningitis from dogs?), fascinate you. From the paper, titled “Zoonoses in the Bedroom”: (more…)

Incidence of malaria-causing Plasmodium vivex worldwide. Red indicates local
infection rates greater than 7 percent; Light blue: one percent. More about map here.

When most people think of malaria, they usually think of its most deadly variety, caused by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, the form most prevalent in Africa. But it’s not the only one: a second type, Plasmodium vivax, is a growing and overlooked disease in Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the world. More resources may need to be devoted to halt it’s spread, say researchers who presented the first comprehensive map of the disease’s worldwide prevalence Tuesday at the ongoing annual meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in Philadelphia. Currently 97 percent of malaria-eradication funds are focused on P. falciparum, Oxford University researcher Peter Gething tells Nature News.

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A new study by Consumer Reports found arsenic levels that exceed federal drinking water standards in 10 percent of the apple and grape juices tested. The group also found excessive levels of lead in 25 percent of grape and apple juices. Arsenic and lead are both poisonous and can cause health problems, especially in pregnant women, infants, and young children. Kids drink a lot of juice—more than one-third drink more than recommended by pediatricians. Although there is no technical limit for these chemicals in most juices and foods, these levels found in five brands exceed the 10 parts per billion allowed in drinking water for arsenic and the 5 ppb allowed for lead (find detailed information about individual brands tested here in a PDF). Consumer Union, Consumer Reports’ advocacy arm, called for the Food and Drug Administration to establish maximal safe levels for these contaminants in juices. Several studies suggests that chronic exposure to arsenic and lead—even at levels below water standards—can result in serious health problems, the group said.

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Doctors long believed that patients who remained in a coma weeks or more after a brain injury would never regain consciousness. But recent research has shown that consciousness isn’t a binary, awake-or-not state; it’s a spectrum. While some brain injury patients are in a vegetative state, without any conscious awareness, others are in what’s called a minimally conscious state, still partially aware of—and at times even able to respond to—their surroundings. From the outside, it can be difficult to tell the two apart, though new methods, such as EEGs that pick up on subtle differences in brain waves, are starting to help clinicians gauge a patient’s level of consciousness.

From these hinterlands of consciousness comes another astounding—and mysterious—discovery: Ambien, the prescription sleep medication, and zolpidem, the drug’s generic form, can help some minimally conscious patients wake up. Jeneen Interlandi delves deep into this seemingly paradoxical treatment in the New York Times magazine:

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