Blogs / Discoblog

Golf might seem like a relatively safe sport, but a new report in the British Medical Journal suggests there’s a hidden danger: hearing loss. Turns out, the loud thwaak! of the new thin-faced titanium drivers is about as loud as a gunshot or firecracker—loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage.

British doctors first tuned in to the problem after a 55-year-old male patient sought treatment for mysterious tinnitus and reduced hearing in his right ear. The doctors confirmed that his symptoms matched those of noise-induced hearing loss, although the man’s occupation didn’t involve loud noises. The puzzle finally came together when the man revealed that for the past 18 months, he’d been teeing off with a King Cobra LD titanium driver three times a week. But the sound from the club had become so irritating that he’d already ditched the club. The doctors also found other golfers online who’d had similar complaints about the “sonic boom” created by the new drivers.

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Doctors have discovered that a 27-year-old British woman has a double womb.  Not only that, she also has two cervixes and two vaginas.  Having two sets of reproductive organs, a condition known as uterus didelphys, may sound bizarre, but doctors say it affects as many as one in 1,000 women.

Lindsay Hasaj never suspected she was doubly-endowed, and neither did her husband or any of the doctors she had visited in her 27 years of life.  Uterus didelphys occurs during embryonic development, when the two halves of the uterus, each attached to a fallopian tube, fail to fuse together.  From the outside, women with uterus didelphys look completely normal. Doctors performing pelvic exams might not even notice, because, as one doctor explained, it’s like walking blindfolded into a tent separated with a tarp down the middle.

Hasaj was finally diagnosed after she had a sonogram for her pregnancy (which is in her right uterus).  Only afterwards did Hasaj connect her condition with the problems she’d always had in using tampons.

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It’s bad enough that loud music can potentially harm your hearing. But now it turns out that head-banging, a violent and rapid form of dancing, can put you at risk for brain injury, whiplash, and even stroke.

There have been isolated reports of head-banging injuries in the past: When guitarist Terry Balsamo of Evanescence had a stroke, his doctors attributed it to his on-stage thrashing. But until now, scientists really haven’t studied the effects of head-banging since it first started back in 1968 with Led Zeppelin.

According to Australian risk and safety researchers Declan Patton and Andrew McIntosh from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, head-banging is pretty much guaranteed to give you brain damage if you’re not careful. To test their theory, the researchers went to a variety of metal and hard rock concerts (the best way to test any scientific theory) and observed the head-thrashing techniques used by artists.

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A retired physics professor is trying to bring clear vision to a billion of the world’s poor.  His strategy: eyeglasses with easily adjustable, fluid-filled lenses that cost just $1 a pair.  His goal: distributing one billion pairs by 2020.  The glasses would help schoolchildren learn how to read, fishermen to mend their nets, and women to weave clothing, he says.

According to the WHO, there are about one billion people in the world who would benefit from vision correction, most of them living in developing countries.  However, in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where people make less than $1 a day and there is roughly one optometrist per one million people, glasses are an impossible luxury.

Josh Silver came up with the idea of fluid-filled lenses over 20 years ago while he was still a professor of physics at Oxford University.  The glasses contain a clear sac in each lens that can be filled with silicone oil.  Adjusting the power of each lens is as simple as changing the amount of silicone oil in the sacs, which can be done with a syringe through the arm of the spectacles (a process reminiscent of adjustable breast implants).  Adjustments can be made by the wearers themselves and the power can range from -6.00 to +6.00 dioptre. The shape-changing lenses actually operate similarly to the natural lens of the eye, although in the eye, the shape of the lenses is controlled by muscles.

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Here’s something to think about the next time a stranger on the subway is suddenly seized by a sneezing fit:  A new report [subscription required] describes people who experience uncontrollable sneezing when thinking about sex, or after doing the deed itself.  The researchers, who conducted an admittedly unscientific survey by scouring Internet chat rooms, believe that this strange phenomenon is more common than reported.

Harold Maxwell and Mahmood Bhutta of West Middlesex University Hospital in London decided to investigate the issue after one patient, a middle-aged man, complained of uncontrollable fits of sneezing when thinking about sex.  Searching through the medical literature, they could find only one similar case of a man who reported severe sneezing after orgasm.  Perhaps the phenomenon is under-reported because people who suffer from it are embarrassed, they thought.

So the researchers turned to the anonymity of the Web: After a survey of chatrooms, the researchers found 17 people who reported sneezing triggered by sexual thoughts, and three who reported sneezing triggered by orgasm.

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A Beverly Hills liposurgeon has been accused of using his patients’ liposuctioned fat to fuel his and his girlfriend’s SUVs. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this story is that no one came up with the lipo-fat-as-fuel idea before.

Give Dr. Alan Bittner this: He was never secretive about what happened to the leftover liposuction fat from his practice, Beverly Hills Liposculpture.  According to Forbes.com, he even ran a Web site dedicated to human fat fuel.  On the now defunct lipodiesel.com, Bittner wrote, “The vast majority of my patients request that I use their fat for fuel—and I have more fat than I can use… Not only do they get to lose their love handles or chubby belly but they get to take part in saving the Earth.”

Experts say animal fat is just as good as vegetable fat and a gallon of either will get you about the same mileage as a gallon of regular diesel.  The only caveat is that animal fat requires an additional processing step to remove free fatty acids.  Due to a recent surge in soybean oil prices, biodiesel manufacturers say that over half of this year’s biodiesel came from animal sources, such as pig lard.  Other new sources of biofuel include turkey feathers (see the DISCOVER story Anything Into Oil), coffee grounds, pond scum, and rainforest fungus.

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• Try wrapping your mind around this: Doctors find a tiny foot, thigh, and hand growing in a baby’s brain. Could be a teratoma or a shrunken identical twin.

• Someone skilled with a crochet hook should add a “foot-in-brain” to the The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art.

• Taking technology to the grave: “It’s comforting to the family to think mom’s playing her iPod or dad’s still got the cell phone that was attached to his ear all the time,” says a funeral planner of the new burial trend.

• When the sun goes down, “sexsomnia” turns a gentle husband into Mr. Hyde.

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The superabundance of online medical information and direct-to-consumer drug ads on TV can be enough to stir the hypochondriac in all of us. But some legitimate (despite their skeptics) conditions, and the people who suffer from them, just can’t seem to get any respect. Looking at this list, we think part of the problem might be the you-can’t-be-serious quality of some of the names. Here‘s a few examples of “illnesses” that could really benefit from a name change:

Restless Leg Syndrome
“The first time I saw a TV commercial about Restless Legs Syndrome, I was pretty sure it was a spoof. I figured I had stumbled across a prime-time Saturday Night Live special and was seeing a well-done fake ad,” wrote Stephen Dubner on the Freakonomics Blog. RLS sufferers report tingling, burning, or numbing sensations in their legs that create an overwhelming need to move them. Trying to relax or keep the legs still only makes the symptoms worse. Though the cause of the RLS is unknown, experts estimate as many as 12 million Americans may have the condition.

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
Do the long winter months make you just sad? Or SAD? Sufferers can experience debilitating hopelessness and depression along with sleep and appetite changes that may be linked to lack of sunlight. Happily, many cases can be alleviated by light therapy (the glow of your computer screen doesn’t count). The National Mental Health Association estimates that half a million Americans suffer from SAD—though the ailment is especially hard to take seriously since nearly everyone not living on the equator can experience some version of the winter blues.

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If you’re not feeling lucky, don’t venture into Wyoming, Utah, or Colorado. These states have some of the highest mortality rates caused by natural disasters, according to a new “death map” that plots where Mother Nature takes her heaviest tolls.

From 1970 to 2004, natural disasters killed some 20,000 people in the U.S. Surprisingly, the deadliest events aren’t the ones that make the headlines. More people died from heat/drought (19.6 percent), sizzling summers (18.8 percent), and freezing winters (18.1 percent) than earthquakes, wildfire, and hurricanes combined (less than 5 percent). And who would’ve thought that lightning accounted for 11.3 percent of deaths from natural hazards? The strikes were especially concentrated in the New England and southeastern states.

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Many people (Discoblog editors included) who crave that mid-afternoon cookie fix may joke that they have a sugar addiction, but now scientists have made it official. Researchers at Princeton University report that sugar-loving mice demonstrate all three criteria of addiction: increased intake, withdrawal, and cravings that lead to relapse.

Previous work has shown that mice deprived of food for several hours and then allowed to binge on sugar water (with concentrations similar to that of soft drinks) soon developed addictive behaviors. Sugar intake causes the release of dopamine in the brain, a reward chemical. After a month of sugar binging and increased dopamine levels, the rats’ brains developed fewer dopamine receptors and more opioid receptors—changes similar to those observed in mice on cocaine and heroine.

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