Blogs / Discoblog

It’s tough to get people to make healthier decisions about the way they live their lives. Public health officials have tried for decades to stem the obesity epidemic by getting people to exercise more, but all their tactics–lecturing, scolding, scaring, informing, inspiring, empowering–have had very little effect.

But at a subway station in Stockholm, a band of inventive social engineers had amazing results when they decided to get commuters off the escalators and onto the stairs. They asked themselves, “Can we get more people to choose the stairs by making it fun to do?” And then they turned the staircase into a piano keyboard, complete with black and white keys.

The project was part of a larger initiative sponsored by Volkswagen called “The Fun Theory,” which aims to prove that people will change their behavior for the better if you let them have a little fun in the bargain. Have you pulled off a similar trick? Tell Volkswagen about it and you can win more than $4,000.

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Video: Volkswagen

The International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago is like a walk through time—a time when removing part of a patient’s skull for “therapeutic” purposes was considered normal.

Wired.com has an inside look:

From graphic paintings of childbirth to a vast collection of often-ghastly tools of the trade, the Surgical Museum is a morbidly fascinating journey into the blood-spattered beginnings of modern medicine. After a look at these hair-raising exhibits, you might remark that while the United States may be in serious need of health care reform, at least we have anesthetics and the germ theory of disease.

Click over to Wired.com for a photo tour of the museum.

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Swine flu has returned, just as predicted, and is getting the better of us—46 states have reported cases of the flu already. And even if you want to take precautions by getting vaccinated, there aren’t enough vaccines to go around.

In any case, when you take sick days to recover, the last thing you’d want to do is be at home without access to the Internet. The Washington Post brings up a good point: If the flu truly becomes a pandemic, then the sick will begin accessing their Internet from home en masse. Such an increase in traffic might overwhelm the system and clog networks run by Comcast, AT&T, Cox, and Verizon. The Post reports:

The Department of Homeland Security is in charge of communications networks during times of national emergency. But it doesn’t have a strategy to deal with overloaded Internet networks—an essential resource to keep the economy humming, and residents informed and connected during a pandemic, the GAO said. Furthermore, the DHS hasn’t coordinated with agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission to create guidelines for how telecom, cable and satellite providers can minimize congestion.

There are solutions, but each has its downsides. Adding bandwidth capacity would be a little too late, and cost too much. Slowing connections to some ‘hoods would violate service agreements to those customers. And blocking traffic to Web sites would require government approval.

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Image: flickr/ hitthatswitch

Many children are anxiously awaiting Halloween this weekend. But with all these sugary treats come a price: cavities. In fact, one out of every four children in the U.S. currently has at least one cavity in their baby teeth, a number that’s the highest it’s been in 40 years— and has been blamed on today’s sugary diet. Even worse, British researchers found that when kids consumed candy every day, they were more likely to be criminals when they grew up.

This Halloween, two Michigan dentists, Shawn Morris and Daniel Simmons, are encouraging kids to turn in their candy for cash. The mission is called Operation Gratitude—children will receive $1 per pound of sweets, so the dentists can collect a large candy stash. The candy, however, won’t go uneaten: The dentists will send it to U.S. troops stationed in Iraq so they can hand out the candy to local children.

So what is the incentive for candy-heavy children to turn in their loot? Hometownlife reports:

Youngsters who trade in their candy — a maximum of five pounds per child and total 1,000 pounds for the event — will receive a new Firefly glow-in-the-dark toothbrush and a goody bag of gifts. The youngsters will also be entered in a raffle to win one of three Nano iPods.

Along with reducing damage to young teeth, the candy collection also will benefit U.S. troops.

Good habits taught when you’re young could go a long way—especially considering that 80 percent of U.S. adults have some sort of gum disease. Plus, if cavities are left untreated, they can lead to permanent damage including loss of teeth and gum disease, which has been linked to stroke and heart disease. Seriously, more candy, more problems.

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Image: flickr/ spundekas

China has an incredibly high suicide rate —44 percent of the world’s suicides occur there. In 2007, China Daily reported that more suicides were happening in rural areas than urban ones, which is the opposite of the trend in other countries.

Now, scientists believe they’ve found the reason why: Exposure to agricultural pesticides increases the number of suicidal thoughts a person has. China still uses agricultural pesticides, or organophosphates, even though they’ve been banned in Western countries because of their known toxicity when ingested and the adverse mental health problems caused by long-term exposure.

Researchers from Tongde Hospital Zhejiang Province and King’s College London studied residents of central and coastal China and found the “first epidemiological evidence to suggest possible effects [of pesticides] on suicidal thoughts.” Leading the study, psychiatrist Robert Stewart took a survey of nearly ten thousand rural Chinese residents to find out how they stored pesticides. People who kept their pesticides in the house were more likely to think suicidal thoughts. Also supporting this casual link: The areas that reported higher numbers of home pesticide storage had a higher suicide thought rate overall.

Physorg reports:

Dr Robert Stewart comments: ‘Organophosphate pesticides are widely used around the world although are banned in many countries because of their risk to health. They are particularly lethal chemicals when taken in overdose and are a cause of many suicides worldwide. Our research findings that suggest that higher exposure to these chemicals might actually increase the risk of suicidal thoughts provides further support for calls for tighter international restrictions on agricultural pesticide availability and use.’

With suicide being the leading cause of death in people ages 15 to 34, public health officials should think about ways to minimize exposure to the pesticides—like making it mandatory to keep them out of the house.

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Image: flickr/ jefvandenhoute

Fresh on the heels of the 2009 Ig Nobel Awards come six mini-movies about the research of past winners, including this doozy, Sword Swallowing and its Side Effects, which took home the Ig Nobel Medicine Prize in 2007.

Check out this episode below:

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Gordon Moore, a 72-year-old British man, no longer needs the metal plate that was inserted into his head 50 years ago, when a car accident destroyed part of his skull. Why doesn’t he need it? Because the missing bone has grown back.

When the front of his skull was destroyed, doctors implanted a titanium plate in the hole. Three years later, Moore was involved in yet another crash. While this accident was less devastating, he still walked away with a dent in his metal plate after his head flew into the windshield.

Surgeons decided to remove the plate recently, after it broke through some skin and caused an infection. But when they cut Moore’s head open, doctors were amazed to find that his skull had re-grown with the same contour as the plate. While bone growth is normal in children, it’s extremely rare in adults. In fact, it is such an anomaly that no one has really kept count of the number of times this kind of re-growth has happened. The Telegraph reports:

“It’s certainly very rare, but it’s very rare to remove a metal plate after this period of time. I had never heard of one being taken out after more than 50 years,” [says Newcastle Hospital consultant neurologist Param Bhattahiri, who was in charge of Gordon’s treatment].

“We had no idea what we were going to find underneath, but I didn’t expect to find a new skull.”

Experts are now waiting to perform more scans of Gordon’s head to check the thickness and strength of the new bone.

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Lost amid all the talk about the swine flu vaccine is another vaccine that is under study—a vaccine against cocaine addiciton.

In a 7-week study of 55 cocaine and opiate addicts, those who received the vaccine and attained a high level of antibodies from it were 45 percent more likely to have a cocaine-free urine test afterwards, as opposed to 35 percent for those who either had lower antibodies or received a placebo instead. According to BBC News:

The proportion of participants who reduced their cocaine use by half was significantly greater among those treated with the active vaccine – 53% compared to 23% in the placebo group.

The researchers said about 40% of the participants achieved antibody levels of 20 micrograms per millilitre.

They said this was enough to combat one to two doses of cocaine which should be enough to prevent relapses in many patients.

Here are details on how the vaccine works from PopSci:

The vaccine works similar to vaccines for microorganisms, training your body to view cocaine as a bad invader. The shots, which include a cocainelike substance (succinylnorcocaine), encourage the body to pump out antibodies against cocaine. The antibodies bind to the coke, which prevents it from getting into the brain, and theoretically prevents people from getting high. Right now, only about 38 percent of the subjects who got the vaccine produced high levels of antibodies, so there’s room for improvement.

There are no FDA approved vaccines against narcotics, but the research could certainly help the 2.5 million Americans that are hooked on cocaine. The researchers told Popsci.com that they plan to confirm their results in a larger study and hope to have the vaccine available withing a few years if all goes well. The study was published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.

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Why do some people never get fat, while most of Americans do? Sure, one can blame eating too much popcorn and junk food and not getting enough exercise for the extra weight—but our eating habits may not be the only factor that determines our chubby destiny, argues University of California, Irvine’s Bruce Blumberg. There’s growing evidence that our exposure to plastic compounds —specifically obesogens—can disrupt the body’s metabolism, enough to make us gain weight.

Planet Green reports:

No one’s blaming these compounds for the country’s entire obesity epidemic—fast food and lack of exercise are not off the hook—but emerging research points to them as one cause of the unexplained tendency for some individuals to gain weight no matter what (or how little) they eat or how much they exercise. Obesogens seem to have the ability to disrupt the fundamental rule of weight management and body chemistry: weight gain occurs when calorie consumption exceeds the amount of energy burned.

It’s all about the timing and the amount of exposure to the plastic. Preventing adult weight loss might be too late, if it’s really childhood exposure to plastics that leads to a lifetime of weight problems.

Newsweek reported recently that:

In 2006 scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health reported that the prevalence of obesity in infants under 6 months had risen 73 percent since 1980. “This epidemic of obese 6-month-olds,” as endocrinologist Robert Lustig of the University of California, San Francisco, calls it, poses a problem for conventional explanations of the fattening of America. “Since they’re eating only formula or breast milk, and never exactly got a lot of exercise, the obvious explanations for obesity don’t work for babies,” he points out. “You have to look beyond the obvious.”

While plastics appear to be linked to obesity, scientists aren’t exactly sure how yet. In the meantime, it doesn’t hurt to exercise and eat right, minimize your exposure to plastics, and yes, hope that you have the skinny gene.

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Image: flickr/ Phoney Nickle

Here you’ll find the everything you need to know about swine flu. We recently reported that up to half of Americans could catch the virus, with the illness already spreading rapidly in colleges. Plus the Internet has helped spread panic to critical mass. And we’ve seen governments try (often ineptly) to stop the flu in its tracks.

Now there’s another unexpected side effect of efforts to control swine flu worldwide: A prison in Dorset thought they’d stave off the flu by stocking their bathrooms with antibacterial gel. But the prisoners learned pretty quickly that the gel contained alcohol, and began ingesting it.

One prisoner was discovered to be drunk after he gulped down a decent amount of the gel. The Guardian reports:

The Prison Service confirmed that this case was being investigated but meanwhile antibacterial gel pumps had been removed as a “precautionary measure”.

“The suspicion that was reported to us was that some of the inmates had drunk them. Of course some of the officers expressed concerns over potentially having to deal with prisoners who have had a drink,” [says Andy Fear, a member of the Verne’s Prison Officers Association]

Hospitals have also been battling the misuse of antibacterial gel, and in one case, it might have actually been responsible for someone’s death. Back in August, patients were reportedly making cocktails by mixing gel with orange juice or soda. [ed. note: They couldn't just round up some morphine? Sure tastes better.]

So as swine season approaches, the real question is, what is worse: Having people get drunk on antibacterial gel, or having them get swine flu? If you asked Dr. Sanjay Gupta , he’d probably say the flu.

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Image: flickr/ Brandon Hambright // The FireStarter Group