Discoblog » Diseases, Injuries, & Other Ailments

“Nasal Tampon” Made of Cured Pork Is a Great Cure for Nosebleeds

Sarah Zhang — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:04:01 +0000

Bacon gets all the internet glory, but its more old-fashioned cousin salt pork may actually be good for you—for your nosebleeds, if not your waistline. Doctors recently used strips of cured salt pork to stop a life-threatening nosebleed. One of the doctors remembered the unconventional treatment from a field manual he saw in his military days, after exhausting all medical treatments short of risky surgeries.

The patient was a four-year-old girl with Glanzmann thrombasthenia, a rare blood disorder where her platelets are unable to do their normal job of blood clotting. Surgery and injection of blood coagulation proteins didn’t stop her bleeding after more than a week, so the doctors turned to something untested and low tech: “Cured salted pork crafted as a nasal tampon and packed within the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively, and without sequelae,” they wrote in a paper about the episode. While “nasal tampon” may sound distinctly undelicious as a pork product, it worked—not once, but twice, as a cure. When the girl re-injured herself four weeks later, the doctors stuffed salt pork up her nose again and she was home in less than 72 hours.

Now we all ...

The Suit That Makes You Feel 75 Years Old

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:22:04 +0000

And reeeach for the shredded wheat…

Pregnancy suit, meet age suit. Just as scientists in Japan made a suit full of balloons, warm water, and accelerometers to give men a sense of what pregnancy feels like, scientists at MIT have put together a suit that simulates being in one’s mid-70s. But it’s a little easier to see the applications with this one. By 2030, 20% of the American population will be over the age of 65, and if you think these folks are going to willingly weather a world designed by and for hyperactive 26-year-old yoga enthusiasts, well, you’ve got another thing coming. By putting on this suit, architects, store designers, and other professionals preoccupied with how people interact with the physical world can get a sense of what old age is like, and design accordingly.

And what does old age feel like? According to the folks at MIT’s Age Lab, where the suit was developed, like having giant rubber bands keeping your limbs from fully extending, braces that make your arms stiff, a helmet that makes your spine curve uncomfortably, and glasses that make small print hard to read, among other impairments. ...

Got Wrinkles? Smear on the Hottest New Fashion Toxin…Snake Venom!

Douglas Main — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:54:11 +0000

Worried about wrinkles, laugh lines, or crow’s-feet adding years to your wizened countenance? Worry no longer, friend—now you can apply synthetic viper venom to your face… for a price. The product, called Syn-Ake, contains a peptide that mimics the effects of Waglerin-1, a toxin found in the venom of the temple pit viper. It works by temporarily paralyzing facial muscles, binding to receptors (called nicotinic acetylcholine receptors) on the muscles and preventing them from being stimulated and contracting. This has the effect of reducing certain small wrinkles in the short term, according to the sole available study on Syn-Ake, performed by the company that markets it, Switzerland-based Pentapharm. And now, according to the Daily Mail, you can buy a tiny bottle of it for only $60 to gingerly bless your wrinkly visage.

It’s the same basic principle as Botox, except that Botox usually involves injection, lasts longer, and is generally more invasive. Both products work by incapacitating a few of the muscles you use to smile, frown, and laugh, which after years of use and tightening create wrinkles by drawing your skin together into folds the way drapes gather along a ...

The App That Looks Both Ways for You

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:50:33 +0000

The average city street these days sports quite a number of people gazing down into their phones as they walk, unable to tear their eyes from a text or email, or gabbing away to their second cousin while checking their manicure. If you are among those who prefer to walk upright, watching for oncoming semis, you may have noticed that these people don’t look at walk signals to tell when to cross; instead, they wait until their peripheral vision picks up a phoneless pedestrian making a move for it. I am frequently in that pedestrian, and am not above making occasional false starts to watch people jerk like fish on a line. Sorry, folks.

But! A day is coming when these phone addicts may no longer need to watch you from the corner of their eyes to gauge when it’s safe to cross. Scientists at Dartmouth and University of Bologna have built an app that will alert these pedestrians when collision with an oncoming vehicle is imminent with a helpful series of vibrations and chirrups.

The app, called WalkSafe, uses the phone’s built-in camera to watch traffic and apply vision learning algorithms to identify car-like objects, going on to identify the ...

What Batman’s Medical Case History Would Look Like

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:18:04 +0000

Ouch.

When you watch Batman plummet 20 stories and somehow drag himself upright, you know there’s going to be a doozy of a doctor’s visit later. And what, the curious fan might wonder, would the doctor say in the face of the massive, persistent injuries of billionaire industrialist Bruce Wayne? If some GPs want to test for weird genetic diseases just on the strength of mouth dryness and occasional fatigue, who knows what they’d say to frostbite in August or bizarre allergic reactions to plants. Or rather, now we know, thanks to a physician’s case history of Patient BW over at Ordinary Gentlemen:

By far the greatest contributor to patient’s ongoing morbidity are his multiple and seemingly ceaseless musculoskeletal injuries…Patient explained most of these (and most subsequent) injuries as being the result of membership in a private and apparently quite intense mixed martial arts club. Patient has denied being the victim of domestic abuse by Mr. Grayson following indirect and direct questioning on numerous occasions.

Patient was advised to consider recreational activities that carry less risk of ongoing physical injury, or at very least allow himself to heal fully from previous trauma before returning to participation. Given ...

Say No to Chicken Pops—Buying Infected Lollipops Online Is Most Likely a Bad Idea

Douglas Main — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:42:36 +0000

Don’t lie. Don’t steal. And don’t buy lollipops allegedly mouthed by infected children peddled over the internets. Apparently the third piece of advice doesn’t go without saying; parents who don’t want to give their kids vaccines in several states have turned to Facebook to find lollipops, spit, or rags from chickenpox-ridden youngsters, according to the Associated Press. Federal prosecutor Jerry Martin warns that the practice is dangerous and illegal—it’s a federal crime to ship known pathogens across state lines. It’s also likely to fail at spreading the virus since chicken pox needs to be inhaled to infect children, according to doctors, and is dangerous, since it could spread other diseases that more readily persist in saliva like hepatitis.

One post from a Facebook group called “Find a Pox Party in Your Area” (a closed group, but with pictures of its hundreds of members) reads, ”I got a Pox Package in mail just moments ago. I have two lollipops and a wet rag and spit.” Another woman warns, “This is a federal offense to intentionally mail a contagion.” Another woman answers, “Tuck it inside a zip lock baggy and then put ...

From “Freedom!” to “Brains!”: Shift In Zombie Narrative Reflects Zombie-fication of Society

Douglas Main — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:01:02 +0000

Life is pretty simple for a zombie. You just wander around and try to eat people’s brains. But it wasn’t always so. In the uncorrupted early years of zombie narratives, zombies were typically the undead slaves of voodoo priests, and their primary motivation was to cast off the yoke of dark magic and rebel against their leaders. For example, the first feature-length zombie film, White Zombie (1932), features a heroine who’s bewitched by a voodoo master (ominously named Murder). When she finally triumphs over him and he is pushed off a cliff, she reverts to her normal, non-zombie self.

No longer. Nowadays zombies have no real motivation. (When polled as to their life purpose, nine out of 10 zombies replied, “Braaaaaiiiiinnnns!!!”)

At least one researcher thinks the shift in the zombie story, beginning in the late 1960s, reflects a greater change in society. ”With no voodoo master, today’s zombies have no clear controller to turn against and free themselves from,” says researcher Nick Pearce. “That means there are no effective plans for resistance and no hope for the future. Zombies may well be popular today because they speak to a similar ...

Why Men Get Sick And Must Lie On The Couch Whenever The Game Is On

Douglas Main — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:25:13 +0000

He may be smiling, but it’s no laughing matter: he’s got the man-flu the game is on.

Either British women are, uh, kind of slow, or English guys are more persuasive than we realized. According to Reuters, a survey found that one in five British ladies believe that “man-flu” is real, a condition which leaves afflicted gentlemen laid up on the couch watching sports. If I had known this could work, I would have caught this fictional bug long ago. This silly survey of 2,000 British adults found that many believed in a surprising amount of myths and old wive’s tales—although perhaps the “man-flu” would be better described as an “old husband’s tale.”

The survey also found that almost half of the people agreed that men exaggerate their symptoms to get attention. Apparently, though, this doesn’t apply to imaginary diseases, in which they prefer to bask in the curative radiation of sports television.

One in 10 Brits supposedly believe that eating more carrots can improve your night vision. This myth allegedly comes from World War II British propaganda that said as much to explain the increased numbers of German fighters being shot down. The borderline-plausible explanation was ...

Improving the Health of the Homeless—That’s the Gooooooooaaaaaallll!

Douglas Main — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:13:33 +0000

A small study has found that homeless men in Copenhagen, Denmark, who took part in 2-3 soccer games per week for three months showed significant improvements in measures of physical health afterward compared with those who continued their normal routines. While the results aren’t exactly surprising, given the known benefits of the kind of intense physical exercise involved in soccer, they provide some hard evidence that sport can have concrete benefits for the homeless. Part of the motivation for the study was the success of the Homeless World Cup, an annual soccer tournament started eight years ago that has involved 100,000 people and participants from 64 countries around the world, according to the organization (in case you were wondering, Scotland won this year’s tourney). Men who played “street football” for 12 weeks had decreased body weight and levels of LDL cholesterol, the “bad” cholesterol. The study also found the men who played soccer had an 11 percent increase in peak oxygen uptake, a good measure of overall fitness closely linked with the risk of heart disease.

The results are encouraging since playing four-on-four soccer ...

Dizzy Discus Throwers, Horny Beer-Bottle Beetles, and the Wasabi Alarm Clock: the 2011 Ig Nobels

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:07:20 +0000

Those classy folks at the Annals of Improbable Research are at it again. Last night, they announced the 2011 winners of some of the most coveted awards in science: the Ig Nobels.

You should watch last night’s ceremony in its entirety, but here are (drumroll) the winners:

First off, in Physiology…from the Cold-Blooded Cognition Lab at the University of Vienna, Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandle, and Ludwig Huber for their paper No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise, published this year in Current Zoology. As it turns out, if one tortoise is yawning, its buddies won’t join in. Not even if you show them movies of yawning tortoises. In Chemistry…Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for determining what concentration of airborne wasabi can awaken sleeping people in case of emergency. They are the inventors of the wasabi alarm, described in US patent application 2010/0308995 A1. In Medicine…Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, and Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff for illuminating how an intense need to pee can affect your decision-making capabilities in their papers Inhibitory Spillover: ...

After One Colon-Embedded Bread Clip Too Many, Doctors Provide Design Analysis, Call for Reform

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:07:58 +0000

If you swallowed pony beads when you were a kid, you are not alone. So many teeny plastic dooboppies are just crying out to be ingested…and frankly, doctors are tired of all those irresponsible designs. After finding a bread clip in the colon of a patient, several docs have outlined the clips’ “evolutionary heritage” and “species” classification in a new article in BMJ Case Reports, in hopes of prompting someone, anyone, to make one that isn’t the perfect shape for lodging in the digestive nether regions.

The researchers, drawing on several members’ longstanding membership in the illustrious Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group, have given each type of bread clip a handy-dandy Latin name. The bread clip genus (?) is Occlupanidae, presumably for its occluding capabilities, while the species names refer to the relative toothiness—one-toothed, two-toothed, etc.—of the types. They also provide a detailed phylogenetic chart showing the evolution from the smooth proto-bread clip to the many-tined versions adorning our bags today.

Twenty case reports of ingested bread clips exist in the literature, they note; surely this detailed description can help elucidate which types pose the greatest threat and inform ...

WiFi Giving You a Rash? Move to West Virginia.

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:00:01 +0000

Green Bank, WV: Home to a giant telescope and a bunch of people who think they’re allergic to electromagnetic waves.

There’s a quiet, hilly place in West Virginia that’s home to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, as well as radio arrays belonging to Navy intelligence and, purportedly, the NSA. And in one of those weird geographic quirks that you just can’t make up, the isolated area has also attracted a band of people who are convinced that radiation from WiFi and cell phone signals, forbidden there so as not to interfere with the arrays, is giving them rashes, splitting headaches, and chronic pain that make life in the outside world unlivable. It’s there, in the National Radio Quiet Zone, that these folks can find relief.

You might think of them as the WiFi refugees.

A whopping five percent of Americans believe they’ve got something called electromagnetic hypersensitivity—aka, a physical reaction to electromagnetic radiation from common devices like TV, phones, and routers. For most of us, that kind of thing falls squarely in “look at my tinfoil hat!” territory, and experiments don’t support the the theory. But some of the folks’ symptoms, if not the perceived cause, are at least ...

Green, Glowing Kittens Contribute to HIV Research, Look Adorable

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:35:33 +0000

These wee green kittens not only glow, they’re resistant to the feline version of HIV.

Scientists exploring possible treatments for HIV have, purely as a byproduct of their methods, earned themselves a spot in today’s science blog postings: They’ve made glowing kittens.

When these green kitties were still twinkles in their parents’ eyes, scientists investigating a macaque gene thought to protect monkeys against feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) inserted it into cat eggs with a lab-grown virus, intending to test whether cats carrying the gene were resistant to FIV as well. Researchers are interested in seeing how the macaque gene guards against FIV, which is the feline version of HIV, in hopes of transferring their insights to combating HIV.

But here’s where things get wacky: The team also included in the virus a jellyfish gene that makes a glowing green protein, to act as a signal. The virus does not always succeed in transferring the genes entrusted to it, but by including the jellyfish gene, the team gave themselves an easy way to tell when the transfer took place: kittens that glow green under fluorescent light, showing that they carry the jellyfish gene, almost certainly carry the macaque ...

150 Kids, Anyone? US Sperm Banks Overdoing It

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:53:27 +0000

Sperm banks are a pretty great idea: women who don’t have a male partner or whose partners aren’t fertile can choose a genetic father with characteristics they like, such as a certain height, eye color, hair color, hobbies, and so on. Thousands of children are born each year in the United States to mothers who like the sound of “tall, dark, enjoys astrophysics and Shostakovich” or “blond surfer, Ivy-League educated, great sense of humor.”

But something very strange has been going on over the last couple decades, and the New York Times covers it in a recent piece: some donors’ sperm has been used many, many times—so many times, in fact, that people are starting to get alarmed.

Up to 150 children each have been born from the sperm of popular donors, far more than donors and mothers had anticipated. American sperm banks don’t keep rigorous records of children born from donor sperm, nor do they limit the number of children born from a particular donor (a chance, some might say, for sexual selection to run out of control—those green-eyed geniuses can be mighty sought-after). Parents only find out that their child has dozens of half-siblings when they look up their ...

Forget the Beer Cooler! Keep Your Still-Pumping Heart in a Box

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:54:00 +0000

The practice of rush-shipping organs for transplants on ice is fertile ground for slapstick comedy. It’s almost too easy—think of five things that could go wrong! Go!

So next time you have a heart that needs transporting, you might consider joining a clinical study currently underway with this little gadget: a cozy box on wheels that recreates the heart’s natural environment, complete with donated blood and tubes to pump that blood through. The study, which is funded and designed by TransMedics, the company that makes the box, is investigating whether keeping the heart going means it can be transported farther and increase the success of transplants by giving doctors more time to test for immune factors that could cause a rejection. The current system, of course, involves shutting the heart down, partaking in crazed race-against-time hijinks, and then jump-starting it once it’s in the recipient’s chest. The whole process can take no more than six hours, chest to chest, or the heart fails.

How long could a heart survive in a box? Perhaps…forever? That’s an iiiinteresting question…for another, madder group of scientists. In the meantime, if you’re anything like us, reading this has given you an urge to revisit this ...

Success! Functioning Anal Sphincter Grown in a Petri Dish

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 19:59:51 +0000

Eyes, sperm, you name it: these days, chances are someone’s cooking it up on a little slab of agar and gearing up to graft/sew/implant it in anything that comes near. Today’s body part is the anal sphincter, that handy little ring of muscle that maintains the separation between your insides and your outsides. Researchers grew them from cells, implanted them in mice, and compared the new sphincters’ function with the animals’, ah, native orifices. And apparently, they were quite satisfactory.

You young whippersnappers out there might not realize it, of course. But malfunctioning sphincters are a big, messy problem as you get older, and a lot of people suffering from fecal incontinence (including women recovering from births, which can put everything down there out of whack) could benefit from this research. Right now, Depends or surgery with high rates of complication are what people with damaged sphincters have to choose from, and the possibility of replacing the muscle is intriguing.

The major step forward made here is that these sphincters, which were grown in a circular mold from human muscle biopsy cells and mouse nerve cells, could, by virtue of those nerve ...

Scientists Solve Switzerland’s Biggest Problem: Upset Stomachs on Tilting Trains

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 19:25:47 +0000

If you’re turning green, it’s not the scenery’s fault.

As you may or may not know, Switzerland, land of chocolate, cheese, and cuckoo clocks, is also the land of trains. More than 1,800 miles of track crisscross the quaint alpine utopia, carrying 347 million passengers per year and maintaining the punctuality of a Stepford wife. That’s some serious trainage.

Some of those trains, unfortunately, are making people trainsick. And the Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, the Swiss train authorities, just wouldn’t stand for that. They asked some scientists to get to the bottom of it.

The problem trains are a class of vehicles that tilt by 8 degrees as they go around curves, preserving their speed by compensating for centripetal force. Something about those tilts was putting passengers off-kilter, so a team of Swiss and American neurologists attached accelerometers and gyroscopes to a test train and to the heads of passengers, whom, one hopes, were compensated for consenting to their unusual headgear.

A tilting train in action.

Usually, the tilt starts with the first train car that hits the curve, then propagates through the later cars. It’s also rather slow, so passengers’ heads get tipped ...

Coming to a Dental School Near You: The Dental Robot With the Sex-Doll Face

Joseph Castro — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:09:30 +0000

Good news dental students: soon you will no longer have to approach your first victim patient with shaky, unsure hands. Researchers at Showa University in Japan have unveiled a new dental dummy, a realistic robot for dental students to practice on before taking the drill to real, human mouths.

I use the term “dummy” here loosely. Showa Tanako 2, as the researchers call her, has a wide range of human-like features. She can engage in simple conversations, flinch, roll her eyes, cough, and close her mouth like a real patient suffering from jaw fatigue. Oh, and she has a gag reflex.

So how did a group of dental researchers build such a realistic—albeit slightly scary—looking robot? Naturally, they sought help from Japanese sex doll maker, Orient Industry, who helped fashion the robot’s skin, tongue, and mouth. If the doll’s face didn’t look realistic, it wouldn’t “have the same effect on users psychologically,” Showa University professor Koutaro Maki said in the video released by DigInfo. “How doctors and students actually feel in the presence of a patient is a really big factor.”

On top of her movements, speech, and look, Showa Tanako 2 has one final similarity to human patients: she judges. ...

Vuvuzelas Spray Millions of Spit Particles, Reaching A New Level of Annoying (& Virulent?)

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 25 May 2011 20:17:46 +0000

Vexing. Also, gross.

The vuvuzela, that ear-splitting horn beloved by soccer fans and despised by everyone else, now has another count against it: it spews aerosolized spit like no other. And you know what travels in aerosolized spit? Germs.

An enterprising researcher wondered whether the technicolor trumpets had contributed to the spread of flu in South Africa during the World Cup. To see if vuvuzelas sprayed more of the tiny particles that carry germs than just plain yelling, she had some people holler into a paper megaphone and others hoot through vuvuzelas. Tracking the particles with a wind speed detector and a laser counter, she made a telling discovery: each second, yellers spewed 7,000 particles…and vuvuzelas spewed about 4 million. That’s more than four times more than a sneeze.

The next step, the researcher says, is to have sick people blow into vuvuzelas and analyze the spray see whether microorganisms are actually in the particles. But we have a deeper question.

Should we be avoiding kazoos? Penny whistles? Mellophones? What else is secretly coating us in a thin layer of possibly germ-bearing spit?

(via Wired)

Image credit: Phillie Casablanca

When You Never Leave Your Car, It Can Be Your Doctor (and Doting Parent)

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 20 May 2011 18:36:37 +0000

Those allergies are going to spike—better roll that window up.

Ford wants to make your car more like a phone. Or maybe like a self-contained living pod that you never have to leave.

Some Fords already feature SYNC, a system the company developed with Microsoft in 2007 that lets you control your phone or media player in your car using voice commands and buttons on the steering wheel. With SYNC, you can make hands-free phone calls, have your texts read aloud to you, and automatically call 911 when an air bag deploys in an accident. But the next generation of SYNC apps will be keeping tabs on your health—only logical, the company says, considering how much time we spend in cars and how much more we probably will in the future.

In fact, they sound almost gleeful about the prospect: “People are spending so much time behind the wheel, and that’s expected to increase as we go forward, with increased traffic density and congestion,” a spokesperson said (via PopSci). “(This is) about seeing the car as more than just a car.”

The new suite of applications, which are not expected for at least a year or ...

An Underappreciated Weapon Against Air Pollution: Our Dead Skin

Patrick Morgan — Tue, 17 May 2011 12:21:58 +0000

We humans have a whole lotta skin: The average adult human body has about 22 square feet of it. If you could step out of your skin and plop it on a scale (kids, don’t try this at home), it would weigh 8 pounds. And every minute, 40,000 of your dead skin cells flake off your body and join their brethren among the dust that accumulates in your home. Knowing how much dead skin we slough off, some scientists decided to test what that skin is up to, discovering that the oils in dead skin cells actually help reduce indoor air pollution.

The idea of linking skin cells with air pollution doesn’t take too much of a mental leap: Past research has shown that the natural organic compound known as squalene, which is found in human skin, hair, and clothing, chemically reacts with ozone and neutralizes it. “More than half of the ozone removal measured in a simulated aircraft cabin was found to be a consequence of ozone reacting with exposed, skin, hair, and clothing of passengers,” according to the American Chemical Society.

In this ...

Bear Attack Alert: It’s the Papas, Not the Mamas, You Should Watch Out For

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 11 May 2011 17:58:19 +0000

If you’ve ever woken to find your campsite a disaster and your garbage being nosed through by an ursine invader, you’ve probably remembered the old bear-safety adage: don’t get between a mama bear and her cub. Bears will generally leave you alone, goes the old saw, as long as you don’t threaten their young. But it turns out mama bears aren’t the problem. It’s the papa bears.

In a survey of all the black bear attacks in North America over the last 110 years, scientists have found that 88% of the bears involved were in hunting mode. And 92% of those predatory bears were males. So while it’s probably still not a good idea to scoop up and cuddle a cub, the researchers suggest that being able to tell whether a bear is being predatory and then fighting back (?!) might be a better move than keeping an eye out for a baby. “With training, people can learn to recognize the behavior of a bear that is considering them as prey and deter an attack by taking aggressive action,” says the lead researcher in a release.

How to tell when a bear thinks you’re lunch, and how ...

My JELL-O Says I’m Pancreatitis-Free

Patrick Morgan — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 14:42:26 +0000

Grad students are a notoriously impoverished group, and so it’s only fitting that one has invented a pancreatitis test using a dollar’s worth of materials. In less than an hour, Reynolds Wrap, JELL-O, and milk can tell you whether you have pancreatitis, a sudden pancreas inflammation that can cause nausea, fever, shock, and even death.

Invented by biochemistry grad student Brian Zaccheo, this match-box-sized test detects high levels of trypsin, a pancreatic enzyme that’s abundant in pancreatitic patients. The diagnosis involves two simple steps: First, you drip some blood from a patient onto a gelatin and milk-protein layer, which breaks down in the presence of trypsin. Second, you add a drop of sodium hydroxide, or lye, which—if the trypsin has reacted through the entire gelatin layer—dissolves the Reynolds wrap that’s underneath the gelatin; the dissolved foil frees up a connection between a magnesium anode and an iron salt cathode, which creates enough current to light a red LED. “In essence, the device is a battery having a trypsin-selective switch that closes the circuit between the anode and cathode,” Zaccheo writes in a paper published ...

Me First! Flesh-Harvesting, Hair-Transplanting Robot Gets FDA Approval

Patrick Morgan — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:31:49 +0000

Some bald men are willing to go to great lengths to grow hair, including paying a robot to punch holes through their scalp skin. Recently approved by the FDA, a new robot takes out tiny pieces of your flesh in order to harvest hair follicles that can then be manually implanted into your bald spots.

Dubbed the ARTAS System, this automated robot images your head to single out a follicular unit, and then uses its robotic arm to make 1 mm-diameter “dermal punches” into your scalp. It continues extracting hair follicles from parts of your head that have sufficient amounts of hair (a process known as follicular unit extraction, or FUE), and these bits of flesh and hair are then stored until a doctor implants them into your bald and thinning areas. Within a few months, these newly-planted hairs start growing just like your other ones.

Having a robot punch out small pieces of your flesh certainly beats the alternative: strip harvesting. This technique does exactly what its name implies: It harvests skin-strips from your scalp. Then your doctor carefully extracts the follicular units from the strip, and implants then ...

What the Duck? Lady Mallards May Get Down With Bright-Billed Drakes to Avoid STDs

Patrick Morgan — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:57:54 +0000

When it comes to mallard bills, brighter is better: A bright yellow bill is duck-speak for “I’m healthy,” attracting more female ducks than dingy green ones. After discovering that avian semen has antibacterial properties, scientists then found that the semen of brighter-billed males killed more bacteria than the semen of darker-billed ones. It implies that by seeking out bright-billed males, female ducks are protecting themselves against bacteria-related sexually transmitted diseases.

In her experiment, University of Oslo researcher Melissah Rowe collected semen from ducks (a feat unto itself—the videos in this link are amazing, but watch at your own risk) of various bill colors, and then tested how well the semen killed bacteria such as E. coli. She found that ducks whose bills had more carotenoids—an organic pigment that brightens bills—also had semen that more effectively killed E. coli. However, they discovered that the semen’s effectiveness against the bacteria S. aureus wasn’t associated with bill color, possibly implying that this bacteria doesn’t pose much harm to ducks.

Although they’re not sure how much E. coli affects ducks, the scientists know that this bacteria can harm the quality of ...

How Cold-War Nuclear Tests Are Helping Heart-Disease Patients

Veronique Greenwood — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 19:11:44 +0000

Should we be strapping these to our torsos?

We’re all a little bit radioactive now. Thanks to atom bomb tests in the mid-20th century, it’s possible to use radioactive (but harmless) carbon-14 to date not only bristlecone pines and putative Noah’s Arks but also, in a recent Karolinska Institutet study, Grandma and Grandpa’s artery fat.

The technique used in this study—radiocarbon dating—is widely employed by archaeologists and geologists to determine when organisms like fossilized trees or plants lived. All organisms absorb carbon-14 along with normal carbon-12 in a ratio that mirrors how much of each type is present in the atmosphere. (Carbon-14 is produced naturally in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays, and then mixes throughout the atmosphere and into the oceans.) When an organism dies, the carbon-14 starts to decay at a known rate—half the atoms become nitrogen-14 in about 5,700 years—and the amount left in the tissue when it’s dug up can be used to back-calculate its age.

The above-ground atom bomb tests of the Cold War era raised the amount of carbon-14 in the air; after the tests stopped, atmospheric radiocarbon declined at a very precisely recorded rate. Using this information, scientists ...

Scientists Say: Shop So You Don’t Drop. Discoblog Says: We Don’t Buy It

Patrick Morgan — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 20:03:02 +0000

Sex. Dark chocolate. Nintendo’s Wii. It seems like most anything can be correlated with health and longevity nowadays. Now, some researchers want to add shopping to that list, after they saw a possible link between daily shopping and death age. Not everyone agrees, though, with this “shop so you don’t drop” mentality (surprise!).

In the study, published by the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, the researchers followed nearly 2,000, independently living, Taiwanese citizens who were at least 65 years old. The researchers gathered their shopping habits by looking at a 1999-2000 survey that evaluated how often these Taiwanese geriatrics shopped, and then they used national death registries to keep track of the study groups’ deaths until 2008. After correcting for age, gender, health, ethnicity, financial status, and other factors, the researchers discovered that daily shoppers were 27% less likely to kick the bucket than their less shop-happy peers (aka those who shopped only once a week or less). Oddly enough, the best shopping-related survival record goes to the men, who reduced their chances of dying by 28% by shopping; women who shopped daily ...

The Measure of a Man’s Private Parts Is Connected to His Fertility

Patrick Morgan — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 20:11:28 +0000

When it comes to male fertility, length matters—the length between the scrotum and anus, that is. New research suggests that measuring a man’s “anogenital distance,” or AGD, is a fast, low-tech, relatively accurate method of getting an idea of the quality of a man’s sperm.

In a new study, University of Rochester professor Shanna Swan and her colleagues broke out the measuring tape and assessed the anus-to-scrotum distance of 126 men born in 1988 or later. The men whose AGD’s were shorter than the average of two inches were 7.3 times more likely to have low sperm counts than their more well-endowed…er, well-distanced, brethren. These men with shorter AGD’s also had low sperm motility and poor sperm morphology.

So why on Earth, you’re wondering, would this be the case?

As DISCOVER said in the 2008 article The Dirty Truth About Plastics, “Biologists recognize a reduction in the length between the anus and the sex organ as an external marker of feminization, easily measured because it is typically twice as long in males as in females.” This reduction in AGD “may be caused by exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals” in the womb; Swan’s previous ...

A New, Effective Treatment for Restless Leg Syndrome: Orgasm

Patrick Morgan — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 20:03:42 +0000

Spasms. Burning sensations. Sleep deprivation. To those suffering with restless leg syndrome (RLS), these are nightly afflictions. New research suggests that orgasm—by any means possible—may be a good way to alleviate the condition.

RLS is a neurological disorder that afflicts upwards of 10% of people in the U.S. and Europe: As RLS-sufferers try to sleep, their legs experience burning, tickling, aching, and itching sensations; these uncomfortable feelings build up until the leg spasms out of control. This cycle repeats throughout the night, writes news.com.au Technology Editor Peter Farquhar, and “it’s not unusual for people who suffer RLS … to describe it as torturous.”

So why do some people’s legs do this? According to the NIH, “in most cases, the cause of RLS is unknown,” though “it may have a genetic component.” Nevertheless, experts do have some inkling of the cause, as the NIH reports on their website:

Considerable evidence suggests that RLS is related to a dysfunction in the brain’s basal ganglia circuits that use the neurotransmitter ...

Weight-Loss Supplement Has Teensy Potential Side Effect: You Might Get Mad Cow Disease!

Valerie Ross — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:44:13 +0000

Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (hGC), a hormone produced during pregnancy, is isolated from the urine of pregnant women and used to treat infertility. Since the 1950s, however, it’s also been used as a weight-loss aid—and still is, even though there’s no solid evidence showing it works.

But taking hCG could be worse than just ineffective: A new study shows that doses of the hormone can transmit prions, the misfolded proteins that cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, an invariably fatal form of dementia that riddles the brain with holes (photo).

That’s right: There’s a potential risk of contracting deadly, brain-destroying illness by injecting yourself with proteins taken from other people’s urine—and you won’t even lose weight.

The New York Times lamely wrote earlier this month that hCG as a weight-loss regimen “has fans and skeptics”—but Travis Saunders at Obesity Panacea says that spreading mad cow is just one more reason to avoid “the most thoroughly debunked weight loss gimmick in medical history.”

No prion diseases have been transmitted through urine yet, the authors of the study say, but it is theoretically possible. And even ...