Blogs / Discoblog

Viagra has worn many jackets in its day. It’s been a heart medicine, a Bob-Dole-championed combatant of erectile dysfunction, and now, if you have muscular dystrophy, it may save your life. Researchers at the Montreal Heart Institute have found that Viagra—or sildenafil, its generic name—boosted the heart circulation of mice with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, thereby warding off heart failure and likely death.

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And here your parents thought all those Mortal Kombat skills would never amount to anything useful: A research team at the University of Washington has created a video game called Foldit, which challenges dexterous gamers to fold protein strands according to the actual laws of physics—thereby helping to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins that could mean cures for diseases from Alzheimer’s to HIV.

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You eschew cars and planes, eat insects instead of meat, dedicate yourself to recycling, avoid plastic, and install CFLs in every socket within reach—but what about your carbon footprint after death?

Standard coffin burials are known environmental hazards, involving high levels of hazardous chemicals and metals at every step. The body is first embalmed with formaldehyde (arsenic and mercury, thankfully, are no longer used), then placed in either a wood coffin (covered in varnishes, sealers, and preservatives) or a metal coffin (full of lead, zinc, copper, and steel). In America, the casket is then placed inside a concrete liner before burial in the ground—using enough reinforced concrete every year to construct a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit.

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In the midst of controversy proclaiming WiFi as the harbinger of brain tumors, it’s nice to hear that wireless might actually be doing us some good. The same technology that lets you jabber into your Bluetooth earpiece can also let your doctor know you’re having a heart attack.

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Robots may not only be cleaning your house and providing you with love and companionship in the coming years—they may also be performing your surgery. A team of engineers at Duke University have completed a set of feasibility tests that they call the “first concrete steps” toward making robot surgery a fully, er, operational process.

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Here’s some new ammunition for the mommy wars: the largest study ever done on the subject of breastfeeding and intelligence has found a correlation between “prolonged and exclusive” breastfeeding and smarter babies.

The study, authored by Michael Kramer from the Montreal Children’s Hospital, started by identifying about 17,000 Belarusian mothers with newborns. Half of the mothers were given a UNICEF/World Health Organization course—which advised long and continuous breastfeeding—while the other half were left alone to breastfeed at whim. The research team then tracked down about 14,000 of the children six and a half years later to give them IQ tests and examine their school evaluations in reading, writing and math.

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Life isn’t fair for the vertically challenged. They can’t see the stage at concerts, can’t reach the top shelf at the grocery store, have to hem their pants, and make less money and have less power than their taller peers. Well, I’m afraid new research shows that it doesn’t get much better. People, particularly women, with shorter arms and legs are at a higher risk for developing dementia. The study, performed by researchers from The Johns Hopkins University and Tufts University, came out in the May 6 issue of Neurology.

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If you’re tired of chewing—and drinkable yogurt, liquid donuts, and Thanksgiving dinner-flavored sodas aren’t your thing—researchers at ENITIAA are coming to the rescue. In the May 14 issue of the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, they report the design of an artificial mouth that mimics the first steps of human digestion, in which we viciously tear apart and grind down our food under a continuous flow of saliva.

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Last year, a story captured the hearts and imaginations of Harry Potter fans everywhere: Lee Spievack sliced off his fingertip (while showing a customer why the motor on his model plane was dangerous), and regrew it with magic pixie dust made from dried pigs’ bladder.

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Here’s some bad news for sports officials in Beijing—not to mention the entire world of professional sports: Certain people may be genetically immune to urine screenings for testosterone, one of the most popular illegal performance-enhancing drugs used by professional athletes.

Jenny Jakobsson Schulze, a molecular geneticist at Karolinska University Hospital, gave urine tests to 55 men, each of whom had been injected with a single dose of testosterone. Nearly 70 percent, or 38 of the subjects, failed the test, but 17 passed with flying colors. While both groups of men had metabolized the hormone the same way, the clean-pissed 17 were missing both copies of a gene that causes testosterone to mix with glucuronide, a chemical that converts the hormone from an oil-soluble one into a water- (and pee-) soluble one.

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Pathogens—those selfish beasts—will do anything to stay alive and procreate. They force us to sneeze and contaminate the water supply with our own diarrhea, they turn ants into berries and make rodents lose their fear of cats, and—in the case of some sexually transmitted diseases like herpes and syphilis—they ooze out of open sores into the ripe bodies of the next host.

But an essay in the New York Times explains that STDs are careful to keep the grossness to a sustainable level. After all, pathogens have to make sure potential hosts still want to have sex with the current host—a lesson which syphilis learned after Columbus brought the disease to Europe. In those days, its sores dwarfed those caused by another fearsome disease—called “small pox” to distinguish it from syphilis, the “great pox.” The Times cites a description of syphilis from Ulrich von Hutten, written in 1519:

“Boils that stood out like Acorns, from whence issued such filthy stinking Matter, that whosoever came within the Scent, believed himself infected. The Colour of these was of a dark Green and the very Aspect as shocking as the pain itself, which yet was as if the Sick had laid upon a fire.”

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Human trials of an artificial blood substitute have been halted after a study revealed that the fake blood led to a 30 percent higher risk of death and tripled the risk of heart attack in surgical, stroke, and trauma patients. Five human trials of artificial blood are currently underway in eight countries, and at least one more is being planned for the U.S.—at least, until this new study circulates.

Blood substitutes, which consist of chemically modified hemoglobin—a protein that carries oxygen—were developed as a means of providing much-needed blood for trauma victims. The benefits of the substitute over the real thing include a longer shelf life and easier storage—no refrigeration is required, meaning the blood could save lives on the battlefield—plus the manufactured blood can’t carry any diseases and doesn’t need to be matched to a patient’s blood type.

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A few months ago at a party, one of my friends pulled a group of us aside, pulled an inconspicuous clear plastic bag out of his pocket, and cautiously opened it as we peered inside. The bag contained a small handful of red berries—magical berries, he proclaimed—which would completely alter our reality. He’d been under the mind-warping influence of such berries before, and was able to get his hands on them in San Francisco. Eat these berries, and afterwards… everything tastes sweet.

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The New England Journal of Medicine has published a report stating that scientists in the U.S. and the U.K. have performed the first successful use of gene therapy—the process of replacing “defective” genes with normal ones—to “dramatically improve” the sight of people with a rare hereditary eye disease that causes blindness. Six subjects received the treatment and four saw their vision partially restored, according to the AP, and experts predict that the technique, if it continues its success in more trials, could be used to treat other blindness-causing diseases.

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At 25-years old, Pierre the penguin was starting to see his glory days as the California Academy of Sciences alpha male fade away. 25 years is a lot to ask for a species that usually only makes it to 20, and the elderly penguin had a rather awkward problem: His waterproof feathers were falling off, leaving him bald (with an “embarrassingly exposed, pale pink behind”). But the main problem wasn’t aesthetics—not that the comb-over is really an option for him—it’s that the penguin paddock is freaking cold. Heat lamps didn’t work, and the poor little guy “was unwilling to plunge into the academy’s penguin tank and ended up shivering on the sidelines while his 19 peers played in the water.”

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According to a story by Ed Price, the Yankees beat reporter for the New Jersey Star Ledger, bottled water has been banned from the dugouts of Major League Baseball. Gatorade—not water—is the “official sports drink” of MLB, and cannot bear to share the dugout with any other form of hydration. Price’s article, which has been heavily blogged, says that players can’t be seen drinking anything but Gatorade—not even Aquafina, the “official water” of MLB. According to White Sox clubhouse personnel, if players take bottled water to the bench, all the bottled water will be removed from the clubhouse as punishment.

This seems like an pretty bad move on Gatorade’s part, as encroaching on an athlete’s right to freedom of hydration might create a bit of a backlash. And it turns out Gatorade actually isn’t that recklessly narcissistic—Price’s article is bogus.

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We’ve discussed how a mother’s diet may influence her baby’s sex. Now there’s research indicating that a baby’s diet may influence his or her future mental health and intelligence. Researchers for the Early Nutrition Programming Project (EARNEST) have found evidence that an infant’s diet can permanently affect the child’s future cognitive development, mental performance, and even susceptibility to mental illness.

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If harvesting cells from your placenta makes you queasy, and it’s too late to access some umbilical cord blood, there’s yet another medical waste product that may provide a new, uncontroversial source of stem cells: menstrual blood.

Dr. Amit Patel from the University of Pittsburgh found that the uterine lining, which is shed during menstruation, contains millions of stem cells. These cells are multipotent (can give rise to several different cell types) and have the capacity for self-renewal—two essential properties of stem cells. The study showed that menstrual stem cells (MenSCs) could differentiate into cells that give rise to fat, cartilage, bone, skin, muscle, heart, and brain cells (though it’s important to note that the MenSC’s did not actually differentiate into these cells—only into their predecessors). The cells actually showed greater potential capacity than bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells, as they had some of the same properties as human embryonic stem cells.

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A new study by the Universities of Exeter and Oxford, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences found the first clear link between a mother’s diet and the sex of her baby. The research team took 740 first-time pregnant mothers in the U.K., none of whom knew their child’s sex, and had each mother record her diet before and directly after getting pregnant. Of the women who consumed the “highest energy intake”—which included the most calories and the widest range of nutrients including potassium, calcium, and vitamins C, E and B12—56 percent conceived sons, compared to 45 percent of the lowest intake group. One surprising note: A “strong correlation” was found between eating breakfast cereals and producing boys.

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A University of Chicago study on happiness that’s been called “one of the most thorough examinations of happiness ever done in America” has found that the oldest Americans are also the happiest, and that different population groups reach greater and more equal happiness levels as they age. Among its other reported findings: African Americans are less happy than white people, men are less happy than women (a topic that’s been discussed at length recently), and happiness levels can “rise and fall between eras.”

Also among the findings: Despite their advancing age, which would seem to bring increased happiness, baby boomers, even with their high earning power and societal influence, are less happy than all the other generations surveyed.

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