Ballet dancers develop differences in their brain structures to allow them to perform pirouettes without feeling dizzy, a study has found.
A team from Imperial College London said dancers appear to suppress signals from the inner ear to the brain.
Dancers traditionally use a technique called spotting
, which minimises head movement.
The researchers say their findings may help patients who experience chronic dizziness — via redwolf.newsvine.com
No time to read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time? In just two and a half minutes, Alok Jha explains why black holes are doomed to shrink into nothingness then explode with the energy of a million nuclear bombs, and rewinds to the big bang and the origin of the universe? — via Youtube
The Preston Robert Tisch Brain Cancer Centre at Duke University has the largest experience on the East Coast with my sort of tumour, so I went there for further consultation and treatment.
As doctors there examined me, it was obvious that my tumour had already grown again; in fact, it had quadrupled in size since my initial chemo and radiation. I was offered several treatments and experimental protocols, one of which involved implanting a modified polio virus into my brain. (This had been very successful in treating GBMs in mice.) Duke researchers had been working on this for 10 years and had just received permission from the FDA to treat 10 patients, but for only one a month. (A Duke press release last May explained that the treatment was designed to capitalize on the discovery that cancer cells have an abundance of receptors that work like magnets in drawing the polio virus, which then infects and kills the cells. The investigational therapy… uses an engineered form of the virus that is lethal to cancer cells, while harmless to normal cells. The therapy is infused directly into a patient’s tumour. The virus-based therapy also triggers the body’s immune system to attack the infected tumour cells
) — via redwolf.newsvine.com
This medical case may give a whole new meaning to the phrase beer gut
.
A 61-year-old man — with a history of home-brewing — stumbled into a Texas emergency room complaining of dizziness. Nurses ran a Breathalyser test. And sure enough, the man’s blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.37 percent, or almost five times the legal limit for driving in Texas.
There was just one hitch: The man said that he hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol that day.
He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime,
says , the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas. His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyser.
Other medical professionals chalked up the man’s problem to closet drinking
. But Cordell and Dr Justin McCarthy, a gastroenterologist in Lubbock, wanted to figure out what was really going on.
So the team searched the man’s belongings for liquor and then isolated him in a hospital room for 24 hours. Throughout the day, he ate carbohydrate-rich foods, and the doctors periodically checked his blood for alcohol. At one point, it rose 0.12 percent.
Eventually, McCarthy and Cordell pinpointed the culprit: an overabundance of brewer’s yeast in his gut.
That’s right, folks. According to Cordell and McCarthy, the man’s intestinal tract was acting like his own internal brewery — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A backpack computer has been developed to let people test a bionic eye so the implant can be perfected for those needing it.
The bionic eye project aims to give some vision to people who have lost their sight by transmitting images from a pair of glasses which have been fitted with a video camera.
Those images go to the implant, which stimulates the optic nerve.
The prototype computer will simulate the experience for testers and help researchers develop the algorithms required for mobility and orientation.
The head of the wearable computer laboratory at the University of South Australia, Bruce Thomas, says the testing project involves equipment readily available which has been modified and made easy to use for practical medical research — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A species of bee reintroduced to the UK after becoming extinct has nested for the first time in a quarter of a century.
The short-haired bumblebee started dying out in Britain in the 1980s and officially became extinct in 2000.
A reintroduction project saw queen bees brought over from Sweden.
After two releases of queens at the RSPB’s Dungeness reserve in Kent, offspring worker bees have been recorded there for the first time.
Short-haired bumblebees were once widespread across the south of England but declined as their wildflower rich grasslands disappeared.
Nikki Gammans, who leads the project, said: This is a milestone for the project and a real victory for conservation.
We now have proof that this bumblebee has nested and hatched young and we hope it is on the way to become a self-supporting wild species in the UK
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Improbable Research Nobel Prize Award ceremony was held at Harvard Thursday night to award this year’s scientific projects that make people laugh, then make them think
, as the organisers, the Annals of Improbable Research, put it.
The awards, held every year since 1991, are meant to raise the question: How do you decide what’s important and what’s not, and what’s real and what’s not — in science and everywhere else?,
write the organisers. And, each year, the awards do just that, lofting projects unlikely to win a real Nobel Prize into the scientific limelight in a zany show that asks the question, why is this science so uproarious? — via redwolf.newsvine.com
There are no Z-rays. Raymond Massey stars in this 1950s warning about the dangers of quacks — via Youtube
An experimental vaccine implant to treat skin cancer has begun early trials in humans, as part of a growing effort to train the immune system to fight tumours.
The approach, which was shown to work in lab mice in 2009, involves placing a fingernail-sized sponge under the skin, where it reprograms a patient’s immune cells to find cancerous melanoma cells and kill them.
It is rare to get a new technology tested in the laboratory and moved into human clinical trials so quickly,
said Glenn Dranoff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and part of the research team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The elusive rock rat, last seen trying to get into a stockman’s lunchbox in 1960, has been rediscovered in central Australia.
One of Australia’s rarest creatures, the critically endangered rat, which was not seen in the area for more than half a century, was found during a survey using remote sensor cameras on the Haasts Bluff Aboriginal land trust west of Alice Springs.
Evidence was also found of the rare black-footed wallaby, which has not been seen in the area since 1991.
The rock rat was thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered in the west MacDonnell ranges in 2002, but finding it in another area that isn’t protected is huge news,
Richard Brittingham, regional land management officer with the Central Land Council said.
This species is obviously persisting in other areas outside of national parks, which is an important consideration in long-term conservation
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
A volcano the size of New Mexico or the British Isles has been identified under the Pacific Ocean, about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) east of Japan, making it the biggest volcano on Earth and one of the biggest in the solar system.
Called Tamu Massif, the giant shield volcano had been thought to be a composite of smaller structures, but now scientists say they must rethink long-held beliefs about marine geology.
This finding goes against what we thought, because we found that it’s one huge volcano,
said William Sager, a geology professor at the University of Houston in Texas. Sager is lead author in a study about the find that was published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience.
It is in the same league as Olympus Mons on Mars, which had been considered to be the largest volcano in the solar system,
Sager told National Geographic — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Despite their lethargic reputations, snails can travel at a relatively speedy one metre per hour, say researchers.
By attaching multicoloured LED lights, the scientists were able to track their movements over a 24-hour period.
The gastropods were fast enough to explore the length of an average UK garden in a single night.
But scientists are worried that the fast-moving snails are spreading a parasite that is deadly for dogs.
Over the past few years the wet summers enjoyed across the UK have proved the ideal breeding grounds for snails.
According to the Royal Horticultural Society, their numbers increased by 50% last year.
As well as being a pest for gardeners, snails can also spread a parasite called Angiostrongylus vasorum.
This lungworm is a particular threat to dogs, which can become infected by accidentally eating slugs or snails which they come across in the garden or on dog toys — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A New Zealand vet has successfully saved a poisoned cat by administering blood from a dog in a rare inter-species transfusion.
Cat owner Kim Edwards was frantic last week when her ginger tom Rory went limp after eating rat poison and rushed the ailing cat to her local veterinary clinic at Tauranga in the North Island for help.
Vet Kate Heller said the feeble feline was fading fast and needed an immediate transfusion to survive, but there was not enough time to send a sample to the laboratory for testing to determine the cat’s blood type.
Instead, she decided to take a gamble and use dog’s blood to try to save the animal, knowing it would die instantly if she gave it the wrong type.
Ms Edwards called up her friend, Michelle Whitmore, who volunteered her black Labrador Macy as a doggie-blood donor in a last-ditch attempt to save Rory.
It was a procedure Dr Heller said she had never performed before and was very rare — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The odorless and tasteless nature of date rape drugs
can make them impossible for victims to detect before it’s too late. But soon your drinking glass may able to warn you if dangerous chemicals have been slipped into your cocktail. Next month, DrinkSavvy will begin shipping plastic cups and straws that change colour if a drink contains GHB, Rohypnol or Ketamine, three drugs commonly used for spiking purposes. The effort began with a successful $50,000 Indiegogo campaign led by company founder Michael Abramson — who himself was once unknowingly “roofied” during a night out with friend — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Even the smallest dose of power can change a person. You’ve probably seen it. Someone gets a promotion or a bit of fame and then, suddenly, they’re a little less friendly to the people beneath them.
So here’s a question that may seem too simple: Why?
If you ask a psychologist, he or she may tell you that the powerful are simply too busy. They don’t have the time to fully attend to their less powerful counterparts.
But if you ask Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, he might give you another explanation: Power fundamentally changes how the brain operates.
Obhi and his colleagues, Jeremy Hogeveen and Michael Inzlicht, have a showing evidence to support that claim — via redwolf.newsvine.com
— via deviantART
Queensland’s chief health officer, Jeannette Young, is investigating a homoeopath who allegedly convinced a mother his treatment would immunise her child.
Dr Young told ABC’s 7.30 Queensland the mother was convinced her child was vaccinated until she was asked about it by a doctor at the Mater Hospital.
The mother said ‘yes, my child is fully vaccinated, I believe in vaccination, but the person who vaccinated my child said that if you were to test my child you wouldn’t find any evidence because it’s a different sort of vaccination’,
Dr Young said.
The doctor explored that with the child’s mother and worked out that a homoeopath had told the mother that he had vaccinated the child when clearly the child had not been vaccinated.
The mother thought she had done the right thing and wanted to do the right thing by her child and believed this healthcare provider, who misled her.
Some homoeopaths offer a treatment called homoeopathic prophylaxis which aims to strengthen a person’s immune system, but public health authorities say there is no evidence it works — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Researchers say a new cancer vaccine that appears to be helping dogs could soon be used in human trials.
The vaccine, developed by researchers at Sydney’s Kolling Institute, has been trialled on almost 30 dogs with advanced melanoma, bone cancer and liver cancer.
Early results found the vaccine not only slowed the growth of the original tumour but also helped to prevent more developing.
Dr Chris Weir, who developed the vaccine, said the anecdotal results are promising — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Harold G White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects.
He and other NASA engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it travels in a certain area, and then observing the change with a device called an interferometer. So sensitive is their measuring equipment that it was picking up myriad earthly vibrations, including people walking nearby. So they recently moved into this lab, which floats atop a system of underground pneumatic piers, freeing it from seismic disturbances.
The team is trying to determine whether faster-than-light travel — warp drive — might someday be possibles — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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