Eating Disorders

Now more and more overweight people around the world, What causes more and more people are overweight? Somebody say Eating Disorders. Introduced the mean about Eating Disorders, An eating disorder is an illness that causes serious disturbances to your everyday diet, such as eating extremely small amounts of food or severely overeating. A person with an eating disorder may have started out just eating smaller or larger amounts of food, but at some point, the urge to eat less or more spiraled out of control.

Eating Disorders mainly in anorexia and Bulimia. Eating Disorders hasseriously jeopardized the safety of human life. Need people to rise to a high degree of attention

Gene Could Explain Why Asthma Treatments Fail Some

Great article discussing why approximately 40% of people with asthma fail to achieve long term relief or control of their symptoms with steroids.  Researchers found that there is a specific gene (one needs to inherit two), which can affect a person's response to steroids (i.e inhalers, "Advair Diskus", etc.).  Data was gathered measuring lung function in participants - those with the more rare copies of the gene showed less than a 1/3 of the lung improvement than those with the regular copies.

http://bit.ly/p3U87I  (Source / Study)

Increased Taurine Intake could improve health

Increased Taurine levels could protect against liver and kidney damage. New research findings are revealing that taking in extra amounts in supplement form may provide many health-related benefits.Taurine has been found to be effective against a wide range of conditions, such as diabetes, anaemia, high blood pressure, kidney and liver damage.

Inside a Cell

This is a cool, interactive application that was designed by the University of Utah to simulate a plant and animal cell. You can look inside the cell at the different organelles that are within each and then the application gives you a brief summary of the location and function of that part of the cell. Looks like a pretty cool way to help you memorize the cell parts and functions since i'm pretty sure we'll all have to know it for the exams. Enjoy! :)

Scientists One Step Closer to Finding New Cancer Treatment

Researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch found that a protein known as fortilin makes the human body vulnerable to uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells by blocking the actions done by a protein known as p53. The p53 protein protects the body from cancer by targeting cancer cells for destruction. According to the researches, fortilin protects these cells by binding to p53 and preventing p53 from activating genes that destroy cancer cells. This discovery enables scientists to search for compounds that can control the activity of fortilin and allow p53 to carry out its function. The picture illustrates the destruction of a cancer cell by p53.

http://www.onlinenews.com.pk/details.php?id=183659

 

Strange Particles, neutrinos to be exact, could travel faster than speed of light.

Even after many decades, after theoretical physicist Albert Einstein hypothesized that nothing could travel with a faster speed than the speed of light (299,792,458 m/s), no one has disproved that hypothesis. This hypothesis is now part of the "Special relativistic theory" and has been used in many applications for modern physics that have worked in many applications. As it is a theory, however, many have been studying and researching to prove or disprove it. Though disproving it has been impossible, a famous study from Kamiokande II experiment in Japan of the supernova SN1987A had managed to prove that Einstein’s theory was right. The study compared the speed of light with the speed of neutrinos- Neutrinos are very small particles with undefined mass. However, one finding from CERN laboratory in Switzerland question this Law and maybe it's the end for one of the "most trusted laws discovered by Einstein." Read the article for more info.

For "Biol1010" students, this could be a great example to understand how science differs from non-science arguments. Think about the debate we had about "Scientific claims", "Science vs. Intelligent design".

Experts caution against stem cell treatments abroad

Peyton, an Indianapolis Colts quarterback, has had three stem cell treatments for his neck injury. As the treatment is not approved in the US, he had to go to Europe for it. 


Like Peyton, a lot of people in the world seek for stem cell experimental treatment to fight their diseases. The stem cell clinics can cure orthopedic injury, heart diseases, neurological conditions, autism.. and so on. 

However, experts warn patients who got or plan to get experimental treatments because they cannot get follow-ups and there's no regulation on quality. There could be many more problems cause by getting experiment treatments but one thing is sure; experiment treatments are not regulated. 


-> So, this is a brief summary of the whole article :) We had a debate about stem cells on Wednesday, and this article gives us an idea about experimental treatments which we didn't cover. So it would be fun to check on it, too! 


http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/22/health/peyton-manning-stem-cells/?hpt=he_c1

First step made towards brain replay.

I know we aren't onto the nervous system in this class yet, but I think that this article is interesting enough that everyone will still like it.

Discussed in this article is an experiment performed to reconstruct visual information from the brain using clips from YouTube. The computer in this experiment actually "learns" to decode the complex information provided by an MRI scan as subjects watch video clips. The computer then "watches" videos from YouTube and picks out ones that create signals similar to those brought about by the experimental clips. It then overlays all these similar videos on top of each other to create a composite.



One might say that this method of mashing together YouTube videos is a silly way of reconstructing visual moving images, but it's the best that can be done until a computer can encode the information from the brain directly into a video.

What Exactly Was Darwin's Religion?

     Some people may be surprised to know that Charles Darwin had a plan as a child to become an Anglican clergyman , but eventually over the course of his life lost his faith. He is categorized as an agnostic atheist since he did not adhere to the normal atheist thinking but rather "crafted a theory in his own image" of religion. Throughout Darwin's life he met with many prominent people with various thoughts about the natural world and how it related to religion. According to Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist  "he saw no spiritual power behind nature's throne" showing his views on evolution and religion were quite clear and these views were not like anything that had been around at the time.

History of Life Mapped Out!

This is pretty neat, and since it was our main topic for a while, I figured I'd show you this cool, intereactive map! It's not really an article, but it's really interesting. Just go to the web site (link in title) and click on the first image (the above) on the web site and you can zoom in to see the particular everything!

Hope your day is lovely!

Future with Two Suns?

Using a fun tool called, "Stumble Upon" in the science section, I came across this article where a professor describes the possibility that we may have two suns for a while!

He also goes on to say that it wouldn't be a doomsday event, but rather a good thing!

http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=13970