Scientific American - Health & Medicine
Science news and technology updates from Scientific American
Genetics Predisposes for Heavy Drinking After Watching Heavy Drinking
Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:45:08 EST
Spend any time in a bar, and sooner or later you’ll hear, “I’ll have what she’s having.” It sounds like a bad pickup line, but there may be an actual biological basis for this kind of alcohol copycat behavior. Because scientists have found that having the gene for a certain dopamine receptor could predispose you to being influenced by the sight of other people drinking. [More]
Genetics - Gene - Alcohol - Games - Biology
Subatomic sunscreen: How light particles can repair UV-damaged DNA
Sun, 25 Jul 2010 13:01:00 EST
The life-giving sun can be quite rough on genetic material. Most organisms, including plants and many animals, are equipped with a special enzyme in their cells that is quick to repair DNA damage wrought by the sun's ultraviolet (UV) rays . Humans, however, have less effective repair strategies and as a result are prone to painful sunburns and deadly skin cancer . [More]
Ultraviolet - Sunscreen - Skin cancer - DNA - Human
Robot Pills (preview)
Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:00:00 EST
The movie Fantastic Voyage , the story of a miniaturized team of doctors traveling through blood vessels to make lifesaving repairs in a patient’s brain, was pure science fiction when it came out in 1966. By the time Hollywood remade the film in 1987 as Innerspace , a comedy, real-world engineers had already begun building prototypes of pill-size robots that could voyage through a patient’s gastrointestinal tract on a doctor’s behalf. Patients began swallowing the first commercially built pill cameras in 2000, and since then doctors have used the capsules to get unprecedented views of places, such as the inner folds of the small intestine, that are otherwise difficult to reach without surgery.
One important aspect of Fantastic Voyage that has remained fantasy is the notion that such tiny pill cameras could maneuver under their own power, swimming toward a tumor to get a biopsy, checking out inflammation in the small intestine, or even administering drug treatments to an ulcer. In recent years, however, researchers have made great strides in converting the basic elements of a passive camera pill into an active miniature robot. Advanced prototypes, now being tested in animals, have legs, propellers, sophisticated imaging lenses and wireless guidance systems. Soon these tiny robots may be ready for clinical trials. Right now they are testing the limits of miniaturized robotics.
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Robotics - Fantastic Voyage - Innerspace - Companies - Science fiction
Skeleton Key: Bone Cells May Play a Part in Regulating the Body's Metabolism
Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:00:00 EST
Insulin , the well-known blood sugar hormone, may have a newly discovered function in the body that will rattle your bones--regulating skeletal growth and breakdown.
Two new studies published online July 22 in Cell show that insulin stimulates both bone building and breakdown in mice through the hormone's effects on two types of bone cells: bone-building osteoblasts and bone-resorbing osteoclasts. What's more, these cells are involved in an intricate hormonal loop that in turn regulates not only insulin production, but also blood sugar levels and energy metabolism. The studies suggest that the skeleton may be an important regulator of whole-body energy metabolism, joining the ranks of known metabolic regulators such as muscle and fat. The authors conclude that their findings have important implications for understanding and treating metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes as well as bone conditions like osteoporosis .
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Diabetes mellitus type 2 - Blood sugar - Insulin - Pancreas - Health
Take Me Out of the Ball Game: When Physics and Physiology Collide
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:00:00 EST
Baseball is a game of trajectories. And as Yogi Berra supposedly said, you can observe a lot just by watching. For example, at Yankee Stadium on May 29, I observed New York slugger Alex Rodriguez hit a pitch by Cleveland Indians David Huff back up the middle and off the pitcher’s head. In fact, the ball hit Huff’s head so hard that it rolled nearly all the way to the right-field wall. The ball, that is, not Huff’s head. He collapsed in a heap and remained face down on the mound for several minutes. Huff eventually left on a stretcher. Home team fans who then watched the Yankees blow a six-run lead left in a huff.
Anyway, many in the crowd feared that Huff was seriously injured. Having observed physics teachers years earlier, however, I was guardedly optimistic--precisely because the ball had ricocheted so far and so fast. Had the ball rebounded from Huff’s dome only a few feet straight back toward home plate, I would have been concerned that the poor pitcher had become the second player in major league baseball history to be killed on the job. In that scenario, much of the ball’s energy of motion would have been imparted to the pitcher. But said energy appeared to have been expended on sending the ball skittering into the right-field corner, with only a small amount having been transferred to Huff’s head.
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Yankee Stadium - Yogi Berra - New York Yankee - Baseball field - Sports
Urban Air Pollutants Can Damage IQs before Baby's First Breath
Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:00:00 EST
In a sweltering summer in New York City back in 1999, Yolanda Baldwin was eight months pregnant with her first child. She lived near a gas station and across the street from an intersection choked with exhaust-spewing cars and buses. Sometimes the air was so thick with pollution that she could see it, breathe it, smell it, even taste it. And she often wondered what it might be doing to her unborn child.
Now Baldwin and several hundred other mothers whose sons and daughters have been monitored for a decade have an answer: Before children even take their first breath, common air pollutants breathed by their mothers during pregnancy may reduce their intelligence .
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New York City - Air pollution - Pregnancy - Intelligence quotient - Environment
Talking trash during the dog days: A brief history of sanitation in New York City
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:00:00 EST
Without modern sanitation , life would be nightmarish--human and animal waste would fester on the streets along with garbage and food scraps, producing a stench so foul that you'd want to keep your windows closed even in the sweltering heat of summer (for the moment, envision lacking the luxury of air conditioning). The offensive odors and accumulating muck would be the least of your worries, however--preventable diseases such as cholera and yellow fever would be rampant, your life expectancy would be extremely short, and infant mortality rates would be staggeringly high.
This is what life was like for many of the previous inhabitants of what is now New York City, from the arrival of the Dutch in the 1600s until the establishment of an official Department of Street Cleaning in the late 19th century. Robin Nagle , professor of anthropology at New York University, chronicled this fascinating history of sanitation and public health in an illustrated lecture July 26 at N.Y.U.'s School of Medicine. Nagle's talk, "How Street Cleaners Saved the City: Garbage, Government, and Public Health in New York," was dotted with vivid descriptions of how the burgeoning sanitation system was influenced by underhanded dealings, two wars, repeated outbreaks of communicable disease, devastating fires and water crises.
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New York City - Life expectancy - New York University - Infant mortality - United States
EPA Relies on Industry-Backed Studies to Assess Health Risks of Widely Used Herbicide
Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:00:00 EST
Companies with a financial interest in a weed-killer sometimes found in drinking water paid for thousands of studies federal regulators are using to assess the herbicide's health risks, records of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show. Many of these industry-funded studies, which largely support atrazine's safety, have never been published or subjected to an independent scientific peer review. [More]
United States - Drinking water - United States Environmental Protection Agency - Herbicide - Health
Self-Fulfilling Fakery: Feigning Mental Illness Is a Form of Self-Deception
Wed, 28 Jul 2010 10:00:00 EST
Assistive technology that helps severely paralyzed people navigate the world and communicate with others often taps into whatever abilities the disabled retain, such as blinking or moving the mouth and tongue. Now, for the first time, researchers have invented a device that allows the paralyzed to write, surf the Web and steer an electronic wheelchair--all by sniffing. Initial tests, described July 26 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ), suggest that many severely paralyzed people can easily master the "sniff controller," which offers certain advantages over other technological aids.
