Nov 14
You recall the story about how Louis Pasteur discovered penicillan because of sloppy habits in the kitchen and moldy bread. Well according to Wired News a funny thing happened on the way to making a special kind of mouse for studying lupus.
Mice discovered accidentally at the Wistar Institute in Pennsylvania have the seemingly miraculous ability to regenerate like a salamander, and even regrow vital organs.
Researchers systematically amputated digits and damaged various organs of the mice, including the heart, liver and brain, most of which grew back.
The results stunned scientists because if such regeneration is possible in this mammal, it might also be possible in humans.
The researchers also made a remarkable second discovery: When cells from the regenerative mice were injected into normal mice, the normal mice adopted the ability to regenerate. And when the special mice bred with normal mice, their offspring inherited souped-up regeneration capabilities.
The mice, known as the MRL strain, were specially bred to develop lupus. But researchers don’t know why exactly the animals’ injuries heal so well.
OK that part about systematically amputated digits is a little creepy.
Oct 26
This article will be taped to many bathroom mirrors or wherever else husbands think wives would find it. It talks about all the benefits of sex including odd things like a better sense of smell.
The best that modern science can say for sexual abstinence is that it’s harmless when practiced in moderation. Having regular and enthusiastic sex, by contrast, confers a host of measurable physiological advantages, whether you’re male or female. (This assumes that you are engaging in sex without contracting a sexually transmitted disease.)
In one of the most credible studies correlating overall health with sexual frequency, Queens University in Belfast, Ireland, tracked the mortality of about 1,000 middle-aged men over the course of a decade. The study was designed to compare persons of comparable circumstances, age and health. Its findings, published in 1997 in the British Medical Journal, were that men who reported the highest frequency of orgasm enjoyed a death rate half that of the laggards.
read more | digg story
Oct 12
Everyone knows that ulcers are caused by stress and that once you get them you will probably always have them. No? Well, that used to be what everyone knew. Robin Warren and his colleague Barry Marshall were shunned by the medical community when they suggested that ulcers were actually caused by the bacterium Helicobacter Pylori. The BBC says:
The two men made their discovery in the early 1980s, but it took a long time to convince the medical community, who viewed them as eccentric.
“The idea of stress and things like that [as the cause of ulcers] was just so entrenched nobody could really believe that it was a bacteria,” Dr Marshall told the Associated Press.
Dr Marshall finally swallowed the bacterium himself to prove his point.
Oct 10
A new tool is now available for scientist who are studying Down’s syndrome according to this story in Wired News.
Scientists have transplanted a nearly entire human chromosome in mice in a medical and technical breakthrough that could reveal new insights into Down’s syndrome and other disorders.
The genetically engineered mice carry a copy of the human chromosome 21. It is the smallest of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes with about 225 genes.
Children suffering from Down’s syndrome, which is one of the most common genetic disorders, inherit three copies of the chromosome instead of two.
The achievement caps 13 years of research by scientists at the National Institute for Medical Health in London and the Institute of Neurology.
“We are very optimistic that we will be able to get insights into what goes wrong with people with Down’s,” said Dr Victor Tybulewicz, who headed the research team.
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