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Post by Barbara on May 2, 2007 7:31:44 GMT -5
#lol# This reminded me of something...I'll write it in "what kids say" thread, haha
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Post by Bogo on May 2, 2007 13:46:23 GMT -5
To Treat the Dead The new science of resuscitation is changing the way doctors think about heart attacks—and death itself. May 7, 2007 issue - Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn't lost blood. All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of "clinical death"—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died? As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later. But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that "astounding" discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers: treating the dead. Biologists are still grappling with the implications of this new view of cell death—not passive extinguishment, like a candle flickering out when you cover it with a glass, but an active biochemical event triggered by "reperfusion," the resumption of oxygen supply. The research takes them deep into the machinery of the cell, to the tiny membrane-enclosed structures known as mitochondria where cellular fuel is oxidized to provide energy. Mitochondria control the process known as apoptosis, the programmed death of abnormal cells that is the body's primary defense against cancer. "It looks to us," says Becker, "as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die." With this realization came another: that standard emergency-room procedure has it exactly backward. When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he's lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? "We give them oxygen," Becker says. "We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it's taking up more oxygen." Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion. Researchers are still working out how best to do this. A study at four hospitals, published last year by the University of California, showed a remarkable rate of success in treating sudden cardiac arrest with an approach that involved, among other things, a "cardioplegic" blood infusion to keep the heart in a state of suspended animation. Patients were put on a heart-lung bypass machine to maintain circulation to the brain until the heart could be safely restarted. The study involved just 34 patients, but 80 percent of them were discharged from the hospital alive. In one study of traditional methods, the figure was about 15 percent. Becker also endorses hypothermia—lowering body temperature from 37 to 33 degrees Celsius—which appears to slow the chemical reactions touched off by reperfusion. He has developed an injectable slurry of salt and ice to cool the blood quickly that he hopes to make part of the standard emergency-response kit. "In an emergency department, you work like mad for half an hour on someone whose heart stopped, and finally someone says, 'I don't think we're going to get this guy back,' and then you just stop," Becker says. The body on the cart is dead, but its trillions of cells are all still alive. Becker wants to resolve that paradox in favor of life. www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368186/site/newsweek/
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Post by Bogo on Jun 22, 2007 15:08:08 GMT -5
Missing: Large lake in southern ChileA lake in southern Chile has mysteriously disappeared, prompting speculation the ground has simply opened up and swallowed it whole. The lake was situated in the Magallanes region in Patagonia and was fed by water, mostly from melting glaciers. It had a surface area of between 4 and 5 hectares (10-12 acres) -- about the size of 10 soccer pitches. "In March we patrolled the area and everything was normal ... we went again in May and to our surprise we found the lake had completely disappeared," said Juan Jose Romero, regional director of Chile's National Forestry Corporation CONAF. "The only things left were chunks of ice on the dry lake-bed and an enormous fissure," he told Reuters. CONAF is investigating the disappearance. One theory is that the area was hit by an earth tremor that opened a crack in the ground which acted like a drain. Southern Chile has been shaken by thousands of minor earth tremors this year. news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070620/sc_nm/chile_lake_dc
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Post by Deleted on Jun 22, 2007 15:10:28 GMT -5
Woah... that's some crazy shat.
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Post by Bogo on Jun 22, 2007 15:12:13 GMT -5
yup I can't imagine one day going out to clinton lake and it being gone, what a trip
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Post by armsaroundastrange on Jun 22, 2007 15:14:32 GMT -5
Especially if you had smoked something before. lol Alot of the lakes here are drying up. You wouldn't even know there was a lake there if you didn't live in the area. That seems like a really BIG lake though, to just disappear in two months.
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Post by Bogo on Jun 29, 2007 16:41:27 GMT -5
Potential cure for HIV discoveredIn a breakthrough that could potentially lead to a cure for HIV infection, scientists have discovered a way to remove the virus from infected cells, a study released Thursday said. The scientists engineered an enzyme which attacks the DNA of the HIV virus and cuts it out of the infected cell, according to the study published in Science magazine. The enzyme is still far from being ready to use as a treatment, the authors warned, but it offers a glimmer of hope for the more than 40 million people infected worldwide. "A customized enzyme that effectively excises integrated HIV-1 from infected cells in vitro might one day help to eradicate (the) virus from AIDS patients," Alan Engelman, of Harvard University's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, wrote in an article accompanying the study. Current treatments focus on suppressing the HIV virus in order to delay the onset of AIDS and dramatically extend the life of infected patients. What makes HIV so deadly, however, is its ability to insert itself into the body's cells and force those cells to produce new infection. "Consequently the virus becomes inextricably linked to the host, making it virtually impossible to 'cure' AIDS patients of their HIV-1 infection," Engelman explained. That could change if the enzyme developed by a group of German scientists can be made safe to use on people. That enzyme was able to eliminate the HIV virus from infected human cells in about three months in the laboratory. The researchers engineered an enzyme called Tre which removes the virus from the genome of infected cells by recognizing and then recombining the structure of the virus's DNA. This ability to recognize HIV's DNA might one day help overcome one of the biggest obstacles to finding a cure: the ability of the HIV virus to avoid detection by reverting to a resting state within infected cells which then cease to produce the virus for months or even years. "Numerous attempts have been made to activate these cells, with the hope that such strategies would sensitize the accompanying viruses to antiviral drugs, leading to virus eradication," Engelman wrote. "Advances with such approaches in patients have been slow to materialize." New experiments must be designed to see if the Tre enzyme can be used to recognize these dormant infected cells, he wrote. "Although favorable results would represent perhaps only a baby step toward eventual use in patients, the discovery of the Tre recombinase proves that enzymatic removal of integrated HIV-1 from human chromosomes is a current-day reality," he said. The researchers who developed the enzyme were optimistic about their ability to design additional enzymes which would target other parts of the virus's DNA. However they warned that there were significant barriers to overcome before the enzyme could be used to help cure patients. "The most important, and likely most difficult, among these is that the enzyme would need efficient and safe means of delivery and would have to be able to function without adverse side effects," wrote lead author Indrani Sarkar of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. "Nevertheless the results we present offer an early proof of principal for this type of approach, which we speculate might form a useful basis for the development of future HIV therapies," Sarkar concluded. news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070628/hl_afp/usgermanyhealth;_ylt=AvV3uZHh5CyPZZkjs3UPh6Ba24cA
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Post by *Sonya* on Jun 30, 2007 8:16:48 GMT -5
That's amazing news, I hope they are able to find a cure.
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Post by Karen on Jul 1, 2007 16:56:29 GMT -5
That would be amazing. It makes you wonder why after all these years scientists haven't discovered a cure. That would be such good news.
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Post by ishbell on Jul 1, 2007 17:20:01 GMT -5
Tattoo ad on forehead for $10,000 A mother had her forehead tattooed with the web address of a gambling site after auctioning off advertising space on her head to pay for her son's school fees. Karolyne Smith with her Goldenpalace.com logo Karolyne Smith has to live with a permanent billboard on her forehead after she accepted Goldenpalace.com's offer of $10,000 for the 'advertising space'. She needed the money to send her son Brady to a private school. Karolyne said: ""I really want to do this. To everyone else, it seems like a stupid thing to do. To me, $10,000 is like a million dollars." "I only live once and I'm doing it for my son. It's a small sacrifice to build a better future for my son." Karolyne did not take the decision lightly. She discussed it for more than three weeks with her boyfriend Jeremy Williams. Smith's eBay auction attracted more than 27,000 hits and 1,000 watchers. Bidding reached $999.99 before Goldenpalace.com, an Internet gambling company met Smith's $10,000 asking price. Goldenpalace.com also gave her another $5,000 for her trouble. Another person, inspired by Karolyne is currently auctioning his forehead as ad space on ebay. I don't know what to think
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Post by tripticket on Jul 1, 2007 17:30:35 GMT -5
yeah, that gives me like two seperate tastes in my mouth. pretty cool concept though
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Post by ishbell on Jul 1, 2007 17:35:09 GMT -5
Bogo, there are cures out there but profits take front seat Cure for Cancer Found, but Drug Companies Won’t Make It Here is another example of how the philosophy of privatization can fail humanity: a drug that has been discovered to cure most forms of cancer will be delayed because it is too old to patent. Big Pharma won’t fund the clinical trials to get the drug, DCA, approved because DCA has been around for decades so no one company can have a monopoly on producing it. So who is going to test the drug and get it out to the people? If government doesn’t step in, millions will probably die unnecessarily. Here is what they are saying over at the New Scientist: IT SOUNDS almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe. It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs. Because the human trials will have to funded by charities and research institutions it will take many years to get the drug on the market. A cure for cancer, and the world has to wait for it due to the profit motive. I guess the market has “decided” that the millions with cancer deserve to die. I’ll take a dash of socialism over that kind of economic Darwinism any day. -Blake
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Post by Bogo on Jul 9, 2007 16:07:00 GMT -5
I dare you not to yawn while reading this Why is yawning contagious?WHO, WHAT, WHY? The Magazine answers... The average yawn lasts six seconds Rather than being a precursor to sleep, yawning is designed to keep us awake, say US researchers. But why does seeing someone else yawn make you to do the same? Yawning is an involuntary action that everyone does. We start before we are born and most creatures on the planet do it - even snakes and fish. New research suggests rather than being a precursor to sleep, the purpose of yawning is to cool the brain so it operates more efficiently and keeps you awake. The theory could explain a puzzling question about subconscious human behaviour - why many of us yawn when we see or hear another person doing it, or even read about it or even just think about it? 'Herding behaviour' It's not copying another person's sleepiness, say scientists at the University of Albany in New York, who are behind the latest research. "We think contagious yawning is triggered by empathic mechanisms which function to maintain group vigilance," says Dr Gordon Gallup, a leading researcher at the university. The belief is further supported by the observation of University of Maryland's Robert Provine that paratroopers report yawning before jumping. But there are other theories. It's been suggested contagious yawning could be a result of an unconscious herding behaviour - a subtle way to communicate to those around us, similar to when flocks of birds take flight at the same time. Another theory suggests contagious yawning might have helped early humans communicate their alertness levels and co-ordinate sleeping times. Basically, if one decided it was time to sleep they would tell the others by yawning and they would do it in return to show they agreed. Chimpanzees also suffer from contagious yawning, according to researchers at Kyoto University in Japan. They are thought to be the only other creatures, apart from humans, who do so. The rest of the animal kingdom - including birds, snakes and hippos - yawn for other reasons. Dogs yawn to stay calm in certain situations, says Turid Rugaas, author of On talking Terms with Dogs. Anyone who gets to the end of this article without yawning may wish to think of themselves as a medical apparition. In fact, only about half of adult humans are prone to contagious yawning. news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6270036.stm
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Post by armsaroundastrange on Aug 15, 2007 18:58:56 GMT -5
blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2007/03/28/personal_submar.htmlPersonal Submarines Designer Guillermo Sureda Burgos has designed personal subs of the future. Each cockpit is individually pressurized so the sub can dive to deeper depths, limited to around 100 to 150 feet. I want one! I could be just like Steve Zisou!
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Post by Bogo on Sept 5, 2007 14:07:16 GMT -5
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