Snake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplements. See the data: bit.ly/snakeoilsupps. See the static versionSee the old flash version Check the evidence for so-called Superfoods visualized. Note: You might see multiple bubbles for certain supplements. These is because some supps affect a range of conditions, but the evidence quality varies from condition to condition. For example, there’s strong evidence that garlic can lower blood pressure.
But studies on whether it can prevent colds have produced inconclusive results. This visualisation generates itself from this Google Doc. As ever, we welcome your thoughts, crits, comments, corrections, compliments, tweaks, new evidence, missing supps, and general feedback. » Purchase: Amazon US or Barnes & Noble | UK or Waterstones » Download: Apple iBook | Kindle (UK & US) » See inside For more graphics, visualisations and data-journalism: Alan Russell on regenerating our bodies. Nathan Wolfe's jungle search for viruses. Larry Brilliant wants to stop pandemics.
Canadian researchers cure cancer and nobody notices. Dammit, we’ve just cured cancah! Why is no one listening? Last week, researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton cured cancer, but I bet you haven’t heard about it. Despite what might be a solid way to treat a wide variety of cancer with no side effects, the mainstream media hasn’t said a peep about it. Why would that be? Because this cure is non-patentable and therefore pharmaceutical companies can’t make money from it, so they’re acting like it doesn’t exist.
The method employs dichloroacetate, which is currently used to treat metabolic disorders. Via. Artificial Organ Regrowth - NOVA scienceNOW. Health : Breakthrough: sensors that can convert thoughts into speech. A mind reading machine has edged closer to reality after scientists found a way of converting thoughts into words. Researchers were able to render brain signals into speech for the first time, relying on sensors attached to the brain surface. The breakthrough, which is up to 90 percent accurate, will be a boon for paralysed patients who cannot speak and could help read anyone’s thoughts ultimately, reports the Telegraph. “We were beside ourselves with excitement when it started working,” said Prof Bradley Greger, bioengineer at the Utah University who led the project.
“It was just one of the moments when everything came together. “We have been able to decode spoken words using only signals from the brain with a device that has promise for long-term use in paralysed patients who cannot speak. The breakthrough came when the team attached two button-sized grids of 16 tiny electrodes to an epileptic’s brain’s speech centres, says the journal of Neural Engineering. Noise kills, and blights lives in Europe - environment - 31 March 2011. Western Europeans suffer a heavy toll of death and disability through exposure to excessive noise, making it second only to air pollution as an environmental cause of ill health. That's the conclusion of the world's first comprehensive report on the health effects of noise, published this week by the World Health Organization and the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.
Between them, western Europe's inhabitants – with an estimated adult population in 2001 of 340 million – were found to lose as much as 1.6 million years of healthy living per year. The authors reduced the headline figure to 1 million to rule out the possibility of double counting. "We are very confident that a million is the bottom line," says co-author Rok Ho Kim, who coordinates the WHO's noise programme. The toll from air pollution is estimated at 4.5 million years of healthy living lost per year. Deadly noise The most dramatic effects are in heart disease, because exposure to noise can kill people.
Cap on noise. Large Hadron Collider: A Russian Scientist Accidently Put His Head Inside a Particle Accelerator and Didn't develop Super Powers or Die | Gifts and Free Advice. With all the news about the Large Hadron Collider I thought readers of this blog would be interested in what happened to a Russian Scientist named Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski in 1978. As a 36 year old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, Bugorski used to work with the largest Soviet particle accelerator, the synchrotron U-70. On July 13, 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when an accident occurred due to failed safety mechanisms. Bugorski was leaning over the piece of equipment when he stuck his head in the part through which the proton beam was running. Reportedly, he saw a flash “brighter than a thousand suns”, but did not feel any pain.
The beam measured about 2000 gray when it entered Bugorski’s skull, and about 3000 gray when it exited after colliding with the inside of his head. Bugorski continued to work in science, and held the post of Coordinator of physics experiments. Amazon Users Click Banner to Go Direct to Amazon: Radiation.png (PNG Image, 1134x1333 pixels) UCSB scientists discover how the brain encodes memories at a cellular level. (Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have made a major discovery in how the brain encodes memories. The finding, published in the December 24 issue of the journal Neuron, could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to aid memory. The team of scientists is the first to uncover a central process in encoding memories that occurs at the level of the synapse, where neurons connect with each other.
"When we learn new things, when we store memories, there are a number of things that have to happen," said senior author Kenneth S. Kosik, co-director and Harriman Chair in Neuroscience Research, at UCSB's Neuroscience Research Institute. Kosik is a leading researcher in the area of Alzheimer's disease. "One of the most important processes is that the synapses –– which cement those memories into place –– have to be strengthened," said Kosik. "In strengthening a synapse you build a connection, and certain synapses are encoding a memory. This is a neuron. Half of Germany's doctors prescribe placebos - health - 13 March 2011. PRESCRIPTIONS of placebos are booming in Germany and Switzerland, reveals a report released last week by the German Medical Association (GMA).
For example, 53 per cent of the doctors from the Medical University of Hannover said they would prescribe placebos such as vitamin pills and homeopathic remedies. Half the doctors in a national Swiss survey agreed. Their use of such treatments contrasts with the UK, where homeopathic treatments have been rejected by scientists. However, "physicians should be made aware of the value of the placebo effect in the daily treatment of patients", says Christoph Fuchs, chief executive of the GMA. Subscribe to New Scientist and you'll get: New Scientist magazine delivered every week Unlimited access to all New Scientist online content - a benefit only available to subscribers Great savings from the normal price Subscribe now! More From New Scientist Pop star's cancer prompts surge in screenings (New Scientist) WHO accused of huge HIV blunder (New Scientist) Tumours could be the ancestors of animals - health - 11 March 2011.
CANCER remains a formidable foe even 40 years after Richard Nixon officially declared war on it. A new and controversial hypothesis now offers hope that the war can ultimately be won. It suggests tumours have a limited ability to evade modern therapies - a consequence of the idea that cancer is our most distant animal ancestor, a "living fossil" from over 600 million years ago. Some cancers evolve resistance to a treatment within a few years. One possible explanation for this is that the cells within a tumour act independently, competing with one another via natural selection to evolve therapy-dodging innovations.
Astrobiologists Charles Lineweaver at the Australian National University in Canberra and Paul Davies at Arizona State University in Tempe have an alternative explanation. Their hypothesis builds on an old idea that suggests a link between cancer and the origin of multicellular animals, sometime before 600 million years ago. Others are more guarded. More From New Scientist. Mobile phones boost brain activity - health - 23 February 2011. WHAT is your cellphone doing to your brain? The latest study shows that long calls boost brain activity, though whether this is harmful is not known. Nora Volkow, director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues attached cellphones to each ear of 47 volunteers. They used a PET scanner to compare brain activity when both phones were switched off and when one phone was receiving a 50-minute call while the other remained off.
The volunteers weren't able to tell which, if either, of the phones was switched on, due to muting. The group found a 7 per cent increase in activity in regions of the brain near the phone's antenna when the phone was receiving a call (Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 305, p 808). Volkow says it is too early to tell whether this is good or bad for the brain.
More From New Scientist Curious mathematical law is rife in nature (New Scientist) Human sex from the inside out (New Scientist) Promoted Stories Recommended by. Raise alcohol prices to save British livers - health - 25 February 2011. SOARING rates of alcohol abuse and liver disease in the UK can be reversed by copying French and Italian strategies of cutting cheap booze from supermarkets. So say a group of health researchers, whose analysis shows that since 1986, UK death rates from liver disease, 80 per cent of which is alcohol-related, have more than doubled from 4.9 to 11.4 per 100,000 people. In France and Italy, the opposite has occurred, with death rates of 50 per 100,000 in the early 1960s falling to less than 10 per 100,000 today (The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(11)60022-6). The solution, says lead author Nick Sheron at the University of Southampton, UK, was to take cheap alcohol out of the system. "France has done the impossible, reducing liver death rates while increasing the value of its alcohol economy," he says.
"The UK drinks industry needs to start selling on quality, not quantity. " New Scientist Not just a website! More From New Scientist Bacterial explanation for Europa's rosy glow (New Scientist) Body morph illusions: How to become superhuman. Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer You may think only aliens could have multiple limbs. But now an experiment conducted by Henrik Ehrsson and his colleagues from Karolinska Institute in Sweden has shown that humans can also feel what it's like to have a third arm and even flinch if it's threatened with a knife (see video above). The illusion is perceived when a person's right arm, and a similar fake arm, are stroked simultaneously when both are in view. For the brain trick to work, the extra arm also has to be lined up with the real one and be placed in an anatomically-appropriate position.
The third arm illusion is similar to the rubber hand illusion, where a person feels like a fake hand is their own when their real arm is hidden from view and stroked at the same time. But the new sensation is different since a person still perceives the real arm as their own and feels like they actually have two of the same limbs. Diabetics: is it time to bin the insulin? - health - 24 February 2011. A PIONEERING hormone treatment may be the secret to an easy life for diabetics, consigning insulin shots and regular glucose monitoring to the medical history books. Most people associate diabetes with insulin, the pancreatic hormone that dictates how much glucose circulates in blood.
Type 1 diabetics have to inject the hormone because they can't make it themselves. Now, the spotlight is turning on insulin's lesser-known pancreatic twin, glucagon, as a treatment that could control blood glucose levels without the need for daily monitoring. Whereas insulin clears surplus glucose from the blood after meals, squirrelling it away in the liver, muscles and elsewhere, glucagon does the opposite when we are hungry, ordering the liver to release stores of glucose "fuel" into the blood or to make more if none is available. To investigate glucagon's role, Roger Unger at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and ...
Is lack of sleep and water giving ecstasy a bad name? - health - 24 February 2011. ALL-NIGHT ravers who take ecstasy might not be harming their brains any more than drug-free party animals. So say John Halpern and colleagues at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who argue that many studies apparently showing that ecstasy use can lead to memory loss and depression were flawed as they did not take account of the rave culture associated with ecstasy use. Lack of sleep and dehydration resulting from all-night dancing can cause cognitive problems on their own, they say.
Halpern's team compared ecstasy users with non-users who had a history of all-night dancing with limited exposure to alcohol and drugs. Both groups completed tests for verbal fluency, memory, depression and other factors. The team found no significant differences in cognitive performance between the two groups, even when they compared non-users with heavy users of the drug (Addiction, DOI: 10.1111/j.1360-0443.2010.03252).
New Scientist Not just a website! More From New Scientist More from the web Recommended by. Our brains are wired so we can better hear ourselves speak, new study shows. Like the mute button on the TV remote control, our brains filter out unwanted noise so we can focus on what we’re listening to. But when it comes to following our own speech, a new brain study from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that instead of one homogenous mute button, we have a network of volume settings that can selectively silence and amplify the sounds we make and hear.
Activity in the auditory cortex when we speak and listen is amplified in some regions of the brain and muted in others. In this image, the black line represents muting activity when we speak. (Courtesy of Adeen Flinker) Neuroscientists from UC Berkeley, UCSF and Johns Hopkins University tracked the electrical signals emitted from the brains of hospitalized epilepsy patients. They discovered that neurons in one part of the patients’ hearing mechanism were dimmed when they talked, while neurons in other parts lit up. The auditory cortex is a region of the brain’s temporal lobe that deals with sound. Dan Dennett on our consciousness. <---LEFThandSIDE. Gene for Left-Handed Trait Discovered. August 1, 2007 The gene most closely linked to left-handedness has been found, experts announced this week.
The gene, called LRRTM1, is also associated with a slight increase in developing certain mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Clyde Francks is lead author of a new study on the gene and a visiting fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University. For right-handed people, he said, the right side of the brain usually controls emotion, while the left side of the brain tends to control speech and language. (Related: "First Ever Brain 'Atlas' Completed" [September 26, 2006].) In left-handers—about 10 percent of the world's population—the pattern is usually reversed.
"We think that this gene affects the symmetry of the brain," Francks said. Brain asymmetry is also a factor in schizophrenia, a mental disorder that affects about one in a hundred people worldwide and results in impaired perception and severe behavioral changes. Finding Symmetry. Health | Left-handers 'think' more quickly. Health | Preferred hand 'set in the womb' Health | Left-handers 'better in fights' The List Blog. Sodium ions could one day let you grow a new hand. 10 Most Useful Medicinal Plants For Your Garden. A cure for the common cold may finally be achieved as a result of a remarkable discovery in a Cambridge laboratory - Science, News. The efficacy of duct tape vs cryotherapy in the tr... [Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2002] - PubMed result.
How Fructose Impairs the Memory. This cancer cure will make you sick.