Archive for the 'Health' Category
System To Build Transplant Tissue Created
Science Daily — One day soon, laboratories may grow synthetically engineered tissues such as muscle or cartilage needed for transplants. In a major step forward, Cornell engineers describe in the journal Nature Materials a microvascular system they have developed that can nourish growing tissues.
The researchers have engineered tiny channels within a water-based gel that mimic a vascular system at the cellular scale and can supply oxygen, essential nutrients and growth factors to feed individual cells. The so-called gel scaffold can hold tens of millions of living cells per milliliter in a 3-D arrangement, such as in the shape of a knee meniscus, to create a template for tissue to form.
No commentsWhy Men Dominate Math and Science Fields
By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 09 October 2007 08:39 am ET
Social scientists have studied it, lawyers have tried to fix it and post-feminist society is over it. But women are still outnumbered by men in math, science and engineering fields.
Most overt discrimination against women in the sciences has been reduced or eliminated in recent decades through legal, academic, corporate and government measures. But a climate that is less than fully friendly to women remains, and its texture is often still so taken for granted that it tends to be invisible.
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Asthma Linked to Cat Allergies
By Robin Lloyd, LiveScience Senior Editor
posted: 28 September 2007 01:20 pm ET
More than 50 percent of the current asthma cases in the U.S. are the result of allergies, especially to cats, according to a new National Institutues of Health (NIH) study.
Asthmatics, people with allergies and doctors alike have long debated possible connections between pets, dust, ragweed, mold, fungus, foods, cockroaches, traffic exhaust, smog, pollen, trees blooming, leaves falling … and wheezing attacks, which can be terrifying and life-threatening.
The lack of consensus can be maddening for those who stay up at night with kids gasping for breath, wondering what can be done. Some parents have wondered if children diagnosed with asthma, and medicated for the condition, don’t actually have an untreated allergy instead.
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Brain’s Capacity Limited by Connectivity Issues
By Dave Mosher, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 13 September 2007 10:08 am ET
If you can’t remember where you left the car keys, take comfort in a new study that suggests the brain’s memory capacity may be far lower than once thought.
About 100 billion neurons, or brain cells, make up the average adult’s brain, but the computer-based discovery shows our memory isn’t based simply on neuron numbers. Instead, the limited amount of connections a neuron can make to other neurons may cut memory capacity.
“People have suspected this for a long time, but we’ve shown it’s possible for the first time in realistic memory networks,” said study co-author Peter Latham, a neuroscientist at University College London
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Brain Surgery: It Really is Brain Surgery
By Joe McClain, College of William and Mary
posted: 31 August 2007 02:22 pm ET
This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.
Everything changes after the surgeons open your skull.
Your brain, and the tumor inside it, no longer fully float in their protective bath of cerebrospinal fluid. Gravity comes into play, as does the atmospheric pressure of the operating theater. The brain responds to these foreign forces, the cerebral tissue sagging, rebounding and changing shape. The tumor that the neurosurgeons want to remove also has changed position.
The preoperative MRI image is no longer accurate enough for brain surgery.
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First Atomic Bomb Test Exposed U.S. Civilians to Radiation
By Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 16 July 2007 12:35 pm ET
The world’s first atomic bomb test might have exposed unaware civilians in New Mexico to thousands of times the recommended level of public radiation exposure, according to reconstructed data in a new study.
The research, led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), found that ingestion of radioactive materials—primarily from irradiated rainwater and goat’s milk—might have been a substantial contributor to public radiation exposure that was largely not accounted for.
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How to Suppress Bad Memories
By LiveScience Staff
posted: 12 July 2007 02:04 pm ET
Scientists have uncovered a two-step process by which our brains can supposedly suppress emotional memories.
The finding, detailed in the July 13 issue of the journal Science, has implications for those suffering from emotional disorders such as depression.
In the study, 16 test subjects were asked to commit to memory 40 different pairs of pictures, consisting of a “neutral” human face and a disturbing picture such as a car crash or a wounded soldier.
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Brain Pathway May Underlie Depression
July 06, 2007
A crescent of electrical activity spotted in rats may allow researchers to map the depressed brain
By JR Minkel
High-speed camera snapshots may have pinpointed a spot in the brain that serves as a marker for depression. Investigators have observed that electrical chatter in the dentate gyrus—a C-shaped region of the hippocampus—contracts in depressed rats but expands again after the animals receive antidepressants.
No commentsKey to Male Infertility Found
By LiveScience Staff
posted: 29 June 2007 03:33 pm ET
How much of a certain immune system protein a man’s semen contains could determine whether or not he can have children, a new study suggests.
The finding, detailed in the latest issue of the journal Molecular Medicine, could lead to fertility tests for males or new types of male contraception, the researchers say.
No commentsBrain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works
By Melinda Wenner, Special to LiveScience
posted: 29 June 2007 09:08 am ET
If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works.
Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain’s emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to “let them go.”
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