Samuel James White, sometimes known as Mr. Shiro, is a young writer from Leeds, England. As a full-time freelance writer, he writes articles on subjects like medical procedures, insurance articles, and even producing interviews with such figures like Emmanuel Ray, who was named Britain's Fashion Icon of the Year 2011. In the middle of his relentless struggle to make the jump from professional writer to published author he spends a day of his week working for charity.
Although people have long scoffed at those suffering from obesity who claim they are overweight because of their genes, there might be something to it after all. “How?”, you might be asking. Scientists have actually discovered how a faulty gene may lead to obesity.
The study in Nature Medicine was conducted on mice and discovered that the body’s traditional message of “Please…for the love of all that is holy…please put down the cake” can be blocked if the mutation is found in animals.
This message is blocked because the appetite hormones have been disrupted by the faulty gene. The Georgetown University Medical Center has said that they hope this will lead to new ways of controlling weight. But pseudo scientists like me believe that it will help disgustingly obese people claim that they ate their twelfth burger of the week because their genes made them that way.
In truth, there are many genes which are thought to have an impact on one’s weight, such as the neurotrophic factor gene (BDNF), which is derived from the brain. However, a lot of these studies have only been tested on animals like mice and rats which don’t have exactly the same genes as us. The human studies are still fairly thin so everything has to be taken with some scepticism.
The mice used were actually genetically modified to have the faulty genes, and it was shown that the mice spent most of their time eating. To put this into perspective because not many of us will have seen an obese mouse before, the mice consumed an additional 80% of food; so pretty much more than their own body weight, many times over.
Generally, the way a healthy body should work is that after a meal has been completed the hormones known as leptin and insulin should inform the brain that the body is full, but with the mutated gene the hormones in the blood were passing the message to the wrong part of the brain.
Professor Baoji Xu, who worked on the study, said that it’s because the neurons can’t communicate with each other so the leptin and the insulin can’t do their jobs correctly.
Ok, so far we have been very kind to overweight people because this may give them an excuse, but, just as God promised Moses a land flowing with milk and honey only to not let him in when he reached the border, it’s this writer’s sad duty to tell you that it’s a prominent disease in mice but not in humans. So this research is only going to be any good for treating overweight people by stimulating an increased amount of the hormone.
But, hey, maybe things like this will lead to a time where we don’t have to bother exercising to keep weight off anymore? A man can dream.
One part of popular games like Call of Duty that has us scratching our heads is how the characters are able to initiate their magic powers and begin regenerating wounds in humans after being shot by a bullet just by hiding outside of combat. But there’s also a real life way to do it too. Bears have apparently mastered this, according to a study completed in the US.
It was reported that medical researchers and zoologists from the University of Minnesota, the University of Wyoming, and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources came together to publish the findings in the journal Integrative Zoology.
Their findings came as a result of a 25-year study carried out on 1,000 tracked black bears. They found that any wounds a bear sustained healed with little scarring and had absolutely no signs of infection at all. This was a process which happened in full during the hibernation process where a bear’s heart beat, metabolism, and body temperature will dramatically decrease; some bears will even have a heart rate of around 9 beats per minute.
Now, you don’t need a scientist to tell you that the point of this is to try and discover the secrets of the bear in order to gain the same skill to begin regenerating wounds in humans. But the scientists who were explaining this said the point of this study was geared towards healing infection-prone wounds in patients who are either malnourished or diabetic.
The researchers reported that bears who had gunshot wounds, arrow wounds, or wounds from other animals often became infected or inflamed by early winter. But, as if by magic, when the bears emerged from their hibernation process in the spring the wounds were healed and there were barely any signs of scarring.
What was even more surprising is the fact that after many months of hibernation the bears hadn’t lost any muscle mass or any fat either. Clearly bears have something special about them which could be useful to humans. And, no, it’s not going to be how to stay fat without eating.
Of course, this has massive implications for medical research because if humans can isolate whatever gives the bear their remarkable healing capabilities then it may be able to be translated into some form of drug to give humans their own healing capabilities.
We all know that the scientists said it was designed to aid those humans who have a significantly reduced capability to heal their own wounds, but, let’s be honest, it can be used for all humans. We could end up seeing it in the military and it might even become as common as morphine. Although don’t expect to be seeing any bear healing hormones for regenerating wounds in humans on the marketfor a very long time yet.
Today was a pretty dull week until Saturday as we all got to watch Bolton player Fabrice Muamba have a heart attack in the middle of the football pitch. This was about the most exciting thing which happened this week for this News in Briefs writer as all was pretty quiet on the foreign front. But at least North Korea is attempting to make things mildly interesting again.
Political Oops of the Week
This is more of an imminent political oops as the Labour Party offices in Westminster were mysteriously broken into. Clearly this will bring back memories of the Watergate scandal which brought down a president (it was Nixon). But, then again, it also shows how crap we really are at scandals because in America we experience a presidential scandal with the most powerful man in the Western world at the centre of it all. In Britain, though, we experience the opposition to the most powerful man on this tiny island having his offices broken into; the most uninspiring, most uncharismatic, and the most uninteresting man in the Western world, I might add.
See, I can be interesting!
Obviously nothing has happened as of yet because nobody has been arrested for it. But what random burglar decides to break into the Labour Party offices? The only burglar which would even think of doing anything like that is one which has some sort of political motive. Is it to do with the Conservatives? I highly doubt it, but one of the smaller fringe parties, or even Labour dissidents could be at the centre of all this.
Don’t expect to hear anything about this for a long time, but when it eventually comes back to the surface again expect it to cause shockwaves which will be felt for a very long time to come. The clock is ticking.
The Painful…
Normally in this News in Briefs section we pick something incredibly painful which makes one cringe, but this time it’s more of a mix between literal and metaphorical pain. All of us will have heard about Sergeant Robert Bales who left his base to go massacre 16 innocent Afghan civilians, and I think all of us will have felt some sense of pain when it comes to this.
However, I’m not merely talking about the fact that 16 innocent people were killed because, let’s be honest, this happens every day in Afghanistan at the hands of foreign forces and it never gets reported. But the fact that this has been reported just after the problems caused by the burning of the Koran just makes you cringe.
The fact that the Americans have not allowed the soldier to stand trial in Afghanistan is only going to mean that the Taliban gain even more support and even more people are going to die because of it. Furthermore, look at the general fact that all of these problems are surfacing now; it just goes to show how ineffective the foreign powers truly have been in Afghanistan.
I guarantee that the moment all foreign troops leave the country Afghanistan will descend into open civil war between the puppet government of the Western nations and the deposed Taliban government. The fact that the media constantly touts Britain and the Western powers as being victorious makes me laugh every time.
…And the Pointless
But away from more sombre news, let’s move to something incredibly pointless yet so so hilarious. The Italian village, Falciano del Massico, situated just south of Naples, has now made it illegal to die in their village. Yes, you read that right, it’s an offense to die in that village.
The row came about as a result of a feud with a neighbouring village. Everybody loves a good row with their neighbours every so often, but, unfortunately, their neighbours also hold the only graveyard in the area. So in a beautiful tactical manoeuvre they are now refusing to bury Falciano del Massico’s dead.
What’s even more hilarious is the fact that the mayor of the village decided to do some real life trolling by creating this law. Then mayor, Giulio Cesare Fava, was found telling the newspaper that the law had brought happiness to the village, before finishing on a more disappointing note: “Unfortunately, two elderly citizens disobeyed.”
Best throw their asses in jail, Giulio!
The so Outrageous that it’s Borderline Hilarious
This week, today actually, I read that the Government had made the decision to get rid of the Sunday trading laws for the Olympics. Now, you must all be wondering exactly why this seemingly innocuous news story has appeared in this section. Well, I’ll tell you why. Exactly why do we still have Sunday trading laws?
Last time I checked we live in the year 2012 not 1812, so the fact that we even have laws which dictate how trade works on this day of the week due to a silly thing like religion is quite frankly embarrassing. Unless you are an ardent advocate of religion, you must be irritated by the fact that if you want to go and buy something early in the morning then you can’t because everything opens at a later time than normal.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this is not a rant against religion in general. It’s not like that at all. What it’s a rant against is the inclusion of religion within politics, economics, and anything to do with life outside of religion. In the 21st century religion has no place in the running of a country and should remain a private practice.
And, no, I don’t care whether David Cameron is trying to pretend that we are a Christian country or not because we’re not a Christian country. British people have this nasty habit of claiming that they’re Christian, but how many times do they really go to church or pray? The answer is that they just say they’re religious out of habit based on the traditions of their ancestors.
In reality, we are a secular country and religion is on the decline within this country. This abandoning of the Sunday trading laws will have a massive impact on the future of Sunday trading because I expect that we may see a permanent relaxing of these laws when they find out how well it works during the Olympics.
A Positive Outlook for the Week Ahead
With any luck Fabrice Muamba will pull through from his illness and he won’t die. Even if you don’t like Bolton Wanderers, and I don’t particularly, you have to be hoping that the boy pulls through and gets playing again as soon as possible.
The budget from Chancellor Osborne is going to appear this week. Many of you will be asking exactly why this is a positive thing, though. Well the main benefit is that the stream of writers who keep producing speculation pieces based on what the chancellor may or may not say in his budget report will disperse.
Apart from that there’s not a lot else to look forward to, which is a blessing in itself because next week will certainly bring up a few surprises that we haven’t considered yet.
So maybe next week won’t be as bleak and irritating after all…
Scientists have discovered that it’s not just the excessive rolls of fat that mean fat people are less likely to find a woman to have kids with. Rather, it’s the saturated fat in food which is leading to lower sperm counts amongst men.
The Harvard Medical School in Boston carried out the experiment under the stewardship of Professor Jill Attaman. The study asked 99 men questions about their diet and analysed their sperm samples over four years.The results of the study showed that of the 99 men in the study, those with the highest fat intake had 43% less sperm than normal at the end of the study. And even more bad news showed that at the end of the study the concentration of the sperm, measured via number of sperm per unit volume of semen, was down by 38%.
The study, reported in the scientific journal Human Reproduction, revealed these results, but everyone involved in the study is saying that more research needs to be done before any conclusions can be made.The men who ate the most omega-3-rich foods had a conventional structure when it came to the shape of the sperm, but the important thing to take into account was that 71% of the 99 men were already overweight or obese anyway. So this could have had an impact on the sperm even before the study had begun.But like with many of these studies which seem to be appearing at the moment, they all seem to have used very small research groups. Is it because they couldn’t find more people to masturbate into a jar every so often for the next four years? If this is the case then they should either be promoting their cause more or paying their volunteers because 99 men where 71% are already obese is not a study that can be taken very seriously.If the study was designed to discover whether high levels of saturated fat caused a reduction of sperm in men or not then surely they should have used people who lived on relatively healthy diets. This would show comprehensively whether it reduced the number of sperm or not. But if they also wanted to know how much it was reduced by then they should have used an equal number of healthy and unhealthy people when it came to the study.
As for this writer’s own personal study on whether people who eat more saturated fat (by implication, fat people) will have a lower chance of conceiving a child or not then a conclusion has been found. To conceive a child you need a woman, and everybody knows that fat guys generally do finish last in this category.All I need is the warm, fatty embrace of these sausagey buns.
So science may not have discovered whether high levels of saturated fat actually do cause a reduction in the amount of sperm yet, but this writer’s study has definitely brought up some comprehensive results.
Anti-rejection drugs, which are used when an organ transplant is completed, may go out of use with a newly-discovered cellular principle. Hooray!
In the past, when one accepted an organ it was a hassle to get the body to accept it. So the patient would have to take immunosuppressive drugs to keep the organ from being rejected. But the problem with this was that the drugs would either have horrible side-effects or would just stop working. And this is all before we get to the price which Suzanne Ildstadthe, Director for the Institute for Cellular Therapeutics at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, outlines as roughly $25,000 per year in the US.
Now, this is clearly due to the fact that the US operates a terrible health care system where only the rich can afford the necessary treatment, but even in the UK this would still cost the NHS a massive amount of money; and all of this is paid for by us through our taxes.
The trial discovered this involved taking a number of patients and reducing a great many of their immune cells, which was done through radiation and chemotherapy. They then implanted the donated organ, from a genetically mismatched donor, and then implemented bone marrow alongside the organ. The hope was that because bone marrow can produce immune cells from the donor’s genetic code and the patient’s genetic code would “blend” so the chance of organ rejection would be significantly reduced. In this test it was all about testing kidney transplantation.
The study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine demonstrated that 7 out of 10 patients used in this trial could be successfully taken off of immunosuppressive drugs. This is great, right?
Well, for the most part this is great. The only issue with this way of transplanting organs is that it still retains the patient’s chances of suffering from graft-versus-host disease, or GVHD as the disease is most commonly known.
GVHD is where the donor’s immune cells actually attack the body it’s being placed in, like if you dropped a group of chavs into another city whilst they were sleeping; hey, they are simplistic, they can’t help it. However, another study did show that the removal of these cells which were likely to cause GVHD did help in preventing the disease. The only problem is that the results of the study were considered to be inconclusive in the long-term because GVHD can appear years later.
Placing this in an overall perspective, essentially what we have done here is replaced another human’s immune system. If we can successfully replace parts of human beings on a cellular level then who knows what this could lead to in the future?
Yes, it would mean that thousands of patients wouldn’t be waiting on hospital beds until a successful donor could be found, but it could mean the death of many more ailments. If undifferentiated cells, from bone marrow, can be successfully differentiated into cells of the scientist’s choice then we could eliminate things like deafness, blindness, and maybe even learn to regenerate entire limbs.
The only issue with all of this is when we eventually ascend to this scientific plane we may even be getting close to the concept of immortality as everybody’s lifespan starts to reach the 100 mark. Of course, none of this is likely to appear in our lifetimes, but the future of science after we are gone is certainly very bright.
This has been a pretty boring week for the news if you were just watching the mainstream news feeds. But that doesn’t mean that we have nothing for you this week because even if politicians and morons (those two are pretty much the same thing) are not in the public eye it doesn’t mean that they haven’t been humiliating and embarrassing themselves just as much as usual.
Political Oops of the Week
It’s never nice when a few Islamic militants have you at gun point in a hostage situation. But this situation was made much more uncomfortable this week when British Special Forces attempted to rescue two hostages, one British and one Italian, in Nigeria. The problem was that they didn’t bother to tell their Italian allies about the rescue operation.
Surely this should have all been forgotten about, though, because the point is that the hostages are alive? Oh, wait. They’re not alive. They’re not alive because when the firing started the militants killed the hostages. If everything had gone well then this political embarrassment could have been forgotten about, but the fact that Britain attempted to demonstrate the size of its figurative balls by doing it all on its own just makes it even worse.
Rightly, the Italians are upset about all of this. But Foreign Secretary William Hague just made things worse when he was quoted as saying: the short amount of time we had to act “constrained how much we were able to consult others.”
So things were that urgent that you couldn’t have given the Italians a quick phone call? Exactly how long does it take to enter a simple phone number into your mobile phone? About ten seconds, twenty seconds if you’re Eric Joyce, and maybe even thirty seconds if you’re Boris Johnson. You didn’t necessarily have to coordinate with the Italians, but you could have at least given them a heads up about it.
It’s a good thing Berlusconi isn’t there anymore because he may have just slept with all your wives in retaliation!
So you say you didn't manage to dial the right number?
The Painful…
Everybody loves a news story they can relate to. This is another one of those stories as Richard Dale Fox killed his girlfriend in his California trailer home with a homemade cannon. Don’t worry, Richard, because we’ve all been there where we’ve accidently set off our homemade cannons and almost killed our loved ones, haven’t we?
His girlfriend died of shrapnel wounds as the projectile came through the window. Sadly, the authorities wouldn’t reveal exactly what the projectile was, or even how the cannon was made, but they did reveal that it was fired by using the same powder found in fireworks. Richard Fox was also taken to hospital with severe leg wounds as the cannon exploded when he fired it. This sounds very similar to the guy who tried to blow up a plane a few years ago but only succeeded in burning his own bollocks off. Maybe they are friends?
What a perfect way to surprise my girlfriend!
…And the Pointless
David Cameron revealed something monumental this week. Ready for it? That’s right, David Cameron likes to play the game Angry Birds in his spare time. And, yes, this was reported on BBC News. It just makes this writer wonder exactly what the point of anything is anymore.
In most cases, it would be a case of me thinking that “Hey, it doesn’t matter to have a bit of light-hearted talk sometimes.” But what was particularly irritating was the fact that this was in the middle of a Government meeting. After a bit of digging, this was actually a part of some initiative where it gets children to report the news on the BBC website next week.
What a complete and utter waste of time and money. Why is this going to be of any use whatsoever? The children are going to be reporting on news that they really don’t know anything about. Do the BBC still think that people are attracted to the prospect of having some snotty-nosed bundle of irritation reporting on the news? The people I know who visit news websites are there for one reason: they are there to get the news quickly, simply, and easily. Not to have to wade through all the childish dribble which the BBC are going to be spreading all over their website.
News should be the news, children’s channels should be for children. It really is that simple.
The so Outrageous that it’s Borderline Hilarious
Vladimir Putin is Russia’s new president, for the third time. Whether you’re a fan of Putin or not, though, you have to admit that the results of the election were a tad dubious when looking at some of Putin’s tactics this time round.
The exit poll predicted that Putin would win the election with at least a 60% majority vote, which he did, but the fact that some of his supporters were caught ferrying his supporters to vote at multiple polling stations does make it seem like it was a little rigged. And the fact that international overseers even admitted that the election favoured Putin doesn’t seem to have bothered any world leaders at all.
To date, all world leaders have acknowledged Putin’s victory, and Obama even phoned him personally from Air Force One to congratulate him. It does make one wonder exactly why nobody seems to be up in arms about this. But there’s no denying that the only reason Putin was out of the presidential office to begin with was because of the Russian constitution stipulating that you can only have two consecutive terms in office.
But, then again, when you look at the fact the Communist Party finished 2nd, you start to see exactly why a little bit of corruption has perhaps done at least some good on this occasion.
A Positive Outlook for the Week
One item on the agenda which does look like it’s coming to an end is the Rangers FC administration case. The administrator stipulated on Friday that there was a Friday deadline for all buyers to put forward their bid to buy the club. This means that it looks like we will be seeing an end to this sorry saga quite soon. What’s more, the fact that the senior players all decided to take massive pay cuts means that Ranger won’t be going anywhere, so now Scottish Football won’t be made completely meaningless and pointless next season. Although, this writer still won’t be paying any attention to it.
As for everything else, the fact that there was very little going on this week leads to speculation that next week should be awash with lots of interesting news.
So maybe next week won’t be as bleak and irritating after all…
