Science & Health – Page 8 – The Daily Opinion

Bear…Regenerate!

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 market for a very long time yet.

Hey, Fatty, Are You Going to Be Having Kids?

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.

Accept the Damn Organ!

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.

Do Children Who Snore Equal the Signs of a Little Bastard?

Why are some children just bad? This is a question which has followed society for hundreds and hundreds of years. And, despite the advances in science and technology, we still have no idea why some children who come from seemingly good homes have to act out on a consistent basis.

But a study which was published in the scientific journal Pediatrics believes there may be some visible signs involved. The study claims to have found a link between behavioural issues in children and sleep-disordered breathing; sleep-disordered breathing is defined as apnoea in this case.

The study was carried out at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and followed over 13,000 children from infancy through their early childhood.

The study originally found that 45% of this group remained free of any sleep-disordered breathing. 8% of children fell into a worst-case group, which involved children who had breathing problems which persisted after the ages of two and three; a group dubbed by the researchers involved in the project.

By age seven, the research team discovered that those with so-called sleep-disordered breathing were more likely to develop some form of behavioural or emotional disorder by age seven. These disorders included anything from ADHD disorder to anxiety and depression. This link was discovered because 13.5% of children had these kinds of symptoms, as opposed to only 8% of children who had no sleep-disordered breathing problems.

But here’s where the problems with this study arrive. The researchers admitted that they weren’t sure about whether any of these children actually had these disorders out rightly or not because the results are based off of questionnaires given to parents. Now isn’t that a reliable way to gain results? Obviously, it’s not which already leads to much scrutiny.

Ok, so they claimed that they accounted this link by using variables such as parental income, education, race, birth weight, and whether parents smoked. This is all well and good, but did it take into account how much a parent smoked or exactly how much the parent weighed? Of course it didn’t. So, these figures are already looking very sketchy already. And this is before we get into the fact that people who smoke already underestimate exactly how much they smoke.

Continuing on, the researchers went on to say that even with these variables they discovered that sleep-disordered breathing was the biggest factor involved as the researchers plucked out a figure which said that there was a 72% chance of behavioural or emotional symptoms in children at age seven.

Now, this seems like they just pulled this figure out of nothing because if 45% of children didn’t have any breathing problems whilst sleeping then that means 55% did. If 55% did and only 13.5% of these children had any of these behavioural or emotional issues by age seven then where is the 72% figure coming from? Luck?

And let’s look at the figures they gained from sleep-disordered children versus children who had no issues when it comes to any symptoms and issues when they got older. 13.5% and 8% are incredibly close to each other as a 4.5% difference in a study of 13,000 is marginal, to say the least. If another 13,000 study was conducted then would these figures necessarily be the same? I think not, but if they are then I would be surprised.

For now, this writer will be blaming bad parenting and poor discipline when a child decides that it would be funny to throw a brick at another child’s head.

America Has Highest Smoking-Related Deaths In The World

America is a country that many revere for its accomplishments and advances in such fields as medicine, technology and military power. It isn’t all stellar news though: America has its fair share of negative reports. One is the well-documented case that it has the highest rate of obesity anywhere in the world, another that it spends more per person on healthcare in the developed world but also ranks last in effectiveness of healthcare in the developed world also. And the latest finding that America would rather stayed a secret is a recent report from the World Health Organisation which shows that America leads the world in smoking-related deaths.

The report shows that of the deaths occurring in the USA, a whopping 23% are supposedly linked to smoking, while Japan and France, renowned as amongst the heaviest smokers on the planet, have 12% and 5% respectively. China, another country with high smoking rates, was spoken of in the report thusly: “The results for China were also interesting with crude proportions of death attributable to tobacco being 12% for men and 11% for women.”

On the surface, these figures are troubling and highlight the need for America to work harder on stamping out the habit. However, a little further analysis portrays a wholly different picture. How is it that a country with a relatively low smoking rate takes the top spot for smoking-related deaths? In fact, 23% is not only the highest in the world but almost twice the global average of 12%. Not only do Japan and France have lower rates of smoking-related deaths than America, they both have higher rates of smoking and lower rates of mortality as a whole. This begs the question: How is it that the people of these countries smoke more, live longer and suffer fewer illnesses related to tobacco? It isn’t the case that these are countries with a life expectancy low enough for the population to die before reaching an age that cancer can kill them – Japan does after all have one of the longest life expectancies in the world. While it has been hypothesised that the Asians have a degree of resistance to lung cancer, this has not been said of other continents and so cannot apply to those in Europe. The vast geographical distance and huge difference in lifestyle between these countries further confuses this issue.

The figures suggest interesting places to focus future research – could it be the type of tobacco Americans smoke that causes the problem, or the way it is cured? Could it be certain additives that American tobacco companies are adding to their cigarettes that other countries do not? Either of those is possible, but it could also be a simple case of miscalculation.

While everyone knows that “smoking-related diseases”, despite their name, afflict non-smokers too, and can be caused by things other than smoking – such as diet, lifestyle and genetics – a number, if not all, of the American states have a check box on the death certificates to state whether tobacco was a primary or secondary factor in the cause of death, and some states have the requirement to tick the box simply if the deceased smoked. In at least some of these states, it isn’t a case of the physician’s final say, but a simple mandatory requirement that if a person smoked and died of a certain disease, they are automatically categorised as a death resulting from smoking. What this means is that a morbidly obese person with a sedentary lifestyle, appalling diet, a genetic history that predisposes him or her to a heart attack and who also smokes will be put down as a smoking-related death – even though there’s a very high chance that any of the numerous lifestyle factors, or indeed genetic history, could have been the real cause of death. This bolsters the number of deaths associated with tobacco, which is ideal for anti-smoking campaigners who can use such numbers to secure further funding to continue their campaign, but in a more objective view, such as the WHO report, it is rather alarming and also detrimental to a real understanding of worldwide health priorities.

America has the largest anti-smoking campaign in the world, and a lot of money is spent at the state and federal level to facilitate it. In 2001, Tobacco Control received $883 million solely from the Master Settlement Agreement – an agreement whereby the tobacco companies paid money to each of the American states to recoup the medical bills of treating smokers. While the $883 million to Tobacco Control will likely be somewhat lower today as part of that money is redirected to other essentials, the anti-smoking movement still commands hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The pharmaceutical industry donates hundreds of millions of dollars to anti-smoking organisations and to back smoking bans in an attempt to encourage smokers to move from tobacco to their own nicotine replacement therapies. Much money is also raised from and donated by the prominent cancer, lung and heart charities. To emphasise the sway held by these groups, in Texas one such foundation has threatened that if the Texas University does not ban smoking on the entire campus, both indoors and out, then it will give its $10 million grant money to another institution – and when the funding group has that sort of leverage over the receiver, there’s never any doubt as to what the results of any grant-funded research will be.

While it’s not easy to determine if America’s unusually high mortality rate from smoking is based on real deaths or falsifying the numbers, it is more than a little peculiar that a country with smoking rates as low as America can have death rates that are so high. The mandatory requirement of classifying any death of a smoker as a smoking-related death may work well for increasing the bank balances of anti-smoking groups, but it does a tremendous disservice to science and true world health efforts as whole. Perhaps if the figures were calculated in the same way as they are in other countries, the percentage would drop considerably.

Russia	4%
France	5%
Brazil	6%
Italy	7%
Germany	9%
China	11%
Japan	12%
GLOBAL AVERAGE	12%
Australia	14%
United Kingdom	20%
Canada	20%
USA	23%

Last Ice Age Didn’t Wipe Out All Vegetation After All?

In the last Ice Age it was thought that all of the existing vegetation at the time of the massive ice sheets had been wiped out by the freezing temperatures and excessive pressure caused by the sheets themselves. But scientists have shown that some vegetation did survive in Scandinavia, which challenges this long-held scientific “truth”.

Originally, modern Scandinavian trees were thought to have arrived when some of the southern species of tree migrated north after the ice age, which was about 9,000 years ago. However, research published in the Science Mag science journal has shown that some conifers survived the ice age by existing on large peaks above the ice or on islands and on the coast.

Professor Eske Willerslev of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen reported that the species survived in small pockets which the ice couldn’t touch, before spreading outwards after the ice melted. But how did they survive in the ice, how did they find the room and shelter needed to stay alive amongst the fraught surroundings?

The answer is nunataks. Nunataks are common in glacial regions and pop out of the ice like a tiny island. They don’t have any ice or snow within its structure, or on the edges of it, which makes them the perfect place for a plant to grow and survive.

To find these results, the researchers used the DNA of two types of modern plant and the composition of the plants in the sediments of lake-core samples; yes, this is incredibly complicated. But to explain it in English, they compared the DNA of the old and the DNA of the new to see how much they matched up. If they were the same, or incredibly similar, then that means they are probably the same species.

However, the only issue with this theory is that modern nunataks in Greenland don’t have any plants growing on them, so how could this have happened in the age of ice? Of course, this doesn’t attack the fact that they have discovered that certain species around today may have existed before the Ice Age, but it does attack their theory as to why.

On a side note, this is why we have to love science because something which has stood as fact for so long has now been challenged. It sure as hell beats other fields of study where most things tend to stay the same all the time.

What do you think about these new findings, and how do you think these plants survived the Ice Age?