IT City

Finally, a reason to start drinking alcohol

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – People who do not drink alcohol may finally have a reason to start — a study published on Friday shows non-drinkers who begin taking the occasional tipple live longer and are less likely to develop heart disease.

People who started drinking in middle age were 38 percent less likely to have a heart attack or other serious heart event than abstainers — even if they were overweight, had diabetes, high blood pressure or other heart risks, Dr. Dana King of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston and colleagues found.

Many studies have shown that light to moderate drinkers are healthier than teetotalers, but every time, the researchers have cautioned that there is no reason for the abstinent to start drinking.

Read more…

Brain Scanner Can Tell What You’re Looking At

Tell me what you see.

On second thought, don’t: A computer will soon be able to do it, simply by analyzing the activity of your brain.

That’s the promise of a decoding system unveiled this week in Nature by neuroscientists from the University of California at Berkeley.

Read more…

Physics lab completes world’s largest jigsaw puzzle

GENEVA (Reuters) – A 100-tonne wheel, the last piece of an ambitious experiment that scientists hope will help unlock the secrets of the universe, was successfully lowered into an underground cavern on Friday.

It is the final major element in the ATLAS particle detector, the largest of four detectors being hooked up to the world’s most powerful particle accelerator which the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) hopes to start up around the middle of 2008.

“This last piece completes this gigantic puzzle,” CERN said in a statement.

Read more…

Cell Phone Radiation Affects Human Skin Proteins

For some time now the usage mobiles phones has been associated to cause a number of dangerous diseases including brain tumor and cancer of salivary gland. Now a new research carried out by Finnish scientists has revealed that radiation from mobiles phones could alter the protein structure of the human skin, although its affect on the health is not yet known.

A group of researchers at the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) carried out tests where some part of participants’ skin was exposed to GSM signal for a period of one hour. The researchers then conducted biopsies of the exposed skin and compared it with the biopsy reports carried out on non-exposed parts of the skin.

Read more…

Trawl of two groups’ genes shows differences

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A trawl through the genes of white people in Utah and Yoruba people in Nigeria shows a significant number of differences that can explain why some groups respond differently to drugs than others.

The findings also suggest that genes underlie some susceptibility to diseases in a general population, the researchers report in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

What the study does not show, the researchers stress, is that any of these differences are necessarily racial. But they are a first step toward a day when medical care may be tailored not only for individuals, but for entire groups.

Read more…

Indians trace jump of bird flu virus to humans

Close on the heels of the bird flu outbreak in Bengal, an Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team led by Indian-born Ram Sasisekharan has explained just how bird flu spread to humans in 1918, leading to a pandemic that killed 50-100 million people worldwide.

Scientists fear the emergence of a new bird flu strain that could jump easily from birds to humans — potentially unleashing a pandemic.

Sasisekharan’s team reports in the February 18 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that two mutations in the 1918 bird flu virus played a key role in transmitting it to humans.

Read more…

Scientists make unique knee-brace power generator

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Talk about a knee-jerk reaction. Scientists in the United States and Canada said on Thursday they have developed a unique device that can be strapped on the knee that exploits the mechanics of human walking to generate a usable supply of electricity.

It generates enough power to charge up 10 cell phones at once, the researchers report in the journal Science.

Researchers have been working on ways to harness the motion of the human body to create power.

Read more…

Bird flu spreads to urban Bangladesh, officials say

DHAKA (Reuters) – Bird flu has spread to the Bangladesh capital Dhaka and to the port city Chittagong despite efforts by authorities to contain it, livestock officials said on Wednesday.

Dozens of dead crows found over the past two days in Dhaka have tested positive for the H5N1 strain of bird flu. City authorities have ordered a ban on the sale of undressed chicken in Dhaka markets, the officials said.

Read more…

Study links marijuana smoking to gum disease

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Smoking marijuana, much like smoking tobacco, may increase a person’s risk for gum disease that can lead to tooth loss, researchers said on Tuesday.

A study of 903 New Zealanders found that people who smoked marijuana frequently had triple the risk for severe gum disease and a 60 percent higher risk for a milder form of it compared to people who did not smoke the drug, also called cannabis.

People who smoked marijuana less frequently had a smaller increased risk for gum disease, the researchers said.

Read more…

Australian girl changes blood group, immune system

CANBERRA (Reuters) – An Australian teenage girl has become the world’s first known transplant patient to change blood groups and take on the immune system of her organ donor, doctors said on Friday, calling her a “one-in-six-billion miracle.”

Demi-Lee Brennan, now 15, received a donor liver when she was 9 years old and her own liver failed.

“It’s like my second chance at life,” Brennan told local media, recounting how her body achieved what doctors said was the holy grail of transplant surgery. “It’s kind of hard to believe.”

Read more…