“The transplant was given to Claudia Castillo, a 30-year-old Colombian mother of two living in Barcelona, suffered from tuberculosis for years. After a severe collapse of her left lung in March, Castillo needed regular hospital visits to clear her airways and was unable to take care of her children. Doctors initially thought the only solution was to remove the entire left lung. But Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, head of thoracic surgery at Barcelona’s Hospital Clinic, proposed a windpipe transplant instead.” [Link]
“The launch of Chandrayaan-1, as the vehicle is called (it means, roughly translated, ‘Moon Craft-1’) comes about a year after China’s first moon mission. The Indian mission is scheduled to last for two years, prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the moon and prospect its surface for natural resources, including uranium, a coveted fuel for nuclear power plants, according to the Indian Space Research Organization, or I.S.R.O. Allusions to an Asian space race could not be contained, even as Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, was due for a visit to China later in the week.” [Link]
Rihanna picture
“To meet the new recommendation of 400 units daily, millions of children will need to take daily vitamin D supplements, the American Academy of Pediatrics said. That includes breast-fed infants — even those who get some formula, too, and many teens who drink little or no milk.” [Link]
Toccara Jones picture
“Much of the research linking excess weight and an increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, among other chronic diseases (the list goes on and on), has been done on people who are obese, with a BMI of 30 or more. When the merely overweight folks are separated out, the health risks drop and sometimes even disappear. ‘Being overweight may not be associated with any risk of heart disease,’ says Robert Eckel, MD, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado and past president of the American Heart Association. ” [Link]
“Artificial noses could one day replace dogs that sniff out drugs and explosives, and could have numerous medical applications including identifying diseases that have distinct odors, according to Shuguang Zhang, associate director of MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering and senior author of a study on the subject.” [Link]
Shuttle Endeavour picture
“The shuttle Endeavour is on standby in case the seven astronauts who go up on Atlantis next month need a safer ride home. Atlantis and its crew are headed into space for one last repair job on the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a venture that was canceled when first proposed a few years ago because it was considered too dangerous.” [Link]
“‘We believe that these devices are used because we consider them very safe, but it could cause harmful effects due to the proximity of the phones and the exposure that they are causing to the gonads,’ says lead researcher Ashok Agarwal, the Director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine.” [Link]
“Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites. He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.” [Link]
“Madison Decker has just celebrated her 1-month birthday, but the roots of her birth go back some 21 years: Her father, Ken, had his sperm frozen before undergoing chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease in the 1980s.” [Link]
Large Hadron Collider picture
“After 14 years of preparation, a new scientific wonder of the world opened for business Wednesday with the official startup of Europe’s Large Hadron Collider. The $10 billion particle accelerator is the biggest, most expensive science machine on earth, designed to probe mysteries ranging from dark matter and missing antimatter to the existence of extra, unseen dimensions in space.” [Link]
Polar Bear In Snow picture
“This year will see the second-biggest loss on record of Arctic sea ice — a sign that the area of ice coverage is shrinking at a pace faster than once expected. The trend also suggests that global warming is likely to increase, polar bear habitat will decline and previously icebound areas could be opened to oil and gas exploration.” [Link]
Recent Comments