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Terry Rudd has covered clinical news and health policy as a reporter and editor since 1994.
Auto-brewery syndrome and hangovers as ‘illnesses’
Food for thought/fermentation
The earliest known alcoholic beverage in the world was a fermented drink of rice, honey, and hawthorn fruit and/or grape that was brewed about 9,000 years ago in China’s Yellow River Valley.
Now there’s another candidate. Meet Klebsiella pneumonia, a common type of gut bacteria that just happens to make its own alcohol and appears to be the cause of a rare condition known as auto-brewery syndrome, which causes those affected to become drunk after eating alcohol-free and high-sugar food.
A group of Chinese investigators had a patient with auto-brewery syndrome and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and found he had several strains of K. pneumonia in his gut that produced high levels of alcohol. Then they sampled the gut microbiota from 43 NAFLD patients and 48 healthy people: 60% of the NAFLD patients had high- and medium-alcohol–producing K. pneumonia in their gut, compared with 6% of the controls.
When the team gave mice with NAFLD that had the alcohol-producing bacteria an antibiotic that killed K. pneumonia, their condition was reversed.
“These bacteria damage your liver just like alcohol, except you don’t have a choice,” lead author Jing Yuan said in a written statement.
That got us wondering: What if you do have a choice? Would a diet high in Cabernet and Merlot grapes give K. pneumonia the makings of Château Lafite Rothschild? Would you get Grey Goose if you ate enough French wheat? Would consumption of Optic or Belgravia malts give you Glenfiddich?
Why Ah-nold is more pumped than you
If you’ve watched “Pumping Iron” or “The Terminator,” you know the star of those films, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is driven to achieve his goals. Such as remorselessly squeezing the bodybuilding dreams of fellow “Pumping Iron” star Lou Ferrigno like a tube of toothpaste. Or finding Sarah Connor.
Given that quality, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that the seven-time Mr. Olympia with the 50-pound Austrian accent would somehow become California’s governator.
But why? Because Ah-nold is clearly a human bursting at his cyborglike biceps with “planfulness.”
Planfulness is the personality trait possessed by those who develop a clear plan when they have a goal that’s important to them. To find out how planfulness interacts with achieving long-term goals, University of Oregon researchers looked at the gym attendance of 282 people looking to get pumped up at a campus rec center.
Using a Planfulness Scale, the investigators tracked their study participants’ progress toward pumpitude. The ones who rated themselves as strong on planfulness were more likely to hit the gym consistently than were those with scrawny scores. In fact, a one-point increase on the five-point Planfulness Scale meant more than 14 extra gym visits over the course of two semesters.
Perhaps Ms. Connor should blame Hollywood’s planfulness for box-office profit, not Ah-nold’s, for the relentless pursuit of her in multiple “Terminator” movies.
A six-pack of illness juice, please
College students, rejoice: Your flimsy excuse to your professor that you’re sick and can’t go to class (when in reality you were out drinking – fruit juice for those with auto-brewery syndrome – all night and have a raging hangover) just got a lot stronger. That hangover is now classified as an illness.
Well, in Germany at least.
A court in Frankfurt has recently ruled against the manufacturer of a supposed “antihangover” cure, a product that contained antioxidants, electrolytes, and vitamins meant to combat the headaches, nausea, and tiredness associated with hangovers.
According to the German court, this is false advertising. Hangovers, by their definition, represent a small (clearly they’ve never dealt with a big hangover headache) and temporary change to the body’s normal state that is cured over time, which falls under the classification of an illness. And, in Germany, it is illegal for food and drink products to claim that they can cure illnesses.
Of course, the Germans have nailed the timing of this groundbreaking decision perfectly, as Oktoberfest is underway in Munich.
We still doubt your professor will believe your “Oh, I’m very sick today, I can’t come in” email, but at least you’ll be technically correct. And that’s the best sort of correct.
Food for thought/fermentation
The earliest known alcoholic beverage in the world was a fermented drink of rice, honey, and hawthorn fruit and/or grape that was brewed about 9,000 years ago in China’s Yellow River Valley.
Now there’s another candidate. Meet Klebsiella pneumonia, a common type of gut bacteria that just happens to make its own alcohol and appears to be the cause of a rare condition known as auto-brewery syndrome, which causes those affected to become drunk after eating alcohol-free and high-sugar food.
A group of Chinese investigators had a patient with auto-brewery syndrome and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and found he had several strains of K. pneumonia in his gut that produced high levels of alcohol. Then they sampled the gut microbiota from 43 NAFLD patients and 48 healthy people: 60% of the NAFLD patients had high- and medium-alcohol–producing K. pneumonia in their gut, compared with 6% of the controls.
When the team gave mice with NAFLD that had the alcohol-producing bacteria an antibiotic that killed K. pneumonia, their condition was reversed.
“These bacteria damage your liver just like alcohol, except you don’t have a choice,” lead author Jing Yuan said in a written statement.
That got us wondering: What if you do have a choice? Would a diet high in Cabernet and Merlot grapes give K. pneumonia the makings of Château Lafite Rothschild? Would you get Grey Goose if you ate enough French wheat? Would consumption of Optic or Belgravia malts give you Glenfiddich?
Why Ah-nold is more pumped than you
If you’ve watched “Pumping Iron” or “The Terminator,” you know the star of those films, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is driven to achieve his goals. Such as remorselessly squeezing the bodybuilding dreams of fellow “Pumping Iron” star Lou Ferrigno like a tube of toothpaste. Or finding Sarah Connor.
Given that quality, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that the seven-time Mr. Olympia with the 50-pound Austrian accent would somehow become California’s governator.
But why? Because Ah-nold is clearly a human bursting at his cyborglike biceps with “planfulness.”
Planfulness is the personality trait possessed by those who develop a clear plan when they have a goal that’s important to them. To find out how planfulness interacts with achieving long-term goals, University of Oregon researchers looked at the gym attendance of 282 people looking to get pumped up at a campus rec center.
Using a Planfulness Scale, the investigators tracked their study participants’ progress toward pumpitude. The ones who rated themselves as strong on planfulness were more likely to hit the gym consistently than were those with scrawny scores. In fact, a one-point increase on the five-point Planfulness Scale meant more than 14 extra gym visits over the course of two semesters.
Perhaps Ms. Connor should blame Hollywood’s planfulness for box-office profit, not Ah-nold’s, for the relentless pursuit of her in multiple “Terminator” movies.
A six-pack of illness juice, please
College students, rejoice: Your flimsy excuse to your professor that you’re sick and can’t go to class (when in reality you were out drinking – fruit juice for those with auto-brewery syndrome – all night and have a raging hangover) just got a lot stronger. That hangover is now classified as an illness.
Well, in Germany at least.
A court in Frankfurt has recently ruled against the manufacturer of a supposed “antihangover” cure, a product that contained antioxidants, electrolytes, and vitamins meant to combat the headaches, nausea, and tiredness associated with hangovers.
According to the German court, this is false advertising. Hangovers, by their definition, represent a small (clearly they’ve never dealt with a big hangover headache) and temporary change to the body’s normal state that is cured over time, which falls under the classification of an illness. And, in Germany, it is illegal for food and drink products to claim that they can cure illnesses.
Of course, the Germans have nailed the timing of this groundbreaking decision perfectly, as Oktoberfest is underway in Munich.
We still doubt your professor will believe your “Oh, I’m very sick today, I can’t come in” email, but at least you’ll be technically correct. And that’s the best sort of correct.
Food for thought/fermentation
The earliest known alcoholic beverage in the world was a fermented drink of rice, honey, and hawthorn fruit and/or grape that was brewed about 9,000 years ago in China’s Yellow River Valley.
Now there’s another candidate. Meet Klebsiella pneumonia, a common type of gut bacteria that just happens to make its own alcohol and appears to be the cause of a rare condition known as auto-brewery syndrome, which causes those affected to become drunk after eating alcohol-free and high-sugar food.
A group of Chinese investigators had a patient with auto-brewery syndrome and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and found he had several strains of K. pneumonia in his gut that produced high levels of alcohol. Then they sampled the gut microbiota from 43 NAFLD patients and 48 healthy people: 60% of the NAFLD patients had high- and medium-alcohol–producing K. pneumonia in their gut, compared with 6% of the controls.
When the team gave mice with NAFLD that had the alcohol-producing bacteria an antibiotic that killed K. pneumonia, their condition was reversed.
“These bacteria damage your liver just like alcohol, except you don’t have a choice,” lead author Jing Yuan said in a written statement.
That got us wondering: What if you do have a choice? Would a diet high in Cabernet and Merlot grapes give K. pneumonia the makings of Château Lafite Rothschild? Would you get Grey Goose if you ate enough French wheat? Would consumption of Optic or Belgravia malts give you Glenfiddich?
Why Ah-nold is more pumped than you
If you’ve watched “Pumping Iron” or “The Terminator,” you know the star of those films, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is driven to achieve his goals. Such as remorselessly squeezing the bodybuilding dreams of fellow “Pumping Iron” star Lou Ferrigno like a tube of toothpaste. Or finding Sarah Connor.
Given that quality, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that the seven-time Mr. Olympia with the 50-pound Austrian accent would somehow become California’s governator.
But why? Because Ah-nold is clearly a human bursting at his cyborglike biceps with “planfulness.”
Planfulness is the personality trait possessed by those who develop a clear plan when they have a goal that’s important to them. To find out how planfulness interacts with achieving long-term goals, University of Oregon researchers looked at the gym attendance of 282 people looking to get pumped up at a campus rec center.
Using a Planfulness Scale, the investigators tracked their study participants’ progress toward pumpitude. The ones who rated themselves as strong on planfulness were more likely to hit the gym consistently than were those with scrawny scores. In fact, a one-point increase on the five-point Planfulness Scale meant more than 14 extra gym visits over the course of two semesters.
Perhaps Ms. Connor should blame Hollywood’s planfulness for box-office profit, not Ah-nold’s, for the relentless pursuit of her in multiple “Terminator” movies.
A six-pack of illness juice, please
College students, rejoice: Your flimsy excuse to your professor that you’re sick and can’t go to class (when in reality you were out drinking – fruit juice for those with auto-brewery syndrome – all night and have a raging hangover) just got a lot stronger. That hangover is now classified as an illness.
Well, in Germany at least.
A court in Frankfurt has recently ruled against the manufacturer of a supposed “antihangover” cure, a product that contained antioxidants, electrolytes, and vitamins meant to combat the headaches, nausea, and tiredness associated with hangovers.
According to the German court, this is false advertising. Hangovers, by their definition, represent a small (clearly they’ve never dealt with a big hangover headache) and temporary change to the body’s normal state that is cured over time, which falls under the classification of an illness. And, in Germany, it is illegal for food and drink products to claim that they can cure illnesses.
Of course, the Germans have nailed the timing of this groundbreaking decision perfectly, as Oktoberfest is underway in Munich.
We still doubt your professor will believe your “Oh, I’m very sick today, I can’t come in” email, but at least you’ll be technically correct. And that’s the best sort of correct.
Cancer with meatballs and the unkindest frozen cut
Two great tastes that cause cancer together
Spaghetti and meatballs. They go together like chocolate and peanut butter. It almost feels wrong to eat one without the other; but if you’re worried about cancer, you may have to go meatless.
The latest blow to an enjoyable meal comes courtesy of a study published in Molecular Nutrition & Food Research, which tested how lycopene – a carotenoid found in tomatoes that has notable anticancer properties – is absorbed by the body when in the presence of iron, which meat contains plenty of. When the study subjects drank a tomato-based shake infused with iron, lycopene was far less present in the blood and digestive system than in subjects who drank an iron-free tomato shake.
The study authors claim that either the iron is oxidizing with the lycopene or that the iron turns the mix of tomato and fat into something like separated salad dressing, preventing everything from mixing together when it enters the body.
Tastes like chicken
It’s an enduring oncologic mystery: How can some cancer cells endure what should be a lethal therapeutic beating, only to bounce off the canvas after an eight-count to deliver a devastating relapse-counterpunch of their own?
A new study offers an unsavory answer: cannibalism.
Turns out that dining on one’s weaker cancer cell neighbors during a chemotherapy barrage provides just enough energy to rope-a-dope and stage a late-round comeback.
Breast cancer cells with wild-type TP53 genes are particularly prone to revival after taking a beating at the hands of doxorubicin or other chemotherapy drugs. Like many of their cancerous compatriots, they retreat to a corner of the therapy ring during chemo and go gloves up in a state of senescence.
But researchers at Tulane University noticed that, in the midst of that pharmaceutical pummeling, those senescent wild-type TP53 cells start doing something that their other senescent, cancerous neighbors don’t: They engulf other cancer cells. Why? Seems those breast cancer cells with the wild-type TP53 gloves are equipped with gene expression programs similar to macrophages.
What’s more, the cannibals’ appetite for fellow cells appears to confer a survival advantage when the chemo rounds end.
We at the Bureau of LOTME will resist the impulse to ring out this item with a tasteless Donner Party punchline. Instead, we’ll indulge our high-brow inner child by retooling an elementary school comedy classic.
Why don’t cancer-cell cannibals eat cancer-cell comedians? They taste funny.
Poop, what is it good for?
One thing you can cross off the list: Cutting meat.
That might seem pretty obvious, but there’s actually a bit of history here. In a book published in 1998, anthropologist Wade Davis shared an account of an elderly Inuit man trapped alone in a storm. He had no tools and no food, so he made a knife out of his own frozen stool and used it to kill and butcher a dog.
That story, which has since become something of an urban legend, directly inspired the career of another anthropologist, Metin Eren, PhD, of Kent State University in Ohio. As director of the school’s laboratory of experimental archaeology, Dr. Eren decided that the time had come to prove or disprove the poop-knife hypothesis.
First, he and his team had to make such a knife. To produce the needed raw materials, Dr. Eren went on an 8-day “Arctic diet” that included lots of beef, turkey, and salmon, with some applesauce and butternut squash risotto thrown in, while a colleague stuck to a more Western diet. Their samples were then frozen to –58° F and sharpened with metal files.
“I was surprised at how hard human feces could get when frozen,” Dr. Eren told Live Science. “I started to think, ‘Oh my gosh, this might actually work!’ ”
The team’s attempts to cut refrigerated pig hide, however, were not successful. “Like a crayon, it just left brown streaks on the meat – no slices at all,” he said.
Today’s lesson? Don’t meat your heroes or their poop knives; they’re sure to disappoint you.
Two great tastes that cause cancer together
Spaghetti and meatballs. They go together like chocolate and peanut butter. It almost feels wrong to eat one without the other; but if you’re worried about cancer, you may have to go meatless.
The latest blow to an enjoyable meal comes courtesy of a study published in Molecular Nutrition & Food Research, which tested how lycopene – a carotenoid found in tomatoes that has notable anticancer properties – is absorbed by the body when in the presence of iron, which meat contains plenty of. When the study subjects drank a tomato-based shake infused with iron, lycopene was far less present in the blood and digestive system than in subjects who drank an iron-free tomato shake.
The study authors claim that either the iron is oxidizing with the lycopene or that the iron turns the mix of tomato and fat into something like separated salad dressing, preventing everything from mixing together when it enters the body.
Tastes like chicken
It’s an enduring oncologic mystery: How can some cancer cells endure what should be a lethal therapeutic beating, only to bounce off the canvas after an eight-count to deliver a devastating relapse-counterpunch of their own?
A new study offers an unsavory answer: cannibalism.
Turns out that dining on one’s weaker cancer cell neighbors during a chemotherapy barrage provides just enough energy to rope-a-dope and stage a late-round comeback.
Breast cancer cells with wild-type TP53 genes are particularly prone to revival after taking a beating at the hands of doxorubicin or other chemotherapy drugs. Like many of their cancerous compatriots, they retreat to a corner of the therapy ring during chemo and go gloves up in a state of senescence.
But researchers at Tulane University noticed that, in the midst of that pharmaceutical pummeling, those senescent wild-type TP53 cells start doing something that their other senescent, cancerous neighbors don’t: They engulf other cancer cells. Why? Seems those breast cancer cells with the wild-type TP53 gloves are equipped with gene expression programs similar to macrophages.
What’s more, the cannibals’ appetite for fellow cells appears to confer a survival advantage when the chemo rounds end.
We at the Bureau of LOTME will resist the impulse to ring out this item with a tasteless Donner Party punchline. Instead, we’ll indulge our high-brow inner child by retooling an elementary school comedy classic.
Why don’t cancer-cell cannibals eat cancer-cell comedians? They taste funny.
Poop, what is it good for?
One thing you can cross off the list: Cutting meat.
That might seem pretty obvious, but there’s actually a bit of history here. In a book published in 1998, anthropologist Wade Davis shared an account of an elderly Inuit man trapped alone in a storm. He had no tools and no food, so he made a knife out of his own frozen stool and used it to kill and butcher a dog.
That story, which has since become something of an urban legend, directly inspired the career of another anthropologist, Metin Eren, PhD, of Kent State University in Ohio. As director of the school’s laboratory of experimental archaeology, Dr. Eren decided that the time had come to prove or disprove the poop-knife hypothesis.
First, he and his team had to make such a knife. To produce the needed raw materials, Dr. Eren went on an 8-day “Arctic diet” that included lots of beef, turkey, and salmon, with some applesauce and butternut squash risotto thrown in, while a colleague stuck to a more Western diet. Their samples were then frozen to –58° F and sharpened with metal files.
“I was surprised at how hard human feces could get when frozen,” Dr. Eren told Live Science. “I started to think, ‘Oh my gosh, this might actually work!’ ”
The team’s attempts to cut refrigerated pig hide, however, were not successful. “Like a crayon, it just left brown streaks on the meat – no slices at all,” he said.
Today’s lesson? Don’t meat your heroes or their poop knives; they’re sure to disappoint you.
Two great tastes that cause cancer together
Spaghetti and meatballs. They go together like chocolate and peanut butter. It almost feels wrong to eat one without the other; but if you’re worried about cancer, you may have to go meatless.
The latest blow to an enjoyable meal comes courtesy of a study published in Molecular Nutrition & Food Research, which tested how lycopene – a carotenoid found in tomatoes that has notable anticancer properties – is absorbed by the body when in the presence of iron, which meat contains plenty of. When the study subjects drank a tomato-based shake infused with iron, lycopene was far less present in the blood and digestive system than in subjects who drank an iron-free tomato shake.
The study authors claim that either the iron is oxidizing with the lycopene or that the iron turns the mix of tomato and fat into something like separated salad dressing, preventing everything from mixing together when it enters the body.
Tastes like chicken
It’s an enduring oncologic mystery: How can some cancer cells endure what should be a lethal therapeutic beating, only to bounce off the canvas after an eight-count to deliver a devastating relapse-counterpunch of their own?
A new study offers an unsavory answer: cannibalism.
Turns out that dining on one’s weaker cancer cell neighbors during a chemotherapy barrage provides just enough energy to rope-a-dope and stage a late-round comeback.
Breast cancer cells with wild-type TP53 genes are particularly prone to revival after taking a beating at the hands of doxorubicin or other chemotherapy drugs. Like many of their cancerous compatriots, they retreat to a corner of the therapy ring during chemo and go gloves up in a state of senescence.
But researchers at Tulane University noticed that, in the midst of that pharmaceutical pummeling, those senescent wild-type TP53 cells start doing something that their other senescent, cancerous neighbors don’t: They engulf other cancer cells. Why? Seems those breast cancer cells with the wild-type TP53 gloves are equipped with gene expression programs similar to macrophages.
What’s more, the cannibals’ appetite for fellow cells appears to confer a survival advantage when the chemo rounds end.
We at the Bureau of LOTME will resist the impulse to ring out this item with a tasteless Donner Party punchline. Instead, we’ll indulge our high-brow inner child by retooling an elementary school comedy classic.
Why don’t cancer-cell cannibals eat cancer-cell comedians? They taste funny.
Poop, what is it good for?
One thing you can cross off the list: Cutting meat.
That might seem pretty obvious, but there’s actually a bit of history here. In a book published in 1998, anthropologist Wade Davis shared an account of an elderly Inuit man trapped alone in a storm. He had no tools and no food, so he made a knife out of his own frozen stool and used it to kill and butcher a dog.
That story, which has since become something of an urban legend, directly inspired the career of another anthropologist, Metin Eren, PhD, of Kent State University in Ohio. As director of the school’s laboratory of experimental archaeology, Dr. Eren decided that the time had come to prove or disprove the poop-knife hypothesis.
First, he and his team had to make such a knife. To produce the needed raw materials, Dr. Eren went on an 8-day “Arctic diet” that included lots of beef, turkey, and salmon, with some applesauce and butternut squash risotto thrown in, while a colleague stuck to a more Western diet. Their samples were then frozen to –58° F and sharpened with metal files.
“I was surprised at how hard human feces could get when frozen,” Dr. Eren told Live Science. “I started to think, ‘Oh my gosh, this might actually work!’ ”
The team’s attempts to cut refrigerated pig hide, however, were not successful. “Like a crayon, it just left brown streaks on the meat – no slices at all,” he said.
Today’s lesson? Don’t meat your heroes or their poop knives; they’re sure to disappoint you.
VIDEO: Dr. Lihi Eder on the diagnostic challenges of psoriatic arthritis
How strong are the links between psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis? What are the biggest challenges that keep clinicians from diagnosing PsA? And which approaches show promise in helping prevent PsA? In this expert analysis, Lihi Eder, MD, PhD, of Women’s College Research Institute, Toronto, and the University of Toronto offers answers to these questions and more.
How strong are the links between psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis? What are the biggest challenges that keep clinicians from diagnosing PsA? And which approaches show promise in helping prevent PsA? In this expert analysis, Lihi Eder, MD, PhD, of Women’s College Research Institute, Toronto, and the University of Toronto offers answers to these questions and more.
How strong are the links between psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis? What are the biggest challenges that keep clinicians from diagnosing PsA? And which approaches show promise in helping prevent PsA? In this expert analysis, Lihi Eder, MD, PhD, of Women’s College Research Institute, Toronto, and the University of Toronto offers answers to these questions and more.
Texting a stroke, game-show grants, and, um, The Beast
Autocorrect, or worse?
Is it just fat thumbs, or something more serious? Incoherent text messages could be the first sign of a stroke for adults, as displayed in two case reports presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology.
It makes sense that stroke can cause dystextia: Typing on a phone involves some fine motor, language, and vision skills. Stroke can affect all these functions, leading to bizarre typos or angry political rants on Facebook.
Just kidding; those are equally as concerning but require a whole different diagnosis.
‘Research Funds’ for $11,000, Alex
In the universal struggle for research funding, many a scientist has resorted to desperate measures to keep the lab assistants paid, the JAX Mice fed, and the frontiers of medical science expanding ever outward.
Marina Simian is a biologist for Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council. She runs a research lab focused on oncology treatments for breast cancer. Faced with a national economic crisis and cuts to research funding, Simian says government funding has nearly dried up. Where did she turn instead?
Enter the local version of the TV game show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Simian went on the show as a contestant, explaining that she needed money to support her cancer research. And when the camera cut away to commercials, Simian walked away with 500,000 pesos ($11,000) in winnings. Which she used to buy more lab supplies.
Admittedly, the “Slumdog Millionaire” approach may not save every cash-strapped scientist’s pet project, but it does give us an idea for game show super champ James Holzhauer’s career when he finally wears out his “Jeopardy!” buzzer: medical research funding consultant.
FDA tames THE BEAST
The LOTME staff had a meeting the other day with our editor (we think he might be the love child of Lois Lane and Ron Burgundy), who said that lately we’ve been “too juvenile” and “not medical enough” and told us to get our “dirty little minds out of the gutter.”
After we stopped crying, he offered up this item from the Food and Drug Administration:
“STIFF BOY LLC. Issues Voluntary Nationwide Recall of THE BEAST Capsules Due to Presence of Undeclared Sildenafil” (no, we did not add the all-caps).
Okay, here goes.
THE BEAST was marketed as a dietary supplement for “male enhancement” (add nonjuvenile but hilarious remark about tumescence), which would not be regulated by the FDA. The presence of Viagra’s active ingredient in the capsules, however, “renders it an unapproved drug for which safety and efficacy have not been established and, therefore, subject to recall,” the FDA said (insert comment about seemingly serious but totally fictitious side effects).
Although the sildenafil in THE BEAST may interact with nitrates found in some prescription drugs, STIFF BOY said that it had not received any reports of adverse events before the recall (imagine a guy working on the engine of his pickup truck).
Seek immediate medical attention if your laughter lasts for more than 4 hours after reading this.
Time flies when you’re having ‘fun’
Match Day is one of the most exciting times in any young, prospective doctor’s life. Finally, the specialty of your dreams is yours. You know the training will be stressful and the hours will be long, but how bad could it be?
It’s not like it’ll take years off your life, right?
Well, according to new research published in Biological Psychiatry, that’s almost exactly what medical residency will do to you.
The researchers took a group of medical students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, entering their first year of residency and measured their telomere length both before and after their internship year, comparing it with a group of first-year undergraduates. Rapidly shrinking telomere length is a well-accepted sign of aging, and interns had their telomeres shrink at a rate six times faster than their nonmedical peers, who were apparently too busy doing upside-down kegstands to notice how stressful college can be.
Oh, don’t worry, there was most definitely an association between hours worked and increased telomere shrinkage. Those who had to work more than 80 hours a week aged most of all.
So, if you emerge from a particularly difficult internship with the sudden desire to yell at those darn kids for being on your lawn, we completely understand.
Autocorrect, or worse?
Is it just fat thumbs, or something more serious? Incoherent text messages could be the first sign of a stroke for adults, as displayed in two case reports presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology.
It makes sense that stroke can cause dystextia: Typing on a phone involves some fine motor, language, and vision skills. Stroke can affect all these functions, leading to bizarre typos or angry political rants on Facebook.
Just kidding; those are equally as concerning but require a whole different diagnosis.
‘Research Funds’ for $11,000, Alex
In the universal struggle for research funding, many a scientist has resorted to desperate measures to keep the lab assistants paid, the JAX Mice fed, and the frontiers of medical science expanding ever outward.
Marina Simian is a biologist for Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council. She runs a research lab focused on oncology treatments for breast cancer. Faced with a national economic crisis and cuts to research funding, Simian says government funding has nearly dried up. Where did she turn instead?
Enter the local version of the TV game show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Simian went on the show as a contestant, explaining that she needed money to support her cancer research. And when the camera cut away to commercials, Simian walked away with 500,000 pesos ($11,000) in winnings. Which she used to buy more lab supplies.
Admittedly, the “Slumdog Millionaire” approach may not save every cash-strapped scientist’s pet project, but it does give us an idea for game show super champ James Holzhauer’s career when he finally wears out his “Jeopardy!” buzzer: medical research funding consultant.
FDA tames THE BEAST
The LOTME staff had a meeting the other day with our editor (we think he might be the love child of Lois Lane and Ron Burgundy), who said that lately we’ve been “too juvenile” and “not medical enough” and told us to get our “dirty little minds out of the gutter.”
After we stopped crying, he offered up this item from the Food and Drug Administration:
“STIFF BOY LLC. Issues Voluntary Nationwide Recall of THE BEAST Capsules Due to Presence of Undeclared Sildenafil” (no, we did not add the all-caps).
Okay, here goes.
THE BEAST was marketed as a dietary supplement for “male enhancement” (add nonjuvenile but hilarious remark about tumescence), which would not be regulated by the FDA. The presence of Viagra’s active ingredient in the capsules, however, “renders it an unapproved drug for which safety and efficacy have not been established and, therefore, subject to recall,” the FDA said (insert comment about seemingly serious but totally fictitious side effects).
Although the sildenafil in THE BEAST may interact with nitrates found in some prescription drugs, STIFF BOY said that it had not received any reports of adverse events before the recall (imagine a guy working on the engine of his pickup truck).
Seek immediate medical attention if your laughter lasts for more than 4 hours after reading this.
Time flies when you’re having ‘fun’
Match Day is one of the most exciting times in any young, prospective doctor’s life. Finally, the specialty of your dreams is yours. You know the training will be stressful and the hours will be long, but how bad could it be?
It’s not like it’ll take years off your life, right?
Well, according to new research published in Biological Psychiatry, that’s almost exactly what medical residency will do to you.
The researchers took a group of medical students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, entering their first year of residency and measured their telomere length both before and after their internship year, comparing it with a group of first-year undergraduates. Rapidly shrinking telomere length is a well-accepted sign of aging, and interns had their telomeres shrink at a rate six times faster than their nonmedical peers, who were apparently too busy doing upside-down kegstands to notice how stressful college can be.
Oh, don’t worry, there was most definitely an association between hours worked and increased telomere shrinkage. Those who had to work more than 80 hours a week aged most of all.
So, if you emerge from a particularly difficult internship with the sudden desire to yell at those darn kids for being on your lawn, we completely understand.
Autocorrect, or worse?
Is it just fat thumbs, or something more serious? Incoherent text messages could be the first sign of a stroke for adults, as displayed in two case reports presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology.
It makes sense that stroke can cause dystextia: Typing on a phone involves some fine motor, language, and vision skills. Stroke can affect all these functions, leading to bizarre typos or angry political rants on Facebook.
Just kidding; those are equally as concerning but require a whole different diagnosis.
‘Research Funds’ for $11,000, Alex
In the universal struggle for research funding, many a scientist has resorted to desperate measures to keep the lab assistants paid, the JAX Mice fed, and the frontiers of medical science expanding ever outward.
Marina Simian is a biologist for Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council. She runs a research lab focused on oncology treatments for breast cancer. Faced with a national economic crisis and cuts to research funding, Simian says government funding has nearly dried up. Where did she turn instead?
Enter the local version of the TV game show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Simian went on the show as a contestant, explaining that she needed money to support her cancer research. And when the camera cut away to commercials, Simian walked away with 500,000 pesos ($11,000) in winnings. Which she used to buy more lab supplies.
Admittedly, the “Slumdog Millionaire” approach may not save every cash-strapped scientist’s pet project, but it does give us an idea for game show super champ James Holzhauer’s career when he finally wears out his “Jeopardy!” buzzer: medical research funding consultant.
FDA tames THE BEAST
The LOTME staff had a meeting the other day with our editor (we think he might be the love child of Lois Lane and Ron Burgundy), who said that lately we’ve been “too juvenile” and “not medical enough” and told us to get our “dirty little minds out of the gutter.”
After we stopped crying, he offered up this item from the Food and Drug Administration:
“STIFF BOY LLC. Issues Voluntary Nationwide Recall of THE BEAST Capsules Due to Presence of Undeclared Sildenafil” (no, we did not add the all-caps).
Okay, here goes.
THE BEAST was marketed as a dietary supplement for “male enhancement” (add nonjuvenile but hilarious remark about tumescence), which would not be regulated by the FDA. The presence of Viagra’s active ingredient in the capsules, however, “renders it an unapproved drug for which safety and efficacy have not been established and, therefore, subject to recall,” the FDA said (insert comment about seemingly serious but totally fictitious side effects).
Although the sildenafil in THE BEAST may interact with nitrates found in some prescription drugs, STIFF BOY said that it had not received any reports of adverse events before the recall (imagine a guy working on the engine of his pickup truck).
Seek immediate medical attention if your laughter lasts for more than 4 hours after reading this.
Time flies when you’re having ‘fun’
Match Day is one of the most exciting times in any young, prospective doctor’s life. Finally, the specialty of your dreams is yours. You know the training will be stressful and the hours will be long, but how bad could it be?
It’s not like it’ll take years off your life, right?
Well, according to new research published in Biological Psychiatry, that’s almost exactly what medical residency will do to you.
The researchers took a group of medical students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, entering their first year of residency and measured their telomere length both before and after their internship year, comparing it with a group of first-year undergraduates. Rapidly shrinking telomere length is a well-accepted sign of aging, and interns had their telomeres shrink at a rate six times faster than their nonmedical peers, who were apparently too busy doing upside-down kegstands to notice how stressful college can be.
Oh, don’t worry, there was most definitely an association between hours worked and increased telomere shrinkage. Those who had to work more than 80 hours a week aged most of all.
So, if you emerge from a particularly difficult internship with the sudden desire to yell at those darn kids for being on your lawn, we completely understand.
Highlights from the ‘Updates in ACS’ session (VIDEO)
Hospital Medicine 2019 attendees outlined their key takeaways from the Updates in Acute Coronary Syndrome session, presented by Jeffrey Trost, MD, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
Dr. Trost’s discussion focused on the relationship between dual antiplatelet therapy, in-stent thrombosis, and in-stent restenosis. He also explored the diagnostic role of fractional flow reserve, and he outlined effective approaches to PCSK9 inhibitor use.
Hospital Medicine 2019 attendees outlined their key takeaways from the Updates in Acute Coronary Syndrome session, presented by Jeffrey Trost, MD, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
Dr. Trost’s discussion focused on the relationship between dual antiplatelet therapy, in-stent thrombosis, and in-stent restenosis. He also explored the diagnostic role of fractional flow reserve, and he outlined effective approaches to PCSK9 inhibitor use.
Hospital Medicine 2019 attendees outlined their key takeaways from the Updates in Acute Coronary Syndrome session, presented by Jeffrey Trost, MD, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
Dr. Trost’s discussion focused on the relationship between dual antiplatelet therapy, in-stent thrombosis, and in-stent restenosis. He also explored the diagnostic role of fractional flow reserve, and he outlined effective approaches to PCSK9 inhibitor use.
REPORTING FROM HM19
Sleepless democracy, space herpes, and the F-bomb diet
Sleep: the key to democracy?
You might need to lie down for this one. Insufficient sleep could be affecting the very institutions and behaviors that keep society from crumbling.
Lack of sleep is proven to affect “private” behaviors, like working, but a new study has shown that exhaustion also has consequences on a national scale. Sleeping less negatively affects the “social behaviors that hold society and democracy together,” according to the study’s authors.
Willingness to vote, donate to charities, and sign petitions decreased in sleep-deprived participants. Although that last one is iffy – is anyone really willing to sign a petition, regardless of sleep intake? One thing to glean from this study is, if you’re holding a clipboard, let the most tired-looking people keep walking.
Perhaps we should start a petition to make the day before Election Day a national napping holiday.
I hear you knocking, but you can’t come in
LOTME takes you to the ends of the earth for this edition of Bacteria vs. the World. Let’s go to our correspondent, Danielle Kang, on the International Space Station. 
Hi, this is Briny Baird in Berlin, Germany. The space station’s extreme environment weakens astronauts’ immune systems, but it has the opposite effect on bacteria, as Elisabeth Grohmann, PhD, of Beuth University of Applied Sciences explains.
“The bacteria [astronauts] carry become hardier – developing thick protective coatings and resistance to antibiotics – and more vigorous, multiplying and metabolizing faster.”
This is, as scientists put it, bad. To prevent an on-board bacterial bacchanal, Dr. Grohmann and her associates covered a vital piece of ISS equipment, the toilet door, with a new coating containing “silver and ruthenium, conditioned by a vitamin derivative.” After 19 months in space, the coated section of the door had 80% fewer bacteria on it than an uncoated control surface.
With long-term missions to Mars being considered, it should be safer for astronauts and their toilet doors to … go where no one has gone before. Back to the studio.
The F-bomb diet
You might think vulgarities and Homo sapiens have been an inseparable pair since the first human bashed her thumb while chipping stones into spearheads to add meat to her diet. You’d probably be right – except for blue-tinged language built on the consonant foundations of the letters F and V.
New linguistics research finds that those $#%*! letters, like truckers and Marine gunnery sergeants, are relatively modern developments. As humans moved away from finger-harming hunting and gathering and toward finger-harming farming, they developed a taste for softer foods. And their speech picked up “labiodentals” such as F and V – which are sounds made when we touch our lower lips to our upper teeth. Half the world’s languages are now riddled with soft-food profanities, er, labiodentals.
Next on the linguists’ research list: Does the paleo diet lead to the dropping of fewer F-bombs?
Herpes! In space!
Viruses can never let bacteria have all the fun. Where there’s an immune system weakened by radiation and microgravity, rest assured, our old friend the herpes virus will be waiting for us.
Yes, it looks like frequent bathroom trips won’t be the only issue future Dr. McCoys will be treating. According to a study published in Frontiers in Microbiology, four of the eight herpes viruses were discovered in the saliva and urine of more than half of the hundred or so astronauts who had samples analyzed during spaceflight.
The good news is that only six astronauts actually had symptoms emerge, all of which were minor. The bad news is that the strength, frequency, and duration of viral shedding through urine and saliva increased as more time was spent in space. Also, only one of the herpes varieties found has a vaccine. The rest will just have to be treated as symptoms emerge.
We’ll just hope Captain Kirk doesn’t come down with a case of mononucleosis while fighting the Klingons. Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a miracle worker!
Sleep: the key to democracy?
You might need to lie down for this one. Insufficient sleep could be affecting the very institutions and behaviors that keep society from crumbling.
Lack of sleep is proven to affect “private” behaviors, like working, but a new study has shown that exhaustion also has consequences on a national scale. Sleeping less negatively affects the “social behaviors that hold society and democracy together,” according to the study’s authors.
Willingness to vote, donate to charities, and sign petitions decreased in sleep-deprived participants. Although that last one is iffy – is anyone really willing to sign a petition, regardless of sleep intake? One thing to glean from this study is, if you’re holding a clipboard, let the most tired-looking people keep walking.
Perhaps we should start a petition to make the day before Election Day a national napping holiday.
I hear you knocking, but you can’t come in
LOTME takes you to the ends of the earth for this edition of Bacteria vs. the World. Let’s go to our correspondent, Danielle Kang, on the International Space Station.
Hi, this is Briny Baird in Berlin, Germany. The space station’s extreme environment weakens astronauts’ immune systems, but it has the opposite effect on bacteria, as Elisabeth Grohmann, PhD, of Beuth University of Applied Sciences explains.
“The bacteria [astronauts] carry become hardier – developing thick protective coatings and resistance to antibiotics – and more vigorous, multiplying and metabolizing faster.”
This is, as scientists put it, bad. To prevent an on-board bacterial bacchanal, Dr. Grohmann and her associates covered a vital piece of ISS equipment, the toilet door, with a new coating containing “silver and ruthenium, conditioned by a vitamin derivative.” After 19 months in space, the coated section of the door had 80% fewer bacteria on it than an uncoated control surface.
With long-term missions to Mars being considered, it should be safer for astronauts and their toilet doors to … go where no one has gone before. Back to the studio.
The F-bomb diet
You might think vulgarities and Homo sapiens have been an inseparable pair since the first human bashed her thumb while chipping stones into spearheads to add meat to her diet. You’d probably be right – except for blue-tinged language built on the consonant foundations of the letters F and V.
New linguistics research finds that those $#%*! letters, like truckers and Marine gunnery sergeants, are relatively modern developments. As humans moved away from finger-harming hunting and gathering and toward finger-harming farming, they developed a taste for softer foods. And their speech picked up “labiodentals” such as F and V – which are sounds made when we touch our lower lips to our upper teeth. Half the world’s languages are now riddled with soft-food profanities, er, labiodentals.
Next on the linguists’ research list: Does the paleo diet lead to the dropping of fewer F-bombs?
Herpes! In space!
Viruses can never let bacteria have all the fun. Where there’s an immune system weakened by radiation and microgravity, rest assured, our old friend the herpes virus will be waiting for us.
Yes, it looks like frequent bathroom trips won’t be the only issue future Dr. McCoys will be treating. According to a study published in Frontiers in Microbiology, four of the eight herpes viruses were discovered in the saliva and urine of more than half of the hundred or so astronauts who had samples analyzed during spaceflight.
The good news is that only six astronauts actually had symptoms emerge, all of which were minor. The bad news is that the strength, frequency, and duration of viral shedding through urine and saliva increased as more time was spent in space. Also, only one of the herpes varieties found has a vaccine. The rest will just have to be treated as symptoms emerge.
We’ll just hope Captain Kirk doesn’t come down with a case of mononucleosis while fighting the Klingons. Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a miracle worker!
Sleep: the key to democracy?
You might need to lie down for this one. Insufficient sleep could be affecting the very institutions and behaviors that keep society from crumbling.
Lack of sleep is proven to affect “private” behaviors, like working, but a new study has shown that exhaustion also has consequences on a national scale. Sleeping less negatively affects the “social behaviors that hold society and democracy together,” according to the study’s authors.
Willingness to vote, donate to charities, and sign petitions decreased in sleep-deprived participants. Although that last one is iffy – is anyone really willing to sign a petition, regardless of sleep intake? One thing to glean from this study is, if you’re holding a clipboard, let the most tired-looking people keep walking.
Perhaps we should start a petition to make the day before Election Day a national napping holiday.
I hear you knocking, but you can’t come in
LOTME takes you to the ends of the earth for this edition of Bacteria vs. the World. Let’s go to our correspondent, Danielle Kang, on the International Space Station.
Hi, this is Briny Baird in Berlin, Germany. The space station’s extreme environment weakens astronauts’ immune systems, but it has the opposite effect on bacteria, as Elisabeth Grohmann, PhD, of Beuth University of Applied Sciences explains.
“The bacteria [astronauts] carry become hardier – developing thick protective coatings and resistance to antibiotics – and more vigorous, multiplying and metabolizing faster.”
This is, as scientists put it, bad. To prevent an on-board bacterial bacchanal, Dr. Grohmann and her associates covered a vital piece of ISS equipment, the toilet door, with a new coating containing “silver and ruthenium, conditioned by a vitamin derivative.” After 19 months in space, the coated section of the door had 80% fewer bacteria on it than an uncoated control surface.
With long-term missions to Mars being considered, it should be safer for astronauts and their toilet doors to … go where no one has gone before. Back to the studio.
The F-bomb diet
You might think vulgarities and Homo sapiens have been an inseparable pair since the first human bashed her thumb while chipping stones into spearheads to add meat to her diet. You’d probably be right – except for blue-tinged language built on the consonant foundations of the letters F and V.
New linguistics research finds that those $#%*! letters, like truckers and Marine gunnery sergeants, are relatively modern developments. As humans moved away from finger-harming hunting and gathering and toward finger-harming farming, they developed a taste for softer foods. And their speech picked up “labiodentals” such as F and V – which are sounds made when we touch our lower lips to our upper teeth. Half the world’s languages are now riddled with soft-food profanities, er, labiodentals.
Next on the linguists’ research list: Does the paleo diet lead to the dropping of fewer F-bombs?
Herpes! In space!
Viruses can never let bacteria have all the fun. Where there’s an immune system weakened by radiation and microgravity, rest assured, our old friend the herpes virus will be waiting for us.
Yes, it looks like frequent bathroom trips won’t be the only issue future Dr. McCoys will be treating. According to a study published in Frontiers in Microbiology, four of the eight herpes viruses were discovered in the saliva and urine of more than half of the hundred or so astronauts who had samples analyzed during spaceflight.
The good news is that only six astronauts actually had symptoms emerge, all of which were minor. The bad news is that the strength, frequency, and duration of viral shedding through urine and saliva increased as more time was spent in space. Also, only one of the herpes varieties found has a vaccine. The rest will just have to be treated as symptoms emerge.
We’ll just hope Captain Kirk doesn’t come down with a case of mononucleosis while fighting the Klingons. Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a miracle worker!
Transplanted food allergies, cavity-check hospital bills, and cancer-blocking houseplants
One lung, please (Hold the food allergy)
Is an organ transplant really worth the risk of developing a food allergy? Probably (er, definitely), but it still totally stinks. A 68-year-old woman suffered an allergic reaction to an innocent peanut butter and jelly sandwich earlier this year, after spending decades of eating peanut butter with no problem. Turns out, her lung transplant donor was allergic to peanuts and unfortunately passed that curse onto her. At least he wasn’t lactose intolerant – can you imagine suddenly being unable to eat cheese?!
Passing on allergies via transplant is extremely rare; there are only about five cases of transplanted peanut allergies. The use of tacrolimus, an immunosuppressive drug, can also increase the risk of contracting food allergies post transplant. Luckily, the woman in question was still in the hospital when she began experiencing symptoms of an allergy attack, and doctors were able to correctly identify and punish the offending sandwich.
A debt of ingratitude
Medical personnel generally don’t get involved in searches for illegal drugs, but physicians at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, N.Y., found themselves in just such a position. Because the police had a court order. Because the suspect said that he’d hidden drugs … in his rectum.
An x-ray had shown no evidence of drugs, but physicians there performed a sigmoidoscopy on Torrence Jackson after a hospital lawyer said “that a search warrant required the doctors to use ‘any means’ to retrieve the drugs,” according to a recent Syracuse.com report of the incident, which took place on Oct. 16, 2017. The sigmoidoscopy confirmed the x-ray finding, or lack thereof, and drug charges against Mr. Jackson eventually were thrown out.
The health care system, however, did its part to put a cherry on top of the situation: The hospital billed Mr. Jackson $4,595.12 for the procedure, and then said it would turn the matter over to a debt collector when he refused to pay.
Cancer-blocking plants?
All hail the GMOs! Researchers from the University of Washington have used genetic modification on a houseplant to turn it into a lean, green, chloroform-eatin’ machine. These mad scientists modified devil’s ivy to pull chloroform (found in chlorinated water) and benzene (found in gasoline) from the air and use them for plant growth.
These compounds are often so small they can’t be caught by air filters but can still cause damage – exposure to chloroform and benzene has been linked to cancer. Now, you can lessen your risk of cancer and enjoy some nice greenery in your home. Researchers have also started working on a new genetic modification to remove formaldehyde compounds from the air. It looks like the future of health is all about plants!
It must be true – it’s in a study
There’s untested, widely accepted truth, and then there’s empirically tested truth demonstrated in a rigorous scientific trial. Untested, widely accepted truth in point: Compared with using a simple backpack, parachute use is more likely to prevent death or major traumatic injury when leaping from an aircraft. Of course, no one’s ever done a study to prove it. Because, duh. Also, institutional review boards. Also, lawyers.
Until now.
Robert Yeh, M.D., of Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues began recruiting for just such a research trial while flying commercially. Few seat mates took up their randomized-to-parachute-or-backpack offer. That forced Dr. Yeh to recruit randomized participants from among fellow academics. Twenty-three research-minded souls agreed to make the leap for scientific progress from either a biplane or a helicopter, thereby making the study “Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial” a BMJ-published reality.
The results? “Our groundbreaking study found no statistically significant difference in the primary outcome between the treatment and control arms.”
How can the scientific method explain such a skydiving miracle? Because each and every study participant leaped ... 2 feet. From a parked biplane or helicopter.
“Although we can confidently recommend that individuals jumping from small stationary aircraft on the ground do not require parachutes, individual judgment should be exercised when applying these findings at higher altitudes.” It’s also possible the study authors are suggesting individual judgment should have a parachute, not a backpack, when physicians dive into a study’s scientific methodology.
One lung, please (Hold the food allergy)
Is an organ transplant really worth the risk of developing a food allergy? Probably (er, definitely), but it still totally stinks. A 68-year-old woman suffered an allergic reaction to an innocent peanut butter and jelly sandwich earlier this year, after spending decades of eating peanut butter with no problem. Turns out, her lung transplant donor was allergic to peanuts and unfortunately passed that curse onto her. At least he wasn’t lactose intolerant – can you imagine suddenly being unable to eat cheese?!
Passing on allergies via transplant is extremely rare; there are only about five cases of transplanted peanut allergies. The use of tacrolimus, an immunosuppressive drug, can also increase the risk of contracting food allergies post transplant. Luckily, the woman in question was still in the hospital when she began experiencing symptoms of an allergy attack, and doctors were able to correctly identify and punish the offending sandwich.
A debt of ingratitude
Medical personnel generally don’t get involved in searches for illegal drugs, but physicians at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, N.Y., found themselves in just such a position. Because the police had a court order. Because the suspect said that he’d hidden drugs … in his rectum.
An x-ray had shown no evidence of drugs, but physicians there performed a sigmoidoscopy on Torrence Jackson after a hospital lawyer said “that a search warrant required the doctors to use ‘any means’ to retrieve the drugs,” according to a recent Syracuse.com report of the incident, which took place on Oct. 16, 2017. The sigmoidoscopy confirmed the x-ray finding, or lack thereof, and drug charges against Mr. Jackson eventually were thrown out.
The health care system, however, did its part to put a cherry on top of the situation: The hospital billed Mr. Jackson $4,595.12 for the procedure, and then said it would turn the matter over to a debt collector when he refused to pay.
Cancer-blocking plants?
All hail the GMOs! Researchers from the University of Washington have used genetic modification on a houseplant to turn it into a lean, green, chloroform-eatin’ machine. These mad scientists modified devil’s ivy to pull chloroform (found in chlorinated water) and benzene (found in gasoline) from the air and use them for plant growth.
These compounds are often so small they can’t be caught by air filters but can still cause damage – exposure to chloroform and benzene has been linked to cancer. Now, you can lessen your risk of cancer and enjoy some nice greenery in your home. Researchers have also started working on a new genetic modification to remove formaldehyde compounds from the air. It looks like the future of health is all about plants!
It must be true – it’s in a study
There’s untested, widely accepted truth, and then there’s empirically tested truth demonstrated in a rigorous scientific trial. Untested, widely accepted truth in point: Compared with using a simple backpack, parachute use is more likely to prevent death or major traumatic injury when leaping from an aircraft. Of course, no one’s ever done a study to prove it. Because, duh. Also, institutional review boards. Also, lawyers.
Until now.
Robert Yeh, M.D., of Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues began recruiting for just such a research trial while flying commercially. Few seat mates took up their randomized-to-parachute-or-backpack offer. That forced Dr. Yeh to recruit randomized participants from among fellow academics. Twenty-three research-minded souls agreed to make the leap for scientific progress from either a biplane or a helicopter, thereby making the study “Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial” a BMJ-published reality.
The results? “Our groundbreaking study found no statistically significant difference in the primary outcome between the treatment and control arms.”
How can the scientific method explain such a skydiving miracle? Because each and every study participant leaped ... 2 feet. From a parked biplane or helicopter.
“Although we can confidently recommend that individuals jumping from small stationary aircraft on the ground do not require parachutes, individual judgment should be exercised when applying these findings at higher altitudes.” It’s also possible the study authors are suggesting individual judgment should have a parachute, not a backpack, when physicians dive into a study’s scientific methodology.
One lung, please (Hold the food allergy)
Is an organ transplant really worth the risk of developing a food allergy? Probably (er, definitely), but it still totally stinks. A 68-year-old woman suffered an allergic reaction to an innocent peanut butter and jelly sandwich earlier this year, after spending decades of eating peanut butter with no problem. Turns out, her lung transplant donor was allergic to peanuts and unfortunately passed that curse onto her. At least he wasn’t lactose intolerant – can you imagine suddenly being unable to eat cheese?!
Passing on allergies via transplant is extremely rare; there are only about five cases of transplanted peanut allergies. The use of tacrolimus, an immunosuppressive drug, can also increase the risk of contracting food allergies post transplant. Luckily, the woman in question was still in the hospital when she began experiencing symptoms of an allergy attack, and doctors were able to correctly identify and punish the offending sandwich.
A debt of ingratitude
Medical personnel generally don’t get involved in searches for illegal drugs, but physicians at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, N.Y., found themselves in just such a position. Because the police had a court order. Because the suspect said that he’d hidden drugs … in his rectum.
An x-ray had shown no evidence of drugs, but physicians there performed a sigmoidoscopy on Torrence Jackson after a hospital lawyer said “that a search warrant required the doctors to use ‘any means’ to retrieve the drugs,” according to a recent Syracuse.com report of the incident, which took place on Oct. 16, 2017. The sigmoidoscopy confirmed the x-ray finding, or lack thereof, and drug charges against Mr. Jackson eventually were thrown out.
The health care system, however, did its part to put a cherry on top of the situation: The hospital billed Mr. Jackson $4,595.12 for the procedure, and then said it would turn the matter over to a debt collector when he refused to pay.
Cancer-blocking plants?
All hail the GMOs! Researchers from the University of Washington have used genetic modification on a houseplant to turn it into a lean, green, chloroform-eatin’ machine. These mad scientists modified devil’s ivy to pull chloroform (found in chlorinated water) and benzene (found in gasoline) from the air and use them for plant growth.
These compounds are often so small they can’t be caught by air filters but can still cause damage – exposure to chloroform and benzene has been linked to cancer. Now, you can lessen your risk of cancer and enjoy some nice greenery in your home. Researchers have also started working on a new genetic modification to remove formaldehyde compounds from the air. It looks like the future of health is all about plants!
It must be true – it’s in a study
There’s untested, widely accepted truth, and then there’s empirically tested truth demonstrated in a rigorous scientific trial. Untested, widely accepted truth in point: Compared with using a simple backpack, parachute use is more likely to prevent death or major traumatic injury when leaping from an aircraft. Of course, no one’s ever done a study to prove it. Because, duh. Also, institutional review boards. Also, lawyers.
Until now.
Robert Yeh, M.D., of Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues began recruiting for just such a research trial while flying commercially. Few seat mates took up their randomized-to-parachute-or-backpack offer. That forced Dr. Yeh to recruit randomized participants from among fellow academics. Twenty-three research-minded souls agreed to make the leap for scientific progress from either a biplane or a helicopter, thereby making the study “Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial” a BMJ-published reality.
The results? “Our groundbreaking study found no statistically significant difference in the primary outcome between the treatment and control arms.”
How can the scientific method explain such a skydiving miracle? Because each and every study participant leaped ... 2 feet. From a parked biplane or helicopter.
“Although we can confidently recommend that individuals jumping from small stationary aircraft on the ground do not require parachutes, individual judgment should be exercised when applying these findings at higher altitudes.” It’s also possible the study authors are suggesting individual judgment should have a parachute, not a backpack, when physicians dive into a study’s scientific methodology.
Cute aggression, a soused super spy, and hospital holiday discharges
I could just eat your little toes!
You know how people are weird around babies and act like they want to squeeze them to death? Yeah, that’s a real phenomenon that goes by the name “cute aggression.” It’s a neural response to adorable stimuli that makes us want to hug and pinch and even bite cute things – baby animals included. A researcher from the University of California, Riverside, took a look at why we do this weird, weird thing.
Using electrophysiology, Katherine Stavropoulos determined that the brain’s reward system plays an integral part in our inexplicable urge to nibble on babies and puppies. She hypothesizes that this may be an evolutionary adaptation, as a way of tempering the feelings of being positively overwhelmed by cuteness. Instead of becoming wholly incapacitated by the sight of your own progeny, your brain responds with some light aggression to snap you out of it and spur you to continue to provide for your young. Reason #12,849 that the human mind is one of the most bizarre things in this universe.
Shaken, not stirred
“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to imbibe.” A new study published in the Medical Journal of Australia has taken a close look at James Bond’s drinking habits over the past 60 years. Unsurprisingly, researchers reported that 007 “has drunk heavily and consistently across 6 decades.” At least he’s consistent.
Study authors estimated that the secret agent’s peak blood alcohol content reached 0.36 g/dL, high enough to kill some people. Maybe weaker men perhaps, but not our Bond. His postdrinking activities include “fights, driving vehicles, gambling, sex, athletic extremes, and operating complex machinery, or devices.” He’s very good at multitasking. Researchers concluded that Bond has a severe drinking problem, according to DSM-5 criteria for alcohol use disorder. They recommend he seek professional help, and they also suggest that MI6 could be a more responsible employer by offering services for his drinking problem and likely PTSD.
“Home Alone,” with life-threatening injuries
The cinematic holiday hit “Home Alone” features an intrepid 8-year-old left alone to defend his house from the depredations of the two notorious Wet Bandits. While some say “intrepid,” others say “sadistic.” Young Kevin McCallister visits a veritable Spanish Inquisition’s worth of torments upon the iniquitous heads, torsos, and extremities of the larcenous duo: BB gunshots, falling steam irons, paint cans to the brain bucket, and everyone’s favorite theft deterrent, the old blowtorch-to-the-scalp routine.
The slapstick Wet Bandits survived their ordeal to burgle again in an equally painful sequel. But would Marv and Harry’s on-screen survival be possible in the world of real-life Sherman-Williams cans? Dr. Ryan St. Clair of the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York examined their celluloid injuries and offered some real-world diagnoses.
Close-range BB gunshots to the head and groin? They’d break the skin, sure. But the Wet Bandits’ skulls and scrotums would likely remain intact. Ah, but what about a steam iron to the face? Marv could expect a “blowout fracture,” leading to serious disfigurement and debilitating double vision. Paint can to the head? Ten pounds of paint can at the end of a 10-foot rope equals a roughly 2-kN blow to the face. Not only are the pair both out cold, they’re probably sporting toothless grins. And that blowtorch to the scalp? Harry’s now the victim of a full-thickness burn likely to cause skull bone necrosis that demands a transplant.
Dr. St. Clair’s expert medical summation? “This movie was way more believable when I was 8.”
Discharged for the holidays
No one wants to be in the hospital during the Christmas holiday, but the most wonderful time of the year could be the most dangerous time to leave the hospital. Canadian investigators compared a group of patients who were discharged during the 2-week holiday period with patients released during control periods before and after the holiday season.
The analysis revealed that the risk of death or readmission was higher within the next 7 days (odds ratio, 1.16), 14 days (OR, 1.14), and 30 days (OR, 1.09) for the group discharged during the holiday period (BMJ. 2018 Dec 10;363. doi: 10.1136/bmj.k4481). “The holiday period might be a time of reduced access to outpatient care” as caregivers take time off, the investigators suggested, or “patients might prefer to postpone their follow-up visit until their usual physician is available, or until the end of the holiday festivities or travel commitments.”
This hospital-related holiday danger is new information, of course, but maybe it’s not such a surprise. The beloved Christmas characters are, after all, a rather unhealthy bunch: Santa is obese, Rudolf has a stunningly severe case of rosacea, Charlie Brown is depressed, and don’t even get us started on the Grinch and his rapidly expanding heart.
I could just eat your little toes!
You know how people are weird around babies and act like they want to squeeze them to death? Yeah, that’s a real phenomenon that goes by the name “cute aggression.” It’s a neural response to adorable stimuli that makes us want to hug and pinch and even bite cute things – baby animals included. A researcher from the University of California, Riverside, took a look at why we do this weird, weird thing.
Using electrophysiology, Katherine Stavropoulos determined that the brain’s reward system plays an integral part in our inexplicable urge to nibble on babies and puppies. She hypothesizes that this may be an evolutionary adaptation, as a way of tempering the feelings of being positively overwhelmed by cuteness. Instead of becoming wholly incapacitated by the sight of your own progeny, your brain responds with some light aggression to snap you out of it and spur you to continue to provide for your young. Reason #12,849 that the human mind is one of the most bizarre things in this universe.
Shaken, not stirred
“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to imbibe.” A new study published in the Medical Journal of Australia has taken a close look at James Bond’s drinking habits over the past 60 years. Unsurprisingly, researchers reported that 007 “has drunk heavily and consistently across 6 decades.” At least he’s consistent.
Study authors estimated that the secret agent’s peak blood alcohol content reached 0.36 g/dL, high enough to kill some people. Maybe weaker men perhaps, but not our Bond. His postdrinking activities include “fights, driving vehicles, gambling, sex, athletic extremes, and operating complex machinery, or devices.” He’s very good at multitasking. Researchers concluded that Bond has a severe drinking problem, according to DSM-5 criteria for alcohol use disorder. They recommend he seek professional help, and they also suggest that MI6 could be a more responsible employer by offering services for his drinking problem and likely PTSD.
“Home Alone,” with life-threatening injuries
The cinematic holiday hit “Home Alone” features an intrepid 8-year-old left alone to defend his house from the depredations of the two notorious Wet Bandits. While some say “intrepid,” others say “sadistic.” Young Kevin McCallister visits a veritable Spanish Inquisition’s worth of torments upon the iniquitous heads, torsos, and extremities of the larcenous duo: BB gunshots, falling steam irons, paint cans to the brain bucket, and everyone’s favorite theft deterrent, the old blowtorch-to-the-scalp routine.
The slapstick Wet Bandits survived their ordeal to burgle again in an equally painful sequel. But would Marv and Harry’s on-screen survival be possible in the world of real-life Sherman-Williams cans? Dr. Ryan St. Clair of the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York examined their celluloid injuries and offered some real-world diagnoses.
Close-range BB gunshots to the head and groin? They’d break the skin, sure. But the Wet Bandits’ skulls and scrotums would likely remain intact. Ah, but what about a steam iron to the face? Marv could expect a “blowout fracture,” leading to serious disfigurement and debilitating double vision. Paint can to the head? Ten pounds of paint can at the end of a 10-foot rope equals a roughly 2-kN blow to the face. Not only are the pair both out cold, they’re probably sporting toothless grins. And that blowtorch to the scalp? Harry’s now the victim of a full-thickness burn likely to cause skull bone necrosis that demands a transplant.
Dr. St. Clair’s expert medical summation? “This movie was way more believable when I was 8.”
Discharged for the holidays
No one wants to be in the hospital during the Christmas holiday, but the most wonderful time of the year could be the most dangerous time to leave the hospital. Canadian investigators compared a group of patients who were discharged during the 2-week holiday period with patients released during control periods before and after the holiday season.
The analysis revealed that the risk of death or readmission was higher within the next 7 days (odds ratio, 1.16), 14 days (OR, 1.14), and 30 days (OR, 1.09) for the group discharged during the holiday period (BMJ. 2018 Dec 10;363. doi: 10.1136/bmj.k4481). “The holiday period might be a time of reduced access to outpatient care” as caregivers take time off, the investigators suggested, or “patients might prefer to postpone their follow-up visit until their usual physician is available, or until the end of the holiday festivities or travel commitments.”
This hospital-related holiday danger is new information, of course, but maybe it’s not such a surprise. The beloved Christmas characters are, after all, a rather unhealthy bunch: Santa is obese, Rudolf has a stunningly severe case of rosacea, Charlie Brown is depressed, and don’t even get us started on the Grinch and his rapidly expanding heart.
I could just eat your little toes!
You know how people are weird around babies and act like they want to squeeze them to death? Yeah, that’s a real phenomenon that goes by the name “cute aggression.” It’s a neural response to adorable stimuli that makes us want to hug and pinch and even bite cute things – baby animals included. A researcher from the University of California, Riverside, took a look at why we do this weird, weird thing.
Using electrophysiology, Katherine Stavropoulos determined that the brain’s reward system plays an integral part in our inexplicable urge to nibble on babies and puppies. She hypothesizes that this may be an evolutionary adaptation, as a way of tempering the feelings of being positively overwhelmed by cuteness. Instead of becoming wholly incapacitated by the sight of your own progeny, your brain responds with some light aggression to snap you out of it and spur you to continue to provide for your young. Reason #12,849 that the human mind is one of the most bizarre things in this universe.
Shaken, not stirred
“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to imbibe.” A new study published in the Medical Journal of Australia has taken a close look at James Bond’s drinking habits over the past 60 years. Unsurprisingly, researchers reported that 007 “has drunk heavily and consistently across 6 decades.” At least he’s consistent.
Study authors estimated that the secret agent’s peak blood alcohol content reached 0.36 g/dL, high enough to kill some people. Maybe weaker men perhaps, but not our Bond. His postdrinking activities include “fights, driving vehicles, gambling, sex, athletic extremes, and operating complex machinery, or devices.” He’s very good at multitasking. Researchers concluded that Bond has a severe drinking problem, according to DSM-5 criteria for alcohol use disorder. They recommend he seek professional help, and they also suggest that MI6 could be a more responsible employer by offering services for his drinking problem and likely PTSD.
“Home Alone,” with life-threatening injuries
The cinematic holiday hit “Home Alone” features an intrepid 8-year-old left alone to defend his house from the depredations of the two notorious Wet Bandits. While some say “intrepid,” others say “sadistic.” Young Kevin McCallister visits a veritable Spanish Inquisition’s worth of torments upon the iniquitous heads, torsos, and extremities of the larcenous duo: BB gunshots, falling steam irons, paint cans to the brain bucket, and everyone’s favorite theft deterrent, the old blowtorch-to-the-scalp routine.
The slapstick Wet Bandits survived their ordeal to burgle again in an equally painful sequel. But would Marv and Harry’s on-screen survival be possible in the world of real-life Sherman-Williams cans? Dr. Ryan St. Clair of the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York examined their celluloid injuries and offered some real-world diagnoses.
Close-range BB gunshots to the head and groin? They’d break the skin, sure. But the Wet Bandits’ skulls and scrotums would likely remain intact. Ah, but what about a steam iron to the face? Marv could expect a “blowout fracture,” leading to serious disfigurement and debilitating double vision. Paint can to the head? Ten pounds of paint can at the end of a 10-foot rope equals a roughly 2-kN blow to the face. Not only are the pair both out cold, they’re probably sporting toothless grins. And that blowtorch to the scalp? Harry’s now the victim of a full-thickness burn likely to cause skull bone necrosis that demands a transplant.
Dr. St. Clair’s expert medical summation? “This movie was way more believable when I was 8.”
Discharged for the holidays
No one wants to be in the hospital during the Christmas holiday, but the most wonderful time of the year could be the most dangerous time to leave the hospital. Canadian investigators compared a group of patients who were discharged during the 2-week holiday period with patients released during control periods before and after the holiday season.
The analysis revealed that the risk of death or readmission was higher within the next 7 days (odds ratio, 1.16), 14 days (OR, 1.14), and 30 days (OR, 1.09) for the group discharged during the holiday period (BMJ. 2018 Dec 10;363. doi: 10.1136/bmj.k4481). “The holiday period might be a time of reduced access to outpatient care” as caregivers take time off, the investigators suggested, or “patients might prefer to postpone their follow-up visit until their usual physician is available, or until the end of the holiday festivities or travel commitments.”
This hospital-related holiday danger is new information, of course, but maybe it’s not such a surprise. The beloved Christmas characters are, after all, a rather unhealthy bunch: Santa is obese, Rudolf has a stunningly severe case of rosacea, Charlie Brown is depressed, and don’t even get us started on the Grinch and his rapidly expanding heart.
Legos for lunch, saliva-sterilized pacifiers, and a healthy personality
Legos for lunch
As any parent, teacher, or teenage babysitter knows, children try to eat everything. Six intrepid researchers from Australia and the United Kingdom decided to put their lives – or, at least, their intestines – on the line by swallowing Lego pieces to determine “typical transit times” for the commonly ingested toy. The things people do in the name of science.
The study participants first measured their bowel habits by the Stool Hardness and Transit (SHAT) score, and then measured the Found and Retrieved Time (FART) score once the Lego was ... expelled. The researchers found that the average FART score was 1.71 days.
At this point, all involved stopped to have a hearty laugh and a round of high-fives. Parents can rest assured that their little progeny who swallow Legos are safe. Everything is awesome.
Don’t wash that pacifier!
If you want to clean your child’s pacifier, you should consider passing on the sink and pop it into your own mouth instead. That’s the story from research presented at the annual scientific meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology.
In a survey of 128 mothers over an 18-month period, 41% of those whose child was currently using a pacifier reported cleaning by sterilization, and 72% reported hand washing their child’s pacifier. (We will henceforth refer to these mothers as “normal people.”) Just over 10% of mothers reported cleaning through parental pacifier sucking.
Before you cringe too much, the children of these mothers had significantly lower IgE levels than the children of normal people, indicating they were at a lower risk of developing allergies or asthma.
The study authors hypothesized that exposure to adult saliva may transfer healthy microorganisms to their children, and they advocated for further study into the subject. We suggest getting the pediatricians from the Lego study involved – they’ll eat anything for science.
One camel latte, please
An unlikely partnership between a Saudi entrepreneur and Amish farmers might lead to a brand-new dairy market in the United States. Walid Abdul-Wahub is on a mission to put camel milk on the shelves of every grocery store in America.
Middle Eastern residents have been drinking camel milk for centuries, so it’s only a matter of time until some hipster coffee shop co-opts it and starts selling camel milk lattes for $9. On the plus side, camel milk has a different protein than cow milk, making it more similar to human milk than bovine milk. This could be a godsend for people with milk allergies and need alternatives to that god-awful almond milk. One camel milkshake, coming right up.
How healthy is your personality?
It’s a question bipedal hominins have pondered since our days scrounging for snacks in the Olduvai Gorge: Is my personality why no one wants to hunt and gather with me?
Homo sapiens researchers from the University of California, Davis, and elsewhere believe they have the answer. In fact, it is your personality that leaves you scavenging for baobab alone.
What’s a healthy personality? The Scientia sapiens split personality into five factors: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. They then surveyed scientists and college students to construct the consensus Dream Date – er, healthy personality: low levels of neuroticism, sprinkled with lots of agreeable straightforwardness, openness to feelings, positive emotions, and warmth. It wouldn’t hurt to ease up on the Old Spice, either.
The taste of deprivation
At one time or another, you’ve probably seen someone who was pretty much physically attached to his or her phone and wondered about the owner’s personal priorities and where the phone fit into them.
Wonder no more.
In a study conducted at the University at Buffalo (N.Y.), 76 students were deprived of food for 3 hours and their smartphones for 2 hours, and then given a computer task that would earn them a serving of their favorite snack or use of their phone. To make things more interesting, the amount of work needed to earn food or phone time increased as the subjects completed their tasks.
“We knew that students would be motivated to gain access to their phones, but we were surprised that, despite modest food deprivation, smartphone reinforcement far exceeded food reinforcement,” lead investigator Sara O’Donnell said in a written statement.
Recruiting subjects for the next step in this line of research – choosing between phones and breathing – could get a little tricky. But we have to admire the creative solution that got one participant disqualified from the current study: He tried to eat his phone.
Legos for lunch
As any parent, teacher, or teenage babysitter knows, children try to eat everything. Six intrepid researchers from Australia and the United Kingdom decided to put their lives – or, at least, their intestines – on the line by swallowing Lego pieces to determine “typical transit times” for the commonly ingested toy. The things people do in the name of science.
The study participants first measured their bowel habits by the Stool Hardness and Transit (SHAT) score, and then measured the Found and Retrieved Time (FART) score once the Lego was ... expelled. The researchers found that the average FART score was 1.71 days.
At this point, all involved stopped to have a hearty laugh and a round of high-fives. Parents can rest assured that their little progeny who swallow Legos are safe. Everything is awesome.
Don’t wash that pacifier!
If you want to clean your child’s pacifier, you should consider passing on the sink and pop it into your own mouth instead. That’s the story from research presented at the annual scientific meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology.
In a survey of 128 mothers over an 18-month period, 41% of those whose child was currently using a pacifier reported cleaning by sterilization, and 72% reported hand washing their child’s pacifier. (We will henceforth refer to these mothers as “normal people.”) Just over 10% of mothers reported cleaning through parental pacifier sucking.
Before you cringe too much, the children of these mothers had significantly lower IgE levels than the children of normal people, indicating they were at a lower risk of developing allergies or asthma.
The study authors hypothesized that exposure to adult saliva may transfer healthy microorganisms to their children, and they advocated for further study into the subject. We suggest getting the pediatricians from the Lego study involved – they’ll eat anything for science.
One camel latte, please
An unlikely partnership between a Saudi entrepreneur and Amish farmers might lead to a brand-new dairy market in the United States. Walid Abdul-Wahub is on a mission to put camel milk on the shelves of every grocery store in America.
Middle Eastern residents have been drinking camel milk for centuries, so it’s only a matter of time until some hipster coffee shop co-opts it and starts selling camel milk lattes for $9. On the plus side, camel milk has a different protein than cow milk, making it more similar to human milk than bovine milk. This could be a godsend for people with milk allergies and need alternatives to that god-awful almond milk. One camel milkshake, coming right up.
How healthy is your personality?
It’s a question bipedal hominins have pondered since our days scrounging for snacks in the Olduvai Gorge: Is my personality why no one wants to hunt and gather with me?
Homo sapiens researchers from the University of California, Davis, and elsewhere believe they have the answer. In fact, it is your personality that leaves you scavenging for baobab alone.
What’s a healthy personality? The Scientia sapiens split personality into five factors: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. They then surveyed scientists and college students to construct the consensus Dream Date – er, healthy personality: low levels of neuroticism, sprinkled with lots of agreeable straightforwardness, openness to feelings, positive emotions, and warmth. It wouldn’t hurt to ease up on the Old Spice, either.
The taste of deprivation
At one time or another, you’ve probably seen someone who was pretty much physically attached to his or her phone and wondered about the owner’s personal priorities and where the phone fit into them.
Wonder no more.
In a study conducted at the University at Buffalo (N.Y.), 76 students were deprived of food for 3 hours and their smartphones for 2 hours, and then given a computer task that would earn them a serving of their favorite snack or use of their phone. To make things more interesting, the amount of work needed to earn food or phone time increased as the subjects completed their tasks.
“We knew that students would be motivated to gain access to their phones, but we were surprised that, despite modest food deprivation, smartphone reinforcement far exceeded food reinforcement,” lead investigator Sara O’Donnell said in a written statement.
Recruiting subjects for the next step in this line of research – choosing between phones and breathing – could get a little tricky. But we have to admire the creative solution that got one participant disqualified from the current study: He tried to eat his phone.
Legos for lunch
As any parent, teacher, or teenage babysitter knows, children try to eat everything. Six intrepid researchers from Australia and the United Kingdom decided to put their lives – or, at least, their intestines – on the line by swallowing Lego pieces to determine “typical transit times” for the commonly ingested toy. The things people do in the name of science.
The study participants first measured their bowel habits by the Stool Hardness and Transit (SHAT) score, and then measured the Found and Retrieved Time (FART) score once the Lego was ... expelled. The researchers found that the average FART score was 1.71 days.
At this point, all involved stopped to have a hearty laugh and a round of high-fives. Parents can rest assured that their little progeny who swallow Legos are safe. Everything is awesome.
Don’t wash that pacifier!
If you want to clean your child’s pacifier, you should consider passing on the sink and pop it into your own mouth instead. That’s the story from research presented at the annual scientific meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology.
In a survey of 128 mothers over an 18-month period, 41% of those whose child was currently using a pacifier reported cleaning by sterilization, and 72% reported hand washing their child’s pacifier. (We will henceforth refer to these mothers as “normal people.”) Just over 10% of mothers reported cleaning through parental pacifier sucking.
Before you cringe too much, the children of these mothers had significantly lower IgE levels than the children of normal people, indicating they were at a lower risk of developing allergies or asthma.
The study authors hypothesized that exposure to adult saliva may transfer healthy microorganisms to their children, and they advocated for further study into the subject. We suggest getting the pediatricians from the Lego study involved – they’ll eat anything for science.
One camel latte, please
An unlikely partnership between a Saudi entrepreneur and Amish farmers might lead to a brand-new dairy market in the United States. Walid Abdul-Wahub is on a mission to put camel milk on the shelves of every grocery store in America.
Middle Eastern residents have been drinking camel milk for centuries, so it’s only a matter of time until some hipster coffee shop co-opts it and starts selling camel milk lattes for $9. On the plus side, camel milk has a different protein than cow milk, making it more similar to human milk than bovine milk. This could be a godsend for people with milk allergies and need alternatives to that god-awful almond milk. One camel milkshake, coming right up.
How healthy is your personality?
It’s a question bipedal hominins have pondered since our days scrounging for snacks in the Olduvai Gorge: Is my personality why no one wants to hunt and gather with me?
Homo sapiens researchers from the University of California, Davis, and elsewhere believe they have the answer. In fact, it is your personality that leaves you scavenging for baobab alone.
What’s a healthy personality? The Scientia sapiens split personality into five factors: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. They then surveyed scientists and college students to construct the consensus Dream Date – er, healthy personality: low levels of neuroticism, sprinkled with lots of agreeable straightforwardness, openness to feelings, positive emotions, and warmth. It wouldn’t hurt to ease up on the Old Spice, either.
The taste of deprivation
At one time or another, you’ve probably seen someone who was pretty much physically attached to his or her phone and wondered about the owner’s personal priorities and where the phone fit into them.
Wonder no more.
In a study conducted at the University at Buffalo (N.Y.), 76 students were deprived of food for 3 hours and their smartphones for 2 hours, and then given a computer task that would earn them a serving of their favorite snack or use of their phone. To make things more interesting, the amount of work needed to earn food or phone time increased as the subjects completed their tasks.
“We knew that students would be motivated to gain access to their phones, but we were surprised that, despite modest food deprivation, smartphone reinforcement far exceeded food reinforcement,” lead investigator Sara O’Donnell said in a written statement.
Recruiting subjects for the next step in this line of research – choosing between phones and breathing – could get a little tricky. But we have to admire the creative solution that got one participant disqualified from the current study: He tried to eat his phone.
Probative pee, Pilgrim obesity, and med school baked bribes
He tweets, he (doesn’t) score!
We all know that less sleep equals poor job performance. Up way too late on a Sunday night means you might fall face first into your keyboard the next morning and accidentally send an email that ends with “hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” So, yeah, sleep is important.
It’s especially important when you are a professional athlete and your entire livelihood depends on you being in tip-top shape. Researchers from the State University of New York at Stony Brook studied the performance of NBA players in relation to their late-night Twitter binges. Unsurprisingly, tweeting in the wee hours correlated with fewer points and fewer rebounds in the next day’s game. We’re sure coaches are just thrilled to hear about their players spending precious night hours @-ing random trolls on Twitter. Does this mean less tweeting and more sleep means anyone can be the next LeBron? Or, um, the next @KingJames? Probably not … but give it a try.
Poppy seeds and probative pee
As you tuck into your Thanksgiving leftovers, give a thought to a valiant physician who ate and drank – and peed – for science. Not just once, but twice.
At the recent Pain Care for Primary Care symposium in San Diego, Mount Sinai Beth Israel addiction specialist Edwin Salsitz, MD, gave a presentation about drug screening and mentioned his own homegrown investigation into two reputed sources of false positives.
A few years ago, a patient tested positive for opiates and, like many before him, blamed his fondness for poppy-seed bagels. Dr. Salsitz asked the patient to buy him a poppy bagel from his usual source, then the doctor went home and ate it on a Sunday prior to collecting his own pee. The doctor’s subsequent urine test was positive for opiates, and the patient was off the hook. (For more about the poppy-seed menace to accurate opiate testing, check this clinical update from the Aegis testing company.)
Later, it was time to check another possible urban legend. Dr. Salsitz got some mate de coca tea from a friend who’d returned from South America. Again, he took time out of a Sunday, this time to enjoy a hot beverage, mate de coca style, and collect his own pee. The urine test was positive this time, too – for cocaine.
The moral of the story? If you have a drug test looming, be safe and just stick to a croissant and coffee.
Psst … want a cookie?
In medical school, the best and brightest sacrifice their bodies and social lives to absorb knowledge like human sponges. Or maybe it’s where they absorb cookies in exchange for positive end-of-course evaluations.
Investigators from the University of Münster (Germany) decided to give 118 of the school’s third-year medical students a little test. During a course on emergency medicine, some groups were given access to free chocolate cookies (Discus deliciosum spp.) in their sessions, and some groups were not. When it came time to fill out their “student evaluations of teaching” at the end of the semester, the “cookie group” was more generous in its ratings of the course material and gave significantly higher scores to the teachers and to the course overall, compared with the control group (Med Educ. 2018 Oct;52[10]:1064-72).
This all seemed a little suspicious, so we did a little digging. Turns out that the cookie group – the one that provided all that warm, chocolatey positive reinforcement – was chock full of the usual suspects: Ernie the elf, Mrs. Fields, Famous Amos, and Mr. Big himself, Cookie Monster.
Why Myles Standish wasn’t fat
In the autumn of 1621, obesity didn’t dine with the 53 Pilgrims who gave culinary thanks for surviving their first disappointing Boston Bruins season. Er, for their first harvest after a brutal New England winter. Why was that first Thanksgiving such a svelte affair, free of the high-BMI epidemic that afflicts so many Bruins faithful nearly 4 centuries later? Was it the free-range turkey? The lean venison? The Wampanoag guests’ demands for a DASH-diet dinner?
A modern study may help reveal the historical truth: 17th century Plymouth Plantation wasn’t yet bisected by the 21st century Cape Cod traffic snarling the Pilgrims Highway, a.k.a. Massachusetts Route 3.
It was Spanish researchers, not English Puritans, who unbuckled the portly puzzle’s Pilgrim hat. Investigators with the Barcelona Institute for Global Health examined the link between traffic noise exposure and obesity markers among a group of Swiss adults. The verdict? Those exposed to the highest levels of traffic noise ran the greatest risk of becoming obese. Specifically, every 10-decibel rise in road noise packed on another 17% increase in obesity. Seems tractor-trailer downshifts and honking horns may disturb sleep, gridlocking glucose metabolism and diverting everyone to the nearest drive-thru.
Next on the Spaniards’ research to-do list: Can your New England uncle’s annual Turkey Day tales of Red Sox triumphs trigger psychosis among familial Yankees fans?
He tweets, he (doesn’t) score!
We all know that less sleep equals poor job performance. Up way too late on a Sunday night means you might fall face first into your keyboard the next morning and accidentally send an email that ends with “hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” So, yeah, sleep is important.
It’s especially important when you are a professional athlete and your entire livelihood depends on you being in tip-top shape. Researchers from the State University of New York at Stony Brook studied the performance of NBA players in relation to their late-night Twitter binges. Unsurprisingly, tweeting in the wee hours correlated with fewer points and fewer rebounds in the next day’s game. We’re sure coaches are just thrilled to hear about their players spending precious night hours @-ing random trolls on Twitter. Does this mean less tweeting and more sleep means anyone can be the next LeBron? Or, um, the next @KingJames? Probably not … but give it a try.
Poppy seeds and probative pee
As you tuck into your Thanksgiving leftovers, give a thought to a valiant physician who ate and drank – and peed – for science. Not just once, but twice.
At the recent Pain Care for Primary Care symposium in San Diego, Mount Sinai Beth Israel addiction specialist Edwin Salsitz, MD, gave a presentation about drug screening and mentioned his own homegrown investigation into two reputed sources of false positives.
A few years ago, a patient tested positive for opiates and, like many before him, blamed his fondness for poppy-seed bagels. Dr. Salsitz asked the patient to buy him a poppy bagel from his usual source, then the doctor went home and ate it on a Sunday prior to collecting his own pee. The doctor’s subsequent urine test was positive for opiates, and the patient was off the hook. (For more about the poppy-seed menace to accurate opiate testing, check this clinical update from the Aegis testing company.)
Later, it was time to check another possible urban legend. Dr. Salsitz got some mate de coca tea from a friend who’d returned from South America. Again, he took time out of a Sunday, this time to enjoy a hot beverage, mate de coca style, and collect his own pee. The urine test was positive this time, too – for cocaine.
The moral of the story? If you have a drug test looming, be safe and just stick to a croissant and coffee.
Psst … want a cookie?
In medical school, the best and brightest sacrifice their bodies and social lives to absorb knowledge like human sponges. Or maybe it’s where they absorb cookies in exchange for positive end-of-course evaluations.
Investigators from the University of Münster (Germany) decided to give 118 of the school’s third-year medical students a little test. During a course on emergency medicine, some groups were given access to free chocolate cookies (Discus deliciosum spp.) in their sessions, and some groups were not. When it came time to fill out their “student evaluations of teaching” at the end of the semester, the “cookie group” was more generous in its ratings of the course material and gave significantly higher scores to the teachers and to the course overall, compared with the control group (Med Educ. 2018 Oct;52[10]:1064-72).
This all seemed a little suspicious, so we did a little digging. Turns out that the cookie group – the one that provided all that warm, chocolatey positive reinforcement – was chock full of the usual suspects: Ernie the elf, Mrs. Fields, Famous Amos, and Mr. Big himself, Cookie Monster.
Why Myles Standish wasn’t fat
In the autumn of 1621, obesity didn’t dine with the 53 Pilgrims who gave culinary thanks for surviving their first disappointing Boston Bruins season. Er, for their first harvest after a brutal New England winter. Why was that first Thanksgiving such a svelte affair, free of the high-BMI epidemic that afflicts so many Bruins faithful nearly 4 centuries later? Was it the free-range turkey? The lean venison? The Wampanoag guests’ demands for a DASH-diet dinner?
A modern study may help reveal the historical truth: 17th century Plymouth Plantation wasn’t yet bisected by the 21st century Cape Cod traffic snarling the Pilgrims Highway, a.k.a. Massachusetts Route 3.
It was Spanish researchers, not English Puritans, who unbuckled the portly puzzle’s Pilgrim hat. Investigators with the Barcelona Institute for Global Health examined the link between traffic noise exposure and obesity markers among a group of Swiss adults. The verdict? Those exposed to the highest levels of traffic noise ran the greatest risk of becoming obese. Specifically, every 10-decibel rise in road noise packed on another 17% increase in obesity. Seems tractor-trailer downshifts and honking horns may disturb sleep, gridlocking glucose metabolism and diverting everyone to the nearest drive-thru.
Next on the Spaniards’ research to-do list: Can your New England uncle’s annual Turkey Day tales of Red Sox triumphs trigger psychosis among familial Yankees fans?
He tweets, he (doesn’t) score!
We all know that less sleep equals poor job performance. Up way too late on a Sunday night means you might fall face first into your keyboard the next morning and accidentally send an email that ends with “hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” So, yeah, sleep is important.
It’s especially important when you are a professional athlete and your entire livelihood depends on you being in tip-top shape. Researchers from the State University of New York at Stony Brook studied the performance of NBA players in relation to their late-night Twitter binges. Unsurprisingly, tweeting in the wee hours correlated with fewer points and fewer rebounds in the next day’s game. We’re sure coaches are just thrilled to hear about their players spending precious night hours @-ing random trolls on Twitter. Does this mean less tweeting and more sleep means anyone can be the next LeBron? Or, um, the next @KingJames? Probably not … but give it a try.
Poppy seeds and probative pee
As you tuck into your Thanksgiving leftovers, give a thought to a valiant physician who ate and drank – and peed – for science. Not just once, but twice.
At the recent Pain Care for Primary Care symposium in San Diego, Mount Sinai Beth Israel addiction specialist Edwin Salsitz, MD, gave a presentation about drug screening and mentioned his own homegrown investigation into two reputed sources of false positives.
A few years ago, a patient tested positive for opiates and, like many before him, blamed his fondness for poppy-seed bagels. Dr. Salsitz asked the patient to buy him a poppy bagel from his usual source, then the doctor went home and ate it on a Sunday prior to collecting his own pee. The doctor’s subsequent urine test was positive for opiates, and the patient was off the hook. (For more about the poppy-seed menace to accurate opiate testing, check this clinical update from the Aegis testing company.)
Later, it was time to check another possible urban legend. Dr. Salsitz got some mate de coca tea from a friend who’d returned from South America. Again, he took time out of a Sunday, this time to enjoy a hot beverage, mate de coca style, and collect his own pee. The urine test was positive this time, too – for cocaine.
The moral of the story? If you have a drug test looming, be safe and just stick to a croissant and coffee.
Psst … want a cookie?
In medical school, the best and brightest sacrifice their bodies and social lives to absorb knowledge like human sponges. Or maybe it’s where they absorb cookies in exchange for positive end-of-course evaluations.
Investigators from the University of Münster (Germany) decided to give 118 of the school’s third-year medical students a little test. During a course on emergency medicine, some groups were given access to free chocolate cookies (Discus deliciosum spp.) in their sessions, and some groups were not. When it came time to fill out their “student evaluations of teaching” at the end of the semester, the “cookie group” was more generous in its ratings of the course material and gave significantly higher scores to the teachers and to the course overall, compared with the control group (Med Educ. 2018 Oct;52[10]:1064-72).
This all seemed a little suspicious, so we did a little digging. Turns out that the cookie group – the one that provided all that warm, chocolatey positive reinforcement – was chock full of the usual suspects: Ernie the elf, Mrs. Fields, Famous Amos, and Mr. Big himself, Cookie Monster.
Why Myles Standish wasn’t fat
In the autumn of 1621, obesity didn’t dine with the 53 Pilgrims who gave culinary thanks for surviving their first disappointing Boston Bruins season. Er, for their first harvest after a brutal New England winter. Why was that first Thanksgiving such a svelte affair, free of the high-BMI epidemic that afflicts so many Bruins faithful nearly 4 centuries later? Was it the free-range turkey? The lean venison? The Wampanoag guests’ demands for a DASH-diet dinner?
A modern study may help reveal the historical truth: 17th century Plymouth Plantation wasn’t yet bisected by the 21st century Cape Cod traffic snarling the Pilgrims Highway, a.k.a. Massachusetts Route 3.
It was Spanish researchers, not English Puritans, who unbuckled the portly puzzle’s Pilgrim hat. Investigators with the Barcelona Institute for Global Health examined the link between traffic noise exposure and obesity markers among a group of Swiss adults. The verdict? Those exposed to the highest levels of traffic noise ran the greatest risk of becoming obese. Specifically, every 10-decibel rise in road noise packed on another 17% increase in obesity. Seems tractor-trailer downshifts and honking horns may disturb sleep, gridlocking glucose metabolism and diverting everyone to the nearest drive-thru.
Next on the Spaniards’ research to-do list: Can your New England uncle’s annual Turkey Day tales of Red Sox triumphs trigger psychosis among familial Yankees fans?