medicine

You’d think that a drug prescribed to 10 million Americans would be well understood. But until now, scientists haven’t firmly grasped why Ritalin helps the scatterbrained. In a University of Wisconsin-Madison study published recently in Biological Psychiatry, researchers found that the stimulant works by optimizing brain signals in the prefrontal cortex.

The researchers fed rats different doses of Ritalin and then studied their neural activity, which was measured by electrodes implanted in their brains.

To some men, bicycles may look like the key to good health and a prosperous sex life—riding around all day keeps you fit and attractive; you can save that $4.50 a gallon of gas money for your date/girlfriend/boyfriend/house party; and you get to wear really, really tight clothes. But there’s a downside. Cycling can also cause genital numbness, erection problems and skin irritations in the groin area, a new report in the urology journal BJU International confirms, citing several medical studies over the last few years.

Gold is valuable to many in copious quantities, but for a team of Duke University scientists, a sub-cellular amount was all that was needed to create a nanostructure which could potentially act as a tiny biological sensor. One which could penetrate individual cells and report back on a cell’s inner workings in real time.

Another everyday emotion has been verified by the neuroimaging technique fMRI—this time, the warm and fuzzy feeling moms get when they gaze at their smiling baby.

What makes a disease deadly in the twenty-first century? Medicine has never been more advanced; our understanding of spread and infection, never more sophisticated. And yet, we may be poised for the largest and most devastating pandemic the human race has ever encountered.

Skin guns. Organ printers. Pig dust. Biochemist Alan Russell believes tools like these could one day be standard-issue for the battlefield medic. The skin gun would heal burns. The organ printer would replace badly wounded livers, kidneys, even hearts. And the pig dust?

To grasp the power of Toshiba’s new Aquilion ONE computed-tomography (CT) scanner, imagine facing a picturesque beach. Your camera doesn’t have a panoramic function, so you take snapshots pointing to the left, the center, and the right. You tape the photographs together and it looks gorgeous, sure, but you’re missing the action of the waves crashing on the sand.

Stumped at the café? Go for a mocha.

According to new research, the tasty beverage provides a double-whammy of health benefits: chocolate may slow cancer growth, and java could help you live longer. The good news about chocolate comes from scientists at Georgetown University Medical Center, who found that a synthetic chemical that is similar to a compound present in cocoa beans slows the growth of colon cancer by 50 percent.

Using animals to assist with human medical procedures is nothing new. Leeches can help heal skin grafts by restoring circulation in blocked veins and removing pooled blood under new grafts. Maggots will clean a wound by eating only the dead tissue, thereby aiding in preventing infection. Now, an insect commonly known as the kissing bug is being put to work in zoos in Germany and England as a living syringe.

Vitamins may soon be a thing of the past. Researchers at Imperial College have developed a new type of glass that dissolves harmlessly in the body and promotes calcium growth. As the bioactive material dissipates, it releases silica and calcium ions into the body. If released at the correct rate, these can activate genes responsible for producing calcium—a near-panacea for an otherwise healthy aging body.

The video shows what looks like a faint nebula in deep space, its neighboring stars resolving to their full brightness after a long exposure. Only the images are not of the very large and distant; they are exactly the opposite. It is the picture of a cell membrane and the stars are hundreds of thousands of molecules at the cell's surface, gathering together to form a particle of the HIV virus. It is the first video of any virus being born and visually illuminates a process never before documented in real time.

Clamber down a bunk bed ladder in the black of night at your own risk, says a large new study of the double-decker berths: falls, head entrapment, strangulation, and even ceiling fan entanglement may await.

What if the key to curing blindness was found in unicellular algae?

In a recent study published in the journal Nature, a group of scientists were able to restore light sensitivity to formerly blind mice using a protein extracted from algaes of the genus Chlamydomonas. The Chlamydomonas are of particular interest because they exhibit phototaxis—an ability to orient themselves toward light sources to aid in photosynthesis. Eager to understand what caused this phenomenon on a genetic level, scientists at the Max Planck institute in 2003 isolated a sequence of genes that stored the blueprints for generating light-sensitive proteins. And now, a joint team of researchers from the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Switzerland and the Harvard Medical School have recently developed a therapy that introduces these genes into the eyes of blind mice. What they observed was a dramatic behavioral change that proved the mice had regained their sensitivity to light.

Last January, an Australian engineer announced a bizarre new contraceptive for men: a radio-controlled implant that could block the flow of sperm with the click of a button. The device, which is still in the conceptual stages, is the latest in a growing number of experimental male birth-control methods—including sperm plugs, sperm dissolvers and heat-inducing gels—that don’t tinker with testosterone.

It is well known how we humans respond to immediate stress—through a phenomenon we share with all animals known as fight or flight. During these times of increased threat, our bodies' systems work in concert to raise our heart rate, pump adrenaline, and sharpen our focus. Now scientists working at Northwestern University have discovered that these responses may be coordinated by special stress-receptor neurons, rather than in each cell individually.