medicine

Chris Knight's avatar

But none of them will turn you into THAT kind of a zombie, thankfully! And the image on the right is the first pic to come from The Walking Dead, an upcoming horror series on AMC helmed by director Frank Darabont (he made The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile so he probably knows what he’s doing…)

But anyhoo, io9.com has put together a list of five real-life maladies that could make you something like an undead horror. You’ll have a whole new appreciation for rabies shots after you read this, along with knowing more about leprosy and necrosis than you probably ever wanted to have floating around your gray matter....

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Chris Knight's avatar

Good. God.

How something like this has escaped my knowledge until now, I’ve no idea.

Did you know that two widely-used childhood vaccines were manufactured with cells taken from aborted fetuses?

I didn’t either, until I read this article from LifeNews.com. It’s about a just-published research study that has found a connection between the MMRII and chickenpox vaccines, and the dramatic rise in the rate of diagnosed autism.

From the article…

A new study conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency shows a correlation between the use of cells from babies in abortions in vaccines to an increase in autism rates. The study provides another problem from pro-life advocates who are already concerned about the abortion-vaccine tie.

The study, published in February in the publication Environmental Science & Technology, confirms 1988 as a “change point” in the rise of Autism Disorder rate.

“Although the debate about the nature of increasing

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On the medical side of things, researchers at Ohio State University have hit upon a promising new lead in the fight against cancer: an experimental drug that kills cancerous cells by cutting off their supply of sugar.

From the article at the university’s website…

Researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center-Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute have designed an experimental drug that chokes off that sugar supply, causing the cells to self destruct.

The agent, called OSU-CG12, is an example of a new class of anticancer drugs called energy-restriction mimetic agents. It is described in a paper published recently in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

“Energy restriction may offer a powerful new strategy for treating cancer because it targets a survival mechanism used by many types of cancer,” says principal investigator Ching-Shih Chen, professor of medicinal chemistry, of internal medicine and of

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Chris Knight's avatar

Don’cha wish we knew this when we were in high school!

(Oh who am I kidding? North Carolina’s government is so bass-ackwards on everything, the concept would never even get the chance to fly here…)

Anyway, an experiment being conducted by an Oxford neuroscience professor at Monkseaton High School in North Tyneside in Great Britain has had students starting classes an hour later than usual, at 10 a.m. The remarkable findings of the experiment thus far are that the later class time has caused an 8% drop in general absence and a 27% drop in chronic absenteeism. Furthermore, memory testing done on the students indicate that the best time for learning more difficult lessons is in the afternoon. Researchers believe that teenagers wanting to sleep in is not a matter of laziness, but merely a component of biology adjusting during the adolescent years.

(Or maybe it’s just that ...

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Assuming that we could ever figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light, there may not be a heck of a lot that we could do with it. That’s what Professor William Edelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (dude sounds like a polymath for having a good head about medicine and high-energy physics) has determined.

The problem is hydrogen, which exists in interstellar space on average of two atoms per cubic centimeter. Which ain’t a whole lot. But if a spacecraft were to accelerate toward lightspeed those scarce atoms would start bombarding the ship like a hail of bullets…

As the spaceship reached 99.999998 per cent of the speed of light, “hydrogen atoms would seem to reach a staggering 7 teraelectron volts”, which for the crew “would be like standing in front of the Large Hadron Collider beam”.

This is a very bad thing,

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Frankincense, the precious fragrance that was among the gifts that the wise men from the East brought to the infant Jesus, is now being studied intensely for its cancer-fighting properties. There’s something in frankincense that compels cancerous cells to “reject” nuclei and reset back to what the normal governing gene sequence should be.

It’s a very educational and intriguing read, especially if you’ve ever read the Christmas story out of the Bible and wondered what the heck frankincense is supposed to be 🙂

(And although that painting has nothing to do with frankincense specifically, I’ll give props to whoever can tell me the name of it, who painted it and what its historical significance is 😉...

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Fifty years after Thalidomide was taken off the market in Great Britain, that country’s government is finally owning up to its role in one of the most horrific disasters of modern medicine.

Thalidomide was a drug approved to combat the symptoms of morning sickness in pregnant women. And when I say “approved” I mean that the British government didn’t perform proper tests on the drug to determine if it was, y’know, safe for both mothers and children. Thalidomide caused hundreds of birth defects throughout Great Britain because it hampered blood vessels from fully developing in the fetuses. Many children were born with vestigial limbs… or no limbs at all. A few had no eyes, among other severe problems.

In addition to the apology, the British government is allocating £20 million to help the hundreds of Thalidomide survivors living in the United Kingdom today.

By the way, although it’s not used ...

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The picture on the left shows what used to be a piece of rattan wood. It’s now almost exactly identical to human bone tissue, after a battery of treatments thunked-up by some brilliant Italian scientists. It’s as strong as real bone material, and what’s more it transplants much better than current bone replacement procedures and is porous enough for blood and nervous tissue to wind its way through.

Mash down here for the rest of the story from the BBC....

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Researchers working around the globe as part of the International Cancer Genome Consortium have announced that the entire genetic code for skin and lung cancer has been “decrypted”.

The scientists have discovered more than 30,000 transcription errors in genetic replication that give rise to melanoma (and almost all of these are triggered from too much sunlight).

And if you’re a smoker, think about this the next time you light up: you typically acquire one fresh new mutation for every 15 cigarettes that you smoke. Not all of these are malign, but there are more than 23,000 genetic errors and some of them will lead to lung cancer.

That’s about, what… 1.25 mutations per pack of cigarettes, on the conservative side of the figures?

Yul Brynner was smoking five packs a day. This is what he had to say about it, in a 1985 television spot intentionally airing after he died…...

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Those mad scientists at DARPA (who previously brought us such curiosities as the Internet) are now actively engaged in research to produce semi-undead swine.

Yeah you read that right: the Pentagon is working on zombie pigs now.

Before you reach for the nearest shotgun or chainsaw though, you should know that there’s some practical applications being sought from this. The problem is severe injuries of military personnel in combat situations: massive blood loss from wounds that without immediate (and often nearly impossible) treatment leads to death or debilitating lifelong trauma that may stand a chance of being averted. So the eggheads at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) are experimenting to see if a state of hibernation can be achieved in pigs, similar to squirrels and other mammals. If it can be made to work in pigs, humans could be the next step. Artificially slowing down brain and heart ...

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