NEVER TOO OLD

STRENGTH TRAINING FOR OLD PEOPLE

IF you’re ninety, lift weights.

It’s good for you.

Dr. Mikel Isquierdo did a study in the journal Age.  It showed that people over ninety who to took part in a weight training program did great. The nanogenarians worked on strength training, flexibility, and balance. At the end, they  walked faster, popped out of their chairs like 75 year old kids and  had less falls.

And they and looked sexier.

Well, obviously, they did better. They were working out, right? What do you expect?

Here’s the thing. We don’t need some huge study to prove the obvious. Exercise is good. Of course it’s good.What we need to know is how they got Mister and Ms Getlostsonny to sign up. If this idea spreads, there’s going to be a lot of empty nursing homes.

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My drawing.

IS PHYSICS REALLY HARDER THAN SEX?

Is physics hard?

Sex would be hard if you were held responsible for the kama sutra on the final. But, like sex, physics can be a rush if you just lay back and enjoy it. That’s what I suggest you do today. This video is hugely fun but it’s not simplistic. In fact, I learned a couple of things about back when the universe was was a pea pod – some of them quite surprising. I knew about the priest who came up with the big bang theory. But I didn’t really think of the first fraction of a second this way. It’s pretty cool. Really.

This is from “Minute Physics” and has been embedded from Youtube.

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The cartoon is mine

NATIONALIZING SCIENCE

UNBELIEVABLE

The Russian Academy of Science is caught in Russia’s political tractor beam. It’s being drawn back, back, back into the yawning maw of the state.

The academy, which includes hundreds of institutions and over 50,000 researchers, was messed with in every  possible way  when Russia was the “Soviet Union”. That was to be expected, right?  But not even Stalin had the brass round ones to try to turn it into a branch of the state

RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

Quirin Schiermeier (NATURE International Journal Of Science) reports that  it’s all over for the 289 year old academy. The State Duma just voted to grab it.

The vote in the upper house is a done deal.  Soon enough, this venerable institution  of Russian science will be breathing the fetid air of bureaucracy and the suave Vladimir  Putin who leads modern Russia will be left wondering why his country’s science is lagging.

It  wouldn’t be right for MISTER ScienceAintSoBad to bite his tongue when a venerable institution of science is being attacked.

I hope you agree.

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Cartoon by me.Credits for the photo to the Russian Academy of Sciences:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

DOCTORS

DON’T HAVE A HEART ATTACK

Don’t have a heart attack, okay?  All kinds of research has gone into this area of medicine but getting to the hospital and then walking out the door alive is still iffy.

SO SIMPLE THAT IT’S SMART

Can you say a Dane has Chuztpah?

I’m just asking. Because Hans Botker has plenty. He went after a problem that nobody’s been able to solve – getting heart attack patients to the hospital alive and in decent shape – and he solved it with  a blood pressure cuff. It’s so clever it makes you go “Aw jeez! Why didn’t I think of that!”.

Here’s what he did – he and his team. Let’s not forget to give credit to everyone involved in this project at Aarhus University Hospital and Aarhus University in Denmark.

In a “heart attack”, the blood vessels supplying the heart have gotten so thickened with fatty plaque that the heart can’t get enough blood for its own use.

Most people who’s arteries are narrowing notice it’s harder to walk up a flight of stairs. Sometimes there’s pain (“angina”) that comes and goes. If a heart attack occurs, it may be accompanied by weakness and lightheadedness – probably chest pain and pressure too although not always. At that point, the heart is in trouble and, if fast action isn’t taken, the injury  will become permanent and it won’t be able to maintain a beat.

A non-beating heart is a bad thing.

So the Danish team started thinking about what simple things could be done to support a  “starving” heart  on the way to the hospital. The idea of cuffing the arms came up.

Your extremities – your harms and legs – can go for several minutes without blood. That’s the idea behind a tourniquet. If, on the ride to the hospital,   blood pressure cuffs were used to periodically reduce the circulation to the limbs, wouldn’t that leave a little more juice for the heart itself?

Blood pressure cuffs for heart attacks? It sure makes sense.

The four year study of 251 patients  is being published by the European Heart Journal on-line. The study, which was run by Astrid Sloth, showed a reduction in new heart symptoms by about 51% and very few fatalities.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 10 (more or less).

The idea is great and the preliminary results are exciting. Because of the profound implications, even a well conducted four year study with 251 participants isn’t good enough. More will be needed. But, you know what? If Mister ScienceAintSoBad were in charge, he would place  extra cuffs in all ambulances. Why wait? I say let’s add this promising procedure when transporting suspected heart attacks.

It’s easy enough.

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Cartoon is by the author

SOME DISCOVERIES AREN’T OBVIOUS AT FIRST

A FINE DISCOVERY

You’re sitting around a waiting room with other people who look even worse than you do. When you finally get called, the doctor says “Whatever this is, it seems to be going around. Would you like me to give you some antibiotics?”

You say “Why ask me? Aren’t you the doctor?”

She says “Yes. But in this case, your guess is as good as mine. If it’s a virus, we’re wasting your money. But if it’s an infection, an antibiotic might help.”

“But,” you say,” I don’t want my guess to be as good as yours.”

“Of course you don’t..” she says.” But what can I do?”

A NEW TEST

What if there were a way to tell if it’s a virus?

Geoffrey S. Ginsburg, and Christopher W. Woods, both from Duke University, created a blood test that shows whether it’s a virus or not. It works and  it’s accurate but it isn’t fast enough yet. It take about 12 hours to get a result. The team knows what it has to do to speed things up.  The goal is to get the answer for the doctor before you leave her office.

There’s more.

The test can also  help tell what kind of virus it is. If there happens to be a treatment for that specific virus, you’re  lucky. If all it does is keep us from overusing (and wasting money on) antibiotics , it’s still a good thing, right?.

When the test gets polished up, I think it’s going to a very popular little thing.

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The drawing is mine

LIFE IN A TEST TUBE?

PLAYING YOU-KNOW-WHO

Sorry about that. I needed a headline.

However, life in a test tube is pretty close to the truth. M. Jewett, and G Church (Northwestern and Harvard Medical School) led a team of researchers which made a  ribosome.

Ribosomes make proteins and enzymes. And proteins are the worker bees of living systems. And enzymes (themselves usually made from proteins) slice up proteins into the many varieties that are needed to make something useful.

In other words, Jewett/Church make a “life kit”.

The ramifications are startling.

Delicate ground? Of course. This kind of thing  could ruffle  the feathers of a snake. Just remember, MisterScienceAintSoBad had   n-o-t-h-i-n-g – to do with this. Okay?

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The drawing is mine.

DREAM ON, BABY

GRAPES AND BLUEBERRIES AND THE IMMUNE SYSTEM

Don’t get too excited, okay? This is ” in the lab”.

According to Adrian Gombart (OSU College of Science)  blueberries and red grapes have compounds –  resveratrol in the grapes  and pterostilbene in the blueberries  – called stilbenoids. This stuff,  they say, pops out from all the hundreds of compounds they studied for its ability to boost the immune system. It works in tandem with Vitamin D (don’t forget to take some this winter) to “increase CAMP gene expression”. The study is published in Molecular Nutrition and Food Research. 

Mister ScienceAintSoBadRating = 3  because this is so, so preliminary and hasn’t been demonstrated in humans.

Why even write this article?

Here’s the thing.

This is the “Age Of Science”.  There’s an awful lot of research – a good thing. But you have to keep your head screwed on when you read about an exciting piece of biochemistry in the lab. There’s a long way to go for those observations to get connected to our lives.  This particular report is more interesting for the way it fits with other things we’ve been reading about resveratrol and pterostilbene.  There’s quite a bit. And a lot of it is exciting.

In spite of the stingy rating, I like this.

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The drawing is mine.

SO EASY

SPACE BRAINS

A few days ago, I wrote about a brainier dune buggy . It does a lot of the work that ground based scientists used to do.

Today I’ve got another one. A smarter rocket ship.

Why have a room full of humans  hunched over computers to control a space launch? Isn’t that from another era? If a dune buggy can be made smarter,  why not a space vehicle?

Seriously.

A rocket  should be able to do its own  instrument checks  asking for a “consult” only when necessary.

The Japanese  Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) read my mind. A few days ago, it launched a 3 stage rocket and, according to Science Recorder (Ellen Miller), the whole thing was controlled with just two  laptops. The rocket handled the nitty gritty, allowing the human controllers to concentrate on higher order decisions.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad was impressed.

Meanwhile, NASA’s beaming about its new “21st Century Control Center”.  It has replaced those bulky old workstations with newer “cleaner” computers But, you know what? I think NASA should have a look at what its Japanese counterpart is doing.  NASA launches more and bigger vehicles but isn’t this the direction that it should be headed?

What do you think?

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Drawing by me

GUNS DAMN IT

Writing about guns is scarier than writing about religion. You never know when you’ll hit a nerve.  But what’s a science writer to do? This study (American Journal of Public Health) is the first to show a strong relationship between the number of guns in a state and the number of homicides. The more guns, the more homicides.

Make of it what you will.

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Drawings are mine.