Are you getting tired of the hot weather? It’s been pretty relentless; On July 6 The New York Times reported about 70 million people in the U.S. were under heat advisories or warnings. I’m sure you’ve seen the cautions about dehydration, heat exhaustion, and so forth. But you can be sitting in the shade with your glass of
Zombies aren’t the only ones looking for brains. Used brains of all kinds are needed for medical research to advance the discovery of better treatments and cures for brain diseases, disorders, and injuries. If this interests you, check out the Brain Donor Project at https://braindonorproject.org/. This topic is especially timely because there is a campaign
High blood pressure is a real health concern, and one of the most effective countermeasures is lowering salt intake. Sometimes that’s not as easy as it sounds, so you have to get creative. Especially if you’re in Japan. Japanese researchers have announced the development of computerized chopsticks that increase the salty taste of foods by
I grew up on a farm with sheep and chickens, adjacent to an uncle’s farm that had dairy cattle. So the headline “Is Cow Hugging the World’s New Wellness Trend?” on BBC Travel certainly caught my attention (https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20201008-is-cow-hugging-the-worlds-new-wellness-trend?). Most would agree that animals, usually in the form of personal pets, can provide calming benefits and
The closest we’ve ever come to a real tooth fairy is probably Erin Dunn, a psychiatric epidemiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dunn calls herself “the science tooth fairy” to encourage kids to donate their baby teeth for science. She gives the teeth to Felicitas Bidlack, a specialist in tooth development at the Forsyth Institute, an oral
Have you ever heard someone who has had a near-death experience say “My whole life flashed before my eyes?” That person may have been right. In 2016, researchers were giving an 87-year-old Canadian man who had epilepsy an electroencephalogram (EEG) — a test that detects abnormalities in the brain’s electrical activity — to study his seizures.
I found a very interesting story in the news recently. A 56-year-old man who had chest pains and had been having trouble breathing for two days went to the emergency room. What doctors found was surprising — a four-inch piece of cement was lodged in his heart. A week earlier, the man had undergone a procedure
Have you heard that if you drop food on the floor, it’s still safe to eat for five seconds? It’s an intriguing idea, but where did it come from? We can’t be sure who thought of the five-second rule first, but some attribute it to Genghis Khan. No, really! “There were some historical quotes from Genghis
In 2010, a musician friend of designer/musician Zacharias Vamvakousis was in a serious motorcycle accident and feared he would never be able to play his guitar again. Zacharías realized there was no musical instrument accessible to people with severe disabilities. So he developed the Eyeharp — a digital instrument for the disabled: “If you can
About 20 years ago, author Dan Buettner, working for National Geographic and with a grant from the National Institute on Aging, started studying the world’s longest-lived people. They’re the ones who reside in the so-called Blue Zones of longevity. Basically, his goal was to reverse-engineer longevity. Since an estimated 20% of a person’s life span is
