Good News About America

As if you needed another reason to stay in bed…

Several studies lately have found a correlation between increased sleep hours and higher performance.  Researchers at Standford found that extra sleep improved football player’s performance on drills, while another study found that young children with a fixed bedtime scored higher on vocabulary and math skills than children whose parents did not have a bedtime rule.

Another study  at Trent University in Ontario found that people who are well rested score better on Guitar Hero.  In other news, playing a lot of Guitar Hero also makes people better at Guitar Hero.  Not that I would know anything about that..

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin have been studying why apples can protect against illness (thus, the famous saying). Tests have shown that the apple peel contains antioxidants that can slow the growth of cancer cells. After breast and prostate cancer cells were treated with apple peel extract, they grew more slowly and survived for less time.

These results were reported in the UK-based Daily Mail.

Progress has been made in treating two types of cancer, the New York Times reports.  Lung cancer and melanoma, two of the hardest cancers to treat, has reacted positively to two new treatments.

The lung cancer treatment works only for the 5% of patients who have a specific genetic abnormality, but shrank the tumors significantly in the majority of the patients.  Individual genetic makeup causes patients to respond differently to drugs; as genetic screening becomes more practical and populations increase, it has become practical to target medicines directly to a small percentage of the population with a particular genetic makeup.

For attacking melanoma, on the other hand, researchers are using a drug, called ipilimumab, that allows the immune system to more strongly attack the cancer.  While the drug has possible side effects – 7 of 540 patients who took it died after their immune systems attacked their own organs – it shows promise against multiple types of cancer.  It works by blocking a protein that slows down T cells, which fight disease.

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have invented a technique using stem cells to regrow lost teeth in as few as nine weeks.  A three-dimensional scaffold is created and infused with growth factor, after which stem cells are encouraged to migrate over it. Rather than growing the tooth outside the body and then implanting it, it can be grown in the socket. By contrast, an implant takes up to six months, and if it fails, it may take up to a year and a half for the replacement implant.  The university has filed patent applications and is actively seeking partners to commercialize the technology.

The dog won’t stop sniffing you?  Maybe there’s a reason…

Current blood tests checking for prostate cancer are iffy, but it turns out that dogs – whose sense of smell is 100,000 times more powerful than humans – can be trained to recognize the scent of a chemical produced by cancerous cells.  In a recent study, trained dogs were presented with 66 urine samples, half of which were from men with cancer; 63 of the samples were correctly categorized.

Researchers at MIT are working on a new type of blood glucose monitor, in the form of a tattoo.  Nanoparticles are injected beneath the skin and react to the presence of glucose; near-infrared light (generated by a wristwatch) causes the tattoo to florescence, indicating the patient’s glucose level.  The tattoos,which would need to be refreshed every six months or so, would eliminate the need to draw blood for testing.  While human trials are still years away, animal trials are expected to begin soon.

It’s not quite an artificial eye, but students in Israel have developed a new hands-free radar system that allows blind people to see objects around them.  Their solution uses a scanning light source, two video cameras, and a computer; an audible signal alerts the user to nearby objects.  Another auditory system is freely available and runs on Windows computers and Nokia and Android phones.

In another approach, a soldier who was blinded by a grenade in Iraq is testing a sensor that converts visual information from a camera into electrical pulses relayed to his tongue, allowing the user to “see” by interpreting the strengths and patterns of the tingles.

Meanwhile, researchers at Stanford have been working on a new artificial retina implant that uses the light entering the eye for power; it currently produces vision of 20/200, but this is expected to be improved to 20/100, good enough to read large print.  Meanwhile, the US Dept of Energy has awarded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory responsibility for the development of a third generation artificial retina; once perfected, the company Second Sight has pledged to commercialize the implant.

Work is also being done on curing some types of blindness using gene therapy.