We Speak For Earth

While the FDA dithers with voluntary approaches to regulation, the meat industry is feasting on antibiotics and sending out product tainted with antibiotic-resistant bugs.

The Meat Industry Now Consumes Four-Fifths of All Antibiotics

whatsoeverpleasesme:

A new human coronavirus (hCoV) has emerged recently in the Middle East. The disease it caused resembled that seen from SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) which was the source of a fatal epidemic in 2002/2003.
A study published today, Dec 11, has determined that this new hCoV has many potential hosts & could pass from animals to humans repeatedly. Researchers compared receptor sites used by this new coronavirus called hCoV-EMC and those used by the SARS-CoV to reach their conclusions.
The results implicate that the new virus might use a receptor that is conserved between bats, pigs and humans suggesting a low barrier against cross-host transmission. Read more on the study here: http://bit.ly/QTValu Access the journal article at mBio, an open access online journal published by the American Society for Microbiology: http://bit.ly/TNy1OF
A coronavirus is illustrated here. These RNA viruses have a pleomorphic viron 80-160 nm in diameter consisting of a lipid containing membrane with large peplomers surrounding a helical nucleocapsid. Source: Wellcome Images

(via scinerds)

gjmueller:

Some Children Lose Autism Diagnosis: Small Group With Confirmed Autism Now On Par With Mainstream Peers

Some children who are accurately diagnosed in early childhood with autism lose the symptoms and the diagnosis as they grow older, a study supported by the National Institutes of Health has confirmed. The research team made the finding by carefully documenting a prior diagnosis of autism in a small group of school-age children and young adults with no current symptoms of the disorder.

“Although the diagnosis of autism is not usually lost over time, the findings suggest that there is a very wide range of possible outcomes,” said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. “For an individual child, the outcome may be knowable only with time and after some years of intervention. Subsequent reports from this study should tell us more about the nature of autism and the role of therapy and other factors in the long term outcome for these children.”

photo via flickr:CC | nlnnet

(via scinerds)

This Map Is Sickening. I Can't Believe My State Is On It. →

scinerds:

upworthy:

So, not to panic anyone, but there’s a flu outbreak. It’s pretty bad. You need to get a shot before you make everyone sick. See the outbreak map and Google trend data below, then use the widget below it to find the closest vaccine to you. Take an extra hour off work and do some shots before you make someone you love sick.

Got my shot last week and I wasn’t even aware until a few days ago, this is very important don’t ignore it or scoff it off as something you can remedy at home. Go get your damn flu shots!

laboratoryequipment:

Passive Smoking Increases Dementia Risk

An international study by scientists in China, the UK and U.S. has found a link between passive smoking and syndromes of dementia. The study of nearly 6,000 people in five provinces in China reveals that people exposed to passive smoking have a significantly increased risk of severe dementia syndromes.

Passive smoking, also known as “second-hand” smoke or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), is known to cause serious cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, including coronary heart disease and lung cancer. However, until now it has been uncertain whether ETS increases the risk of dementia, mainly due to lack of research. Previous studies have shown an association between ETS and cognitive impairment, but this is the first to find a significant link with dementia syndromes.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/01/passive-smoking-increases-dementia-risk

(via scinerds)

laboratoryequipment:

3D Color X-Ray is Huge Security Screening Advancement

Scientists at The Univ. of Manchester have developed a camera that can be used to take powerful three dimensional color X-ray images, in near real-time, without the need for a synchrotron X-ray source.

Its ability to identify the composition of the scanned object could radically improve security screening at airports, medical imaging, aircraft maintenance, industrial inspection and geophysical exploration. The X-Ray system developed by Prof. Robert Cernik and colleagues from The School of Materials can identify chemicals and compounds such as cocaine, semtex, precious metals or radioactive materials even when they’re contained inside a relatively large object like a suitcase.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/01/3d-color-x-ray-huge-security-screening-advancement

… an outbreak of norovirus in Britain this winter has struck more than 1.1 million people with vomiting and diarrhea.

That’s right: 1.1 million. In Britain alone.

(via brooklynmutt)

The world actually produces more than enough food (WHO daily requirement of 2200 - 2500 food calories) for everyone on the planet – but not everyone has access to it, can afford it, or is eating a healthy diet. Whilst some 850 million people are estimated to be malnourished in developing countries, in the Northern developed world nearly 2 billion are overweight and obese. One-third of the world’s grain harvest goes to feed livestock and in recent years significant amounts have gone to fuel cars, rather than feeding either animals or people.

Soil Association, An inconvenient truth about food – Neither secure nor resilient (via perscientiamlibertas)

food
health

scinerds:

Leukemia-Killing Plasma Beam Could Offer New Cancer Treatments

Patients battling the blood cancer leukemia could one day receive a new type of treatment that uses a plasma — a gas of electrically charged particles — to kill cancer cells while keeping the healthy cells intact, according to new research.

“We have a really amazing device,” said Mounir Laroussi, director of the laser and plasma engineering institute at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., “We can generate a beam of plasma that is around room temperature. It doesn’t burn anything; it doesn’t destroy or poke holes. You can touch it with your hand.”

After 10 minutes of treatment with the cold-plasma blowtorch, over 90 percent of leukemia cells were destroyed, according to the study published by Laroussi and research scientist Nazir Barekzi in October in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

scinerds:

Citizen Science Time: Help Scientists by Sending Them Some Poop.. No Seriously

Stool Samples for Science: For Jack Gilbert’s next research project, he’ll be exploring a dark, mysterious place where thousands of unique species live, many of them unknown to science. He’ll be collecting samples of those species, cataloging them and trying to understand how they live.

Image: Enterococcus faecalis, a bacterium species that lives in the human gut. A new project is looking for volunteers to donate stool, skin and mouth samples for a study about the bacteria that live in human intestines. Credit: USDA

He’s not heading out on an expedition to the seafloor, a deep cave or anywhere else to do it, however. The specimens will be coming to him, by mail, in the form of thousands of scrapings from people’s skin, mouths and stools.

“Of course it’s gross, but science and helping people is more important than our sensibilities,” Gilbert, who normally studies marine bacteria at the University of Chicago, told TechNewsDaily.

Want to send Gilbert a bit of you? Simply visit his study’s crowd-funding page and order a $99 kit to participate.

It’s a project whose time has come, says Lita Proctor, who coordinates the Human Mircobiome Project for the National Institutes of Health. She said DNA-analyzing technology — and social media — are finally ready to handle the task, which is being called the American Gut Project.

Ultimately, Gilbert and 28 other U.S. university researchers participating in the American Gut Project hope they can persuade 10,000 people to send scrapings. From those submissions, the researchers hope to learn more about how bacteria, health and diet are related. “How does the Atkins diet affect gut bacteria populations?” and “What bacteria do thinner people tend to have?” are the kinds of questions they should be able to answer, Gilbert said.

As long as they can gather enough volunteers, they plan to publish their first results sometime in 2014, he added.