Blood Test for Breast Cancer

 

Researchers in Denmark have come up with a simple blood test that can predict breast cancer up to five years before it develops.

Last year, a study involving 13,000 women found that screening via mammography misses more than 2,000 cases of breast cancer per year in the UK alone, while falsely alerting other women that they have the disease when they don't.

Not only does it significantly increase your risk of developing breast cancer, but dense breast tissue makes it harder for the mammogram to pick up on any tell-tale lumps.

To test the new breast cancer blood test's efficacy, the Danish researchers observed 57,000 participants over 20 years, gathering blood samples along the way.

A smaller selection of 800 women was split into two groups - those who remained healthy throughout the entire process, and those who developed breast cancer within seven years of their first blood sample - and their blood samples were compared and their metabolic profiles built.

Early detection is crucial for breast cancer - if you catch it up to stage 2, you have a 93 to 100 percent chance of surviving the diseases, which drops down to 72 percent at stage 3, and 22 percent at stage four.

"These exciting findings could help us move a step closer to being able to identify a woman's individual risk of developing breast cancer," Samia al Qadhi - Chief Executive at Breast Cancer Care in the UK, who was not involved in the research - told Donnelly at The Telegraph.

Read more here

Map! Lightening Does Strike More Often than you Imagine

Forget what you've been told, lightning definitely does strike twice.

Around the planet, lightning strikes around 40 to 50 times a second, and depending on where you live, you could be in for a whole lot more action.

NASA's Earth Observatory has just released a map that shows where lightning flashes most often, and it reveals that lightning is far more likely to occur over land than water, and is also much more common near the equator.

So which spots on Earth receive the most lightning strikes? That would be Lake Maracibo in northwestern Venezuela, and the far eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, both of which are located close to the equator.

In Lake Maracibo, Reuters reports that there are lightning storms 300 days of the year.

This new map compiles data taken over a much longer time period than previous efforts to map Earth's lightning strikes, the researchers explain.

"The longer record allows us to more confidently identify some of these finer details," NASA scientist Daniel Cecil said in a NASA press release.

Read more here

Totally Scientific! Using Electrical Signals to Boost Brain Creativity

Publishing their results in the journal Cortex, a team from the University of North Carolina in the US used a low dose of electrical current to enhance brain waves called alpha oscillations, which naturally occur when someone is day-dreaming.

"We've provided the first evidence that specifically enhancing alpha oscillations is a causal trigger of a specific and complex behaviour - in this case, creativity. But our goal is to use this approach to help people with neurological and psychiatric illnesses." Specifically, there's already strong evidence that people with depression have impaired alpha oscillations.

Alpha oscillations occur within the low range between 8 and 12 Hertz, and are most prominent when we close our eyes and meditate or get lost in our own thoughts, which led scientists to associate them with creativity.

As soon as we have more pressing tasks to attend to, higher frequencies such as gamma oscillations take over.

These electrical currents were either placebo stimulations, that let participants feel a little tingle but didn't do much else, or 10-Hertz currents, designed to work in unison to trigger alpha oscillations.

The independently graded results showed that those who had received the alpha oscillation stimulation performed far better than those who hadn't.

To make sure that the alpha oscillations were really causing this creativity boost, the team repeated the experiment using 40-Hertz electrical stimulation, which boosted the activity of gamma oscillations instead. This had no benefit on creativity.

Read more here

Shocking! Oral Infections Could Actually Cause Heart Diseases

Oral infections that destroy teeth are linked to an increased risk of heart disease, a US study has found.

The researchers, reviewing current literature, say inflammation-causing oral diseases, including cavities and gum diseases such as gingivitis and periodontitis, are associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke.

"Given the high prevalence of oral infections, any risk they contribute to future cardiovascular disease is important to public health," says Thomas Van Dyke of the Forsyth Institute.

A high dose of a commonly prescribed cholesterol-lowering medication, atorvastatin, part of the statins group, prevents both periodontal and cardiovascular inflammation and reverses existing disease.

"The majority of diseases and conditions of aging, including obesity and type 2 diabetes, have a major inflammatory component that can be made worse by the presence of periodontitis," Van Dyke says.

"Periodontitis is not just a dental disease, and it should not be ignored, as it is a modifiable risk factor." The review article, published in the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism, summarises the latest clinical evidence supporting a link between oral infections and heart disease.

Read more here.

What Happens when Astronauts Die in Space?

For the first time since the Apollo missions, there is serious talk of more manned spaceflight missions, and it is raising an important question: When someone dies in space, what do you do with the body? A mission to Mars would require several months of travel just to get there.

The simplest solution is to just pop the ship's airlock and send the body floating out into the vacuum of space, as in Spock's funeral in Star Trek.

A UN agreement says you can't litter in space, and that includes dumping bodies.

That's because bodies floating through space could collide with other spacecraft or even float over to alien planets and effectively colonize them with human remains and whatever bacteria and other organisms may be living on and in the body.One of the most interesting proposals for dealing with death in space is a collaboration between the green burial company Promessa and NASA that spawned the idea of the 'Body Back'.

Body Back involves an airtight sleeping bag that a human corpse is zipped into and then exposed to the freezing temperatures of outer space.

"I mean, no society has done that on Earth that I know of. There are societies that desperately need fertilizer, and even they don't use their dead bodies for the purpose. There's always been an extremely strong taboo for using dead bodies for instrumental purposes." Death is a deeply human issue, but for long-term spaceflight it has to also be treated as a cost issue and a practicality issue.

Read More Here

What do You know About Pluto? NASA missions may re-elevate Pluto and Ceres

What can you really say about the unexplored planet in our Universe?

Of the approximately 10,000 internationally registered members of the IAU in 2006, only 237 voted in favour of the resolution redefining Pluto as a "Dwarf planet" while 157 voted against; the other 9,500 members were not
present at the closing session of the IAU General Assembly in Prague at which the vote to demote Pluto was taken.

Unlike the larger planets Ceres, like Pluto, according to the IAU definition, "Has not cleared the neighbourhood
around its orbit." The asteroid belt is, apparently, Ceres' neighbourhood while the Kuiper Belt is Pluto's neighbourhood - though no definition of a planet's
neighborhood exists, and no agreed upon understanding of what "Clearing the neighbourhood" [means] yet exists.

More than a century before Pluto was discovered, Ceres was plutoed.

Pluto ' s short planetary reign When Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, many astronomers were certain that a large planet orbited the Sun beyond Neptune.

So what is Pluto? Pluto is the last unexplored planet in our Solar System.
In a few months, a few intrepid humans will pull back the curtain on Pluto and say "Hello, Pluto, we're here." And Pluto will begin to share her secrets with us.

When she does, as with Ceres, our familiarity with Pluto will help us recognise that Pluto is, was, and has
always been a planet, albeit a small one.

Read more here.

How Marijuana Affects and Weakens Your Muscles

Researchers have figured out how marijuana use affects the nerve cells that control our muscles, and say it could explain why it's had positive effects on people with neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis.

A team led by Bernardo Moreno from the
NeuroDegeneration and NeuroRepair Group of the University of Cadiz in Spain wanted to figure out why side-effects of marijuana use sometimes include difficulty speaking and forming words, difficulty breathing, and - despite the intense need for munchies - difficulty swallowing food.

Many previous studies have focussed on psychotropic effects of the drug, such as anxiety, depression, cognition, learning, and memory, but until now, little has been done to figure out the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie the impairment of motor skills in some users.

To investigate, the team used synthetic analogues of the psychoactive compounds of marijuana and observed their effects on the motor neurons - or nerve cells - that control our muscle movement.

Using lab mice, they focussed on the nerve cells that control the tongue, because it's responsible for speaking, breathing and swallowing.

Publishing in the journal Neuropharmacology, the team reports that the psychoactive compounds in marijuana actually inhibit the transmission of information between these neurons via the synapses.

"The motor neuron - that is, the one that gives the order to the muscle to contract - sees its activity reduced which, as a consequence, would weaken the strength of the muscle contraction," Moreno said in a press release.

While the mechanism behind making it harder for us to speak and swallow might not sound like a helpful one, the team thinks it's at play when people with neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis report beneficial affects from using marijuana.

"In pathological processes associated with muscular hyperactivity phenomena, the reduction in motor neuron activity induced by cannabis could lead to a symptomatological improvement," says Moreno.

Interestingly, just last year, a separate study also looked into how marijuana affected the connectivity of the brain, and found that when it comes to long-term use, it appears to shrink a certain part of the brain in heavy users, but their brains will actively compensate for this by increasing connectivity - especially if the user started young.