Paralysed man can stand and move his legs again

A US man who was paralysed from the chest down after being hit by a car is now able to stand with electrical stimulation of his spinal cord.

Rob Summers, from Oregon, said standing on his own was “the most amazing feeling”.

He can voluntarily move his toes, hips, knees and ankles and also walk on a treadmill while being supported, according to research in the Lancet.

However, a UK expert said this should not be interpreted as a cure.

Rob was a keen baseball player and in 2006 was part of the team which won the College World Series.

But in that summer he was injured in a hit and run accident and his spinal cord was damaged.

Messages from the brain, which used to travel down the spinal cord, were blocked and he was paralysed.

Doctors surgically implanted 16 electrodes into his spine.

Rob trained daily in trying to stand, walk and move his legs, while electrical pulses were sent to the spinal cord.

Within days he was able to stand independently and eventually he could control his legs and step, with assistance, for short periods of time.

“None of us believed it,” said Professor Reggie Edgerton, from the University of California. “I was afraid to believe it.”

Rob has also regained other functions such as bladder, bowel and blood pressure control.

He said it had been a “long journey of countless hours of training” which had “completely changed my life”.

He added: “For someone who for four years was unable to even move a toe, to have the freedom and ability to stand on my own is the most amazing feeling.”

via BBC News – Paralysed man can stand and move his legs again.

New method ‘confirms dark energy’

First results from a major astronomical survey using a cutting-edge technique appear to have confirmed the existence of mysterious dark energy.

Dark energy makes up some 74% of the Universe and its existence would explain why the Universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate.

The finding was based on studies of more than 200,000 galaxies.

Scientists used two separate kinds of observation to provide an independent check on previous dark energy results.

Two papers by an international team of researchers have been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.

One type of observation used by the astronomers involves measuring a pattern in how galaxies are distributed in space. This pattern is known by the term “baryon acoustic oscillations”.

The second type of observation involves measuring how quickly clusters of galaxies have formed over time. Both of these techniques confirmed the existence of dark energy and the acceleration in the expansion of the Universe.

The concept of dark energy was first invoked in the late 1990s by studying the brightness of distant supernovas – exploding stars.

Einstein was right

To explain why the expansion of the Universe was speeding up, astronomers had to either rewrite Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity or accept that the cosmos was filled with a novel type of energy.

“The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster,” said co-author Dr Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

“The results tell us that dark energy is a cosmological constant, as Einstein proposed. If gravity were the culprit, then we wouldn’t be seeing these constant effects of dark energy throughout time.”

via BBC News – New method ‘confirms dark energy’.

In a first, Venezuela suspends driver’s license

Car-friendly Venezuela, where gasoline is almost free and troublesome highway rules rarely imposed, has suspended a bus driver from the roads for a year in the first case of a suspended license in the OPEC nation.

Police stopped Ramon Parra, 41, for driving at excessive speed in a large, overladen passenger bus that was missing one of its rear wheels.

The bus was packed with more passengers than legally permitted and one of its six wheels was wedged in an aisle inside, national police chief Luis Fernandez told reporters.

“It is important to emphasize that this is a totally new act; for the first time in Venezuela we are suspending a driving license, for 12 consecutive months,” Fernandez said.

South America’s top oil producer places a strong emphasis on the rights of drivers. Gas costs about 12 cents a U.S. gallon and prices have not been raised in years, meaning it is economical to operate gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and 1970s muscle cars like Ford Mustangs. …

via In a first, Venezuela suspends driver’s license – Yahoo! News.

12 cents per gallon… hmmm…

Crossing your arms ‘relieves hand pain’

Crossing your arms across your body after injury to the hand could relieve pain, researchers suggest.

The University College London team, who undertook a proof-of-concept study of 20 people, say the brain gets confused over where pain has occurred.

In the journal Pain, they suggest this is because putting hands on the “wrong” sides disrupts sensory perception.

Pain experts say finding ways of confusing the brain is the focus of many studies.

The team used a laser to generate a four millisecond pin-prick of pain to participants’ hands, without touching them.

Each person ranked the intensity of the pain they felt, and their electrical brain responses were also measured using electroencephalography (EEG).

The results from both participants’ reports and the EEG showed that the perception of pain was weaker when the arms were crossed over the “midline” – an imaginary line running vertically down the centre of the body.

via BBC News – Crossing your arms ‘relieves hand pain’.

Good trick to know. I wonder if it would work with a head ache?

Microscope – handy, quick and flat

Are the dark spots on a patient’s skin malignant? In the future, doctors will be able to take a closer look at suspicious blemishes using a new microscope – with results in just a few fractions of a second. It examines to a resolution of five micrometers; it’s also flat and lightweight, and it records images so quickly that the results are not blurred even if the doctor is holding the microscope in his or her hand. For results with comparable resolution values, a conventional microscope would either be restricted to a tiny field forced to scan the surface: conventional equipment slowly sweeps the surface, point by point, recording countless images before combining them to create a complete picture. The drawback: it takes quite a while before the image is complete. The new microscope designed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF in Jena, combines the best of both types of microscope: because it foregoes the grid, it needs to make just a single measurement, and that’s what makes it very fast. Still, it records across a broad imaging area. “Essentially, we can examine a field as large as we want,” remarks IOF group manager Dr. Frank Wippermann. “At five micrometers, the resolution is similar to that of a scanner.” There is also another benefit to the new system: With an optical length of just 5.3 millimeters, the microscope is extremely flat.

But how did researchers accomplish this feat? “Our ultrathin microscope consists of not just one but a multitude of tiny imaging channels, with lots of tiny lenses arrayed alongside one another. Each channel records a tiny segment of the object at the same size for a 1:1 image,” Wippermann explains. Each slice is roughly 300 x 300 µm² in size and fits seamlessly alongside the neighboring slice; a computer program then assembles these to generate the overall picture. The difference between this technology and a scanner microscope: all of the image slices are recorded simultaneously. …

via Microscope – handy, quick and flat – Research News 05-2011 Topic 5 – Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

Cell phone use may reduce male fertility

Men who have been diagnosed with poor sperm quality and who are trying to have children should limit their cell phone use. Researchers have found that while cell phone use appears to increase the level of testosterone circulating in the body, it may also lead to low sperm quality and a decrease in fertility.

“Our findings were a little bit puzzling,” says Rany Shamloul, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and lead researcher on the project. “We were expecting to find different results, but the results we did find suggest that there could be some intriguing mechanisms at work.”

The research team discovered that men who reported cell phone use had higher levels of circulating testosterone but they also had lower levels of luteinizing hormone (LH), an important reproductive hormone that is secreted by the pituitary gland in the brain.

The researchers hypothesize that electromagnetic waves (EMW) emitted by cell phones may have a dual action on male hormone levels and fertility. EMW may increase the number of cells in the testes that produce testosterone; however, by lowering the levels of LH excreted by the pituitary gland, EMW may also block the conversion of this basic circulating type of testosterone to the more active, potent form of testosterone associated with sperm production and fertility.

More in-depth research is needed to determine the exact ways in which EMW affects male fertility.

via Cell phone use may reduce male fertility | Queen’s University News Centre.

Recall this from a few years ago:

Keeping a cell phone on talk mode in a pocket can decrease sperm quality, according to new research from the Cleveland Clinic.

“We believe that these devices are used because we consider them very safe, but it could cause harmful effects due to the proximity of the phones and the exposure that they are causing to the gonads,” says lead researcher Ashok Agarwal, the Director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine.

In the small study, Agarwal’s team took semen samples from 32 men and brought them to the lab. Each man’s sample was placed into small, conical tubes and divided into two parts: a test group and a control group. The control group was unexposed to cell phone emissions, but kept under the same conditions and temperature as the test group.

The semen in the test group was placed 2.5 centimeters from an 850 MHz cell phone in talk mode for 1 hour. Researchers say that 850 MHz is the most commonly used frequency.

They used the measurement of 2.5 centimeters to mimic the distance between the trouser pocket and the testes. Agarwal reasoned that many men keep their active cell phones in their pants pocket while talking on their headsets.

Overall, researchers found an increase in oxidative stress such as a significant increase in free radicals and oxidants and a decrease in antioxidants. Agarwal says that equals a decrease in sperm’s quality, including motility and viability. Evidence of oxidative stress can appear under other conditions, including exposure to certain environmental pollutants or infections in the urinary genital tract.

“On average, there was an 85 percent increase in the amount of free radicals for all the subjects in the study. Free radicals have been linked to a variety of diseases in humans including cancer,” said Agarwal. Free radicals have been linked to decreased sperm quality in previous studies. …

via CNN

Archaeologists uncover oldest mine in the Americas

Archaeologists have discovered a 12,000-year-old iron oxide mine in Chile that marks the oldest evidence of organized mining ever found in the Americas, according to a report in the June issue of Current Anthropology.

A team of researchers led by Diego Salazar of the Universidad de Chile found the 40-meter trench near the coastal town of Taltal in northern Chile. It was dug by the Huentelauquen people—the first settlers in the region—who used iron oxide as pigment for painted stone and bone instruments, and probably also for clothing and body paint, the researchers say.

The remarkable duration and extent of the operation illustrate the surprising cultural complexity of these ancient people. “It shows that [mining] was a labor-intensive activity demanding specific technical skills and some level of social cooperation transmitted through generations,” Salazar and his team write.

An estimated 700 cubic meters and 2,000 tons of rock were extracted from the mine. Carbon dates for charcoal and shells found in the mine suggest it was used continuously from around 12,000 years ago to 10,500 years ago, and then used again around 4,300 years ago. The researchers also found more than 500 hammerstones dating back to the earliest use of the mine.

“The regular exploitation of [the site] for more than a millennium … indicates that knowledge about the location of the mine, the properties of its iron oxides, and the techniques required to exploit and process these minerals were transmitted over generations within the Huentelauquen Cultural Complex, thereby consolidating the first mining tradition yet known in America,” the researchers write. The find extends “by several millennia the mining sites yet recorded in the Americas.”

Before this find, a North American copper mine dated to between 4,500 and 2,600 years ago was the oldest known in the Americas.

via Archaeologists uncover oldest mine in the Americas.