‘Tesk’ could be the culprit is a gene that controls the sensitivity of pain nerves in the brain and if defective, can activate these nerves and cause such severe headaches known as migraines. After studying the DNA of 110 migraine sufferers and their families, arrived at the conclusion of scientists from Oxford University with a [...]
Friday is an MIT holiday for the new year (actually, so is today, but I put in two must-do posts anyway, below). Have a safe and festive (or meditative and reflective)New Year’s eve and January 1.
- Charlie Petit
Ah, lovely memories come to mind of years long past, when as a callow reporter at the SF Chronicle one of the joys of the morning was reading in my own publication’s pages the wit of columnist Art Hoppe, gone for nigh on 11 years now. Among his zanier recurring characters: the Harvard-educated gorilla. This [...]
The Orlando Sentinel’s space writer Robert Block, who has made the cudgeling of NASA a regular practice, takes an oblique route to deliver another story this week that won’t be so welcome at agency headquarters. It opens with a review of the well-covered, recent success of Elon Musk – internet tycoon, electric car man, and [...]
White nose syndrome broke through the avalanche of white Christmas news at the Boston Globe where Beth Daley today writes – while extracting info from the newspaper’s blogs – of urgent efforts by local researchers to get the law behind saving the little brown bats of the Eastern U.S.
That tangled photo is of wing bones [...]
Too bad about that Indian rocket that blew up Saturday with a communications satellite on board. Reuters’s Krittivas Mukherjee filed a quick report. Most interesting is the video report linked to it. It’s disturbingly like the space shuttle Challenger’s destruction – although as no one was on board one can watch it without utter horror. [...]
Low vitamin D intake during gestation appears to be associated with increased respiratory infections and wheezing in children, but not with a higher incidence of asthma, researchers reported.
WASHINGTON (AP) – Federal health officials on Friday approved Botox injections, which typically are used to blur the wrinkles, to alleviate migraine, which gave the nod to the pharmaceutical company Allergan to market its drug with patients with a history of suffering from these severe headaches. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA, for its acronym [...]
Last year, there were moments of panic about swine flu. Many found government advice vague or alarming. One result was strong take-up of the vaccine when it became available. After the pandemic faded, there was relief that although the new virus was serious, it was nowhere near as deadly as had sometimes been predicted.
A new study in the University Hospital of Essen, Germany, suggests that acupuncture transforms the way the brain processes pain. Using MRI, researchers led by Dr. Nina Theysohn could observe brain areas that normally deal with perception and response to pain. We studied 18 healthy volunteers who received electronic stimulation painful left ankle, the radiologists [...]Inhaled corticosteroids modestly increase the risk of diabetes onset and progression, especially when given at high doses, researchers found.
Several of the leaders of the new GP consortia believe that asthma medicines are ?over-prescribed? and are planning on raising with patients the idea of ?stepping down? to lower dose drugs. And with the NHS struggling to find £20 billion of savings and respiratory drugs costing large sums for the NHS, some patients have already reported being switched onto cheaper inhalers.