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Apple Shown to Prevent Early Atherosclerosis
A new study shows that apples and apple juice are playing the same health league as the often-touted purple grapes and grape juice.
According to Physorg, researcher Kelly Decorde from the Universite Montpelier in France was part of the European research team that found apples have similar cardiovascular protective properties to grapes.
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Long-term consumption of antioxidants supplied by apples and purple grapes, especially phenolic compounds, prevents the development of atherosclerosis in hamsters.
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The researchers also observed that processing the fruit into juice has the potential to increase the bioavailability of the naturally-occurring compounds and antioxidants found in the whole fruit.
Using a variety of established analytical techniques, aortic plaque was evaluated to determine the effectiveness in decreasing plaque that is associated with atherosclerosis.
According to the research, “This study demonstrates that processing apples and purple grapes into juice modifies the protective effect of their phenolics against diet induced oxidative stress and early atherosclerosis in hypercholesterolemic hamsters.“
Researchers also noted, “These results show for the first time that long-term consumption of antioxidants supplied by apples and purple grapes, especially phenolic compounds, prevents the development of atherosclerosis in hamsters, and that the processing can have a major impact on the potential health effects of a product.“
In summary, the researchers stated that their work would help provide encouragement that fruit and fruit juices may have significant clinical and public health relevance.
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Diet Treatment Call for Epilepsy
A special high-fat diet helps to control fits in children with epilepsy, a UK trial suggests.
The number of seizures fell by a third in children on the ’ketogenic’ diet, where previously they had suffered fits every day despite medication.
The diet alters the body’s metabolism by mimicking the effects of starvation, the researchers reported in the Lancet Neurology, BBC said.
The researchers called for the diet to be more widely available on the NHS.
It is the first trial comparing the diet with routine care, even though it has been around since the 1920s. Children are given a tailored diet very high in fat, low in carbohydrate and with controlled amounts of protein.
It is not exactly clear how it works but it seems that ketones, produced from the breakdown of fat, help to alleviate seizures. A total of 145 children aged between two and 16 who had failed to respond to treatment with at least two anti-epileptic drugs took part in the study.
Half started the diet immediately and half waited for three months. The number of seizures in the children on the diet fell to two-thirds of what they had been, but remained unchanged in those who had not yet started the diet, the researchers reported.
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Acoustic Cloak Feasible
An “acoustic cloak“ that could one day be used to damp down the sound of aircraft, or blot out the din of noisy neighbors, is now feasible, according to a new study.
The work follows recent research on “invisibility cloaks“, where a number of teams have shown that synthetic materials, called metamaterials--which are designed down to the microscopic level--can make beams of light flow around an object to make it invisible, Nature reported.
Physicists had suspected that it should be possible to create similar “acoustic cloaks“, another feat that has many commercial and military uses, and recently teams in Duke University, North Carolina, came up with special materials and a scheme to fashion them into a cloak. Today, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Prof Andrew Norris, Rutgers University concludes the materials used by these previous schemes (in which the mechanical properties vary in different directions, so sound waves travel at different speeds) suffer from one problem: the resulting cloak would have infinite mass.
The good news is that he has found another class of materials that can make sound waves travel seamlessly around the cloak. The sound waves would then continue on their original courses.
“There is no reason this material cannot be designed and fabricated--it is just a matter of time and effort,“ he tells the Telegraph.
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Quantum Camera Snaps Objects It Cannot See
A normal digital camera can take snaps of objects not directly visible to its lens, US researchers have shown. The “ghost imaging“ technique could help satellites take snapshots through clouds or smoke.
Physicists have known for more than a decade that ghost imaging is possible. But, until now, experiments had only imaged the holes in stencil-like masks, which limited its potential applications, NewScientist reported.
Now Yanhua Shih of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and colleagues at the US Army Research Laboratory, also in Maryland, have now taken the first ghost images of an opaque object--a toy soldier.
Ghost imaging works a bit like taking a flash-lit photo of an object using a normal camera. There the image forms from photons that come out of the flash, bounce off an object and into the lens.
The new technique also uses a light source to illuminate an object. However, the image is not formed from light that hits the object and bounces back. Instead, the camera collects photons that do not hit the object, but are paired through a quantum effect with others that did.
In Shih’s experiments a toy soldier was placed 45 centimeters away from a light source, which was split into two beams. One was pointed at the toy and the other at a digital camera. A photon detector was placed near the soldier, able only to record when a photon bounced off.
Photons from the light source constantly travel down both paths made by the splitter, either towards the soldier and the photon detector, or towards the camera. The detector and camera record a constant stream of those photons, and occasionally record a photon at exactly the same time.
When this happens, there is a direct relationship between where one of the photons hit the soldier, and where the other one hits the camera’s sensor, says Shih, because of a quantum effect called “two-photon interference“.
“If the first photon stops at one point on the object plane, the second photon can only be observed at the corresponding point on the image plane,“ he says.
So when the camera records only pixels from photons that hit simultaneously with one reaching the detector, a “ghost image“ of the object builds up. The soldier’s image appeared after around 1000 coincidental photons were recorded.
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Tendon Power
While happiness helps, the Achilles tendon is actually what puts more spring in your step. The tendon--a stretchy tissue that connects muscles to bones--makes the ankle three times as efficient as muscles alone.
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Japanese Mushroom Leads to Breakthrough
Using an enzyme of the Japanese mushroom Grifola frondosa (Maitake or dancing mushroom), proteins can be identified without knowing the organism’s genetic composition.
This advance simplifies the study of proteins lying at the root of such diseases as cancer and diabetes. Utrecht University Prof. Albert Heck’s research group announced this breakthrough on the website of the journal Nature Methods, ScienceDaily reported.
Proteins play a critical role in disease and growth processes of humans, animals and plants. Identification was previously only possible when the genetic composition of the organism in question was known. Thanks to Heck’s discovery, this is now a thing of the past. Heck used an enzyme from the Japanese mushroom Grifola frondosa to identify proteins.
This makes it possible to study the proteins of an organism of which the genetic composition is--as yet--unknown (e.g. exotic animal species).
Baby Birds Babble Like Human Infants
Baby birds babble, just like human infants, the discovery that young songbirds babble before they can mimic an adult’s song adds to evidence that young animals are born with circuitry to make them explore the possibilities of their vocal apparatus and to make sense of the world, Telegraph wrote.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, report in the journal Science that immature and adult birdsongs are driven by two separate brain pathways, rather than one pathway that slowly matures, in work that offers insights into how birds-- and perhaps people too--learn new behaviors, and what goes wrong when they have difficulty learning. “The babbling during song learning exemplifies the ubiquitous exploratory behavior that we often call play but that is essential for trial-and-error learning,“ comments Dr. Michale Fee, senior author.
“The main point of our finding is that the child-like behavior of young animals may not be just because they have an immature form of the circuitry that makes adult behaviors, but because they have special circuits in the brain that purposefully drive their exploratory and random-looking behaviors.
Blobs Inside Earth Like Peanut Butter
You know Earth’s schematic: core, mantle, crust, right? Sorry, not so simple.
According to LiveScience, like the gooey center of a chocolate morsel harboring peanut butter and honey, inner Earth is far more nuanced than outward appearances would suggest.
Earth is made up of several layers, once thought to be pretty distinct. The skin, or crust, goes down about 25 miles (40 km). Below that is the mantle area, which extends about halfway to the center of the planet.
The mantle is a thick layer of silicate rock surrounding a dense, iron-nickel core, and it is subdivided into the upper and lower mantle, extending to a depth of about 2,900 km. The outer core is beneath that and extends to 5,150 km and the inner core to about 6,400 km.
New data reveal the mantle consists of more varying material than was thought. So convection--how heated material bubbles up--is now thought to work differently.
“Imagine a pot of water boiling,“ explains researcher Allen McNamara of Arizona State University. “That would be all one kind of composition. Now dump a jar of honey into that pot of water. The honey would be convecting on its own inside the water and that’s a much more complicated system.“
Baldness Linked to Pollution
Men living in polluted areas are more likely to go bald than those breathing cleaner air, a new study suggests.
The ground breaking research, by academics at the University of London, has linked the onset of male pattern baldness, to environmental factors, such as air pollution and smoking, Telegraph said. The scientists believe toxins and carcinogens found in polluted air can stop hair growing by blocking mechanisms that produce the protein from which hair is made. Baldness is known to be hereditary, but the new research suggests that environmental factors could exacerbate hair loss.
It raises the hope that scientists may be able to develop treatments for balding men, with topical creams that are able to combat the effects of pollution on hair follicles.
Mike Philpott, from the school of medicine at Queen Mary University of London, said, “We think any pollutant that can get into the bloodstream or into the skin and into the hair follicle could cause some stress to it and impair the ability of the hair to make a fiber.
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