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The photograph says it all.

via BBC News – US school road marking spelled wrongly.

The annual World Sauna Championships in Finland have ended in tragedy with the death of one of the finalists — Vladimir Ladyzhensky from Russia. He and Timo Kaukonen from Finland were rushed to the hospital after collapsing during the final. The doctors at the hospital were not able to revive him.

The event, which has been running since 1999, requires participants to withstand 110ºC for as long as possible. To put things in proper perspective, an ambient temperature of over 45ºC is frequently reported as a ‘Killer Heat Wave’.

Source: BBC News – Finalist dies at World Sauna event in Finland.

Source: Discovery News – Gasoline From Thin Air

An agricultural enzyme can convert carbon monoxide [CO] into propane [C3H8].  The organism that produces the enzyme is usually found in the soil around the roots of nitrogen-fixing plants. … The enzyme could eventually turn carbon dioxide [CO2] into gasoline.

An enzyme found in the roots of soybeans could be the key to cars that run on air. The enzyme can only make two and three carbon chains, not the longer chains that make up liquid gasoline. However, scientists believe they can modify the enzyme so it could produce gasoline. If perfected, the technique could lead to cars partially powered on their own fumes. Even further into the future, vehicles could even draw fuel from the air itself.

Scientists have known about this enzyme for a long time because of its importance in agriculture. They even isolated the genes that encode for vanadium nitrogenase more than 20 years ago, which opens the door to genetic engineers and synthetic biologists. But the technology to extract, grow and store large quantities of the enzyme has only developed within the last few years, which made this new research possible. Of course, much, much more advances will be necessary before air and bacteria cars take to the roads.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk -  Sewage powered VW Beetle hits the road in Bristol

The Telegraph reports that Volkswagen is giving new meaning to the term ‘Dung Beetle’ with a prototype able to cover 10,000 miles annually on the waste from 70 households. The Bio-Bug was launched by Wessex Water, which is generating methane from human waste at a sewage treatment works near Bristol. If the trial proves successful, Volkswagen will consider converting some of its fleet of vehicles to run on biogas.

The Anaerobic Digestion and Biogas Association says the launch of the Bio-Bug proves that biomethane from sewage sludge can be used as fuel. ‘This is a very exciting and forward-thinking project demonstrating the myriad benefits of anaerobic digestion (releasing energy from waste). Biomethane cars could be just as important as electric cars.’

Yesterday I posted a story about a terrier who sensed an infection festering in his master’s big toe, and mentioned that researchers had long been aware of the capacity of dogs to sniff out everything from cancer to blood glucose levels. Well WebMD had a slideshow titled Surprising Things You Didn’t Know About Dogs and Cats that confirmed this. Some interesting bits from the slideshow :

1. Fact: Dogs Can Smell Diabetes
   It sounds like a Lassie TV episode, but it’s truth, not fiction. Dogs can sniff out a dangerous drop in blood sugar in a diabetic owner and alert the person to take action by pawing, licking, whining, or barking. A few dogs have even been trained and placed as diabetic service dogs. Their nose for hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) is correct 90% of the time, according to their trainers.
2. Fact: Cats May Love Too Much
   Behavior experts confirm that some cats really do experience separation anxiety when apart from a favorite person — and that’s one reason a sweet kitty may pee on your clothes when you’re at work. Other signs: the cat paces, vocalizes, or blocks the owner’s path to the door. Left alone, she may vomit or be too worried to eat. For cats who love too much, behavior therapy can help – and Prozac.
3. Fact: Cats Smell With Their Mouths
   Cats have a small scent gland in the roof of the mouth called the vomeronasal organ. For a really good whiff of something like urine or another cat’s private parts, they’ll open their mouths wide to draw the odor to this scent organ. This fierce-looking behavior is called the Flehmen reaction, and it’s often seen in males who are checking out a female cat in heat.
4. Fact: Early Bonding Key for Kitty
   Cats that are aloof or bite the hand that feeds them probably had no exposure to people in early life. Feline behavior experts say a kitten needs regular contact with people in the first seven weeks, or it may never bond with humans. Even five minutes a day in the early weeks will teach a kitten not to bite when the hand of a towering human lifts it off the ground.
5. Myth: Cats Need Milk
   The long-standing myth that cats need milk is wrong and giving your pet a saucer of cow’s milk could make it vomit or have diarrhea. Kittens drink their mother’s milk until they are weaned and older cats may like the taste of cow’s milk. But adult cats don’t have much lactase, the enzyme needed to break down the lactose sugar in milk. The result is often uncomfortable and messy: diarrhea.
6. Myth: Dogs Need Bones
   This practice comes from the idea that ancient dogs (wolves) ate plenty of bones. Today, pet dogs can get all the calcium and nutrients they need from dry kibble. Bones do satisfy the intense canine chewing instinct, but they can choke a dog or splinter into knife-like shards, even when cooked. Edible chewies or sturdy rubber chew toys from the store are a safer choice.
7. Fact: Cats Kiss With Their Eyes
   Cats communicate with a slow blink, according to feline experts. With their own kind, it’s a peace sign, meant to put other felines at ease. Aimed at a human, this seductive blink shows affection, even love. People can return the love with a long gaze and slow blink to "blow a kiss" back in cat body language. The calming blink works on house cats, feral cats, and even tigers in the wild, according to behaviorist Roger Tabor.
8. Fact: Smoking Kills Cats and Dogs
   Secondhand smoke causes at least two fatal cancers in cats: lymphoma and oral carcinoma. Housecats get a double dose of toxins by breathing cigarette smoke in the air and by licking the residue off their fur when grooming. Dogs with long noses may develop cancerous nasal tumors from living with a smoker — and short-nosed breeds are more prone to lung cancer.
9. Cat Language: Purring Through Pain
   The quiet, motor-like sound of a purring cat is not yet well understood. Every cat fancier has seen their pet purring in happiness; yet cats also purr when they are in pain or close to death. It may be a self-soothing behavior. Kittens begin purring within hours of birth as they nurse — and the mother cat purrs during feeding sessions, too.
10. Cat Language: Chirping
    Cats make this sharp, high-pitched sound when highly aroused by the sight of prey, such as the animal more commonly known for chirping, the bird. When a cat is blocked from getting at the prey, he may chatter — a throaty vocalization accompanied by quick movements of the lower jaw.

Did you hear about the curious case where a man got so drunk that he passed out and his dog ate his toe? And then after that he hailed the little Jack Russell terrier as his lifesaver ! This case happened in Michigan last week.

Last weekend, Jerry Douthett of Rockford, Michigan came home and passed out drunk on too many margaritas. His family dog Kiko then allegedly chewed off most his right big toe.

The toe was gone. He ate it. I mean, he must have eaten it, because we couldn’t find it anywhere else in the house. I look down, there’s blood all over, and my toe is gone.

It’s just as well it happened, for It turns out Jerry has type 2 diabetes and a wound on his toe had become dangerously infected. His wife Rosee rushed him to the hospital where tests revealed an infection to the bone, and doctors there amputated what was left of the toe. More importantly, treating the wound led the doctors to the crucial diagnosis of diabetes for Jerry. Kiko apparently sensed an infection festering in his master’s right big toe, and took action. It should come as no surprise to researchers studying the capacity of dogs to sniff out everything from cancer to blood glucose levels. (Dogs have up to 220 million olfactory receptors,over 4 times more than humans.)

Things could have gone badly for Kiko. Two years ago, Linda Floyd, a 56-year-old diabetic from Illinois, awakened to discover her miniature dachshund, Roscoe, had gnawed off her right big toe. As a result, the poor misunderstood dog was euthanized, something Jerry initially considered. He soon reversed the decision when others pointed out the obvious. “If it hadn’t been for that dog, I could have ended up dead,” he realised.

Jerry has since sworn off alcohol. “For the better part of 48 years, I’ve had a good run”. And as for falling asleep, he said he’s not taking any chances. “I don’t think Kiko would do it again, but I wear shoes to bed now.”

Source: mlive.com – Dog eats Rockford man’s big toe, saves his life

A newly-developed heat-ray gun that burns the skin but doesn’t cause permanent injury has been deployed by the US troops in Afghanistan. The Active Denial System (ADS) is a millimeter-wave non-lethal heat-ray weapon system designed to disperse violent crowds and repel enemies. A US military spokesperson says that while the kit is now in Afghanistan, no decision has yet been made on its use.

It uses a focused invisible beam that causes an “intolerable heating sensation”, but only penetrates the skin to the equivalent of three sheets of paper. The discomfort causes whoever it’s pointed at to immediately start moving away. They often scream but the US military says the chance of injury from the system is 0.1%. It’s already been tested more than 11,000 times on around 700 volunteers, even on reporters.

The beam produced by the ADS can travel more than 500m (1,640ft) and is seen as an important new way to limit unnecessary deaths and minimise war zone casualties. Developers also say it could also be adapted to other operations, like fighting drug smuggling at sea and general peacekeeping operations. Work is continuing to make the system smaller, lighter and less expensive.

Source: Wired – U.S. Testing Pain Ray in Afghanistan

As microprocessors have shrunk, but the wiring between them hasn’t always kept up. But engineers at the University of Illinois are shrinking these wiring with a decades-old metalworking technique –electrodeposition. It’s basically the same process used in electroplating, but instead of depositing metal on a surface, as when trying to make a gold-plated piece of jewellery, the metal is deposited as a three dimensional shape.

Currently about 30% of the space in a microchip wafer is taken up by the wires between components. This technique could reduce that drastically, allowing more chips to fit in a given space. Another plus is that the process uses only water, and wastes almost none of the metal.

Source: International Business Times – Engineers Create Tiny Wires With Old Technique

I used to think that beverages and food products labelled sugar free would have no effect on sugar levels in the blood. Well, I was tripped up (again, sigh) recently when a diabetic friend sent me the scanned image of the label of a jar of his newfound favourite jam. He got tired of the diabetic fare and found it while scanning the supermarket shelves for ‘sugar free’ products. He asked if it was permissible and I replied that I don’t see why not. He loves the Australian produced jam but it played havoc with his blood sugar level, which he monitored closely. As it turned out, the jam was ‘sugar free’ technically, but the sweetener used is loaded as far as a diabetic is concerned. Let me explain:

Most artificial sweeteners like saccharin, aspartame and sucralose provide the sweetness of sugar without any caloric value, and thus have no effect on blood sugar. But these sweeteners are frequently used in conjunction with another sugar substitute called sugar alcohols.

The chemical structure of sugar alcohols looks like a cross between alcohol and sugar. The most common of these to us pharmacists is glycerol (aka glycerine). It is used in many formulations, usually to increase the viscosity (easier to pour) or refractive index (transparent emulsion).  As sweetener, food companies usually use much cheaper alternatives like sorbitol, maltitol and xylitol. While sugar alcohols provide lower calories than regular sugar (about half to a third of normal sugar), they DO raise blood sugar level when consumed in quantity.

So for my diabetic friend, he’s back to enjoying his marmalade, just not the thick slab on his toast the way he would like.

The inaugural Youth Olympic Game opens here in Singapore on the 14 of August, a mere 3 weeks away. In all, about 3,500 athletes, aged between 14 and 18, are expected to converge in Singapore to compete in 26 Summer sports. As the objectives of the YOG includes promoting cultural exchange and understanding of environmental issues in addition to expressing excellence in sports, I think doping wouldn’t be a problem amongst these young athletes. Still, boosting performance with legitimate means wouldn’t be too far from their minds.

Talking of boosting performance, lately sports scientists have stumbled on an amazing discovery. Athletes can improve their performance in intense bouts of exercise, lasting an hour or so, if they merely rinse their mouths with a carbohydrate solution. They don’t even have to swallow it. It has to be real carbohydrates, though;  artificial sweeteners have no effect.

Many athletes depend on sugary beverages to keep them going. But often, when blood is diverted from the stomach to working muscles during intense exercise, drinks or foods cause stomach cramps. So a carbohydrate rinse can be a way to get the same effect. It appears that the brain can sense carbohydrates in the mouth, even tasteless ones. The sensors are different from the ones for tasting sweetness, and they prompt the brain to respond, spurring on the athlete.

You can get an advantage from tricking your brain. Your brain tells your body, ‘Carbohydrates are on the way !’ And with that message, muscles and nerves are prompted to work harder and longer.   – Matt Bridge, coaching and sports science at the University of Birmingham, England.

Exercise scientists long knew it help to eat or drink carbohydrates during a long endurance event like a marathon. Muscles can use up their glycogen, the storage form of glucose, during long exercise sessions. But if athletes consume carbohydrates, they can provide a new source of fuel for their starving muscles. This view held that carbohydrates would have no effect on performance in shorter races of less then an hour: Muscles can’t use up their glycogen that fast, and by the time the body metabolizes the carbohydrates for fuel, the race is practically over.

Then in the 1990s, a few studies began to show that carbohydrates did have an effect in short exercise sessions. Athletes, often trained cyclists, rode hard and fast for an hour or so after drinking either a beverage containing carbohydrates. In intense exercise sessions lasting more than half an hour, the athletes were able to go faster or keep going longer when they had the drink with carbohydrates. Their performance improved as much as 14 percent.

The body is not capable of metabolizing the carbohydrates in the drinks and put them to use in such a short time. So the puzzle was how to account for the performance improvement observed. Thus exercise physiologists at the University of Birmingham put trained cyclists on intravenous infusions  of glucose just prior to asking them to ride as fast as they could for about 24 miles, about an hour. The IV glucose meant the athletes had large amounts of sugar available right away. They found it had no effect on their performance.

Next they asked the cyclists to do the same ride, but first to rinse their mouths with the a solution of maltodextrin, (a flavourless starch derivative usually used as thickener in food production). To their surprise, the performance of the cyclists improved. In fact, the magnitude of improvement was the same for rinsing with the solution and drinking it.  In repeat experiments by other scientists involving runners doing separate 30 and 60 minutes runs, rinsing the mouth with carbohydrates consistently led them to run farther, as compared with rinsing with placebos.

Using functional magnetic-resonance imaging, researchers at the University of Birmingham, UK conducted a study on the effect of glucose, maltodextrin (which is tasteless) and artificial sweeteners (which has no caloric value) on the brain and was able to confirmed the exercise study results: Carbohydrates activate brain areas involved with rewards and muscle activity while artificial sweeteners do not.

The effect, while interesting, may not have much application in the field of athletics and sports. Most exercise researchers acknowledge that the effect is real, but think endurance competitors are better off just consuming the calories. “That way they get real fuel, instead of sipping and then spitting out expensive, sticky spit.” Then there’s the need for fluid replacement, especially in the tropical climate of Singapore. Maybe in the 2012 Winter Olympic Youth Games, where athletes wish to gain a measure of performance boost without the extra weight of consumed beverage.

Scientists at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering carried out a study that investigates the ability of microneedles (made of dissolving polymer) to penetrate the human skin and allow the medicine to diffuse as effectively as the ordinary hypodermic needle. The findings, published in the journal Nature Medicine, revealed that a skin patch with microneedles attached to it can introduce the medical payload, in this case, flu vaccine effectively and with no pain.

The advantages offered by this skin patch are that it can be easily applied, even by an untrained hand, it provides an alternative for those who have needle phobia, and that it makes vaccinations more accessible and easy to transfer. The price of the new skin patch system would be the same as the traditional syringes and needle.

Source:
• Medical Daily – Microneedles may make getting flu shots easier
• BBC NEWS – Vaccine patch may replace needles
• TopNews UK – Trypanaphobics Worry No More as Needle-Free Vaccine Coming