Nerdy Science Blog

Chinese military treatise ‘The Art of War’ is not the only thing from ancient Chinese that influences the U.S. military.  The traditional Chinese medicine skill, acupuncture, will also be used by the U.S. military.

U.S. Air Force will be training its physicians to take acupuncture to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Col. Richard Niemtzow, chief of acupuncture clinic at Andrews Air Force Base, developed the “battlefield acupuncture” from traditional acupuncture in 2001.  The “battlefield acupuncture” used short needles and acupuncture five points on the outer ear to control pain and reduce stress.  Short needle is used so that it can fit better under combat helmet, hence the soldiers can continue their mission while they are acupunctured.  The patients who experienced the acupuncture treatment said it felt like something clipped the ear.  Many patients felt that it really reduced pain.  This reminds me of Chinese Martial Arts Novels (it’s a literature which is unique to Chinese literature) which the evil doctors used acupuncture to turn people into zombie and obeyed their orders.  44 Air Force, Navy and Army doctors will be trained in a pilot program starting in March to use acupuncture as emergency care in combat and in frontline hospitals.

The U.S. military first encountered acupuncture during Vietnam War.  Col. Richard Niemtzow started learning acupuncture in 1995 at McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey.  He then became full-time military medical acupuncturist for Navy.  He later established acupuncture clinic at the Malcolm Grow Medical Center at Andrews.  He also treated patients at Walter Reed and other Air Force bases in U.S. and in Germany with acupuncture.

The use of acupuncture in the military will help to improve the acupuncture research and development, which will be benefit to the civilian as well.  Maybe you will see James Bond using acupuncture to numb everyone in the next 007 movie.

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Breast Cancer is the most common cause of cancer in women and as per statistics, the second most common cause of death in women in the U.S. aged between 45 and 55. No one knows the exact cause of breast cancer but there are women with certain risk factors that are more likely to develop the disease. It should be mentioned that a even when a woman with risk factors develops breast cancer, it is hard to know just how much these factors contributed to her cancer. There are certain risk factors like gender, race and ethnicity, family history, aging and dense breast tissues that you cannot change. But there are certain lifestyle risk factors that you can keep track of to reduce the chances of the disease. Let us take a look at these lifestyle risk factors that can cause breast cancer.

1. Child-bearing factor. A woman who has her first child after the age of 35 stands a greater chance of getting breast cancer than a woman who has her first child around age 20. The older she is, the greater the risk of developing breast cancer. Further, having more than one child at an earlier age reduces her risk of the disease and having no children at all increases the risk. Pregnancy reduces a woman’s total number of lifetime menstrual cycles, which may be the reason for this effect.
2. Recent Use of Birth Control Pills. Women who are recent users of oral contraception have a higher risk of developing breast cancer. The risk is highest for women who start using oral contraceptives as teenagers. However 10 or more years after they have stopped taking oral contraceptives, the risk comes down considerably. Women who plan to take oral contraception must discuss the side-effect of breast cancer with their doctor.
3. Not Breast Feeding. Women that do not breast feed their babies stand a slightly higher chance of breast cancer than women that breast feed their babies for a long period of time like 1-2 years. This could be attributed once again to the reduced number of menstrual cycles that goes with breast feeding.
4. Lack of Physical Exercise. When women do not include exercise as a part of their daily routine, they elevate their risk of breast cancer. A sedentary life style with absolutely no physical activity makes them susceptible to the disease. An ideal exercise program to reduce the risk would be about 45-60 minutes, 5 days a week.
5. Alcohol Consumption. The more the alcohol intake of women, the higher the risk of breast cancer. Alcohol consumption is clearly linked to an increased risk and it has been found that women who have about 2-5 drinks daily have about 150 % higher chance of breast cancer than those that do not consume alcohol at all. It is suggested for women to limit their alcohol consumption to one drink a day if they have to drink at all.

There are other factors too like post menstrual hormone therapy, obesity and high fat diets that are said to expose women to breast cancer. Keeping a check on these factors after discussing them with your health team will help reduce the risk of the disease.

By-line:

This post was contributed by Holly McCarthy, who writes on the subject of the certification for geriatric nursing. She invites your feedback at hollymccarthy12 at gmail dot com

It’s going to be Valentine’s Day two weeks later, and it’s never too early to think what to prepare for your Valentine. First of all, you need a Valentine’s Card, and these are several Valentine’s Day Cards ideas.

The following Darwin, Sagan, Newton, Curie and Einstein valentines were created by Ironic Sans.

Neatorama was also being inspired and created several science valentines LOLcats, which included Archidemes, Avogadro, Tesla, Hawking, and Pavlov.

And here comes Nicolaus Copernicus.

Bad Astronomy also spread love to Mars.

This is my favourite, The Love Gel!

Jack of Science also created lots of lovely nerdy Valentine’s cards

“You’re perfect in every single way, all the way down to your DNA.  I wanted you to know I care, and that we’d made a great base pair.”  How sweet is that!

If your picture editting skill is not as good as the people above, why not consider hand made your own Valentine’s Day poster?

Or write your Valentine’s message on the drugs.

Another easy way out is buying gifts online!  Perhaps you can consider buying nerdy tees from YellowIlbis, like Theobromine Heart Jersey t-shirts.  There are different colour for this tee featuring a heart with the chemical structure of theobromine (theobromine is the methylxanthine alkaloid present in cacao beans), which are raspberry melange, brown melange, and pink melange.

As gifts for geeky guys, why not consider the t-shirt featuring sextic equation for a heart surface?  It comes with red, navy, and also red for women.

What’s your 2009 Valentine’s Day idea?

Hormone plays an important role in stimulating cancer cells proliferation, hence causing prostate cancer.  Man’s sex drive is also stimulated by hormone.  Scientists at University of Nottingham studied the relationship between men sex drive and prostate cancer, and they really found a link between the two.  According to the study involved 800 men, men who had frequent sex and masturbation are more likely to have higher risk of getting prostate cancer.  However the risks diminish with age.  The study was published in January issue of BJU International.

So would you like to enjoy life earlier and longer but suffering health problem, or shorter happy days but healthier life?

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After reading this cute little chemistry joke from About.com Chemistry, I can’t help myself draw this ugly comic:

Two atoms are hanging out together.
ATOM 1: Hey, I think I’ve lost an electron.
ATOM 2: Are you sure?
ATOM 1: Yep, I’m positive.

Whenever I read the news about fruit flies, I can’t help myself repeating a sentence over my mind and in this blog, “Time flies like arrow, fruit flies like banana!”

This time fruit flies may be able to enjoy more bananas in their life.  Researchers from Brown University, University of Chicago, and University of Connecticut Health Center had identified the cellular mechanism of aging gene in fruit flies.  The study was based on the discovery made by Stephen Helfand, a professor in biology, molecular biology, cell biology and biochemistry at Brown University, which mutation of Indy (I’m Not Dead Yet) gene could prolong the life span of fruit flies.  The researchers examined the mutated fruit flies with normal ones at molecular level.  Genes required to produce energy in normal cell life were expressed at lower level in the mutated ones.  This created less free radical which contributed to the aging process.  However the overall energy generated by the mutated fruit flies was the same and the mutated fruit flies lived longer without any side effect.

Scientists suggested this discovery could be used in anti-aging treatment.  The paper was published online on this Wednesday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).  Other authors are Nicola Neretti, Pei-Yu Wang, Alexander S. Brodsky, Hieu H. Nyguyen, Kevin P. White, and Blanka Rogina.

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Flubber (1997) is a movie about a professor at a college trying to create a new source of energy with his assistant.  In the end, he created a rubbery bouncy creature which it was called Flubber.

The image above that looked like Flubber is not Flubber (sorry for fooling you with the title).  It is a 5 mm capsule doll composed of living cells created by scientists  at University of Tokyo’s Institute of Industrial Science (IIS).  The researchers cultivated hundred thousand cell capsules which each coated with dozens of skin cells into the doll-shaped mold, hence creating a doll-shaped tissue.  IIS lead researcher professor Shoji Takeuchi said that this technique can create body organs and tissues which is useful in regenerative medicine and drug development.

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As explained in wikipedia, cachexia is “loss of weight, muscle atrophy, fatigue, weakness and significant loss of appetite in someone who is not actively trying to lose weight.”  This condition accompanies with severe diseases such as cancer, AIDS, and autoimmune disorders.  A group of physicians and scientists had recently published cachexia definition in December issue of the Clinical Nutrition.  This can be an important guideline to diagnose the cachexia in patients.  John Morley, an endocrinologist at Saint Louis University School of Medicine said that weight loss is an important indicator of diseases and cachexia is a very serious problem which many physicians ignore.

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Although fungus infection is one of the major factors that the world’s frog population is decreasing to a very small amount, human may contributed to their soon-to-be extinction.

Frog legs have been a delicious dish on human dining table and they are traded globally.  Researchers found this has threatened the frogs to extinction.  Both Europe and Asia countries are power consumers of frogs.  It is funny that the Chinese called the edible frog as “field chicken”.  There are also other factors that may lead to frog extinction, such as habitat loss and climate change.

The study team of this human appetite leads to frog extinction includes researchers from University of Adelaide in Australia, South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI), the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, the National University of Singapore and Harvard University.

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Two separate systematic reviews by Cochrane researchers show that fake acupuncture may work as well as the real acupuncture.  The researchers had conducted studies on whether acupunction could reduce the frequency of headache occurrences, and the results showed the placebo effects worked as well as the ‘correct’ ones.  Placebo acupuncture reduces headaches and migraines as well as the real one.  I guess that’s why rubbing your head makes headaches go away.

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