Eideard

There are many reasons to stay properly hydrated, but only recently have scientists begun to consider diabetes prevention one of them. The amount of water you drink can play a role in how your body regulates blood sugar…

The reason: a hormone called vasopressin, which helps regulate water retention.

When the body is dehydrated, vasopressin levels rise, prompting the kidneys to hold onto water. At the same time, the hormone pushes the liver to produce blood sugar, which over time may strain the ability to produce or respond to insulin.

In one of the largest studies to look at the consequences…published last year in Diabetes Care…French scientists tracked more than 3,000 healthy men and women ages 30 to 65 for nearly a decade. All had normal blood sugar levels at the start of the research.

After nine years, about 800 had developed Type 2 diabetes or high blood sugar. But those who consumed the most water, 17 to 34 ounces a day, had a risk roughly 30 percent lower than that of those who drank the least. The researchers controlled for the subjects’ intake of other liquids that could have affected the results, mainly sugary and alcoholic drinks, as well as exercise, weight and other factors affecting health. The researchers did not look at eating habits, something future studies may take into account.

Another study worth expanding. We already have sufficient evidence of the need for controlled, healthy nutrition. Coupled with exercise, folks have a better chance of avoiding this disease. Sufficient water consumption may be one relatively easy victim of our hectic culture to restore to something more appropriate to our evolution.

Armenia, one of the world players in chess, has made it mandatory in school for ages seven to nine.

Chess is a national obsession in the country of three million.

The passion was fostered in modern times by the exploits of chess champion Tigran Petrosian, who won the world championship in 1963 and then successfully defended his title three years later…

Armenian authorities say teaching chess in school is about building character, not breeding chess champs.

The education minister says taking the pastime into classrooms will help nurture a sense of responsibility and organization among schoolchildren, as well as serving as an example to the rest of the world.

“We hope that the Armenian teaching model might become among the best in the world,” Armen Ashotyan told The Associated Press.

Half a million dollars were allocated to the national chess academy to draw up a course, create textbooks, train instructors and buy equipment. Another $1 million went toward buying furniture for chess classrooms.

Two characteristics educators hope to encourage are quoted in the article – by the father of an 8-year-old whiz at chess. He hopes that continued involvement with and study of chess will encourage logical thinking and the ability to improvise.

Not bad attributes for your life’s culture.

A new study of hand hygiene in hospitals found that wearing latex gloves makes health care workers less likely to clean their hands before and after treating patients. The finding is concerning, researchers say, because germs can travel through latex gloves, and because they’re often worn when doctors work with bodily fluids and the sickest, most infectious patients. Taking off latex gloves can also cause a “back spray” effect, in which fluids and germs are snapped back onto the wearer’s hands.

As a result, doctors and nurses who don’t wash up after using latex gloves can spread infections through contaminated hands, said Dr. Sheldon Stone, lead author of the study…

“If you’re a patient, you assume that if someone is wearing gloves they’re being careful and protecting you from infection,” he said. “But in fact, their hands could be very dirty…”

The researchers found that the overall hand-washing rate — regardless of whether gloves were worn — was just 47.7 percent, similar to compliance rates for hand hygiene in American hospitals, which average about 40 percent. But when gloves were used, the latest study found, hand washing in the 15 hospitals that were part of the research went down even further, to about 41 percent…

The study found that health care workers wore gloves in roughly a quarter of all contacts with patients, and in 60 percent of those cases did not clean their hands either before or after treating the patient…

It was unclear why doctors, nurses and other hospital workers were less likely to wash or disinfect their hands before and after donning gloves. But Dr. Stone and his colleagues speculated that they might be influenced by a widespread misconception that gloves are impermeable to pathogens. While gloves do lower the rate of hand contamination, germs can still get through. Dr. Stone said he and his colleagues wanted to dispel the myth and get across to hospital workers the idea of “The Dirty Hand in the Latex Glove.”

“We want health care workers to avoid it,” he said. “It’s gross. And it’s not just a British phenomenon. I’m sure if you went all over you would find it.”

Eeoough!

In a survey of hair professionals, some reported that they look at customers’ face, scalp and neck for suspicious skin lesions, according to a report in the October issue of Archives of Dermatology…

Elizabeth E. Bailey, M.D…and colleagues conducted a survey of 304 hair professionals from 17 salons in a single chain in the greater Houston area…which included questions on the frequency with which they observed their customers’ scalp, neck and face for abnormal moles during the previous month.

Of the 203 respondents, 69 percent reported being “somewhat” or “very likely” to give customers a skin cancer information pamphlet during an appointment; 49 percent reported they were “very” or “extremely” interested in participating in a skin cancer education program; and 25 percent share general health information with customers “often” or “always.” Most respondents (71.9 percent) also reported they had not received a course on skin cancer but a modest number were educating their customers and observing for suspicious lesions.

When answering questions about observing suspicious skin lesions during the previous month, 73 participants (37.1 percent) reported looking at more than 50 percent of their customers’ scalps; 56 (28.8 percent) reported looking at more than 50 percent of their customers’ necks; and 30 (15.3 percent) reported looking at more than 50 percent of their customers’ faces. Additionally, 58 percent of participants reported they had recommended at least once that a customer see a health professional for an abnormal mole…

“In conclusion, this study provides evidence that hair professionals are currently acting as lay health advisors for skin cancer detection and prevention and are willing to become more involved in skin cancer education in the salon,” the authors write.

“Future research should focus on creating a program that provides hair professionals with expert training and effective health communication tools to become confident and skilled lay skin cancer educators.”

Many medical professionals don’t realize the benefits of adding those few seconds of examination for a problem which only continues to increase in a population which spends more and more time outdoors. I may holler about sedentary Americans; but, a significant and expanding minority is getting off their rusty dusty and exercising outdoors in some manner or other. Michelle Obama’s advocacy for children is starting to have an effect.

It became clear his detection rate exceeded “normal” stats and he was among the first to press for expanded exams.

A Newcastle University team has discovered that Type 2 diabetes can be reversed by an extreme low calorie diet alone…

In an early stage clinical trial of 11 people, funded by Diabetes UK, all reversed their diabetes by drastically cutting their food intake to just 600 calories a day for two months. And three months later, seven remained free of diabetes.

Professor Roy Taylor of Newcastle University who led the study and is also Director of the Newcastle Magnetic Resonance Centre said …, “This is a radical change in understanding Type 2 diabetes. It will change how we can explain it to people newly diagnosed with the condition. While it has long been believed that someone with Type 2 diabetes will always have the disease, and that it will steadily get worse, we have shown that we can reverse the condition.”…

Under close supervision of a medical team, 11 people who had developed diabetes later in life were put on an extreme diet of just 600 calories a day consisting of liquid diet drinks and non-starchy vegetables. They were matched to a control group of people without diabetes and then monitored over eight weeks…

After just one week, the Newcastle University team found that their pre-breakfast blood sugar levels had returned to normal.

A special MRI scan of their pancreas revealed that the fat levels in the pancreas had returned from an elevated level to normal (from around 8% to 6%). In step with this, the pancreas regained the normal ability to make insulin and as a result, blood sugar after meals steadily improved.

The volunteers were then followed-up three months later. During this time they had returned to eating normally but had received advice on portion size and healthy eating. Of the ten people re-tested, seven remained free of diabetes…

The usual precautions apply: Don’t go putting yourself on a 600 calorie a day diet; don’t make too many assumptions or draw too many conclusions from a single small study; etc. All that said, this is indeed interesting.

Thanks, Tom, for finding the story; and Eid, for letting me steal it.

A 10-year study has revealed that the electron is very spherical indeed.

To be precise, the electron differs from being perfectly round by less than 0.000000000000000000000000001 cm. To put that in context; if an electron was the size of the solar system, it would be out from being perfectly round by less than the width of a human hair.

The Imperial College team behind the research, which was conducted on molecules of ytterbium flouride, used a laser to make measurements of the motion of electrons, and in particular the wobble they exhibit when spinning. They observed no such wobble, implying that the electron is perfectly round at the levels of precision available, reflected in the figure above…

The next step is to up that precision level even further, using new methods to cool the molecules to extremely low temperatures and control their motion. The results are important in the study of antimatter, and particularly the positron — which should behave identically to the electron but with an opposite electrical charge. If more differences can be found, it could help to explain why far less antimatter has been discovered in the universe than predicted by theory.

Keep on rockin’. Just imagine what sort of rotation could be achieved with spheres like this as the contact points in a bearing race?

What do you suppose the odds are that your surgeon is going
to show you these “before and after” illustrations?

THE woman’s hips bulged in unsightly saddlebags. Then she had liposuction and, presto, those saddlebags disappeared.

Photo after photo on plastic surgery Web sites make liposuction look easy, its results transformative. It has become the most popular plastic surgery, with more than 450,000 operations a year, each costing a few thousand dollars.

But does the fat come back? And if it does, where does it show up?

Until now, no one knew for sure. But a new study, led by Drs. Teri L. Hernandez and Robert H. Eckel of the University of Colorado, has answered those questions. And what he found is not good news.

In the study, the researchers randomly assigned nonobese women to have liposuction on their protuberant thighs and lower abdomen or to refrain from having the procedure, serving as controls. As compensation, the women who were control subjects were told that when the study was over, after they learned the results, they could get liposuction if they still wanted it. For them, the price would also be reduced from the going rate.

The result, published in the latest issue of Obesity, was that fat came back after it was suctioned out. It took a year, but it all returned. But it did not reappear in the women’s thighs. Instead, Dr. Eckel said, “it was redistributed upstairs,” mostly in the upper abdomen, but also around the shoulders and triceps of the arms…

It turns out … that the body controls the number of its fat cells as carefully as it controls the amount of its fat. Fat cells die and new ones are born throughout life. Scientists have found that fat cells live for only about seven years and that every time a fat cell dies, another is formed to take its place…

As for the women in the control group, when the study ended and they knew the results, more than half still chose to have liposuction.

Mac users are more politically liberal, more urban, younger and more educated than their PC-using counterparts, according to a new survey by affinity aggregator Hunch.

The results of a survey of 388,315 Hunch users posted Friday in Hunch’s visually arresting style identified 52 percent of respondents as self-described PC people, 25 percent as users of Apple’s Macintosh computers and 23 percent as neither. Hunch cross-referenced those results with dozens of other questions it asks users to answer.

The details of the findings seem to fall along the lines that many people would have had a, well, hunch about in the first place. Mac users are chic, design-oriented and like hummus and San Pelligrino. PC users get around in jeans and chase down patty melts with Pepsi or Orange Crush…

Among the more provocative findings:

► 58 percent of Mac people are “liberal,” as compared to 38 percent of PC people
► 67 percent of Mac people have completed a four-year college degree or higher, as compared to just 54 percent of PC people
► 52 percent of Mac people live in a city, while PC people are 18 percent more likely than Mac people to live in the suburbs and 21 percent live in rural areas
► Mac people throw a lot more parties than PC people
► Mac people are more confident about their verbal abilities but less confident about their math abilities than PC people
► Mac people are more likely to see random people as “similar,” whereas PC people are more likely to see them as “different”.

There are dozens of articles spinning the Hunch data. I admit I chose this one just for the headline – to bust the chops of the few family members who haven’t yet left the Wonderful World of Windows.

Here’s the original study.

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one. The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland…

Dr Wiener continued: “In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%.”

The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the “non-religious” category.

They found…that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them. And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction.

However, Dr Wiener told the conference that the team was working to update the model with a “network structure” more representative of the one at work in the world.

“Obviously we don’t really believe this is the network structure of a modern society, where each person is influenced equally by all the other people in society,” he said. However, he told BBC News that he thought it was “a suggestive result”.

Overdue. Not that I think philosophical idealism will vanish. We have a few too many genes that need to update before that could happen. But, so-called organized religion appears to be working as diligently as possible to become a force for regressive, even reactionary behavior. Probably, because those who profit the most from incumbency fear the only way to maintain power and profit is by drawing back into fundamentalism for protection.

Since the study concerned educated secular democracies, the United States obviously has little need to fear a change.

A new University of Maryland study finds that when average Americans are presented the federal budget in some detail, most are able to reduce the budget deficit dramatically and resolve the Social Security shortfall.

Through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, on average, respondents cut the discretionary budget deficit projected for 2015 by seventy percent. Six in ten solved the problem of the projected Social Security shortfall through adjustments in payroll taxes, premiums, and benefits. The projected Medicare shortfall was also dramatically reduced…

Unlike conventional polls [Program for Public Consultation] PPC consults with the public by first presenting respondents with information on policy issues and a range of options for addressing them. “When given information and a chance to sort through their options, most Americans do a pretty good job of dealing with America’s budget problems – better than most politicians,” says…Steven Kull, who directs PPC…

On average respondents made net spending cuts of $145.7 billion. The largest cuts included those to defense ($109.4 billion), intelligence ($13.1 billion), military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq ($12.8 billion) and the federal highway system ($4.6 billion) – all of which were cut by majorities.

On average respondents increased revenues by $291.6 billion. The largest portion was from income taxes which were raised by an average of $154.8 billion above the levels currently in place. Majorities increased taxes on incomes over $100,000 by five percent or more, and increased them by 10 percent or more for incomes over $500,000.

Majorities also increased corporate and alcohol taxes, and turned to new sources of revenue, including a tax on sugary drinks, treating ‘carried interest’ income as taxable (also known as the hedge fund managers’ tax), and charging a crisis fee to large banks. A plurality (49 percent) favored a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. But a sales tax was rejected by 58 percent of respondents…

Most respondents also successfully dealt with the problem of Social Security. Respondents were presented eight possible steps for dealing with the Social Security shortfall that will occur as the baby boom generation retires.

Six in ten respondents selected enough steps to resolve the problem. This was the case even though many of them also chose to make the problem more difficult by increasing benefits to low income retirees.

This parallels the study done by readers of the NY TIMES a little while ago. Time after time, when Americans are presented with simple objective information about taxes and policies they come up with common sense solutions that escape the petty analyses of our payola politicians.

The Americans surveyed suggested increased spending on education and social security. The total deficit reduction was over $437 billion.