6 Space Myths that Hollywood movies have promoted - Debunked!

A layman’s knowledge of space is very similar to their knowledge of science and history…It’s usually based on what we’ve picked up from movies, not research-based awareness of the world around us. I’m not underestimating laymen but there are a good many people who just assume they know the truth and have not sought it – so here’s another mythbuster: Outer-Space-style!

Asteroid belts are deadly.

Myth: Remember in The Empire Strikes Back, Hans Solo (temporarily hyperdriveless) had to navigate through a chaotic asteroid field while trying to evade the Empire. Obviously, all of the Empire starships were destroyed while Hans succeeded in doing what C-3PO said the chances were slim to none. But that’s what an asteroid belt is right? A stampede of millions of huge murderous space boulders instead of pissed off buffalos…

Reality: Wrong! The asteroid belt in our solar system looks like the picture below (scroll down…got it?) It looks very similar to the one in Star Wars. Yes, there are about half a million asteroids that we know of, in there but no picture of space can convey the real distances. There are miles and miles inbetween those hunks of rock, to the point that when NASA sent a probe through the belt, scientists said the odds of colliding into a meteorite was one in a billion!

So basically, Hans could’ve blindfolded himself and steered through the belt with his knees and his odds of colliding with an asteroid wouldn’t be much more than hitting one driving to the grocery store. Once upon a time, our belt had a thousand times more asteroids in it and even then, each asteroid had (wait for it…) 400,000 square miles to itself. No jokes.

You could argue that this particular galaxy and this particular asteroid belt in the Star Wars universe could be superdense but that’s impossible due to the laws of physics. Over time, they would HAVE to disperse due to all the collisions; they would go flying off outside the belt into outer space, free from the bounds of the belt’s gravity.

So to get hit by an asteroid, you’d have to have a hell of space pilot with a hell of a deathwish!

Black holes are cosmic vacuum cleaners.

Myth: Out of all the horrible things out there in space, black holes are one of the worst. They are ominion, invisible, huge and hoover everything within lightyears into their incomprehensible void. Due to this tendency, black holes are pretty much contractually obliged to appear in every sci-fi epic. From the planet-Vulcan-destroying black hole in Star Trek to Doctor Who, the black hole is portrayed as an inescapable vortex of destruction, slurping our universe through a straw.

Reality: Say tomorrow we woke up to find someone had replaced our sun with a black hole of the same mass. What would happen? Nothing. Well, we would freeze because our sun is gone but other than that, neither would we get sucked into or fall into space. Black holes are not as frightening as other people believe them to be. As big as they are, they still have mass and that means they have a finite amount of strength (Force =Mass x Acceleration of Gravity). So, black holes are like any other object subjected to the laws of physics meaning that this black hole would have the same gravitation pull as our sun – no more, no less.

The sun is yellow.

Myth: If you grab a crayon now and you drew anything other than a yellow sun, you would be a smartass or failing kindergarten. The sun is yellow, pretty much the first thing a child learns, right after it is hot. It’s even classified as the yellow dwarf.

Reality: Sorry to crush all the memories of art class, the sun is not yellow, nor is it engulfed in wavy flames. Doesn’t look like anything much, except perhaps an intergalactic cue ball. The sun appears yellow-tinted due to the Earth’s atmosphere and at 6,000 Kelvin, any thing can only be one colour: white. Pretty boring white, too.  Yes, the sun looks like the moon, but without the face or interesting dents.

I'm not kidding. That's actually our sun. (Courtesy of NASA)

We aren’t dependent on our eyes for the rest of our solar system either. For example, Mars, we’ve got pictures right, straight from the Mars rover landed on the ground, taking pictures of the red planet from inches away? It’s not even NASA’s fault - extraterrestrial photography is tricky, and the pictures that result do not necessarily represent the most accurate version of the subject. Instead, the scientists involved in the process tend to go for the combination of colors that help their work the most.

 Basically, all those awesome pictures space research has been throwing our way for years are nothing but black and white images colored in to show how much science each part of the picture features. And NASA will run it through filters to approximate what the full color version would look like if you were actually there sitting on the rover:

(Left: What the Mars Rover sent back. Right: What we coloured in.
All pictures courtesy of NASA)

But then you have to remember that Mars gets less than half as much sunlight as the Earth, and that said light is shining down through an atmosphere full of dust made of iron oxide (rust) particles. What we're saying is, the question of "What color is ________?" never has a simple answer when you're talking about outer space.

Meteorites are hot.

Myth: Say, a meteorite were to land in your backyard right now. You run out and see it sitting in its very own crater. Do you touch it? Hell-to-the-no, right? Not till it cools down? I mean, we’ve seen it in a million movies like Armageddon where the fiery meteor shower bombard NY, exploding stuff on impact.

Seriously...would you touch this? I wouldn't choose to be anywhere within 100km.

Reality: Sorry, wrong. These chunks of rock have been in space, 3 degrees above absolute zero, which is -270degC for billions of years. Due to their extreme speed, they are only in the atmosphere for a few minutes. They have NO time to become scorching hot before impact and likely to be just lukewarm.

So where does that giant fireball image come from, in those meteor showers? In fact, the fireball is not from the actual physical meteor but from the air in front of the meteor being compressed at incredibly fast speeds. That layer of air, creates a shock wave all the way to impact and heats up to point of catching fire!

Of course, the fire would heat up the outer layers of the meteor in those few minutes but it doesn’t matter since those always get blown off on impact. So if you’re around when a meteor lands, just pick it up. Great souvenirs for when the alien conspiracy fellas turn up!

YAY! All for meeee!

People explode in the vacuum of space.

Myth: In countless movies and sci-fi shows (the low-budget 0nes), we’ve seen it time and time again; if you go into space without a spacesuit, you will explode! The pressure inside you compared to the pressre outside will turn you inside out in a gruesome way immediately. Even Bart and Homer Simpson died this way (although I’m not sure we can expect accurate science from The Simpsons).

For example a balloon in the upper atmosphere, the pressure outside is greater than the pressure inside the balloon, the balloon will go splat! So this part is indeed correct. But why not humans?

Reality: Well…we’d like to think that we’re more complicated than balloons! We have our skin and circulatory system! The skin contains and protects our body so well that it can negate the effect of explosive decompression. The circulatory system is so adaptable that instead of boiling, the blood keeps going. Even freezing isn’t an immediate issue despite the cold environment, as there’s not much matter in space to absorb your body heat. The fact is that the main dangers of not having a spacesuit are oxygen-related: breating and holding air in your lungs, which leads to lung-inflating trauma.

Of course, if you just decide to hang around in space in a bikini and a respirator, it will kill you. Just won’t be as hilarious to watch.

There is a permanent dark side on the moon.

Myth: The moon has a dark side that doesn’t receive much sunlight, resulting in a freezing, dark wasteland, complete opposite to the other side where there is warmth. Thus, the dark side of the moon has become a place of myth, mystery and fear in popular culture, such as hiding ancient Transformer technology.

Reality: There’s no such thing, just like there’s no dark side of the Earth. Of course, only one side of the moon faces the Earth at any given time, just the Earth, not the sun! Besides eclipses and other anomalies, both sides of the moon get exactly the same amount of light as the face side, at different times though. On Earth, scientists refer to this phenomenon as ‘night’ :D

Just because we don’t see the far side of the moon doesn’t mean it’s bathed in darkness. It’s like applying the same logic as the baby game, Peekaboo: ‘Can’t see my face? Not there!’

Yes, I'm obsessed with Memes. I almost added one with the Win Baby :)

So there you go...Now you can watch Star Wars and point out more flaws...than usual. Thanks Shrusti and George Lucas :) 

Source + Pics from Google Images mainly...It's too annoying to list sources for pictures.

Psychology and History behind To-Do Lists

So...what do you do when you are completely stuck? I have been having writer's block for a month. It's BAD! The lack of inspiration is not for lack for trying. I'm still reading plenty of articles, bookmarking what I find interesting as possible future blogposts; but I can't get around to writing them. I've been working on ONE post for what seems like 2 weeks. Anyways, so instead of making some grand return to the blogosphere, I'm going to ease my way in with articles I have enjoyed and don't see any purpose in redoing it as it is very interesting by itself!

Written by: Maria Popova at BrainPickings

“The list is the origin of culture,” Umberto Eco famously proclaimed. (Leonardo da Vinci,John Lennon, and Woody Guthrie would have all agreed.) But the list, it turns out, might also be the origin of both our highest happiness and our dreariest dissatisfaction. So argues New York Times science writer John Tierney and psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. While the book is fascinating in general, its third chapter, titled “A Brief History of the To-Do List, From God to Drew Carey,” is particularly interesting. In it, Tierney and Baumeister dissect the sociocultural anatomy of our favorite organizational tool, from the storytellers who crafted the Bible and wrote the Genesis myth with its six-step world-creation plan, to Benjamin Franklin’s fastidious pursuit of virtue bound by goal-setting lists, to comedian Drew Carey’s quest for supreme personal productivity.

These anecdotes and pieces of cultural mythology are interwoven with ample psychology experiments from the past century and, ultimately, distilled into insight on how to make the to-list a tool of fulfillment rather than frustration.

Franklin, for instance, demonstrated one of the greatest pitfalls of the to-do list: trying to do too much at once, letting different goals come into conflict with one another:

Franklin tried a divide-and-conquer approach. He drew up a list of virtues and wrote a brief goal for each one, like this one for Order: ‘Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.’

…

When, as a young journeyman printer, he tried to practice Order by drawing up a rigid daily work schedule, he kept getting interrupted by unexpected demands from his clients — and Industry required him to ignore the schedule and meet with them. If he practiced Frugality (‘Waste nothing’) by always mending his own clothes and preparing all his own meals, there’d be less time available for Industry at his job — or for side projects like flying a kite in a thunderstorm or editing the Declaration of Independence. If he promised to spend an evening with his friends but then fell behind his schedule for work, he’d have to make a choice that would violate his virtue of Resolution: ‘Perform without fail what you resolve.’”

The result of conflicting goals is unhappiness instead of action. But deciding on the right goals can be a daunting task.

Tierney and Baumeister recount a revealing experiment: When a psychologist was invited to give a talk at the Pentagon on managing time and resources, he decided to warm up the elite group of generals with a short writing exercise. He asked them all to write a summary of their strategic approach limited to 25 words.

The exercise stumped most of them. None of the distinguished men in uniform could come up with anything.

The only general who managed a response was the lone woman in the room. She had already had a distinguished career, having worked her way up through the ranks and been wounded in combat in Iraq. Her summary of her approach was as follows: ‘First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three down.’”

Unscrupulous, perhaps, but the authors argue this is a simple version of an important to-do list strategy for reconciling the long-term with the short-term, or “the fussy with the fuzzy.”

Comedian Drew Carey took a different approach to mastering his to-do list — he outsourced his strategy to productivity guru David Allen, author of the cultish, modern Bible Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, who taught him how to adhere to specific next steps rather than abstract larger goals. The latter loom in the back of our mind like a nagging mother, never fully silenced until specific actionable steps are taken.

In fact, our brain appears to be wired to nag about unfinished to-do list items as uncompleted tasks and unmet goals continue to pop up into our minds. This is called the Zeigarnik effect and explains phenomena like earworms — when you hear only a portion of song, the song is likely to run through your mind at odd intervals as your brain struggles to finish it. Originally, the Zeigarnik effect was believed to be the brain’s way of ensuring goals are eventually accomplished, by prodding you into urgency until they are. But recent research has shed new light on the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in our cognitive to-do lists.

[It] turns out that the Zeigarnik effect is not, as was assumed for decades, a reminder that continues unabated until the task gets done. The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconscious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. Instead, the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan. The unconscious mind apparently can’t do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconscious can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders.”

The moral, then? Unless you are Woody Guthrie, keep your to-do list to a few very specific, actionable, non-conflicting items, then go fly your kite in peace.

I love this for multiple reasons.

1. LISTS are amazing! They are neat, organised and highly productive if used efficiently.
2. The fact that the only person who managed to eke out her strategic approach was a woman! (Yes, I'm a feminist. Sue me!)
3. It's nice to see that even Benjamin Franklin was sooo busy he couldn't get his lists to work towards his advantage at times.
4. The Zeigarnik effect, not only has a cool name, but explains the way your conscious and subconscious mind interacts. The earworm (classic problem). Not being able to focus on anything nowadays, yes there are more distractions, but at the same time, we also have more to do, which means we are spread thinner. So if we don't have a plan to tackle these things, we can never get a single thing done right. Great explanation.

Thanks for reading...Sorry for the long hiatus (if you missed me at all). I promise I'm going to try harder.

Google Dependence and Withdrawal...

Have we become too dependent on Google and its subsidiary products?

I have absolutely no doubt that I’m addicted to Google. To its search engine, its mail system, calendar, docs, reader, G+ and even blogger! Since Tuesday morning, I have not had access to my Google Account and thus, all the Google Apps that I use regularly (regularly, in this case, means about 10 times a day). The reason for this malfunction (and oversight on my part) is that due to all the things that I have on Google, I use a higher security system to access it called the 2-way verification. This means that after I input my password, a text is sent to my cellphone with a code that I have to input into my computer (Only when accessed from a new IP address). If you would note, this is something banks generally do when you buy something online. Ever since I came back to Singapore 3 weeks ago, I haven’t logged in on my own computer since I never log out in the first place so it was never an issue. When my friend logged me out to check her email on Tuesday, I realised I couldn’t log back in as I left my sim card in UK and Google finally realised that I was running on a different IP address. I realised that I didn’t give Google a back-up phone number and my back-up email address wasn’t receiving any emails as everything was forwarded to Gmail. Thus, my life was effectively ruined. Not being dramatic. Just over.

Through all of Tuesday, I tried to forget about it although my friends and family thought it’d be hilarious to make fun of my dependence. But it’s 8:30pm on Wednesday night and I’m not kidding but I’m going through some serious withdrawal symptoms. I’m depressed, lost my appetite, have a headache, indulged in retail therapy and don’t feel any better. This is an addiction. Fine, I admit it. But the fear that I might lose all that information terrifies me.

So the question remains, have we (the human race who have computers and internet) become too dependent on Google?

In the wake of Google's weekend error that labeled the entire Web as malware, some like CMS Watch analyst Kas Thomas are asking a provocative and timely question: have we become too dependent on Google?

One wonders: If Google were to go down (or become essentially unusable -- same thing) for, say, 72 hours or more, how disruptive would it be to the economy? Would online retailers see a slowdown in business? Would job-seekers remain out of work longer? Would the productivity of information workers (who supposedly spend a couple hours per day doing online searches) be seriously affected?

Sometimes even the most highly distributed, highly virtualized, "enterprise-hardened" infrastructure is no stronger than its weakest component. And quite often, the weakest component is human. That's never going to change--cloud or no cloud.

In the case of the Google error, which was caused by a simple human mistake, the world arguably went its merry way without serious disruption. But it's a fair question, and the same one formerly raised about Microsoft's dominance on the desktop. When one company dominates a market so completely, does it become an essential facility and hence require government regulation to ensure that it doesn't bottleneck the economy?

I'm not sure. I tend to eschew government regulation whenever possible, and I'd hate to see Google significantly constrained by U.S. oversight. Even so, the weekend snafu demonstrates just how vulnerable Google is to attack, as well as how susceptible we'd be to going down with Google.

Yes, other search engines are just a click away, but with more and more people enveloping their online lives with Google products (Gmail, News, Finance, Reader, etc.), an error in one aspect of Google's product suite could have a domino effect on all of them, and significantly hamper productivity until Google fixes the source error.

Even so, the answer to Microsoft's dominance wasn't regulation: it was competition. Google, too, will face increased competition on the Web, so perhaps the answer to the concern is simply to wait. Over time, open source and other trends will no doubt diminish the relevance of Google's stranglehold in online search.

But for now, I can't help but feel a little vulnerable.

Lol.

Lemons, Life & Many Questions

If life gives you lemon, make lemonade.

Why? What’s wrong with lemons? Why do I have to make lemonade? The way I see it, if life gives you lemons, that’s pretty good because you got yourself some free lemons and why do you have to use them in some way? Life thinks about you and gives you something for free, even after all the irreparable damage we have caused and how hard we’ve seemingly tried to destroy this planet. The idea that we always have to turn lemons into something else seems pretty rude when we look at it in this light. There are times when a lemon would be useful, right? If you were in a desert, would you be picky about where you satiated your thirst from?

I like lemons. And if you don’t like lemons, then how can you like lemonade? I guess you coud add sugar to it but what if life didn’t give you sugar?  And why do you need sugar…oh wait, because you put all those ice cubes in it, watering down its lemony flavour. Wait, where did you get ice? Oh and what if life didn’t give you a glass?

I read somewhere (sorry I forget) and it made me think; this saying is a fitting metaphor for our species’ obsession with consumerism and manufacturing nature into a mass produced package. We get something for free (lemons) from our kind and generous Earth and instead of just using what we need and leaving the rest, we manufacture it and force Earth to make more and more. Well, originally the idea came because we could feed the hungry but why are they hungry in the first place? Our society is based on large-scale agriculture, which reaps huge surplus of food: increasing any given population’s food supply results in a population increase. Doh. Ok, but then we get what we need, population increases, we run out, population dies (just like every other animal in the ecosystem). Nope. Humans took the agricultured land and ‘developed’ it to make room for cities and set up all the mining and deforestation operations that are required to support the mass production industry.

Ok. So the same land that used to give us lemons (for free) can’t support us any longer because you wanted your DAMN lemonade! Our air is polluted, 200 species a day become extinct because of the factories that you need to make aluminium cans and cardboard boxes to package the lemonade? ‘And the Earth is bleeding under the oceans and the ozone layer is being depleted and the ice caps are melting and countries are perpetually bombing each other because of all the petroleum you need to fuel all the trucks and planes you built to transport the lemonade to thousands of corporate distributors worldwide?’

Sometimes sayings become so cliché and I understand that the true meaning is a motivational thing to make something positive when you’re handed something that you don’t like in life. Looking at the bright side is great and of all people, I’m usually the last to say this, but sometimes we should look at the other side. If life gives you lemons, just be thankful you got something.

Bonus (Alternate saying):

When life gives you lemons, be sure to send a hand written thank you note for the lemons, as email thank you notes can appear to be less sincere.

When life gives you lemons suck out all of the vitamin C and yell “EAT THAT, LIFE!

When life gives you lemons ask for salt and tequila!

When life gives you lemons, make orange juice, then wonder how the heck you did it.

When life gives you lemons, collect them one day life will stop and u would have the most lemons ever.

When life hands you lemons make lemonade and find someone else who life handed vodka to, and have a party

When life gives you lemons alter their DNA and make super lemons!!!

When life gives you lemons sell them on ebay,

When life gives you lemons when no one is looking, throw them through life’s window and run away.

When life gives you lemons, squirt the juice in his eye

When life gives you lemons, find a kid with a paper cut

When life gives you lemons, ask for the receipt

The James Bond Shower

A Shot of Cold Water for Health and Vitality  

James Bond always starts off his water (in the shower) nice and hot and then, turn it down to cold for the last few minutes. Perhaps a subtle way to illustrate Bond’s ancestry since this type of shower is sometimes known as the ‘Scottish Shower’ (although many cultures have this routine).

Hilarious History (as it usually is)

Hot water used to be a luxury in the ancient times, unless you lived near hot springs, so for most of human history, people bathed in cold water. However, even after the Greeks invented a heating system for their public baths, they continued cold showers for health benefits. Although they also made ill people bleed or induced vomit…

During the first century, the Finnish would sweat it out in the ancient version of a sauna and then, jump into an ice-cold stream or lake, a past-time also known as icehole swimming and still enjoyed by modern Finns and Scandinavians. And by those stupid Americans in movies, who fall into the ice, get stuck and die.

I'm still considering whether or not to add this to my bucket list. What say?

Many other cultures also incorporated cold water dousing during religious ceremonies. Native American tribes would alternate between sweating it out in a sweat lodge and jumping into a snow bank. Ancient Russians also took frequent plunges for health and spiritual cleansings. Who’s betting that Vodka was involved? Japanese Shinto practitioners would stand under an icy waterfall as a part of a ritual called Misogi to cleanse their spirit and is still practiced today.

In the 1820s, a German farmer named Vincenz Priessnitz started touting a new medical treatment called ‘hydrotherapy’ which used cold water to cure everything from broken bones to erectile dysfunction. Shhh…Don’t tell the pharmaceutical companies, they’ve got billions of dollars in this research! He converted his house into a sanitarium and patients flocked to it in the hope that his cold water cure could help them. Why couldn’t they just take long cold water baths? This soon spread to the rest of Europe and United States and people took to it like a duck to water - haha get it? – Charles Darwin was one of them (a chronically sick guy in addition to coming up with evolution). By the end of the 19^th century, there were over 200 hydrotherapy/sanitarium  resorts in the US, the most famous founded by John Harvey Kellogs (Inventor of corn flakes, preacher of circumcision to prevent self-abuse and great believer in the power of enemas).

What is practised in the name of hydrotherapy these days. Just looks like a $60 bath.

Although its popularity declined over the 20^th century as more physicians started to adopt allopathic medicine rather than holistic approaches which were seen as pseudo-hokum. While ice-cold baths are not prescribed for illness cures, they are still used to treat injuries such as sprained muscles and broken bones.

Real Benefits of a Cold Shower

1. Jump-start your mood and motivation
2. Deepen your breathing
3. Keep your hair healthy
4. Help with insomnia (although warm showers are also known for doing the same thing)
5. Detoxify your body
6. Rejuvenate, heal, and tone the skin
7. Enhance immunity against infections and cancer
8. Give your glands (thyroid, adrenal, ovaries/testes) a boost, improving hormonal activity
9. Crank up your metabolism to fight type 2 diabetes, obesity, gout, rheumatic diseases etc…
10. Increase testosterone and also virility
11. Reduce stress by regulating your autonomic nervous system
12. Strengthen exhausted, irritable nerves
13. Normalize your blood pressure
14. Train and improve your blood circulation
15. Fight fatigue
16. Improve kidney function
17. Reduce swelling and oedema
18. Improve lymphatic circulation, thereby increasing immune function
19. Regulate temperature, fighting chronically cold hands and cold feet and excessive sweating
20. Improve haemorrhoids and varicose veins
21. Decrease chronic pain
22. Reduce aches and pains

People who shouldn't try this: If you have the following conditions – heart disease, high blood pressure, overheated or feverish

Steps for the perfect James Bond Shower

1. Start off with the hot water.
2. Wash your hair with some Pinaud Elixir shampoo, just like 007.
3. When you’re ready to rinse, turn on the cold water. Bond would spend a few minutes under the cold water, meditating about a lost love or on how awesome his job is.
4. As you walk out of the shower, kill the hitman that’s been hiding in the closet using nothing by a towel and a Scotch glass.
5. Say a pithy one liner and proceed to put on a tux.

My personal advice (if anyone cares), is take it with a pinch of salt. If you want to try this, gradually decrease the temperature so your body can adjust.

Most importantly, listen to your body, it knows best. 

Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs of 2011

Courtesy of TIME Specials

1. Scientists use cloning to create stem cells

Not exactly human cloning but not too shabby either. A variation of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) was used on human cells; the same technique that created Dolly except from ewe skin cells. SCNT replaces the egg cell’s genetic material with a mature cell’s DNA. The egg cell then is stimulated to divide and if it develops fully, it produces a genetically identical clone of the animal from which the mature cell was taken.

At the New York Stem Cell Foundation, they modified the technique recently and instead of replacing the egg’s DNA, they combined it with the mature cell’s genetic material. Something about this seemed to click and appeared to facilitate cell division and allow stem cell generation. However, the stem cells weren’t quite normal since they contained an extra set of chromosomes (the ones from the original egg).

The researchers hope to find a way to silence or eliminate the extra set of DNA. But there seems to be a lot of promise as potentially yielding stem cells means that we could, one day, treat diseases such as Parkinson’s and spinal cord injuries that match their donor but also erase the need for an embryo.

 

2. First ever Malaria vaccine

A vaccine tested in children in sub-Saharan Africa cut the risk of infection with malaria by about half. Considering there has never bee a vaccine against a human parasite before, or against malaria (which infects millions of children each year), this is a remarkable achievement. Scientists reported that the experimental vaccine known as RTS,S was 56% effective in protecting children aged 5 to 17 months from infection with malaria a year after immunisation and also 47% effective in preventing severe case of the disease. Although the trial is not complete, the infants (aged 6 to 12 weeks) who have been vaccinated are going to be followed. This age group would be the target population (if it proves effective). Clinical trials are a long and laboured process and the age groups would be followed for three years to determine how long protection lasts and to track malarial infections, if any.

While encouraging, public health officials are still on the fence as whether to warrant widespread immunisation in malaria-endemic areas. Vaccines against childhood infections such as measles usually reach efficacy rates of 70% to more than 90%.

 

3. HIV Prevention as Treatment

HIV treatment has come a long way, thanks to anti-retroviral drugs (ARV) than can lower the virus levels in the body, keeping people healthy and reducing the risk of HIV transmission. Recently, studies are showing that the same treatment drugs can also help protect HIV-free people from becoming infected in the first place. Inn 2011, two ground-breaking trials (the first with heterosexual men and women) showed that HIV free people were significantly less likely to become infected if they took ARV drug Truvada every day.

In the developing world, where most new infections occur in heterosexual couples, using ARVs could help curb the AIDs epidemic. Public health officials face significant challenges to make ARVs widely available but if they can, beating AIDs is a real possibility.

4. Food pyramid becomes a plate

Every five years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services update its Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA). This year's update, released in June, unveiled MyPlate, its new symbol for healthy eating to replace the well-meaning but confusing food pyramid. The circular MyPlate departs from the original triangular shape and better represents the average person’s place. Health officials hope that the symbols’s clear and simple visual cues will prompt healthier eating choices.

5. Body Parts grown in the Lab

Mary Shelley may have been on to something as the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine recently created real functioning body parts like the urethra.The urethra is the thin tube responsible for transporting urine out of the body. In men, it can become damaged or narrowed by disease. To build a new one, Atala first created a biodegradable scaffold in the shape of a tube, then seeded it with patients' own bladder cells, and watched them grow. When the man-made organs were transferred into patients, remarkably they started working to eliminate waste.At the moment, the technique is too expensive to be of much help to most patients — it requires a $5,000 investment in materials and equipment. But it's a promising step toward a new world of regenerative medicine where creating healthy body tissues to replace diseased ones isn't such a mad idea.

 

6. Link between Colon Cancer and Bacteria

Two research groups reported similar findings about a type of bacteria called Fusobacteria which are rarely among the usual bugs that live in our guts but seem to flourish in colon cancer cells and are linked to higher rates of the disease. In some samples, they found hundreds of times more fusobacteria in cancerous as opposed to healthy cells. Earlier studies have also shown that the microbes are associated with a higher risk of ulcerative colitis, a condition in which inflammation destroys the colon’s epithelial cells (a risk factor for colon cancer). But is this a matter of cause and effect?

 

7. Weight-loss Miracle

If there's one constant in the world of weight loss, it's that there's no magic pill to melt off your excess pounds. At least, not yet.

But in the latest study of an experimental drug called Qnexa, researchers said obese patients taking the drug lost 10% of their body weight in a year. The pill combines two existing drugs — the weight-loss drug phentermine and the anti-epilepsy medication topiramate. The idea is to tackle the problem of weight gain on two different levels: phentermine (a distant cousin of amphetamines) can decrease appetite (although its long-term safety is still a question mark), while topiramate, which controls epileptic seizures by regulating electrical connections between nerves in the brain, also affects appetite and the body's ability to burn calories by modulating the same brain activity.

In other obesity-drug news year, scientists at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston tested an injectable compound called adipotide, a drug based on cancer research, and found that it slimmed fat monkeys by 11% in just a month.

 

8. Dogs than can sniff out Lung Cancer

Man's best friend might also be a doctor's newest weapon in detecting cancer. Dogs are known to have a keen sense of smell — sharp enough, according to a new study, to detect the presence of cancer on a person's breath. German researchers trained dogs over nine months to distinguish between breath samples from lung cancer patients and from healthy people; the animals were able to identify 71 out of 100 cancer samples accurately, and also picked out 93% of the cancer-free samples.What were they sniffing out? The scientists think the dogs were picking up on very subtle changes in certain volatile organic compounds in the breath, which may change when cancer is present. It may be possible to analyze cancer patients' breath for whatever compounds the dogs were identifying, but it's not clear what that is. "It is unfortunate that dogs cannot communicate the biochemistry of the scent of cancer!" the study's author noted.

 

9. Your spit can give away your age

Despite many medical advancements, something that science cannot do till now is accurately establish the age of a body at the time of death. DNA doesn't give away age (AN - and it shouldn't since it should be constant throughout life and if it’s changing, you’re in trouble, my friend!)

Thanks to some sophisticated analysis of saliva, UCLA researchers reported that scientists can now glean the age of a dead body from genetic material. These are not fundamental changes to the DNA, but epigenetic changes caused by environmental influences like diet, stress, exposure to sunlight, carcinogens or toxins even. These don’t change the DNA but are layered on top of the genome, affecting how genes are on or off. At specific area of the genome, these changes build up or decrease in an almost chronological way, serving as a timeing to predict a person’s age within five years accuracy. While this needs more studies to confirm and validate, every clue will definitely help!

 

10. A death risk predictor?

Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden reported in August that a simple blood test may be able to predict who is most likely to die of heart disease or cancer. In a 12-year study of nearly 2,000 people, the researchers found that those with higher levels of an enzyme called cathepsin S were more likely to die than those with lower levels. The enzyme, which helps break up certain proteins, tends to be higher in people with heart troubles or tumors, and may contribute to atherosclerosis, so people with higher levels of the enzyme are more likely to die of these diseases, the researchers found. Cathepsin S is also abundant in fat tissue, which isn't surprising since being overweight is a major risk factor for heart events.

It's not clear yet exactly how cathepsin S contributes to either heart disease or cancer, but drug companies are already busy working on compounds that might block its effects.

(AN – Not to put a damper on things, but something that has such widespread effects on the body probably shouldn't be blocked as it will definitely have too many side effects but be my guest!)