Archive for the ‘Daily Health’ Category
Mind-controlled prosthetics to help amputees
ROBOTIC limbs controlled solely by the mind could be available to paralysed people within a year.
Monkeys are being trained to control what might be the world’s most sophisticated and human-like robot arm. But they never touch the prosthetic limb or fiddle with a remote control: they guide it with their thoughts alone. If trials are successful, in a few months from now people with spinal cord injuries could learn to do the same.
In 2008, Andrew Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania published a landmark paper describing how two rhesus macaques learned to feed themselves marshmallows and fruit using a crude robotic limb controlled by electrodes implanted in their brains (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature06996).
Chimps lose out by aping others
OUR closest cousins’ mental agility has been cast into doubt. Chimps seem curiously unable to use their own initiative to gain the best possible reward if this means behaving in a different way to a dominant group member.
Lydia Hopper of Georgia State University in Atlanta trained a dominant female chimp to exchange one of two types of token for a chunk of carrot. This female was then housed with five subordinate chimps, and they quickly learned to ape her reward-receiving style.
Immune Suppressants: A Self-defeating drug or necessary evil?
For a while now, I have been a firm believer in not suppressing your thoughts, emotions or words. People love to edit what you say, despite the proverbial right of freedom of speech.
If you cannot use the words that you are most used to to convey your deepest thoughts, then whats the point, really! But then again the absence of censorship can only exist in an ideal world and were a long way from getting there!
Often, suppression of what one desires to express results in disaster, and I mean, an outright revolt that goes viral in no time.
How antidepressants boost growth of new brain cells
THE first clear evidence of how antidepressant drugs help to boost brain cell formation could lead to better treatments for depression.
The hippocampus is one of just two brain regions known to grow new neurons throughout life – a process called neurogenesis. This process is disrupted in people with depression, although it is not known whether this is a cause or symptom of the condition. It is clear, however, that one of the ways that antidepressants work is by boosting neurogenesis in the hippocampus. Christoph Anacker and his colleagues at King’s College London have now worked out how they do so.
Previous research has shown a link between some antidepressants and stress hormones called glucocorticoids.
Ringworm Humans: Some things are not for sharing…
Where have all the good women gone, honestly?
Yes, the quintessential women possessing a balance of oomph, style and substance knowing where the line has to be drawn.
Not needing attention but getting it all the same while in a girlie fashion being able to generate controversy just for funs sake, and all the while, not taking herself seriously!
The old guard of women whether movie stars, musicians or fashion models had something to them (an element of glamour, if you will) that is so lacking in the present generation of women that carry the torch into the New Millenium.