GOLLYGEE!

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03.05.2013

does thinking wear you out?

Maybe. Maybe not.

That said, studies show that people do slow down after performing taxing mental tasks. One experiment, conducted by Samuele Marcora of the University of Kent, split subjects into two groups. Members of the first played a mentally challenging computer game. Those in the second group watched a documentary about trains or sports cars. Then everyone took an endurance test on an exercise bike. Marcora found that people who were “mentally exhausted” gave up pedaling more quickly than the documentary-watching controls. It was as if the heavy thinking had worn them out.

At the same time, Marcora found no correlation between the mental task and measures of their cardiovascular response, such as blood pressure, oxygen consumption, or cardiac output. In other words, the mental workout didn’t seem to slow their bodies so much as it appeared to skew their perception of how hard a given physical task might be.

03.04.2013

A baby, born in Mississippi 2.5 years ago appears to have been cured of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. She is the first child, and only the second person ever, to have been thought to be cured of the infection. The cure was acheived thanks to an aggressive and early treatment with antiretroviral drugs just 30 hours after she was born. From NPR:

Gay decided to begin treating the child immediately, with the first dose of antivirals given within 31 hours of birth. That’s faster than most infants born with HIV get treated, and specialists think it’s one important factor in the child’s cure.

In addition, Gay gave higher-than-usual, “therapeutic” doses of three powerful HIV drugs rather than the “prophylactic” doses usually given in these circumstances.

Over the months, the baby thrived, and standard tests could detect no virus in her blood, which is the normal result from antiviral treatment.

Doctors then lost track of the baby for several months, as the mother went through “life changes.” But when they regained contact with the child, it showed a surprising lack of HIV virus. Again from NPR:

Gay expected to find that the child’s blood was teeming with HIV. But to her astonishment, tests couldn’t find any virus.

“My first thought was, ‘Oh, my goodness, I’ve been treating a child who’s not actually infected,’ ” Gay says. But a look at the earlier blood work confirmed the child had been infected with HIV at birth. So Gay then thought the lab must have made a mistake with the new blood samples. So she ran those tests again.

The results of this isolated event are prompting researchers to begin planning studies on whether this early and aggressive treatment can be more widely applied. It would have huge implications for AIDS treatment in the developing world where many children are infected with HIV during birth.

Also see coverage at the New York Times.

03.03.2013

stinkbugs on the rise?

A stinkbug on a glass

Will this be another record year for stinkbugs in America? National Geogrphic reports:

The worst summer for the bugs so far in the U.S. was 2010, but 2013 could be shaping up to be another bad year. Scientists estimate that 60 percent more stinkbugs are hunkered down indoors and in the natural landscape now than they were at this time last year in the mid-Atlantic region.

Once temperatures begin to rise, they’ll head outside in search of mates and food. This is what farmers are dreading, as the Asian stinkbug is notorious for gorging on more than a half dozen North American crops, from peaches to peppers.

Page 38 of 111

does thinking wear you out?

baby cured of HIV

stinkbugs on the rise?