Autism - superpowers?

I've always wondered about autistic types who are geniuses with numbers, music pitch, incredible attention to details, superhuman memory - why can't we use this to our advantage somehow?? Well, this idea is far from new and researchers have found some interesting revelations.

So lackluster are we 'normal' types in certain ways that apparently people without autism are called "neurotypicals." What's sad is that this article doesn't go into ways in which we can use this.

SciAm's Blindsight needs explaining

Here's a real teaser from Scientific American. They've got a video and article of a blind guy who can navigate through a cluttered space, sidestepping objects and not crashing.

They don't tell you anything about this so-called 'blindsight,' except how blind the guy is. You have to subscribe/register to read more.

So I go on wikipedia and it doesn't have anything useful either about how this is possible, and after much googling, I finally find the explanation. Cheap trick, SciAm. He's not really blind. This isn't really special to blindness in general. It only applies to people who are not "blind" because their eyes do not function. Rather, they suffer from cortical blindness - they sensory information but don't process it correctly, usually due to damage in some part of the brain.

This was clever marketing on SciAm - something people at journalistic organizations always tell you, but I thought in the name of passing on knowledge this was kind of cheap, no? And wouldn't they figure that generally people will try to see if the answer's somewhere for free online elsewhere but leave SciAm with kind of a bad taste in their mouths?

Fat Pride Folk to be angry

Yikes. A gene that makes people fat may also make people bad at problem-solving.

The fat pride community isn't going to like this one.

But how great would it be to have gene therapy solve this? Make people thinner AND smarter? The Chinese must be on to this already.

Tea Party Smarties

Well this is a little weird. Turns out tea party backers are wealthier and more educated than average. Maybe the smart ones make the not so smart ones do the physical demonstrating for them? Guess that seems clever.

Health Bill and Race

This new effort to consider characteristics like ethnicity to maximize the health bill is a pretty novel idea.

But since there is no race gene, would that complicate matters? Or will it be more like certain races are more likely to be overweight, because of income discrepancies? ...If that's the case it might make more sense to target that variable instead.

No more Botax, but Tan Tax

So much for botax. I really liked the idea but I guess more people use tanning beds than Botox, and the cosmetic surgery industry has more lobbying power than the tanning industry, so we've got the tan tax now.

Of course now the tanning salons are up in arms about the 10% tax effective in July, which is to raise $2.7 billion over the next decade (compare to Botax which was 5% to raise $6 billion).

But unlike arguing that clients are average wage-earning Janes as the botox group did and that the measure would be sexist (86% of Botox takers are women), people are saying it's racist(against pale-skinned types), unfair (tax the travel industry too?), and targets mom-and-pop stores more (I'll give them that).

But ridiculously, some are saying that tanning is not all that bad for you (from the Indoor Tanning Association) and the tax interferes with what some people ocnsider a way to keep them healthy with Vitamin D.

First of all, 10% on a tanning session is $1 to $2. I don't know if that's much obstruction. Second, scientists have consistenly been calling out the dangers of tanning beds-that they're as poisonous as arsenic, they're so dangerous that there should be a minimum age of 18 requirement, and oh right they cause cancer to a scary high degree. So actually this tax is better than Botox. Making yourself look better doesn't add to the healthcare system burden, but giving yourself cancer does. Not to mention the number one reason why you get wrinkles is because of UV rays, not aging.

All this really shows it like climatologists, tannings salons need some better PR skills too.

Snow Brands Magic Fat-Fighting Yogurt

Never mind feeling betrayed about yogurt using calcium as a reason for why it makes you lose weight. It might actually do the trick now so they can drop those snake oil tactics.

According to a recent study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, one type of bacteria - LG2055 was found to be the magic bug.

One of the largest dairy companies in Japan (besides us food schizo Americans, they always find the most interesting ways to trim the fat) called Snow Brand Milk Products had 87 people drink 100 grams of fermented milk twice a day, with no other change in diet. After 12 weeks, they had lost an average of 1 kg, 4.6% of bad fat (which surround internal organs) and 3.3% of fat-fat. Hips slimmed 1.7 cm, while waist 1.5.

Now before you rush to get this stuff, the company also caused the worst case of food poisoningin Japan in 2000, where more than 14,000 people got sick from old milk and failed to recall quickly. Then in 2002, a (now-dissolved immediately post-scandal) subsidiary called Snow Brands Foods labeled Australian beef as Japanese to receive government subsidies and five execs were arrested on fraud charges.

But EJCN is a respected journal, so hopefully there's nothing to fear.

Anti-Health Bill Folk

Yikes. Some ammo for Democrats: tea party folk protesting the "socialist" bill with interesting literary skills.

Autism 0, Vaccine 2

So last time in the Vaccine v Autism court battles, the court found that mercury preservative plus MMR vaccine does not equal autism.

Just on March 12, the same court also declared that there was no proof that the children's autism was caused by the preservative alone.

So just as we thought we were getting closer to resolving this (first the retraction, then the first ruling, now this ruling...) apparently vaccine-autism believers are now saying that it's just that children are receiving so many vaccines, it causes autism.

Well. I don't know about that. If the vaccine doesn't cause autism, why would more together be evil? Likening vaccines to collateralized financial derivatives seems a bit desperate. But hey, I'm no toxicologist. So if anyone's an expert about vaccines, I'd love to know.

Human Guinea Pigs

Newscientist has a very interesting article today on metabolic syndrome. Apparently your body would rather you be obese than have excess fat build up in your bloodstream, by depositing fat and sugar somewhere safer. In other words, getting fat is a defense against unhealthy eating.

More interestingly, this was tied to another study which injected volunteers' bloodstreams with the amount of fat found in a large beef burger.

Well naturally, it got me wondering. Why would anyone volunteer to do this??

Always a favorite site, McSweeney's has an interesting interview with a human guinea pig ($8,000 a study, 98 percent are men...I think that might say something).

Sleep and Obesity Again and Again

A study was published this month in the scientific journal Sleep on how you're at greater risk of being fat if you're sleep deprived.

According to researchers at North Carolina's Wake Forest University, if you sleep less than 5 hours, you (people under 40, that is) gained 1.8 kg or almost 4 lbs more than if you slept 6 or 7 hours.

On the other hand, sleep more than 8 hours and you gain 0.8 kg or 1.76 lbs more.

Two things I don't get:

1. Considering you burn more calories while you're awake, shouldn't you get fatter sleeping more? That is..if we're not spending that time eating/drinking Red Bulls.

2. These sorts of fat/sleep studies have been done so many times (here's one done six years ago by Columbia University in the same journal and another one five years ago in JAMA)..why is this still news?

H1N1 fallout

This is why we need an improved health communication system, besides the sad display of unnecessary paranoia last year concerning H1N1. Whatever our new healthcare system is, this communication problem has to be addressed.

So at some point even after H1N1 vaccine paranoia instigators panicked everyone out of getting vaccinated, everyone clamored to get vaccinated first, got scared there wasn't enough to go around, and now there's too much of it, with the Dutch government trying to sell vaccines back to manufacturers GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis. And why the Dutch ministry ordered 34 million doses-enough to give two shots to every person in the Netherlands-is beyond me.

Fertility transplant...T + 2 years

For the first time, a woman who had her only ovary removed and frozen, then transplanted back again, successfully conceived naturally and gave birth. Oh, this all happened in Denmark and was published in 2008, but for some reason we are all noticing it now. Anyone know why?

Obama takes on obesity

Obesity has been quite the ubiquitous, serious issue talked about for some time. And our government's realized that posting calories and banning trans fats (in NYC at least) might not be enough to keep us Americans from eating ourselves to death.

So here is a more unique government program created in some time: LetsMove is the new initiative, to be led by Michelle Obama, to promote healthy diets for children.

The program is a partnership between the US Departments of Treasury, Agriculture and Health, and Human Services, which will put in $400 million a year to make sure children eat the right kinds and right amount of food with more well-placed grocery stores and placement of healthy foods. How? Through "innovative financing" and grants.

Maybe they should just get rid of agricultural subsidies and save us $12 billion annually on higher food prices from backwards Great Depression-era protectionism.

Stem cell research gets a leg up

Here's some good news for the $1.5 billion vitamin industry, especially for vitamin C, which makes up for the most of that market share.

According to a study published in Cell Stem Cell, a ton of researchers supported by grants and foundations in China, vitamin C is not useless! Apparently vitamin C can greatly in stem cell development.

Ever since scientists figured out how to turn human adult cells into stem cells in 2007, therefore bypassing that ethical issue, research still hasn't gone the way researchers hoped because it the transformation was frustratingly inefficient- only getting 0.01 percent of of cells to change into stem cells.

Well these researchers discovered vitamin C can speed up that process over 100 times, making transformation and thus research much more viable, and also increase chances of survival for the stem cell.

Besides that very interesting development, maybe even more intriguing is that this research was supported by 13 grants from China, with one of them, EFBIC RED, being related to China. One of my friends who works in biotech has been complaining about the dangerous shortage of grants in the US, despite this administration's friendlier attitude toward scientific research. So China has been drawing scientific talent instead.

But scientific research is one of those things that builds on other's research, and it doesn't really matter where that research came from except when it comes to patents. Maybe Obama knows this and is willing to take the backseat for now (since we are battling greater troubles). But either way we should really step it up soon or risk losing to China in more ways than Americans would like.

Gene therapy is the new steroid?

In a report published today by three researchers in Science journal, steroids won't be the only thing athletes might be seduced by. Gene therapy might become, or already is, an untested and extremely risky way for athletes to gain an edge over competition:

"Some athletes and coaches will be tempted, prematurely and unwisely, to take advantage of results packaged by some as performance enhancement 'breakthroughs,' even if they are untested in humans and the only 'breakthrough' is faster or stronger mice."

And they aren't just speculating. From athletes begging for help from gene therapist Lee Sweeney and a doctor caught trying to give gene therapy to a fictitious American Olympic swimmer in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the market is certainly there. Plus two of these researchers have worked with the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, established more than a decade ago with International Olympic Committee funding.

So if there's going to be gene therapy doping, we need new tests since steroid doping isn't going to detect anything. And they're on that too, with WADA doing research into developing "biological passports" to monitor an athlete's biological profile over time.

You just wonder, with all this superhuman business going on, from Speedo LZR bodysuits to simply changing yourself biologically, what the point of sports will be. Watching people do incredible stuff with aids of all kinds? Then again I'm not a sports fan in the first place, so even without the doping I wouldn't know the answer.

Vaccines: Good For You!

Autism to H1N1, I can't say enough how important vaccines are. And it's truly scary how few people are getting vaccinated now.

According to a study released today by the Trust For America's Health, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 50,000 people die from vaccine-preventable illnesses a year. This year, only a third of adults were vaccinated flu.

But again this might not be exactly newsworthy, since it happens a lot. In fact, this year had twice the number of people getting vaccines than usual, with H1N1 and FluMist spurring people to action.

So I'd love to see number of vaccine taken charted against flu cases. Unfortunately I don't have access to VaccineTrack by SDI, which seems to be the only thing that records vaccine data. Until I get my hands on the info, let's keep getting vaccinated anyway.

Vaccines & Autism

I've always been skeptical of vaccine paranoia. Not only was all that fuss about H1N1 turned out to be just fuss, it looks like vaccines' link to autism might finally see its day of reckoning.

Andrew Wakefield is the one we can thank for all the hubbub about the vaccine-autism thing, when he came out with a paper in 1998 that said autism was a rare side effect of vaccines against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR). So he recommended that the vaccines be given space out, a year apart.

Even when the paper came out, it was pretty controversial. But leave it to parents to shun vaccines altogether, despite countless studies proving the contrary (Danish study, Court of Federal Claims), with even people trying to rationalize such irrational paranoia. Thankfully though, parents might just stop needlessly endangering their kids to scare diseases like MMR (death, infection of spinal cord, swelling of testicles or ovaries, just to name a few).

In a statement by the editors of The Lancet last week, they found in an investigation panel that "several elements of the paper are incorrect," therefore fully retracting the paper from public record. Looking forward to seeing what anti-vaccine camp responds with.

Homeopathy, Beware

Yesterday 400+ Brits took a "massive overdose" of homeopathic remedies to protest Boots' (their equivalent of our Duane Reade, but with better, actually fresh, food) endorsement and sale of homeopathic remedies.

Homeopathy has always struck me as a strange science, if science at all. The vitalist philosophy, born all the way back in 1796 to a German doctor, doesn't just concern all things herbal - it's based on a few (interesting) principles, some of which include the following:

1. Water has memory

2. Therefore diluting something with water makes it stronger, making some remedies so diluted that there aren't even any molecules from the original solution

These two are pretty much agreed upon actual homeopathic ideas. But certain homeopaths also adhere to others, like what ails you can cure you (ie caffeine - diluted, remember - to cure insomnia) and stuff involving pinning the patient with a piece paper with the remedy written on it, which borders on superstition.

Anyhow homeopathy is much bigger in Europe (compared to Americans, where most just think it's "something herbal..?"), where insurance covers it and even Sweden did some 5 year study and found it wasn't cost-effective enough to concern itself with the idea. It seems to be the biggest in India actually, where it's recognized as a national system of medicine.

Yesterday's stunt, called the 1023 campaign, was actually preceded by a letter of complaint the Merseyside Skeptics Society sent to Boots protesting homeopathy a week ago. So I guess there are other people besides me who aren't exactly convinced of homeopathy's efficacy.

They don't really say why they're targeting Boots and not homeopathic manufacturers and physicians themselves. Maybe Boots sells so many of the homeopathic remedies, that Boots is where MSS can dent?

It's hard to tell as the company was taken private in ₤11.1bn takeover in 2007 by now-Executive Vice Chairman Stefano Pessina, so sales figures on homeopathic or even health products aren't available. But he did say in May 2009 that the health and beauty division had sales of ₤6.2bn, so looks like there's a lot at stake, anyway.

Well I guess since this is not taking place in the US, few Americans care. I don't know if I believed much in homeopathy in the first place, but who knows about these things? Just as long as another philosophy doesn't get in the way of you getting medical attention or care when you need it (vaccines, surgeries, which MSS says severe homeopathics do cut out), I don't see why it's so bad. They just better not touch acupuncture, because I tell you that stuff really works.

FDA Crackdown on Fake Botox

As scary as fake Botox is, the FDA has been doing something about it! ..Only recently, though.

It started in November 2004, when four people became paralyzed with severe botulism poisoning in Florida. The difference here though, as opposed to unfortunate Faith He's case, is that this was a doctor who was passing it off as authentic Botox.

Since then, the FDA started cracking down, and the whole thing turned into 210 investigations against health professionals, 31 arrests and 29 convictions of individuals who "purposely injected an unapproved, cheaper substitute toxin for FDA-approved Botox Cosmetic into nearly 1,000 unknowing patients."

They actually tracked down (one of) the sources of this lethal stuff to a California lab, which also sold to an Arizona distributor, from which doctors would buy at a lower price (they marketed it as a cheaper alternative) and sell to patients at the usual $470 per vial, adding to the paranoia of the modern consumer. One giveaway though: the vials were clearly marked as "For Research Purposes Only, Not For Human Use."

Using distribution records, the FDA found that at least 200 healthcare professionals ("from Manhattan to Las Vegas," says one special agent) bought the stuff, and "many" (not most) have been prosecuted.

So what to do when we next desire to expunge those dastardly wrinkles from our stressed-out foreheads!? The FDA doesn't help much. It 's the same "use a trusted professional, ask about the source" routine, but nothing's keeping those doctors from refilling authentic vials with the cheaper, paralyzing stuff.

I guess you only find out when the price of beauty goes terribly high and you find yourself mute and helpless with lockjaw, or need a stomach tube to eat, or respirator to breath. Maybe those wrinkles aren't so bad after all.

Barefoot Study

I always thought there was something to be learned from barefoot running, and now there's a new study supporting the practice.

It appeared in the Nature scientific journal today, but was actually accepted a month after my post. Conducted by eight researchers from different medical and engineering schools (Harvard to Kenya to Glasgow to Ann Harbor), the study is the first to use 3-D infrared tracking to study foot strike patterns. They looked at three groups:

1. People who had always run barefoot

2. People who had always run with shoes

3. People who had switched from shoes to being shoeless

And the study actually proved our shoes really have changed our strides (in a way that years of evolution didn't prepare us for)...which can obviously lead to a lot of problems. SciAm's actually got a few of their quite astonishing pictures.

And it confirms another study published last week in the Journal of Injury, Function and Rehabilitation which found running in athletic shoes increased pressure on knees by 38 percent, and on hips 54 percent.

Anyway I got those Vibram shoes over winter, and other than this healthy-feet reason, I really don't know why I got them as I haven't exercised since..some time last summer. So I've really just been living through Ted. Maybe I'll get around to staving off obesity, and once I do, I'll let you know.

(Lack of) Reproduction In NYC

Just a thought out of left field:

I always wondered, with so many smart, attractive, ambitious types here, why NYC has so many single women.

That men might prefer less powerful women, might be a clue.

Botox, The New WMD

When it comes to beauty, some people don't mind taking risks when they'd be cautious otherwise. It just might be all the unnatural, photoshopped perfection getting to us.

Late last year, my mom's "facialist"—Faith He from China who opened her own relatively successful salon in Seattle about nine years ago—was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for injecting women with fake cosmetic procedures products. As in fake botox, restylane, etc. And she wasn't licensed to do so with the real stuff either.

Apparently an acquaintance of my mom's was getting (re?)married and wanted everything done. And when a laser-peel wasn't doing the trick, she wanted more. And of course, the facialist obliged. (Might be a Chinese reflex—go to Asia and you'll find people will tell you they can do anything you ask for. Whether they can is a risk you are taking, as I found when the broken watch I took in for repairs was even more broken, or when my resulting perm more closely resembled the sheep outside than the model in the picture I brought).

Anyhow, it turns out the products the facialist was using (may or may not be to her knowledge) was unregulated, fake stuff from China, as this woman found out when it coagulated above her cheekbone and a dermatologist sucked some out for inspection.

Ah China, always churning out the most interesting things. But it gets even more interesting, when the WaPo came out saying how the black market for Botox may be more dangerous than suburban housewives getting lumpy cheekbones.

According to WaPo, the essential ingredient in Botox—botulinum toxin Type A—is the most toxic substance known to man. It just might be the new weapon of mass destruction of choice. A grain-sized amount could kill a 150-lb adult, apparently. But a terrorist would have to get hundreds of vials of Botox ($470 a pop) to kill one person. The only reason why we're still pondering anthrax and uranium is that botulinum's quite allergic to heat, degrading the moment the temperature goes up.

This black market, however, poses a new threat. Especially when you consider this:

James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, two scientists found that a biologist with a master's degree and $2,000 worth of equipment could easily make a gram of pure toxin, an amount equal to the weight of a small paper clip but enough, in theory, to kill thousands of people.

Thankfully so far it seems the only people the stuff goes to are youth-seeking types, but obviously unregulated or no, the products can be made with the real stuff. Then we've got more than lumpy cheeks to worry about.