Ian McGregor lost his entire leg to a cancerous tumor, but he’s lucky to be alive thanks to a weird, never-before-attempted 18-hour surgical procedure: First doctors removed his calf and attached it to his arm to keep it alive during the tumor and leg amputation. Then they used the calf to fix the huge hole that resulted from the operation.
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Confirmed: Dark chocolate is good for your heart. Really good. What’s better, scientists have discovered that people who eat 70 grams of chocolate every day increase their vascular health dramatically by "restoring flexibility to arteries and preventing white cells from sticking to the walls of blood vessels."
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A quick online search of Aspartame will provide you with numerous opinions about this artificial sweetener. Some claim it causes things like cancer, seizures, multiple sclerosis, lupus, memory problems and brain tumors. Just about every governmental organization in the world, regulating food products, have deemed it safe for human consumption. (But, you know, just about every governing body in the world still gets the"sodium raises blood pressure" myth wrong, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, so let’s not take their word on the whole Aspartame thing!)
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The Food and Drug Administration has this week embarked on discussions on a topic sure to prove controversial: the idea of creating embryos from the DNA of three people.
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Everybody’s heard of hair plugs, but did you realize you could get a full beard transplant? A growing number of men in New York and elsewhere are catching on. It’s apparently becoming a very popular thing to do, especially in hipster-packed neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Bushwick.
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In 1998, there was a groundbreaking study telling parents that their children were at risk of getting autism from vaccines. Parents everywhere collectively gasped. After all, they had been told for years vaccines were the best way to prevent any number of unwanted diseases. Now they find out the very treatment they thought was making their children better could potentially result in devastating consequences, at least in the case of low-functioning Autism.
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Diagnosing cancer and heart disease generally requires extensively trained personnel and expensive instruments. But one MIT research group that wants to solve that problem has designed a single injection and paper-based detection system they’re hoping to ship them everywhere a letter can travel.
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While dinosaurs have not yet been resurrected Jurassic Park-style, scientists fiddling with ancient DNA sequences have made a discovery that may turn out to be a tad more useful: a treatment for gout. That a 90 million-year-old protein could treat a modern disease is a fascinating window into evolutionary history.
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Pain is a hard problem. Sure, we can throw a little morphine at pain in the short term, but researchers continue to struggle with solutions for chronic pain. New research from Stanford’s futuristic Bio-X lab looks like a light at the end of the tunnel—literally!
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Remember that great episode of The Magic Schoolbus, where the class took a field trip through the human body? This little chip could be as close as we ever need to get to that dream, by providing a real-time 3D view from within the heart and blood vessels.
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