Because science never sleeps, we missed a whole slew of awesome over the past couple of weeks while we were plumbing the depths of patent law and artificial DNA bases, including exploded cancer cells, the discovery of the “Necronomicon” and how to succeed in having healthier kids (without really trying).
As it turns out, letting your very small infants roll around in allergens is the healthiest thing for them, according to a recent study from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.
Researchers found that kids exposed to things like pet dander and household bacteria before their first birthday were less likely to develop allergies or asthma, benefits that dropped off sharply for children who only encountered the same substances after their first year of life.
According to a recent study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and a release posted to the Johns Hopkins website, kids who grow up on farms usually have lower asthma rates than their inner-city cohorts, likely because farms are just chock full of bacteria and allergens. Ask anyone who’s ever mucked out a chicken coop.
To verify this phenomenon, researchers tracked the health outcomes of 467 children from Baltimore, Boston, New York and St. Louis for the first three years of their lives and compared the levels of three specific allergens in their homes.
Newborns exposed to mouse and cat dander, as well as cockroach droppings, were reportedly three times less likely to develop wheezing by age 3 — a precursor to asthma — than kids who grew up in environments without the same allergens and bacteria. It also appeared that the more allergens present in the home, the better.
“Our study shows that the timing of initial exposure may be critical,” said Robert Wood, M.D., chief of the Division of Allergy and Immunology at JHCC. “What this tells us is that not only are many of our immune responses shaped in the first year of life, but also that certain bacteria and allergens play an important role in stimulating and training the immune system to behave a certain way.”
While we’re waiting for a follow-up on the benefits of paste-eating as an effective block against cooties, researchers at Rice University have been busy blowing up cancer cells with very tiny bubbles.
The process is a mash-up of four different treatment strategies that specifically target stubborn or inoperable types of cancer while leaving noncancerous cells completely unharmed, according to a release on the university’s website.
The treatment, called “quadrapeutics,” combines encapsulated drugs and colloidal gold nanoparticles with short laser pulses and X-rays to shift the therapeutic paradigm to a more mechanical method taking place within the cells themselves, according to lead author Dmitri Lapotko.
“Another strategic innovation is in complementing current macrotherapies with microtreatment,” said Lapotko in the release. “We literally bring surgery, chemotherapies and radiation therapies inside cancer cells.”
Basically, you take some very small quantities of cancer drugs and gold nanoparticles, encapsulate them and tag them with antibodies that seek out cancer cells.
This is then injected into the tumor and hit with a laser pulse. The pulse causes rapid expansion that releases nanobubbles, delivering the drugs while simultaneously tearing apart the targeted cancer cells from within.
That is followed up with a very low dose of X-ray radiation aimed at clusters of the gold nanoparticles, which amplifies the dose like a cancer-killing disco ball.
Applying all four methods has a 100-fold increase in strength and was particularly effective against head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), an aggressive and deadly form of cancer that is resistant to chemotherapy drugs and radiation, according to the release. It was so effective, in fact, that just a single treatment using 3 percent of the typical drug dose and 6 percent of the typical radiation dose effectively eliminated tumors in mice within one week.
Scientists at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology — who apparently still don’t understand that building robots that are better than humans in every conceivable way is a terrible idea — have meanwhile decided to make a bipedal contraption capable of outrunning Usain Bolt, the fastest living human.
Clocking in at an astounding 46 kilometers per hour on a treadmill, the “Raptor” employs tail-assisted pitch control that actually enables it to run over obstacles and adjust balance accordingly. Check the blog for a video of this thing in action, it really is impressive.
This newest innovation in hunter/killer technology is only slightly slower than Boston Dynamics’ “Cheetah,” with a top speed of 47 kph. Rest assured, however, that military institutions would never dream of trying to weaponize the Raptor, which is clearly the superior choice for eradicating human survivors in pesky, hard-to-reach outposts.
And finally, Harvard University is turning to bibliography experts Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell to help investigate an oddity they’ve discovered in the prestigious university’s fruit cellar: A meditation on the soul and life after death bound in human skin.
Arsene Houssaye reportedly presented his bibliophile friend, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, with a copy of his “Des destinees de l’ame” in the mid-1880s, according to a recent blog post from Heather Cole, assistant curator of modern books and manuscripts. Bouland, weirdo that he was, decided to bind it in a scrap of human skin he just had lying around because “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering,” according to a note from Bouland found inside the book.
The skin was taken from the unclaimed body of a deceased female mental patient who had died of a stroke. The process, called anthropodermic bibliopegy, was apparently not uncommon and dates back to the 16th century. Harvard might have at least one other such volume in another collection, a French translation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” dating from 1597.
No word yet on whether reading passages aloud from either tome will summon an unspeakable terror from beyond our plane, but hey, here’s hoping, right?
Alex Rose covers the Delaware County Courthouse for the Daily Times. Follow him on Twitter at @arosedelco. Check out his blog at delcoscience.blogspot.com. Email him at email@example.com. His column appears every Tuesday.