Lose weight, maintain your mojo

From ABC Science Online, News in Science, 21 November 2008:
A man's secret to maintaining a healthy sex life well into old age could be as simple as shedding a few kilograms, says an Australian obesity expert.
Professor Gary Wittert, endocrinologist and Professor of Medicine at the University of Adelaide says erectile dysfunction is often a warning sign of underlying lifestyle-related diseases.
These include heart disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome - a condition that includes risks factors such as high blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol.
"For men, the penis is the window to the heart," says Wittert, speaking at the Australian Health and Medical Research Congress in Brisbane. "The blood vessels in the penis are exactly the same as the blood vessels in the heart."
"If they have some erectile dysfunction then they've probably got subclinical coronary artery disease." Read more.

Silk the key to rebuilding bone

From ABC Science Online, News in Science, 18 November 2008:
Silkworms and spiders could hold the key to engineering healthy bone tissue to replace damaged bone and teeth, according to a US biomedical engineer.
Speaking at the Australian Health and Medical Research Congress in Brisbane, Professor David Kaplan from Tufts University in Massachusetts says spider and silkworm silks are among the strongest natural fibres in existence, and have incredible properties.
"When you look at the mechanical properties of single fibre silks, they are remarkable in terms of tension and compression," says Kaplan.
Silk has the added advantage of being bio-compatible, so it can be used in humans. He says it has already been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for use in early human clinical trials. Read more.

Dystrophies among rarest mysteries

From The Australian, 15 November 2008:
IF little Jade Ochnio was a "normal" child, her mother Cheri believes she'd be a handful.
"If she was my able-bodied child, she'd be the naughty one," Ochnio says. However Jade, 7, is not able-bodied because she has congenital muscular dystrophy. A few seemingly minor misspellings and deletions in her DNA have left her with such severe muscle weakness that she cannot walk, and never will, and struggles even to raise her head.
When Jade was diagnosed at five months of age, doctors gave Ochnio a grim forecast. "When she was originally diagnosed, with the information we had, they did warn us she possibly wouldn't live past two years -- but she's now 7, so she's writing her own textbook at the moment," Ochnio says.
Jade's condition is one a group of inherited muscular disorders which range from the most common -- Duchenne muscular dystrophy, affecting around 1 in 3500 boys -- to rarer dystrophies that have yet to even be given a name.
Some will kill within the first year of life through failure of the heart and lung muscles, while others have a far lesser impact and allow patients to live a relatively normal life with minimal disability.
While the number of children affected by congenital muscular dystrophy adds up to several thousand in Australia alone, the condition is classified as a rare disease and as such, rarely earns the attention of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, or medical charities.
However, the annual cost of supporting a patient with a muscular dystrophy can be as high as $100,000 per year, and many families struggle to care for an affected child.
It is for precisely these reasons that congenital muscular dystrophies, and other equally rare childhood diseases such as X-linked mental retardation, have captured the imaginations of Lyndall and Malcolm Beville.
It's uncommon to find two partners with such a passion for philanthropy in Australia, and even less common to find two people who can afford to indulge that passion. The result of this happy coincidence is the SMILE Foundation -- a charity dedicated to funding research into rare childhood diseases and to supporting families affected by them. Read more.

Southern Ocean close to acid tipping point

From ABC Science Online, News in Science, November 11 2008:
Australian researchers have discovered that the tipping point for ocean acidification caused by human-induced CO2 emissions is much closer than first thought.
Scientists from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and CSIRO looked at seasonal changes in pH and the concentration of an important chemical compound, carbonate, in the Southern Ocean.
The results, published in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, show that these seasonal changes will actually amplify the effects of human carbon dioxide emissions on ocean acidity, speeding up the process of ocean acidification by 30 years. Read more.

The private life of the brain, with Wammo on Kiwi

Talking New Scientist stories with Wammo on Kiwi FM, 1 November 2008:
The brain is doing very important things when stuck in neutral. Researchers have noticed that instead of lying dormant when unoccupied, the brain devours a huge amount of calories when we’re doing absolutely nothing. So what exactly is it up to? Some say there’s a major system within the brain that taps in to our memories, knitting them all together. Others believe all the evidence points to a default network that enables us to daydream.
And...
Spoken phrases seem to morph into song when repeated, shedding light on the difference between speech and song. In a US test, people who were played a phrase once and asked to repeat what they heard, spoke it back. But those who heard the same phrase many times sang it back.
Listen here.

Raking in the benefits

From CSIRO's Process Magazine, February 2008:
Although a rake may appear to be a fairly straightforward piece of technology, when used in mineral processing facilities, the difference between a well-designed or poorly-designed rake can mean millions of dollars in scaled, damaged or poorly operating equipment.
Research is suggesting that even small changes to the size, shape, location and angle of the rake blades, and speed of the rake movement, could make a big difference.
Working through the Parker Centre for Integrated Hydrometallurgy Solutions, CSIRO researchers are exploring how variations in the size, shape and spacing of rake blades and changes in operating conditions can affect thickener performance. Read more (pdf file, page 10).

Study reveals AFL drinking habits

From ABC Science Online, News in Science, 3 November 2008:
An Australian study has revealed for the first time the drinking habits of elite Australian football players, showing that unlike the rest of the population, AFL players do their riskiest drinking outside the football season.
It's the first time an entire sporting code has gone under the microscope to explore alcohol use and abuse. Researchers say the results suggest an entirely different approach to alcohol education is needed among this group.
The study, published in the latest edition of the Medical Journal of Australia, found that just 2% of AFL players drank at risky levels during the sporting season compared to 15% of the general male population.
But this figure climbed to 54% at the end of the season - a period sometimes known as 'mad Monday'.
Associate Professor Paul Dietze, an epidemiologist at the Burnet Institute in Melbourne, says the study highlights that the drinking patterns of AFL players differ significantly from those of the general population. Read more.

Suspicious minds, with Wammo on Kiwi FM

Talking about the latest in New Scientist with Wammo on Kiwi FM, 30 October 2008:
Women beware. Men are better at detecting their partner’s infidelities than women. In a US study of heterosexual couples, 80 per cent of women’s inferences about fidelity or infidelity were correct, while men were accurate 94 per cent of the time. However, men were also more likely to suspect infidelity even when there was none. Researchers say the results make evolutionary sense because, unlike women, men can never be certain a baby is theirs.
and
Tell stock investors that the economy is influenced by activity on the sun and they would never believe you. That doesn’t stop plenty of them responding to other equally irrelevant information, though - and this tendency may be a factor driving current market volatility. Economists in the US have demonstrated that what happens in reality has very little to do with what actually happens in a market. Listen here.

Maths makes counting hair easy

From ABC Science Online, News in Science, 31 October 2008:
New software is able to analyse exactly how many hairs there are in a patch of skin and could help in testing the effectiveness of baldness treatments and depilatory creams, say Australian researchers.
Researchers from CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences in Sydney report their findings in the November issue of the journal Skin Research and Technology.
The software, developed in partnership with a UK company, will make it easier for researchers developing hair removal creams to accurately assess how well they work, says image analyst Dr Pascal Vallotton.
"Up to now they were counting the number of hairs that survived after treatment manually," he says.
"That's hard work and it's difficult because you may count a hair twice or you may miss it, so image analysis offers distinct advantages because you always get the same counts and you get the right counts." Read more.