The number of male eating disorder cases is on the rise. This NBC Nightly News segment takes a closer look at increasing prevalence of anorexia among boys and how the disorder differs between genders. In the video, James Lock, MD, PhD, a psychiatrist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, explains why anorexia is generally more advanced among boys by the time they seek treatment.
Engineers at Stanford have developed a tiny wireless chip, driven by magnetic currents, that is small enough to travel inside the human body. In the above video, Ada Poon, PhD, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, and colleagues describe how the device can propel itself though the bloodstream. They also discuss its wide range of potential biomedical applications, including delivering drugs and cleaning arteries.
Gilbert Khalil’s exemplary fitness did not protect him against prostate cancer – after age 60, the risk rises for every man. Khalil, a project manager from Danville, took a very orderly approach to decide how to proceed after his diagnosis. He had watched his mother and brother endure the side effects of their cancer treatments, so he and his wife Stacee read everything they could. “They all had consequences,” he told me. “We decided we wanted to get a second or even a third opinion.” The couple ended up at Stanford, talking with Mark Gonzalgo, MD, PhD, director of robotic-assisted urologic cancer surgery. This video tells their story.
In this interesting TED Talk, Lucien Engelen, the founder and curator of TEDxMaastrict, discusses several emerging technologies that he thinks have the potential to change health care, including a crowd-sourced map of defibrillators.
To celebrate Valentine’s Day, quarterly DVD magazine Wholphin has released a short film documenting an experiment by Stanford neuroscientists to determine if it’s possible for one person to love more than another person can.
In the film, titled The Love Competition, researchers at the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain activity of seven people as they ponder love. Bob Dougherty, PhD, research director at the center, helped develop the love test and Stanford psychology postdoctoral fellow Melina Uncapher, PhD, served as scientific director for the film.
Wired reports:
It turns out — based on the levels of activity in the dopamine, serotonin and ocytocin/vasopressin pathways — it is possible for one person to exhibit that they can love someone more deeply than another person can. But what’s amazing about The Love Competition is seeing the participants talk about their loves and the effects the fMRI tests had on them. Many come out almost giddy when the test is complete, and one woman tearily explains that she just feels lucky for the love she’s had in her life.
The film is definitely worth watching. Personally, my favorite contestant is 10-year-old Milo.
Stanford psychology researchers are using imaging techniques to learn more about what happens in the brains of young girls at risk of depression and, as recently described here, they’re exploring a novel way to train brains away from negative situations. Ian Gotlib, PhD, discusses the work, which represents a “critical step in learning how to prevent the onset of a depressive episode,” in a Stanford Reportarticle and the video above.
And for more on the topic, my colleague recently reported on adolescent depression and efforts to prevent it in Stanford Medicine.
Yesterday, Nikon Instruments announced the winners of its inaugural Small World in Motion Photomicrography Competition. From a selection of more than 200 submissions, judges deemed 13 stunning videos to be the most visually outstanding as well as high-caliber depictions of the intersection of science and art.
This time-lapse movie showing the movement of mitochondria in sensory neurons in the tail of a zebra fish larva took second place. MSNBC reports:
Mitochondria are the energy-producing powerhouses of the cell, and play a vital role in sparking neural activity. This movie was created in the course of [postdoctoral fellow Dominik Paquet's] research into the molecular and cellular pathologies associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Paquet and his team at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Disease in Munich were studying how problems with the transport of cellular components can affect nerve cells. Paquet says this video may represent the first-ever example of live imaging of mitochondrial transport in the nerve cells of an intact, unmodified vertebrate.
Paquet discusses additional details about the video in this brief Q&A. Additional winning videos can be viewed here.
Today, President Obama welcomed more than 100 students from across the country for the second annual White House Science Fair, an opportunity that gave the students a chance to show off their research projects. Angela Zhang, a local high school senior who took the top prize at the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology back in December, was among the participants. Zhang, who was mentored by Stanford radiologist Zhen Cheng, PhD, won a $100,000 scholarship for what one scientist called “a Swiss army knife for cancer treatment” — a multifunctional nanoparticle that combines treatment and imaging in a single unit. In the video above, she describes her work to CBS News.
Here’s an interesting video from Stefani Bardin, a TEDxManhattan 2011 fellow, and Braden Kuo, MD, a gastroenterology instructor at Harvard. According to their description, the video uses “the M2A and SmartPill devices to look at how the human body responds to processed versus whole foods.” While I’m by no means an expert on this subject, the video makes for some interesting watching.
For your Friday afternoon enjoyment, Wired Science ran an interesting slide show yesterday showing their picks for the 16 best science visualizations of 2011. This video is one of the visualizations, taken from the game “Powers of Minus Ten,” that allows:
…players to zoom into a person’s hand, explore the world at different magnifications and learn about the human body (in the screenshot above, a cellular-level magnification shows dividing cells).
So, if you’re up for some pretty pictures, I recommend heading over to Wired Science and taking a look.
In a new paper in Nature, UC San Francisco researchers argue that sugar, with its “potential for abuse, coupled with its toxicity and pervasiveness in the Western diet,” is helping contribute to 35 million deaths annually worldwide from non-communicable diseases like diabetes, heart disease and cancer. The authors, as you’ll hear in the video above, believe that sugar consumption in America should be considered a public health issue, and that sugar should be controlled like alcohol and tobacco products.
Schmidt further explains the researchers’ position in a release:
We’re not talking prohibition. We’re not advocating a major imposition of the government into people’s lives. We’re talking about gentle ways to make sugar consumption slightly less convenient, thereby moving people away from the concentrated dose. What we want is to actually increase people’s choices by making foods that aren’t loaded with sugar comparatively easier and cheaper to get.
This work follows a study recently published in Health Affairsshowing that adding a penny-per-ounce tax onto sweetened beverages purchases would prevent nearly 100,000 cases of heart disease, 8,000 strokes and 26,000 deaths over the next decade.
“A single human brain has more switches than all the computers, routers and Internet connections on Earth,” said Stephen J. Smith, PhD, a Stanford professor of molecular and cellular physiology, as he took a Macworld audience on a breathtaking HD video tour of the most amazing computer of all — the brain.
The audience was clearly moved by the beauty of the short film, which takes viewers on a virtual flight through the cerebral cortex of a mouse. “The finished product, titled Synaptaesthesia, was stunning,” Mauricio Grijalva wrote yesterday in a Macworld piece.
Smith and his team have pioneered a method for directly observing brain circuit development, structure and function called “array tomography.” Developed by a consortium of neuroscientists, computer scientists, and lab technicians from Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, this technique opens up a window on the brain that will provide researchers with insights on how to diagnose and treat neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s. (Smith’s website also features an animated video of a human brain with Alzheimer’s disease.)
While the techie Macworld audience was primarily interested in the how-to aspects of the film — how his team combined electron microscopy, specialized fluorescent molecules from jellyfish, high-resolution photography, super computers and Apple Computer technologies to create the final animation — Smith also explained why he believes the film is so emotionally appealing:
Human beings are hardwired to love the sight of trees because our evolutionary ancestors survived in trees. The brain is a vast forest of hundreds of billions of tree-shaped neurons — what could be more beautiful? Modern physics and computation have finally given us the ability to glimpse this beauty.
If you’re not a woman, I bet you know a few who you love. Heart disease, although typically viewed as a man’s disease, happens to be the number one killer of women. The disease affects women of all backgrounds and ages and, because symptoms show themselves differently in women than men, women are often misdiagnosed.
It became clear to us that most women don’t think that heart disease will affect them, but the statistics show otherwise. Women’s Heart Health at Stanford graciously collaborated with Liat Kobza, my colleague, and me to create this video.
We hope the video will spread far and wide, so please share this with all the women you love and help save lives.
In this video, Clifford Nass, PhD, a professor of communication at Stanford, discusses research he conducted with colleagues showing girls ages 8-12 who spend endless hours multitasking with digital devices tend to be less successful in their social and emotional development. But the good news, says Nass, is these unwanted effects might be warded off with something as simple as face-to-face conversations with other people.
A Stanford Reportarticle published today offers more details about the study and notes that, while researchers found a correlation between some media habits and diminished social and emotional skills, a definite cause-and-effect relationship has yet to be proved.
One of the first things we learn about bodies is, of course, that women and men are different – that awareness is undoubtedly prehistoric. What remains remarkable is just how far we still have to go in our understanding of those differences, whether it’s pain or heart disease.
This month, the Women’s Heart Health program at Stanford celebrates the fifth anniversary of its pursuit toward a more delineated picture of heart disease in women. Interventional cardiologist Jennifer Tremmel, MD, is its founding clinical director. While she and other researchers in the field have uncovered some notable gender distinctions in heart health, their work hasn’t led to a full understanding among all physicians of the unique symptoms and issues facing women. As Tremmel explained to me in a recent Health Notes story:
For years, the standard medical treatment for women with heart disease was based on what we know about heart disease in men. That’s really confounded things. In the past 30 years, we’ve learned a lot about how women differ from men, but there’s a lot we still don’t know. Just getting physicians to have a broader concept of symptoms, and what constitutes coronary artery disease in women, is a challenge.
In the same article I tell the story of one Stanford patient: a thirtysomething woman with chest pain whose doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her. “I intuitively knew something wasn’t right,” Reyna Robles said, and she was correct: As you’ll see in the video above, she eventually saw Tremmel and was diagnosed with and treated for a myocardial bridge.
A just-released Bravewell Collaborative survey involving 29 integrative medicine centers, including Stanford, is shedding light on how this type of medicine ...
