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Health Chip Gives Instant Diagnoses

Soon, your family doctor will no longer have to send blood or cancer cell samples to the laboratory. A little chip will give her test results on the spot.

Today, a blood sample whose protein content, genes and so on are to be read needs to be submitted to a series of complex processes, such as centrifugation, heat treatment, mixing with enzymes and concentration of disease markers. This means that samples are sent to central laboratories for analysis, and weeks may pass before the results are returned.

The same thing happens when women are checked for cervical cancer by taking a cell scrape from the cervix. The samples are then sent off and studied under the microscope. Diagnostic error rates can be high when abnormal cell appearance is determined by even experienced eyes.

 

Perception of Our Heartbeat Influences Our Body Image

A new study, led by Dr Manos Tsakiris from Royal Holloway, University of London, suggests that the way we experience the internal state of our body may also influence how we perceive our body from the outside, as for example in the mirror.

The research appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Psychologists measured how good people are at feeling their body from within by asking them to count their heartbeats over a few minutes. They then measured how good people are at perceiving their own body-image from the outside by using a procedure that tricks them into feeling that a fake, rubber hand is their own hand.

Looking at a rubber hand being touched at the same time as one's own unseen hand creates the illusion that the rubber hand is part of one's body. The less accurate people were in monitoring their heartbeat, the more they were influenced by the illusion. The study shows for first time that there may be a strong link between how we experience our body from within and how we perceive it from the outside.

Secondhand Television Exposure Linked to Eating Disorders

For parents wanting to reduce the negative influence of TV on their children, the first step is normally to switch off the television set. But a new study suggests that might not be enough. It turns out indirect media exposure, i.e., having friends who watch a lot of TV, might be even more damaging to a teenager's body image. 

Researchers from Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine examined the link between media consumption and eating disorders among adolescent girls in Fiji.

What they found was surprising. The study's subjects did not even need to have a television at home to see raised risk levels of eating disorder symptoms.

In fact, by far the biggest factor for eating disorders was how many of a subject's friends and schoolmates had access to TV. By contrast, researchers found that direct forms of exposure, like personal or parental viewing, did not have an independent impact, when factors like urban location, body shape and other influences were taken into account.

Emotional Signals Are Chemically Encoded in Tears, Researchers Find

Emotional crying is a universal, uniquely human behavior. When we cry, we clearly send all sorts of emotional signals. In a paper published online January 6 in Science Express, scientists at the Weizmann Institute have demonstrated that some of these signals are chemically encoded in the tears themselves. Specifically, they found that merely sniffing a woman's tears -- even when the crying woman is not present -- reduces sexual arousal in men. 

Humans, like most animals, expel various compounds in body fluids that give off subtle messages to other members of the species. A number of studies in recent years, for instance, have found that substances in human sweat can carry a surprising range of emotional and other signals to those who smell them.

But tears are odorless. In fact, in a first experiment led by Shani Gelstein, Yaara Yeshurun and their colleagues in the lab of Prof. Noam Sobel in the Weizmann Institute's Neurobiology Department, the researchers first obtained emotional tears from female volunteers watching sad movies in a secluded room and then tested whether men could discriminate the smell of these tears from that of saline. The men could not.