Results tagged “braindamage” from 60 Second Science

Ah, the never-ending dance revolving around the questionable link between mobile phones and cancer. It's like Ross and Rachel, Sam and Diane, Cigarettes and Cancer--mostly like the last one. However, a new study from Tokyo Women's Medical University has reported that after looking at phone use by 322 brain cancer patients and 683 healthy people, regular phone use (at least once a week for 6 months) does not increase your likelihood of getting cancer.

Of course, if you live in the country and gab more over your phone than your fence, you'll probably still get a tumor in your salivary glands--but that's for quibbling. You'll also stop sleeping. And age like a zombie--but no cancer!

Continue reading 'Cell phones won't give you brain cancer' >

Just when fMRI told me about why I was optimistic about my chances on Everest, it had to come back and kick me in the nuts. A new article published by a group of Spanish doctors in the American Journal of Medicine uses magnetic resonance imaging to show consistent brain damage in nearly all of the professional and amateur high-altitude mountaineers surveyed.

Only 1 in 13 of the Everest climbers had a normal MRI; the amateur showed frontal subcortical lesions, and the remainder had cortical atrophy and enlargement of Virchow-Robin spaces but no lesions. Among the remaining amateurs, 13 showed symptoms of high-altitude illness, 5 had subcortical irreversible lesions, and 10 had innumerable widened Virchow-Robin spaces. Conversely, we did not see any lesion in the control group.

Continue reading 'Today in Lite-Brite science: Mountaineering causes brain damage' >