Author: Théophile Niyitegeka

{Language has such a powerful effect, it can influence the way in which we experience time, according to a new study.}

Professor Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist from Lancaster University and Professor Emanuel Bylund, a linguist from Stellenbosch University and Stockholm University, have discovered that people who speak two languages fluently think about time differently depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events.

The finding, reported in the ‘Journal of Experimental Psychology: General’, published by the American Psychological Association, reports the first evidence of cognitive flexibility in people who speak two languages.

Bilinguals go back and forth between their languages rapidly and, often, unconsciously — a phenomenon called code-switching.

But different languages also embody different worldviews, different ways of organizing the world around us. And time is a case in point. For example, Swedish and English speakers prefer to mark the duration of events by referring to physical distances, e.g. a short break, a long wedding, etc. The passage of time is perceived as distance travelled.

But Greek and Spanish speakers tend to mark time by referring to physical quantities, e.g. a small break, a big wedding. The passage of time is perceived as growing volume.

The study found that bilinguals seemed to flexibly utilize both ways of marking duration, depending on the language context. This alters how they experience the passage of time.

In the study, Professor Bylund and Professor Athanasopoulos asked Spanish-Swedish bilinguals to estimate how much time had passed while watching either a line growing across a screen or a container being filled.

At the same time, participants were prompted with either the word ‘duración’ (the Spanish word for duration) or ‘tid’ (the Swedish word for duration).

The results were clear-cut

When watching containers filling up and prompted by the Spanish prompt word, bilinguals based their time estimates of how full the containers were, perceiving time as volume. They were unaffected by the lines growing on screens.

Conversely, when given the Swedish prompt word, bilinguals suddenly switched their behaviour, with their time estimates becoming influenced by the distance the lines had travelled, but not by how much the containers had filled.

“By learning a new language, you suddenly become attuned to perceptual dimensions that you weren’t aware of before,” says Professor Athanasopoulos. “The fact that bilinguals go between these different ways of estimating time effortlessly and unconsciously fits in with a growing body of evidence demonstrating the ease with which language can creep into our most basic senses, including our emotions, our visual perception, and now it turns out, our sense of time.

“But it also shows that bilinguals are more flexible thinkers, and there is evidence to suggest that mentally going back and forth between different languages on a daily basis confers advantages on the ability to learn and multi-task, and even long term benefits for mental well-being.”

Source:Science Daily

{Smelly discharge is an issue that could be embarrassing to discuss, and as a result, many women both young and old, suffer it in silence.}

Vaginal discharge is very important in keeping the female organ in good condition; in the sense that, the fluid made by the glands inside the vagina carries away dead cells and bacteria, thus keeping the vagina clean and healthy, and help fight off infection.

The smell of your discharge may be different if you are pregnant, or your personal hygiene isn’t good enough, or if you have bacterial vaginosis – a bacterial infection.

However, these discharges have treatments and aren’t incurable; yeast infections are usually treated with antifungal medications, bacterial vaginosis is usually treated with antibiotic pills or creams and trichomoniasis has drugs that will remedy its effect.

A healthy vagina smell is usually described as “musky”, while a menstrual cycle discharge might have a slightly “metallic” scent for a few days.

However, if you notice an unusual odour, you can try the following home remedy:

{{1. Good hygiene }}

Clean the outside of your vagina regularly with a mild soap and clean water. Avoid using perfumed soap and body washes or any scented products, as this could upset your body’s natural pH.

{{2. Underwear }}

Try to always wear 100% cotton underwear; they are usually comfortable and breathable. They are even more important if you’re in a hot environment. Excess moisture can upset your body’s natural bacteria levels. And of course, you ought to change your underwear regularly.

{{3. Apple cider vinegar }}

This has antibacterial and antiseptic properties that can be used to fight vaginal odour. They can help fight off the toxins that cause vaginal odour.

You can choose to drink a glass of water with one or two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar daily. You can also mix it with warm water for a bath; doing this regularly can help remedy the smell in a week.

{{4. Yoghurt }}

Yoghurt is rich in lactobacillus which is a known fighter of candida infection – a common cause of vaginal odour. It’ll also help restore the vagina’s normal pH level, and once this is balanced, the odour will be gone in no time.

{{5. Garlic }}

Garlic also has powerful antifungal properties that can deal with vaginal infections and its odour. Eating garlic or placing a little piece in the vagina for about an hour daily can help fight yeast infection and help your body get rid of other bad bacteria that causes that pungent smell.

{{6. Tea tree oil }}

This contains strong antifungal properties and antiseptic that’ll help fight off those smell causing bacteria. Apply a few drops on a cotton pad to your vagina and it can make a huge difference if done daily.

{{7. Fruits and vegetables }}

The importance of fruits and vegetables can never be overemphasised; they contain essential vitamins and minerals that not only promote a healthy body system (including your vagina) but also boosts your immune system against disease-causing bacteria. Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables to stimulate vaginal health.

{{8.Water }}

Water is life, they say and if you want a healthy vagina, you must keep hydrating your system. Water helps lubricate your vagina naturally, which will aid in diminishing vaginal smells.

If the odour is accompanied by unusual symptoms, then you should skip any home treatment and consult your doctor. Strong odours, irritation and itching, as well as unusual discharge could all be signs that you might need to see a doctor.

Source:Elcrema

{Researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine have successfully developed a method to grow inner ear tissue from human stem cells — a finding that could lead to new platforms to model disease and new therapies for the treatment of hearing and balance disorders.}

“The inner ear is only one of few organs with which biopsy is not performed and because of this, human inner ear tissues are scarce for research purposes,” said Eri Hashino, PhD, Ruth C. Holton Professor of Otolaryngology at IU School of Medicine. “Dish-grown human inner ear tissues offer unprecedented opportunities to develop and test new therapies for various inner ear disorders.”

The study, published online May 1 in Nature Biotechnology, was led by Karl R. Koehler, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery at IU School of Medicine, and Dr. Hashino in collaboration with Jeffrey Holt, PhD, professor of otology and laryngology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. The research builds on the team’s previous work with a technique called three-dimensional culture, which involves incubating stem cells in a floating ball-shaped aggregate, unlike traditional cell culture in which cells grow in a flat layer on the surface of a culture dish. This allows for more complex interactions between cells, and creates an environment that is closer to what occurs in the body during development, Dr. Koehler said.

By culturing human stem cells in this manner and treating them with specific signaling molecules, the investigators were able to guide cells through key processes involved in the development of the human inner ear. This resulted in what the scientists have termed inner ear “organoids,” or three-dimensional structures containing sensory cells and supporting cells found in the inner ear.

“This is essentially a recipe for how to make human inner ears from stem cells,” said Dr. Koehler, lead author of the study and whose research lab works on modeling human development. “After tweaking our recipe for about a year, we were shocked to discover that we could make multiple inner ear organoids in each pea-sized cell aggregate.”

The researchers used CRISPR gene editing technology to engineer stem cells that produced fluorescently labeled inner ear sensory cells. Targeting the labeled cells for analysis, they revealed that their organoids contained a population of sensory cells that have the same functional signature as cells that detect gravity and motion in the human inner ear.

“We also found neurons, like those that transmit signals from the ear to the brain, forming connections with sensory cells,” Dr. Koehler said. “This is an exciting feature of these organoids because both cell types are critcal for proper hearing and balance.”

Dr. Hashino said these findings are “a real game changer, because up until now, potential drugs or therapies have been tested on animal cells, which often behave differently from human cells.”

The researchers are currently using the human inner ear organoids to study how genes known to cause deafness interrupt normal development of the inner ear and plan to start the first-ever drug screening using human inner ear organoids.

“We hope to discover new drugs capable of helping regenerate the sound-sending hair cells in the inner ear of those who have severe hearing problems,” Dr. Hashino said.

Source:Science Daily

{Every week, there seems to be another story about the health benefits of running. That’s great — but what if you can’t run? For the elderly, obese or otherwise mobility-limited, the rewards of aerobic exercise have long been out of reach.}

Salk Institute scientists, building on earlier work that identified a gene pathway triggered by running, have discovered how to fully activate that pathway in sedentary mice with a chemical compound, mimicking the beneficial effects of exercise, including increased fat burning and stamina. The study, which appears in Cell Metabolism on May 2, 2017, not only deepens our understanding of aerobic endurance, but also offers people with heart conditions, pulmonary disease, type 2 diabetes or other health limitations the hope of achieving those benefits pharmacologically.

“It’s well known that people can improve their aerobic endurance through training,” says senior author Ronald Evans, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and holder of Salk’s March of Dimes Chair in Molecular and Developmental Biology. “The question for us was: how does endurance work? And if we really understand the science, can we replace training with a drug?”

Developing endurance means being able to sustain an aerobic activity for longer periods of time. As people become more fit, their muscles shift from burning carbohydrates (glucose) to burning fat. So researchers assumed that endurance is a function of the body’s increasing ability to burn fat, though details of the process have been murky. Previous work by the Evans lab into a gene called PPAR delta (PPARD) offered intriguing clues: mice genetically engineered to have permanently activated PPARD became long-distance runners who were resistant to weight gain and highly responsive to insulin — all qualities associated with physical fitness. The team found that a chemical compound called GW1516 (GW) similarly activated PPARD, replicating the weight control and insulin responsiveness in normal mice that had been seen in the engineered ones. However, GW did not affect endurance (how long the mice could run) unless coupled with daily exercise, which defeated the purpose of using it to replace exercise.

In the current study, the Salk team gave normal mice a higher dose of GW, for a longer period of time (8 weeks instead of 4). Both the mice that received the compound and mice that did not were typically sedentary, but all were subjected to treadmill tests to see how long they could run until exhausted.

Mice in the control group could run about 160 minutes before exhaustion. Mice on the drug, however, could run about 270 minutes — about 70 percent longer. For both groups, exhaustion set in when blood sugar (glucose) dropped to around 70 mg/dl, suggesting that low glucose levels (hypoglycemia) are responsible for fatigue.

To understand what was happening at the molecular level, the team compared gene expression in a major muscle of mice. They found 975 genes whose expression changed in response to the drug, either becoming suppressed or increased. Genes whose expression increased were ones that regulate breaking down and burning fat. Surprisingly, genes that were suppressed were related to breaking down carbohydrates for energy. This means that the PPARD pathway prevents sugar from being an energy source in muscle during exercise, possibly to preserve sugar for the brain. Activating fat-burning takes longer than burning sugar, which is why the body generally uses glucose unless it has a compelling reason not to — like maintaining brain function during periods of high energy expenditure. Although muscles can burn either sugar or fat, the brain prefers sugar, which explains why runners who “hit the wall” experience both physical and mental fatigue when they use up their supply of glucose.

“This study suggests that burning fat is less a driver of endurance than a compensatory mechanism to conserve glucose,” says Michael Downes, a Salk senior scientist and co-senior author of the paper. “PPARD is suppressing all the points that are involved in sugar metabolism in the muscle so glucose can be redirected to the brain, thereby preserving brain function.”

Interestingly, the muscles of mice that took the exercise drug did not exhibit the kinds of physiological changes that typically accompany aerobic fitness: additional mitochondria, more blood vessels and a shift toward the type of muscle fibers that burn fat rather than sugar. This shows that these changes are not exclusively driving aerobic endurance; it can also be accomplished by chemically activating a genetic pathway. In addition to having increased endurance, mice who were given the drug were also resistant to weight gain and more responsive to insulin than the mice who were not on the drug.

“Exercise activates PPARD, but we’re showing that you can do the same thing without mechanical training. It means you can improve endurance to the equivalent level as someone in training, without all of the physical effort,” says Weiwei Fan, a Salk research associate and the paper’s first author.

Although the lab’s studies have been in mice, pharmaceutical companies are interested in using the research to develop clinical trials for humans. The team can envision a number of therapeutic applications for a prescription drug based on GW, from increasing fat burning in people suffering from obesity or type 2 diabetes to improving patients’ fitness before and after surgery.

Source:Science Daily