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Health24.com | Lifestyle changes helped new dad shed more than 20kg
It happens every January. Gyms fill with people who’ve committed to New Year’s resolutions involving health and fitness. While making a resolution is an important first step, developing new habits is the key to long-term success, said Erik Minaya, who has maintained significant weight loss for several years.
Minaya started to put on the kilo during his first year year in college. His body mass index continued to creep up throughout his college years and beyond, as he began working at a stressful job with a one-hour commute each way. By age 24, he tipped the scale at nearly 120kg.
“The bad habits compounded over the years,” said the 30-year-old from Michigan.
Sugary drinks and fast food were his biggest vices. Drive-in dinners were easier and cheaper than healthy options, and the jolt of sugar and fat temporarily alleviated some of the stress after working at a job he didn’t enjoy. By 14:00 nearly every afternoon, Minaya would crash.
“I wasn’t motivated to do much,” he said. “And good luck getting me to go out and do anything physical.”
Minaya’s family has a history of elevated blood pressure and cholesterol, and diabetes. Worried that he was headed down the same path, Minaya made drastic lifestyle changes in 2013.
He cut out fast food, replacing it with lower-carb offerings that he prepared himself. He swapped regular soda for diet; a few months later, he switched to water.
“It wasn’t a crash diet,” Minaya said. “I was trying to make actual life changes.”
People should limit their intake of added sugars to no more than half of their daily “discretionary calories,” suggests the American Heart Association. For most men, that figure is 150 calories per day; for most women, it’s 100 calories. But one 350ml can of most sugary sodas will typically contain about 150 calories, and some have even more.
The changes Minaya made had an almost immediate impact.
He lost just under 7kg during the first year. And after accepting a new job with a shorter commute and an onsite gym, he lost nearly 7kg more. Since then, he has continued to lose weight more slowly – nearly 23 kg total so far. He has more energy and focus.
“I have an almost heightened sense of awareness,” he said.
Minaya recently finished a 5km in less than 30 minutes “which is slow for me,” he said. He also lifts weights and plays golf, tennis and soccer. He persuaded his company, Delta Dental of Michigan, to put up a basketball hoop in the parking lot.
“It’s good to have a goal and go for it,” Minaya said. “I like being driven to achieve something.”
Minaya is not shy about sharing his experience. He recently encouraged a friend to adopt the same diet, which led the friend to lose nearly 14kg. He also told his story at an event hosted by Delta Dental, the AHA and the Grand Rapids Children’s Museum as a part of the Rethink Your Drink campaign.
With a newborn at home, Minaya said he has succumbed to old temptations and put on a few pounds, but he is determined to get back on track, not only for his sake but also for the sake of his daughter, Elsie.
“My wife, Jamie, and I want to make better choices for her sake,” he said. “I’ll never have six-pack abs, but what I care about is good health.”
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Health24.com | Salaam, Polly
When a lost parrot dropped in for Christmas lunch in Kenwyn, it set in motion a bizarre string of events nobody could have foreseen.
I can’t really seat 14 people, so when every single person I invited accepted the invitation, it took some ingenuity to make sure nobody ate Christmas lunch on their laps.
Glasses and cutlery and tablecloths had to be bought, and furniture from other parts of the house was pressed into service. Three guests came early and they worked like Trojans.
We drank, ate, and chatted, played the Secret Santa game, and then ate some more – as one does at Christmas lunch. Just as we were gathering our strength for dessert, bird poop dropped from the tree onto an empty plate.
As we looked up, there it was: an African Grey Parrot, with a bright red tail. It was messily eating red berries from the tree and doing that upside-down parrot thing, hanging by its beak – and clearly not in the least put off by 14 strangers. So what would you do? I was, for once, speechless.
Efforts by two guests to coax it down with a broom handle failed. Parrots know how to use their beaks to good effect. Who doesn’t emerge from a self-respecting Christmas lunch with a battle scar or two?
And then the first of things in a bizarre chain of events unfolded. One of the guests is an office manager at a vet and has years of experience working with birds. (I mean, come on, what are the chances?) Within a minute or two it was sitting calmly on her arm.
Distressed
It was hungry and very thirsty and I found some sunflower seeds in the dark recesses of my kitchen cupboards. I have three cats, so to avoid having a dead parrot on my hands, it was shipped off to the guest bedroom, where it calmly sat (with head turned sideways) on the wooden clothes dryer, and decorated the Oregon pine floor beneath it.
We finished dessert. The office manager phoned her boss, a vet, whose husband is – you might have guessed it – a bird enthusiast.
The parrot then calmly travelled by car sitting on the office manager’s shoulder, and was handed over at Constantia Nek to the vet coming from her Christmas lunch in Hout Bay in a scene reminiscent of a spy movie from the 1960s.
And now to find the owner. Messages followed to and from Neighbourhood Watch Whatsapp groups, searches were done on the internet, phone calls were made to animal organisations. Suddenly there were seven people claiming to have lost their parrots. But they either got the gender wrong, or the leg on which the bird was ringed, or they were just simply too far away for it to be plausible.
A parrot with half-clipped wings isn’t going to fly 25km to get to my backyard.
Some of them were genuine and in real distress, but the thing is these birds go for thousands of rand, so one cannot just hand it over. Meanwhile our Christmas parrot is getting comfy in its new surroundings, courtesy of the kindness of the vet and her family. It flies around in the house and teases the dogs and is starting to learn the children’s names.
Reunited
Six days pass. And then the parrot starts to speak. Clear as a bell, it says: Salaam Alaikum. Again and again. That settles it. Chances are it comes from around where I live, where the majority of the population is Muslim.
I phone my Muslim neighbour, who happens to be the chairperson of our extremely active neighbourhood watch. He is on holiday, but he manages to set the grapevine in motion. It works. Three hours later, as we are lighting the fire for a New Year’s Eve Braai, the front door bell rings.
A snappily dressed man (on his way to a New Year’s Dance) and his wife from the suburb next door has heard about the parrot, and he produces a photo, has the gender right, as well as the ring on the leg. They are ecstatic, as they had assumed that he was lost forever.
The parrot’s name is Billy, and he escaped on 23 December when there were neighbour’s kids visiting. And when I say the bird is speaking, he asks if it says Salaam Alaikum.
It does. It later turned out that out he also has a further choice vocabulary, for which the kids next door get the blame.
The next day, eight days after his Christmas adventure, Billy was reunited with his owner at the vet’s house. He lifted his wings, screeched, and then lurched into rather more colourful words. What could have been a sad story with an unhappy ending, turned into an early highlight of the new year.
If that is the way 2019 begins, it can only be a better year than last year. Salaam Alaikum, Billy.
Image credit: iStock
Health24.com | Trial launched for cancer breath test – may be a huge breakthrough for early detection
British researchers have launched a trial which could be a major breakthrough in cancer treatment – by using a breathalyser-like device which could potentially detect multiple cancers.
The 10-minute test could could be key in early detection of cancers, often a major stumbling block with cancer treatment.
Watch the video for more.
Some HRT tablets ‘linked to higher blood clot risk’
The overall risk remains low, with patches and gels the safest treatment, BMJ researchers say.
X-ray pulse detected near event horizon as black hole devours star
On Nov. 22, 2014, astronomers spotted a rare event in the night sky: A supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, nearly 300 million light years from Earth, ripping apart a passing star. The event, known as a tidal disruption flare, for the black hole’s massive tidal pull that tears a star apart, created a burst of X-ray activity near the center of the galaxy. Since then, a host of observatories have trained their sights on the event, in hopes of learning more about how black holes feed.
Now researchers at MIT and elsewhere have pored through data from multiple telescopes’ observations of the event, and discovered a curiously intense, stable, and periodic pulse, or signal, of X-rays, across all datasets. The signal appears to emanate from an area very close to the black hole’s event horizon — the point beyond which material is swallowed inescapably by the black hole. The signal appears to periodically brighten and fade every 131 seconds, and persists over at least 450 days.
The researchers believe that whatever is emitting the periodic signal must be orbiting the black hole, just outside the event horizon, near the Innermost Stable Circular Orbit, or ISCO — the smallest orbit in which a particle can safely travel around a black hole.
Given the signal’s stable proximity to the black hole, and the black hole’s mass, which researchers previously estimated to be about 1 million times that of the sun, the team has calculated that the black hole is spinning at about 50 percent the speed of light.
The findings, reported today in the journal Science, are the first demonstration of a tidal disruption flare being used to estimate a black hole’s spin.
The study’s first author, Dheeraj Pasham, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, says that most supermassive black holes are dormant and don’t usually emit much in the way of X-ray radiation. Only occasionally will they release a burst of activity, such as when stars get close enough for black holes to devour them. Now he says that, given the team’s results, such tidal disruption flares can be used to estimate the spin of supermassive black holes — a characteristic that has been, up until now, incredibly tricky to pin down.
“Events where black holes shred stars that come too close to them could help us map out the spins of several supermassive black holes that are dormant and otherwise hidden at the centers of galaxies,” Pasham says. “This could ultimately help us understand how galaxies evolved over cosmic time.”
Pasham’s co-authors include Ronald Remillard, Jeroen Homan, Deepto Chakrabarty, Frederick Baganoff, and James Steiner of MIT; Alessia Franchini at the University of Nevada; Chris Fragile of the College of Charleston; Nicholas Stone of Columbia University; Eric Coughlin of the University of California at Berkeley; and Nishanth Pasham, of Sunnyvale, California.
A real signal
Theoretical models of tidal disruption flares show that when a black hole shreds a star apart, some of that star’s material may stay outside the event horizon, circling, at least temporarily, in a stable orbit such as the ISCO, and giving off periodic flashes of X-rays before ultimately being fed by the black hole. The periodicity of the X-ray flashes thus encodes key information about the size of the ISCO, which itself is dictated by how fast the black hole is spinning.
Pasham and his colleagues thought that if they could see such regular flashes very close to a black hole that had undergone a recent tidal disruption event, these signals could give them an idea of how fast the black hole was spinning.
They focused their search on ASASSN-14li, the tidal disruption event that astronomers identified in November 2014, using the ground-based All-Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASASSN).
“This system is exciting because we think it’s a poster child for tidal disruption flares,” Pasham says. “This particular event seems to match many of the theoretical predictions.”
The team looked through archived datasets from three observatories that collected X-ray measurements of the event since its discovery: the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space observatory, and NASA’s space-based Chandra and Swift observatories. Pasham previously developed a computer code to detect periodic patterns in astrophysical data, though not for tidal disruption events specifically. He decided to apply his code to the three datasets for ASASSN-14li, to see if any common periodic patterns would rise to the surface.
What he observed was a surprisingly strong, stable, and periodic burst of X-ray radiation that appeared to come from very close to the edge of the black hole. The signal pulsed every 131 seconds, over 450 days, and was extremely intense — about 40 percent above the black hole’s average X-ray brightness.
“At first I didn’t believe it because the signal was so strong,” Pasham says. “But we saw it in all three telescopes. So in the end, the signal was real.”
Based on the properties of the signal, and the mass and size of the black hole, the team estimated that the black hole is spinning at least at 50 percent the speed of light.
“That’s not super fast — there are other black holes with spins estimated to be near 99 percent the speed of light,” Pasham says. “But this is the first time we’re able to use tidal disruption flares to constrain the spins of supermassive black holes.”
Illuminating the invisible
Once Pasham discovered the periodic signal, it was up to the theorists on the team to find an explanation for what may have generated it. The team came up with various scenarios, but the one that seems the most likely to generate such a strong, regular X-ray flare involves not just a black hole shredding a passing star, but also a smaller type of star, known as a white dwarf, orbiting close to the black hole.
Such a white dwarf may have been circling the supermassive black hole, at ISCO — the innermost stable circular orbit — for some time. Alone, it would not have been enough to emit any sort of detectable radiation. For all intents and purposes, the white dwarf would have been invisible to telescopes as it circled the relatively inactive, spinning black hole.
Sometime around Nov. 22, 2014, a second star passed close enough to the system that the black hole tore it apart in a tidal disruption flare that emitted an enormous amount of X-ray radiation, in the form of hot, shredded stellar material. As the black hole pulled this material inward, some of the stellar debris fell into the black hole, while some remained just outside, in the innermost stable orbit — the very same orbit in which the white dwarf circled. As the white dwarf came in contact with this hot stellar material, it likely dragged it along as a luminous overcoat of sorts, illuminating the white dwarf in an intense amount of X-rays each time it circled the black hole, every 131 seconds.
The scientists admit that such a scenario would be incredibly rare and would only last for several hundred years at most — a blink of an eye in cosmic scales. The chances of detecting such a scenario would be exceedingly slim.
“The problem with this scenario is that, if you have a black hole with a mass that’s 1 million times that of the sun, and a white dwarf is circling it, then at some point over just a few hundred years, the white dwarf will plunge into the black hole,” Pasham says. “We would’ve been extremely lucky to find such a system. But at least in terms of the properties of the system, this scenario seems to work.”
The results’ overarching significance is that they show it is possible to constrain the spin of a black hole, from tidal disruption events, according to Pasham. Going forward, he hopes to identify similar stable patterns in other star-shredding events, from black holes that reside further back in space and time.
“In the next decade, we hope to detect more of these events,” Pasham says. “Estimating spins of several black holes from the beginning of time to now would be valuable in terms of estimating whether there is a relationship between the spin and the age of black holes.”
This research was supported, in part, by NASA.
Quadruple amputee given double hand transplant
Quadruple amputee Corinne Hutton, from Lochwinnoch in Renfrewshire, had been waiting five years for the surgery.
Respiratory microbiome may influence your susceptibility to flu
Specific respiratory microbiome communities may be linked to influenza susceptibility, according to a study published January 9, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Betsy Foxman from the University of Michigan, USA, and colleagues.
Influenza virus, the causative agent of flu, primarily targets the respiratory tract and infects epithelial cells here. The epithelial cells of the nose and throat are enveloped by complex bacterial communities, leading Foxman and colleagues to hypothesize that this respiratory microbiome might interact with the virus — and could play a role in the body’s defences against flu.
In this study, 144 Nicaraguan households with a member identified as having influenza were enrolled between 2012 and 2014 and all household adults and children monitored for up to two weeks. Study staff visited each household five times, sampling the respiratory microbiomes of all household members as well as testing for influenza infection; participants also kept symptom diaries. Using statistical modeling, the authors were able to categorize each participant’s respiratory microbiome into one of five distinct community types at every visit, though approximately half of participants underwent changes in microbiome type between study visits. The authors could then compare participants’ microbiome types to the likelihood of their contracting flu.
One of the five respiratory microbiome community types across age groups clearly demonstrated decreased susceptibility to the flu. This microbiome type was significantly less common in infants and young children, and when present also appeared less stable in these age groups compared to older children and adults. While the link between microbiome and influenza susceptibility was not shown to be causal in this study, the authors suggest that these microbiome differences might contribute to the increased influenza risk observed among young children.
The authors note that the further work could examine whether the high degree of change to microbiome types seen in many participants represents normal variation among healthy individuals or a response to influenza exposure. Nonetheless, the authors believe this is the first human population study to indicate that your respiratory microbiome may affect your susceptibility to flu.
The authors add: “The nose/throat microbiome may be a potential target for preventing the spread of influenza.”
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Materials provided by PLOS. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
The lonely giant: Milky Way-sized galaxy lacking galactic neighbors
Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, fewer galaxies were born than expected — and that could create new questions for galaxy physics, according to a new University of Michigan study.
The study examined the satellite galaxies of Messier 94, or M94, a galaxy similar in size to our Milky Way. Researchers have long known the Milky Way has about 10 smaller, satellite galaxies surrounding it, each with at least a million stars, and up to more than a billion, such as the Magellanic Clouds.
Now, with the powerful Subaru telescope, astronomers can peer at galaxies five or 10 times the distance from the Milky Way, such as M94. They then can use the physics of how satellite galaxies form around the Milky Way to predict how many satellite galaxies a similar-sized galaxy such as M94 may have.
When U-M astronomers examined M94, they expected to find a similar number of satellite galaxies. However, they detected just two galaxies near M94, with very few stars each. Their results, led by Adam Smercina, a National Science Foundation fellow in the U-M Department of Astronomy, are published in the journal Astrophysical Letters.
“More than just an observational oddity, we show that the current crop of galaxy formation models cannot produce such a satellite system,” Smercina said. “Our results indicate that Milky Way-like galaxies most likely host a much wider diversity of satellite populations than is predicted by any current model.”
Smercina also says their results have implications for the current understanding of how galaxies form — which is in much larger halos of dark matter.
These halos of dark matter surrounding galaxies have immense gravitational force, and can pull in gas from their immediate vicinity. Large galaxies like the Milky Way generally form in halos of about the same mass. But these smaller satellite galaxies, which form in smaller ‘subhalos,’ are not nearly so dependable.
The production rate of high-mass stars in these satellite galaxies actually modulates their growth. If, for example, the nascent satellite galaxy forms too many high-mass stars at one time, their eventual supernova explosions might expel all its gas and halt all further growth. But astronomers are unsure at what size halo this ‘scatter’ in galaxy formation becomes important.
Smercina says M94 indicates that galaxy formation in intermediate-sized dark halos may be much more uncertain than previously thought.
“We think that that scatter — the range of galaxies we expect to see — may be a lot higher than what people currently think for dark matter halos of a certain mass,” he said. “Nobody’s under any illusions as to there being this huge scatter at the very lowest halo masses, but it’s at these intermediate dark matter halos that the discussion is happening.”
To observe the number of satellite dwarf galaxies around M94, the researchers took a composite image of the large galaxy. The image covered about 12 square degrees of the night sky — the full moon, for comparison, appears as about one square degree. This kind of image includes layers and layers of “noise,” including cosmic rays and scattered light, which make faint dwarf galaxies difficult to detect.
To make sure they weren’t missing satellite galaxies, Smercina and his team engineered artificial galaxies back into the image and recovered them using the same methods as for real satellites. With this technique, the researchers confirmed that were no more than two galaxies around M94.
“The real kicker is whether or not the community expected this could be possible,” Smercina said. “That is the real curiosity of this finding — the result is something the simulations don’t predict. When you can discover something we didn’t really think we could find, you can make a contribution to our understanding of how our universe works, that’s really rewarding.”
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Materials provided by University of Michigan. Original written by Morgan Sherburne. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
