Aug 23, 2010
Oilspill, asthma, melamine, peer review
These are the latest science news links and snippets from Sciencebase:
- That underwater hydrocarbon plume is still there – Things in the Gulf of Mexico may not be cleaning themselves up quite as fast as some had claimed and many had hoped. Surprise, surprise
- Paracetamol use and risk of asthma in teenagers studied – NHS Choices – Health News – It is not possible in a study of this design to determine whether the positive association observed was causal.
- Piped David Bradley – My main science blogs, going down the tubes? Yahoo Pipes pulls in all the feeds from Sciencebase (science), Sciencetext (tech), ReactiveReports (chemistry), SciScoop (forum), and ImagingStorm (scientific photos)
- New colour-change test for melamine contamination of milk products – First pets died in the US, then babies in China succumbed to the scurrilous practice of artificially boosting protein readings in milk products by adding the nitrogen-rich industrial chemical melamine to milk products. Now, researchers in China have published details of a simple test for melamine contamination, in the peer-reviewed journal Talanta.
- Good God! Can’t a Journal Author Have Any Fun Anymore? – Jesus cures case of influenza, gets retracted by scholarly journal
- Drug testing – A simple analytical approach to identifying drugs of abuse would be a boon to forensic scientists and law enforcement agencies. A collaboration between researchers in the US and Europe demonstrates how an assessment of different methods using chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry reveals that multivariate selectivity can take into account the degree of resolution between nominally unresolved peaks due to the presence of various drugs in a forensic sample and so allow quicker identification.
Yes, Richard asthma is baffling. I too “suffer” and have tried focused breathing (akin to Buteyko) through karate and yoga techniques. They’re all fine, but none of them prevent that wheezy tightness that comes on when I’m exposed to a carpeted dwelling with several fluffy cats or when running outdoors in cold weather. That said, I’ve chopped and changed medications several times over the last couple of years because tolerance seems to come and the old meds no longer work for me the way they did. I doubt it’s in the pharma industry’s interest to find an absolute cure, but I also think it’s beyond their whit anyway.
A relevant but strangely ignored or not generally known fact about asthma and breathing troubles is that the change between weak (asthmatic) and strong (healthy) breathing is dependent on abdominal muscle tension. Slackening the muscles here causes abysmally weak and asthmatic breathing. Instead of describing an asthma attack as being like breathing through a straw (57,00 Google hits), attempting to breathe vigorously with relaxed abdominal muscles provides a more genuine illustrative example. Training the muscles, for example by “abdominal hollowing” (see Web articles) produces an antiasthmatic effect. Abdominal muscle tension plays a prominent part in Asian martial arts.
So it is fair to assume that there is a natural breathing spectrum with an asthmatic tendency at one end and Ku Fu or Karate breathing at the other end. For a few words on the Japanese version of Asian breathing see http://www.lrz.de/~s3e0101/webserver/webdata/OBT.pdf
I personally tend to breathe asthmatically after an evening meal or in pollen-laden air. Breathing powerfully into my lower abdomen with tensed muscles provides an effective cure for me. But then I’ve always been sceptical about medical wisdom on asthma: such a paradoxical and doctor-baffling increase in the last 40 years with modern, merely symptomatic inhalers. Respectfully, Richard Friedel