Category: Health

Spitting the Cure

Human saliva contains a natural painkiller according to new research. The chemical is named opiorphin may soon be able to provide a new gamut of painkillers and maybe even anti-depressent drugs.

I guess this means that YOU really are the cure.

“Its pain-suppressive effect is like that of morphine,” says Catherine Rougeot at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, who led the research. “But we have to test its side effects as it is not a pure painkiller,” she says. “It may also be an anti-depressive molecule.”

Air Shower Uses Less Water

Some Australians have invented a shower head that adds some air to water to get some super O in the H2O. The article points out that Australians are becoming more concerned about their water usage, yeah for environmental awareness.

“The scientists have developed a simple ‘air shower’ device which, when fitted into existing showerheads, fills the water droplets with a tiny bubble of air. The result is the shower feels just as wet and just as strong as before, but now uses much less water.”

Breathing Concretely

Concrete that breaths is getting a lot media coverage recently, and that’s great to see. Business Week recently ran an article about smog-eating concrete that is on display in Venice (ironically, a city with no cars). The idea of buildings using this concrete is really nice, it will make city air breathable, of course if less people drove this research wouldn’t be needed.

Previously, we looked at an artistic display of this concrete.

“Visitors to the Italian Pavilion of the architecture exhibition in the Venice Biennale, which will remain open until Nov. 19, will get a breath of fresh air. That’s because parts of the concrete walls and grounds have been built with cement containing an active agent that, in presence of light, breaks air pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, benzene, and others through a natural chemical process called photocatalysis.”

Ducks for Desalination

ducky thingWater is becoming more precious round the world, yet the oceans are filled with the wet. If someone found a way to turn salty water into potable water easily and cheaply there would be a lot less thirsty people out there.

Stephen Salter at Edinburgh University has found a way to use the power of waves to remove salt from water. Desalination takes a lot of energy and by using waves, the energy cost obviously is a lot lower. The system is shaped like a duck and works by popping in the water and using that force to steam water for clean, drinkable goodness.

THe inventor also invented the first system to use wave energy for electric power and he was inspired to make this system from a trip to India.
“I visited India just after they had missed two monsoons and water was becoming a worry,” Salter told New Scientist. “I thought that using wave power for desalination would be a neat idea.”

AIDS Fighting AIDS

A new, but very small, study has found that AIDS can be used to fight AIDS like a vaccine. The US experimenters used gene therapy techniques to tackle AIDS in the five test patients. The results are promising and “hint at something much more,” according to Dr. Carl June of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

The article points out in the second paragraph that AIDS has no cure, something that many articles fail to do when talking about proposed new ‘cures’ for HIV/AIDS. So that acknowledgment is good, because there is (for some bizarre reason) people who think that HIV/AIDS can be cured. This article talks about fighting AIDS, and in doing so also fights ignorance.