Breakthroughs Today

A newsreport has it that oral sex can lead to cancer. Apparently, it is not the oral sex but the genital warts in the male partner. [ Read Report ]

So much has been blamed on sugar over unremitting obesity. Sugar is just a biochemical tool in the process. The cause can be much deeper. IF YOU you think sweets sabotaged your, already-heavy weight, think again. A German study found out that it is not the reason. Instead, it is stress; the more acute the stress, the faster it piles up those unwanted bulges in the last places you want them. Achim Peters, Britta Kubera, Christian Hubold, and Dirk Langeman of Medical Clinic 1 at the University of Luebeck in Luebeck, Germany reported their findings in this year’s issue of the Frontiers of Neuroscience. The team confirmed two studies made in 2009 and 2010 that... [ READ MORE ]  This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 23 January 2012.

When Martian visitors cannot come, would meteorites do? At about 2:00 AM (Morocco time), a fireball streaked the sky of Morocco  on 18 July 2011. And the Meteoroleogical Society confirmed on 18 January 2012 that the red meteorite, seven kilograms in weight, was an authentic chunk of the red planet Mars. And Moroccans winded with an income of $500 to $1000 per gram as price for the pieces. Experts estimated that meteorites are 10-20 times more expensive than gold. [ READ MORE ]

A recent study pointed to a vitamin as a factor that may result to or contribute to the appearance of narcolepsy. A RESEARCH report published last year, uncovered a drop of vitamin D level in patients with narcolepsy with cataplexy (NC). Bertrand Carlander and six colleagues from the National Reference Network for Narcolepsy (NRNN) noted that vitamin D level in the blood of patients with NC only have 59.45 nanomole per liter (nm/L) compared to healthy people who register 74.73 nmol/L. NRNN is a reference desk for narcolepsy of the Hopital Gui-de-Chauliac Department of Neurology in Montepellier, France. Vitamin D has been known for its role in... [ READ MORE ]  This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 18 January 2012.

Healthy feelings, and an effective way of managing these, can turn out very critical in such a highly primed environment as the stock market. IT IS easy to believe that health issues are off-limits in the “unemotional world of finance.” But if you had been into the stock market, it will not take long to see that people connected to it—brokers, market makers, dealers, and investors—are nothing but. Well, that depends on your investment strategy. Stock traders who ride on the second-to-second movement of stocks in the Philippine Stock Exchange will experience fear and ecstasy, and shades of these emotions in between, depending on which direction their holdings are moving for the moment. If their stocks came on breaking ceiling prices, they will thank heaven for being born. But when the market hits bottom for many days or weeks, you will hear from news reports that someone came to believe that the top of a high-rise building is just a step away to the streets below. The emo

Certain things in life comes when we have the patience to wait for the right time. That same thing holds true in medical science and technology. Where cardiac events had been known for its bad reputation as a "thief in the night," right now it can be predicted with sensible accuracy. THE recent wave of science and technology developments in medicine, particularly in Japan, gave rise to a better way of predicting deadly turns in coronary artery disease (CAD). As of 2006, CAD is the leading cause of death in Taiwan. And the disease results from degenerative stiffening of blood vessels in the body, called atherosclerosis. During the later part of the 20th century, Japan came up with a technology that measures the stiffness of arteries using pulse wave velocity (PWV). The basic scientific principles of PWV through the arterial tree dates back to 1808 when Thomas Young started investigating it.  As early as 1998, carotid-femoral PWV (cfPWV), the use of PWV in as

There beautiful memories coming out when the word Christmas is spoken. These are beautiful moments in our lives, even among those who simply have to dream about these memorable things in life. Christmas trees even among Asian countries like the Philippines are already part of those memories. But certain precautions be exercised when dealing with these memorable tress though. CHRISTMAS trees fascinate me a lot when fully decorated at Yuletide Season. Their living height forces us to look up and marvel at those twinkling lights of various colors—red, white, yellow, green, and even blue. In fact, I have no interest in knowing when this American tradition started. Mystiques awe more that way. Bringing a live tree inside the house adds some natural smell into the air. The distinct smell of the tree recreates the feel of the forest inside. Many Cebuanos, of course, can manage only the artificial trees that can easily be tucked away somewhere in the house for the next season. B