Human body contains enough sulphur to kill all fleas on one dog

Each lymphocyte circulating in the lymph of the human blood travels through all blood and lymph vessels of the body from 10 to 20 times during a day. A lymphocyte covers the distance of 100 and more kilometers during its life cycle.

Each leg of a spider has a certain area made of thinnest hairs. Each of those hairs is made of tens of thousands of thinner bristles that interact with the surface on the molecular level with the help of Van der Waals forces. The power of these intermolecular forces is very weak, and they can hardly be noticed against the background of other forces. However, the adhesive power of hundreds of thousands of bristles is rather large. About 600,000 hairs allow a spider to sit on the ceiling and bear the weight which exceeds the weight of a spider 170 times.

The osmotic pressure inside bacteria may reach four kilograms per a square centimeter, which is fives times as much as the atmospheric pressure.

A snowflake contains about 10x18 water molecules.

A shark is capable of sensing one gram of blood dissolved in 600,000 liters of water at the distance of 500 meters.

Each square inch of the human body contains 32 million bacteria.

About 50,000 of your body cells will die and will be replaced with new cells while you are reading this sentence.

One square inch of human skin contains: 4 yards of nerve fibers, 1300 nerve cells, 100 sweat glands, 3 million cells, and 3 yards of blood vessels.

The average human body contains enough: sulphur to kill all fleas on an average dog; carbon to make 900 pencils; potassium to fire a toy cannon; Fat to make 7 bars of soap; phosphorus to make 2,200 matchheads; and enough water to fill a ten-gallon tank.

The tooth is the only part of the human body that does not regenerate.

Only one man would be enough to repopulate the whole plane in six months because a man’s testicles produce 10 million new sperm cells every day.

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Cancer to remain incurable even in 100 years

The World Health Organization published the forecast of most common reasons of mortality in 2030. The picture of the possible future was based on the data of present-date causes of death supplemented with certain expectations. There are three most common reasons of mortality nowadays in the world: oncological diseases, ischemic heart disease and stroke.

The WHO believes that the three most common killers will keep and even improve their leading positions during the next coming decades. Strangely enough, cancer will be killing more people despite the development of modern medicine: the people, who would die of other diseases before, would live up to cancerous diseases. Heart attacks and strokes will cause many deaths among elderly people due to scientific achievements in medicine too.

The number of deaths in car accidents will be growing in the future. The technical development of the human civilization has always been ahead of the evolution of culture.

The global death rate may also increase in the event people decide to refuse from vaccinations. There were such outbursts before, for example in 1873-1874 in Stockholm, when many declined vaccination for religious reasons and fell victims to smallpox. The epidemic of smallpox in the Swedish capital ended only as a result of massive vaccination. Outbursts of whooping cough in Britain during the 1970s, measles in Holland, Ireland, Nigeria and the USA during the 2000s occurred for the same reason.

Acute respiratory infections, TB, malaria and child labor death rates will decrease. The forecast of the World Health Organization includes the countries of the golden billion and the third world states, where the above-mentioned death rate is especially high. The decrease of the overall death rate in Africa and South-East Asia will depend on the state of the world economy. If mankind goes through a decade of the economic recession, similar to the Great Depression of 1929-1940, the humanitarian missions in developing states will not be able to expand their activities.

AIDS as a cause of death will be getting more frequent before 2015. The AIDS-related death rate will start to decrease afterwards. Specialists probably pin their hopes on the invention of the anti-AIDS vaccine. No one knows if the vaccine is ever going to become possible due to frequent mutations and changes of the nature of the virus. However, the death rate is possible to decline. Even modern therapy guarantees a considerable level of survival for HIV-positive individuals.

Some other scientists, for example, Bryan Sykes of Oxford University, wrote in his book, “Adam’s Curse”, that men would disappear in the course of the human evolution. The scientist believes that the Y-chromosome, which is responsible for the male sex, will eventually disappear due to numerous defects. Men may become extinct in about 125,000 years, Sykes believes.

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Drug Companies Keep Quiet On Drugs That Don’t Work

Unfavorable results of drug trials are often swept under the rug, according to a new review of FDA drug applications. Nearly a quarter of drug trial outcomes submitted to the FDA by pharmaceutical companies—most of them unfavorable—remained unpublished or only partially published after five years. Published results were often positively skewed from those originally reported to the FDA. “These new findings confirm our previous suspicions that this is happening on a much broader systemic level. It shows that information is unavailable to those who really need it the most — the clinicians and the researchers,” [Science News] says An-Wen Chan of the Mayo Clinic.

Drug companies are required to submit the results of all drug trials to the FDA as part of new drug applications. After approval, these results are supposed to be made public, usually in the form of scientific publications. However, the new review published in PLoS Medicine found disturbing omissions and bias on the road to publication. The new analysis examined 164 trials for 33 new drugs that were approved by the FDA from January of 2001 to December 2002. By June 2007, one quarter of the trials were either published only in a partial form — as an abstract, or part of a pooled publication — or were not published at all [Science News]. Of 43 negative outcomes reported to the FDA, only 20 were later published. Nine percent of all published outcomes were more positive than those originally reported to the FDA.

The mechanisms behind the apparent publication bias is unclear, though it is understood that manufacturers of new drugs rely on publications to market their products, often with billions of dollars on the line. In discussions with investigators on unpublished trials, [the study authors] found no cases where companies prohibited the researchers from publishing. But they did describe two cases in which the investigators said they wanted to publish the results but had not had full cooperation from the sponsors [MedPage News].

“It confirms that this is not an open, transparent process. There is still the opportunity for sponsors of new products to try and tip the scales in their favor,” [Wired Science] said Arthur Levin, director of the Center for Medical Consumers. Since September, federal law requires all clinical trials to be registered in a publicly accessible database, ClinicalTrials.gov, run by the National Institutes of Health. But the law still does not require full disclosure of all outcomes.

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In a Few Years, Men Could Pee in a Cup to Diagnose Prostate Cancer

A simple urine test is being developed that would revolutionize the treatment of prostate cancer by differentiating between the benign and aggressive forms of the disease.

While prostate cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers in men, the real challenge for treatment tends to lie in measuring the progress of the disease. A person can live a long time with benign prostate cancer, but the aggressive kind of tumor grows much more quickly and requires urgent treatment. The current method for distinguishing between the two can involve several rounds of testing, including an invasive and painful biopsy.

The urine test, which will not be ready for at least another three to five years, would be an easy and inexpensive way to determine which type of cancer is present, researchers report in Nature [subscription required]. Research for the test began when doctors found that men with an aggressive form of prostate cancer carry elevated levels of a particular molecule in their urine [The Guardian].

The researchers pinpointed about 10 molecules–or metabolites–that were more often present in samples taken from patients with advanced cancer. One metabolite in particular, sarcosine, was often found at elevated levels in samples taken from patients with advanced cancer, or cancer that had spread, but not at all in samples taken from healthy tissue. In fact, sarcosine was a better indicator of advancing disease than the traditional marker, a protein called prostate specific antigen [BBC].

The new research has potential implications for treatment of other cancers as well. Scientists believe that cancer cells need the molecule [sarcosine] to spread around the body, so drugs that stop it working could effectively contain cancers and stop them spreading to other organs…. “This is the molecule that the cancer cells use when they want to spread. If it turns out to be involved in metastasis in other cancers, then this discovery will be huge,” said Christopher Beecher, a co-author on the study [The Guardian].

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