More Groovy Science 2

Here is more research to interest you:

• Scientists Capture Very Moment Blood Flow Begins


• New Evidence That Drinking Coffee May Reduce the Risk of Diabetes


• Trekking-Poles Help Hikers Maintain Muscle Function While Reducing Soreness


• Caffeine Reduces Pain During Exercise


• First Large-Scale Formal Quantitative Test Confirms Darwin's Theory of Universal Common Ancestry


• How Smarter School Lunchrooms Increase Fruit Sales


• Tibetans Developed Genes to Help Them Adapt to Life at High Elevations


• Tissue Engineering Technique Yields Potential Biological Substitute for Dental Implants

Scientists Capture Very Moment Blood Flow Begins: By capturing movies of both the blood and vasculature of zebrafish embryos, each less than two millimeters long, researchers have been able for the first time to see the very moment that blood begins to flow. The observations show that the earliest blood flow, involving what appear to be hundreds of cells, begins all at once. Remarkably, that onset of life-giving circulation takes more than a beating heart. In fact, red blood cells remain stuck to the blood vessel wall initially, even after the heart starts to beat.

New Evidence That Drinking Coffee May Reduce the Risk of Diabetes: Scientists are reporting new evidence that drinking coffee may help prevent diabetes and that caffeine may be the ingredient largely responsible for this effect, in this animal study. The scientists fed either water or coffee to a group of laboratory mice commonly used to study diabetes. Coffee consumption prevented the development of high-blood sugar and also improved insulin sensitivity in the mice, thereby reducing the risk of diabetes. Coffee also caused a cascade of other beneficial changes in the fatty liver and inflammatory adipocytokines related to a reduced diabetes risk. Additional lab studies showed that caffeine may be "one of the most effective anti-diabetic compounds in coffee," the scientists say. Trekking-Poles Help Hikers Maintain Muscle Function While Reducing Soreness: A study has shown for the first time that trekking-poles help hikers maintain muscle function while significantly reducing soreness in the days following a hike. This is the first documented study into the effectiveness of trekking poles in the environments for which they were designed.
The results showed that there was significantly less muscle soreness in the group using trekking poles. This group demonstrated a reduced loss of strength and a faster recovery immediately after the trek compared to the control group. Self-rated soreness peaked at 24-hours in both groups but was significantly lower in the trekking-pole group, both at this point and at the 48-hour point. In addition, levels of the enzyme creatine kinase (which indicates muscle damage) were much higher at the 24-hour point in the non-pole group, while the trekking-pole group's levels were close to the pre-trekking levels. This shows that the muscle damage they were experiencing was negligible.
"The results present strong evidence that trekking poles reduce, almost to the point of complete disappearance, the extent of muscle damage during a day's mountain trek."

Caffeine Reduces Pain During Exercise: "It's becoming increasingly common for athletes – before competing – to consume a variety of substances that include caffeine, motivated by "the notion that it will help you metabolize fat more readily. That research isn't actually very compelling."
"This study looks at the effects of caffeine on muscle pain during high-intensity exercise as a function of habitual caffeine use. No one has examined that before. What we saw is something we didn't expect: caffeine-naïve individuals and habitual users have the same amount of reduction in pain during exercise after caffeine (consumption)."
"We've shown that caffeine reduces pain reliably, consistently during cycling, across different intensities, across different people, different characteristics. But does that reduction in pain translate into an improvement in sport performance?" Meanwhile, the current research could prove encouraging for a range of people, including the average person who wants to become more physically active to realize the health benefits.
"One of the things that may be a practical application, is if you go to the gym and you exercise and it hurts, you may be prone to stop doing that because pain is an aversive stimulus that tells you to withdraw. So if we could give people a little caffeine and reduce the amount of pain they're experiencing, maybe that would help them stick with that exercise. "Maybe then they'll push a little harder as well … maybe get even better adaptations to the exercise."

First Large-Scale Formal Quantitative Test Confirms Darwin's Theory of Universal Common Ancestry: More than 150 years ago, Darwin proposed the theory of universal common ancestry (UCA), linking all forms of life by a shared genetic heritage from single-celled microorganisms to humans. Until now, the theory that makes ladybugs, oak trees, champagne yeast and humans distant relatives has remained beyond the scope of a formal test. Now, a Brandeis biochemist reports in Nature the results of the first large scale, quantitative test of the famous theory that underpins modern evolutionary biology.
The results of the study confirm that Darwin had it right all along. In his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, the British naturalist proposed that, "all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form." Over the last century and a half, qualitative evidence for this theory has steadily grown, in the numerous, surprising transitional forms found in the fossil record, for example, and in the identification of sweeping fundamental biological similarities at the molecular level....

How Smarter School Lunchrooms Increase Fruit Sales: The researchers observed a 58 percent increase in fresh fruit sales at one Upstate New York school simply by moving the fruit from a stainless steel tray and into a basket lit by an ordinary desk lamp.

Tibetans Developed Genes to Help Them Adapt to Life at High Elevations: Researchers have long wondered why the people of the Tibetan Highlands can live at elevations that cause some humans to become life-threateningly ill -- and a new study answers that mystery, in part, by showing that through thousands of years of natural selection, those hardy inhabitants of south-central Asia evolved 10 unique oxygen-processing genes that help them live in higher climes.

Tissue Engineering Technique Yields Potential Biological Substitute for Dental Implants: A technique can orchestrate stem cells to migrate to a three-dimensional scaffold infused with growth factor, holding the translational potential to yield an anatomically correct tooth in as soon as nine weeks once implanted. An animal-model study has shown that by homing stem cells to a scaffold made of natural materials and integrated in surrounding tissue, there is no need to use harvested stem cell lines, or create an environment outside of the body (e.g., a Petri dish) where the tooth is grown and then implanted once it has matured. The tooth instead can be grown "orthotopically," or in the socket where the tooth will integrate with surrounding tissue in ways that are impossible with hard metals or other materials.