Gout of Town

Recent findings have just proven that the increased consumption of fructose in post-menopausal women heightens the chances of gout. Now what is gout, you ask? According to its Mayo Clinic page, "Gout is a complex form of arthritis characterized by sudden, severe attacks of pain, redness and tenderness in joints, often the joint at the base of the big toe." Gout occurs when uric acid, a waste product, crystallizes in the joints instead of passing through the kidney and exiting via urine. This is similar to how kidney stones occur, which is when uric acid crystallizes in the kidneys. An early indicator of gout is high levels or uric acid in the blood, known as hyperuricemia. Hyon Choi of Boston University School of Medicine and his research team, having researched and made findings of gout for the past decade, set about looking to see if fructose levels heighten the risk of gout in women. A previous study done by Choi and his team proved that fructose does indeed increase the risk of gout in men, so now they ran trials to see if that transferred over to women. The correlation between gout risk increasing factors in women and men may seem like pointless work, but gout itself is much more prevalent in men, and women are already at much less of a risk. 

The study was based on data taken from 79,000 pot menopausal women. Women who are not post menopausal are at an extremely low risk of contracting gout because they still produce a hormone that regulates uric acid levels. The study found, out of these 79,000 women, that consuming one sugar sweetened soft drink a day as opposed to one a month drastically increases one's chances of getting gout, a disease which is extremely painful.There are some pretty nasty looking pictures of gout, so considered yourself warned and think twice before watching my Animoto video below.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

In addition to proving that fructose consumption affects the possibility of getting gout, the article discusses the soft drink industry and the corn syrup industry. High fructose corn syrup is the chief sweetener in almost all non-diet soft drinks. Every time one woman drinks a Coke, she is increasing her chances of getting gout.  For a long time, health advocates have been protesting the use of high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener. Unlike table sugar, which has the same amount of glucose as fructose, high fructose corn syrup usually contains about 58% fructose. In addition to raising the possibility of gout, fructose, which is broken down in the liver, can cause extra fat synthesis to occur.  Consumption of soft drinks has also been linked to an increased chance of pancreatic cancer.

Overall, even though non-diet soft drinks (especially Mtn Dew) are extremely tasty, they stealthily carry many health risks.

Even though I now know that these health risks are valid, I will just forget that I ever wrote this article and continue consuming Mtn Dew in excess. 



Sources:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003476.htm 

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/gout/DS00090 

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/65355/title/Fructose_poses_gout_risks_even_in_women 

Sally: Grandma's Hairless Cat

You may or may not have a cat as a pet, but you have most likely seen one. While you were at your grandma's house observing her hairless cat, did you take the time to look at the magic of how he or she drinks? A recent paper has gone into detail of the wonderful complexity of just exactly how cats go about drinking. After reading those first sentences, you may be wondering what I could possibly be talking about. In your mind, you've most likely thought that cats drink in a simple manner. They form a ladle with their tongue and scoop the liquid into their mouth. Wrong. The method I just described is used by dogs, but cats employ a completely different method. Cats, being the intelligent creatures they are, take advantage of the liquid's inertia. Inertia is the laziness of an object, in simple terms. Inertia is the unwillingness of an object to change unless it is manipulated by another force. In this case, we will make the liquid milk and the manipulator gravity. As your grandma's hairless cat stealthily approaches the milk filled bowl (while wearing kitten mittens), he prepares to take full advantage of the inertia of the milk. Your grandma's cat, henceforth known as Sally, dips her tongue, which is the same color as her fur (or lack thereof), into the milk. Almost as quickly as the tongue enters the milk, she pulls it, yanking the milk up into the air. For a split second, the inertia of the milk suspends it in the air, and in this moment, Sally surrounds the milk with her mouth and swallows it. After that split second of suspension, gravity, the manipulator, kicks in, snapping the milk back down into the bowl. Still thirsty, Sally repeats the complex and intricate process again until her thirst is quenched.

The intricacy of this seemingly simple process was discovered by a team of scientists led by Pedro Reis. The team went about observing this by using high speed cameras, as cats dip their tongues down into the liquid an astounding three and a half times per second. Even more astoundingly, when the tongue shoots back into the mouth, it moves at a speed of seventy-eight centimeters per second. When Reis first began the experiment, he and his team figured that the roughness of the cat's tongue would play a role; a prediction that was drastically wrong. In actuality, the tip of the tongue that penetrates the surface of the liquid is smooth, and the smoothness is actually very good for lapping up the milk or water. Throughout the research, Reis and his team found that the viscosity of the liquid, and least between the bounds of what a cat would logically drink, did not affect the process. Rather, the determining factors were the inertia and gravitational pull. One may think that this is an odd thing to research or that somebody must have done it before, but as Rebecca Z. German of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says, "What we know about mammalian feeding is woefully incomplete."

Here are some videos, one of a cat lapping up milk in slo-mo, and the other of a simulator demonstrating the inertia of water.


FAST LAPS from Science News on Vimeo.


TONGUE SUBSTITUTE from Science News on Vimeo.


So now you know, and next time you see your grandma's hairless feline lapping up some milk, you can explain to all your friends what Sally is really doing.

Source:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/65379/title/Cats_drink_using_lap-and-gulp_trick
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-481062/Puss-Hood-Hairless-Sphynx-cat-keeps-warm.html

Osmoregulation in Bull Sharks

All sharks that live in marine environments have adapted their osmoregulatory systems in order to survive. If they didn't, then they would die. Most sharks survive in saltwater due to a high concentration of urea and TMAO in the bloodstream as well as urine that contains excess salt. In marine environments, the external environment has a very high concentration of salt. In order to stay in balance with this outside environment, normal organisms would let water out to try and balance the concentrations. However, if a shark did this then it would soon have too high of a concentration of salt inside its body. To deal with this, sharks bodies contain urea and TMAO. Urea and TMAO make the inside environment saltier, and then balance out the concentrations that way. Water is constantly passively entering the shark through the gills and once inside the body, passes along to the kidneys for desalinization. In sharks, the kidneys make do a very efficient job, and send a very high concentration of salt out via urine and retain a lot of freshwater, preventing the inside of the shark from having a concentration of salt that is too high. Bull sharks are unique because they can survive in marine environments as well as freshwater environments. This is possible because Bull Sharks adapt their osmoregulation systems depending on what environment they are in. When they are in marine environments, they osmoregulate like other sharks, using urea, TMAO, and efficient kidneys to keep an isotonic relationship with the external environment. When Bull Sharks are in freshwater, they basically tone down their kidneys and remove not as much salt but more urea and TMAO. It should be said that this process must be gradual and that a Bull Shark just dropped from saltwater into freshwater it will die. Since Bull Sharks have this unique ability to adapt their osmoregulation system from the normal process of getting rid of salt to the process of retaining salt, they are capable of living in freshwater.       

Sources:

http://www.sharksavers.org/en/education/shark-biology-behavior/385-how-bull-sharks-can-live-in-fresh-water-through-clever-osmoregulation.html

http://www.elasmo-research.org/education/white_shark/tmao.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark#Osmoregulation

http://animals.howstuffworks.com/fish/bull-shark.htm

http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~etaylor/426www/lectures/sharks3.html