Written on Friday, November 24, 2006 by Gemini
Some comedians put their faith in punchlines or razor-sharp one-liners, while others believe timing is everything. But, when it comes to making people laugh, the answer could be staring them in the face. Research has shown the key to comedy is skin deep, with the most successful comedians having similar facial features.
To make us smile before they even start to speak, a comic should have a round face, small forehead, wide nose and big lips. Large eyes and high cheekbones add to the laughter factor. Psychologist Anthony Little believes Ricky Gervais, star of The Office, has the perfect comedy face, with features that win over the audience before he cracks his first joke.
Little said: “The features most likely to mark out male comedians for success are predominately soft and feminine. The characteristics of a feminine face imply that the person may be agreeable and co-operative, which can be causal in our first impressions of comedians as being friendly and funny.”
“In the same way that infants are preprogrammed to respond to the warmth and approachability of a mother’s face, soft feminine features put us at ease and encourage us to relax. This is conducive to laughter and enjoyment.” The University of Stirling psychologist studied the facial features of 20 of our favourite comics, including Peter Kay, Lee Evans, Jack Dee, Jimmy Carr, Tommy Cooper, Harry Hill and Ricky Gervais. After looking for common characteristics such as round faces and large eyes, he morphed their features together to create a composite image representing the perfect comedy face.
Little then looked outside the world of comedy, to see which public figures might make it on the comedy circuit, should the day job not work out. Strong candidates for a life of standup include David Cameron and Wayne Rooney. Cameron’s round, wide face, large eyes and soft features make him an almost perfect contender, said Little.
And while Manchester United player Wayne Rooney has an angular and masculine jaw, these are offset by a round face and snub nose, with the overall effect a boyish appearance which is approachable rather than threatening. Actor Daniel Craig, the new James Bond, is a good example of someone who conveys both humour and heroism in a single glance. Little said: “His face is closer to that of a heroic actor than that of a comedian, yet it does possess some feminine aspects. He is suited to play Bond since it demands a light-heartedness as well as dashing masculine heroism. He added: “There may be a perfect face for business and so on. There is great potential for research.”
Written on Friday, November 24, 2006 by Gemini
Crushing milk at high pressures could help it last for weeks in the refrigerator without the unfavourable flavours associated with other long-lasting milks, researchers now report. Conventionally, milk is pasteurised, or heated at high temperatures to kill harmful germs, at roughly 71° C for 15 seconds.
While pasteurisation kills most germs, it does not wipe out bacterial spores, the dormant versions of the germs, which are resistant to any form of destruction. Bacterial spores and remaining germs eventually spoil conventionally pasteurised milk, which is why it typically has a shelf life of only about 20 days when refrigerated.
Heating milk to between 135 and 150 ° for three to five seconds can kill both bacteria and their spores, leading to milk that is stable at room temperature for up to six months. Instead, researcher J. Antonio Torres, chemical engineer at Oregon State University are now investigating squeezing milk at high pressures while using a moderate amount of heat to kill germs. “Pressure inhibited the formation of key undesirable flavour compounds in milk,” Torres said.
The researchers found pressurising milk at 85,000 pounds per square inch for five minutes at about 130° C kills germs while retaining the taste of fresh milk. The result is milk that stays fresh at least 45 days in the refrigerator. If the researchers can make this process commercially viable, Torres anticipated such milk could appear on the market in three to five years.
Written on Wednesday, November 22, 2006 by Gemini
Embryonic stem cells, the controversial and versatile cells that seem able to do just about anything, have now expanded their repertoire into cancer prevention. A vaccine made from these cells shields mice against developing lung cancer under conditions thought to mimic the effects of smoking.
Safety concerns about injecting stem cells into humans mean that regulatory agencies are unlikely to approve human tests of the vaccine, says lead researcher John Eaton at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. Nevertheless, he thinks the vaccine is worth testing in people at high risk of developing cancer, such as heavy smokers or people with certain genetic mutations.
Other researchers are more cautious. Cancer vaccines, particularly vaccines made from cells, are notoriously more effective in mice than people, says Jeffrey Weber, an immunotherapist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “The idea is interesting, but the execution may be impossible,” he says.
But both Weber and Eaton agree that the finding could lead to new ways to prevent or treat cancer. Eaton’s approach was inspired by the similarities between embryos, embryonic stem cells and tumours. “Embryos and tumours both grow as balls, they derive nutrients from the host, and they both express peculiar proteins—some of them in common,” he says.
These shared proteins made Eaton think that a vaccine prompting an immune response to embryonic stem cells would also trigger an attack against tumours. He and his colleagues injected mice with stem cells and gave the mice a booster shot ten days later. The researchers then transplanted lung cancer cells under the animals’ skin — a standard animal model for the disease. The stem-cell injection protected 20 out of 25 mice from developing tumours, whereas tumours grew in all unvaccinated mice. “We were absolutely shocked,” Eaton says.
Even more effective was a mixture of stem cells and cells engineered to make a molecule that stimulates the immune system. None of the mice given this vaccine developed tumours when implanted with cancer cells.
Written on Monday, November 20, 2006 by Gemini
A 125 Kg British Woman Will Be Fitted With Remote-Controlled ‘Easyband’ To Help Her Lose Weight
A woman weighing 20 stones is to be fitted with a remote- controlled stomach band that can be electronically adjusted from outside her body. The operation on 29-year-old Maria Corvi will be the first of its type carried out. The gastric band will be tightened to vary the capacity of her stomach, limiting the amount of food she eats while giving a feeling of fullness. Called the Easyband, it contains a tiny receiver and a computer chip linked to a motor the size of a 10p piece. Once the band is in place, a wire attached to it is led up into the chest and fitted to a tiny receiver which sits just underneath the skin by the breastbone.
To tighten the Easyband, a doctor presses a button on a handheld computer, sending an electronic signal via the receiver to the motor. Conventional gastric bands are filled with salt water and can be tightened only by injecting more fluid to inflate the band - which carries a risk of infection. Corvi is paying £9,500 for the operation, which will take place at the Alexandra Hospital in Manchester. She hopes it takes her from a Size 20 to a Size 12 after her weight ballooned thanks to takeaways and tortillas.
She said: “I have thought about weight-loss surgery several times. I was put on my first diet by my mum, who took me to see a nutritionist when I was six. I have tried all the diets going and last year I started a hospital diet. I did lose a few stones, but I have put the weight back on.” David Ashton, from the Healthier Weight Centre said: ‘This is a huge advance for gastric band surgery. It allows accurate and painless adjustments, whilst removing the risk of infection or leaks.”
Model ‘stomach’ to aid research
British scientists have built what they say is the world’s first artificial stomach: a shiny, high-tech box that physically simulates human digestion. Constructed from plastics and metals able to withstand the corrosive acids found in the gut, the device will aid development of supernutrients, such as foods that could fool the stomach.
“There have been lots of jam-jar models of digestion before,” said Martin Wickham of Norwich’s Institute of Food Research, the artificial gut’s chief designer, referring to the beakers of enzymes typically used to approximate the chemical reactions in the stomach.
Written on Monday, November 20, 2006 by Gemini
They are orphans. No one to advocate their cause, sponsor them or give them a future. They lie in the dumpheap of the pharmaceutical industry, discarded by both the big and small pharmaceutical firms. A disease which has not been “adopted” by the pharmaceutical industry because it provides little financial incentive for the private sector to make and market new medications is known as an orphan disease.
According to the US Food and Drug Administration, an orphan disease is one that affects less than five patients in 10,000 inhabitants. There are dozens of experimental drugs that seem to have great potential to cure these orphan diseases. Yet the industry is reluctant to pursue them as the market isn’t profitable enough to justify the cost. So the USFDA decided to offer tax incentives so that some firms would at least give orphan drugs a once-over. Since research and development of drugs to treat such diseases is huge, the US decided to reward the firms with tax reductions and marketing exclusivity on that drug for seven years to encourage more companies to invest money in research. Similar legislations have been adopted by Europe, Australia and Japan.
Now, more than 200 orphan drugs have been approved by the USFDA and are on the market. In 2003, the leading orphan drug by worldwide sales was Amgen’s Epogen, with sales of $2.4 billion. Due to the varied sops on offer, many drugs have been developed, including those to treat glioma, multiple myeloma and cystic fibrosis. In the US, from January 1983 to June 2004, a total of 1,129 different orphan drug designations have been granted by the Office of Orphan Products Development and 249 orphan drugs have received marketing authorisation in the US. In contrast, the decade prior to 1983 saw fewer than ten such products come to market.
Closer home, Ranbaxy Laboratories recently brought home an ‘orphan’ from Switzerland. The Delhi-based firm signed an agreement with Swiss biopharmaceutical firm Debiopharm to market a drug used in treatment of portal hypertension, which is an increase in the pressure within the portal vein (the vein that carries blood from the digestive organs to the liver). The new chemical entity, Sanvar (vapreotide acetate), has been granted orphan drug status in the US where it is undergoing Phase III clinical trials.
Several Switzerland-based biopharmaceutical firms are crazy to adopt. Developing drugs that treat diseases the industry has abandoned, specifically parasitic illnesses that plague the developing world, is not everyone’s cup of tea. “The granting of the orphan drug status is designed to encourage the development of drugs which are necessary but would be prohibitively expensive or say unprofitable to develop under normal circumstances,’” said Jessica Mann, medical director of Speedel, a Basel-based biopharmaceutical company, which is looking at orphan drugs.
A non profit pharmaceutical company in the US, OneWorld’s first drug was paromomycin, an injectable antibiotic, to treat visceral leishmaniasis, a deadly parasitic infection that afflicts 1.5 million people in India, and kills 200,000 people each year. The World Health Organisation had got the rights to the injectable form of paromomycin from Pharmacia - now Pfizer. It had completed mid-stage trials, but had shelved the drug due to a tight budget. OneWorld decided to go ahead with trials on its own. The WHO and OneWorld now jointly own the license to the injectable form of paromomycin, which will be available in the Indian market early next year.
MEDICAL MATTERS
- The Europe Orphan Drug Regulation, which came into force in January 2000, defines rare diseases as an incidence of less than five patients in 10,000 inhabitants.
- The definition, however, is not absolute as a disease can be rare in one region while being common in another. Leprosy is a rare disease in Europe but it is more prevalent in central Africa
- List of these diseases changes over time. AIDS was once an orphan disease, but is now a high-incidence disease globally
