Children may soon be able to take a simple breath test to see if they have dyslexia. The breath test, developed by Dr. Alexandra Richardson of the University of Oxford, works by measuring biochemical imbalances in the body that are thought to underlie some behavioral and learning difficulties.
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There are popular cartoons of cavemen co-existing with dinosaurs, even though we know we didn?t come along until well after all the dinosaurs were gone. Now it?s been discovered that the common ancestor of humans, monkeys, apes and other primates may have arisen much earlier than previously thought. Humans didn?t interact with dinosaurs, but our ancestors may have.
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New research shows that rats given large bingeing doses of alcohol every eight hours for four consecutive days experienced brain damage. The area of the brain responsible for smell was damaged after only two days of heavy drinking and other regions were damaged after four days.
“This is a four-day model,” says Fulton Crews, of the center for alcohol studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. ?If you went on a long weekend binge, you could do this.”
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Lena H. Sun reports in the Washington Post that six months after inhaling anthrax spores, several of the mail workers who survived the deadly disease have yet to make a full recovery and are experiencing serious fatigue and memory loss.
In interviews with five of the six survivors of inhalational anthrax, four reported frequent exhaustion. Only one person, a 74-year-old Florida man, has returned to work. But others say they need daily naps after the slightest exertion.
“The question is, why aren’t these people back to normal?” says Mark Galbraith, an infectious disease specialist in Virginia who is treating one of the victims. This shows how little is known by the medical community about this illness.
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