So I got my genome scanned by Navigenics for a story I wrote for the LA Times. It went up yesterday. The scariest thing I found was that I carry one copy of the APOE4, the allele of the gene associated with an increased risk of late onset Alzheimer’s disease. People with one copy are 3-4 times more likely to get AD. Those with two copies are 15 times more likely to develop it - and earlier in life.

APOE - or apolipoprotein E - is a normal compound that transports cholesterol around the blood and seems also to be responsible for depositing plaques in the brains of AD patients. Fun.

My grandmother AD it, so it’s not exactly shocking that I carry the risk factor. What’s left to be determined is whether there is anything we can do about it. AD is linked to high blood pressure, cholesterol, high fat diet, diabetes, head injuries, lack of exercise, low education level and mental activity (the use it or lose it angle).

So here’s the extra funny part. I also have two copies of the “risk” allele for the fat gene FTO - discovered last April by a team of UK researchers as they were exploring massive cohorts of diabetics. FTO is widely lauded as the first widespread fat gene - all the other ones were random freaky mutation that only appeared in a couple of people.  16% of people in the research cohorts had two copies of the fat gene, weighing an average of 3 kilos more with a 67% increased risk of being obese. The effects were seen starting from just seven years old (ironically, when I started to pudge out. It’s hilarious to be able to see yourself so directly in research studies).

To sum up: I have an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease (normal for women is about 17% lifetime risk - mine is 29%) and two copies of a gene that make it harder for me to avoid the AD risk factors - obesity, diabetes etc. Fun! So fun! Thanks Mom and Dad!

That’s my news. I have to go not eat now.

I have a weakness for Doritos. I pretty much love all the classic flavors, although Cool Ranch is my real Achilles heel. There has been more than one occasion when the boyfriend has come home to find me sheepish, ashamed, nauseous and nearly comatose on the sofa beside an empty Doritos bag (and not the small one). I swear on a stack of vegetables that I’ll never do it again, but let’s be honest. Doritos are drugs in crunchy, cheesy, salty-food format and I am helpless to resist them.

Of course Frito-Lay is well aware of the effect their product has on me. They’ve spent years adding salts and sugars in their most potent and evil forms (MSG and corn syrup) to ensure that I keep coming back for more. And more and more. I bet they have a whole bank of fMRI machines to test for maximal activity in brain pleasure zones when ingesting their products.

Indeed this contrived intensity of and variety of flavors found in many processed foods likely makes people eat more and feel less full - or at least that’s the contention of one David Katz at Yale University. He has a book called The Flavor Point Diet, which is all about keeping meals within a limited number of flavors thereby allowing our brains to feel full on less food...because there is always room for more of another taste. Such as desert. Or Doritos.

Likewise, a recent report from the journal Hypertension found that kids who ate less salty snack foods also drank less sugary sweet drinks. The authors contend that the kids drank less fluids cause salty foods make you thirsty, which is of course true, and yet methinks that kids who eat crap snacks also drink crap drinks, so there’s no medical mystery there. And again, the delightfully addictive intensity of saltiness and sweetness feed into one another to ramp up calorie consumption. I mean is it a mistake that Frito-Lay is owned by Pepsi-Co? It’s kind of like they hooked us on purpose...like they knew that their product was addictive and dangerous.....and...and…

(PHOTO: HARTINI A)

Irony Incarnate is when you’re waiting at the bus stop. Forever. And one bus goes by and it’s full so it doesn’t stop. And more people pile up at the stop. And all the other buses you do not want go by three times over before yours arrives.

And in the meantime you’re listening to a BBC News podcast that is highlighting the new formula arrived at by Caltech and Harvard math gurus that breaks down whether or not its worth it to continue waiting for the bus that doesn’t come, or screw it and walk. And to make things even more ironic, their equation usually errs on the side of continuing to wait while me, this morning, in my frigidly cold and yet fuming state, could have walked to work in the time it took me to arrive on my tardy and stinky bus.

Now I know I’m not the only one afflicted. The waiting-for-the-bus-that-won’t-come conundrum is so widespread that it inspired a brilliant poem by Wendy Cope that starts off “Bloody men are like bloody buses. You wait for about a year And as soon as one approaches your stop. Two or three others appear.” She’s a wise one is that Wendy Cope. Sure enough, behind my packed Number 8 bus this morning (it was like lemmings jumping off a cliff but in reverse: humans irrationally jumping on in droves) were two others, empty and fancy free.

I was driving around Vancouver the other day and caught a snippet on CBC radio about new BC legislation designed to protect kids with serious food allergies; it’s called the Anaphylactic Student Protection Act and requires schools to educate and prepare staff for a student’s allergic reaction and try to limit contamination of potential allergens in cafeterias and classrooms. Check out the bill here. The bill was modeled on an Ontario law, Sabrina’s Law, named after 13-year old Sabrina Shannon who died in 2004 after eating french fries at her high school cafeteria that were likely contaminated with dairy.

While the laws are focused solely on education, cleanliness and treatment delivery, the radio show quickly turned to discussions of “banning” certain foods including peanuts, as many schools have already done (check out the nut free policy of Cliffwood Public School in Toronto - yikes!)

Now as many of you know, I am deathly allergic to peanuts and tree nuts. Fun for me. But I didn’t develop my anaphylactic reactions until I was 19 (and at a university ball no less; ask Anne about it sometime, she was there and she has pictures). During my elementary and high school years I used to just throw up. Gross, but not deadly.

So personally, I am a little torn about all this. Yes I want more things to be nut free and for, when possible, cafeterias and restaurants to try and eliminate cross contamination. Because if you try and eat out with me, you’ll know how hard that is. NO ONE will guarantee nut-free food. I usually just ask whether they put nuts in there ON PURPOSE, cause if not, I’m usually fine. I can taste traces for sure, but an eeeensy bit won’t kill me. And that is the difference between me and some of these super sensitive kids. I can take a little and not die. They can’t.

Should schools ban nuts and milk and eggs? Er..that’s tough. Public schools should be safe places, but we are dealing with invisible amounts of proteins here. When a child (or grown up) is that sensitive you can never be truly safe unless you control everything. In short, these kids are kind of screwed. So they survive high school - what about everywhere else?

But I think there is real hope on the horizon in the form of new food allergy treatments. Wesley Burks at Duke University has had some success with highly controlled feeding trials - where kids (and adults) essentially build up tolerances to peanuts by consuming ever greater amounts, starting out from 1/1000th of a gram. It might not “cure” the allergy entirely, but the treatment means that kids can withstand up to a whole peanut! before reacting. And that is the difference between life and accidental death.

There are also anti-IgE shots (that bind the antibodies that recognize allergens) that seem to increase tolerance (though some law suits over who owns the drug are complicating things); Burks and peanut research master Hugh Sampson at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NYC are working on peanut vaccines; Sampson is also working with his Chinese colleagues to produce a herbal mixture that seems to totally block allergic reactions (though it’s still in the mice stage).

What’s more, Gideon Lack at King’s College in London has begun a seven year trial to see if FEEDING peanuts to young and at risk babies/toddlers (who already have eczema) might actually prevent the development of food allergies - as all the advice to AVOID allergic foods in the first years of life has seemingly NOT worked.

Also, why not just have a petting zoo at every preschool? Kids would love it and studies consistently show that kids exposed to farms and farm animals are less likely to develop allergies. Better yet, why not just give every child pints of unpasteurized milk, as a recent European study found that ‘farm milk’ reduce allergies and asthma in suburban kids. Of course the same can be said for kids with loads of parasites...which is why some companies are thinking of using pig parasite eggs (that can’t survive and reproduce in people) to treat food allergies. All these treatments are essentially based on the hygiene hypothesis - if you keep your immune system busy with a variety of real threats from parasites, viruses, bacteria (even the “good” bacteria found in raw milk or yogurt), it will have less free time to go around attacking harmless foods.

So even though food allergies are seemingly on the rise, it’s a pretty good time to be born a nut sufferer, if you ask me.

PHOTO: CAROLE NICKERSON)
It’s a really important question: what to do when you spill coffee on your laptop (other than curse like a sailor and panic)?

Lucky for me when I spilled half a cup of molten coffee over my 12” powerbook this morning the computer savvy whizzes in my office came to the rescue. And fast. But why not ward off undue risk and read about it before disaster strikes. Seriously, we all flirt with this disaster each and every day. Just look at the number of women who entered our ”She’s Such a Geek” photo contest with photos of their laptops in potential splash zones.

Plus, I’d like to point out that a lower computer mortality rate is better for the planet (Related: ”Apple’s Beryllium Cremation Damages Environment?” May 1, 2007).

1. Cut the power! Pull out the power cord. Pull out the battery. It’s cruel but worth it.

(Saving your laptop after a spill by dummies.com suggests you “ground yourself by touching the center screw on the faceplate of a dry electrical outlet or by touching some other metal object that reaches to ground.” This sounds awkward and unrealistic to me. For example, how could I have possible grounded myself while cleaning the mess up? Craziness.)

2. Unplug the power cord from the wall… !

3. Disconnect any external devices. In my case a hardy set of USB headphone and an ipod charger.

(now here is where I parted ways from the dummies.com advice. They suggest you dismantle your computer part by part and dry each component. Getting me to do that is inviting major pain and breakage)

4. Mop up any residual spill. I for one was struck with an overwhelming urge to do something like that snake bite first aid thing where you suck up all the tainted blood from the wound. But that’s gross. And a roll of paper towels will do the trick.

5. Let your computer hang to dry. There are several recommended positions for this. I started off with my computer open and inverted like an upside down “V” but this position was fast replaced with another one I dubbed the “hangover.” Open your laptop so that the keyboard and screen are at right angles to each other. Then turn it upside down and hang it over the ledge of your desk. This way the keyboard part is resting upside down flat on the surface of your desk while the screen hangs over the edge.

6. Now here comes the hardest part. Next you have to wait while everything dries - to become sticky sticky sticky. I think this period of time varies with the spill hazard. Me? I walked down the street, bought more coffee (because I’m dumb like that), bought some apple strudel, came back, wrung my hands, drank the coffee, ate the strudel, and picked up some knitting (See our related blog category: The End is Nigh). Two long hours later I pressed the on button to discover that joy of all joys my computer was alive and well. Now that I have a new lease on it’s life we’re back in the throes of love with renewed vigor.

For some further happy stories of coffee spills check out this stream of comments over at lifehacker. 

I don’t know if you remember way back to when all I could talk about was death; beheading, drowning, heart attack, death in the vacuum of space. If there was a “morbid” category on Trivial Pursuit, let me tell you I could clean up. Anyways, the reason for all this lethal research was that I was writing a feature on the physiology of various modes of death in order to give a weeee insight into what it might feel like to die. It’s all done and published now (actually last week, sorry).

Now I shall share with you my favourite findings (some of which didn’t make it into the actual article):

1) The shock of falling into cold water (especially if you are all warm and clothed) can set you on the road to death in a couple of seconds; cold shock screws up breathing, makes you hyperventilate and fiddles with heart rhythms. This effectively leaves you inhaling a lethal lungful of water (for an average 155 pound man, with a lung volume of about 5 liters, it takes only 1.5 litres of inhaled saltwater and 3 litres of freshwater to kill you) and even going into cardiac arrest. Wear your life vest.

2) People wait a really really really long time before they seek emergency treatment for a heart attack. It’s obviously terrifying to admit to yourself that you are having a heart attack, but YOU HAVE TO. Tell your parents and your grandparents and every single person you ever meet: learn the symptoms of heart attack and if you feel them, call freakin’ 911. Don’t drive yourself, don’t wait for the feeling to pass. We have an amazing arsenal of treatments available that, if used in time, can effectively STOP a heart attack in its tracks and make it like it never even happened. And WOMEN!! are the worst delayers. They are most likely to experience less-than average symptoms. Heart attacks are also still thought of as a man’s disease, even by health professionals. So women are less likely to think they are having a heart attack, and so are the doctors!!! This is not good. Be proactive. If something is wrong, get help. We are talking about your heart here.

3) Bleeding to death. It feels, kind of, gross. Quick, yes, and depending how well you cut, not so painful. But exsanguination is not considered a humane way to kill animals by the American Veterinary Medical Association, it’s too stressful for them. Blood loss can induce feelings of anxiousness in people, too. Ew.

4) In Britain a couple hundred years ago, they used to burn women to death who killed their husbands. As opposed to just hanging for all other kinds of murders. This is because killing your husband (not killing your wife, mind you) was considered “petit treason” - a crime against king and country. We’ve come a long way ladies.

5)Decapitation is of course on of the most intriguing modes of death; painless? instant? really? At the upper estimate, we have about 7 seconds worth of oxygen left in the blood in our brains before we’d pass out. Which means at the upper max, we could have a whole 7 seconds to look at the crowd and smile or frown or whatever before we lost consciousness. But experiments with decapitated rats found that the electrical activity in the brain post head-severing was the same in awake rats as it was in anesthetized rats, meaning there is no brain activity suggestive of conscious feeling of pain. Or consciousness at all. Given that even the most reputable anecdotes about movement/reaction post decapitation report effects far after the 7 second cut-off, it seems very unlikely to me that they were anything more than postmortem twitches.

6) The electric chair was designed by a dentist. A dentist. 

7) Hangmen were seriously proud people, even verging on cocky. They were professionals and prided themselves on doing their jobs well. They were also kind of famous, especially the English hangmen from the 17 and 1800s. Fun times. I think it might have been cognitive dissonance over how horrid their job actually was - if you could perfect the skill, make the death as clean and painless as possible, it wasn’t really that bad, right? Also, if you drop a man too far (give him too much rope) his head will rip off. Which was just totally embarrassing. For the hangman.

8) One day, two dudes in Oklahoma just sat down and decided on the lethal injection protocol based on hunches and previous experience..but with seeming little understanding of biology. It’s more than likely that larger inmates are not given a high enough dose of the initial injection - the anesthetic - meaning they are kind of awake and conscious during the next two shots. The first paralyzes your lungs, meaning you can’t breath and would feel like you are suffocating. The second shot is potassium chloride, which should stop the heart instantly, but it also burns like a son of a bitch when injected. Like if you have to give it to patients in the hospital, they scream their guts out. Oh...and because of the Hippocratic Oath, doctors don’t assist in executions, which means that sometimes the lethal injection assistants can’t find a vein, which means even more pain and suffering.

9) Competing with decapitation for the most pondered about death form, we have death in a space vacuum. Some notable findings include, you swell up A LOT as the water in your body tissues vaporizes. Bloat like a balloon. Some pilots have experienced this when they lost pressure in their gloves (but no where else); it hurts. If you go whole hog into the vacuum you’ve got about 12 seconds before you pass out. If you hold your breath or are at the peak of inspiration when you loose pressure/fall out the space lock, your lungs will probably explode.  If someone pulls you back in before about 90 seconds, you’ll probably live and be totally OK. Any longer and you’re dead. How do we know this? Because of all the dogs and monkeys and squirrels etc that gave their lives in a vacuum chamber at some NASA or military research centre. Nice.

That’s right people. DARPA needs more wacky brainpower to fuel their raving visions of cutting edge military science. And they’ve got all these videos of project manager testimonials reinforcing just how RAD working at DARPA is. It’s got this really hot little soundtrack that echoes early ‘90s exercise videos.

Daniel Engber over at Slate reports on the murky organization’s recent DARPATech meeting in Anaheim, California in his article ”I Want To Be a Mad Scientist.”

But it sure is interesting learning about the inner workings of the Pentagon’s crazy zany R&D dept. which has brought us such goodies as remote-controlled sharks and cyber-insect armies.

If anything, it looks like a bureaucratic nightmare led by a nano-managing boss according to some of the cutting comments on Wired Blog’s coverage of the conference.

(Also, along the lines of military recruitment, check out these recruitment videos for Japan’s Navy that channel the village people AND the Power Rangers.  They should keep you smiling ‘til Monday.)

“Big people small people, matter of fact, all people, everybody makes mistakes oh yes they doooooo.” (click on lyrics to watch!)

That’s what Big Bird sang on my favorite Sesame Street album. And it came to mind when I read about the bioweapons boo boos that are rife inUniversity biodefense labs nationwide. The Sunshine Project outs some of them - that is from the biosafety level three labs that are forthcoming and open about admitting their mistakes. So, they warn, the incidents they’ve dug up are probably a conservative estimate of how often this happens.

Here’s a laundry list of their mistakes. Errors include researchers jabbing themselves with biological agent infected needles: there’s one anthrax needle, one unidentified pathogen needle, and another that was either plague or anthrax. There are a couple other incidents that include unauthorized research and alarms not sounding when exhaust fans failed.

The Sunshine Project is unflinching in its censure:

What is needed, according to the Sunshine Project, is to reduce the number of facilities and people handing bioweapons agents in the United States and to bring the fragmented and frequently unenforced hodgepodge of federal biolab rules and suggestions together into a unified, mandatory, and enforced system that ensures laboratory safety and public accountability

And this is coming from the same non-profit organization that dug up enough dirt on the University of Texas’ bioweapons lab practices that the CDC had to shut down their work on bioweapons.

A couple years ago the 14 year old Rajesh Kumar from the town of Rampur started spouting english to huge effect, according to the Indian superstitious news wires and IBNLive.com:

The boy talks gibberish with a few words of science thrown in here and there. And the people in his village Rampur claim that “Rajesh Kumar is explaining scientific formulas and concepts,” although he has never studied science or has been overseas.

Watch the video of his garble here. Anyways, it turns out that he’s nothing near a reincarnation of some American egghead. Doubts surfaced when his many grammatical errors came to light (which, if you watch the video is a generous way of describing his blathering) and he appeared incapable of understanding the language himself.

After Zee News grilled the poor teen for five hours (no one devotes the airtime to live interrogations anymore - clearly a very effective means of cutting through the bull) he finally confessed. “It was a Hollywood movie, Total Recall, and the constant exposure to Western culture that gave him a cursory knowledge of English,” Zee News triumphantly reported. And yes, the irony of that movie title is not lost on me. Here’s the 411:

In 2005 on the eve of 26th January, Rajesh was insulted by his teacher when he failed to read out a speech in English. The incident left a scar on his mind, and a humiliated Rajesh vowed revenge. He took up this challenge, and set out on a spree of watching English movies and listening to English songs.

Anne and I share our office with some fabulously lovely persons (and two cats). Yesterday, two of said awesome dudes consumed one square of an energy bar they got free at a street market. Said chocolately-like bar is called Red Rush. It’s active ingredients are caffeine (160mg for the bar, about one really big cup of coffee); taurine (a normal metabolite of amino acid cysteine that helps with detox processing in the liver); D-Glucoronolactone (again a normal metabolite of glucose) and guarana (a South American, coffee-like bean that manufacturers use to pack in LOADS of caffeine, in an unregulated way. Anyways).

The combo of caffeine, D-gluc and taurine is found in many energy drinks and some studies have found it to increase athletic performance. For an overview of the three, check this page from the European Commission. Highlights of the report include: “There is a lack of scientific evidence to support the safety of taurine present in beverages at concentrations that may result in intakes several-fold higher than that usually obtained from the rest of the diet.” AND “While there is no indication from the available data that there is any risk to health from consumption of high amounts of glucuronolactone, there is a lack of scientific evidence to support the safety of glucuronolactone present in beverages at concentrations that may result in intakes as much as two orders of magnitude greater than that obtained from the rest of the diet.”

But I digress. Knowing my interest in all things medical, these two boys came over to my desk to report on their experience with the bar (actually in hindsight, they were probably high and you know how high people are). I should note that both boys had at least one, if not two cups of of coffee today, which likely compounded the effects of eating the bar.  Within five minutes, they both felt hot flashes and an increase in heart rate. They said their eyes were glassy, irritated and they had reduced depth perception (”...it’s like you and the brick wall are in the same plane...."). One mentioned it was a feeling similar to a medication he’d taken that mimicked psychosis - at least in the visual field “...I feel like I could jump that far right now...”.  Both were sweating on the upper lip and forearm. They both promptly left and went for a bike ride.