Nous sommes les freebirthers by Stéphanie St-Amant

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I’m up at 3 am with either food poisoning or a stomach bug…nothing better to do than hop online and distract myself.At Eric’s family reunion 2 years ago, I remember the exact same thing happening…mysterious gastro-intestinal malady, middle-of-the-night websurfing, puke bowl next to me on the couch. And unbeknownst to me, I was also pregnant!I don’t think that’s the case this time around, unless my Mirena IUD has failed me. This can happen, although it’s rare. A friend of mine and mother of 8 has gotten pregnant once on birth control and TWICE on IUDs! Both times the IUD came out with the baby.Anyway…I came across a fantastic article by Stéphanie St-Amant: Nous sommes les freebirthers. Enfanter sans peur …


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#Acadamiaedu, #Amant, #Case, #Enfanter, #Giving, #Health-Insurance, #Mirena, #Recherches

What Does a Judge do in a Personal Injury Case Trial?

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The lawsuit process can be intimidating. When you’re injured and are considering filing a lawsuit, it’s hard to know where to begin. Even after hiring a lawyer and getting started, the process can be hard to figure out. What do you have to do? What does your lawyer do? What happens at trial? What happens between now and then?To help you understand the lawsuit process, let’s look at a one specific piece of the personal injury process: the judge’s role. Specifically, let’s look at what the judge will and won’t do if your case goes to trial.Judges, Cases and the LawIn a personal injury case, the judge serves as a trier of law. The trier of law is responsible for making a ruling over the legal issues brought up during the course of the trial.For example, a woman sues the driver of the car that struck her while she was riding a bike. Because the injured woman filed a lawsuit, it is up to her to prove that the other driver was at fault. …


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#Attorney, #Case, #Judge, #Lawsuit, #Objections, #Personal-Injury-Tips, #Rule, #Specifically, #Suesthedriver, #Trial

Zebrafish discovery may shed light on human kidney function

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Researchers say the discovery of how sodium ions pass through the gill of a zebrafish may be a clue to understanding a key function in the human kidney. The findings from a collaboration between Mayo Clinic and the Tokyo Institute of Technology appear in the online issue of the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology.The researchers discovered a protein responsible for gas exchanges in the fish gill structure. Specifically they studied and characterized the Na+/H+ (sodium/hydrogen) exchanger named NHE3, responsible for controlling sodium and hydrogen ions across the gill. The researchers also directly demonstrated that NHE3 can function as a Na+/NH4+ (sodium/ammonium) exchanger.”This is significant because the fish tends to mimic the process in humans,” says Michael Romero, Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic physiologist who works in nephrology. “This is the true beauty of comparative physiology– a lot of the organs function by very similar processes, down to ionic transfer.”In this case the protein allows the sodium ions to be absorbed from the forming urine while at the same time discarding waste from normally functioning cells, thus keeping the body in balance and serving as an energy saving system. The researchers say the same NHE3 protein performs a similar function in the intestine, pancreas, liver, lungs and reproductive system.The gill is used in the fish as a transport system: sodium ions are nutrients and ammonium carries away waste. It’s a key process allowing zebrafish to extract sodium ions from fresh water. In humans, NHE3 is involved in the acid-waste control system in the kidney, but there hasn’t been a good analysis of that process in humans. Part of this acid-control process in the human kidney is “ammoniagenesis” which requires the initial part of the kidney tubule (proximal tubule) to export ammonia/ammonium. Physiologically, it has been assumed that NHE3 can perform a Na+/NH4+ exchange, but this has never been experimentally demonstrated.Ammoniagenesis and increased renal sodium bicarbonate absorption are partly under the control of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS), which means that this work enhances understanding of human hypertension. …


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#Acid, #American, #Cancer, #Case, #Discovery, #Online, #Physiology, #Science, #Species

Understanding (and Signing) the Mesothelioma Attorney-Client Agreement

Understanding (and Signing) the Mesothelioma Attorney-Client Agreement



In an earlier post we discussed how communication is vital to the attorney-client relationship. Once you’ve selected a qualified attorney who communicates clearly with you and makes you feel comfortable, it’s...

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#Agreement, #Attorney, #Case, #Contingency, #Discovery, #Mesothelioma, #Result, #Signature

Breast cancer drug found in bodybuilding supplement

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In a letter to The BMJ this week, researchers explain that, for more than 30 years, bodybuilders have taken tamoxifen to prevent and treat gynaecomastia (breast swelling) caused by use of anabolic steroids.Usually, tamoxifen is sourced from the illicit market, they say. However, bodybuilding discussion forums have speculated that a dietary supplement called Esto Suppress contains tamoxifen because the label listed one of its chemical names.The researchers purchased four samples at different times between late 2011 and early 2012 and analysed their contents. Tamoxifen was found in three out of the four samples at different concentrations (3.8 mg, 0.9 mg and 3 mg).The product label suggested a dosage of two capsules a day, which in the case of sample 1 may have provided 7.6 mg of tamoxifen (10-20 mg is used clinically for treating gynaecomastia).It is not known whether the Esto Suppress currently being sold still contains tamoxifen, but since the 2000s a growing number of off-the-shelf “food,” “herbal,” or “dietary” “supplements” — aimed at gym goers and people wanting to lose weight or enhance their sex lives — have contained pharmacologically active substances, explain the authors.These include anabolic steroids, erectogenics (to stimulate erections), stimulants, appetite suppressants, and anxiolytics (to treat anxiety).Often the substances are not listed on the labelling, and products may be marketed as “natural,” exploiting the belief that they are safer and healthier options, they add. In other cases, such as with Esto Suppress, only an obscure reference is made to the substance, such as a chemical name.They warn that most users “will be unaware that they are taking these substances” and urge healthcare professionals to ask their patients about their use of “supplements” and report suspected adverse reactions.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by BMJ-British Medical Journal. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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#Agriculture, #Alzheimer, #Bmj, #Case, #Health, #Journalnote, #Materials, #Product, #Science, #Source, #Suppress

With their amazing necks, ants don"t need "high hopes" to do heavy lifting

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High hopes may help move a rubber tree plant (as the old song goes), but the real secret to the ant’s legendary strength may lie in its tiny neck joint.In the Journal of Biomechanics, researchers report that the neck joint of a common American field ant can withstand pressures up to 5,000 times the ant’s weight.”Ants are impressive mechanical systems — astounding, really,” said Carlos Castro, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The Ohio State University. “Before we started, we made a somewhat conservative estimate that they might withstand 1,000 times their weight, and it turned out to be much more.”The engineers are studying whether similar joints might enable future robots to mimic the ant’s weight-lifting ability on earth and in space.Other researchers have long observed ants in the field and guessed that they could hoist a hundred times their body weight or more, judging by the payload of leaves or prey that they carried. Castro and his colleagues took a different approach.They took the ants apart.”As you would in any engineering system, if you want to understand how something works, you take it apart,” he said. “That may sound kind of cruel in this case, but we did anesthetize them first.”The engineers examined the Allegheny mound ant (Formica exsectoides) as if it were a device that they wanted to reverse-engineer: they tested its moving parts and the materials it is made of.They chose this particular species because it’s common in the eastern United States and could easily be obtained from the university insectary. It’s an average field ant that is not particularly known for it’s lifting ability.They imaged ants with electron microscopy and X-rayed them with micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) machines. They placed the ants in a refrigerator to anesthetize them, then glued them face-down in a specially designed centrifuge to measure the force necessary to deform the neck and eventually rupture the head from the body.The centrifuge worked on the same principle as a common carnival ride called “the rotor.” In the rotor, a circular room spins until centrifugal force pins people to the wall and the floor drops out. In the case of the ants, their heads were glued in place on the floor of the centrifuge, so that as it spun, the ants’ bodies would be pulled outward until their necks ruptured.The centrifuge spun up to hundreds of rotations per second, each increase in speed exerting more outward force on the ant. At forces corresponding to 350 times the ants’ body weight, the neck joint began to stretch and the body lengthened. The ants’ necks ruptured at forces of 3,400-5,000 times their average body weight.Micro-CT scans revealed the soft tissue structure of the neck and its connection to the hard exoskeleton of the head and body. Electron microscopy images revealed that each part of the head-neck-chest joint was covered in a different texture, with structures that looked like bumps or hairs extending from different locations.”Other insects have similar micro-scale structures, and we think that they might play some kind of mechanical role,” Castro said. …


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#American, #Ants, #Case, #Department, #Health, #Professor, #Robotics, #Space, #United, #University