Drinking more than a pint of beer a day can substantially increase the risk of some cancers, research suggests.

The Europe-wide study of 363,988 people reported in the British Medical Journal found one in 10 of all cancers in men and one in 33 in women were caused by past or current alcohol intake.

More than 18% of alcohol-related cancers in men and around 4% in women were linked to excessive drinking.

The Department of Health said it was taking action to reduce drinking.

Cancer charities say people should limit their drinking to lower the risk.

The study calculated that in 2008 current and past drinking habits were responsible for about 13,000 cancer cases in the UK, out of a total of 304,000 cases.

Previous research has shown a link between alcohol consumption and cancers of the oesophagus, liver, bowel and female breast.

When alcohol is broken down by the body it produces a chemical which can damage DNA, increasing the chance of developing cancer.

Glass too far

The latest research found that individuals who drank more than two standard drinks a day for men and one drink a day for women were particularly at risk of alcohol-related cancers

A standard drink contains about 12g of alcohol, which is equivalent to a 125ml glass of wine or a half pint of beer.

Yet NHS guidelines are a little more relaxed, saying that men should drink no more than three to four units a day while women should not go above two to three units a day.

Of the cancers known to be linked to alcohol, the researchers suggest that 40% to 98% occurred in people who drank more than the recommended maximum.

The results were gathered as part of a study following 363,988 men and women in eight European countries aged between 35 and 70.

The European Prospective Investigation into Cancer study tracked their levels of drinking and how this affected their risk of cancer.

Researchers then looked at figures on how much people drank in each country, including the UK, taken from the World Health Organization.

The study focused on France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Greece, Germany, Denmark and the UK.

Madlen Schutze, lead researcher and study author, from the German Institute of Human Nutrition, said that many cancer cases could be avoided if alcohol consumption was limited.

“And even more cancer cases would be prevented if people reduced their alcohol intake to below recommended guidelines or stopped drinking alcohol at all,” she said.

‘Best data’

Cancer Research UK director of health information Sara Hiom said that many people did not know that drinking alcohol could increase their cancer risk.

“In the last 10 years, mouth cancer has become much more common and one reason for this could be because of higher levels of drinking – as this study reflects.

“Along with being a non-smoker and keeping a healthy bodyweight, cutting back on alcohol is one of the most important ways of lowering your cancer risk.”

Cancer Partners UK medical director Prof Karol Sikora said the message had to be “drink occasionally, but not regularly”.

“This is the best data we’ve got and we’re ever likely to get.

“The take-home message is that the more alcohol you drink, some of the common cancers – the four cancers that have been identified – do increase, and that’s worrying. So the message has to be ‘look at drinking habits, and reduce.’”

The Department of Health is set to publish an alcohol strategy in the summer.

Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, former president of the Royal College of Physicians and chairman of the UK Alcohol Health Alliance, called for tougher regulation to curb alcohol consumption.

He told the BBC: “It is yet another piece of evidence that really leads us to conclude that sitting back and waiting for people to change their habits, perhaps with voluntary partnerships with the drinks industry included in policies, will not bring about results.

“If we really want to see preventable deaths coming down in the next decade or so, I think there will have to be some form of tougher regulation by government.”

It is expected to include plans to stop supermarkets selling cheap alcohol and tighten up licensing laws which were relaxed under the previous government.

Source: BBC:COM

New Zodiac sign chart and addition of Ophiuchus

MINNEAPOLIS – It’s a new year, and there’s new Zodiac signs for many in 2011. Professor Parke Kunkle of the Minnesota Planetarium Society says the Zodiac has a date problem. If you imagine the Earth as a spinning top, the axis changes as it wobbles.

5,000 years later, it means the stars are not aligned, so those with a Libra horoscope are really a Virgo, and many others have a new Zodiac sign too.

“Right now its pointing this way, the North Star, but 3000 BC it was pointing differently,” Kunkle said. “Now things have moved and the sun is in a different constellation. We’re about a whole constellation off.“

And don’t forget Ophiuchus, astrology’s orphan.

”Ophiuchus has been a constellation for years and it just gets left out,” Kunkle said.

NEW ZODIAC SIGN CHART

Capricorn
January 20- to February 16

Aquarius
February 16 to March 11

Pisces
March 11 to April 18.

Aries
April 18 to May 13

Taurus
May 13 to June 21.

Gemini
June 21 to July 20

Cancer
July 20 to August 10

Leo
August 10 to September 16

Virgo
September 16 to October 30

Libra
October 30 to November 23

Scorpio
November 23 to November 29

Ophiuchus
November 29 to December 17

Sagittarius
December 17 to January 20

Betsy Blumenfeld of Mendota Heights, Minn. has been studying astrology for 30 years, and says most of the charting these days is done by computer. She also says most Western astrologers look not to the stars, but to the Earth.

For the astrologer and the astronomer, it seems the stars will never align — the age-old battle between science and mysticism, and yet both keep looking.

“I’m having a blast,” Kunkle said. “among other things it calls attention to astronomy.”

Statement from Prof. Parke Kunkle, Minneapolis Community and Technical College and Minnesota Planetarium Society board member:

”In science we deal with a long tradition of fact based investigation. We are not in the business of interpreting the purported relation between the positions of planets and human affairs.

“The Earth spins and, like a toy top, the spin axis moves around, pointing in different directions. Today, Earth’s spin axis points toward the pole star, Polaris. Around 3000 BC Earth’s spin axis pointed toward Thuban. Wait 26,000 years and the north star will again be Thuban. Astronomers call this motion of the spin axis precession. About 130 BC, Hipparchus noticed that the Earth’s spin axis had changed directions, so astronomers and astrologers have known about the Earth’s precession for over 2000 years.

“But this means that if the sun was “in” a certain constellation on a particular date, it is in a different constellation on that date today. For example, the sun was in Pisces on March 1, 2000 BC but it is in Aquarius on March 1, 2011 AD.”

Story originally published on MyFoxTwinCities.com

Source: www.myfoxtwincities.com

Some scientists in Cornell University’s Compuational Synthesis Lab are developing possibly the greatest invention in the world- a 3D food printer that would allow users to “print” meals using raw food as “ink”! Talk about ingenious. All users will have to do is load up the printer with the correct ingredients, select a recipe, and adjust its properties such as flavor and texture, and hit print. The printer will then squeeze out the right amount of ingredients from the syringes into a prearranged pattern, and cook the meal for you – viola, your meal is done!
Long term plans include the ability for users to share their recipes with each other all over the world, creating some sort of social network linked by food. According to Homaru Cantu from Chicago’s Moto, “3D printing will do for food what e-mail and instant messaging did for communication.” Sounds like fun, we can’t wait.

Source: ubergizmo.com

man of HIV infection.

This announcement divided researchers into two camps: those optimistic about the whole thing and those saying that this method is not really worth it.

The study started three years ago, in February 2007, when an HIV-infected man, also suffering from acute myeloid leukemia (a cancer of the immune system), underwent a stem-cell transplant.

The patients stopped taking anti-HIV medication and the doctors wiped out his entire immune system though high doses of chemotherapy and radiation.

Thirteen months after the transplant the leukemia recidivated, so he underwent another round of treatment followed by another stem-cell transplant, from the same donor.

There is a catch however, since the donor’s stem cells contained a rare, inherited gene mutation that made them naturally resistant to infection with HIV.

Still, study lead author Kristina Allers, said she was positive that HIV would nevertheless relapse over time.

Today, three-and-a-half years later, without taking any anti-HIV drugs, the patient presents no sign of either leukemia or HIV replication and his immune system has come back to normal.

So, the researchers thought it is safe to conclude that the “results strongly suggest that cure of HIV has been achieved in this patient.”

Nevertheless, Dr. Michael Saag, professor of medicine and director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham AIDS Center, said that “this probably is a cure, but it comes at a bit of a price.

“For him to receive the donor cells, his body had to have all of his immune system wiped out” and he received a bone marrow transplant.

“The Catch-22 here is that the best candidates for a cure, ideally, are people who are healthy” and don’t suffer from leukemia.

CNN reports that in a telephone interview, Saag said that this treatment associated with wiping out the immune system “is very hazardous.

“Even if somebody doesn’t die from a transplant, there are complications that make it very unpleasant for people to live with,” and in certain cases the transplant proves fatal.

The doctor added that this study actually proves the concept “that our understanding of HIV biology is correct, and that if you eliminate — not just in theory but in practice — all of the cells in the body that are producing HIV and replace them with uninfected cells, you have a cure.”

However, HIV-infected people can have a normal life span today, meaning that “a 25-year-old diagnosed today with HIV has a reasonably good chance of living to 80, 85, 90.”

Another factor that limits the popularity of this new method is money – the treatment costs hundreds of thousands of dollars for every person benefiting from it, and still, “it’s not going to be applicable unless they develop leukemia or lymphoma and need a bone-marrow transplant,” added Saag.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said that this treatment is rather impractical.

He explained that “it’s hard enough to get a good compatible match for a transplant like this.

“But you also have to find (a) compatible donor that has this genetic defect, and this defect is only found in 1% of the Caucasian population and 0% of the black population; this is very rare.”

This new study was published in the journal Blood.

A new study carried out by a team of Russian and German scientists, concluded that cold plasma jets could be an efficient replacement for antibiotics, in treating multi-drug resistant infections.

The researchers proved than a ten-minute treatment with low-temperature plasma managed to kill drug-resistant bacteria that were causing wound infections in rats, and also boosted the healing process of these wounds.

The team at the Gamaleya Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, conducted an experiment testing the impact of a low-temperature plasma torch against bacterial species which included Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus.

The results proved that plasma was lethal to up to 99% of bacteria in laboratory-grown biofilms after only five minutes.

Also, nearly 90 % of the bacteria (on average) infecting skin wounds in rats, was killed after ten minutes, AlphaGalileo reports.

Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa are two very dangerous bacteria, that cause chronic wound infections and that develop resistance to antibiotics by growing together in protective layers called biofilms.

The leader of the research, Dr Svetlana Ermolaeva said that the latest findings concerning cold plasma (at temperatures of 35-40°C) turned it into a viable option for treating infections.

“Cold plasmas are able to kill bacteria by damaging microbial DNA and surface structures without being harmful to human tissues,” she explained.

“Importantly we have shown that plasma is able to kill bacteria growing in biofilms in wounds, although thicker biofilms show some resistance to treatment.”

Plasma is the fourth state of matter after solids, liquids and gases, and it forms when high-energy processes strip atoms of their electrons to produce ionized gas flows at high temperature.

Hot plasmas are already used to disinfect surgical instruments and theyThey have an increasing number of technical and medical applications and hot plasmas are already used to disinfect surgical instruments.

Plasma technology could eventually represent a better alternative to antibiotics, according to Dr Ermolaeva.

“Our work demonstrates that plasma is effective against pathogenic bacteria with multiple-antibiotic resistance – not just in Petri dishes but in actual infected wounds,” she said.

“Another huge advantage to plasma therapy is that it is non-specific, meaning it is much harder for bacteria to develop resistance.

“It’s a method that is contact free, painless and does not contribute to chemical contamination of the environment.”

The study was published this week in the January issue of the Journal of Medical Microbiology.