What’s the Buzz
High-tech toys causing severe injuries to kids
Children as young as eight are suffering adult injuries such as repetitive strain injuries (RSI) and neck pains from using hand-held electronic devices, experts say.
According to chiropractors, children using “tech toys” such as iPhones, iPads and hand-held games are complaining of repetitive strain injuries of the thumbs, wrist and elbows, stiff necks, headaches and sore shoulders, which are injuries usually associated with adults working with computers.
Chiropractors association spokesman Dr Kerein Earney said children were risking permanent damage because of excessive game play.
Dr Earney said she saw an eight-year-old with an opposite neck curve from playing hand-held games. She also saw a 15-year-old boy who spent the whole school holidays watching TV and playing computer games in his room and began experiencing muscle aches and migraines.
“When children play these games, or use these tech toys, they are often slouched in a chair, head down and they’re putting a lot of pressure on their head,” the Herald Sun quoted Dr Earney as saying.
Human brain cells created from skin samples
In a startling medical breakthrough, scientists in Scotland have created brain tissue from skin samples of patients who are suffering from mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression.
The latest achievement was made by researchers at Edinburgh’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine.
“A patient’s neurones can tell us a great deal about the psychological conditions that affect them, but you cannot stick a needle in someone’s brain and take out its cells,” the Daily Telegraph quoted Professor Charles ffrench-Constant, the center’s director, as telling the Guardian.
“However, we have found a way round that. We can take a skin sample, make stem cells from it and then direct these stem cells to grow into brain cells. Essentially, we are turning a person’s skin cells into brain,” he stated.
The scientists hope that studying these manufactured brain cells will reveal clues to the conditions of patients with mental illnesses - a task that had been challenging in the past.
“It is very difficult to get primary tissue to study until after a patient has died,” said the Royal Edinburgh Hospital’s Professor Andrew McIntosh, who is collaborating with the center on the project. “Even then, that tissue is affected by whatever killed them and by the impact of the medication they had been taking for their condition, possibly for several decades. So having access to living brain cells is a significant development for the development of drugs for these conditions,” McIntosh added.
If successful, the same methods could be used for other organs, including the liver and heart.
Solar storms behind vanishing electrons
Scientists have unraveled the mystery behind the disappearing act of high-energy electrons in Earth’s outer radiation belt, which may pave the way to predict space weather phenomena.
UCLA researchers showed that the missing electrons are swept away from the planet by a tide of solar wind particles during periods of heightened solar activity.
“This is an important milestone in understanding Earth's space environment,” said lead study author Drew Turner, an assistant researcher in the UCLA Department of Earth and Space Sciences and a member of UCLA's Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP). "We are one step closer towards understanding and predicting space weather phenomena."
During powerful solar events such as coronal mass ejections, parts of the magnetised outer layers of sun’s atmosphere crash onto Earth’s magnetic field, triggering geomagnetic storms capable of damaging the electronics of orbiting spacecraft.
These cosmic squalls have a peculiar effect on Earth’s outer radiation belt, a doughnut-shaped region of space filled with electrons so energetic that they move at nearly the speed of light.
