Most Popular Health Facts

1. Women have a better sense of smell than men.

2. The human brain has the capacity to store everything that you experience.

3. Sex burns about 360 calories per hour.

4. When you take a step, you are using up to 200 muscles.

5. The largest cell in the human body is the female egg and the smallest is the male sperm.




All Health Facts

1. It's possible to die from a broken heart; it's called Stress Cardiomyopathy.

2. Your thumb is about the same size as your nose.

3. Poor eyesight (myopia) is associated with higher IQ.

4. The Internal Revenue Service audits 87 percent of women who claim breast implants as tax deductions.

5. If your DNA was stretched out it would reach to the moon 6,000 times.

6. By weight, Bone is five times stronger than steel.

7. Fidgeting can burn about 350 calories a day.

8. It is possible for you to survive even after the removal of the spleen, the stomach, one kidney, one lung, 75% of the liver, 80% of the intestines, and almost every organ from the pelvic and groin area.

9. 20 minutes after smoking a cigarette, blood pressure drops to normal.

10. Smoking while pregnant increases the chances of spontaneous abortions (miscarriages) stillbirths and premature labor.

11. Smokers get ten times more wrinkles than non-smokers.

12. Cigarette smoke contains 4,800 chemicals, 69 of which cause cancer.

13. A human being loses an average of 40 to 100 strands of hair a day.

14. A person can live without food for about a month, but only about a week without water.

15. One or two alcohol drinks a day can be anti-inflammatory.

16. Gin is a mild diuretic which helps the body get rid of excessive fluid. Thus, it can reduce problems such as menstrual bloating.

17. It has been shown that caffeine causes headaches when stopped suddenly and can cause morning headaches that are relieved by a dose of caffeine.

18. The levels of two stress hormones, cortisol and epinephrine which suppress the body's immune system, will actually drop after a dose of laughter.

19. Scientists estimate that laughing 100 times is equivalent to a 10-minute workout on a rowing machine.

20. Curvy hips indicate smart women who will deliver intelligent children.

21. On average, someone in the US suffers a stroke every 40 seconds; someone dies every 3 minutes from stroke.

22. Brain scans show that people who view photos of a beloved experience an activation of the caudate - the part of the brain involving cravings.

23. After age 30, the brain shrinks a quarter of a percent (0.25%) in mass each year.

24. 10 seconds is the amount of time until unconsciousness after the loss of blood supply to the brain.

25. The brain can stay alive for 4 to 6 minutes without oxygen. After that cells begin die.

26. A man's beard grows fastest when he anticipates sex.

27. Having sex can make a woman look younger and more attractive due to the release of estrogen and collagen.

28. You heart will pump about 400 liters or about 800 quarts in its lifetime.

29. The human brain uses approximately as much energy as a 10 watt light bulb.

30. Coughing can cause air to move through your windpipe faster than the speed of sound - over a thousand feet per second!

31. The human body contains over a billion miles of DNA.

32. Sex burns about 360 calories per hour.

33. The skin on your lips is 200 times more sensitive than your fingertips.

34. Unconsciousness will occur after 8-10 seconds after loss of blood supply to the brain.

35. Pain occurs when sounds are above 130 db.

36.The adult human brain weighs about 3 pounds (1,300-1,400 g).

37. Lack of water is the #1 trigger of daytime fatigue.

38. Our Right Lungs takes more air than our left lung.

39. Although African-Americans make up only 13% of the U.S. population, they accounted for one half of the estimated new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in 2004.

40. Stress can result in more headaches as a result of the body rerouting blood flow 

to other parts of the body.

Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Created from Fat Cells

An unlikely team of cardiologists and plastic surgeons have found a way to make adult induced pluripotent stem cells quickly and easily from a readily available resource--fat

The standard way to make inducedpluripotent stem (iPS) cells for medical research is to scrape skin cells and mix up their internal clocks, coaxing them back into pluripotency over a matter of weeks. But now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have turned their attention to another cell type in abundant supply: fat cells. The team of cardiologists and plastic surgeons found adipose fat cells to be much more efficient than skin cells at turning back into stem cells.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=stem-cells-from-fat-cells

The potential of iPS cells to help treat everything from damaged heart tissue toParkinson's disease, has prompted intensive research that has looked into the use of skin fibroblast cells as an alternative to controversial embryonic stem cells. Skin cells, however, take a few weeks to be cultured into pluripotency—a process that also often requires exposing the cells to mouse stem cells, called feeder cells, to nourish and guide the transformation. 

"We thought, why not use a different cell type—and we can easily get access to fat," says Joseph Wu, a co-author of a study on this process and assistant professor of medicine at Stanford.  Fat also "turns out to be a readily available, great natural resource," says Michael Longaker, a professor of plastic surgery at Stanford. He and Wu point out that more than a third of Americans are considered obese and even young, healthy patients would have ample fat to harvest for iPS cell culturing. Each liter of fat promises hundreds of millions of potential cells, Longaker estimates. 

Other stem cells in the body, such as liver and stomach cells, have been examined for their ability to culture usable iPS cells. Fat stem cells, however, seem especially primed for the job, as they are capable of turning into fat, heart, bone or muscle tissue. "We know that these fat cells are multipotent, which should [make it] easier to reprogram them," Wu says.

Indeed, they were: According to the team's findings, adipose stem cells can be turned into iPS cells twice as quickly as fibroblast skin cells and with 20 times the efficiency. The process can begin immediately after the fat is harvested—via liposuction—and cells are ready to culture within the same day. 

The results were published online today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Wu and Longaker, both clinical practitioners, are always looking for methods that will present "one less hurdle to worry about," Longaker says. Being able to skip the mouse feeder cell step necessary with skin cells, along with the shortened culturing period, may make the new method more palatable to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which must approve such treatments for human use and prefers methods that reduce opportunities for contamination. 

Wu, Longaker and their team still have many questions to answer before fat cells could become the latest industry iPS cell standard. They need to find out how much differentiation these cells require before they become helpful in specific areas of the body. "How much do you have to coach them in the dish before you put them back in the patient before they become heart muscles, say?" asks Longaker. 

The ultimate safety of the cells, especially regarding their potential to spark cancer, will also need to be examined in more detail, notes Yasuhiro Ikeda, an assistant professor of molecular medicine at the Mayo Clinic's College of Medicine, in Rochester, Minn., who wasn't involved in the work. "It will be necessary to characterize the cells in more detail…for their tumorigenicity upon transplantation," he wrote in an email. 

Wu and Longaker's research thus far has taken a fairly broad swipe at reprogramming adipose fat stem cells, so the team hopes to refine the process to target only the most efficient candidates. "If these are a so-called chicken soup of [cell] population, we don’t know if it's one type of cell or five," Longaker says. "We would like to identify which sub-population is most easily reprogrammable—and reprogram it in a way the FDA would approve of." 

Other researchers in the field will be watching to see what further tests might reveal about the practicality of using fat cells instead of skin cells for iPS research. "This is definitely a promising new technology for iPS, particularly translating this technology into the clinic in the future," Ikeda notes.