Friday April 29, 2005 Omni - where are they now? (February 1991)
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It's been a while since I've done one of these. Just one Continuum article this time, but several of the factoids: |
- Dracula's Nightmare:
Garlic has been touted as having many legendary powers from
a cure for the common cold to keeping vampires at bay. Penn
State scientists have just added a couple more miracles to the
list: thwarting heart attacks and preventing breast cancer.
This all started when these scientists read reports about near-cancerless regions in China where garlic consumption can hit 20 cloves a day.
Dr. John Milner, head of the nutrition department at Penn State's College of Health and Human Development then did some tests with rats, feeding them upto 20 grams of garlic a day (a gram for a rat equals a clove for a human) along with a carcinogen that induces breast cancer. The result? A marked lack of mammary tumors. There is now a search for the active ingredient that suppresses the cancer.
A related study by Dr. Yu Yan Yeh suggests that garlic may stave off heart disease by lowering blood cholesterol.
Where are we now? This article in the Mail on Jan 4th 2004, suggests they now know what the active ingredient is, but there is still a little way to go.
- Factoids:
- A blowfish's toxin is 100 times more potent than cocaine; a lethal dose, about 1 mg, could fit on a pin head.
- Apollo 8 astronauts used a new adhesive to fasten down their tools in zero gravity -- silly putty.
- The oldest rocks retreived from the moon's surface are 4.72 billion years old -- older than any found on earth.
- It's only the female mosquito that bites.
- Studies of fossil coral suggest that 370 million years ago, a year was 400 days long.
( Apr 29 2005, 08:00:42 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink
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