The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Chinese medicine could treat Parkinson’s: HK study Posted: 22 Jul 2011 05:53 AM PDT  Researchers said a traditional Chinese herb helped patients better communicate and made them less prone to depression and sleeping difficulties. – Pic by Charles Taylor/shutterstock.com Researchers at Hong Kong Baptist University said Gouteng, a traditional Chinese herb used to treat hypertension, helped patients better communicate and made them less prone to depression and sleeping difficulties. "There is no cure for Parkinson's right now, but the study showed Chinese medicine can help treat the disease," a university spokesman told AFP yesterday. Parkinson's is a progressive motor-system disorder which usually affects people over the age of 50, although it can strike earlier, often causing severe symptoms including body trembling, stiffness and loss of balance. The condition is usually treated with a drug called levodopa, which the brain converts into dopamine to relieve the symptoms, but it can also cause nausea and hallucinations. The Baptist University study found that patients who took Gouteng together with levodopa experienced fewer side effects from the drug while showing a marked improvement in their communication skills. Li Min, an associate professor who led the study, said the findings could also help boost the profile of Chinese medicine. "They provide not only pharmacological proof of the efficacy of Gouteng in treating Parkinson's disease, but will also help promote the effectiveness and safety of Chinese medicine to the international medical arena," she said. Li – whose team has applied for a US patent – told the South China Morning Post that she expects the herb would start being used to treat the disease after the second phase of the study in 2013. – AFP Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
| Hubble detects a tiny fourth moon around Pluto Posted: 22 Jul 2011 01:38 AM PDT WASHINGTON, July 22 — The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a tiny fourth moon orbiting the distant icy dwarf planet Pluto, according to Nasa. The space telescope was searching for rings around the planetary oddball at the edge of our solar system when it came across P4, the temporary name for the newly discovered moon.  Two images taken about a week apart by Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope show four moons orbiting the distant, icy dwarf planet Pluto. The green circle in both snapshots marks the newly discovered moon, temporarily dubbed P4, found by Hubble in June. — Reuters pic Pluto's largest moon, Charon, is 1043km across, and its other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 32-113km in diameter. "I find it remarkable that Hubble's cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than three billion miles (five billion kilometres)," said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who led this observing programme with Hubble. The observation by Hubble is part of ongoing work to support Nasa's New Horizons mission, scheduled to have a close encounter with Pluto and its moons in 2015. P4 is located between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, both of which were discovered by Hubble in 2005. Charon was discovered in 1978 at the US Naval Observatory. All four of Pluto's moons are believed to have formed when Pluto and another planet-sized body collided in the early history of our solar system. Earth's Moon may have formed the same way. P4 was first seen in a photo taken by Hubble on June 28 and was confirmed in subsequent Hubble pictures taken on July 3 and July 18, NASA said. In June, Pluto came between a star and Earth, casting a small shadow on Earth's surface that astronomers tracked across the Pacific. This event, known as an occultation, occurred on June 23, according to scientists at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Four of them travelled on a modified 747 aircraft that carried a big telescope, which managed to snap images of Pluto and its thin atmosphere. Learning more about Pluto's tenuous atmosphere was possible because the starlight behind it dimmed in a specific way, which lets astronomers determine atmospheric temperature and density, Lowell Observatory said in a statement. Pluto cast an extremely long shadow: it has an average distance of 9.495 billion km from the Sun, compared to Earth's distance of 149.7 million km. — Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
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