Just eight months ago, 6-year-old Emma Whitehead was gravely ill with leukemia and running out of options.Two rounds of chemotherapy had already failed, and a bone marrow transplant was no longer possible, The NewYorkTimes reports. So her parents opted for an experimental therapy developed at the University of Pennsylvania that aimed to enlist Emma’s own immune system in the fight […]
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■ A World War II veteran was able to hear a symphony he wrote 67 years ago for the first time, when the U.S. Army Orchestra premiered it in Washington, D.C. Retired Col. Harold Van Heuvelen, 93, was inspired by his experiences as a soldier to write a symphony in 1945, but it languished on the shelf for decades and […]
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Miami South Florida is battling a growing infestation of one of the world’s most destructive invasive species: the giant African land snail. At least 1,000 of the snails are being caught each week \ in Miami-Dade County, and a total of 117,000 of the mollusks have been caught since September 2011. They can grow as big as a rat and […]
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As humans get older, our brains shrink by about 15 percent, making us vulnerable to memory loss, dementia, and depression. But the brains of our closest relatives, chimpanzees, stay the same size throughout life, a new study has found. And while 50 percent of Americans over 85 suffer from Alzheimer’s, elderly chimps appear to have no similar problems. “The million […]
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Some of us like to rock & roll, and some of us like to gyrate & gestate. Gynecology clinic Institut Marquès has discovered a way to bring that front row concert experience right to your fetus. What they’ve designed is called Babypod, a speaker that expecting mothers insert into their vaginas (in tampon fashion) to play songs for their developing […]
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■ Don Miyada was just a month shy of graduating in 1942 when he was pulled from school and sent to an internment camp in Arizona along with 17,000 other Japanese-Americans. Miyada received his diploma in the mail, but he always regretted missing the ceremony. Last week, the 89-year-old Californian donned a cap and gown and joined Newport Harbor High […]
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Astronomers have discovered two clouds of gas some 12 billion light-years away that appear to preserve the primordial conditions of the universe in the minutes after the big bang. The clouds contain just hydrogen and its isotope deuterium, making them “the first examples to fit precisely” into what scientists think the early universe was like, University of California astronomer Jason […]
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Two NASA probes that spent last year orbiting the moon have returned stunning new geological maps that could help explain how it, Earth, and other planets in our solar system formed. The probes, named Ebb and Flow, flew identical orbits just miles above the moon’s surface to measure its gravity field. Slight disruptions in their paths—caused by the push and […]
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A California quadriplegic has built up an 8,000-strong Twitter following for his warm and witty observations, written using a special computer that reads his eye movements. David Rose, 24, is deaf and unable to move his body, but communicates with friends and followers online using an eye-gaze computer. “I want make people laugh, I want tell people life worth living […]
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Every week, more than 50 million Americans take acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol and many other popular painkillers, to ease their aches and pains. But a new study has revealed that the drug also dulls emotions—including happiness. Prior research showed that acetaminophen can help take the sting out of negative feelings like dread, but the new findings from Ohio […]
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