Health, Lifestyle & Fitness

A group of doctors aims to find out why and how kidney stones form, and what can be done to stop them? Anyone who’s ever had a kidney stone knows how painful they can be. Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas are working to make that pain a thing of the past. Their [...]

Earlier, the diagnosis of kidney stones did not involve information regarding the fragility of the stones. This made it impossible to determine the intensity and number of shock waves required during Lithotripsy to disintegrate the stone. Many patients would end up receiving more shock waves than was necessary to break up their stones. To regulate [...]

When humans are exposed to microgravity (the unique low-gravity environment inside the International Space Station and other spacecraft) there are a number of physiological changes to the human body that takes place. Among these changes are alterations in renal function, fluid redistribution, bone loss and muscle atrophy, all of which contribute to an altered urinary [...]

Professor Hojatollah Vali answers the above question. He says that kidney stones and search for life in Mars has one thing in common- Biomineralization, which is the formation of minerals by living organisms. Professor Vali’s research includes, investigating minerals from sources as diverse as Martian meteorites, bacteria and the human body. Vali is director at the [...]

In Passo, Fundo Brazil geneticist Adil Pacheco took blood samples last Friday from three puppies in a poor neighborhood in in southern Brazil to settle a dispute over a claim they were born from a cat.

“It’s rather simple really. If the puppies prove to have 78 chromosomes, they are dogs. If they have 38, they are cats,” said Pacheco, director of the Institute of Biological Sciences of the University of Passo Fundo.

“But I seriously doubt they are feline. Every characteristic about them is canine.”  This is probably a hoax because there is no documented cases of dog and cats being able to mate successfully.