Discovered: Erectile dysfunction meds and green tea team up to fight cancer; cell phone towers are responsible for many bird deaths; look at this tractor beam in action; shooting your belly full of botox won't make you skinny.
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The cancer-fighting properties of green tea and erectile dysfunction meds. Ever wonder why men who drink green tea and have Viagra prescriptions live so long? Of course you didn't, nobody wonders that. But according to a new study led by Kyushu University's Hirofumi Tachibana, it could be true! He gave mice suffering from cancer a cocktail of green tea and PDE5 inhibitors (the kind of drug in Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, and other brands of erectile dysfunction medication), finding that malignant cells stopped growing when subjects took the healthy/arousing mixture. The EGCG catechin found in green tea has long been thought to have cancer fighting properties, but Tachibana's work shows that the PDE5 enzyme could be stifling it. Luckily, we already have a drug that suppresses PDE5, and it just happens to be used for erectile dysfunction. Tachibana warns the public from trying this remedy at home right now, and in the meantime researchers in the U.S. plan to set up human trials this year. [The Japan Times]
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Cell phone towers are killing many birds. The verdict's out on cell phones' link with brain cancer, but it's very clear cell phones are having a negative effect on bird populations. Around 7 million birds have been killed each year by flying into cell towers, according to a new paper in Biological Conservation. And many of them are rare species, such as the yellow rail (2,000 die from cell phone tower collisions each year, and there are only about 20,000 total). Researchers suggest that affixing blinking red lights to the towers could lower deaths by 70 percent. [Scientific American]
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Tractor beams made real, on a miniature scale. Star Trek is coming true—at least on a miniature scale. We brought you news of a real-life tractor beam's invention last October, and now University of St. Andrews researcher Tomas Cizmar and his colleagues have caught the tractor beam's effect in action. What you're looking at below is light attracting particles towards it. "When the right configuration of particles occurs the tractor beam makes it stable and the whole structure moves against the tractor beam," says Cizmar. Light's ability to push objects away from it has been demonstrated before, but this ability to beam particles up is shown here for the first time. [New Scientist]
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No, injecting botox into your belly won't make you skinny. It might iron out the wrinkles in your stomach skin, but injecting Botox into your belly won't slim you down according to a new study from the Mayo Clinic. Data on this was split previously, with some researchers saying that botulinum toxin A injections could reduce waistline fat by delaying emptying of the stomach. This would induce a great feeling of fullness and discourage overeating, the thought went. But the Mayo Clinic's Mark Topazian and his colleagues found no evidence that the injections corresponded with weight loss. ""On the basis of our findings, I would not recommend gastric Botox injections to people who want to lose weight. There are some risks with this treatment and we found that there was no benefit in terms of body weight loss," Topazian says. "Unless future studies show different results I'd advise patients to seek other means of achieving weight loss." [American Gastroenterological Association]
