Universal Medicine

The Brain: the central control system of the entire body. Indeed, it is mesmerising to consider, while only weighing in at approximately 3Ibs, it controls all bodily functions and can process information at a peak of 120 m/s across the housed 100 billion neurones plus 1,000 trillion synaptic pathways! In order to sustain this metabolic activity, 20% of your body’s oxygen is consumed by the brain - provided in 100,000 miles of blood vessels to this one organ… truly mind blowing statistics. Interestingly, the net rate of activity is heavily influenced by external stimuli - that is the surrounding environment. Many people have experienced the first night effect (FNE); when sleeping in an unfamiliar setting, it is likely to take longer to fall asleep. Characteristically in other organisms such as birds and marine animals, this is a permanent adaptation to stay alert for potential predators. Although identified in the past, the reason behind the FNE has remained unclear. Recently how...

Concussion From non-league football to professional rugby...concussion is something which a catalogue of sports has to deal with. In fact, American football is the sport which involves the most individuals suffering from concussion with, a staggering, 20% of high school players (in America) who experience concussion. This week, Universal Medicine will be exploring the topic of concussion along with symptoms and an exciting prospect which allows concussion to be identified from the side lines. Concussion is described as a "Mild" traumatic brain injury, here the brain bounces or twists in the skull as a result of a collision of sort. Although it is described as a "Mild" injury, concussion does have negative impacts on the individuals as well as possible long term effects. Firstly, it is important to understand that long term effects of concussion are very rare and can pass over time. A long term effect of concussion is the difficulty in making decisions as well ...

   You may be wondering why there's a rather large image of pigeons right at the beginning of this blog post, however I assure you its entirely relevant. In fact these apparently stupid 'flying rats' could actually be life saving doctors in disguise. Pigeons actually have an impressive visual memory capacity, from their history as message carrying birds, their extraordinary visual memory has aided humans well and a study has shown that, when trained, pigeons can be as accurate as humans in detecting breast cancer in images. So maybe they are not gonna be the solution to our current doctor shortage but still pretty amazing. However pigeons are not the only amazing animal mother nature has created. Rats have also found a place in the medical world. Those who have watched ratatouille ( those who haven't should make it a priority) will know that rats have a superior sense of smell. With up to 1,000 olfactory receptors- well over 5x more than humans- rats have the...

Lasers and astronomers have now become good acquaintances over the past few years as the lasers help to sharpen the resolution of images to create beautiful landscapes of the vast empty space that surrounds us. What else is more beautiful? But, recently, astronomers could now go on to use lasers as a way of playing hide and seek from extraterrestrial creatures lurking in the deep horizons of space. The way to hide is reasonably simple yet slightly complex to understand. A star emits different radiations out in all directions at brisk speeds. If an object was to get into the way of a ray of light, it would terminate the light from travelling through it, as it creates a modest eclipse and a reduction in the volume of light that the star emits. This is a mechanism which has been used by the Kepler telescope to identify over a thousand iconic planets across the galaxy. According to astronomers, this is a similar way in which intelligent civilians would be using to look for us. This is w...