Are you getting enough sleep?
Sleep is much more than just resting, it is an extremely essential process for both our mental and physical wellbeing, sleep deprivation is now recognized as a contributing factor for many serious conditions such as Alzheimer disease, diabetes, High blood pressure and others. Sleeping is also integral for balancing our mood, processing new memories and acquiring new skills.
That being said we would like to ask how many hours do you sleep a night? Are you getting the eight hours of sleep recommended by the world health organization or not?
Fascinating Surgeries Part 4 (Born Twice!):
In 2008 a pregnant woman “Margaret Hawkins” discovered that her unborn baby had developed a tumor on her spine, if untreated the tumor could be fatal, yet Margaret was only in her 16th week of pregnancy and the fetus still too young to be delivered and operated on. The only solution was to take the fetus outside the womb, operate on it and then put it back inside!
Such type of operations is extremely dangerous and rare, but after being informed of the risks for both mother and child, the parents decided to go ahead with the surgery.
In a four hours operation, surgeons at Texas Children Hospital opened the mother womb, took out most of the baby’s body leaving only her head and upper torso inside.
Being exposed to air at this time of the fetus life could be dangerous and cause cardiac arrests so the doctors had to operate quickly to remove the tumor and return the baby back inside the womb
A few weeks later Margaret gave birth “again” (this time through C-section) to a beautiful baby girl who is now about 13 years old.
Fascinating Surgeries (Part 5):
The above picture is not fictional, it is a real photo of a patient at the “King’s College Hospital” in London playing the violin while surgeons operate on her brain.
Miss Dagmar Turner had a tumour located in the right frontal lobe of her brain, very close to an area that controls hand movements, to ensure the surgeons were not doing any damage to that area they woke her up mid surgery and asked her to play the violin! It is interesting to know that although Miss Turner was awake during parts of the operation she was not in pain, because while the brain is responsible of processing pain signals from all over the body, the brain tissue itself has no pain receptors.
The X-Men and gene mutations:
Super heroes in the famous X-Men franchise gain their powers through mutations in their genes, in real life, gene mutations are not very uncommon, it is an integral part of evolution, which begs the question: can we expect superheroes to walk among us any time soon?
Rest assured there are no shape shifters among us, nor anyone with retractable claws. However, some rare gene mutations could have favorable “super hero” effects. For example, a mutation in a gene called MSTN abstracts the work of the Myostatin protein (which is responsible for limiting how much muscle cells grow and divide). This mutation allows muscle cells to grow bigger and divide more than usual; although this does not create movie-like superheroes it does give a boost to strength and muscle mass.
