Spinal Injuries, disorders of the nervous system, and Brain Repair

Famous for breaking down buildings, termites could reveal new ways to build homes in the future. African termites live in very complex mounds, which form a very stable environment for the little bugs. The whole structure can respond to changes in conditions both inside and outside the mound. Now a team of engineers and insect specialists are taking termite design principles and trying to apply them to human buildings. The team are based at Leicester, but will be travelling to Namibia to digitally scan the structure of the mounds and map them in three-dimensional details. Termite mounds have a complex array of tunnels and air channels which maintain air quality, temperature and moisture in Termite Towers. For example, they use special tunnels which capture the wind to ventilate their home. They are also farmers, using a fungus to digest chewed up wood fibre to provide the termites with food. Scientists hope to design human homes based on the termite prototypes that have these kinds of characteristics- meeting all their energy, waste management and other needs on site. Such building might be useful in inhospitable environments like deserts or even on the moon! And if you're itching to see these termites up close and personal, you'll be able to catch up with the termite spotters in a new David Attenborough series, due to be screened in 2006.

It's almost the classic conundrum - "what do you do if you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant" - but that's exactly what's happening in Mount Eccles National Park in Victoria, southern Australia. The growth of the koala population is putting too much strain on the eucalyptus trees which form their staple diet. The long term preservation of the species depends as much upon the preservation of their habitat as upon the preservation of the animals itself, so conservationists plan to put 2000 of their koalas 'on the pill' to slow down the population boom. According to Ian Walker, the project manager, the method that has been chosen is to use a matchstick-sized hormone implant that is inserted under the skin between the shoulder blades. The implant, which is also used by women all over the world, releases small amounts of female hormones to prevent pregnancy. The implants last about 6 years. The benefit of using this approach is that it is minimally invasive and completely reversible. Full fertility is restored once it is removed. Victoria is home to the largest number of wild Koalas of all states in Australia. Koala numbers in Australia have plummeted from around 7 million at the time when Europeans first arrived in Australia in the late 1700's, to as few as 100,000 now. As recently as the 1920's 3 million were shot for their fur.

The answer is that sunlight is a spectrum - when you see white light it's actually made up of lots of different wavelengths of light. You can split them with a prismto reveal all of the different colours which make up white light. When that light comes from the sun and hits the earth's atmosphere, the atmosphere is made up of a lot of nitrogen and oxygen, and this nitrogen and oxygen strongly bounces around, or scatters, light which is at the blue end of the spectrum - the wavelength is about 480 - 500nm. The blue light bounces around all over the place like bullets ricocheting around a room. But light which has a much longer wavelength towards the red, green and yellow, goes straight through the atmosphere without being scattered about, and reaches your eye directly. So what you see is light from the sun, with some of the blue taken out because it's bounced all over the place. Because your eye can't work out exactly where the blue light have come from (because it is coming from all directions) your brain interprets it as the whole sky being blue, rather than just one spot. So that's why you see a blue sky. Now what happens at sunset is that because the earth has moved (rotated), the sun has moved towards the horizon and its light is now coming through a lot more of the atmosphere than when it was directly overhead. So because it's coming through more atmosphere even more at the blue light is taken away, making the sky look even more red than it was before. So that's why you get the red colouration of the sunset. The other thing that affects this is how many particles there are in the atmosphere, so you tend to see much redder sunsets and yellower moons at harvest time, and at times when there's been big volcanic eruptions. So when Mount Pinatubo blew up on the Philippines a few years ago, you saw beautiful sunsets, and very very orange coloured moons, and that was because of the dust in the atmosphere adding to the effect we've just described.

脑积水是多余的ive amount of fluid in the skull cavity, within the brain, and that can be due to a number of problems. In children the commonest cause is normally is that there's either been some damage to the brain, that the fluid filled cavities have got bigger as a result or that there's an obstruction to flow. We make fluid within our brain all the time, and it circulates around a series of chambers in the brain. If there is an obstruction to that then clearly the production doesn't stop, there's a blockage and the pressure goes up, hence you get hydrocephalus. In children what happens is because the skull hasn't yet fused the head gets bigger so you actually get these large heads with hydrocephalus in childhood. Whereas in adulthood you've obviously got a thick skull and what tends to happen if you've got a blockage in the system is that you tend to get raised pressure inside the head which gives you a very severe headache and you need to do something about it fairly urgently. To treat it you first need to find what is causing it. Normally you either then remove the blockage, or to put in a drain, called a shunt, so that you take the high pressure out of the system. You drain the fluid to another cavity, normally the abdomen.

Well the answer is Clive, a stitch is not due to muscle paralysis or anything like that, it's actually because of things tugging on your diaphragm which is the domed muscle which sits above your stomach and below your lungs, and contracts to expand your chest and pull air in. It has some ligaments, which attach it to the organs underneath it, including the liver which is very heavy, and the stomach. When you get running those organs start to bounce up and down a bit and when they tug on those ligaments they can make them quite uncomfortable and that's why you tend to get a worse stitch when you're running having just eaten, because the stomach is much heavier and puts a lot more pressure on your diaphragm. One cure, I'm told, is if you change step - switch so that you breathe in when the other foot hits the ground. This can reduce the stretch applied to the ligaments, and reduce the discomfort.

it's a relatively new drug. So there is no long term (decades) data available to say it is safe to take. But, generally speaking, most drugs by the time they come into regular clinical use, have gone through extensive trials across many countries, with many thousands of patients being involved and so one can be pretty confident that this new drug, which works like aspirin, is safe, and I'm sure will be safe in the long term.

It's possible in incredibly extreme cases, but for most people halitosis arises mainly in the mouth and the so-called oropharynx, the early part of the throat. I think people like to think that they have really serious terrible problems, when in fact all they have to do is clean their teeth. There is a guy in Israel who has actually started a halitosis research institute, and he wanted to know if bad breath was in the eye, or nose even, of the beholder, or whether it was a psychological thing where people think they've got bad breath, and they haven't - delusional halitosis as it is known. He went round sniffing the breath of 200 people or so, in order to define what kinds of bad breath there are and what causes it.