The brightest take on this week’s science
Good health news is hard to come by, so you’ve got to cherish weeks like these…
First, there’s a new light therapy for hair loss that outperforms standard red light therapy by 90 percent in some tests.
Then, there’s a lifestyle habit that can cut dementia by nearly 40 percent.
Plus:
🌟 What’s lurking at the center of our Milky Way?
🤯 A mind-blowing fact about the invention of chainsaws
🔬 A microscope mystery
To the good news!
LOW-KEY GENIUS
A New Light Therapy For Hair Loss
(Alan Rubio/Getty Images)
A new form of light therapy can lower markers of hair loss in cell experiments by more than 90 percent.
Scientists in Korea want to use their invention to make a comfortable ‘hair loss’ hat, which can be worn out in public with ease and style.
The light technology is specifically tuned to stimulate hair-regenerating cells at the base of follicles.
Compared with standard red-light treatments, this new tech is 92 percent more effective at reducing a key marker of hair loss.
It also doesn’t have to sit in a hard helmet. The light platform can be slid into a flexible cap that fits closer to the scalp.
With so few effective treatments for hair loss, this new invention is rejuvenating hope for improved hair regrowth.
HEADLINES
What Else We're Watching
🏅This week’s most read: Memory Loss in Alzheimer's Linked to Problems With The Brain's 'Replay Mode'
LOOK OUT
Lifelong Reading Can Cut Dementia Risk
(JJ Jordan/Pexels)
Reading books, writing, and learning languages are lifelong habits that could have a significant impact on dementia risk.
A new study has found that these activities may cut the relative risk of Alzheimer's disease by as much as 38 percent.
The research compared the ‘cognitive enrichment’ scores of nearly 2,000 older individuals, around the age of 80, whose health was tracked for almost eight years.
Those with higher lifetime scores engaged more with the written word, reading books, visiting libraries or museums, learning foreign languages, or using dictionaries.
Those with higher childhood scores were also more likely in later life to show protection against markers of Alzheimer’s in the brain.
The study can’t prove cause and effect, but the associations suggest that mental stimulation throughout life may affect how our brains age.
ZOOM ZONE
Microscope Mystery: What Do You See?
(Science Photo Library/Getty Images)
A) Saliva
B) Fungal mycelium
C) Blood clots
D) Polystyrene microbeads
Answer at the bottom.
LOOK UP
A Dark Mystery Lurking in the Milky Way
(Valentina Crespi et al.)
Something massive is lurking at the center of the Milky Way… but what is it?
A supermassive black hole 4 million times the mass of our Sun is just one explanation. Some astrophysicists now see a different entity in the data:
A giant, compact blob of fermionic dark matter – a dark matter ‘core’ if you will.
It’s a whole new way to interpret our galaxy. The trouble is, we don’t yet have the data to test the hypothesis.
Yet another dark matter mystery to solve…
WOW FACTOR
Science Fact of The Week
(Sabine Salfer/Orthopädische Universitätsklinik Frankfurt/Public Domain)
The first chainsaw was originally invented for childbirth – and no, that’s not a sick joke, it’s the brutal reality.
The hand-cranked tool above was devised in the 1780s to break through bone and cartilage, thereby widening the birth canal during difficult cases.
Thank goodness for modern medicine.
DOPAMINE HIT
Before You Go…
There’s beauty in detail…
Microscope answer: Saliva.
Saliva contains billions of microbes, and this particular microscopic image features a biofilm of cocci (round) bacteria linked together by strands of extracellular DNA. The structure gives the material a sticky consistency.
That’s all for today… see you next week!
- Carly
