TED lecture highlights new research on suspended animation using hydrogen sulfide gas in mice.

Wired.com has excellent coverage and an interview.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/mark-roth-on-mice-and-men/

I had no idea these things were out there, but evidently three people died in connection to a "Sweat Lodge" ceremony in Sedona, Arizona, in October 2009.

The news this week is that a self-help guru has been arrested in connection with the deaths.

The LA Times reported that people paid thousands of dollars to attend this event, in which they were sleep-deprived, fed little, and then forced to sit in hot saunas for extended periods.

The variety of "alternative" therapies out there never ceases to amaze me. We will keep an eye on the sweat lodge story.

For years, the idea of a sleep deficit has been popular. The analogy is a bank: you build up deposits of sleep, and if you stay up too many hours, you enter a "sleep deficit." Naturally what you need to do, the wisdom goes, is to "pay back" the deficit of sleep you built up.

Researchers are calling for clinical trials of high-dose IV vitamin C in cancer treatment since the discovery that the supplement reduces cell proliferation in mice independent of an antioxidant effect. This goes against fifty years of theory dating all the way back to Linus Pauling. Turns out the vitamin turns off gene expression in genes critical to cell growth. Who new? This goes back to the T.S. Kuhn concept of science defined by its tools and techniques. When you had ways of measuring things by their oxidation activity you called them antioxidants.

Big surprise: antioxidants don't prevent cancer The list of documented conditions improved by antioxidants remains: chronic pancreatitis. If there are any others I am not aware of them yet.

This is the first documented benefit of antioxidants that I can remember coming across in a long time. If anybody can show me evidence of medical benefits of antioxidants in the mainstream literature I will be happy to see it. http://www.physorg.com/news150024131.html "In this placebo-controlled double blind trial 127 patients ages 30.5+/-10.5 were assigned to placebo or antioxidant groups. After six months the reduction in the number of painful days/month was significantly higher in the antioxidant group compared with the placebo group (7.4±6.8 versus 3.2±4 respectively)." Nice.

Good news for doctors pilots and other people who work night shifts.  A new treatment for jet lag is in the offing in the next few years since researchers recently reported a drug based on the hormone melatonin or N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine can restore the body's natural sleep pattern. Currently long-haul travelers can take days or even weeks to recover from jet lag.  Standard melatonin has been advocated as a jet lag treatment but fails to keep many people asleep the whole night through. Researchers have been studying melatonin's sleep-inducing properties since the early 1980's.

Melatonin derivative posts encouraging sleep results What was wrong with plain old melatonin?

Measure hemoglobin through skin?

64 slice CT studies accurately check for coronary disease