Japan, Australia confirm first cases of swine flu

Quarantine officials with protective masks and outfits make their way to board a commercial plane that has just arrived for checking of its passengers at Narita International Airport in Narita, east of Tokyo, Japan, Saturday, May 9, 2009. Japan confirmed its first cases of swine flu Saturday in three people who recently returned from Canada, even as the disease's spread appeared to slow in the rest of the world. (AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye)
(AP) -- Japanese authorities scrambled Saturday to track travelers who arrived on the same flight as three people diagnosed with the country's first confirmed cases of swine flu. Australia also joined the ranks of affected countries with its first confirmed case.

US swine flu victims had chronic health problems

This undated photo provided by the Rudy Garza Funeral Home and taken by Ultrashots studio shows Judy Trunnell. Texas health officials on Tuesday May 5, 2009 announced the first death of a U.S. resident with swine flu, and said Trunnell was a 33-year-old schoolteacher who had recently given birth to a healthy baby. Health officials stopped short of saying that swine flu caused the woman's death. State health department spokeswoman Carrie Williams said the woman had "chronic underlying health conditions" but wouldn't give any more details. (AP Photo/ Courtesy Garza Funeral Home, Ultrashots) .

NASA's ENose can sense brain cancer cells

(PhysOrg.com) -- An unlikely multidisciplinary scientific collaboration has discovered that an electronic nose developed for air quality monitoring on Space Shuttle Endeavour can also be used to detect odour differences in normal and cancerous brain cells. The results of the pilot study open up new possibilities for neurosurgeons in the fight against brain cancer.

Brain & Nervous System

How the Nervous System WorksThe basic functioning of the nervous system depends a lot on tiny cells called neurons. The brain has billions of them, and they have many specialized jobs. For example, sensory neurons take information from the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin to the brain. Motor neurons carry messages away from the brain and back to the rest of the body.All neurons, however, relay information to each other through a complex electrochemical process, making connections that affect the way we think, learn, move, and behave.Intelligence, learning, and memory. At birth, the nervous system contains all the neurons you will ever have, but many of them are not connected to each other. As you grow and learn, messages travel from one neuron to another over and over, creating connections, or pathways, in the brain. It's why driving seemed to take so much concentration when you first learned but now is second nature: The pathway became established.In young children, the brain is highly adaptable; in fact, when one part of a young child's brain is injured, another part can often learn to take over some of the lost function. But as we age, the brain has to work harder to make new neural pathways, making it more difficult to master new tasks or change established behavior patterns. That's why many scientists believe it's important to keep challenging your brain to learn new things and make new connections— it helps keeps the brain active over the course of a lifetime.Memory is another complex function of the brain. The things we've done, learned, and seen are first processed in the cortex, and then, if we sense that this information is important enough to remember permanently, it's passed inward to other regions of the brain (such as the hippocampus and amygdala) for long-term storage and retrieval. As these messages travel through the brain, they too create pathways that serve as the basis of our memory.
Movement. Different parts of the cerebrum are responsible for moving different body parts. The left side of the brain controls the movements of the right side of the body, and the right side of the brain controls the movements of the left side of the body. When you press the accelerator with your right foot, for example, it's the left side of your brain that sends the message allowing you to do it.Basic body functions. A part of the peripheral nervous system called the autonomic nervous system is responsible for controlling many of the body processes we almost never need to think about, like breathing, digestion, sweating, and shivering. The autonomic nervous system has two parts: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems.

Brest Cancer

What is Breast Cancer?
Breast cancer is a malignant (cancerous) growth that begins in the tissues of the breast. Cancer is a disease in which abnormal cells grow in an uncontrolled way. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, but it can also appear in men. In the U.S., it affects one in eight women.
Symptoms of Breast Cancer:
a lump or a thickening in the breast or in the armpit
a change of size or shape of the mature breast
fluid (not milk) leaking from the nipple
a change of size or shape of the nipple
a change of color or texture of the nipple or the areola, or of the skin of the breast itself (dimples, puckers, rash)
Read more details about symptoms of breast cancer