Scientists at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute have proved that the human heart produces new muscle cells throughout normal adult life, raising hope that this regenerative prowess can be harnessed to replace cardiac tissue that had been damaged by heart attacks and other pathological conditions.

Conventional wisdom had been that the heart does not produce new cells and people died with pretty much the same ticker as the one they started out with.

But Jonas Frisen and colleagues determined that up to age 25, the heart replaces about 1% of its cells per year, and it continues doing so, albeit at gradually diminishing rates, through old age.

When it’s all said and done, nearly half the heart’s muscle cells are created during a normal lifetime, the scientists estimated.

The scientists knew that cell turnover rates could be quantified in animals by adding radioactive molecules to cells and observing how quickly the radioactivity disappears.

This can’t be done in humans for ethical reasons, but Frisen reasoned that above-ground nuclear weapons testing, which was done by several countries until 1963, had seeded the atmosphere with carbon-14, and this stuff would find its way into the food chain.

The net result would be that the DNA in the nuclei of all living creatures has been C-14 labeled more or less continually as a byproduct of the nuclear folly.

The C-14 remains in the cell for as long as it survives, but since C-14 levels have diminished since 1963, cellular loads of the stuff in more recently formed cells have also diminished. The amount of C-14 in a particular cell thus indicates when it was formed.

The clever work appears in Science.

Loren Field, a cardiologist at Indiana University, told the New York Times the goal now becomes “to try to tickle the system to enhance (cellular regeneration rates).”

Last week, 2 lunkheads employed by Domino’s Pizza in Conover, North Carolina decided it would be a hoot to do a video in the chain’s kitchen, in which one prepared sandwiches while stuffing cheese into his nose and swabbing his snot on the sandwiches while the other did a play-by-play.

“In about five minutes…somebody will be eating these…little did they know that cheese was in his nose and there was some lethal gas that ended up on their salami,” chirped the narrator.

Then last Monday, the inspired pair decided to post the video on YouTube.

Domino’s found out on Tuesday. It immediately fired the lunkheads and jettisoned all opened food containers from the ground-zero franchise. On the PR side, the company decided to lay low and wait for the dust to settle.

That proved to be a mistake. By Wednesday, the video had been watched more than a million times. Five of the top 12 results on the Google search for “Domino’s” referenced the ghastly spectacle and on Twitter the tweets were louder than ravens at a Bodega Bay school house.

By Wednesday evening, the offending video had been removed, and Domino’s had created both a Twitter account and a YouTube video of its own.
 
“We got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea,” Domino’s spokesman Tim McIntyre told the New York Times. Even people who’ve been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years are second-guessing their relationship with Domino’s. That’s not fair.”

At last report, the lunkheads were simmering in a Conover lock-up facing felony charges for delivering prohibited foods, and an impending civil lawsuit from the aggrieved fast food chain.

Michigan State University scientists have found that brand name information and marketing claims overshadow fine print safety warnings on OTC medications, despite Federal regulations requiring that display of the latter should be “prominent” and “conspicuous.” 
 
Laura Bix and colleagues used an eye-tracking device to quantify the visual inspection patterns of subjects as they scanned package labels on OTC pain killers and subsequently assessed the extent to which subjects could recall the information.

The scientists focused on five elements of the package label: brand name, the statement of claims such as “extra strength,” drug facts information, the child-resistant warning and the tamper-evident warning.
 
They observed that subjects focused primarily on the brand name and much less on the 2 warnings.  For example, 67% of the subjects were able to remember one or more brands they had observed during the study, but only 18% recalled alcohol-related warnings.

A dismal 8% remembered the warning that the product shouldn’t be used in homes where young children were around and not one single participant recalled the warning about tamper-evident features.
 
Part of the explanation, according to Bix and Co., is that the brand and product claims were more legible than the warning statements.

Their write-up appears in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

“To be effective, warnings about the lack of a child-resistant feature, or those that alert consumers to potential tampering of the product, need to be read and comprehended at the time of purchase,” Bix told BurrillReport.

“Little guidance exists from the federal government regarding what it means to be ‘prominent’ or ‘conspicuous,’ yet, this term is used quite frequently in the regulations that dictate labeling for a variety of product,” Bix added.