The science news of the week: Hangover is by far not the most serious consequence of alcohol poisoning. Strong black coffee, a cold shower, a run in the freezing air – people do all sorts of things to get rid of the extra alcohol in their system before a flight, a trip, an important meeting, and the list goes on and on. And none of these methods can be considered reliable. And sometimes it is urgent to cleanse the body, not just for its own sake, but to save a life: by the way, every year 3 million people worldwide die from alcohol overdoses! And it seems that scientists have finally invented a simple, inexpensive, and reliable way to quickly get rid of alcohol from the body. They started from the fact that our liver does 90% of the work of removing alcohol from the blood. Nobody can make it work faster, but it is possible to help it: if you involve the lungs in full operation, then alcohol can be removed from the blood much faster. And, in fact, there was no need to invent anything; doctors simply adapted the ClearMate breathing device, which has been approved for use in the U.S. as a first-line treatment for carbon monoxide poisoning since 2019.
“This primitive, low-tech device can be made anywhere, without any electronics, computers, or filters,” admits one of the authors of the idea (details published in Scientific Reports), an anesthesiologist at Toronto Central Hospital, Joseph Fisher. “I can’t understand why we didn’t think of this decades ago.”
The device is simple and primitive, but – effective, as researchers say. While it has long been known that increased breathing speeds up the evaporation of ethanol from the blood, the problem is that the body also loses carbon dioxide, which is also dangerous. “Just taking a deep breath won’t work, because after a few minutes you’ll feel dizzy and lose consciousness,” Fischer cautions. The advantage of the ClearMate device is that it restores the necessary amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide to maintain the proper balance in the lungs. Laboratory tests on five volunteers, who were given a vodka-based cocktail, showed that with the help of ClearMate, alcohol is eliminated from the body three times faster than usual. The results are impressive, but the scientists themselves admit that five volunteers are not enough to draw reliable conclusions, and the researchers have not experimented with high doses that could really endanger health.
We explain quickly, simply, and clearly what happened, why it matters, and what will happen next. The number of offers should remain: Episodes The end of the story. Advertising Podcasts. If antibiotic-resistant bacteria have entered your bloodstream, every hour is precious: the sooner the analysis detects these bacteria, the sooner the doctors can stop giving you a general antibiotic, which is likely to be ineffective, and find the right medicine. Otherwise, you understand… Until now, the fastest test was considered to be a 24-hour analysis for superbugs, which is not bad in itself, but unacceptable for critical cases. And now, thanks to British scientists, a test has been developed that gives results in just one hour. “Fitting everything into an hour has always been our goal,” says one of the idea’s authors, Brigham University’s Aaron Hawkins (the research was published in Lab on a Chip). “And we are very happy to have achieved this cherished goal through our collaborative efforts.” In fact, the discovery was the result of the collective work of specialists in molecular biology, chemistry, and optics. In the method they developed, a blood sample tube is placed in a centrifuge, where bacteria are isolated and tested using specially designed fluorescent molecules that attach to segments of bacterial DNA known for their resistance to antibiotics. The optical microchip then detects these DNA fragments with attached markers. The new method is also good because it can detect several types of resistant bacteria at once. Superbugs are constantly mutating and becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, causing growing concern among specialists developing new treatments: will the bacteria outpace them in this race? “When a diagnosis needs to be made, every minute counts,” explains Hawkins. “Because for every hour that goes by without treatment, the patient’s chance of survival decreases by about 7%.” Of course, the new method does not solve the problem of superbugs, but the rapid diagnosis gives doctors a good advantage.
The bottom of an ancient lake is hidden under two kilometers of ice. Greenland’s colossal ice shield, the second largest in the world after Antarctica, holds many secrets, but scientists did not expect to find the remains of an ancient lake dating back hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Over the past year, researchers have discovered more than 50 subglacial lakes formed by melting ice between the upper ice sheet and the island’s underlying bedrock. But the new discovery is much older. In fact, the lake itself has long since dried up, leaving only the sedimentary bottom covered with sediments and a layer of ice nearly two kilometers thick. When the giant lake with an area of more than 7 thousand square kilometers and a volume of 580 cubic kilometers was formed, scientists believe that there was no ice in Greenland. The lake was fed by at least 18 rivers, the dry beds of which can still be seen. The lake was discovered from the air by radar during NASA’s IceBridge research mission. Researchers led by Columbia University geophysicist-glaciologist Guy Paxman, who published details of their discovery in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, believe the lake may have formed as a result of subsidence because it was located over a geological fault. Another theory is glacial soil erosion over a long period of time. In any case, the ancient seafloor contains important sedimentary rocks, and if it is possible to reach them with a drilling rig and take samples, it will be possible to determine whether Greenland was covered with ice at that time, and if so, how far this ice cover extended, and what the climate was like in this part of the planet. The species that lie deep in this lake hold secrets of ancient climate changes that can give scientists insight into what is happening to the polar climate today. “We are trying to understand how Greenland’s ice shield has behaved in the past in order to understand what will happen to it in the coming decades,” says Paksman.