Helping paralysed people to walk again is up there with curing cancer and HIV/AIDS. Doctors and scientists have been striving towards it for a long time now, and last year seemed to be a year of medical marvels, with progress in all those departments coming on in leaps and bounds. We told you about how electricity could be the key to stimulating the spinal cord enough for a person paralysed from the waist d ...

Surgeons from the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff have been looking at which songs make for better listening in the operating theatre. And using this information, they have come up with a list of Dos and Do-Nots for them to work to. Of course, the song list is only meant to be a bit of Christmas fun, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t real research behind it. The research was carried out by Dr David ...

Patients at Broadmoor Hospital could be set to test a camera that remotely monitors a person’s vital signs, such as their heart rate or breathing. But before you go thinking that such cameras would, of course, be a huge invasion of the patients’ privacy, they are simply detection devices and don’t actually send pictures at all. Broadmoor is a high-security psychiatric hospital where staff take care of aroun ...

When it comes to illnesses like depression, many people dismiss the idea of talking therapies as something that simply doesn’t work. But according to a new study coming out of the US, talk-therapy sessions can actually reduce the risk of suicide in people who have previously attempted to take their own life. The team from John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland studied information pertain ...

Trying to stay ahead of outbreak trends is not an easy task. It usually involves laboratory tests, collecting data, calls to doctors’ surgeries and trying to keep track of the number of people who visit health facilities. This process might be accurate, but it is also slow and expensive, and by the time an outbreak is being announced to the publicly, it had already been in effect for a couple of weeks. But ...

The first ever UK live donor liver transplant involving identical twins took place earlier this year - but the twins didn’t know they were identical until one of them needed surgery. Annemarie Atha and Geraldine Rowing, both 48 and from Leeds, were always told by their mother that they were not identical because they hadn’t shared a placenta in the womb. Despite the sisters having identical noses and indeed ...

After reading this, you are going to hope you have a friend like Dylan Siegel - and strive to be a friend like him. At eight years old, Dylan is an author with almost $1 million (£630,000) to his name. Or he would be if every single penny of book sales didn’t go on research for his best friend’s illness. Dylan’s book is called Chocolate Bar, a phrase that he uses in place of “awesome”. Various places and ac ...

Engineers from Boston in the US have managed to find a way of making batteries safe if they are accidentally swallowed - potentially saving the lives of thousands of children around the world. The batteries in question are those small, round button-like ones that you might find in a watch, hearing aid, toy, or other small electronic device. They can easily be swallowed and thus result in injury, which can b ...

Google is working on new technology that could potentially diagnose health problems like cancer or heart attacks at a much earlier stage than is currently possible. As with treatment of many diseases, early diagnosis is key. Unfortunately, many can only be detected when they have already passed the treatable stage and have become fatal. But there are clearly noticeable differences between cancerous cells an ...

The old adage of eating all your greens so you grow up to be big and strong is true, according to analysis on the bones of Roman gladiators. A study from researchers from Switzerland’s University of Bern and Austria’s Medical University (MediUni) of Vienna, published online in PLOS ONE, examined remains from the Roman town of Ephesus. The graves in Ephesus - which is in what is now Turkey - date back to the ...