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Amazing response by the human body to return to normal if you quit smoking right now. On the other hand, this also shows how much harm cigarettes do to you.

Reference: HealthBolt, KevinMD

Interesting photos from Life Photo Archive:

Using the hair of a woolly mammoth preserved in the Siberian tundra, scientists have reconstructed 80 percent of the mammoth genome, raising the possibility of one day resurrecting the beast.

If this is successful, genes for some of the most famous scientists in history can also be reverse-engineered. This technology therefore can allow Einstein, Darwin and other such prominent scientists to live again.

Wonder what will be their reaction to our modern world?

Reference: Wired Science

Photographs from Life photo archive

Poliomyelitis is a deadly disease which may affect the central nervous system leading to irreversible flaccid paralysis of the legs. Since it strikes children at a very young age, affected children are paralyzed for their entire life.

Google’s philanthropic arm - Google.org is about to release a movie titled “The Final Inch” to document the historic effort to eradicate this disease from the planet. Once we succeed this will be second disease after small pox to be found only in history books (and/or some covert lab, somewhere in the world).

The Final Inch is a 38-minute film about the historic global effort to eradicate polio. Here, the story told is as much about the messengers as the message. You’ll meet Munzareen Fatima, one of the thousands of community “foot soldiers” across India working to sway reluctant families to vaccinate their children, and Dr. Ashfaq Bhat, who travels into the backwaters of India’s Ganges Basin by boat and foot to detect emerging cases of polio. Martha Mason and Mikail Davenport bring us into their lives and describe the paralyzing challenges of childhood polio, reminding us how endemic polio once was in the United States.

Filmed in high-definition (HD) in cinematic style — wide open shots to give a strong sense of place — The Final Inch captures their stories, and we hope it is both a tribute and an inspiration of hope. With a final push, this is a disease that can, and should, be eradicated finally.

Via Google.org

The movie airs on HBO in 2009. Check out the film trailer:

What if HIV mutates and can now be transmitted by sneezing and coughing - just like common cold??

What would this graph look like?

iPhone is an incredible device. The entire medical literature (available on the internet) is in your hand. However, typing those long medical terms can sometimes be a pain.

Enter Google app with voice search. Just say the term as if you are talking with the phone and the application recognizes the search and outputs the results.

[YouTube Video]

I wonder how well it would do if I searched for Bannayan-Zonana-Riley Syndrome!

(This app is yet to be released on the iTunes app store)

Update: November 17, 2008

Google search application has launched on the app store (iTunes Link).

Unfortunately, it did not work for Bannayan-Zonana Riley Syndrome. However, it was pretty good at recognizing most common diseases although it searched for “no motivation” a couple of times when I was searching for “adenoma sebaceum.” I did finally get it right.

Amazing!