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Pujols To DL, Could Miss Rest Of Year

Albert Pujols #5 of the Los Angeles Angels looks at his second broken bat of the night against the Oakland Athletics at O.co Coliseum on July 26, 2013 in Oakland, California. The A’s won 6-4. (credit: Brian Bahr/Getty Images)

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Los Angeles Angels slugger Albert Pujols was put on the disabled list Sunday with a tear in his left foot that could end his season.

Manager Mike Scioscia said the star will be sidelined for “a significant amount of time.”

Pujols has a partially torn plantar fascia, an injury that has bothered him most of the season. He aggravated it while running out a single in the ninth inning of Friday’s 6-4 loss to Oakland.

“This is something that, talking to Albert, has been going on for six or seven years,” Scioscia said before the Angels’ game against Athletics. “It’s been going on for a long time and he’s managed it. This is a big blow to our team right now.”

Although surgery seems unlikely, Scioscia didn’t rule out the possibility that Pujols could be sidelined for the rest of the year.

Pujols left the team and returned to Los Angeles on Saturday morning for additional testing. That’s when the injury was diagnosed.

“We’ll just take it one step at a time and see how it goes,” Scioscia said. “But this is not something that’s going to heal in a week or two. After that we’ll just wait and get direction from our medical department and how Albert feels. It’s a significant amount of time, that’s what it’s going to take.”

The three-time NL MVP, who signed a $240 million, 10-year contract with the Angels as a free agent in December 2011, has served as the club’s designated hitter most of the season. Pujols was hitting .258 with 17 home runs and 64 RBIs before re-injuring his foot.

The Angels went into the season with hopes of winning the AL West. They began the day with a 48-54 record, 12 games behind the first-place A’s.

Outfielder Kole Calhoun was called up from Triple-A Salt Lake.

(© Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

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Exclusive - Alex McLeish believes Wayne Rooney could leave Manchester United

By Ian Cruise | Sunday, July 14, 2013

Alex McLeish believes Wayne Rooney could yet leave Manchester United ahead of the start of the season.

New Old Trafford boss David Moyes insists the striker won’t be sold, but former Aston Villa and Birmingham manager McLeish feels the situation may not be quite so clear-cut.

He told the Transfer Tavern: “Will he stay or will he go? David has said they’re keeping Wayne but there’s no smoke without fire. It’s an ongoing saga that will probably come to fruition in the coming months.

“He [Rooney] will probably be thinking, ‘do I stay at United for ever, or do I seek pastures new’? I think that’s bubbling under at the moment.

“But United will look for a massive fee for Wayne and if it’s not forthcoming maybe he won’t be able to go. That could be the bottom line.”

Stories continue to link Rooney with the likes of Arsenal and Chelsea, despite Moyes’ claims he will be staying, and that leads McLeish to question his long-term prospects.

"Jose Mourinho is keen if we believe the press,” he added. “If it’s really, really hot I think Wayne will go.”

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'Bath Salts' Stimulant Could Be More Addictive Than Meth

Main Category: Alcohol / Addiction / Illegal Drugs
Article Date: 12 Jul 2013 - 1:00 PDT Current ratings for:
'Bath Salts' Stimulant Could Be More Addictive Than Meth

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have published one of the first laboratory studies of MDPV, an emerging recreational drug that has been sold as "bath salts." The TSRI researchers confirmed the drug's powerful stimulant effects in rats and found evidence that it could be more addictive than methamphetamine, one of the most addictive substances to date.

"We observed that rats will press a lever more often to get a single infusion of MPDV than they will for meth, across a fairly wide dose range," said TSRI Associate Professor Michael A. Taffe, who was the principal investigator of the study.

The findings are described by the journal Neuropharmacology online ahead of the publication's August 2013 print issue.

A New Threat from an Old Source

MDPV (3,4-methylenedioxypyrovalerone) and other "bath salts" drugs are actually derived from cathinone, the principal active ingredient in khat, a leaf chewed for its stimulant effects throughout northeast Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Synthesized by pharmaceutical companies decades ago but never used, cathinone derivatives were rediscovered by underground chemists in the early 2000s. The drugs have been sold as "bath salts" or "plant food" to skirt laws against marketing them for internal use, but in the U.S., UK, Canada and many other countries, their sale for any purpose is now banned.

Cathinone derivatives inhibit the normal removal of the neurotransmitters dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonin from synapses (the small gap separating neurons that enables cell-to-cell communication). In this way, the derivatives disturb the activity of brain networks that mediate desire, pleasure, muscle movements and cognition. Users have described classic stimulant effects such as an initial euphoria, increased physical activity, an inability to sleep and a lack of desire for food or water - plus almost irresistible cravings to take more of the drug. Higher doses bring a strong risk of paranoid psychoses, violence and suicide.

A few years ago, the sudden rise in anecdotal reports of these drugs' dangerous effects prompted Taffe and his TSRI colleague, chemist Associate Professor Tobin J. Dickerson, to set up studies with laboratory animals. "The drugs had not yet been scheduled, and we were able to work out how to synthesize them in sufficient quantities for animal testing," said Dickerson.

"One of the great strengths of TSRI with its multidisciplinary, collaborative environment is that we can get started on researching these drugs even before the drugs are available in pure form from the ordinary scientific suppliers," Taffe said.

In five other studies published over the past year, Taffe, Dickerson and their laboratories have looked at the effects of MDPV and a related "bath salts" cathinone derivative, mephedrone, in a range of animal models.

Repetitive Behaviors

In this new study, the researchers directly compared some of MDPV's major stimulant effects to those of methamphetamine.

In a standard method for evaluating stimulant drugs, the animals were able to dose themselves intravenously by pressing a lever. As is typical for addictive stimulants, the rats maintained a steady self-administration of each drug whenever they could. In one set of tests designed to quantify how much the rats desired each drug, they could get another infusion only by making ever-greater numbers of lever presses.

"When we increased how many lever presses a rat would have to emit to get an additional infusion of drug, we observed that rats emitted about 60 presses on average for a dose of METH but up to about 600 for MDPV - some rats would even emit 3,000 lever presses for a single hit of MDPV," said TSRI Research Associate Shawn M. Aarde, who was first author of the study. "If you consider these lever presses a measure of how much a rat will work to get a drug infusion, then these rats worked more than 10 times harder to get MDPV."

MDPV increased the average activity level of the animals. But at higher - albeit still modest - doses, it produced repetitive behaviors similar to the tooth-grinding and compulsive skin-picking seen in human meth and MDPV users. "One stereotyped behavior that we often observed was a rat repeatedly licking the clear plastic walls of its operant chamber - a behavior that was sometimes uninterruptable," said Aarde. "One could say MDPV turned some rats into 'window lickers' of a sort."

Chemical Variations

Reports on human MDPV users suggest that the drug's behavioral effects can persist for lengthy periods after drug use stops, and Taffe and Aarde are now setting up studies of MDPV's long-term behavioral effects.

"MDPV looks like it's going to stick around as a recreational stimulant, because it is so potent," said Taffe.

He notes, however, that in the wake of the criminalization of first-generation cathinone derivatives, new members of this drug class are being invented that will also require study. He hopes in time to be able to anticipate how future chemical variations on the cathinone theme will change the way these drugs act on the brain.

"We'd like the ability to predict, for example, which ones have the highest abuse potential, which are more likely to have long-term toxicity issues, and which carry high risks of acute lethal consequences," Taffe said.

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our alcohol / addiction / illegal drugs section for the latest news on this subject.

Other contributors to the study, “The novel recreational drug 3,4-methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) is a potent psychomotor stimulant: self-administration and locomotor activity in rats,” in Neuropharmacology (Volume 71), were P.K. Huang and K.M. Creehan of TSRI. For more information, see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028390813001408

The study was supported by the U.S. Public Health Service (grants DA018418, DA024105 and DA024705).

Scripps Research Institute

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New Cry Analyzer Could Detect Babies' Health Problems

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Academic Journal
Main Category: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Also Included In: Neurology / Neuroscience;  Medical Devices / Diagnostics
Article Date: 12 Jul 2013 - 8:00 PDT Current ratings for:
New Cry Analyzer Could Detect Babies' Health Problems

Parents may sometimes wish they could interpret their babies' cries, and now researchers may have found a way to do this.

A team from Brown University and the Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island developed a device that analyzes a baby's cry as a means to interpret possible health or developmental problems.

The computer-based instrument may allow researchers and doctors to make use of cries as a way to determine whether a child has neurological or developmental problems.

The Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research recently published a paper describing the device and its testing methods.

According to a release from Brown University, the analyzer works in two steps:

It separates recorded cries from babies into frames of 12.5 milliseconds. Each of these frames is then studied for things like frequency traits, voicing and volume.The frames then go back together, and this time they are categorized as either an utterance or a silence (the pause between each utterance). The utterances are then grouped according to their length and analyzed for variables such as pitch. In addition, the lengths of the silences are measured.

In total, 80 different metrics are used to find clues about the health of a baby.

Stephen Sheinkopf, an assistant professor at Brown who helped develop the device, says:

"There are lots of conditions that might manifest in differences in cry acoustics. For instance, babies with birth trauma or brain injury as a result of complications in pregnancy, or birth of babies who are extremely premature can have ongoing medical effects.

Cry analysis can be a noninvasive way to get a measurement of these disruptions in the neurobiological and neurobehavioral systems in very young babies."

Barry Lester, director of Brown's Center for the Study of Children at Risk, has been working with Sheinkopf and others on this project as an expert in baby cries. He notes that this kind of research dates back to the 1960s, with a disorder known as Cri du chat - cry of the cat - syndrome.

Like Down syndrome, Cri du chat is a result of a genetic anomaly and is characterized by a recognizably high-pitched cry. Although the cries are perceivable by the human ear, Lester says the cries associated with that syndrome led him to wonder if there were other, smaller differences in a baby's cry that could be indicative of health.

He refers to a baby's cry as "a window into the brain."

Since the tests outlined in the team's paper show an accuracy rating of 88% to 95% for detecting voicing characteristics in the samples, the team is optimistic that their new device will be able to accurately identify problems in babies from a very early stage.

Lester adds: "Early detection of developmental disorders is critical. It can lead to insights into the causes of these disorders and interventions to prevent or reduce the severity of impairment."

In addition to aiding doctors, the team believes their device can further the research being done on "infant cry development."

Recently, a Smart Diaper was created that can communicate urine data to parents' phones, in yet another way scientists are attempting to glean health information from babies.

Written by Marie Ellis

Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today Visit our pediatrics / children's health section for the latest news on this subject.

“A Flexible Analysis Tool for the Quantitative Acoustic Assessment of Infant Cry”, B. Reggiannini, Xiaoxue Li, Harvey F. Silverman, JSLHR, DOI:10.1044/1092-4388(2013/11-0298), published online 19 June 2013.

“Cry analyzer seeks clues to babies’ health”, Brown University, published online 11 July 2013.

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I Could Look Like That? How to Get a 3-Minute Makeover

Brunette to blonde, fresh-faced to super-glam, find your best look (without the commitment) using our virtual makeover tool

By Ashley Fodor - June 20, 2013

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I Could Look Like That? How to Get a 3-Minute Makeover

Brunette to blonde, fresh-faced to super-glam, find your best look (without the commitment) using our virtual makeover tool

By Ashley Fodor - June 20, 2013

Could you really rock bangs? How about going blonde? Which lipstick shade won’t wash you out? iVillage readers got instant makeovers using our free online virtual makeover tool — check them out and then try a new style on yourself.

iVillage

With nothing more than a few clicks of her mouse, this reader takes her look from fresh-faced to glamorous, adding bangs that are just long enough to meet her glossy-black lashes. A sweep of virtual kohl liner traced along top and bottom lash lines keeps the focus on her gaze, while deep rose lipstick completes the transformation.

Try it on: See how you look with new hair or makeup using our virtual makeover tool

iVillage

Liquid black liner, peachy-pink lips, and rosy cheeks add up to a playful and fresh wear-anywhere makeup look.

Try it on: See how you look with new hair or makeup using our virtual makeover tool

iVillage

Lots of liner, a little blush and a mega sweep of mascara give this reader a totally new makeup look, while chestnut highlights and pretty waves bring extra dimension to her hair.

Try it on: See how you look with new hair or makeup using our virtual makeover tool

iVillage

This reader’s cool complexion and sapphire eyes are ideal for a pale, buttery blonde hair color. She amped up the volume on her crown and imagined her blonde hair long and sleek.

Try it on: See how you look with new hair or makeup using our virtual makeover tool

iVillage

By bumping up her hair’s base to an all-over caramel hue, this reader instantly brightens her skin tone. She clicked to add some heavy bangs, long lashes, and bubblegum pink lips to complete her pretty look.

Try it on: See how you look with new hair or makeup using our virtual makeover tool

iVillage

A digital dye job without the damage let this reader experiment with a bold blonde base.

Try it on: See how you look with new hair or makeup using our virtual makeover tool

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A few simple changes prove a total transformation for this reader: glossy raven color adds depth and richness to her hair, length gives her lashes a doll-like look, and full, brow-grazing bangs work well on her oval-shaped face.

Try it on: See how you look with new hair or makeup using our virtual makeover tool

iVillage

Sun-kissed, flaxen highlights woven throughout this reader’s auburn brown color are a subtle approach to lightening up. By adding some loose waves, she gives her hair even more dimension and movement. Makeup stays simple, too, accenting her almond-shaped eyes with a single line of black on her top lids.

Try it on: See how you look with new hair or makeup using our virtual makeover tool

iVillage

Ditching subtle, face-framing highlights, this reader tried on a fearless two-tone ombré style that would let her embrace platinum blonde color without fretting over root touch-ups.

Try it on: See how you look with new hair or makeup using our virtual makeover tool

iVillage

This reader warmed up her hair to a red-brown hue with pretty butterscotch blonde highlights. A soft bisque foundation evened out her complexion, creating the perfect palette for a bright pop of raspberry lipstick.

Try it on: See how you look with new hair or makeup using our virtual makeover tool

Connect with Us Follow Our Pins

Yummy recipes, DIY projects, home decor, fashion and more curated by iVillage staffers.

The very dirty truth about fashion internships... DUN DUN @srslytheshow http://t.co/wfewf

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