With 700,000 Americans suffering from strokes each year (and over 150,000 dying from them), doctors are continuously researching new ways to clear brain clots. Strokes generally occur when the blood vessels feeding the brain become blocked, which deprives brain cells of oxygen until they die.

For those who suffer a stroke, the clot-eliminating drug TPA is one of their only options, and must be used within three hours of the first symptoms. Still, less than five percent of stroke victims can get this care because it is not recognized in time (if only we had the crew from Disney’s Fantastic Voyage to help us out).

Enter Penumbra, which is a new treatment that can be used because patients missed out on early health-care; it can be tried eight hours within a stroke’s first symptoms. Specialist thread a tiny tube inside a blood vessel and the groin and scale it up the body until it reaches the clot in the brain. Like a tiny vacuum cleaner, it sucks up the clot bit by bit, restoring blood flow to the brain. This treatment actually causes a much better recovery.

While Penumbra is a breakthrough in helping treat clots at a later stage, it still may not help stroke victims whose stroke is too severe. “Is the patient at a stage of stroke where you’re going to hurt them by pulling a clot out, or show benefit?” asks Dr. Walter Koroshetz of the National Institutes of Health. “Your ability to succeed with taking the clot out depends on what’s going on in the brain.”

Still, Penumbra shows great promise with patients who suffer from brain clots. Take 45-year-old Aretha Streeter, who suffered a stroke in the hospital she worked at. Even after being treated with TPA, her left side still remained paralyzed an hour later. Her brain was scanned and spotted a key artery that was completely blocked. She agreed to the new Penumbra treatment. During the procedure, she began moving more and more as the clot was suctioned out. Streeter was walking the next day, and was left with weakness in her arm instead of paralysis in a side of her body.

So, for patients, early detection plays a big part in being able to recover from a stroke. Call 911 as soon as symptoms begin, which include sudden numbness or weakness (usually one one side of the body), confusion, trouble speaking or walking, or an abrupt (and terrible) headache.

It was only a matter of time before their two worlds collided.  Barbie made her debut in March 1959, and the world of Mad Men takes place circa 1960.  It wasn’t long before someone came up with the brilliant idea to tie the two together, and thus the Mad Men Barbie dolls were born.  Barbie’s […]

There’s rich, there’s really rich, and then there’s Carlos Slim.  The Mexican businessman, generally acknowledged as the richest man in his home country, has also managed to crawl his way to the top of the Forbes 20 richest people in the world list.  This marks only the second time since 1995 that someone has managed […]

Twitter came to life as a place where you could engage in live, real-time conversation with your friends and loved ones, but it seems as though the actual users of Twitter aren’t engaging in the world at large very much.  If you hold any truth to a recent study of Twitter done by security firm […]

Peter Antal had a problem.  His town, the tiny town of Pecica, Romania, is a busy, vibrant town on the border between Romania and Hungary.  As such, there are frequently cars traveling through it at all hours of the day and night.  This creates as problem, as the biggest road to Hungary also runs right […]

It’s a little known fact, but there’s a nasty little secret about green building.  All the ecological housing isn’t as good or as energy efficient as simply remodeling older homes.  For one thing, there’s the huge environmental impact of destroying the existing building.  Then there’s all the raw materials wasted by trashing a perfectly good, […]

Since Cyprus gained independence in 1960, a central figure of the country was Thassos Papadopoulos.  He was one of the central figures in the revolutionary movement to gain freedom.  At 26, he was the youngest cabinet minister to serve in the post-colonial government.  Until his death in December 2008, he was one of the leading […]

When you think of alien spacecraft, you never think of the space equivalent of a used Toyota.  You think of something sleek and fast, not something belching smoke and overheating.  Yet, for skywatchers over Eureka, California, they believe a jalopy UFO is just what they saw.  I mean, it was belching fire and smoke, little […]