Ice Therapy Works Wonders for Your Skin's Health & Beauty

For better or worse, your face is the first thing the world notices about you. It’s for this reason that I invest so much (too much!) time ensuring I look my best by making use of expensive skin care products. I always thought this was a wise investment, but I have recently discovered a method that’s even better, easier and cheaper: cryotherapy. 
Not only is cryo or ice therapy relaxing and therapeutic it will also improve your skin by rejuvenating it and making it look healthy and radiant again. Whether you opt for green tea, cucumber or other novel cubes, all you really need for cryotherapy is plenty of ice.

Important Information About Ice Therapy:

•    Make sure your face is clean before beginning.
•    Always wear gloves when holding ice cubes, in order to protect your hands.
•    Never let ice make direct contact with your skin. Avoid this by covering the ice with either a soft cloth or plastic bag.
•    Do not apply any ice packs to your body for longer than 1 hour, otherwise, you are at risk of skin burns.
•    You can gain even more skin benefits by making cucumber, green tea, horsetail tea or garlic ice cubes.
 

The following 6 tips will work best when combined with both regular exercise and a good, healthy diet:

1. Make Your Skin Smoother Try this simple tip in the evenings or before you go to sleep: after washing your face, fill up a plastic bag with some ice, then use it to massage your face and neck for approximately three minutes. You should see results in a matter of moments, with your skin becoming smoother and fresher. This will also help you sleep better and even help prevent wrinkles.
2. Banish Acne

Ice therapy is a terrific method for clearing your skin of acne. To do this, first, wash your face as normal. Then wrap one ice cube up in a napkin or soft cloth. Press this gently against your spot or troubled area for between three and five minutes. You’ll be stunned by the results.

3. Prevent and Reduce Wrinkles Massage your face daily, perhaps before applying makeup, for around one minute to improve blood circulation to your facial skin. The increased circulation is known to prevent premature aging and wrinkling.
 

4. Shrink Open Pores

If your pores are too opened out, try this ice therapy method. Simply rub a covered ice cube onto your face for two to three minutes. If you repeat this daily, you should notice your pores shrinking after a few days have passed.

5. Get Rid of Puffy Eyes We get puffy eyes for many reasons, but the most common is through crying. To banish the tell-tale effects of this wrap 2 ice cubes in cloth pieces and place them over your closed eyes. Now carefully massage the inflammations for two minutes, making slow, circular motions.

6. Fight Stomach Fat

For a home-made alternative to expensive cryotherapy sessions, try this fat-burning massage. Put an ice pack onto your stomach for 15 minutes, then take it away for three minutes. Repeat this for up to an hour (remembering that an hour is the upper limit). Ice actually turns white fat cells into brown cells. These brown fat cells are more easily and speedily burned by your natural metabolic processes. 

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New AI-enabled system translates brain signals into speech

In a first, scientists have created an artificial intelligence (AI) based system that directly translates thoughts into intelligible, recognisable speech, an advance that may help people who cannot speak regain their ability to communicate with the outside world.

By monitoring someone's brain activity, the technology developed by researchers can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. 
 
The breakthrough, which harnesses the power of speech synthesisers and artificial intelligence, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain. 


It also lays the groundwork for helping people who cannot speak, such as those living with as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or recovering from stroke, regain their ability to communicate with the outside world, researchers said.

"Our voices help connect us to our friends, family and the world around us, which is why losing the power of one's voice due to injury or disease is so devastating," said a researcher.


"With today's study, we have a potential way to restore that power. We've shown that, with the right technology, these people's thoughts could be decoded and understood by any listener," said  a principal investigator of the study.

Decades of research has shown that when people speak-or even imagine speaking-telltale patterns of activity appear in their brain. 

Distinct pattern of signals also emerge when we listen to someone speak, or imagine listening.
Experts, trying to record and decode these patterns, see a future in which thoughts need not remain hidden inside the brain-but instead could be translated into verbal speech at will.

However, accomplishing this feat has proven challenging. Early efforts to decode brain signals by researchers focused on simple computer models that analysed spectrograms, which are visual representations of sound frequencies.

However, because this approach has failed to produce anything resembling intelligible speech, the team turned instead to a vocoder, a computer algorithm that can synthesise speech after being trained on recordings of people talking.

"This is the same technology used by Amazon Echo and Apple Siri to give verbal responses to our questions," she said.

Researchers plan to test more complicated words and sentences next, and they want to run the same tests on brain signals emitted when a person speaks or imagines speaking. 

Ultimately, they hope their system could be part of an implant, similar to those worn by some epilepsy patients, that translates the wearer's thoughts directly into words. 

"In this scenario, if the wearer thinks 'I need a glass of water,' our system could take the brain signals generated by that thought, and turn them into synthesised, verbal speech," she said.

"This would be a game changer. It would give anyone who has lost their ability to speak, whether through injury or disease, the renewed chance to connect to the world around them," he said. 

THIS IS ONLY FOR INFORMATION, ALWAYS CONSULT YOU PHYSICIAN BEFORE HAVING ANY PARTICULAR FOOD/ MEDICATION/EXERCISE/OTHER REMEDIES.                                    PS- THOSE INTERESTED IN RECIPES ARE FREE TO  VIEW MY BLOG-                                                                                           https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com/       
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13-Year Old Finds a Way to Treat Pancreatic Cancer

When it comes to pancreatic cancer, survival rates are extremely low. Statistics show that around 9% of people with pancreatic cancer survive for five years, and only around 1% survive for 10 years. And these stats haven't improved significantly in the past 40 years either. However, one 13-year-old, 8th grader  from Portland, Oregon, Rishab Jain is determined to change these statistics with his AI-based tool, PCDLS Net, which improves pancreas tracking during radiotherapy. Jain also won the 2018 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge, before he started high school. 

But how did he get started? "It all started in the summer of 2017 when I went to visit my brother in Boston, and there I learned about some research that was happening, and the surprisingly low statistics about pancreatic cancer, like its survival rate." In light of this, he created an artificial intelligence-based tool called PCDLS Net to improve pancreas tracking during a treatment called radiotherapy for pancreatic cancer. 

Currently, pancreatic cancer is detected in quite a late stage, so by then, doctors use radiotherapy to help treat it, but most of the time, it is not effective enough. This inspired Jain to do some research on this. "Because I am a big programmer, and I like artificial intelligence, so I wondered if I could combine my knowledge in the two areas to help solve the problem, and I created an artificial intelligence-based tool called PCDLS Net to improve pancreas tracking during a treatment called radiotherapy for pancreatic cancer." 

Jain contacted over 253 doctors and got 30 replies from leading experts from institutions at cancer centers and around the world. 

What makes surgery for the pancreas even more complicated is that it is very hard for the human eye to detect. This poses a big problem to radiologists and oncologists who have to find the pancreas and apply the radiation treatment. "other organs such as the stomach and liver that may cover the area, and also, it's right below the lungs causing it to move during some of the treatments. It's also very hard to reach in. It's right in the center of the abdomen next to the spinal cord... It's sometimes detailed as a mushy or angry organ because of its position in the body," he says. 

This is where Jain's invention comes into play. "My tool can be run to find where exactly the pancreas is in one of these CT or MRI slices and output this result instantaneously." He adds "currently, doctors have to apply sometimes a seven-millimeter overlay around the pancreas of radiation, and this can affect millions of healthy cells, so my tool is able to reduce that area to around four millimeters, so that saves millions of healthy cells and can improve patient quality of care." 

Jain says that he has detailed a five-year plan about how he want to globally commercialize his tool, PCDLS Net, improving pancreatic cancer survival rates. "I envision partnering with a hospital as well as 3M to work and create my tool as an add-on, and for this, I'll need to conduct clinical testing, so I want to gain FDA and IRB approval. So I want to continue pursuing medicine and engineering as I grow up, so for my undergraduate degree, I'm thinking about becoming a biomedical engineer," he concludes.

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Scientist Destroyed Breast Cancer Tumours in Days Without Chemo

Research revealed that scientists had tested the effectiveness of a pair of drugs- known as Herceptin- a.k.a. trastuzumab, and Lapatinib.

The two drugs are commonly used in breast cancer treatment already, but this is the first time they had been combined together and used before surgery and chemotherapy. What they found was they're able to eliminate some types of breast cancer in just 11 days.

The scientists aimed to use these drugs to combat a protein called HER2( human epidermal growth receptor 2) which affects the growth and division of cancer cells. It's also more likely to return than other cancer types.

What also makes this treatment so appealing is the fact that it eliminates the need for chemotherapy and surgery. The temporary effects like hair loss, vomiting and fatigue are also avoided, making this treatment less impactful on the body. Chemotherapy is not entirely effective, nor is it the right choice for a lot of patients, so any alternatives are welcomed.

Research results
257 women with HER2 positive breast cancer were selected for the study, with half being out on drug combo and the other half were the control group. What they found was that those on the drug ,11% had no cancer cells remaining two weeks and 17% of the cases had dramatically shrunken tumours.

Compared to the control group who were only given Hereptin, they're found to have 0% with no trace of cancer cells and only 3 % showed a drop in tumour size. Clearly the two drugs combined have a major effect on breast cancer cells as opposed to being used on their own.

The problem currently however, is that Herceptin's licensing makes it available for use alongside chemo and not alone. The results of this study may help to change that view.

Although, there is still a lot of work to be done, hopefully, this is a major step in the fight against one of the world's deadliest diseases. With medical advancements improving every year, it's entirely possible this could happen sooner than we think.

THIS IS ONLY FOR INFORMATION, ALWAYS CONSULT YOU PHYSICIAN BEFORE HAVING ANY PARTICULAR FOOD/ MEDICATION/EXERCISE/OTHER REMEDIES.                                    PS- THOSE INTERESTED IN RECIPES ARE FREE TO  VIEW MY BLOG-                                                                                           https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com/       
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