Could we create ‘exercise in a bottle’?
Way off. It’s an exotic particle proposed as a candidate for the elusive ‘glueball’ by scientists at Vienna a University of Technology.
So what’s a glueball?
It’s a particle made up entirely of gluons – elementary particles that help to bind quarks together to form protons and neutrons. Its existence was first proposed by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Harald Fritzsch in 1972.
Okay. What makes them so elusive?
Glueballs are so unstable that they can only be detected indirectly by searching for evidence of their decay patterns. This means that researchers must look for the signature particle trails they leave behind as they break down. The team has proposed a mechanism for this decay process.
So now they have found them, we can break out the champagne, right?
Not just yet. While there is strong evidence that the team have got their sums right, the theory is going to be tested further in experiments carried out by the TOTEM and LHCb detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in the coming months. WE ALL KNOW that working out is good for us but sometimes the sofa and a bag of crisps are just too inviting.
A team at the University of Sydney has found that drugs could potentially be created that mimic the effects of exercise. “Exercise is the most powerful therapy for many human diseases, including Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and neurological disorders,” explained research leader Prof David James. “However, for many people, exercise isn’t a viable treatment option. This means it’s essential we find ways of developing drugs that mimic the benefits of exercise.”
The researchers analysed muscle biopsies from four untrained, healthy males following 10 minutes of high intensity exercise. They found that activity triggered more than 1,000 molecular changes within the muscle.
Most traditional drugs target individual molecules, but the exercise blueprint shows that for any drug to mimic exercise it will need to target multiple molecules at the same time.
“We believe this is the key to unlocking the riddle of drug treatments to mimic exercise,” James said. “Our data clearly show the complexity of the response: it is not one thing, but rather the drug will have to target multiple things. Our research has provided the roadmap to figure this out.”