Fitmodo: How Playing The Bagpipes Can Kill You

Fitmodo: How Playing The Bagpipes Can Kill You

Welcome to Fitmodo, your regular weekly round up of the news you need to know to keep your earthly form in top shape — from fitness advice to breakthroughs in medical research.

This week:

How Playing The Bagpipes Can Kill You


Bagpipes and other wind instruments produce beautiful music, but they can also be prime breeding grounds for moulds and fungi. Players then regularly breathe in those creatures, and can develop inflamed lungs as a result — or even a fatal lung disease.

That’s the conclusion of an unusual case study just published in the journal Thorax by researchers at the University Hospital South Manchester in England. They have dubbed it “bagpipe lung”, because that was this particular patient’s instrument of choice, but the same risk applies to any wind instrument, the authors caution.
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LSD Can Mess With The Language Centres In Your Brain


The stereotype of late 1960s authors and musicians is that certain drugs can help to expand the mind and make the user more creative. As someone who has never taken psychedelics, I can’t know this for sure, but a recent study seems to be the first step in displaying scientific evidence in support of that claim.

Researchers from the University of Kaiserslautern studied the effects of LSD on language and found that taking the drug does have some interesting consequences. The study, which was published in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, is the first study on LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, and language in over 50 years, according to a press release (although we can’t confirm this).
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Why Apple’s Move Towards Health Is So Exciting


Apple’s slow creep towards becoming a health company just made a little progress with the acquisition of Gliimpse, a personal health data startup. It’s unclear what Apple plans to do with the company, but I have a free idea for Tim Cook: Let me control my health records on an iPhone. It could save my life.

The Gliimpse purchase isn’t a huge surprise, if only because it was funded by former Apple engineer Anil Sethi. The company’s tagline also aligns well with Apple’s stated philosophy on personal health data. The words are big and bold on Gliimpse’s website: “I should be able to collect my medical records and securely share them with whomever I trust.”
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Also catching our eye:

  • Floating is an increasingly popular form of sensory deprivation therapy that involves lying in a pitch black tank of salted water, and Lifehacker Australia gave it a go.
  • Significant caloric restriction — cutting caloric intake by about 30 per cent — is at this point the anti-ageing intervention that researchers think might actually stave off the physical processes that make cells slower to heal, opening up the brain and body to disease. Business Insider has the story.
  • Popsugar Australia swear by the humble psyllium husk — here’s why.

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