The H-spot: Your Sex Questions Answered | Hyphen magazine ...

Welcome to Hyphen?s The H-spot column, where Hyphen drops mad knowledge on readers? questions about the nasty and other prurient delights. Our experts consist of sex goddess Nadia Cho, intrepid medical doctors Monica Hahn and Dharushana Muthulingam, and diva extraordinaire Barbie. Each week, we?ll feature questions that cover health, LGBTQ, and various other burning topics that our prudish parents would disown us from asking.

Feel free to send over more sex questions to Abigail Licad, our fledgling editor-assassin of all things repressed and taboo, at abigail.licad[at]hyphenmagazine.com.

Ready to straighten out the kinks in our thoughts on sex and sexuality?? Let?s do it!

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I know a few people who are in an open relationship. For example, while my aunt's girlfriend does not want my aunt to sleep with other women, she doesn't mind my aunt sleeping?with men. I also have a few straight friends who sleep with several partners. My question is, how do open sexual relationships work? How can couples be ok with dating other people?

--Legs Wide Shut

Dear Wide Shut,

The central idea behind making open relationships work is that a partner?s sexual or emotional intimacy with another person? doesn?t always mean that your partner cares any less about you. Oftentimes, it?s possible to be attracted to more than one person. The fact that your partner is attracted to another person doesn?t make you any less attractive or lovable.

Monogamy makes love seem like a finite resource and we?re conditioned by media representations of love to feel jealous when a partner is remotely attracted to someone else. But just as you?re capable of loving many friends and family members, it?s possible to love multiple people in the romantic sense as well.??

That being said, non-monogamous partners acknowledge that they have desires to date or have sex with other people, and understand that their partners? extra desires don?t reflect any personal inadequacies. Commitment does not always equal sexual exclusivity. Honest communication is crucial, especially with regard to boundaries that draw what each partner is not comfortable with. Monogamy works for some people, but it doesn?t for many others. Both people have to believe it?s possible to love more than one person and if you believe it really is, it will be.

--Nadia

??????????????? Sex goddess Nadia Cho

Nadia Cho is an undergrad at UC Berkeley majoring in psychology, with strong interests in sociology, Asian American Studies and gender and women?s studies. She was a Sex on Tuesday columnist at UC Berkeley?s student paper The Daily Californian. She continues teach sex positive thinking and living at her blog nadiacho.com. Her hobbies include drinking coffee, playing with cats and being sassy. She secretly loves Tumblr and kale.?

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Can sex be a form of exercise? I heard you can burn calories through sex. If so, how do I do that and what's the average amount of calories I can burn?

--Let's Get Physical

Dear Let's Get Physical

Great to hear you are working on both your cardiovascular and sexual well being!

The number of calories burned during physical activity varies from person to person, depending on factors such as body weight, duration of activity and strenuousness.

In the past, these numbers have been overestimated. Recently, a New England Journal of Medicine review estimates that an ?average? 150-lb man in his thirties burns only 3.5 calories per minute, and that an ?average? sexual encounter lasts only 6 minutes. Therefore, the ?average? sexual encounter burns only 20 calories. Another study in the American Journal of Cardiology compared heart rates during sex versus treadmill workouts. They found that people do not reach the same heart rate level via sex that they would have achieved through treadmill exercise (men reach only 72% and women 64%).

So although sex fans the fire of your loins, it only modestly lights the fires of your metabolism?(For variations in sexual positions, the Sex Calories Calculator App provides more precise estimates).

The American Heart Association recommends at least 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise or 75 minutes per week of vigorous exercise for preventing cardiovascular disease. If this is attempted through sex, you would need to have aerobic, heart-rate raising sex for at least 30 minutes per day for 5 days a week. If this is your usual regimen -- GOOD JOB! However, many find a zumba class more convenient.

Bottomline: "Sexercise" doesn?t burn as many calories as we?d like to hope, so don?t swap out your gym membership for other pleasurable undertakings just yet. We encourage working up a sweat both at the gym and between the sheets -- evidence shows that getting to the gym can improve sexual enjoyment, as better blood circulation means better-functioning sex organs. Good luck! ?

--Monica and Dharushana

Doctors Monica Hahn and Dharushana Muthulingam

Monica Hahn (L) is a resident physician at the UCSF Family and Community Medicine Residency at San Francisco General Hospital. ?She received her MD from UCSF School of Medicine and her MPH from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. ?She has been involved in community-based youth empowerment advocacy, as well as HIV prevention projects.? She is currently interested in adolescent health, HIV prevention and sexual health. She enjoys capoeira, Afro-Latin dance, and Brazilian percussion.

Dharushana Muthulingam (R) is a resident physician in the department of Internal Medicine of the Kaiser Medical Center in Oakland. She studied medicine at UCSF and public health at UC Berkeley. ?She is interested in infectious disease, healthy aging, health justice and working with patients to live the good and flourishing life. In her spare time, she has been attempting to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. After two years, she is happy to report she is almost half way done.?

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I am a lesbian who lives in Portland and I am having trouble in the dating scene.?I am attracted to femme lesbians, but it seems that everyone I encounter strives to be more masculine. What's so wrong with being feminine and putting on some lipstick once in a while? Do you agree that there?s something inherently sexist in these folks? desire to be more masculine? Or am I being totally transphobic?

--Lipstick Lesbian Lover

Dear Lipstick Lesbian Lover,

Portland has got to be the queerest place on earth, right? It?s one of the lesbian sweet spots -- a place where women of endlessly varied persuasions converge.

Nothing is wrong with preferring ?feminine? women to more ?masculine? types, but keep in mind that conceptualizing sexuality in such a feminine-masculine binary conforms to narrow, oppressive gender norms currently dictated by dominant society. ??

There might not be a lot of lipstick around but have you tried chapstick?

In other words, have you considered diversifying? Go explore the queer rainbow. If you haven?t tried dating more ?masculine? lesbians, perhaps you should give it a try and see what happens. You may be surprised. ?

On the other hand, don?t force yourself to date other types if this really isn't your thing. At the end of the day, the bottom line is that your preferences are your choice and your business, so do what makes you happy. Don?t fret too much about the meanings and implications of what you prefer. Remember, how you choose to experience and enjoy your existence is subject to nothing else except your own power and self-opinion. So long as you take pride in doing your own thing, you are a big TURN ON.

To increase your chances of meeting someone you are into, DO explore non-competitive group activities from community organizing, working-out, hiking to crafting. Come off-line from PDX femme web portals and go out clubbing, karaoke or join a community-supported agriculture (CSA) group. Attend art walks, burlesque shows, cocktails and sleepovers with galpals on the go. Believe me, there are lots of feminine-presenting lipstick lesbians I?ve known who have found their more ?femme? dates this way. Love comes your way, because you live your life your way.

--Barbie

Barbie is your sister and pal in all things love and taboo. NYC-based, she loves long walks on city streets, watching sunsets over the river, farming and looking for the next big thing. She's your wellness connector, media maker, and fellow troublemaker. She loves her food homestyle, hands down. If you're ever in NYC, look her up to chat and chew.

Source: http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2013/06/h-spot-your-sex-questions-answered-0

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San Onofre closure generates mixed feelings

The picturesque beach city of San Clemente has hummed along for decades just up the highway from the ominous concrete domes of the San Onofre nuclear plant.

To residents, there were always reminders of their neighbor's presence ? the quarterly emergency siren tests and the potassium iodide tablets that local agencies kept on hand to distribute to residents in the 10-mile emergency planning zone around the plant.

But for the most part, the 63,000 residents of this city on the southern edge of Orange County ? known for its proximity to legendary surf spots and the rolling coastal hills of Camp Pendleton Marine base ? went about their daily lives for years with little thought of the nuclear generating station four miles down Interstate 5.

The tide began to shift in 2011, however, when a tsunami inundated Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, leading to equipment failures and meltdowns at three reactors and raising new concerns about the safety of Southern California's own coastal nuclear plant. A year later, a tube in one of San Onofre's newly installed steam generators leaked a small amount of radioactive steam, setting off a chain of events that led to Edison's announcement this month that the facility will be retired for good.

Residents in San Clemente greeted the news with a mix of feelings ? relief; sadness that the jobs of hundreds of utility workers who lived, shopped, and ate and drank in town will be lost; and worry about replacing the plant's energy and about the nuclear waste that will remain at the site.

"Every year, I have to sign a waiver so if something happened or leaked while the kids are in school, we give the school permission to give them iodine tablets," said Alicia Lopez, a mother of three who waits tables at the OC Tavern, a restaurant and sports bar in San Clemente that is popular with San Onofre workers.

"That's crazy," Lopez said. "I had to ask my pediatrician if I should do it. I'll be glad when we don't have to deal with that."

But Lopez's relief was tempered with regret at the thought that many of her longtime customers will lose their jobs as the plant is mothballed.

Over the next year, the plant's workforce will be cut from 1,500 to about 400 ? who will be charged with securing the plant during the potentially decades-long decommissioning process.

Daniel Dominguez, business manager for Utility Workers Union of America Local 246, said the employees were disappointed but will now focus on keeping the facility safely shut down:

"We're all professionals," he said. "It's unfortunate the plant was shut down, but it is what it is."

A plant employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said many workers hadn't expected a decision on the plant's fate until later in the year and were caught off guard. The plant's workforce has already been cut by about 700 in the last year.

"We just went through a very painful reduction in force," he said. "Some people just barely made it through, and they celebrated."

The employee said he expected that many of his colleagues would leave Southern California to find jobs elsewhere with comparable pay. With San Onofre gone, the two nearest nuclear plants are Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo and Palo Verde in Arizona.

San Clemente officials said about 400 of the plant's employees live in the city. On top of that, contractors stay for months at a time during the plant's regular refueling outages and other projects ? including the steam generator replacement that ultimately led to the plant's permanent closure.

Eric Moser, general manager at the Best Western Casablanca Inn in San Clemente, said San Onofre contractors made up about 3% to 4% of the hotel's overall business; but during the winter months when the plant generally scheduled its refueling outages, they could account for 30% or more.

Some suggested that the plant's closure could boost property values. Median home prices in San Clemente are about half that of nearby Laguna Beach, according to real estate firm DataQuick, and lower too than in neighboring Dana Point, which also is within San Onofre's emergency planning zone but a few miles farther from the plant.

"We have disclosures we have to give to people. Sometimes it's an issue, sometimes it's not," said Debbie Ferrari, who owns a local real estate business and has lived in San Clemente since 1981. She said it is difficult to determine whether the plant has been a factor in real estate decisions.

"We might have more people willing to come here now that it's closed, and willing to pay a higher price."

San Onofre's first reactor began operating in 1968, and Units 2 and 3 followed in the early 1980s. Unit 1 was shut down in 1992 rather than undergo expensive upgrades. The other two units were expected to continue generating power at least until 2022, when the plant's license expired. But the leak and unusual wear on hundreds of other tubes led to a complex regulatory process that had dragged on for 16 months while the plant sat idle. With no end in sight, Edison threw in the towel.

There have always been those who viewed the plant with suspicion.

In 1970, residents argued that an expanded plant would be in danger of sabotage because then-President Nixon's home ? the so-called Western White House ? was about 11/2 miles away. A decade later, about 15,000 people attended a festival in Laguna Niguel, calling for San Onofre to be shut down and replaced with renewable energy.

San Clemente City Councilwoman Lori Donchak said community concerns about the plant surged after the Fukushima disaster. The council sent letters to federal officials asking them to find a permanent off-site storage place for spent fuel before relicensing the plant. But city officials stayed out of the more recent debate over restarting the plant.

"I felt like we should let the experts decide how to operate this thing and how to do the restart," said Mayor Bob Baker, who characterized the activists opposed to the plant as a "very vocal minority."

Activists celebrated the plant's closure but expressed lingering concerns about the waste that will be left behind, perhaps indefinitely.

"We'll probably never do anything more important in our lives," said Gary Headrick, co-founder of the group San Clemente Green, who along with his wife has devoted his life since 2009 to shutting down the plant.

Gene Stone, 66, a local activist who launched an effort to outfit residents with portable Geiger counters so they could post real-time radiation readings online, called the permanent closing of the plant a "good step" for safety, but said: "The bad news is the easy part is over. We need to work to make sure it's decommissioned properly. There's no way in the world that we will allow this to be a nuclear waste dump."

abby.sewell@latimes.com

anh.do@latimes.com

Source: http://feeds.latimes.com/~r/latimes/news/science/~3/sVIWPjyWmKM/la-me-adv-nuclear-neighbors-20130624-1,0,189723.story

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Promise of price cut on hospital bills is in limbo

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Huge list prices charged by hospitals are drawing increased attention, but a federal law meant to limit what the most financially vulnerable patients can be billed doesn't seem to be making much difference.

A provision in President Barack Obama's health care overhaul says most hospitals must charge uninsured patients no more than what people with health insurance are billed.

The goal is to protect patients from medical bankruptcy, a problem that will not go away next year when Obama's law expands coverage for millions.

Because the Affordable Care Act doesn't cover everyone, many people will remain uninsured. Also, some who could sign up are expected to procrastinate even though the law requires virtually everyone to have health insurance.

Consumer groups that lobbied for a "fair pricing" provision are disappointed. A university researcher who's studied the issue says the government doesn't seem to be doing much enforcement, and at least one state, Colorado, enacted a stricter rule since the federal statute passed.

Critics say the law has several problems:

?It applies only to nonprofit institutions, which means about 40 percent of all community hospitals are exempted. By comparison, the Colorado law also covers for-profit hospitals.

?It lacks a clear formula for hospitals to determine which uninsured patients qualify for financial aid, and how deep a discount is reasonable. A California law spells out such a formula for that state's hospitals.

?More than three years after Obama signed his law, the Internal Revenue Service has not issued final rules explaining how hospitals should comply with the federal billing limits. Delay doesn't signal a high priority.

"We still hear the same stories about patients who are being sent to (debt) collection," said Jessica Curtis, director of the hospital accountability project at Community Catalyst, a Boston-based advocacy group that led the push for billing limitations. "It's the same behavior that we were seeing before the passage of the Affordable Care Act."

The Obama administration responds that fair pricing is the law of the land, and that hospitals are expected to comply even if the IRS has not finalized the rules. The agency has begun compliance reviews, a spokeswoman said.

The health law "helps to protect patients from hidden and high prices and unreasonable collection actions," said Treasury Department spokeswoman Sabrina Siddiqui.

The American Hospital Association says it urges members to limit charges to the uninsured in line with the federal law. But neither the administration nor the industry has statistics on how many hospitals are doing so.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recently took on hospital pricing policies when she released federal data that document wide disparities in what different hospitals charge for the same procedures.

Most patients never face those list prices because private insurers negotiate lower rates and government programs such as Medicare get to set what they will pay. The burden of paying list price falls on the uninsured and people with skimpy policies. It's unclear that the federal requirements are helping at all.

Justin Farman, a nursing student from Watertown, in upstate New York, was diagnosed with a blood cancer last fall, when he was uninsured.

Going without health insurance is a calculated risk taken by many young people starting out their careers. Farman, 26, said the $120 his employer charged monthly for premiums was too much for his budget. Besides, he was in good shape and an avid weightlifter. But months of deep tiredness and unexplained weight loss led him to consult doctors, and he was eventually diagnosed with lymphoma.

Treatment at Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse was successful, but Farman faced more than $54,000 in medical bills, between the hospital and doctors.

"After I went into remission, the bills started to roll in," said Farman. The hospital did not tell him that financial assistance might be available, Farman said.

He had to fend off collection agencies. "That's not too fun," he added.

A spokesman for Upstate said the federal fair pricing law does not appear to apply to the hospital because it is publicly owned and not incorporated as a nonprofit under federal law. Spokesman Darryl Geddes said he could not discuss individual cases, but the hospital does not decline care to anyone based on the individual's ability to pay. Upstate maintains a financial assistance program that complies with state law, he added.

Part way through his treatment, Farman was able to get on Medicaid. With the help of a community agency, he also applied for assistance under New York law to help pay for his medical care during the period he was uninsured. On Friday, he received a letter saying his application had been approved and his debts would be greatly reduced.

Such discounts should be taken up front, advocates say.

Congress needs to take a second look at the federal law, says University of Southern California health policy professor Glenn Melnick.

As written, the law leaves it up to hospitals to determine which uninsured people qualify for discounted bills, and that could create a whole new set of disparities.

"One hospital could say it applies to people at 100 percent of the poverty line, and another could say 200 percent," Melnick explained. He called the enforcement provisions were "very weak."

A California law could serve as a model, he said. It defines the patients who qualify for assistance as those who are uninsured or making at or below 350 percent of the federal poverty line ? $40,215 for an individual and $82,425 for a family of four. Those patients cannot be charged more than the hospital would receive from Medicare.

"This issue will not go away," said Melnick. "Even when the (Affordable Care Act) is fully implemented, there will be millions and millions of people without insurance."

___

Online:

Health care law: http://www.healthcare.gov

White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/healthreform/healthcare-overview

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/promise-price-cut-hospital-bills-limbo-121939649.html

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What Does 200 Calories Look Like?

The answer to the question of how much can you eat of different foods before you hit 200 calories varies, depending what you're consuming. Two hundred calories is a whole lot of apples, but less than half of a Big Mac. It's a plate full of broccoli, but more like a spoonful of peanut butter. But it's a lot easier to understand what that really means when you actually see the food in front of you in this video from ASAP Science.

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/KlDgO4OZ8P0/what-does-200-calories-look-like-560954147

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Obama leaves Kenya off itinerary for Africa trip

WASHINGTON (AP) ? When President Barack Obama arrives in Africa this week, there will be one notable omission from his travel itinerary: Kenya, the birthplace of his father and home to many of his relatives.

Concerns about Kenya's political situation have trumped Obama's family ties. Kenya's new president is facing charges of crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court, accused of orchestrating the violence that marred the country's 2007 election.

Ahead of Uhuru Kenyatta's victory earlier this year, a top Obama administration official warned Kenyans that their "choices have consequences" ? a remark that now appears prescient given the president's decision to skip a stop in his ancestral homeland.

"The optics of that, of a presidential trip, are not what he wants to be demonstrating right now," said Jennifer Cooke, Africa director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The president will instead visit Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania, all countries that fit more neatly into the democracy and good governance message he'll tout during his weeklong trip. Obama, along with first lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha, is scheduled to depart Washington Wednesday morning.

The White House did consider a visit to Kenya when they contemplated an African swing during the president's first term, before Kenyatta's election. That trip never happened, but Obama pledged that he would, in fact, visit Kenya before leaving office.

"I'm positive that before my service as president is completed I will visit Kenya again," he said in a 2010 interview with Kenya's state broadcaster.

White House officials say they respect the right of Kenyans to choose their own leaders. But deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said the U.S. also has "a commitment to accountability and justice."

"Given the fact that Kenya is in the aftermath of their election and the new government has come into place and is going to be reviewing these issues with the ICC and the international community, it just wasn't the best time for the president to travel to Kenya," Rhodes said.

Kenya's government has been muted in its response to the president's decision to leave the county off his itinerary.

"It's for the Americans to decide where Obama goes," spokesman Muthui Kariuki said. "There are 54 nations on the African continent and he's only visiting three, so I don't see the real big deal about not going to Kenya."

But Sam Ochieng, a political activitist who lives in Kibera, Nairobi's largest slum, said the U.S. president was sending a message about Kenya's political problems by putting democratic values ahead of his personal connections.

"It would be a shame for an American president to come to Kenya and shake dirty hands," Ochieng said.

By now, Obama's ties with Kenya are a well-known part of his unique family history. Barack Obama, Sr. was born in the western Kenyan village of Kogelo, moved to the U.S. to study, and met and married the president's mother in Hawaii. He left the family soon after his son was born.

Obama made his first trip to Kenya in 1988, after his father's death, and wrote extensively about the visit in his memoir "Dreams From My Father."

"My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances and grudges that I did not yet understand," he wrote.

The president visited Kenya two more times, most recently in 2006 as a freshman senator. He was greeted by cheering crowds in the capital of Nairobi and in Kogelo, where he spent time with his grandmother and visited his father's grave. He and wife Michelle Obama also publicly took HIV tests, part of their campaign at the time to reduce the stigma surrounding the virus.

But Obama's nationally televised speech criticizing the government for failing to curb corruption or instill trust in its people earned him a cold shoulder from Kenya's leadership. Kenya's presidential spokesman said at the time that Obama was ignorant of Kenyan politics and had yet to form an understanding of foreign policy.

Kenya is an important strategic partner for the U.S. in East Africa. But the recent election has complicated the relationship.

Johnnie Carson, who until April served as head of the State Department's Africa bureau, said in the lead-up to this year's election that "choices have consequences," a comment that was viewed as a warning against electing Kenyatta. His remarks were widely criticized as an inappropriate intrusion into a sovereign nation's elections.

Kenyatta, the son of the country's first president, has been charged by the ICC as an "indirect co-perpetrator" for the crimes of murder, deportation, rape, persecution and inhumane acts allegedly committed by his supporters in the aftermath of the 2007 elections. He insists he is innocent of any wrongdoing.

More than 1,000 people were killed in the ethnic violence that followed the flawed 2007 contest.

The ICC has pushed back the start of Kenyatta's trial until Nov. 12. Kenyan deputy president William Ruto will also face similar charges at the international court in September.

___

Associated Press writer Jason Straziuso in Nairobi contributed to this report.

___

Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-06-24-US-Obama-Africa/id-bf7abeaa7ab449d4bbef103b32088091

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Southwest flights delayed, canceled after computer glitch

(Reuters) - Southwest Airlines Co canceled or delayed about 250 flights overnight and early on Saturday due to a system-wide outage of computers used to dispatch aircraft, said a spokeswoman for the airline.

The Dallas-based airline said 43 overnight flights were canceled as a result of the outage, which began around 11 p.m. EDT on Friday (0300 GMT on Saturday) and lasted until about 3 a.m. on Saturday (0700 GMT), said Southwest Airlines spokeswoman Michelle Agnew.

Another 14 morning flights were canceled due to "flight crew availability and aircraft positioning" after the outage ended, she said.

Most of the cancellations affected routes in the western United States, Agnew said. Flights that were already airborne were not affected by the outage, while planes on the ground were held back, she said, adding that the cause of the computer failure was unknown.

Southwest, which operates some 3,400 flights daily, said in a statement on its website that its "systems are working at full capacity."

(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson; Editing by Scott Malone and Paul Simao)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/southwest-flights-delayed-canceled-computer-glitch-144202486.html

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Unexpected discovery of the ways cells move could boost understanding of complex diseases

June 23, 2013 ? A new discovery about how cells move inside the body may provide scientists with crucial information about disease mechanisms such as the spread of cancer or the constriction of airways caused by asthma. Led by researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), investigators found that epithelial cells -- the type that form a barrier between the inside and the outside of the body, such as skin cells -- move in a group, propelled by forces both from within and from nearby cells -- to fill any unfilled spaces they encounter.

The study appears June 23, 2013 in an advance online edition of Nature Materials.

"We were trying to understand the basic relationship between collective cellular motions and collective cellular forces, as might occur during cancer cell invasion, for example. But in doing so we stumbled onto a phenomenon that was totally unexpected," said senior author Jeffrey Fredberg, professor of bioengineering and physiology in the HSPH Department of Environmental Health and co-senior investigator of HSPH's Molecular and Integrative Cellular Dynamics lab.

Biologists, engineers, and physicists from HSPH and IBEC worked together to shed light on collective cellular motion because it plays a key role in functions such as wound healing, organ development, and tumor growth. Using a technique called monolayer stress microscopy -- which they invented themselves -- they measured the forces affecting a single layer of moving epithelial cells. They examined the cells' velocity and direction as well as traction -- how some cells either pull or push themselves and thus force collective movement.

As they expected, the researchers found that when an obstacle was placed in the path of an advancing cell layer -- in this case, a gel that provided no traction -- the cells moved around it, tightly hugging the sides of the gel as they passed. However, the researchers also found something surprising -- that the cells, in addition to moving forward, continued to pull themselves collectively back toward the gel, as if yearning to fill the unfilled space. The researchers dubbed this movement "kenotaxis," from the Greek words "keno" (vacuum) and "taxis" (arrangement), because it seemed the cells were attempting to fill a vacuum.

This new finding could help researchers better understand cell behavior -- and evaluate potential drugs to influence that behavior -- in a variety of complex diseases, such as cancer, asthma, cardiovascular disease, developmental abnormalities, and glaucoma. The finding could also help with tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, both of which rely on cell migration.

In carcinomas, for instance -- which represent 90% of all cancers and involve epithelial cells -- the new information on cell movement could improve understanding of how cancer cells migrate through the body. Asthma research could also get a boost, because scientists think migration of damaged epithelial cells in the lungs are involved in the airway narrowing caused by the disease.

"Kenotaxis is a property of the cellular collective, not the individual cell," said Jae Hun Kim, the study's first author. "It was amazing to us that the cellular collective can organize to pull itself systematically in one direction while moving systematically in an altogether different direction."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/z8YbWatzDnE/130623145100.htm

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