It’s not all handsprings, cartwheels and round-offs. It’s also sprains, dislocations and fractures. Gymnastics, a new study finds, can take a heavy toll on its young practitioners’ bodies. “We found that gymnastics has one of the highest injury rates of all sports,” said one of the researchers of Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, US. The report was published in the journal Pediatrics. The researchers looked at injuries involving children 6 to 17 over a 16-year period. They found that most injuries occurred in the upper extremities, with the lower extremities and head and neck following right behind. Common culprits were handsprings, flips and cartwheels or round-offs. However painful they may look, splits did not cause a lot of casualties. One problem, the researchers said, is that unlike football players, for example, gymnasts are not taught to fall properly.

Tilting head backwards not a cure for nosebleed
While most people lean the head back and apply pressure to the nose to stop a nosebleed, medical experts say that the technique, widely considered proper first aid, can create complications by allowing blood into the oesophagus. It risks choking, and it can cause blood to travel to the stomach, possibly leading to irritation and vomiting. The American Academy of Family Physicians says the best treatment is to sit down, lean forward and keep your head above your heart, which lessens the bleeding. Leaning forward also helps drain the blood from the nose and keeps it from the oesophagus. A report in the British Medical Journal says you can stop the bleeding by using your thumb and index finger to squeeze the soft tissue just below the bridge of your nose for 5 -10 minutes. An ice pack placed across the bridge of the nose can also help. If all of this fails and the bleeding lasts for more than 20 minutes or the nosebleed is caused by a blow to the head, seek medical attention.

Memory training may turn up brainpower
A new study has found that it may be possible to train people to be more intelligent, increasing the brainpower they had at birth. Until now, it had been widely assumed that the kind of mental ability that allows us to solve new problems without having any relevant previous experience—what psychologists call fluid intelligence—is innate and cannot be taught (though people can raise their grades on tests of it by practicing). But in the new study, researchers describe a method for improving this skill, along with experiments to prove it works. The key was carefully structured training in working memory — the kind that allows memorisation of a telephone number just long enough to dial it. This type of memory is closely related to fluid intelligence and appears to rely on the same brain circuitry. The results, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were striking.

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