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Roxy is a Staffordshire bull terrier who suffers from diabetes and requires daily insulin shots. The Scottish SPCA wondered if she would ever be adopted into a permanent home. But Catherine and Graham Hendry didn’t consider the shots a burden because their 8-year-old twin daughters, Louise and Katie, also have type 1 diabetes and must take daily shots as well.
The dog and girls now all have their injections together.
The Hendry family had spotted a newspaper appeal about Roxy and decided to visit her at the charity’s animal rescue and rehoming centre at Drumoak, where she had been since July.
Mrs Hendry said: “We originally saw an appeal for Roxy in our local paper about six weeks ago but our staffy, Buzz, had recently passed away and we felt it was too soon.
“Then we saw another appeal a few weeks later and thought it must be fate. We decided to go and see her that day and just fell in love with her.
Miss C’s most recent Mental Floss article features 8 amazingly heroic dogs. My favorite story is the one about Belle, a beagle who has been trained to recognize when her diabetic owner, Kevin Weaver, should check his blood sugar levels. Even more impressive, she’s may have saved his life when he went into a seizure by biting down on the #9 on his cell phone, which called 911. Now that’s a good dog.
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Slate has an interactive map showing when and where cases of diabetes are soaring. At the link, you can adjust the year with a slider and mouseover the counties to find yours. My county had a diabetes rate of 11.4% in 2008. Link -via Gene Expression
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed what they call “Life Beans”. These are fluorescent beads that are implanted inside the human body. They glow with varying intensity subject to the glucose level of the patient:
Researchers tested it in the ears of a mouse, and watched as the ear fluoresced at different intensities depending on the mouse’s blood sugar.
The researchers think it would be possible to develop devices that manage diabetics’ blood sugar without them noticing it.
One difficulty with the current design is that the patient’s immune system attacks the beads and dims the lights.
Previously:
Contact Lenses That Change Color to Alert Diabetics of Glucose Levels
Diabetes-Monitoring Nanoparticle Tattoos
Usually dog owners frown upon dog biting people, but in this case, the dog bite may very well have saved his owner’s life:
Kiko apparently sensed an infection festering in his master’s right big toe — and chewed most of it off after Douthett passed out in a drunken stupor.
A trip to the hospital confirmed Douthett’s digit required amputation, and Kiko is being heralded by his owner for helping him realize he has been suffering from Type 2 diabetes.
Tom Rademacher of The Grand Rapids Press has the story: Link (Photo: Katy Batdorff / The Grand Rapids Press)
Jin Zhang, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, is developing contact lenses that change color with the user’s blood sugar level. This could allow diabetics to monitor themselves without frequent blood samples. The technology:
…uses extremely small nanoparticles embedded into the hydrogel lenses. These engineered nanoparticles react with glucose molecules found in tears, causing a chemical reaction that changes their colour.
Hard to imagine eating 10 sugar cubes, but when you guzzle down a can of soda, that’s what you’re putting in your body. See just how much sugar you’re destroying yourself with …
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by ebzzz2.
Diabetics monitoring their glucose levels may soon put the days of painful finger-sticks behind them. Instead, they can go through the one-time ordeal of getting inked with a nanoparticle tattoo. Heather Clark, a scientist at Draper Laboratories, has developed a nano ink particle that constantly samples glucose levels in the skin. Injected subcutaneously, the ink changes color in response to glucose content.
The nano ink particles are tiny, squishy spheres about 120 nanometers across. Inside the sphere are three parts: the glucose detecting molecule, a color-changing dye, and another molecule that mimics glucose.
…
If the molecules mostly latch onto glucose, the ink appears yellow. If glucose levels are low, the molecule latches onto the glucose mimic, turning the ink purple. A healthy level of glucose has a “funny orangey,” color, according to Clark. The sampling process repeats itself every few milliseconds.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by tempeh.
