Shots - Health News Fri February 15, 2013 What Nuclear Bombs
Tell Us About Our Tendons Originally published on Tue February
19, 2013 6:57 am You really don't want to mess with your
Achilles tendons. Trust us, injury to these tendons can take
months to heal, and even then recovery is often not complete. A
big reason the Achilles is such a foot-dragger at getting better
is that the tendon tissue we have as adults is basically the
same as we had when we were teenagers. That finding was
published earlier this week in The FASEB Journal. But how the
researchers figured that out is every bit as interesting as the
result. The scientists used fallout from nuclear bomb tests as
biological tracers. Recall that during the Cold War, above-
ground nuclear bomb tests carried out by the United States and
the old Soviet Union resulted in a dramatic increase in
atmospheric levels of radioactive carbon-14. According to study
co-author Jan Heinemeier, director of the AMS 14C Dating Centre
at Denmark's Aarhus University, this "bom