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Eye bees, reversed innards, and the DNA van
Bees? Really?
This might be one of the weirdest thing we’ve ever seen. It’s definitely the weirdest thing this Taiwanese woman has ever seen, considering it’s BEES in her EYE.
One more time, for the people in the back: BEES. IN. HER. EYE.
The unfortunate 29-year-old, identified as He, reported to a hospital with sharp eye pain that she assumed was from dirt in her eyes after a vigorous afternoon of gardening near a grave site. Upon close inspection, the hospital’s head of ophthalmology noticed “something that looked like insect legs” floating in her eye and carefully pulled them out. (Pause to dry heave.)
The eyeball intruders turned out to be “sweat bees,” which nest in fallen trees and are attracted to human perspiration. The bees flew into He’s eye and started drinking from her tear duct, which was overproducing because of the immense pain she was in. Miraculously, He’s eyeball and sight are intact, and she’s expected to make a full recovery. The bees are fine, too.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, sweat bees live all over the world. We’re wearing goggles outside from now on.
Flip it and reverse it
Imagine you’re back in your med school days, happily dissecting another cadaver. You pop the body open and … every organ is in the wrong place??
That’s what some students at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) experienced recently. They discovered their body donor had a condition called situs inversus with levocardia – meaning, her heart was in the right place (hah), but all her abdominal organs were transposed right to left. The deceased woman was Rose Marie Bentley, who had died at the ripe old age of 99 without ever knowing she had this condition.
What makes her remarkable is barely anyone with this condition lives to adulthood. Professor Cam Walker of OHSU estimates the odds are 1 in 50 million, and there are only two other known cases of older patients who lived with situs inversus. After taking a look at their mother’s medical records, Bentley’s children noted that the surgeon who removed her appendix recorded its strange location, but no one raised any alarm.
Ms. Bentley lived a full and happy life, despite her organs being a mirror image of virtually everyone else’s anatomy. Some people are just special.
Turn that smile upside down
Service with a smile. Put on a happy face. Let a smile be your umbrella. Seems like good advice, but don’t let these cliches fool you. They are all examples of surface acting – hiding feelings of annoyance behind a mask of forced pleasantness – and they’re not really good for you. At least not if you work with the public and are required to be nice.
Investigators at Penn State University and the University at Buffalo looked at survey data from nurses, teachers, and people in food service and found that they were more likely to drink after work than those who did not interact with the public on a regular basis. “In these jobs, there’s also often money tied to showing positive emotions and holding back negative feelings. Money gives you a motivation to override your natural tendencies, but doing it all day can be wearing,” lead investigator Alicia Grandey said in a written statement.
Personality also plays a part. The risk of increased drinking is greater for surface actors who are more impulsive. And it is stronger still for impulsive people who “also worked in jobs where employees have one-time service encounters with customers, like a call center or coffee shop, rather than relationships, like health care or education,” the investigators said.
They suggested that businesses could give their employees more autonomy, but we’ve got another idea. There are lots of awards for real actors, so how about one for surface actors? They could call it the Oscar … Mayer. Best performance in serving a drive-thru customer who smoked a little too much marijuana. Creative achievement while helping a credit card applicant who still doesn’t understand after being told the same thing five times. Stunt coordination while helping a patient use a bedpan (the “turn the other cheek” award). Choreography to get out of bed every day to face the blank stares of sullen teenagers (the “Lord, give me strength” award). The “okay, we get the picture, you can stop with the awards” award.
That’s not the ice cream truck
Any story that starts with strange men in white, unmarked vans is never going to end well. Especially when that strange man is offering $20 in exchange for DNA samples.
However, this is the situation that Louisville, Ky., finds itself in. According to WAVE3 News, the aforementioned men have been cruising the poorer neighborhoods of the city for a couple of months, offering money to anyone who belongs to Passport Health. Cheek swabs are collected, no questions are asked, and the person walks out with 20 extra dollars.
This is already shady territory, but to make things worse, Passport Health has denied any affiliation. And when asked by one of their customers, the men reported being with Freedom Health. The number the customer was given? Of course it didn’t work.
The cherry on top of the shady cake? According to a professor from the University of Louisville interviewed by WAVE3, the swabs can be used to test for only certain kinds of cancer, and those tests aren’t even commercially available yet. What, you mean this was all a scam? We’re shocked! SHOCKED!
Bees? Really?
This might be one of the weirdest thing we’ve ever seen. It’s definitely the weirdest thing this Taiwanese woman has ever seen, considering it’s BEES in her EYE.
One more time, for the people in the back: BEES. IN. HER. EYE.
The unfortunate 29-year-old, identified as He, reported to a hospital with sharp eye pain that she assumed was from dirt in her eyes after a vigorous afternoon of gardening near a grave site. Upon close inspection, the hospital’s head of ophthalmology noticed “something that looked like insect legs” floating in her eye and carefully pulled them out. (Pause to dry heave.)
The eyeball intruders turned out to be “sweat bees,” which nest in fallen trees and are attracted to human perspiration. The bees flew into He’s eye and started drinking from her tear duct, which was overproducing because of the immense pain she was in. Miraculously, He’s eyeball and sight are intact, and she’s expected to make a full recovery. The bees are fine, too.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, sweat bees live all over the world. We’re wearing goggles outside from now on.
Flip it and reverse it
Imagine you’re back in your med school days, happily dissecting another cadaver. You pop the body open and … every organ is in the wrong place??
That’s what some students at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) experienced recently. They discovered their body donor had a condition called situs inversus with levocardia – meaning, her heart was in the right place (hah), but all her abdominal organs were transposed right to left. The deceased woman was Rose Marie Bentley, who had died at the ripe old age of 99 without ever knowing she had this condition.
What makes her remarkable is barely anyone with this condition lives to adulthood. Professor Cam Walker of OHSU estimates the odds are 1 in 50 million, and there are only two other known cases of older patients who lived with situs inversus. After taking a look at their mother’s medical records, Bentley’s children noted that the surgeon who removed her appendix recorded its strange location, but no one raised any alarm.
Ms. Bentley lived a full and happy life, despite her organs being a mirror image of virtually everyone else’s anatomy. Some people are just special.
Turn that smile upside down
Service with a smile. Put on a happy face. Let a smile be your umbrella. Seems like good advice, but don’t let these cliches fool you. They are all examples of surface acting – hiding feelings of annoyance behind a mask of forced pleasantness – and they’re not really good for you. At least not if you work with the public and are required to be nice.
Investigators at Penn State University and the University at Buffalo looked at survey data from nurses, teachers, and people in food service and found that they were more likely to drink after work than those who did not interact with the public on a regular basis. “In these jobs, there’s also often money tied to showing positive emotions and holding back negative feelings. Money gives you a motivation to override your natural tendencies, but doing it all day can be wearing,” lead investigator Alicia Grandey said in a written statement.
Personality also plays a part. The risk of increased drinking is greater for surface actors who are more impulsive. And it is stronger still for impulsive people who “also worked in jobs where employees have one-time service encounters with customers, like a call center or coffee shop, rather than relationships, like health care or education,” the investigators said.
They suggested that businesses could give their employees more autonomy, but we’ve got another idea. There are lots of awards for real actors, so how about one for surface actors? They could call it the Oscar … Mayer. Best performance in serving a drive-thru customer who smoked a little too much marijuana. Creative achievement while helping a credit card applicant who still doesn’t understand after being told the same thing five times. Stunt coordination while helping a patient use a bedpan (the “turn the other cheek” award). Choreography to get out of bed every day to face the blank stares of sullen teenagers (the “Lord, give me strength” award). The “okay, we get the picture, you can stop with the awards” award.
That’s not the ice cream truck
Any story that starts with strange men in white, unmarked vans is never going to end well. Especially when that strange man is offering $20 in exchange for DNA samples.
However, this is the situation that Louisville, Ky., finds itself in. According to WAVE3 News, the aforementioned men have been cruising the poorer neighborhoods of the city for a couple of months, offering money to anyone who belongs to Passport Health. Cheek swabs are collected, no questions are asked, and the person walks out with 20 extra dollars.
This is already shady territory, but to make things worse, Passport Health has denied any affiliation. And when asked by one of their customers, the men reported being with Freedom Health. The number the customer was given? Of course it didn’t work.
The cherry on top of the shady cake? According to a professor from the University of Louisville interviewed by WAVE3, the swabs can be used to test for only certain kinds of cancer, and those tests aren’t even commercially available yet. What, you mean this was all a scam? We’re shocked! SHOCKED!
Bees? Really?
This might be one of the weirdest thing we’ve ever seen. It’s definitely the weirdest thing this Taiwanese woman has ever seen, considering it’s BEES in her EYE.
One more time, for the people in the back: BEES. IN. HER. EYE.
The unfortunate 29-year-old, identified as He, reported to a hospital with sharp eye pain that she assumed was from dirt in her eyes after a vigorous afternoon of gardening near a grave site. Upon close inspection, the hospital’s head of ophthalmology noticed “something that looked like insect legs” floating in her eye and carefully pulled them out. (Pause to dry heave.)
The eyeball intruders turned out to be “sweat bees,” which nest in fallen trees and are attracted to human perspiration. The bees flew into He’s eye and started drinking from her tear duct, which was overproducing because of the immense pain she was in. Miraculously, He’s eyeball and sight are intact, and she’s expected to make a full recovery. The bees are fine, too.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, sweat bees live all over the world. We’re wearing goggles outside from now on.
Flip it and reverse it
Imagine you’re back in your med school days, happily dissecting another cadaver. You pop the body open and … every organ is in the wrong place??
That’s what some students at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) experienced recently. They discovered their body donor had a condition called situs inversus with levocardia – meaning, her heart was in the right place (hah), but all her abdominal organs were transposed right to left. The deceased woman was Rose Marie Bentley, who had died at the ripe old age of 99 without ever knowing she had this condition.
What makes her remarkable is barely anyone with this condition lives to adulthood. Professor Cam Walker of OHSU estimates the odds are 1 in 50 million, and there are only two other known cases of older patients who lived with situs inversus. After taking a look at their mother’s medical records, Bentley’s children noted that the surgeon who removed her appendix recorded its strange location, but no one raised any alarm.
Ms. Bentley lived a full and happy life, despite her organs being a mirror image of virtually everyone else’s anatomy. Some people are just special.
Turn that smile upside down
Service with a smile. Put on a happy face. Let a smile be your umbrella. Seems like good advice, but don’t let these cliches fool you. They are all examples of surface acting – hiding feelings of annoyance behind a mask of forced pleasantness – and they’re not really good for you. At least not if you work with the public and are required to be nice.
Investigators at Penn State University and the University at Buffalo looked at survey data from nurses, teachers, and people in food service and found that they were more likely to drink after work than those who did not interact with the public on a regular basis. “In these jobs, there’s also often money tied to showing positive emotions and holding back negative feelings. Money gives you a motivation to override your natural tendencies, but doing it all day can be wearing,” lead investigator Alicia Grandey said in a written statement.
Personality also plays a part. The risk of increased drinking is greater for surface actors who are more impulsive. And it is stronger still for impulsive people who “also worked in jobs where employees have one-time service encounters with customers, like a call center or coffee shop, rather than relationships, like health care or education,” the investigators said.
They suggested that businesses could give their employees more autonomy, but we’ve got another idea. There are lots of awards for real actors, so how about one for surface actors? They could call it the Oscar … Mayer. Best performance in serving a drive-thru customer who smoked a little too much marijuana. Creative achievement while helping a credit card applicant who still doesn’t understand after being told the same thing five times. Stunt coordination while helping a patient use a bedpan (the “turn the other cheek” award). Choreography to get out of bed every day to face the blank stares of sullen teenagers (the “Lord, give me strength” award). The “okay, we get the picture, you can stop with the awards” award.
That’s not the ice cream truck
Any story that starts with strange men in white, unmarked vans is never going to end well. Especially when that strange man is offering $20 in exchange for DNA samples.
However, this is the situation that Louisville, Ky., finds itself in. According to WAVE3 News, the aforementioned men have been cruising the poorer neighborhoods of the city for a couple of months, offering money to anyone who belongs to Passport Health. Cheek swabs are collected, no questions are asked, and the person walks out with 20 extra dollars.
This is already shady territory, but to make things worse, Passport Health has denied any affiliation. And when asked by one of their customers, the men reported being with Freedom Health. The number the customer was given? Of course it didn’t work.
The cherry on top of the shady cake? According to a professor from the University of Louisville interviewed by WAVE3, the swabs can be used to test for only certain kinds of cancer, and those tests aren’t even commercially available yet. What, you mean this was all a scam? We’re shocked! SHOCKED!
EHR parodies, hangover-free booze, and dubstep repellent
Epic tweets
Need a little break from seeing all your patients? Hop on Twitter for a few minutes – specifically, the Epic parody account.
A frustrated but hilarious physician somewhere on the East Coast created the account a month ago to brighten busy days and help other physicians connect through a shared hatred of Epic, the electronic health records system.
The account’s bio states: “My goal is to create confusion for doctors. I will not rest until doctors do nothing but click buttons. Eye contact is evil.” In continuing with this theme, the account dedicates many Tweets to decrying patient-doctor interaction and encouraging computer-doctor interaction instead. And it rails against the “shaming of data-entry clerks.”
If you, too, are frustrated with Epic or your own EHR system, submit them to @EPICEMRparody with the hashtag #EPICfail. Join the club.
Pour me another, bartender
All the beauty of alcohol without the soul-crushing hangover the next day? I’ll take two on the rocks, please.
For the last decade, visionary, scientist, and soon-to-be hero David Nutt, DM, has been working on a formula for synthetic alcohol that gets you nice and tipsy, but spares you the hangover. Dr. Nutt has created a compound he calls “alcosynth” that triggers a buzz but doesn’t activate the brain receptors that cause the symptoms of hangover.
Dr. Nutt is confident that his alcohol will hit liquor stores in just 5 years. As the director of neuropsychopharmacology at the Imperial College London and a wine bar owner, he knows a bit more than the average person about alcohol and brain receptors. He realized that the brain’s GABA receptors can be stimulated by alcohol and developed his product, Alcarelle, to simulate that stimulation without causing headaches, nausea, dizziness, and other hangover symptoms.
Dr. Nutt guards his process pretty tightly, however – the secret to hangover-free booze is as precious as a golden ticket to the Wonka factory. Everyone’s going to want to get their hands on it!
Don’t just do something, lie there
As the Trump administration tries to implement work requirements for food stamps and Medicaid, the Artificial Gravity Bed Rest Study offers another way to get paid for doing nothing.
This joint effort between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the German Space Agency will recreate outer space conditions right here on earth – in Cologne, Germany, to be exact – by having participants lie down for 60 days with their heads 6 degrees below their feet, causing fluids in the body to shift toward their heads and reproducing conditions experienced by astronauts in the absence of gravity.
Unsurprisingly, not just anyone will be considered: Participants have to be women aged 24-55 years with body mass indexes of 19-30 kg/m2 who speak German and don’t smoke. Test subjects have to bathe, eat (the project’s website mentions pancakes), and go to the toilet while lying down, and they will spend 30 minutes a day in the human centrifuge – that’s the artificial gravity part of the study – to counteract the effects of weightlessness. They also will receive an expense allowance of about $18,500.
So, you can earn almost 20 grand as you get waited on, stuffed with pancakes, and massaged while catching up on your reading and relaxing for 2 months. Hmm, we may have gotten this backwards with that work requirement remark. Sounds more like a trial membership into the “1%,” so be sure to keep track of your portfolios.
That’s why mosquitoes don’t go to clubs
There’s not a whole lot of positive things that can be said about mosquitoes, spreaders of such wonderful diseases such as malaria and Zika. But we’ll give them this: They have good taste in music.
Those musical standards were the subject of a study published in Acta Tropica, in which female mosquitoes were starved for 12 hours, introduced to a fresh hamster for an all-you-can-eat buffet and a single male mosquito for reproductive purposes, then subjected to either silence or some extremely loud dubstep music, courtesy of the artist Skrillex. The researchers’ goal was simple: Is loud music an “environmentally friendly” repellent alternative?
In a blow to the egos of dubstep fans everywhere, not only did the mosquitoes forced to listen to Skrillex take longer to start sucking blood from the hamster, they sucked out less blood and made fewer attempts to reproduce with the lone male mosquito. According to the researchers, the so-called music’s aggressive vibrations disrupts the mosquito’s ability to fly and synchronize wing beats.
This is really a good news/bad news situation here. Good news, we’ve found an easy way to drive off a very annoying insect. Bad news, we have to suffer through loud dubstep music. Personally, we’ll take the mosquitoes.
Epic tweets
Need a little break from seeing all your patients? Hop on Twitter for a few minutes – specifically, the Epic parody account.
A frustrated but hilarious physician somewhere on the East Coast created the account a month ago to brighten busy days and help other physicians connect through a shared hatred of Epic, the electronic health records system.
The account’s bio states: “My goal is to create confusion for doctors. I will not rest until doctors do nothing but click buttons. Eye contact is evil.” In continuing with this theme, the account dedicates many Tweets to decrying patient-doctor interaction and encouraging computer-doctor interaction instead. And it rails against the “shaming of data-entry clerks.”
If you, too, are frustrated with Epic or your own EHR system, submit them to @EPICEMRparody with the hashtag #EPICfail. Join the club.
Pour me another, bartender
All the beauty of alcohol without the soul-crushing hangover the next day? I’ll take two on the rocks, please.
For the last decade, visionary, scientist, and soon-to-be hero David Nutt, DM, has been working on a formula for synthetic alcohol that gets you nice and tipsy, but spares you the hangover. Dr. Nutt has created a compound he calls “alcosynth” that triggers a buzz but doesn’t activate the brain receptors that cause the symptoms of hangover.
Dr. Nutt is confident that his alcohol will hit liquor stores in just 5 years. As the director of neuropsychopharmacology at the Imperial College London and a wine bar owner, he knows a bit more than the average person about alcohol and brain receptors. He realized that the brain’s GABA receptors can be stimulated by alcohol and developed his product, Alcarelle, to simulate that stimulation without causing headaches, nausea, dizziness, and other hangover symptoms.
Dr. Nutt guards his process pretty tightly, however – the secret to hangover-free booze is as precious as a golden ticket to the Wonka factory. Everyone’s going to want to get their hands on it!
Don’t just do something, lie there
As the Trump administration tries to implement work requirements for food stamps and Medicaid, the Artificial Gravity Bed Rest Study offers another way to get paid for doing nothing.
This joint effort between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the German Space Agency will recreate outer space conditions right here on earth – in Cologne, Germany, to be exact – by having participants lie down for 60 days with their heads 6 degrees below their feet, causing fluids in the body to shift toward their heads and reproducing conditions experienced by astronauts in the absence of gravity.
Unsurprisingly, not just anyone will be considered: Participants have to be women aged 24-55 years with body mass indexes of 19-30 kg/m2 who speak German and don’t smoke. Test subjects have to bathe, eat (the project’s website mentions pancakes), and go to the toilet while lying down, and they will spend 30 minutes a day in the human centrifuge – that’s the artificial gravity part of the study – to counteract the effects of weightlessness. They also will receive an expense allowance of about $18,500.
So, you can earn almost 20 grand as you get waited on, stuffed with pancakes, and massaged while catching up on your reading and relaxing for 2 months. Hmm, we may have gotten this backwards with that work requirement remark. Sounds more like a trial membership into the “1%,” so be sure to keep track of your portfolios.
That’s why mosquitoes don’t go to clubs
There’s not a whole lot of positive things that can be said about mosquitoes, spreaders of such wonderful diseases such as malaria and Zika. But we’ll give them this: They have good taste in music.
Those musical standards were the subject of a study published in Acta Tropica, in which female mosquitoes were starved for 12 hours, introduced to a fresh hamster for an all-you-can-eat buffet and a single male mosquito for reproductive purposes, then subjected to either silence or some extremely loud dubstep music, courtesy of the artist Skrillex. The researchers’ goal was simple: Is loud music an “environmentally friendly” repellent alternative?
In a blow to the egos of dubstep fans everywhere, not only did the mosquitoes forced to listen to Skrillex take longer to start sucking blood from the hamster, they sucked out less blood and made fewer attempts to reproduce with the lone male mosquito. According to the researchers, the so-called music’s aggressive vibrations disrupts the mosquito’s ability to fly and synchronize wing beats.
This is really a good news/bad news situation here. Good news, we’ve found an easy way to drive off a very annoying insect. Bad news, we have to suffer through loud dubstep music. Personally, we’ll take the mosquitoes.
Epic tweets
Need a little break from seeing all your patients? Hop on Twitter for a few minutes – specifically, the Epic parody account.
A frustrated but hilarious physician somewhere on the East Coast created the account a month ago to brighten busy days and help other physicians connect through a shared hatred of Epic, the electronic health records system.
The account’s bio states: “My goal is to create confusion for doctors. I will not rest until doctors do nothing but click buttons. Eye contact is evil.” In continuing with this theme, the account dedicates many Tweets to decrying patient-doctor interaction and encouraging computer-doctor interaction instead. And it rails against the “shaming of data-entry clerks.”
If you, too, are frustrated with Epic or your own EHR system, submit them to @EPICEMRparody with the hashtag #EPICfail. Join the club.
Pour me another, bartender
All the beauty of alcohol without the soul-crushing hangover the next day? I’ll take two on the rocks, please.
For the last decade, visionary, scientist, and soon-to-be hero David Nutt, DM, has been working on a formula for synthetic alcohol that gets you nice and tipsy, but spares you the hangover. Dr. Nutt has created a compound he calls “alcosynth” that triggers a buzz but doesn’t activate the brain receptors that cause the symptoms of hangover.
Dr. Nutt is confident that his alcohol will hit liquor stores in just 5 years. As the director of neuropsychopharmacology at the Imperial College London and a wine bar owner, he knows a bit more than the average person about alcohol and brain receptors. He realized that the brain’s GABA receptors can be stimulated by alcohol and developed his product, Alcarelle, to simulate that stimulation without causing headaches, nausea, dizziness, and other hangover symptoms.
Dr. Nutt guards his process pretty tightly, however – the secret to hangover-free booze is as precious as a golden ticket to the Wonka factory. Everyone’s going to want to get their hands on it!
Don’t just do something, lie there
As the Trump administration tries to implement work requirements for food stamps and Medicaid, the Artificial Gravity Bed Rest Study offers another way to get paid for doing nothing.
This joint effort between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the German Space Agency will recreate outer space conditions right here on earth – in Cologne, Germany, to be exact – by having participants lie down for 60 days with their heads 6 degrees below their feet, causing fluids in the body to shift toward their heads and reproducing conditions experienced by astronauts in the absence of gravity.
Unsurprisingly, not just anyone will be considered: Participants have to be women aged 24-55 years with body mass indexes of 19-30 kg/m2 who speak German and don’t smoke. Test subjects have to bathe, eat (the project’s website mentions pancakes), and go to the toilet while lying down, and they will spend 30 minutes a day in the human centrifuge – that’s the artificial gravity part of the study – to counteract the effects of weightlessness. They also will receive an expense allowance of about $18,500.
So, you can earn almost 20 grand as you get waited on, stuffed with pancakes, and massaged while catching up on your reading and relaxing for 2 months. Hmm, we may have gotten this backwards with that work requirement remark. Sounds more like a trial membership into the “1%,” so be sure to keep track of your portfolios.
That’s why mosquitoes don’t go to clubs
There’s not a whole lot of positive things that can be said about mosquitoes, spreaders of such wonderful diseases such as malaria and Zika. But we’ll give them this: They have good taste in music.
Those musical standards were the subject of a study published in Acta Tropica, in which female mosquitoes were starved for 12 hours, introduced to a fresh hamster for an all-you-can-eat buffet and a single male mosquito for reproductive purposes, then subjected to either silence or some extremely loud dubstep music, courtesy of the artist Skrillex. The researchers’ goal was simple: Is loud music an “environmentally friendly” repellent alternative?
In a blow to the egos of dubstep fans everywhere, not only did the mosquitoes forced to listen to Skrillex take longer to start sucking blood from the hamster, they sucked out less blood and made fewer attempts to reproduce with the lone male mosquito. According to the researchers, the so-called music’s aggressive vibrations disrupts the mosquito’s ability to fly and synchronize wing beats.
This is really a good news/bad news situation here. Good news, we’ve found an easy way to drive off a very annoying insect. Bad news, we have to suffer through loud dubstep music. Personally, we’ll take the mosquitoes.
Pathogenic ball pits, zombie bacteria, and OTC beer
It’s the pits
Physical therapists sometimes use therapeutic ball pits to provide stimulation to pediatric patients with sensory impairments. However, anyone who’s ever been to a fast food joint or a Chuck E. Cheeses in the last 30 years knows that ball pits are not as innocent as they seem – instead of being simply a joyous sunken hole of fun, they are a prime breeding ground for all sorts of bacteria. And adhesive bandages. Why are there always bandages??
Researchers recently took a deep, disgusting dive into the underworld of clinical ball pits, which do not seem to be regulated by any governing body. There are no clinical guidelines from the Ball Pit Association of America on how or when to clean these cesspools of spheres. In fact, there’s no Ball Pit Association of America at all! Shocking.
Unsurprisingly (for any parent or person older than 14), the ball pits sampled were teeming with human and zoonotic-associated microorganisms. Researchers found that “bacterial colonization was found to be as high as thousands of cells per ball” (gag), exposing children to a lot of opportunity for infections. In case the diapers and bandages swimming in the McDonald’s ball pit didn’t turn you off them, this certainly should.
Zom-bacteria are coming
Special edition: Zombie Bacteria vs. The World. Recent research reveals that one type of bacteria, Bacillus subtilis, enters an oligotrophic state when nutrient starved, in which they are not fully dormant but verrrrrry slowly continue to grow and divide. Much like zombies verrrrry slowly continue to walk and eat flesh.
This research fundamentally changes the way we look at bacteria’s ability to survive. Previously, all bacteria were thought to go into a state of complete dormancy within a protective endospore. It appears that the zombie-like bacteria can awaken more easily from their oligotrophic state than bacteria using an endospore, which may shed light on how bacteria can escape antibiotic treatments. As if superbugs weren’t enough to deal with already.
An OTC beer keeps the doctor away
There’s plenty of evidence that a beer or two every now and again is good for your health. But the owner of the Seery Athlone Brewing Company in Addison, Ill., may have taken things too far.
While the reason of its closure just a few months after its grand opening in December 2018 is technically still a mystery, we feel fairly safe in speculating that it had something to do with the fact that brewery owner James Stephen was making his beer at the same location as his main business – a pharmaceutical company engaging in testing of over-the-counter drugs.
In fact, the Food and Drug Administration sent Mr. Stephen a letter in August 2018 warning him that, among numerous other transgressions, fermenting beer literally 10 feet away from where drugs were being tested is a health hazard, for both the beer and the drugs. The FDA ordered the brewery shut down, but the intrepid Mr. Stephen soldiered on, to obviously limited success.
Our advice to Mr. Stephen? Go all in with the pharmaceutical theme. Who wouldn’t want to drink an ibuprofen IPA, ranitidine red ale, loratadine lambic, pseudoephedrine porter, or diphenhydramine doppelbock? You’ll make millions!
A seat in the oval office
No, not that seat, and not the Oval Office. This is LOTME, after all, not Politico. The “seat” we’re talking about is a cardiovascular monitoring system, and “oval office” is just a euphemism for a toilet.
Here’s the deal: A company called Heart Health Intelligence (See? Intelligence is involved, so clearly we’re not talking about politics) has developed a toilet seat equipped “with an integrated electrocardiogram, ballistocardiogram , and photoplethysmogram … capable of clinical-grade measurements of systolic and diastolic blood pressure, stroke volume, and peripheral blood oxygenation.” Wait, ballistocardiogram? That sounds like something from that show House; it sounds too cool to pass up: “Chase, you idiot, why didn’t you do that ballistocardiogram I ordered?”
The idea is to prevent expensive readmissions by keeping track of patients with heart failure after they leave the hospital in a way that fits into their daily routine and ensures adherence.
It would cost about $200,000 to provide 150 heart failure patients with the toilet seats when they left the hospital, the company estimated, but the penalties from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for readmitting 150 patients come to $500,000 a year. Thus saving money by flushing it down the toilet.
So it looks like we were talking about politics after all. An intelligent toilet seat is like the Oval Office because, in both cases, the buck stops here.
It’s the pits
Physical therapists sometimes use therapeutic ball pits to provide stimulation to pediatric patients with sensory impairments. However, anyone who’s ever been to a fast food joint or a Chuck E. Cheeses in the last 30 years knows that ball pits are not as innocent as they seem – instead of being simply a joyous sunken hole of fun, they are a prime breeding ground for all sorts of bacteria. And adhesive bandages. Why are there always bandages??
Researchers recently took a deep, disgusting dive into the underworld of clinical ball pits, which do not seem to be regulated by any governing body. There are no clinical guidelines from the Ball Pit Association of America on how or when to clean these cesspools of spheres. In fact, there’s no Ball Pit Association of America at all! Shocking.
Unsurprisingly (for any parent or person older than 14), the ball pits sampled were teeming with human and zoonotic-associated microorganisms. Researchers found that “bacterial colonization was found to be as high as thousands of cells per ball” (gag), exposing children to a lot of opportunity for infections. In case the diapers and bandages swimming in the McDonald’s ball pit didn’t turn you off them, this certainly should.
Zom-bacteria are coming
Special edition: Zombie Bacteria vs. The World. Recent research reveals that one type of bacteria, Bacillus subtilis, enters an oligotrophic state when nutrient starved, in which they are not fully dormant but verrrrrry slowly continue to grow and divide. Much like zombies verrrrry slowly continue to walk and eat flesh.
This research fundamentally changes the way we look at bacteria’s ability to survive. Previously, all bacteria were thought to go into a state of complete dormancy within a protective endospore. It appears that the zombie-like bacteria can awaken more easily from their oligotrophic state than bacteria using an endospore, which may shed light on how bacteria can escape antibiotic treatments. As if superbugs weren’t enough to deal with already.
An OTC beer keeps the doctor away
There’s plenty of evidence that a beer or two every now and again is good for your health. But the owner of the Seery Athlone Brewing Company in Addison, Ill., may have taken things too far.
While the reason of its closure just a few months after its grand opening in December 2018 is technically still a mystery, we feel fairly safe in speculating that it had something to do with the fact that brewery owner James Stephen was making his beer at the same location as his main business – a pharmaceutical company engaging in testing of over-the-counter drugs.
In fact, the Food and Drug Administration sent Mr. Stephen a letter in August 2018 warning him that, among numerous other transgressions, fermenting beer literally 10 feet away from where drugs were being tested is a health hazard, for both the beer and the drugs. The FDA ordered the brewery shut down, but the intrepid Mr. Stephen soldiered on, to obviously limited success.
Our advice to Mr. Stephen? Go all in with the pharmaceutical theme. Who wouldn’t want to drink an ibuprofen IPA, ranitidine red ale, loratadine lambic, pseudoephedrine porter, or diphenhydramine doppelbock? You’ll make millions!
A seat in the oval office
No, not that seat, and not the Oval Office. This is LOTME, after all, not Politico. The “seat” we’re talking about is a cardiovascular monitoring system, and “oval office” is just a euphemism for a toilet.
Here’s the deal: A company called Heart Health Intelligence (See? Intelligence is involved, so clearly we’re not talking about politics) has developed a toilet seat equipped “with an integrated electrocardiogram, ballistocardiogram , and photoplethysmogram … capable of clinical-grade measurements of systolic and diastolic blood pressure, stroke volume, and peripheral blood oxygenation.” Wait, ballistocardiogram? That sounds like something from that show House; it sounds too cool to pass up: “Chase, you idiot, why didn’t you do that ballistocardiogram I ordered?”
The idea is to prevent expensive readmissions by keeping track of patients with heart failure after they leave the hospital in a way that fits into their daily routine and ensures adherence.
It would cost about $200,000 to provide 150 heart failure patients with the toilet seats when they left the hospital, the company estimated, but the penalties from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for readmitting 150 patients come to $500,000 a year. Thus saving money by flushing it down the toilet.
So it looks like we were talking about politics after all. An intelligent toilet seat is like the Oval Office because, in both cases, the buck stops here.
It’s the pits
Physical therapists sometimes use therapeutic ball pits to provide stimulation to pediatric patients with sensory impairments. However, anyone who’s ever been to a fast food joint or a Chuck E. Cheeses in the last 30 years knows that ball pits are not as innocent as they seem – instead of being simply a joyous sunken hole of fun, they are a prime breeding ground for all sorts of bacteria. And adhesive bandages. Why are there always bandages??
Researchers recently took a deep, disgusting dive into the underworld of clinical ball pits, which do not seem to be regulated by any governing body. There are no clinical guidelines from the Ball Pit Association of America on how or when to clean these cesspools of spheres. In fact, there’s no Ball Pit Association of America at all! Shocking.
Unsurprisingly (for any parent or person older than 14), the ball pits sampled were teeming with human and zoonotic-associated microorganisms. Researchers found that “bacterial colonization was found to be as high as thousands of cells per ball” (gag), exposing children to a lot of opportunity for infections. In case the diapers and bandages swimming in the McDonald’s ball pit didn’t turn you off them, this certainly should.
Zom-bacteria are coming
Special edition: Zombie Bacteria vs. The World. Recent research reveals that one type of bacteria, Bacillus subtilis, enters an oligotrophic state when nutrient starved, in which they are not fully dormant but verrrrrry slowly continue to grow and divide. Much like zombies verrrrry slowly continue to walk and eat flesh.
This research fundamentally changes the way we look at bacteria’s ability to survive. Previously, all bacteria were thought to go into a state of complete dormancy within a protective endospore. It appears that the zombie-like bacteria can awaken more easily from their oligotrophic state than bacteria using an endospore, which may shed light on how bacteria can escape antibiotic treatments. As if superbugs weren’t enough to deal with already.
An OTC beer keeps the doctor away
There’s plenty of evidence that a beer or two every now and again is good for your health. But the owner of the Seery Athlone Brewing Company in Addison, Ill., may have taken things too far.
While the reason of its closure just a few months after its grand opening in December 2018 is technically still a mystery, we feel fairly safe in speculating that it had something to do with the fact that brewery owner James Stephen was making his beer at the same location as his main business – a pharmaceutical company engaging in testing of over-the-counter drugs.
In fact, the Food and Drug Administration sent Mr. Stephen a letter in August 2018 warning him that, among numerous other transgressions, fermenting beer literally 10 feet away from where drugs were being tested is a health hazard, for both the beer and the drugs. The FDA ordered the brewery shut down, but the intrepid Mr. Stephen soldiered on, to obviously limited success.
Our advice to Mr. Stephen? Go all in with the pharmaceutical theme. Who wouldn’t want to drink an ibuprofen IPA, ranitidine red ale, loratadine lambic, pseudoephedrine porter, or diphenhydramine doppelbock? You’ll make millions!
A seat in the oval office
No, not that seat, and not the Oval Office. This is LOTME, after all, not Politico. The “seat” we’re talking about is a cardiovascular monitoring system, and “oval office” is just a euphemism for a toilet.
Here’s the deal: A company called Heart Health Intelligence (See? Intelligence is involved, so clearly we’re not talking about politics) has developed a toilet seat equipped “with an integrated electrocardiogram, ballistocardiogram , and photoplethysmogram … capable of clinical-grade measurements of systolic and diastolic blood pressure, stroke volume, and peripheral blood oxygenation.” Wait, ballistocardiogram? That sounds like something from that show House; it sounds too cool to pass up: “Chase, you idiot, why didn’t you do that ballistocardiogram I ordered?”
The idea is to prevent expensive readmissions by keeping track of patients with heart failure after they leave the hospital in a way that fits into their daily routine and ensures adherence.
It would cost about $200,000 to provide 150 heart failure patients with the toilet seats when they left the hospital, the company estimated, but the penalties from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for readmitting 150 patients come to $500,000 a year. Thus saving money by flushing it down the toilet.
So it looks like we were talking about politics after all. An intelligent toilet seat is like the Oval Office because, in both cases, the buck stops here.
Sleepless democracy, space herpes, and the F-bomb diet
Sleep: the key to democracy?
You might need to lie down for this one. Insufficient sleep could be affecting the very institutions and behaviors that keep society from crumbling.
Lack of sleep is proven to affect “private” behaviors, like working, but a new study has shown that exhaustion also has consequences on a national scale. Sleeping less negatively affects the “social behaviors that hold society and democracy together,” according to the study’s authors.
Willingness to vote, donate to charities, and sign petitions decreased in sleep-deprived participants. Although that last one is iffy – is anyone really willing to sign a petition, regardless of sleep intake? One thing to glean from this study is, if you’re holding a clipboard, let the most tired-looking people keep walking.
Perhaps we should start a petition to make the day before Election Day a national napping holiday.
I hear you knocking, but you can’t come in
LOTME takes you to the ends of the earth for this edition of Bacteria vs. the World. Let’s go to our correspondent, Danielle Kang, on the International Space Station. 
Hi, this is Briny Baird in Berlin, Germany. The space station’s extreme environment weakens astronauts’ immune systems, but it has the opposite effect on bacteria, as Elisabeth Grohmann, PhD, of Beuth University of Applied Sciences explains.
“The bacteria [astronauts] carry become hardier – developing thick protective coatings and resistance to antibiotics – and more vigorous, multiplying and metabolizing faster.”
This is, as scientists put it, bad. To prevent an on-board bacterial bacchanal, Dr. Grohmann and her associates covered a vital piece of ISS equipment, the toilet door, with a new coating containing “silver and ruthenium, conditioned by a vitamin derivative.” After 19 months in space, the coated section of the door had 80% fewer bacteria on it than an uncoated control surface.
With long-term missions to Mars being considered, it should be safer for astronauts and their toilet doors to … go where no one has gone before. Back to the studio.
The F-bomb diet
You might think vulgarities and Homo sapiens have been an inseparable pair since the first human bashed her thumb while chipping stones into spearheads to add meat to her diet. You’d probably be right – except for blue-tinged language built on the consonant foundations of the letters F and V.
New linguistics research finds that those $#%*! letters, like truckers and Marine gunnery sergeants, are relatively modern developments. As humans moved away from finger-harming hunting and gathering and toward finger-harming farming, they developed a taste for softer foods. And their speech picked up “labiodentals” such as F and V – which are sounds made when we touch our lower lips to our upper teeth. Half the world’s languages are now riddled with soft-food profanities, er, labiodentals.
Next on the linguists’ research list: Does the paleo diet lead to the dropping of fewer F-bombs?
Herpes! In space!
Viruses can never let bacteria have all the fun. Where there’s an immune system weakened by radiation and microgravity, rest assured, our old friend the herpes virus will be waiting for us.
Yes, it looks like frequent bathroom trips won’t be the only issue future Dr. McCoys will be treating. According to a study published in Frontiers in Microbiology, four of the eight herpes viruses were discovered in the saliva and urine of more than half of the hundred or so astronauts who had samples analyzed during spaceflight.
The good news is that only six astronauts actually had symptoms emerge, all of which were minor. The bad news is that the strength, frequency, and duration of viral shedding through urine and saliva increased as more time was spent in space. Also, only one of the herpes varieties found has a vaccine. The rest will just have to be treated as symptoms emerge.
We’ll just hope Captain Kirk doesn’t come down with a case of mononucleosis while fighting the Klingons. Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a miracle worker!
Sleep: the key to democracy?
You might need to lie down for this one. Insufficient sleep could be affecting the very institutions and behaviors that keep society from crumbling.
Lack of sleep is proven to affect “private” behaviors, like working, but a new study has shown that exhaustion also has consequences on a national scale. Sleeping less negatively affects the “social behaviors that hold society and democracy together,” according to the study’s authors.
Willingness to vote, donate to charities, and sign petitions decreased in sleep-deprived participants. Although that last one is iffy – is anyone really willing to sign a petition, regardless of sleep intake? One thing to glean from this study is, if you’re holding a clipboard, let the most tired-looking people keep walking.
Perhaps we should start a petition to make the day before Election Day a national napping holiday.
I hear you knocking, but you can’t come in
LOTME takes you to the ends of the earth for this edition of Bacteria vs. the World. Let’s go to our correspondent, Danielle Kang, on the International Space Station.
Hi, this is Briny Baird in Berlin, Germany. The space station’s extreme environment weakens astronauts’ immune systems, but it has the opposite effect on bacteria, as Elisabeth Grohmann, PhD, of Beuth University of Applied Sciences explains.
“The bacteria [astronauts] carry become hardier – developing thick protective coatings and resistance to antibiotics – and more vigorous, multiplying and metabolizing faster.”
This is, as scientists put it, bad. To prevent an on-board bacterial bacchanal, Dr. Grohmann and her associates covered a vital piece of ISS equipment, the toilet door, with a new coating containing “silver and ruthenium, conditioned by a vitamin derivative.” After 19 months in space, the coated section of the door had 80% fewer bacteria on it than an uncoated control surface.
With long-term missions to Mars being considered, it should be safer for astronauts and their toilet doors to … go where no one has gone before. Back to the studio.
The F-bomb diet
You might think vulgarities and Homo sapiens have been an inseparable pair since the first human bashed her thumb while chipping stones into spearheads to add meat to her diet. You’d probably be right – except for blue-tinged language built on the consonant foundations of the letters F and V.
New linguistics research finds that those $#%*! letters, like truckers and Marine gunnery sergeants, are relatively modern developments. As humans moved away from finger-harming hunting and gathering and toward finger-harming farming, they developed a taste for softer foods. And their speech picked up “labiodentals” such as F and V – which are sounds made when we touch our lower lips to our upper teeth. Half the world’s languages are now riddled with soft-food profanities, er, labiodentals.
Next on the linguists’ research list: Does the paleo diet lead to the dropping of fewer F-bombs?
Herpes! In space!
Viruses can never let bacteria have all the fun. Where there’s an immune system weakened by radiation and microgravity, rest assured, our old friend the herpes virus will be waiting for us.
Yes, it looks like frequent bathroom trips won’t be the only issue future Dr. McCoys will be treating. According to a study published in Frontiers in Microbiology, four of the eight herpes viruses were discovered in the saliva and urine of more than half of the hundred or so astronauts who had samples analyzed during spaceflight.
The good news is that only six astronauts actually had symptoms emerge, all of which were minor. The bad news is that the strength, frequency, and duration of viral shedding through urine and saliva increased as more time was spent in space. Also, only one of the herpes varieties found has a vaccine. The rest will just have to be treated as symptoms emerge.
We’ll just hope Captain Kirk doesn’t come down with a case of mononucleosis while fighting the Klingons. Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a miracle worker!
Sleep: the key to democracy?
You might need to lie down for this one. Insufficient sleep could be affecting the very institutions and behaviors that keep society from crumbling.
Lack of sleep is proven to affect “private” behaviors, like working, but a new study has shown that exhaustion also has consequences on a national scale. Sleeping less negatively affects the “social behaviors that hold society and democracy together,” according to the study’s authors.
Willingness to vote, donate to charities, and sign petitions decreased in sleep-deprived participants. Although that last one is iffy – is anyone really willing to sign a petition, regardless of sleep intake? One thing to glean from this study is, if you’re holding a clipboard, let the most tired-looking people keep walking.
Perhaps we should start a petition to make the day before Election Day a national napping holiday.
I hear you knocking, but you can’t come in
LOTME takes you to the ends of the earth for this edition of Bacteria vs. the World. Let’s go to our correspondent, Danielle Kang, on the International Space Station.
Hi, this is Briny Baird in Berlin, Germany. The space station’s extreme environment weakens astronauts’ immune systems, but it has the opposite effect on bacteria, as Elisabeth Grohmann, PhD, of Beuth University of Applied Sciences explains.
“The bacteria [astronauts] carry become hardier – developing thick protective coatings and resistance to antibiotics – and more vigorous, multiplying and metabolizing faster.”
This is, as scientists put it, bad. To prevent an on-board bacterial bacchanal, Dr. Grohmann and her associates covered a vital piece of ISS equipment, the toilet door, with a new coating containing “silver and ruthenium, conditioned by a vitamin derivative.” After 19 months in space, the coated section of the door had 80% fewer bacteria on it than an uncoated control surface.
With long-term missions to Mars being considered, it should be safer for astronauts and their toilet doors to … go where no one has gone before. Back to the studio.
The F-bomb diet
You might think vulgarities and Homo sapiens have been an inseparable pair since the first human bashed her thumb while chipping stones into spearheads to add meat to her diet. You’d probably be right – except for blue-tinged language built on the consonant foundations of the letters F and V.
New linguistics research finds that those $#%*! letters, like truckers and Marine gunnery sergeants, are relatively modern developments. As humans moved away from finger-harming hunting and gathering and toward finger-harming farming, they developed a taste for softer foods. And their speech picked up “labiodentals” such as F and V – which are sounds made when we touch our lower lips to our upper teeth. Half the world’s languages are now riddled with soft-food profanities, er, labiodentals.
Next on the linguists’ research list: Does the paleo diet lead to the dropping of fewer F-bombs?
Herpes! In space!
Viruses can never let bacteria have all the fun. Where there’s an immune system weakened by radiation and microgravity, rest assured, our old friend the herpes virus will be waiting for us.
Yes, it looks like frequent bathroom trips won’t be the only issue future Dr. McCoys will be treating. According to a study published in Frontiers in Microbiology, four of the eight herpes viruses were discovered in the saliva and urine of more than half of the hundred or so astronauts who had samples analyzed during spaceflight.
The good news is that only six astronauts actually had symptoms emerge, all of which were minor. The bad news is that the strength, frequency, and duration of viral shedding through urine and saliva increased as more time was spent in space. Also, only one of the herpes varieties found has a vaccine. The rest will just have to be treated as symptoms emerge.
We’ll just hope Captain Kirk doesn’t come down with a case of mononucleosis while fighting the Klingons. Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a miracle worker!
Friendly gut bugs, MCI-battling mushrooms, and remembering to forget
Friend or foe, how do we know?
That’s the question immune cells ask all the time, especially about gut bacteria. A study published March 7 seeks to explain how immune systems can distinguish between happy-go-lucky gut microbes and deadly pathogens. Turns out, the friendly microbes simply high five!
Well, not really. But they do have a hook-like arm, called a holdfast, which latches onto the gut lining. The holdfast is lined with vesicles that carry antigens into the gut. While antigens normally cause immune cells to attack, something about these antigens are telling T cells to hold their fire.
The authors of the study hypothesized that the packaging of the antigens – the vesicles – might be the reason for the friendliness between microbes and T cells. It’s like the immune system expects a cannonball, but is pleasantly surprised by an Amazon Prime package full of goodies showing up on their doorstep instead. Yay for presents!
Don’t skimp on the ’shrooms
While you’re piling onions onto your plate to reduce cancer and cheese for your heart, make sure you add mushrooms for extra brain power. Researchers conducting a 6-year study in Singapore observed cognitive decline in 600 Chinese people aged at least 60 years, and they found that those who eat more than two portions of cooked mushrooms per week have up to 50% reduced odds of mild cognitive impairment.
Researchers here at the LOTME Lab have harnessed the power of these food studies to determine that a Philly cheesesteak with mushrooms and onions is the healthiest meal out there. Chow down!
As far as we know, all the mushrooms were standard edible fungi, and none were magic mushrooms (although, that might help, too; try that on your own time). Researchers believe that the compound ergothioneine, an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory that cannot be synthesized by humans, might be reason for the reduced risk of mild cognitive impairment Maybe it’s time to add a cup of cooked shiitake mushrooms to your morning routine.
Fuggedaboutit!
We all have unwanted memories that we’d rather forget about. An embarrassing incident, a painful experience – everyone has moments they’d rather not think about. So, the question is: How do you get rid of these bad memories?
The obvious solution is to stop thinking about it. But if you’re a regular reader of Livin’ on the MDedge, you can probably guess that the answer isn’t that simple.
And, in fact, it isn’t! A group of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, has performed a study on intentional forgetting, and they found that the best way to forget something is ... to think about it. Study subjects were shown a series of images and told to either remember or forget those images while their ventral temporal cortex was monitored for activity. Not only were participants successfully able to forget images by thinking about it, but activity in the brain was higher when forgetting than while remembering.
Obviously, this research would be helpful for anyone dealing with trauma, and we hope doctors who have to treat such patients keep it in mind. Just don’t think about it too much, or you’ll forget about it.
The Golden Lobbyist
If you need health care in your neighborhood
Who you gonna call? Jack Nicklaus!
You need 20 mill to make it good
Who you gonna call? Jack Nicklaus!
Health care in general didn’t do very well in President Trump’s 2020 budget proposal; Medicare, Medicaid, and the National Cancer Institute were all targeted for cuts. But it did include one particular $20-million initiative for a mobile children’s hospital.
Politico reports that the nation’s golfer in chief “personally directed the Department of Health and Human Services to earmark the funds” after playing a couple of rounds with the Golden Bear himself, Jack Nicklaus. The mobile unit would be part of the Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami. The golf legend turned lobbyist also had meetings off the course with HHS Secretary Alex Azar and then-OMB Director Mick Mulvaney.
Are health care ideas running through your head?
Who you gonna call? Jack Nicklaus!
He’ll golf with the prez, and get your bread
Who you gonna call? Jack Nicklaus!
He ain’t afraid of no tweets
Friend or foe, how do we know?
That’s the question immune cells ask all the time, especially about gut bacteria. A study published March 7 seeks to explain how immune systems can distinguish between happy-go-lucky gut microbes and deadly pathogens. Turns out, the friendly microbes simply high five!
Well, not really. But they do have a hook-like arm, called a holdfast, which latches onto the gut lining. The holdfast is lined with vesicles that carry antigens into the gut. While antigens normally cause immune cells to attack, something about these antigens are telling T cells to hold their fire.
The authors of the study hypothesized that the packaging of the antigens – the vesicles – might be the reason for the friendliness between microbes and T cells. It’s like the immune system expects a cannonball, but is pleasantly surprised by an Amazon Prime package full of goodies showing up on their doorstep instead. Yay for presents!
Don’t skimp on the ’shrooms
While you’re piling onions onto your plate to reduce cancer and cheese for your heart, make sure you add mushrooms for extra brain power. Researchers conducting a 6-year study in Singapore observed cognitive decline in 600 Chinese people aged at least 60 years, and they found that those who eat more than two portions of cooked mushrooms per week have up to 50% reduced odds of mild cognitive impairment.
Researchers here at the LOTME Lab have harnessed the power of these food studies to determine that a Philly cheesesteak with mushrooms and onions is the healthiest meal out there. Chow down!
As far as we know, all the mushrooms were standard edible fungi, and none were magic mushrooms (although, that might help, too; try that on your own time). Researchers believe that the compound ergothioneine, an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory that cannot be synthesized by humans, might be reason for the reduced risk of mild cognitive impairment Maybe it’s time to add a cup of cooked shiitake mushrooms to your morning routine.
Fuggedaboutit!
We all have unwanted memories that we’d rather forget about. An embarrassing incident, a painful experience – everyone has moments they’d rather not think about. So, the question is: How do you get rid of these bad memories?
The obvious solution is to stop thinking about it. But if you’re a regular reader of Livin’ on the MDedge, you can probably guess that the answer isn’t that simple.
And, in fact, it isn’t! A group of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, has performed a study on intentional forgetting, and they found that the best way to forget something is ... to think about it. Study subjects were shown a series of images and told to either remember or forget those images while their ventral temporal cortex was monitored for activity. Not only were participants successfully able to forget images by thinking about it, but activity in the brain was higher when forgetting than while remembering.
Obviously, this research would be helpful for anyone dealing with trauma, and we hope doctors who have to treat such patients keep it in mind. Just don’t think about it too much, or you’ll forget about it.
The Golden Lobbyist
If you need health care in your neighborhood
Who you gonna call? Jack Nicklaus!
You need 20 mill to make it good
Who you gonna call? Jack Nicklaus!
Health care in general didn’t do very well in President Trump’s 2020 budget proposal; Medicare, Medicaid, and the National Cancer Institute were all targeted for cuts. But it did include one particular $20-million initiative for a mobile children’s hospital.
Politico reports that the nation’s golfer in chief “personally directed the Department of Health and Human Services to earmark the funds” after playing a couple of rounds with the Golden Bear himself, Jack Nicklaus. The mobile unit would be part of the Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami. The golf legend turned lobbyist also had meetings off the course with HHS Secretary Alex Azar and then-OMB Director Mick Mulvaney.
Are health care ideas running through your head?
Who you gonna call? Jack Nicklaus!
He’ll golf with the prez, and get your bread
Who you gonna call? Jack Nicklaus!
He ain’t afraid of no tweets
Friend or foe, how do we know?
That’s the question immune cells ask all the time, especially about gut bacteria. A study published March 7 seeks to explain how immune systems can distinguish between happy-go-lucky gut microbes and deadly pathogens. Turns out, the friendly microbes simply high five!
Well, not really. But they do have a hook-like arm, called a holdfast, which latches onto the gut lining. The holdfast is lined with vesicles that carry antigens into the gut. While antigens normally cause immune cells to attack, something about these antigens are telling T cells to hold their fire.
The authors of the study hypothesized that the packaging of the antigens – the vesicles – might be the reason for the friendliness between microbes and T cells. It’s like the immune system expects a cannonball, but is pleasantly surprised by an Amazon Prime package full of goodies showing up on their doorstep instead. Yay for presents!
Don’t skimp on the ’shrooms
While you’re piling onions onto your plate to reduce cancer and cheese for your heart, make sure you add mushrooms for extra brain power. Researchers conducting a 6-year study in Singapore observed cognitive decline in 600 Chinese people aged at least 60 years, and they found that those who eat more than two portions of cooked mushrooms per week have up to 50% reduced odds of mild cognitive impairment.
Researchers here at the LOTME Lab have harnessed the power of these food studies to determine that a Philly cheesesteak with mushrooms and onions is the healthiest meal out there. Chow down!
As far as we know, all the mushrooms were standard edible fungi, and none were magic mushrooms (although, that might help, too; try that on your own time). Researchers believe that the compound ergothioneine, an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory that cannot be synthesized by humans, might be reason for the reduced risk of mild cognitive impairment Maybe it’s time to add a cup of cooked shiitake mushrooms to your morning routine.
Fuggedaboutit!
We all have unwanted memories that we’d rather forget about. An embarrassing incident, a painful experience – everyone has moments they’d rather not think about. So, the question is: How do you get rid of these bad memories?
The obvious solution is to stop thinking about it. But if you’re a regular reader of Livin’ on the MDedge, you can probably guess that the answer isn’t that simple.
And, in fact, it isn’t! A group of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, has performed a study on intentional forgetting, and they found that the best way to forget something is ... to think about it. Study subjects were shown a series of images and told to either remember or forget those images while their ventral temporal cortex was monitored for activity. Not only were participants successfully able to forget images by thinking about it, but activity in the brain was higher when forgetting than while remembering.
Obviously, this research would be helpful for anyone dealing with trauma, and we hope doctors who have to treat such patients keep it in mind. Just don’t think about it too much, or you’ll forget about it.
The Golden Lobbyist
If you need health care in your neighborhood
Who you gonna call? Jack Nicklaus!
You need 20 mill to make it good
Who you gonna call? Jack Nicklaus!
Health care in general didn’t do very well in President Trump’s 2020 budget proposal; Medicare, Medicaid, and the National Cancer Institute were all targeted for cuts. But it did include one particular $20-million initiative for a mobile children’s hospital.
Politico reports that the nation’s golfer in chief “personally directed the Department of Health and Human Services to earmark the funds” after playing a couple of rounds with the Golden Bear himself, Jack Nicklaus. The mobile unit would be part of the Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami. The golf legend turned lobbyist also had meetings off the course with HHS Secretary Alex Azar and then-OMB Director Mick Mulvaney.
Are health care ideas running through your head?
Who you gonna call? Jack Nicklaus!
He’ll golf with the prez, and get your bread
Who you gonna call? Jack Nicklaus!
He ain’t afraid of no tweets
Poppy-seeking parrots, harmonious mice, and feline-fueled hospital bills
Polly want another hit?
Once again, the animals are getting high.
Parrots in India are giving opium farmers a huge and expensive headache. The birds have become addicted to the poppy crop and are taking a huge bite out of the seasonal yields. According to an opium specialist, the birds get a jolt of instant energy from the poppy flower, similar to drinking a cup of coffee. No wonder the birds keep coming back for more.
This roving (flying?) gang of parrot menaces are feeding 30-40 times a day on the plants. Farmers have tried in vain to use firecrackers to scare off the birds, but nothing will stop Polly from getting her next fix. Opium dens might be long gone, but opium nests might be the next big thing.
Sing your little mouse heart out
In addition to being a big star on American Idol: Rodent Edition, the Alston’s singing mouse could also be a key player in understanding how mammalian brains control conversations.
These musical mice, native to Central America, do something unique: They take turns singing, rather than all belting it out at once. Researchers at New York University are using these mouse powerhouses as a model to study how conversation is regulated.
Unsurprisingly, this superstar is reportedly the mouse version of Mariah Carey, requiring a very specific environment: a palatial terrarium, a highly specialized diet, a microphone-shaped swimming pool, no brown M&Ms … you get the picture.
Researchers believe the demands are worth it, however. They’ve discovered that the mice time their songs very precisely to avoid any overlap with a singing neighbor. This could lead to insight on how humans delay conversation in order to not talk over one another (except for that one annoying coworker – you know who you are).
Reason No. 48,512 to hate cats
It really is true that no good deed goes unpunished. Jeannette Parker was nice to a cat, and she ended up with a hospital bill of $48,512.
We will elaborate. Ms. Parker, a wildlife biologist in Florida, offered a stray kitten some tuna and got bitten in the process. (Reason No. 48,513: Cats will bite the hand that feeds them.) There had been rabies warnings recently and the bite did break the skin, so she decided to go to the emergency department at Mariners Hospital in Tavernier, Fla., according to Kaiser Health News. She was there 2 hours and never spoke with a physician, but she did get the first in a series of rabies shots and 12 mL of rabies immune globulin.
The next thing she received from the hospital was a bill for – you guessed it – $48,512, of which $46,422 was for the immune globulin. “My funeral would have been cheaper,” she told Kaiser.
Her husband’s insurance covered most of the bill, but Ms. Parker ended up paying the rest of her deductible and 10% of the charges accepted by her insurer, almost $4,200.
All because she tried to help a cat. Way to go, cat.
And the best doctor award goes to ...
Normally, it requires a lot of time and money to become a respected physician. Medical school, residencies – it’s tough just becoming a doctor, let alone reaching the top of your field.
However, if you’re a reporter at ProPublica who specializes in health care, you can receive the prestigious Top Doctor award for just $289 – or only $99 if you act right now. For your money, you get a customized plaque made of either cherry wood with gold trim or black with chrome trim. That’s an offer too good to pass up.
A reasonable question to ask at this point would probably be, Why is a reporter receiving an award presumably meant for an actual doctor? Well, according to the company selling the award, the reporter’s peers had nominated him and his patients had given him stellar reviews. He was without a doubt one of America’s Top Doctors. His lack of medical degree was absolutely not a problem.
Okay, the award is probably a scam. But we’re also health care reporters here at Livin’ on the MDedge, so if the Top Doctor people are reading, we’ll have the cherry wood with gold trim.
Polly want another hit?
Once again, the animals are getting high.
Parrots in India are giving opium farmers a huge and expensive headache. The birds have become addicted to the poppy crop and are taking a huge bite out of the seasonal yields. According to an opium specialist, the birds get a jolt of instant energy from the poppy flower, similar to drinking a cup of coffee. No wonder the birds keep coming back for more.
This roving (flying?) gang of parrot menaces are feeding 30-40 times a day on the plants. Farmers have tried in vain to use firecrackers to scare off the birds, but nothing will stop Polly from getting her next fix. Opium dens might be long gone, but opium nests might be the next big thing.
Sing your little mouse heart out
In addition to being a big star on American Idol: Rodent Edition, the Alston’s singing mouse could also be a key player in understanding how mammalian brains control conversations.
These musical mice, native to Central America, do something unique: They take turns singing, rather than all belting it out at once. Researchers at New York University are using these mouse powerhouses as a model to study how conversation is regulated.
Unsurprisingly, this superstar is reportedly the mouse version of Mariah Carey, requiring a very specific environment: a palatial terrarium, a highly specialized diet, a microphone-shaped swimming pool, no brown M&Ms … you get the picture.
Researchers believe the demands are worth it, however. They’ve discovered that the mice time their songs very precisely to avoid any overlap with a singing neighbor. This could lead to insight on how humans delay conversation in order to not talk over one another (except for that one annoying coworker – you know who you are).
Reason No. 48,512 to hate cats
It really is true that no good deed goes unpunished. Jeannette Parker was nice to a cat, and she ended up with a hospital bill of $48,512.
We will elaborate. Ms. Parker, a wildlife biologist in Florida, offered a stray kitten some tuna and got bitten in the process. (Reason No. 48,513: Cats will bite the hand that feeds them.) There had been rabies warnings recently and the bite did break the skin, so she decided to go to the emergency department at Mariners Hospital in Tavernier, Fla., according to Kaiser Health News. She was there 2 hours and never spoke with a physician, but she did get the first in a series of rabies shots and 12 mL of rabies immune globulin.
The next thing she received from the hospital was a bill for – you guessed it – $48,512, of which $46,422 was for the immune globulin. “My funeral would have been cheaper,” she told Kaiser.
Her husband’s insurance covered most of the bill, but Ms. Parker ended up paying the rest of her deductible and 10% of the charges accepted by her insurer, almost $4,200.
All because she tried to help a cat. Way to go, cat.
And the best doctor award goes to ...
Normally, it requires a lot of time and money to become a respected physician. Medical school, residencies – it’s tough just becoming a doctor, let alone reaching the top of your field.
However, if you’re a reporter at ProPublica who specializes in health care, you can receive the prestigious Top Doctor award for just $289 – or only $99 if you act right now. For your money, you get a customized plaque made of either cherry wood with gold trim or black with chrome trim. That’s an offer too good to pass up.
A reasonable question to ask at this point would probably be, Why is a reporter receiving an award presumably meant for an actual doctor? Well, according to the company selling the award, the reporter’s peers had nominated him and his patients had given him stellar reviews. He was without a doubt one of America’s Top Doctors. His lack of medical degree was absolutely not a problem.
Okay, the award is probably a scam. But we’re also health care reporters here at Livin’ on the MDedge, so if the Top Doctor people are reading, we’ll have the cherry wood with gold trim.
Polly want another hit?
Once again, the animals are getting high.
Parrots in India are giving opium farmers a huge and expensive headache. The birds have become addicted to the poppy crop and are taking a huge bite out of the seasonal yields. According to an opium specialist, the birds get a jolt of instant energy from the poppy flower, similar to drinking a cup of coffee. No wonder the birds keep coming back for more.
This roving (flying?) gang of parrot menaces are feeding 30-40 times a day on the plants. Farmers have tried in vain to use firecrackers to scare off the birds, but nothing will stop Polly from getting her next fix. Opium dens might be long gone, but opium nests might be the next big thing.
Sing your little mouse heart out
In addition to being a big star on American Idol: Rodent Edition, the Alston’s singing mouse could also be a key player in understanding how mammalian brains control conversations.
These musical mice, native to Central America, do something unique: They take turns singing, rather than all belting it out at once. Researchers at New York University are using these mouse powerhouses as a model to study how conversation is regulated.
Unsurprisingly, this superstar is reportedly the mouse version of Mariah Carey, requiring a very specific environment: a palatial terrarium, a highly specialized diet, a microphone-shaped swimming pool, no brown M&Ms … you get the picture.
Researchers believe the demands are worth it, however. They’ve discovered that the mice time their songs very precisely to avoid any overlap with a singing neighbor. This could lead to insight on how humans delay conversation in order to not talk over one another (except for that one annoying coworker – you know who you are).
Reason No. 48,512 to hate cats
It really is true that no good deed goes unpunished. Jeannette Parker was nice to a cat, and she ended up with a hospital bill of $48,512.
We will elaborate. Ms. Parker, a wildlife biologist in Florida, offered a stray kitten some tuna and got bitten in the process. (Reason No. 48,513: Cats will bite the hand that feeds them.) There had been rabies warnings recently and the bite did break the skin, so she decided to go to the emergency department at Mariners Hospital in Tavernier, Fla., according to Kaiser Health News. She was there 2 hours and never spoke with a physician, but she did get the first in a series of rabies shots and 12 mL of rabies immune globulin.
The next thing she received from the hospital was a bill for – you guessed it – $48,512, of which $46,422 was for the immune globulin. “My funeral would have been cheaper,” she told Kaiser.
Her husband’s insurance covered most of the bill, but Ms. Parker ended up paying the rest of her deductible and 10% of the charges accepted by her insurer, almost $4,200.
All because she tried to help a cat. Way to go, cat.
And the best doctor award goes to ...
Normally, it requires a lot of time and money to become a respected physician. Medical school, residencies – it’s tough just becoming a doctor, let alone reaching the top of your field.
However, if you’re a reporter at ProPublica who specializes in health care, you can receive the prestigious Top Doctor award for just $289 – or only $99 if you act right now. For your money, you get a customized plaque made of either cherry wood with gold trim or black with chrome trim. That’s an offer too good to pass up.
A reasonable question to ask at this point would probably be, Why is a reporter receiving an award presumably meant for an actual doctor? Well, according to the company selling the award, the reporter’s peers had nominated him and his patients had given him stellar reviews. He was without a doubt one of America’s Top Doctors. His lack of medical degree was absolutely not a problem.
Okay, the award is probably a scam. But we’re also health care reporters here at Livin’ on the MDedge, so if the Top Doctor people are reading, we’ll have the cherry wood with gold trim.
Cancer-battling breath, Zombie Bambi, and hops as health food
Does my breath smell like reduced cancer risk?
Cancer prevention just got a whole lot more ... fragrant. Allium vegetables – garlic, onions, leeks, chives, and shallots – have been found to decrease the risk of colorectal cancer (CRC), according to a Chinese study published last year. Very good news for Italians, but it looks like the risk of CRC in the vampire population might continue to rise.
The study authors reported that high allium intake correlated with lower CRC risk in both men and women, in the northeast Chinese population sampled. Bioactive compounds in these vegetables have anticarcinogenic properties, and researchers found that eating at least 35 pounds of allium vegetables per year could reduce cancer risk.
Unclear if this study was secretly funded by Big Onion, but as fans of delicious and anticancer flavor, we here at LOTME support these findings. However, we strongly advise against going the Tony Abbott route of chomping into whole onions.
An IPA a day keeps the doctor away
After you’re finished eating your annual 35 pounds of garlic and onions (sure, do it all in 1 day if you want), you might be a little thirsty. And we’ve got good news for you – have a brewski, it’s good for ya! Turns out, hops might have some health benefits, so drink up.
Hops contain a class of compound called isohumulones, which gives them that bitter taste. There have been multiple studies showing the metabolic effects of isohumulones, including cell inflammation suppression, reduced weight gain, reduced hyperglycemia, and increased glucose tolerance.
These isohumulones (try typing that 10 times in a row) interact with the bitter taste receptors in the gut, and researchers are hopeful that this could lead to isohumulone-esque drugs to treat metabolic disorders. In the meantime, maybe just chug a few IPAs a day.
My kingdom for a helmet
Most people like to root for the underdog. You know, the whole David vs. Goliath thing, the little guy who goes against overwhelming odds to take on some form of the Big Establishment.
But what if the little guy happens to be a fairly normal-sized lacrosse player with a very large head?
Alex Chu, a freshman at Division III Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., is just such a guy. “My head is wide,” he told WJAR TV. He wants to play goalie for the school’s lacrosse team, but he can’t because no current helmet will fit on the 25-inch-circumference head that sits atop his 6-foot-tall, 265-pound body.
He’s up against Big Sports Equipment in the form of Cascade-Maverik and Warrior, the two major manufacturers of lacrosse helmets, which won’t build him a custom helmet. It would be too expensive, they say – but the Boston Globe reported that there is a lacrosse player at a Division I school who wears a very large helmet “that was produced after [his] coaches and Cascade ‘huddled up.’ ”
We wish Mr. Chu well, and perhaps one day he will be mentioned with such large-skulled high achievers as Jay Leno, LeBron James, Jennifer Garner, Tyrannosaurus rex, Rihanna, Napoleon Bonaparte, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Simon Cowell.
We’ll just have the salad
Zombies, beware: You might want to eat us, but now, we can eat you.
Okay, “zombie” deer aren’t actually zombies, but they are infected with something almost as terrifying. Chronic wasting disease is a prion disorder similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, and has been found in deer across 24 U.S. states as of January 2019.
While venison is less commonly eaten than beef, if mad cow disease can make the jump to humans, can people who eat meat infected with chronic wasting disease also become infected?
Thanks to an Oneida County, N.Y., fire company and a 2005 Sportsmen’s feast we’re sure someone’s never heard the end of, we know the answer to be “no.”
The fire company accidentally served meat from a deer that was infected with chronic wasting disease, and more than 200 people were exposed. A group of about 80 of these individuals have been monitored since then by a research team from the Oneida County Health Department and the State University of New York at Binghamton. At the most recent follow-up, no individual had developed the disease.
Experts do caution that it’s entirely possible chronic wasting disease will make the jump to humans eventually, despite the species gap. But for now, you can enjoy without fear your sweet ironic revenge on those zombies.
Does my breath smell like reduced cancer risk?
Cancer prevention just got a whole lot more ... fragrant. Allium vegetables – garlic, onions, leeks, chives, and shallots – have been found to decrease the risk of colorectal cancer (CRC), according to a Chinese study published last year. Very good news for Italians, but it looks like the risk of CRC in the vampire population might continue to rise.
The study authors reported that high allium intake correlated with lower CRC risk in both men and women, in the northeast Chinese population sampled. Bioactive compounds in these vegetables have anticarcinogenic properties, and researchers found that eating at least 35 pounds of allium vegetables per year could reduce cancer risk.
Unclear if this study was secretly funded by Big Onion, but as fans of delicious and anticancer flavor, we here at LOTME support these findings. However, we strongly advise against going the Tony Abbott route of chomping into whole onions.
An IPA a day keeps the doctor away
After you’re finished eating your annual 35 pounds of garlic and onions (sure, do it all in 1 day if you want), you might be a little thirsty. And we’ve got good news for you – have a brewski, it’s good for ya! Turns out, hops might have some health benefits, so drink up.
Hops contain a class of compound called isohumulones, which gives them that bitter taste. There have been multiple studies showing the metabolic effects of isohumulones, including cell inflammation suppression, reduced weight gain, reduced hyperglycemia, and increased glucose tolerance.
These isohumulones (try typing that 10 times in a row) interact with the bitter taste receptors in the gut, and researchers are hopeful that this could lead to isohumulone-esque drugs to treat metabolic disorders. In the meantime, maybe just chug a few IPAs a day.
My kingdom for a helmet
Most people like to root for the underdog. You know, the whole David vs. Goliath thing, the little guy who goes against overwhelming odds to take on some form of the Big Establishment.
But what if the little guy happens to be a fairly normal-sized lacrosse player with a very large head?
Alex Chu, a freshman at Division III Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., is just such a guy. “My head is wide,” he told WJAR TV. He wants to play goalie for the school’s lacrosse team, but he can’t because no current helmet will fit on the 25-inch-circumference head that sits atop his 6-foot-tall, 265-pound body.
He’s up against Big Sports Equipment in the form of Cascade-Maverik and Warrior, the two major manufacturers of lacrosse helmets, which won’t build him a custom helmet. It would be too expensive, they say – but the Boston Globe reported that there is a lacrosse player at a Division I school who wears a very large helmet “that was produced after [his] coaches and Cascade ‘huddled up.’ ”
We wish Mr. Chu well, and perhaps one day he will be mentioned with such large-skulled high achievers as Jay Leno, LeBron James, Jennifer Garner, Tyrannosaurus rex, Rihanna, Napoleon Bonaparte, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Simon Cowell.
We’ll just have the salad
Zombies, beware: You might want to eat us, but now, we can eat you.
Okay, “zombie” deer aren’t actually zombies, but they are infected with something almost as terrifying. Chronic wasting disease is a prion disorder similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, and has been found in deer across 24 U.S. states as of January 2019.
While venison is less commonly eaten than beef, if mad cow disease can make the jump to humans, can people who eat meat infected with chronic wasting disease also become infected?
Thanks to an Oneida County, N.Y., fire company and a 2005 Sportsmen’s feast we’re sure someone’s never heard the end of, we know the answer to be “no.”
The fire company accidentally served meat from a deer that was infected with chronic wasting disease, and more than 200 people were exposed. A group of about 80 of these individuals have been monitored since then by a research team from the Oneida County Health Department and the State University of New York at Binghamton. At the most recent follow-up, no individual had developed the disease.
Experts do caution that it’s entirely possible chronic wasting disease will make the jump to humans eventually, despite the species gap. But for now, you can enjoy without fear your sweet ironic revenge on those zombies.
Does my breath smell like reduced cancer risk?
Cancer prevention just got a whole lot more ... fragrant. Allium vegetables – garlic, onions, leeks, chives, and shallots – have been found to decrease the risk of colorectal cancer (CRC), according to a Chinese study published last year. Very good news for Italians, but it looks like the risk of CRC in the vampire population might continue to rise.
The study authors reported that high allium intake correlated with lower CRC risk in both men and women, in the northeast Chinese population sampled. Bioactive compounds in these vegetables have anticarcinogenic properties, and researchers found that eating at least 35 pounds of allium vegetables per year could reduce cancer risk.
Unclear if this study was secretly funded by Big Onion, but as fans of delicious and anticancer flavor, we here at LOTME support these findings. However, we strongly advise against going the Tony Abbott route of chomping into whole onions.
An IPA a day keeps the doctor away
After you’re finished eating your annual 35 pounds of garlic and onions (sure, do it all in 1 day if you want), you might be a little thirsty. And we’ve got good news for you – have a brewski, it’s good for ya! Turns out, hops might have some health benefits, so drink up.
Hops contain a class of compound called isohumulones, which gives them that bitter taste. There have been multiple studies showing the metabolic effects of isohumulones, including cell inflammation suppression, reduced weight gain, reduced hyperglycemia, and increased glucose tolerance.
These isohumulones (try typing that 10 times in a row) interact with the bitter taste receptors in the gut, and researchers are hopeful that this could lead to isohumulone-esque drugs to treat metabolic disorders. In the meantime, maybe just chug a few IPAs a day.
My kingdom for a helmet
Most people like to root for the underdog. You know, the whole David vs. Goliath thing, the little guy who goes against overwhelming odds to take on some form of the Big Establishment.
But what if the little guy happens to be a fairly normal-sized lacrosse player with a very large head?
Alex Chu, a freshman at Division III Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., is just such a guy. “My head is wide,” he told WJAR TV. He wants to play goalie for the school’s lacrosse team, but he can’t because no current helmet will fit on the 25-inch-circumference head that sits atop his 6-foot-tall, 265-pound body.
He’s up against Big Sports Equipment in the form of Cascade-Maverik and Warrior, the two major manufacturers of lacrosse helmets, which won’t build him a custom helmet. It would be too expensive, they say – but the Boston Globe reported that there is a lacrosse player at a Division I school who wears a very large helmet “that was produced after [his] coaches and Cascade ‘huddled up.’ ”
We wish Mr. Chu well, and perhaps one day he will be mentioned with such large-skulled high achievers as Jay Leno, LeBron James, Jennifer Garner, Tyrannosaurus rex, Rihanna, Napoleon Bonaparte, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Simon Cowell.
We’ll just have the salad
Zombies, beware: You might want to eat us, but now, we can eat you.
Okay, “zombie” deer aren’t actually zombies, but they are infected with something almost as terrifying. Chronic wasting disease is a prion disorder similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, and has been found in deer across 24 U.S. states as of January 2019.
While venison is less commonly eaten than beef, if mad cow disease can make the jump to humans, can people who eat meat infected with chronic wasting disease also become infected?
Thanks to an Oneida County, N.Y., fire company and a 2005 Sportsmen’s feast we’re sure someone’s never heard the end of, we know the answer to be “no.”
The fire company accidentally served meat from a deer that was infected with chronic wasting disease, and more than 200 people were exposed. A group of about 80 of these individuals have been monitored since then by a research team from the Oneida County Health Department and the State University of New York at Binghamton. At the most recent follow-up, no individual had developed the disease.
Experts do caution that it’s entirely possible chronic wasting disease will make the jump to humans eventually, despite the species gap. But for now, you can enjoy without fear your sweet ironic revenge on those zombies.
Diagnostic metal rod, eyeball extramission, fungal foot fetish
Doctor, (fake) doctor, gimme the news
Florida Man strikes again, and this time he’s a faux MD.
Onelio Hipolit-Gonzalez was charged with a felony for impersonating a doctor who promised patients he could easily diagnose their diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and pretty much any other malady … with a metal rod. The “doctor” would have patients hold on to a metal rod connected to a beeping machine (these are the scientific terms, of course), and then he would gravely diagnose them with a variety of ailments that he could cure for the low, low price of $2,000.
If you’re curious how he treated patients, fear not. This intrepid medical professional took the ingenious measure of drawing a patient’s blood and simply injecting it back inside them. Bada-bing, instant cure! Honestly, medical school these days is really overrated. Just learn to properly use a syringe, and you should be good to go. Just make sure not to attempt to treat/con any undercover cops.
Step away from the stinky socks
In another edition of “Humans: What Won’t They Do?” a Chinese man has developed a severe lung infection from prolonged, voluntary inhalation of his sweaty socks.
Take a moment to gag if you need it.
The man reportedly would finish his daily walk home from work with a deep, relaxing session of smelling his socks. Somewhat unsurprisingly, he developed a fungal infection and had to be hospitalized.
His doctor, perhaps in an effort to spare his feelings, conceded that the infection could be attributed to his weakened immune system from looking after his child. Sock-smelling weirdo, or just a good dad? Let’s just hope he doesn’t pass on this … unorthodox hobby to his offspring.
Turn down your eye beams
Do you remember the recent LOTME about a company selling tissues that have already been used by a sick person? Good news! This next item has nothing to do with that.
More good news! Belief in extramission – the ability to emit an invisible energy from the eyes – is down to about 5% among Americans after being greater than 50% at the turn of the century. The bad news? Belief in extramission is about 5% among Americans, according to investigators at Princeton (N.J.) University.
It’s not really a superhero thing, though. The researchers shared an explanation common among the extramission believers: “Light enters the eye, and there is a reflector piece inside the eye. The reflector reflects the light back out and hits the object, allowing the eye to see it.”
Now, we’d like to discount this whole eye-beam business, we really would, but there may be an exception that proves the rule. Ever had a staring contest with a cat? There’s got to be some sort of freaky power going on there.
The world’s worst superpower
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in the beginning of a science fiction novel? Well, worry no more – a group of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University has you covered!
Okay, we’re pretty sure that the nanoparticles they’ve come up with won’t turn you into the Borg, but they will make your urine glow. Specifically, when injected into the bodies of people who’ve recently undergone transplants, they can help identify when an organ is failing.
The particles are tiny (duh), but they’re big enough that they won’t accumulate in normal, native tissue. However, they are small enough that, when a transplanted organ is being attacked by the body, the nanoparticles will end up getting through the kidneys and into urine. The particles are fluorescent and glow under near-infrared light.
The nanoparticles are aimed at replacing biopsies, as they are more predictive and less invasive. Also, who wouldn’t want to claim they’ve been enhanced by nanotechnology? Resistance is futile, after all.
Doctor, (fake) doctor, gimme the news
Florida Man strikes again, and this time he’s a faux MD.
Onelio Hipolit-Gonzalez was charged with a felony for impersonating a doctor who promised patients he could easily diagnose their diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and pretty much any other malady … with a metal rod. The “doctor” would have patients hold on to a metal rod connected to a beeping machine (these are the scientific terms, of course), and then he would gravely diagnose them with a variety of ailments that he could cure for the low, low price of $2,000.
If you’re curious how he treated patients, fear not. This intrepid medical professional took the ingenious measure of drawing a patient’s blood and simply injecting it back inside them. Bada-bing, instant cure! Honestly, medical school these days is really overrated. Just learn to properly use a syringe, and you should be good to go. Just make sure not to attempt to treat/con any undercover cops.
Step away from the stinky socks
In another edition of “Humans: What Won’t They Do?” a Chinese man has developed a severe lung infection from prolonged, voluntary inhalation of his sweaty socks.
Take a moment to gag if you need it.
The man reportedly would finish his daily walk home from work with a deep, relaxing session of smelling his socks. Somewhat unsurprisingly, he developed a fungal infection and had to be hospitalized.
His doctor, perhaps in an effort to spare his feelings, conceded that the infection could be attributed to his weakened immune system from looking after his child. Sock-smelling weirdo, or just a good dad? Let’s just hope he doesn’t pass on this … unorthodox hobby to his offspring.
Turn down your eye beams
Do you remember the recent LOTME about a company selling tissues that have already been used by a sick person? Good news! This next item has nothing to do with that.
More good news! Belief in extramission – the ability to emit an invisible energy from the eyes – is down to about 5% among Americans after being greater than 50% at the turn of the century. The bad news? Belief in extramission is about 5% among Americans, according to investigators at Princeton (N.J.) University.
It’s not really a superhero thing, though. The researchers shared an explanation common among the extramission believers: “Light enters the eye, and there is a reflector piece inside the eye. The reflector reflects the light back out and hits the object, allowing the eye to see it.”
Now, we’d like to discount this whole eye-beam business, we really would, but there may be an exception that proves the rule. Ever had a staring contest with a cat? There’s got to be some sort of freaky power going on there.
The world’s worst superpower
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in the beginning of a science fiction novel? Well, worry no more – a group of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University has you covered!
Okay, we’re pretty sure that the nanoparticles they’ve come up with won’t turn you into the Borg, but they will make your urine glow. Specifically, when injected into the bodies of people who’ve recently undergone transplants, they can help identify when an organ is failing.
The particles are tiny (duh), but they’re big enough that they won’t accumulate in normal, native tissue. However, they are small enough that, when a transplanted organ is being attacked by the body, the nanoparticles will end up getting through the kidneys and into urine. The particles are fluorescent and glow under near-infrared light.
The nanoparticles are aimed at replacing biopsies, as they are more predictive and less invasive. Also, who wouldn’t want to claim they’ve been enhanced by nanotechnology? Resistance is futile, after all.
Doctor, (fake) doctor, gimme the news
Florida Man strikes again, and this time he’s a faux MD.
Onelio Hipolit-Gonzalez was charged with a felony for impersonating a doctor who promised patients he could easily diagnose their diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and pretty much any other malady … with a metal rod. The “doctor” would have patients hold on to a metal rod connected to a beeping machine (these are the scientific terms, of course), and then he would gravely diagnose them with a variety of ailments that he could cure for the low, low price of $2,000.
If you’re curious how he treated patients, fear not. This intrepid medical professional took the ingenious measure of drawing a patient’s blood and simply injecting it back inside them. Bada-bing, instant cure! Honestly, medical school these days is really overrated. Just learn to properly use a syringe, and you should be good to go. Just make sure not to attempt to treat/con any undercover cops.
Step away from the stinky socks
In another edition of “Humans: What Won’t They Do?” a Chinese man has developed a severe lung infection from prolonged, voluntary inhalation of his sweaty socks.
Take a moment to gag if you need it.
The man reportedly would finish his daily walk home from work with a deep, relaxing session of smelling his socks. Somewhat unsurprisingly, he developed a fungal infection and had to be hospitalized.
His doctor, perhaps in an effort to spare his feelings, conceded that the infection could be attributed to his weakened immune system from looking after his child. Sock-smelling weirdo, or just a good dad? Let’s just hope he doesn’t pass on this … unorthodox hobby to his offspring.
Turn down your eye beams
Do you remember the recent LOTME about a company selling tissues that have already been used by a sick person? Good news! This next item has nothing to do with that.
More good news! Belief in extramission – the ability to emit an invisible energy from the eyes – is down to about 5% among Americans after being greater than 50% at the turn of the century. The bad news? Belief in extramission is about 5% among Americans, according to investigators at Princeton (N.J.) University.
It’s not really a superhero thing, though. The researchers shared an explanation common among the extramission believers: “Light enters the eye, and there is a reflector piece inside the eye. The reflector reflects the light back out and hits the object, allowing the eye to see it.”
Now, we’d like to discount this whole eye-beam business, we really would, but there may be an exception that proves the rule. Ever had a staring contest with a cat? There’s got to be some sort of freaky power going on there.
The world’s worst superpower
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in the beginning of a science fiction novel? Well, worry no more – a group of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University has you covered!
Okay, we’re pretty sure that the nanoparticles they’ve come up with won’t turn you into the Borg, but they will make your urine glow. Specifically, when injected into the bodies of people who’ve recently undergone transplants, they can help identify when an organ is failing.
The particles are tiny (duh), but they’re big enough that they won’t accumulate in normal, native tissue. However, they are small enough that, when a transplanted organ is being attacked by the body, the nanoparticles will end up getting through the kidneys and into urine. The particles are fluorescent and glow under near-infrared light.
The nanoparticles are aimed at replacing biopsies, as they are more predictive and less invasive. Also, who wouldn’t want to claim they’ve been enhanced by nanotechnology? Resistance is futile, after all.
Love hormone plein air, posh preused Kleenex, and dieting plague vectors
Paint me like one of your French girls
If you’re trying to think of a fun Valentine’s activity, look no further than paint night! Normally associated with a ladies night out (and heavy on the wine), a recent study found that painting releases high levels of the “love hormone”, a.k.a. oxytocin, in men.
Researchers compared the levels of oxytocin with partners painting and partners playing board games, and were surprised by the results: While all the couples released oxytocin during these activities, men in paint class had the highest levels – twice as much as any other group.
Feel free to cite this study next time your man complains about being dragged to a paint-and-sip. Painting partners also experienced more touching than the gaming group (unless you count throwing Monopoly pieces at your significant other as touching).
You won’t get me sick, I’ll get me sick!
There are certain items that, after being used once, you really wouldn’t want to reuse. A snotty, mucus-filled tissue is pretty high up on that list ... or so you would hope. But that’s not thinking with real American entrepreneurial spirit! Welcome to Vaev Tissue, a startup based in Los Angeles that sells used tissues containing germs from a sick person for the bargain price of $79.99.
Yes, you read that correctly. They sell an $80 used tissue. The purpose, according to Vaev’s mission statement, is “to get sick on your own terms,” as “using a tissue that carries a human sneeze is safer than needles or pills.”
As you might expect, the tissues are popular with young parents and adults who are “critical” of vaccines. Who else could hear advice from actual doctors who told Time magazine that “there is nothing positive that can come from this, only things that are adverse,” or that the tissues are an “incredible liability,” and continue on, regardless?
And if you’re thinking, “If these people want to get sick, why not just have someone sneeze on them?” Don’t be ridiculous. Focus testers responded highly negatively to simply being handed a dirty tissue. The premium packaging and high price tag are a necessity.
Our advice? Well, as tempting as all this sounds, we think we’ll stick with washing our hands and not sticking used tissues in our faces. You know, like reasonable people.
Why Bullwinkle thinks pink
Flying squirrels are secretly doing their best flamingo impression – who knew? A forestry professor discovered, by happy accident, that flying squirrels are fluorescent – they glow hot pink under ultraviolet light.
Turns out, almost all species of gliders – even blue-helmeted Rocket “Rocky” J. Squirrel – are members of the Pink Ladies. They are one of the very few glowing mammals; the only other known mammalian species to have fluorescent fur are certain opossums.
But why do these airborne rodents glow pink? Is it because of an overintake of bubblegum? Are flying squirrels just really flamboyant but also shy? Are they huge fans of the singer Pink?
A biologist involved in studying these colorful critters hypothesized that the reason is slightly more related to environment than musical preference. Flying squirrels are nocturnal, making them most active when UV light is most prominent. The garish glow might have something to do with nighttime perception.
However, we don’t know the answer for sure. And in the meantime, we can choose to believe flying squirrels eat way too much cotton candy.
Buzz, feed, diet. Repeat
Guns don’t hurt this mass murderer. Police can’t arrest it. Background checks are pointless. A border wall won’t keep it out. So, how do you stop a mosquito?
Diet drugs.
Because female mosquitoes transmit malaria, Zika, and other diseases when they move from person to person feeding on human blood, investigators sought to curb that appetite by chemically re-creating the feeling of fullness they get after a big meal.
The lady killers in their study – Aedes aegypti, to be exact – when given an antiobesity drug that suppresses human appetite by activating neuropeptide receptors that regulate food intake, turned away from a tempting piece of nylon stocking that had been worn by one of the researchers. Further work showed that treated mosquitoes were as disinterested in feeding on a live mouse as mosquitoes that had already enjoyed a full blood meal.
The LOTME research staff (What? Of course, we have a research staff. You don’t?) is working on the mosquito problem too, although we’ve taken a somewhat different approach: The “volunteers” who walk into the mosquito-filled room wear a sign that says, “My blood will make your butt look bigger.”
Paint me like one of your French girls
If you’re trying to think of a fun Valentine’s activity, look no further than paint night! Normally associated with a ladies night out (and heavy on the wine), a recent study found that painting releases high levels of the “love hormone”, a.k.a. oxytocin, in men.
Researchers compared the levels of oxytocin with partners painting and partners playing board games, and were surprised by the results: While all the couples released oxytocin during these activities, men in paint class had the highest levels – twice as much as any other group.
Feel free to cite this study next time your man complains about being dragged to a paint-and-sip. Painting partners also experienced more touching than the gaming group (unless you count throwing Monopoly pieces at your significant other as touching).
You won’t get me sick, I’ll get me sick!
There are certain items that, after being used once, you really wouldn’t want to reuse. A snotty, mucus-filled tissue is pretty high up on that list ... or so you would hope. But that’s not thinking with real American entrepreneurial spirit! Welcome to Vaev Tissue, a startup based in Los Angeles that sells used tissues containing germs from a sick person for the bargain price of $79.99.
Yes, you read that correctly. They sell an $80 used tissue. The purpose, according to Vaev’s mission statement, is “to get sick on your own terms,” as “using a tissue that carries a human sneeze is safer than needles or pills.”
As you might expect, the tissues are popular with young parents and adults who are “critical” of vaccines. Who else could hear advice from actual doctors who told Time magazine that “there is nothing positive that can come from this, only things that are adverse,” or that the tissues are an “incredible liability,” and continue on, regardless?
And if you’re thinking, “If these people want to get sick, why not just have someone sneeze on them?” Don’t be ridiculous. Focus testers responded highly negatively to simply being handed a dirty tissue. The premium packaging and high price tag are a necessity.
Our advice? Well, as tempting as all this sounds, we think we’ll stick with washing our hands and not sticking used tissues in our faces. You know, like reasonable people.
Why Bullwinkle thinks pink
Flying squirrels are secretly doing their best flamingo impression – who knew? A forestry professor discovered, by happy accident, that flying squirrels are fluorescent – they glow hot pink under ultraviolet light.
Turns out, almost all species of gliders – even blue-helmeted Rocket “Rocky” J. Squirrel – are members of the Pink Ladies. They are one of the very few glowing mammals; the only other known mammalian species to have fluorescent fur are certain opossums.
But why do these airborne rodents glow pink? Is it because of an overintake of bubblegum? Are flying squirrels just really flamboyant but also shy? Are they huge fans of the singer Pink?
A biologist involved in studying these colorful critters hypothesized that the reason is slightly more related to environment than musical preference. Flying squirrels are nocturnal, making them most active when UV light is most prominent. The garish glow might have something to do with nighttime perception.
However, we don’t know the answer for sure. And in the meantime, we can choose to believe flying squirrels eat way too much cotton candy.
Buzz, feed, diet. Repeat
Guns don’t hurt this mass murderer. Police can’t arrest it. Background checks are pointless. A border wall won’t keep it out. So, how do you stop a mosquito?
Diet drugs.
Because female mosquitoes transmit malaria, Zika, and other diseases when they move from person to person feeding on human blood, investigators sought to curb that appetite by chemically re-creating the feeling of fullness they get after a big meal.
The lady killers in their study – Aedes aegypti, to be exact – when given an antiobesity drug that suppresses human appetite by activating neuropeptide receptors that regulate food intake, turned away from a tempting piece of nylon stocking that had been worn by one of the researchers. Further work showed that treated mosquitoes were as disinterested in feeding on a live mouse as mosquitoes that had already enjoyed a full blood meal.
The LOTME research staff (What? Of course, we have a research staff. You don’t?) is working on the mosquito problem too, although we’ve taken a somewhat different approach: The “volunteers” who walk into the mosquito-filled room wear a sign that says, “My blood will make your butt look bigger.”
Paint me like one of your French girls
If you’re trying to think of a fun Valentine’s activity, look no further than paint night! Normally associated with a ladies night out (and heavy on the wine), a recent study found that painting releases high levels of the “love hormone”, a.k.a. oxytocin, in men.
Researchers compared the levels of oxytocin with partners painting and partners playing board games, and were surprised by the results: While all the couples released oxytocin during these activities, men in paint class had the highest levels – twice as much as any other group.
Feel free to cite this study next time your man complains about being dragged to a paint-and-sip. Painting partners also experienced more touching than the gaming group (unless you count throwing Monopoly pieces at your significant other as touching).
You won’t get me sick, I’ll get me sick!
There are certain items that, after being used once, you really wouldn’t want to reuse. A snotty, mucus-filled tissue is pretty high up on that list ... or so you would hope. But that’s not thinking with real American entrepreneurial spirit! Welcome to Vaev Tissue, a startup based in Los Angeles that sells used tissues containing germs from a sick person for the bargain price of $79.99.
Yes, you read that correctly. They sell an $80 used tissue. The purpose, according to Vaev’s mission statement, is “to get sick on your own terms,” as “using a tissue that carries a human sneeze is safer than needles or pills.”
As you might expect, the tissues are popular with young parents and adults who are “critical” of vaccines. Who else could hear advice from actual doctors who told Time magazine that “there is nothing positive that can come from this, only things that are adverse,” or that the tissues are an “incredible liability,” and continue on, regardless?
And if you’re thinking, “If these people want to get sick, why not just have someone sneeze on them?” Don’t be ridiculous. Focus testers responded highly negatively to simply being handed a dirty tissue. The premium packaging and high price tag are a necessity.
Our advice? Well, as tempting as all this sounds, we think we’ll stick with washing our hands and not sticking used tissues in our faces. You know, like reasonable people.
Why Bullwinkle thinks pink
Flying squirrels are secretly doing their best flamingo impression – who knew? A forestry professor discovered, by happy accident, that flying squirrels are fluorescent – they glow hot pink under ultraviolet light.
Turns out, almost all species of gliders – even blue-helmeted Rocket “Rocky” J. Squirrel – are members of the Pink Ladies. They are one of the very few glowing mammals; the only other known mammalian species to have fluorescent fur are certain opossums.
But why do these airborne rodents glow pink? Is it because of an overintake of bubblegum? Are flying squirrels just really flamboyant but also shy? Are they huge fans of the singer Pink?
A biologist involved in studying these colorful critters hypothesized that the reason is slightly more related to environment than musical preference. Flying squirrels are nocturnal, making them most active when UV light is most prominent. The garish glow might have something to do with nighttime perception.
However, we don’t know the answer for sure. And in the meantime, we can choose to believe flying squirrels eat way too much cotton candy.
Buzz, feed, diet. Repeat
Guns don’t hurt this mass murderer. Police can’t arrest it. Background checks are pointless. A border wall won’t keep it out. So, how do you stop a mosquito?
Diet drugs.
Because female mosquitoes transmit malaria, Zika, and other diseases when they move from person to person feeding on human blood, investigators sought to curb that appetite by chemically re-creating the feeling of fullness they get after a big meal.
The lady killers in their study – Aedes aegypti, to be exact – when given an antiobesity drug that suppresses human appetite by activating neuropeptide receptors that regulate food intake, turned away from a tempting piece of nylon stocking that had been worn by one of the researchers. Further work showed that treated mosquitoes were as disinterested in feeding on a live mouse as mosquitoes that had already enjoyed a full blood meal.
The LOTME research staff (What? Of course, we have a research staff. You don’t?) is working on the mosquito problem too, although we’ve taken a somewhat different approach: The “volunteers” who walk into the mosquito-filled room wear a sign that says, “My blood will make your butt look bigger.”
Clown-tox, tattooed immunity, and cingulum-bundle comedy
Quit clowning around
Would you like a balloon giraffe, elephant, or hypodermic needle? A recently published study examined how the use of “medical clowns” eased the anxiety and pain of children during botulinum toxin injections. These injections are used to treat spasticity in children, and researchers hypothesized that a clown might be an effective distraction.
As anyone who has been to a circus can surmise, the clowns did not perform better than the control distractions.
Researchers concluded that the clowns were appreciated by the parents but not particularly effective on the children. Maybe that’s because the parents weren’t the ones being stuck with needles while some crazy person in clown makeup attempted to distract them. Or maybe they were all just big fans of Stephen King’s “It.”
Inked immunity
Starting to feel a bit under the weather? Head to the local tattoo artist for the cure! Research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham found evidence that the immune systems of heavily tattooed people are stronger than those without, proving once and for all that tats = toughness. Hell's Angels were on to something all along.
While your immune system can actually grow temporarily weaker after one tattoo, multiple tattoos create a stronger immunological response. Researchers tested the immunoglobulin A levels in those getting a first tattoo and those with many tattoos. They found that the latter group had higher IgA levels.
Maybe that’s why Adam Levine showed off his ink at the Super Bowl halftime show – he was just signaling his strong immune system to the rest of us.
Brain surgery is a laughing matter
This certainly came as a surprise to us, but as it turns out, undergoing brain surgery while conscious and awake can be extremely stressful and panic inducing to the patient. We’re sure most people (including us) would prefer to be asleep for their surgery, but sometimes when dealing with the brain, the surgeon needs to be able to talk to the patient to accurately assess their faculties in case they damage something important.
So the question is: How do you keep brain surgery patients from panicking? Why, with the power of laughter, of course! Specifically, a group at Emory University, Atlanta, published a case study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation about their treatment of a patient with moderate anxiety. When the patient woke up from initial anesthesia, she began to panic. However, after electrical stimulation of the cingulum bundle, the patient immediately turned her frown upside down and began laughing and joking with the surgeons.
Sadly, while the team did not report on the quality of the jokes being told, we can only assume the phrase “this isn’t brain surgery” was thrown around multiple times.
A male brain is a terrible thing to waste
In the future, comedy may mean pressing a button to stimulate your cingulum bundle, but for now we still have jokes. One old joke goes like this: Some aliens land on earth and want to learn about humans, so they go into a store to buy some brains. “Why does the male brain cost twice as much as the female brain?” one asks the store owner, who replies, “It’s hardly been used.”
There may be another explanation: Womens’ brains appear to age more slowly than mens’, investigators at Washington University, St. Louis, said in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They performed PET scans on 121 women and 84 men aged 20-82 years to determine the fraction of sugar committed to aerobic glycolysis in various regions of the brain, and then a machine-learning algorithm used those data to calculate metabolic ages.
The womens’ brains were younger than the mens’ brains, with various calculations producing average differences of 2.7-5.3 years, they reported.
The male brain, it seems, is used for something, and after one LOTME staffer spent 5 minutes explaining total quarterback rating (QBR) to his wife, we think we’ve figured out what it is: sports trivia.
Quit clowning around
Would you like a balloon giraffe, elephant, or hypodermic needle? A recently published study examined how the use of “medical clowns” eased the anxiety and pain of children during botulinum toxin injections. These injections are used to treat spasticity in children, and researchers hypothesized that a clown might be an effective distraction.
As anyone who has been to a circus can surmise, the clowns did not perform better than the control distractions.
Researchers concluded that the clowns were appreciated by the parents but not particularly effective on the children. Maybe that’s because the parents weren’t the ones being stuck with needles while some crazy person in clown makeup attempted to distract them. Or maybe they were all just big fans of Stephen King’s “It.”
Inked immunity
Starting to feel a bit under the weather? Head to the local tattoo artist for the cure! Research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham found evidence that the immune systems of heavily tattooed people are stronger than those without, proving once and for all that tats = toughness. Hell's Angels were on to something all along.
While your immune system can actually grow temporarily weaker after one tattoo, multiple tattoos create a stronger immunological response. Researchers tested the immunoglobulin A levels in those getting a first tattoo and those with many tattoos. They found that the latter group had higher IgA levels.
Maybe that’s why Adam Levine showed off his ink at the Super Bowl halftime show – he was just signaling his strong immune system to the rest of us.
Brain surgery is a laughing matter
This certainly came as a surprise to us, but as it turns out, undergoing brain surgery while conscious and awake can be extremely stressful and panic inducing to the patient. We’re sure most people (including us) would prefer to be asleep for their surgery, but sometimes when dealing with the brain, the surgeon needs to be able to talk to the patient to accurately assess their faculties in case they damage something important.
So the question is: How do you keep brain surgery patients from panicking? Why, with the power of laughter, of course! Specifically, a group at Emory University, Atlanta, published a case study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation about their treatment of a patient with moderate anxiety. When the patient woke up from initial anesthesia, she began to panic. However, after electrical stimulation of the cingulum bundle, the patient immediately turned her frown upside down and began laughing and joking with the surgeons.
Sadly, while the team did not report on the quality of the jokes being told, we can only assume the phrase “this isn’t brain surgery” was thrown around multiple times.
A male brain is a terrible thing to waste
In the future, comedy may mean pressing a button to stimulate your cingulum bundle, but for now we still have jokes. One old joke goes like this: Some aliens land on earth and want to learn about humans, so they go into a store to buy some brains. “Why does the male brain cost twice as much as the female brain?” one asks the store owner, who replies, “It’s hardly been used.”
There may be another explanation: Womens’ brains appear to age more slowly than mens’, investigators at Washington University, St. Louis, said in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They performed PET scans on 121 women and 84 men aged 20-82 years to determine the fraction of sugar committed to aerobic glycolysis in various regions of the brain, and then a machine-learning algorithm used those data to calculate metabolic ages.
The womens’ brains were younger than the mens’ brains, with various calculations producing average differences of 2.7-5.3 years, they reported.
The male brain, it seems, is used for something, and after one LOTME staffer spent 5 minutes explaining total quarterback rating (QBR) to his wife, we think we’ve figured out what it is: sports trivia.
Quit clowning around
Would you like a balloon giraffe, elephant, or hypodermic needle? A recently published study examined how the use of “medical clowns” eased the anxiety and pain of children during botulinum toxin injections. These injections are used to treat spasticity in children, and researchers hypothesized that a clown might be an effective distraction.
As anyone who has been to a circus can surmise, the clowns did not perform better than the control distractions.
Researchers concluded that the clowns were appreciated by the parents but not particularly effective on the children. Maybe that’s because the parents weren’t the ones being stuck with needles while some crazy person in clown makeup attempted to distract them. Or maybe they were all just big fans of Stephen King’s “It.”
Inked immunity
Starting to feel a bit under the weather? Head to the local tattoo artist for the cure! Research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham found evidence that the immune systems of heavily tattooed people are stronger than those without, proving once and for all that tats = toughness. Hell's Angels were on to something all along.
While your immune system can actually grow temporarily weaker after one tattoo, multiple tattoos create a stronger immunological response. Researchers tested the immunoglobulin A levels in those getting a first tattoo and those with many tattoos. They found that the latter group had higher IgA levels.
Maybe that’s why Adam Levine showed off his ink at the Super Bowl halftime show – he was just signaling his strong immune system to the rest of us.
Brain surgery is a laughing matter
This certainly came as a surprise to us, but as it turns out, undergoing brain surgery while conscious and awake can be extremely stressful and panic inducing to the patient. We’re sure most people (including us) would prefer to be asleep for their surgery, but sometimes when dealing with the brain, the surgeon needs to be able to talk to the patient to accurately assess their faculties in case they damage something important.
So the question is: How do you keep brain surgery patients from panicking? Why, with the power of laughter, of course! Specifically, a group at Emory University, Atlanta, published a case study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation about their treatment of a patient with moderate anxiety. When the patient woke up from initial anesthesia, she began to panic. However, after electrical stimulation of the cingulum bundle, the patient immediately turned her frown upside down and began laughing and joking with the surgeons.
Sadly, while the team did not report on the quality of the jokes being told, we can only assume the phrase “this isn’t brain surgery” was thrown around multiple times.
A male brain is a terrible thing to waste
In the future, comedy may mean pressing a button to stimulate your cingulum bundle, but for now we still have jokes. One old joke goes like this: Some aliens land on earth and want to learn about humans, so they go into a store to buy some brains. “Why does the male brain cost twice as much as the female brain?” one asks the store owner, who replies, “It’s hardly been used.”
There may be another explanation: Womens’ brains appear to age more slowly than mens’, investigators at Washington University, St. Louis, said in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They performed PET scans on 121 women and 84 men aged 20-82 years to determine the fraction of sugar committed to aerobic glycolysis in various regions of the brain, and then a machine-learning algorithm used those data to calculate metabolic ages.
The womens’ brains were younger than the mens’ brains, with various calculations producing average differences of 2.7-5.3 years, they reported.
The male brain, it seems, is used for something, and after one LOTME staffer spent 5 minutes explaining total quarterback rating (QBR) to his wife, we think we’ve figured out what it is: sports trivia.