A pig farm in central NSW has its pigs in quarantine, with swine flu. It is believed that they caught it from workers at the farm. I see a delicious irony in pigs catching swine flu from humans.
Veterinarians and emergency disease response specialists are at the Dunedoo piggery tracing the movements of people, animals, and equipment on and off the property. The pigs started coughing late last week and vets were called to the property early this week.
Poor piggies!
I just saw this story of British man, Gary Reinbach, who died aged 22 of liver failure, caused by severe cirrhosis of the liver. Gee, I thought, that would have taken some serious drinking to get to the point of killing him at such a young age.
Reinbach began binge drinking when he was just 13. He began by drinking bottles of cheap cider with his mates while skipping school. When he left school aged 17 he began drinking up to eight cans of beer plus a bottle of vodka or half a bottle of whisky and cans of cider. (One has to wonder how he paid for all this – let me hazard a guess, social welfare.)
He was admitted to a London hospital in May but died after doctors refused to give him a liver transplant amid fears he would not stay sober for six months after the operation. His mother Madeline Reinbach said her son had been in great pain and scared before his life support machine was turned off on Sunday.
You won’t be surprised also to find out he was a smoker – that was something he had given up earlier on doctors’ advice, as it was contributing to his health problems.
Sad story, but wholly brought upon himself.
Got this from someone at work today – I love it.
Poor Piglet!
Poor Ian, too … I’ve developed a raging attack of the sniffles since last night to go with my jet lag from my trip to New York. I trust its not swine flu, just a result of going from cold to hot to cold and wet in a week and a bit.
Beer goggles – the tendency of finding people more attractive as you get more drunk, has been debunked, at least somewhat, in a UK research study.
British forensic psychologist Vincent Egan took to venues in Scotland to test the beer goggle theory. Dr Egan said:
“We got 240 people out in the field in bars and cafes. We saw 120 who were sober and 120 who had been drinking and we’ve asked them to do two things: firstly, to say how attractive the face was; and secondly to say how old they thought the face was,”
“The girls were originally 17 years old and they were morphed to look like they were 15 up to 19. So from being girlish to being womanly,”
“We found that alcohol basically didn’t influence things as much as you might have thought. We found alcohol consumption did inflate attractiveness ratings but the greater alcohol consumption didn’t lead to the overestimation of age.”
He says there was no difference in age estimates between the drinkers and those abstaining.
Dr Egan argues that his findings suggest men who have sex with underage girls should not be able to use alcohol as a defence.
However, there is still hope for ugly folk going out and hoping to score. Just don’t lie about your age.
Professor James Murray, a maths expert at Oxford University, and his team, have developed a model whereby they can calculate whether a relationship will succeed.
In a study of 700 couples, it predicted the divorce rate with 94 per cent accuracy. The calculations were based on 15-minute conversations between couples who were asked to sit opposite each other in a room on their own and talk about a contentious issue, such as money, sex or relations with their in-laws. Professor Murray and his colleagues recorded the conversations and awarded each husband and wife positive or negative points depending on what was said. Partners who showed affection, humour or happiness as they talked were given the maximum points, while those who displayed contempt or belligerence received the minimum.
Professor Murray said:
"I am still absolutely amazed that human emotions can be put into a mathematical model and that a prediction can be made,"
"What astonished me was that a discussion, sometimes highly charged and emotional, could so easily and usefully be encapsulated.
"It is trying to assess and quantify how a couple interact by giving them a scoring system … If either the husband or the wife is consistently negative, then they are going to get a divorce."
The forecast of who would get divorced in his study of 700 couples over 12 years was 100 per cent correct, what reduced the accuracy of the predictions was those couples who we thought would stay married and actually ended up getting divorced.
Call me cynical, but I have a feeling that the scoring of the conversations by the researchers would have been quite subjective and heavily influenced the results.
We all know that divorce is often an expensive and messy business. A friend argues that if you ever think of cheating on your wife, ask yourself “is she worth a house?” because thats what it will cost you.
People often say their divorce cost them an arm and a leg. Well, there’s a case in New York now where the couple are arguing over a kidney.
Richard Batista, a surgeon from Long Island in New York, gave his kidney to his wife Dawnell after two previous transplants failed. He now wants it back because she cheated on him and has filed for divorce. He has claimed either the kidney back or $US1.5m compensation.
Dr Batista told New York Daily News there is “no value you can put on an organ when it saves someone’s life. There is no greater feeling on this planet”. He says he is only suing Dawnell to get to her act reasonably in the divorce case, claiming she is restricting access to their children, aged 8, 11 and 14.
However, it seems unlikely he will get either the kidney back or money from his wife.
Medical ethicist Robert Veatch from Georgetown University told News Day it’s illegal for an organ to be exchanged for anything of value. He said organ donation is a gift which means you can’t legally get it back.
"It’s her kidney now and taking the kidney out would mean she would have to go on dialysis or it would kill her,”
he said. Also he argued no reputable surgeon would do it and no court could compel someone to undergo an operation.
I’m not talking just about me, but the world in general. As of now, the world has not been sucked into a black hole, created by the CERN experiment that commenced operations in Switzerland a few days ago. One of the fears held by some people was that the experiments using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which basically fires beams of atoms around in opposite directions and smashes them into each other with the aim being to see what comes out of the atomic particles when they are smashed, would generate so much energy that mini black holes would be formed which might suck the Earth into them.
Well, that hasn’t happened so far. But that didn’t help a girl in India who apparently committed suicide due to fears about the world ending. She jumped the gun, so to speak …. should have waited to see what happened first. Also, as posed by this article, why would she choose to die painfully by drinking pesticide, versus being painlessly vapourised in a black hole.
As for what the LHC is, and what it is supposed to prove for its price tag of $10 billion, here is a useful summary.
Apparently athletes are using drugs like Viagra and Cialis to improve their performance – and I don’t mean their horizontal dance performance.
Drug testers say they are regularly turning up traces of the drugs in urine samples they examine, but the drugs are not on the sports list of banned substances. It is thought the drug helps the delivery of oxygen to muscles. Some experts believe it could help in events requiring spurts of power, like sprinting. Others think it might help endurance athletes, especially at altitude.
At least in the male athletes this will be easy to detect, no drug tests needed.
Dr Don Catlin, an American anti-doping expert, said:
“There has actually been a study in mountaineers, people climbing at high altitude on or off of Viagra, showing that it does produce marginal improvements,”
Not only that, it gives them an extra piton to use if they get in trouble during the climb, perhaps another brake bar on their rappel rack?
Technorati Tags: Viagra, Cialis, drug cheats, anti-doping
Scientists have found that watermelon has effects similar to Viagra. It contains an ingredient called citrulline that can trigger production of a compound that helps relax the body’s blood vessels, similar to what happens when a man takes Viagra, said scientists in Texas.
Found in the flesh and rind of watermelons, citrulline reacts with the body’s enzymes when consumed in large quantities and is changed into arginine, which boosts nitric oxide, which relaxes blood vessels, the same basic effect that Viagra has. According to Bhimu Patel, one of the researchers:
“Watermelon may not be as organ-specific as Viagra, but it’s a great way to relax blood vessels without any drug side effects.”
The nitric oxide can also help with angina, high blood pressure and other cardiovascular problems, according to the study, which was paid for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Only one slight problem: you would need to eat about six cups of watermelon to get enough citrulline to boost the body’s arginine level.
I can see a few downsides in using watermelon as a natural substitute for Viagra:
Technorati Tags: watermelon, viagra, arginine, citrulline
Internet addiction is a “common” mental disorder that should be recognised by health officials. The American Journal of Psychiatry published an editorial claiming that internet addiction met the criterion for a mental disorder and called on the American Psychiatric Association to officially list it as such.
According to the editorial, internet addiction consists of three particular subtypes: excessive gambling, sexual preoccupations and email or text messaging.
Phew!!! That seems to rule out blogging … unless of course you’re blogging about gambling, sex or email and text messaging (although I suppose you could say those latter ones and reading and posting on blogs are very similar).
