To Quote Joan Rivers ...

... "You ripped me to shreds!". Thanks to Random Good Stuff for this amazing animation of the progress of a birth.

The beautiful cello music is presumably designed to mask the mother's screams of agony :-).

Ick !!

I'm certain this is an incredibly useful device, and they say there's no chance of anything undesirable making it past the filter, but I still can't help visualising a mouthful of snot!

Those Swedes are darned clever. I'm surprised this is the first I've heard about it. Thanks to Random Good Stuff for that delectable mental picture :-).

Robotic Nano-Surgeon

According to this Engadget article, a team at Carnegie Mellon University has created a "robotic caterpillar" that can crawl across a patient's heart to administer treatment.

I just hope the damned thing doesn't leave droppings as it goes :-) !!

Please Use The Rear Entrance

This "deer end" doorbell adorns the office of one Dr. Harold B. Utzman.

Who'd have thought a proctologist would have a sense of humour? Sticking your finger up other people's arses doesn't sound like an occupation filled with job satisfaction to me.

What Was That?

Now, here's a product I can use.

The Ear Scope XL has a tube on one end that you stick in your ear. On the other end is a viewing scope that shows all the gory details. You can then play "hunt the earwax".

I'm just so tempted!

There's an article on it, including some nice images, over at Plastic Bamboo.

The iPhone Had Better Come Out Soon ...

... or I may be forced to feed my technological sweet tooth with this iPod-based stethoscope recording package from ThinkLabs.

This has to be the most bizarre, but probably also the most useful iPod add-on I've seen so far.

Learn A Second Language ...

... and slow down the onset of dementia!

This was the finding of some research done at the Rotman Research Institute in Canada, reported at Medical News Today.

Of 184 patients, "mean age of onset of dementia symptoms in the monolingual group was 71.4 years, while the bilingual group was 75.5 years."

This was after considering the effects of other factors like cultural differences, level of formal education and employment history.

I'd like to see a larger sample space, but this is definitely interesting.

[The painting is entitled "Flight from Dementia" by Jan Witten Sewall]

Fighting Cancer With Sugars

According to this article, a team at Johns Hopkins University, led by Srinivasa-Gopalan Sampathkumar and Kevin J. Yarema, recently had a paper published in Chemistry & Biology, in which they discuss a short-chain fatty acid compound they developed, which kills cancer cells, without the need for radiation or the normal style of toxic chemotherapy.

So far no experiments have been performed on animals or humans; all of the research has been done in glassware. However, the results look promising.

In case you'd like to track down the original paper, it has the alluring title "Targeting Glycosylation Pathways and the Cell Cycle: Sugar-Dependent Activity of Butyrate-Carbohydrate Cancer Prodrugs".

My Brain Hurts

While you're getting frustrated, queuing up at the cab rank over the silly season, spare a thought for the poor drivers.

They're probably just trying to get their heads around the fact that their brains are growing.

Apparently, some scientists at London's Institute of Neurology measured the amount of grey matter in the brains of taxi drivers and other people. They discovered that the cab drivers had more in the part of the brain associated with memory, the mid-posterior hippocampus.

This is the first research which indicates that adult brains can grow when exercised.

So, there's hope for me yet. Now, if I can only learn enough street names to cancel out the loss of brain cells from my Bah Humbug partying ...