August 10, 2006 at 5:32 pm
· Filed under Health, Brain & Psychology
If you wake up with the sensation of little bugs crawling all over you, turn on the lights. If there are tiny bugs crawling all over you, you’re not the only one. It turns out that bedbugs are on the rise in the U.S. Yes, bedbugs actually exist. And they’re nasty. (Shiver.)
Even worse: You wake up with the sensation of little bugs crawling all over you, you turn on the light, and there are no bugs. But you’re covered in sores, and red and blue fibers are erupting from your flesh. You probably have Morgellon’s condition. And no one knows what causes it, or if it’s actually a disease. Some doctors think it’s a “delusional parasitosis” caused by patients who think that they are infected by parasites and have imagined effects. But strangely, when the little red and blue fibers were analyzed, they can’t figure out what they are. (Weird. Shiver. Urgh.)
And if that’s not enough to make you stop reading this post, Turkey is currently battling an outbreak of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, which is similar to Ebola. There have bee 242 reported cases of the disease, including 20 deaths, and more cases are expected. If you don’t know what hemorrhagic fever looks like, watch the 1995 film Outbreak. Or don’t. (Blood. Shiver. Urgh. Bleh.)
Another scary outbreak: Sexually transmitted cancer in dogs. Canine transmittable venereal tumor (CTVT) has been shown to be transmitted during sex. The disease has also been linked to a single source, according to a recent study. Amazingly, since the tumor cells are actually transferred from dog to dog during sex and grown in the host, they are genetically different from host dog’s cells. By analyzing the tumor cells, the cancer was traced back to a dog that was likely similar to a Husky or a Shih Tzu that lived 250 to 1,000 years ago. So keep your poor little puppies at home and make sure they know the dangers of CTVT. No one wants them catching this 500 year old itch at the doggie park. (Less bleh. More Urgh. And an, Oh! Poor little doggies!)
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July 19, 2006 at 9:19 pm
· Filed under Technology, Health, Nutrition, Brain & Psychology
Danger: Work kills. Or at least,
research suggests that excessive work leads to unhealthy behaviour in women. Funny, because as I type this I am smoking two cigarettes (who can decide between regulars and lights?), eating pizza and twinkies, and drinking coffee mixed with red bull. Oh, did I mention I’m not actually working?
And another way work leads to unhealthy behaviour: The office candy dish. It is now scientifically proven that the more visible and accessible it is, the more you eat! New support for the “If I can’t see it, it’s not there” problem solving technique! Just hide the candy, and hope that, by the time you find it, it’s all icky, stuck together, and generally unappealing.
Even waking up to go to work can be bad for your health. Another study has found that half of people in urban societies suffer from “social jet lag” because their work schedules differ substantially from their body clocks. The study suggests that employers tell their employees to wake up naturally and arrive to work on their own schedules. That sounds awesome, but I’m not sure if I’d ever get out of bed. I guess it beats calling in hung-over, but it might not be as good as taking an apathy day.
But really, you snooze, you lose. Weight that is. Another study linking sleep deprivation to obesity contributes to the growing body of knowledge on the importance of sleep to good health. So really, we’ve gone full circle here. You work too long, you eat more crap. You wake up early to go to work, you get fat. Time to either quit your job or throw caution to the wind and pig out on peanut butter and deep-fried oreos.
Speaking of unhealthy, a new study found that people who live in neighborhoods that are lacking in grocery stores, but plentiful in fast food restaurants, are more prone to premature death, diabetes, cancer and heart problems. But they are much less likely to cause alcohol-related oven explosions, as occurred in this ill planned pot roast attempt.
Are you one of those people that always sets off the security alarm at the mall? Have you recently had major surgery? You just might have an errant surgical sponge in your abdomen. At Stanford’s Medical School they are testing a program where radio frequency identification tags are attached to surgical sponges in hopes of preventing the pesky loss of surgical implements inside of patients. This beats the previous program, where first year medical students were subjected to the cut-rate educational film, “Dude, Where’s My Sponge?” and the follow-up, “Sponge Bob Dead Pants”, which I hear is a total bummer.
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July 13, 2006 at 6:20 pm
· Filed under Technology, Health, Brain & Psychology
New research promises that implanted brain sensors will help paralyzed people perform tasks. I know what you’re all thinking: Hello? What about lazy people? Soon we’ll be able to perform pesky tasks such as opening the door, turning on the TV, or ordering a pizza without lifting a finger! The implications are astonishing. You could see the pizza commercial on TV (which you turned on with your mind), order pizza by brain-dialing, then blink open the door for the pizza guy! Maybe you’d have to get up to tip, but I’m sure they can come up with a way to solve that. I mean we don’ t need telekinesis or magic if the technology will do it for us! Of course we will need to engineer pizza delivery-bots, tip-bots and TV repair-bots, but we can outsource that to India! The future just gets brighter and brighter, doesn’t it?
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July 10, 2006 at 9:24 pm
· Filed under Space, Health, Politics, Brain & Psychology
A new study shows that drunk people were less than half as likely to see a dude in a monkey suit than sober people. In the test, people were given drinks (or not) and asked to count how many times a ball was tossed in a video of people playing a ball game. During this engaging film, someone in a monkey suit comes to the center of the screen, beats his chest and leaves. Eighteen percent of drinkers and 46 percent of sober people noticed this.
Firstly, less than half of the people noticed the monkey to start with. I’ve heard of this before. It is called “inattentional blindness” and results from focusing too much attention on a single thing, preventing one from noticing unexpected items right in front of you. The Bush Administration knows a lot about this. They might try to get us to focus on, say, flag burning, while diverting our attention from, say, everything else (the war, loss of civil liberties, the national debt). But that’s nothing new.
Secondly, who’s to say the drunks cared about a dude in a monkey suit? Did the monkey have more booze? Were the people in the film throwing around Jager bombs? The drunks were probably like, “Who’s this boring psychiatrist dude trying to make me watch this stupid movie? I bet he never gets laid.” Yeah. Drunks rule. And pirates. Yarrrr.
P.S. Pardon the lack of posting over the past week or two. I was in Cocoa Beach, FL and I saw the (1st ever 4th of July) shuttle launch from there! It was awesome. I will post pictures once I manage to extract them from my not-so-awesome camera phone.
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