Upgrade your browser!
Skip to Content
Sign-In
Community
Exp Leader Board
Don't have an account? Create one and start earning XP!
Video:
HUSAVIK, Iceland (Reuters) - Sigurdur Hjartarson is missing a human penis. But he's not worried: four men have promised to donate theirs to him when they die. Hjartarson is founder and owner of the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which offers visitors from around the world a close-up look at the long and the short of the male reproductive organ. His collection, which began in 1974 with a single bull's penis that looked something like a riding crop, now boasts 261 preserved members from 90 species. The largest, from a sperm whale, is 70 kg (154 lb) and 1.7 metres (5.58 ft) long. The smallest, a hamster penis bone, is just 2 mm and must be viewed through a magnifying glass. One species conspicuous by its absence is homo sapiens, but that may soon be rectified since a German, an American, an Icelander and a Briton have promised to donate their organs after death, according to certificates on display. The American, 52-year-old Stan Underwood, supplied a written description of his penis -- which he purportedly nick-named "Elmo" -- for display alongside a life-size plastic mold of the member as well as his pledge to donate it. Hjartarson said the Icelandic donor, a 93-year-old from nearby Akureyri, was a womanizer in his youth who thought having his penis in the collection might bring him eternal fame. But vanity may make him rethink the offer. "He has mentioned lately that his penis is shrinking as he gets older and he is worried it might not make a proper exhibit," Hjartarson said. The specimens, most of which were donated by fishermen, hunters and biologists, are kept in glass jars of formaldehyde or dried and mounted on the wall, creating an atmosphere that is part science lab, part trophy room. Hjartarson has paid for only one -- an elephant penis nearly 1 meter long that hangs, stuffed and mounted on a wooden board, in the museum's "foreign section". He said he began collecting penises 24 years ago, when working as a school administrator, with little notion he would one day be running a museum devoted to the subject. "It was just a hobby," he said, adding that the collection was relegated to his office until the inception of the museum. Hjartarson maintains a light-hearted approach to his delicate subject matter, saying a sense of humour and a bit of intelligence are necessary to appreciate the collection. "I hope visitors leave the museum in a better mood than when they arrived," he said. Source Jars filled with various animal phalli are on display at the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Husavik
TOKYO (Reuters) - Ladies, take your battle for the environment a little closer to your heart with a solar-powered bra that can generate enough electric energy to charge a mobile phone or an iPod. Lingerie maker Triumph International Japan Ltd unveiled its environmentally friendly, and green colored, "Solar Power Bra" on Wednesday in Tokyo which features a solar panel worn around the stomach. The panel requires light to generate electricity and the concept bra will not be in stores anytime soon, said Triumph spokeswoman Yoshiko Masuda, as "people usually can not go outside without wearing clothes over it." But it does send the message of how lingerie could possibly save the planet, Masuda said, adding that the bra should not be washed or sunned on a rainy day to avoid damaging it. Being eco-friendly is now fashionable in Japan, and the "Solar Energy Bra" follows the company's other green-themed undergarments that include a bra that turns into a reusable shopping bag and one that featured metal chopsticks to promote the use of reusable chopsticks. "It is very comfortable and I can really feel involved in eco-friendly efforts as well," model Yuko Ishida said. Source
Article Submitted by master911. CLIMATE change could lead to "killer cornflakes" with the most potent liver toxin ever recorded, an environmental health conference has been told. The effects of the toxins, known as mycotoxins, have been known since the Middle Ages when rye bread contaminated with ergot fungus was a staple part of the European diet, environmental health researcher Lisa Bricknell of Central Queensland University (CQU) said. "People started suffering mass hallucinations, manic depression, gangrene, abortions, reduced fertility and painful, convulsive death," Ms Bricknell told the 10th World Congress on Environmental Health in Brisbane today. "The rye bread, which was known as the staff of life, quickly became known as the scepter of death." The damage was done not from a single exposure but from many small doses of the toxins over a long period of time. Mycotoxins can appear in the food chain as a result of the fungal infection of crops in the field or in storage, either by being eaten directly by humans, or by being used as livestock feed. The most important group of mycotoxins in Australian maize is aflatoxins. They could spread when temperature and moisture conditions were right and could affect crops including maize and peanuts and in some milk, dried milk products and some spices, Ms. Bricknell said. Ms. Bricknell said there had been outbreaks of high levels of aflatoxins in Australian crops in recent years and global warming was providing a new threat to food safety, with temperatures expected to rise and rainfall drop in inland areas of the eastern states. "Rainfall is correlated with aflatoxin contamination, so not only do these conditions favour aflatoxin contamination but they also induce plant stress, which is going to make our plants more susceptible to contamination," Ms Bricknell said. Grain-growing areas of Australia could become unviable, and Australia may have to import more maize and maize-based food products to meet demand. "In a situation of climate change, if we are importing more products and imported products are not regulated ... we can also expect that other countries may be experiencing similar problems with increased contamination. "While killer cornflakes may not precisely be around the corner, we do have potential for increasing aflatoxin exposure," Ms Bricknell said. "We need to investigate risk management for maize production and we need to undertake careful monitoring of food products coming into our country." Source Have any interesting articles you'd like to share? Article Request Thread.
Article Submitted by ug7344. The discovery of traces of flesh in a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex bone ties the King of the Dinosaurs to modern-day species and, scientists say, heralds a "milestone" shift in paleontology. "Based on the small sample we've recovered, chickens may be the closest relatives (to T. rex)," says geneticist John Asara of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, co-leader of a team reporting the discovery of faint traces of chicken-like bone lining preserved inside a dinosaur drumstick. In studies reported in the journal Science, Asara and colleagues conclude that seven traces of proteins detected in purified T. rex bone most closely match those reported in chickens, followed by frogs and newts. The astonishing find of barely detectable tissue from a creature tens of millions of years old, along with similar traces the team found in a mastodon bone at least 160,000 years old, upends the conventional view of fossils and may shift paleontologists' focus from bone hunting to biochemistry, say experts. Until now, scientists thought fossilization replaced every last bit of living tissue with inert mineral. "I'd call it a milestone," says paleontologist Hans Larsson of McGill University in Montreal, who was not part of the studies. "Dinosaurs will enter the field of molecular biology and really slingshot paleontology into the modern world." In the two studies, led by Asara and Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the team unearthed a T. rex buried underneath 60 feet of cliffside rock in Hell Creek, Mont. Keeping the dinosaur entombed in sandstone to prevent contamination, the scientists extracted a few grams of material from its thick thighbone, and forwarded the bone powder to Asara's lab. There it was ground down to about a billionth of a gram of material, suitable for inspection with a high-tech mass spectrometer generally used to precisely diagnose cancer genes inside tumors. The team suspects the dry sandstone, combined with the thickness of the T. rex bone, allowed some faint measure of preservation, only about 1% of the purified sample's collagen, the ribbonlike tissue found in ligaments, tendons and bone lining inside the thighbone. The protein traces are a far cry from the Jurassic Park vision of genes leading to a re-created dinosaur, Larsson notes. He voiced some caution about the results until independent researchers have ruled out the possibility of contamination in the bone samples. "It wasn't terribly long ago we thought there was no preservation whatsoever in fossils," says paleontologist Thomas Holtz of the University of Maryland in College Park. "We have a lot more to learn about fossilization." "Finding any soft tissues in dinosaur bones greatly surprised us," says Schweitzer, who led a 2005 study that found still-elastic blood vessel remains in a dinosaur bone. Her team plans to embark on a worldwide exploration of dinosaur sites in the next year, looking for more fossil bones to examine. Source,Source
TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Japanese cell phone users will test a new service that allows them to download fragrances, major telecommunications company NTT Communications Corp. said Monday. A downloaded fragrance will be sent from a user's cell phone to a base station that will emit the scent. Twenty participants using "Mobile Fragrance Communications" can download files of specific scents accompanied by music or video clips, the company said in a statement. Scent playlists can be downloaded from "i-mode" mobile Web site run by the company's affiliate, NTT DoCoMo. The service uses a handset's infrared port to transfer the "fragrance data" to a dedicated device similar to a plug-in air freshener that is loaded with a cartridge of base fragrances. The device then mixes them to create the chosen smell, which it then wafts out. The service is a cell phone version of an existing fragrance download service for scent users' homes and offices. Trials will run for 10 days beginning Thursday. The company is also testing a device that can be connected to the Internet so that a user can remotely program a scent from a mobile phone. The company in 2005 launched a similar service for Japanese homes, allowing users to download different programs to emit smells from a 73,500 yen (US$720; euro460) machine Source Image above: A downloaded fragrance will be sent from a user's cell phone to a base station that will emit the scent.
BALTIMORE (AP) — Johns Hopkins surgeons transplanted a half-dozen kidneys simultaneously, an operation believed to be the first of its kind, hospital officials announced Tuesday. The transplants conducted Saturday were made possible when a so-called altruistic donor, who was willing to donate to anyone, was found to be a match for one of six transplant candidates. Five of the candidates had a willing donor whose kidney was incompatible with their particular friend or relative, but a match for another of the six. The 10-hour surgeries used six operating rooms and nine surgical teams. "All 12 are doing great, the six kidneys are working well," said Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of Hopkins' transplant center and head of the transplant team. The six-way transplant follows a quintuple transplant performed in 2006 at the hospital and several triple transplants. Last week, doctors at Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital performed simultaneous transplants of four kidneys. Most kidney transplants use organs taken from people who have died, but doctors prefer organs from live donors because the success rates are higher. The donors and recipients in the six-way transplant were matched using a living-donor system developed at Johns Hopkins. Montgomery has advocated a wider system of connecting altruistic donors, transplant candidates and incompatible but willing donors to increase the number of available organs. Randy Bolten, whose brother is President Bush's chief of staff, Josh Bolten, was among the donors. He couldn't donate a kidney to his wife, Jeanne Heise, but he was a match for another recipient. Heise, who has suffered from kidney disease for more than 30 years, was about to go on dialysis when the chain of transplants became possible. "We want to spread the word about this sort of group surgery and living organ donation," Heise said in a statement issued by the National Kidney Foundation of Northern California. "The waiting list for a kidney is very long and too many people die while waiting. With this group procedure, more and more people can beat kidney disease and live long productive lives." The United Network for Organ Sharing knows of no other six-way transplant, spokeswoman Amanda Claggett said. She added that so-called paired donations are still very rare. More than 252,000 kidney transplants have been performed in the United States since UNOS started keeping data in 1988; 87,000 of the kidneys came from living donors. There have been only 301 transplants performed through so-called paired kidney exchange, including 122 in 2007, Claggett said. She said more than 75,000 people are waiting for kidney transplants and 4,352 died while waiting for a kidney last year. Source
Article Submitted by blizzloader . Sony BMG is no stranger to piracy. As one of the most vocal supporters of the RIAA and IFPI antipiracy efforts, the company has some experience hunting down and punishing consumers who don't pay for its products. The company is getting some experience on the other side of the table, however, now that it's being sued for software piracy. PointDev, a French software company that makes Windows administration tools, received a call from a Sony BMG IT employee for support. After Sony BMG supplied a pirated license code for Ideal Migration, one of PointDev's products, the software maker was able to mandate a seizure of Sony BMG's assets. The subsequent raid revealed that software was illegally installed on four of Sony BMG's servers. The Business Software Alliance, however, believes that up to 47 percent of the software installed on Sony BMG's computers could be pirated. These are some pretty serious—not to mention ironic—allegations against a company that's gone so far as to install malware on consumers' computers in the name of preventing piracy. While PointDev is claiming €300,000 (over $475,000) in damages in its suit against Sony BMG, Agustoni Paul-Henry, PointDev's CEO, says (from a Google translation of a French report) that this is more about principle than money: "We are forced to watch every week if key software pirates are not [sic] on the Internet. We are a small company of six employees. Instead of trying to protect us, we could spend this time to develop ourselves." Paul-Henry thinks Sony BMG's piracy of PointDev's products is the fault of more than just a single employee (again, translated): "I think piracy is linked to the policy of a company. If the employee has the necessary funding to buy the software he needs, he will. If this is not the case, he will find alternative ways, as the work must be done in one way or another." Certainly, one wonders what led to Sony BMG to steal PointDev's product in the first place. It's a safe bet that the company can afford to pay for the necessary licenses, which leaves sheer laziness as the most likely culprit. In any event, it's absolutely inexcusable for a company that has been at the forefront of the antipiracy fight, going so far as to surreptitiously install rootkits on its customers' PCs. Source Have any interesting articles you'd like to share? Article Request Thread.
Article Submitted by Henri_. A man cut off his finger tip while working on a model plane. His brother, a medical research scientist, sent him a vial containing powdered pig bladder and told him to sprinkle on the severed finger tip. It grew back -- "flesh, blood, vessels and nail" -- in four weeks. That powder is a substance made from pig bladders called extracellular matrix. It is a mix of protein and connective tissue surgeons often use to repair tendons and it holds some of the secrets behind the emerging new science of regenerative medicine. "It tells the body, start that process of tissue regrowth," said Badylak. Badlayk is one of the many scientists who now believe every tissue in the body has cells which are capable of regeneration. All scientists have to do is find enough of those cells and "direct" them to grow. "Somehow the matrix summons the cells and tell them what to do," Badylak explained. "It helps instruct them in terms of where they need to go, how they need to differentiate - should I become a blood vessel, a nerve, a muscle cell or whatever." Be sure to check out this CBSnews Article for more information about re-growing organs... including: Ink Jet Heart Cells And Custom-Made Body Parts Source, Source
Article Submitted by master911. In an unprecedented experiment, a Japanese astronaut has thrown a boomerang in space and confirmed it flies back much like on Earth. Astronaut Takao Doi "threw a boomerang and saw it come back" during his free time on March 18 at the International Space Station, a spokeswoman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said. Doi threw the boomerang after a request from compatriot Yasuhiro Togai, a world boomerang champion. "I was very surprised and moved to see that it flew the same way it does on Earth," the Mainichi Shimbun daily quoted the 53-year-old astronaut as telling his wife in a chat from space. The space agency said a videotape of the experiment would likely be released later. Mr Doi travelled on US shuttle Endeavour on the March 11 blast-off and successfully delivered the first piece of a Japanese laboratory to the International Space Station. Source, Source
Article Submitted by Henri_. Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered. The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. It's the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk. Astronomers have decided to call the star "Lucy" after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. "You would need a jeweller's loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond," says astronomer Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team of researchers that discovered it. The diamond star completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 546-carat Golden Jubilee which was cut from a stone brought out of the Premier mine in South Africa. The huge cosmic diamond - technically known as BPM 37093 - is actually a crystallised white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon. For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallised, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently. The white dwarf is not only radiant but also rings like a gigantic gong, undergoing constant pulsations. "By measuring those pulsations, we were able to study the hidden interior of the white dwarf, just like seismograph measurements of earthquakes allow geologists to study the interior of the Earth. "We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy's largest diamond," says Metcalfe. Astronomers expect our Sun will become a white dwarf when it dies 5 billion years from now. Some two billion years after that, the Sun's ember core will crystallise as well, leaving a giant diamond in the centre of the solar system. "Our Sun will become a diamond that truly is forever," says Metcalfe. Source, Source, Source