Weird News

[Sundae]

Glad for the warning Zen.
Will I be clicking?

No.

[Lamplighter]

What do Jenny McCarthy and January Jones have in common ?

The Register-Guard
Lauren Gambino
The Associated Press
5/7/13

Senate approves bill to let mothers keep placentas

SALEM — The Oregon Legislature has agreed that mothers who
have just given birth should be able to take home their placentas.<snip>
Under current state law, hospitals are prohibited from releasing
hazardous medical waste, which includes human placentas.
Some Oregon hospitals, however, have allowed mothers to take home
their placentas for cultural and religious reasons.

Some mothers have their placentas put into capsules,
which they consume in the belief it boosts their energy
and staves off post-partum depression.<snip>

Actress January Jones spotlighted the issue when she claimed that
ingesting her placenta helped boost her energy and get her back to work
just weeks after giving birth.

Experts have said there is no scientific evidence of a health benefit.

“There’s no scientific evidence stating that it’s entirely safe,” said
Dr. Mark Kristal, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Buffalo.

Kristal said placenta-eating was first reported in the 1970s
when people living in communes cooked the organ into stew.
The increasing number of American women eating their placentas
today means the fad is back, he said.
<snip>

[glatt]

cannibals

[Sundae]

I wouldn't be squeamish about eating placenta.
If it was given freely and well seasoned. Like drinking breast milk - I wouldn't have it direct from the source, but I have no problem with it.

Then again I'm European
Except when I want to call myself a Briton.
Or English.
Or a Southerner....

[Clodfobble]

Kristal said placenta-eating was first reported in the 1970s
when people living in communes cooked the organ into stew.

Kristal is obviously not up on her anthropology. Many ancient societies ate the placenta, and many animals instinctively do it today. When food is scarce, you don't let that many nutrients go to waste.

I'm not saying I would do it, but it's silly to pretend this is somehow a modern invention.

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

Kristal is obviously not up on her anthropology. Many ancient societies ate the placenta, and many animals instinctively do it today. When food is scarce, you don't let that many nutrients go to waste.

I'm not saying I would do it, but it's silly to pretend this is somehow a modern invention.

Not to mention that predators can smell that shit a million miles away and will come and eat your defenseless ass and that of your hard-got babbehs.

Clodfobble's obviously not up on her predatory thinking.

[footfootfoot]

But, that's not why I'm here. I'm here for this bit of sickening irony. Enough iron in this irony to build an aircraft carrier...

Head of U.S. Air Force's anti-sexual assault unit arrested for sexual battery

[Sheldonrs]

Originally Posted by footfootfoot

But, that's not why I'm here. I'm here for this bit of sickening irony. Enough iron in this irony to build an aircraft carrier...

Talk about letting the fox guard the hen house.

[Pete Zicato]

Originally Posted by Sheldonrs

Talk about letting the fox guard the hen house.

Wouldn't that be the wolf guarding the foxes?

[ZenGum]

"Research, your honor."

[glatt]

Vegetarian catches anthrax while eating salad at drum circle.

Here's how it happened. An anthrax infected goat in Africa was skinned and made into a drum head. The drum was brought to New Hampshire, and played in a basement multipurpose room drum circle. Hitting the dried drum head aerosolized the anthrax bacteria, which then floated across the room and onto the salad. She ate the salad.

You just never freakin' know.

[Lamplighter]

Aerialized spores from the drums is likely, but this article doesn't
really incriminate the lettuce. But so be it, CDC may have good evidence for it.

It does remind me of my first (1960's) and worst (potentially) career mistake.

As a graduate teaching assistance for a course in Medical Microbiology,
one of my first assignments was to set up a class exercise to demonstrate "virulence".
That is, how one strain of a pathogenic microorganism can
produce severe disease while another strain does not.

So I wrote a letter on university stationery to Fort Detrick, MD,
the US Army's Center for Biological Warfare, asking for
one culture of virulent- and one of avirulent- B.anthrasus.
Within a few days, the cultures arrived, along with a letter giving the LD50 .
This is the dose (number of cells/spores) it takes to kill 50% of the animals infected.

The LD50 for avirulent strain was something like billions.
In other words, you could not inject enough to kill 50% of the mice.
The LD50 for that virulent strain of anthrax was 1.

This so scared the bejesus out of me and I immediately
autoclaved the entire package for several hours.

It also gave me a lifelong fear of what the military was capable of
doing to "prevent and protect" the US from biological warfare.

[glatt]

Funny how times change. They just mailed that shit to you.

My dad as a physics prof had an underground closet in his old lab that was full of radioactive samples. Dangerously radioactive samples. About 20 years ago, as various regulation were getting tighter, he started worrying about the stuff and worked really hard to get rid of all of it through quickly disappearing appropriate channels. If he had waited any longer, he would have had to devote the entire department budget to paying to get rid of the stuff. He had pulled one sample out of there once to show me, and the sample actually glowed in the dark. Very cool. Actually, now that I think about it, he took my grandmother's radium clock up there to get rid of it. That clock was cool. Its hands would glow in the dark too.

[Lamplighter]

I hope the hackers were also smart enough to get
the movie rights to this scheme.
It smacks of George Clooney and Julia Roberts

NY Times
MARC SANTORA
Published: May 9, 2013
In Hours, Thieves Took $45 Million in A.T.M. Scheme

It was a brazen bank heist, but a 21st-century version in which
the criminals never wore ski masks, threatened a teller or set foot in a vault.

In two precision operations that involved people in more than two dozen
countries acting in close coordination and with surgical precision,
thieves stole $45 million from thousands of A.T.M.’s in a matter of hours.

In New York City alone, the thieves responsible for A.T.M. withdrawals
struck 2,904 machines over 10 hours starting on Feb. 19, withdrawing $2.4 million.
<snip>
The hackers, who are not named in the indictment, then raised the withdrawal limits
on prepaid MasterCard debit accounts issued by the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah,
also known as RakBank, which is in United Arab Emirates.
<snip>
With five account numbers in hand, the hackers distributed the information
to individuals in 20 countries who then encoded the information on magnetic-stripe cards.
On Dec. 21, the cashing crews made 4,500 A.T.M. transactions worldwide,
stealing $5 million, according to the indictment.

While the street crews were taking money out of bank machines, the computer experts
were watching the financial transactions from afar, ensuring that they would
not be shortchanged on their cut, according to court documents.
<snip>

[glatt]

We live in interesting times.