The Thoughts and Feelings of a Melbourne Person
Two weeks ago Donna spotted a mole on my back that had grown since she last noticed it, so off to the doctors we went that Monday for a punch biopsy, and the following Friday evening I get a call saying that they want me to come in to discuss the results and to get [...]
Some hot news in from New Scientist..
Clifford Woolf and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School have now discovered a way of blocking just the pain neurons using capsaicin - the active ingredient in chilli peppers - along with a version of lignocaine that can’t diffuse through cell membranes unassisted. [....] Woolf’s team is testing [...]
The Western World has been fretting about SARS and Avian Influenza for some time now, but all the while there’s been another bug that we thought we had previously conquered sitting in the wings evolving drug resistance, and it could be far deadlier.
Oops, it looks like there’s been a bit of a mix up with the humble leech in medical research!
In the slimiest and perhaps costliest case of mistaken identity in modern biology, hundreds of scientific papers and years of research could be thrown into doubt, for they may have been based on experiments carried out on [...]
There’s been a fair bit of discussion around the web about the US FDA banning the import of Vegemite1 2 3 4.
Well I went digging around because this sounded a little too odd and because the only source was a tiny news story that gave no details. Wikipedia’s Vegemite entry mentions the ban but [...]
The BBC reports on a man caught speeding:
New Zealand police have dropped charges of dangerous driving against a man with no arms who was caught speeding.
The police are now satisfied that he can drive safely with only his feet, and he’s now got his learners permit.
The BBC is reporting that the text of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has been adopted by the UN.
Those countries that sign up to it will have to enact laws and other measures to improve disability rights and also agree to get rid of legislation, customs and practices that discriminate against [...]
Just updated Donnas’ events page to list the first of the talks in the US in November!
Well tonight the SBS Insight program “Understanding Autism” was on tonight, and Donna and myself were on talking about how we live with Donna’s autism.
One question I didn’t get to ask was going to be this:
Why, if we hear that people with autism react so very differently to different treatments with one helping one child [...]
The oldest known living animal, 175 year old Harriet the Tortoise has died of a heart attack following a short illness at Australia Zoo in Queensland.
Whilst it was long thought that Harriet was collected by Charles Darwin on his visit to the Galapagos Islands, genetic testing has shown that although she was born prior to [...]
