My life. Maybe yours.

Title: A perpetual motion (well, until you die) machine. By Indexed. 

Ain't nothing you can do about this one but worry

In my senior year high school yearbook, there was a section in the back, doubtlessly mass-produced in many other yearbooks of vintage 1999, in which notable events and news stories from the past year were described. While I'm sure there were many important things in there, the only one I remember (and I remember it vividly) was a mouse with what looked like* a human ear growing out of its back.**

At the time, I was fascinated and repelled by the mouse with the ear on its back. Revisiting it now, I find I still am, so much so that I will decline from posting a picture, though there are plenty on the web if you Google it or click some of the links on this page. I mean, I know the intention was to see if we could grow parts for human transplant on mice, which is nice and all, but the resulting creature is quite grotesque. Okay, totally grotesque.

Which is all to say that I'm super glad I don't (to my knowledge) have any errant parts (human or otherwise) growing where they don't belong. You may think it's silly to be glad about such a thing, but once I tell you about what I discovered yesterday you'll think yourself the silly one.

Here's what I discovered: Humans, after they are fully formed and growing up and living normally, sometimes GROW EXTRA BITS WHERE THEY DON'T BELONG. And I'm not talking about cancer. I'm talking about actual body parts. How terrifying is that!?

From a blog at National Geographic:

One of the most common examples of misplaced cells seems to be livers. They grow all over the place. The first reported case, in 1922, described a liver growing on a gallbladder. Since then doctors have found other livers in gallbladders...as well as in the thoracic cavity, pancreas, esophagus, and on adrenal glands sitting atop the kidneys. A recent review finds 74 so-called ectopic livers reported in the medical literature, and offers no explanation.

Then there are the errant bones. Take a 2005 report of an 85-year-old woman in the U.K. who went to the doctor for bowel troubles. For a month, she had experienced alternating diarrhea and constipation. The doctors had no idea what it could be, so they peered inside her large intestine. They found a 1.5-centimeter pale brown polyp and sent it to the lab for testing. And what was that polyp? A piece of bone. In her colon. Why was it there? Unclear. Similarly, last year, researchers from India described a 16-year-old girl who couldn’t see out of her right eye. The vision loss had started six years earlier, when she suffered “accidental trauma by fist of hand.” Surgeons removed the eye and, a few weeks later, gave her an artificial one. When they analyzed the damaged eye in the lab, they found pieces of adult bone, with marrow and all.

Just one more...In 2007, researchers from Japan reported the case of an 11-year-old girl with a brain tumor. She had had the mass since birth and her doctors had been watching it closely throughout her childhood. By age 11, she needed surgery to remove it. Later, researchers analyzed the dissected tissue. And it was totally weird. As one study put it: “The initial histological analysis demonstrated a tumor growing out of what appeared to be nearly normal looking pancreas.” Pancreas. In her brain.

ACK. I wish I could un-learn all of that! Since I can't, I figure the second best thing is to share the horror.

I had a nightmare last night in which a femur grew out of my eye. I think the internet might be bad for my health.

*****

Bonus: here's two low-quality pictures from my high school days, stolen from someone on Facebook:

The good ol' basement, and its plaid couch.

Disco party! Definitely not a sausage fest.

*Turns out it wasn't an actual human ear, but rather some cow cartilage shaped to look like an ear. But I didn't know that until...right now.
**Wikipedia says this ear mouse ("Vacanti mouse") was unveiled in 1997, so I'm not really sure what it was doing in my yearbook. Did that section include highlights from my whole high school career, perhaps?

Australia is hereby crossed off the list of places I would consider living

Imagine walking into your charity store to find a hole in the ceiling, vomit on the floor, and all kinds of things messed up. You'd probably conclude a burglar broke in, vomited everywhere, made a mess, and left, right? Only...why didn't the burglar take anything?

Oh, it's because it's not a burglar. It's a 19-FOOT PYTHON. Which lay undetected in the charity store for a whole day after the break-in.

That's something that apparently happens in Australia, according to NPR/The AP:

Australian police were mystified by a chaotic crime scene including a hole in the ceiling and a smelly pool of vomit-like liquid — until they found the culprit was a 5.7-meter (19-foot) python.

The massive snake weighing in at 17 kilograms (37 pounds) was captured a day after a suspected burglary was reported at a charity store in Queensland in northeastern Australia.

"Its head was the size of a small dog," Police Sgt. Don Auld said Wednesday.

Before they found the python, investigators' working theory was that a human burglar with an appetite for destruction — and a serious illness — had gone on a rampage inside the St. Vincent de Paul store in the small town of Ingham.

"We thought a person had fallen through the ceiling because the roof panel was cut in half," Auld said. "When they've hit the floor, they've vomited and then staggered and fallen over. That's what we thought anyway."

Police now suspect the python entered the store through the roof, which was damaged in a cyclone two years ago.

The animal then plummeted through the ceiling, knocking over dishes, clothes and other items, before relieving itself on the floor. It somehow managed to hide from officials until staff spotted it lying alongside a wall the next day.

Can I just repeat what happened? A 37-pound 19-foot-long snake apparently lived in the roof of a building for some period of time, then fell through the ceiling, "vomiting"* everywhere, and then HID FOR A WHOLE DAY. I don't even want to GO to Australia anymore**, lest I wander into a place with a giant snake hiding out! I have the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.

Dear god.

*The "vomit" turned out to be "snake urine and feces," by the way.
**Lies. I totally do. I need to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef before it's dead!

Speaking of the Great Barrier Reef...

Sigh. Ever since I did my 6th grade Endangered Species Report on the Galapagos Penguin, I've wanted to go to the Galapagos Islands. And now I learn that tourists are ruining the island...what a conundrum!

Via

Time to book a trip to the Great Barrier Reef

RIP Coral Reefs.

All Coral Reefs Could Die by Century’s End

Every coral reef in the world will probably die off by the end of this century unless the production of carbon dioxide is curtailed severely, researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science report. Accelerated carbon dioxide production is making the oceans more acidic, thus preventing the basic skeletons of coral reefs from being made.

Better get on that dream to snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef!*

Lighthouse Reef, Belize - Photograph by Brian Skerry, National Geographic

*...Although, maybe not. Are there starfish there? Starfish really creep me out.

Ugggggh, so creepy. Via.