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?

UM WHAT?

Oh Em GEE. Have you heard about the police officer in NYC who was recently arrested for plotting, on multiple occasions, to "kidnap, rape, cook and eat women"?!?!

This is a real story, and like many real stories, it is incredibly bizarre. It has recently been discovered (by the FBI, no less) that NYC police officer Gilberto Valle, aged 28, married, with a one-year-old daughter, liked to spend his free time on his home computer chatting with various people via IM about the logistics of kidnapping and/or cooking women. Not only that, but he also created upwards of 100 files that contained information about various women that he knew, including their addresses, physical descriptions, and photographs. He also went so far as to look up various women in a federal database, and to offer to kidnap some of them for money.

The federal complaint filed against him is fascinating, and creepy as hell. For example, here's the FBI's description of Gilberto chatting with his "co-conspirator #1" (CC-1) about the logistics of silence-of-the-lambsing one particular woman:

And let's not forget about the kidnapping, plotted with Co-Conspirator #2!

Valle's lawyer claims that he is "at worst is someone who has sexual fantasies about people he knows and he talks about it on the Internet" and that "nothing has happened....it's just talk," and that may be legally true. But I can't imagine that his wife--who turned him in, by the way--or his job--which he used to access federal database information about potential victims--will take kindly to any of his talk.

People can be really creepy sometimes.

***********

In other news, THERE IS A HURRICANE OUTSIDE.

From The Cat in the Hat

Try to get the first appointment after lunch; barring that, bring snacks.

Sometimes it's startling to think of how much of our lives are controlled by the whims of another human being. For example, getting a correct diagnosis at the doctor is something we simply assume will happen, and if you have a common disease--strep throat, chlamydia, pinkeye, whatever--it probably will. But more complicated "medical mysteries" will not necessarily be solved your physician. As I learned several years ago in Atul Gawande's excellent book Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, sometimes a correct diagnosis in a difficult case happens only because a doctor has recently read something or heard something about the ailment in question; had the patient come the day before or a week after, the doctor might never have made the connection, or the diagnosis. Rather sobering if you think about it.

(Side note: This is actually why I'm pretty jazzed on the idea I heard (on Nova, of course, my favorite TV show) of using a computer like Watson to do medical diagnoses. With a computer full of every symptom of every disease ever recorded, improbable diagnoses will become a lot easier. Of course, an unintended consequence of building computers smart enough to diagnose human diseases might, eventually, be a computer takeover of the world, but I'm not really too worried about that. If they diagnose us as well as I think they will, humans will be healthy enough to pull the plug before too much happens. Plus, we'll probably run out of electricity before machines become self-aware.)

Back to the point. Recently a few items in the news have made me stop and think again about how easy it would be our lives to be inexorably altered (or cut short) by a simple human mistake, or an accident of timing. First, I'm sure you've heard about the spate of air traffic controllers who have been found, quite literally, to be asleep on the job? Yeah. And it turns out they're not just sleeping--sometimes they also get locked out of the tower, or watch movies on duty.

Hilarious picture stolen from Wikipedia

All of which is to say, there's sometimes nobody directing the planes while people like you and me are hurtling towards the airport at terrifying speeds in what is essentially a tin can with wings. Safe to land? Who knows, let's just go for it. (Oh god, we're all gonna die.)

(Related: Wikipedia has a nice long list of additional ways to die in an airplane. Swell.)

The other fate-hanging-in-the-balance-of-a-capricious-human news item I saw recently has less potential for fatality, but it is interesting nonetheless because it involves justice, who, it turns out, can be blind to no ill effect, but who definitely shouldn't be hungry. As I learned in an article in The Economist, if you want a favorable decision from a judge, it's best to be the first appointment after lunch. Yes, really - according to recent research, if you're the last appointment before lunch, you have a significantly lower chance of having your case decided in your favor than if you're the first appointment after...at least if you're an Israeli criminal seeking parole, that is.

As one might expect, I went to the online home of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and read through the study discussed in the Economist article, which is entitled "Extraneous factors in judicial decisions" (abstract here). In the study, researchers in Israel examined the parole decisions of "experienced judges" over the course of 50 days.  Most of the parole cases involved requests from prison inmates to change the terms of their incarceration, and the researchers recorded not only the outcomes of these cases (all of which were decided by one judge), but also many additional details, such as severity of the crime committed, months served, availability of rehabilitation programs for the inmate, religion of the criminal, and so on. Time of day in which the request was considered, meal breaks, and the temporal sequencing of the case for the relevant day were also recorded.

The researchers made a fascinating discovery, which is that the order of the case matters, even when controlling for confounding factors. Just look at this chart:

As described by the researchers, "The plot shows that the likelihood of ruling in favor of a prisoner spikes at the beginning of each session--the probability of a favorable ruling steadily declines from ≈0.65 to nearly zero and jumps back up to ≈0.65 after a break for a meal."

Isn't that amazing? Your future in jail might depend on whether a judge has eaten recently or not.

(Hey-Maybe there is something to the popular belief in my department that the best time to talk to my adviser is while she is eating lunch or immediately thereafter...hm. Fascinating.)

***

Well, that's about all I have to say about that. I guess the take-away message of this somewhat rambling post is this: It might not be a bad idea to send a pizza to the air traffic control tower shortly before your flight is scheduled to land. Just sayin.

The Sixth Mass Extinction is a really good name for a band, come to think of it

A study just published in Nature has pointed out that it's just about time for the earth's sixth mass extinction, and that this extinction might in fact be underway as we speak.

Time magazine, covering the story, suggests that within 300 years 75% of the species on the planet could be wiped out.

National Geographic thinks change is coming even faster:

By the year 2100, human activities such as pollution, land clearing, and overfishing may have driven more than half of the world's marine and land species to extinction.

Dude, we eat those species!

I've done some Googling on the "sixth mass extinction," and all I can say is I wish I hadn't. Although I must admit it is somewhat gratifying that there is a group of scientists that share my "we're all gonna die" perspective. Take this cheery article abstract from the Asian Journal of Experimental Sciences, for example:

Mass extinctions probably account for the disappearance of less than 5% of all extinct species – 95% of species extinctions occur between mass extinctions. In short, extinction can occur at any time in Earth’s history. The concept of sustainable use of the planet assumes that humans can live on the planet indefinitely – or at least until the sun dies. However, human production of greenhouse gases is resulting in rapid climate change that threatens human society globally. In addition, greenhouse gas emissions are increasing markedly, and no agreement has been reached on specific goals for reducing emissions. Finally, coal is being used to replace diminishing supplies of petroleum, despite evidence that coal produces about twice as many greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy produced than petroleum. Although alternative sources of energy (e.g., wind, solar, geothermal) are becoming increasingly popular, humankind’s primary source of energy is fossil fuels. Global climate change resulting from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions has already affected food production, water supplies, natural habitat, and human security. Climate change and other types of habitat destruction threaten the biospheric life support system upon which human survival depends. All these issues suggest that Homo sapiens may be just another stochastic event that is adversely affecting life on Earth.

It doesn't feel very good to be called "just another stochastic event that is adversely affecting life on earth," does it?


I guess the moral of this story is that we should probably live it up because we're going extinct, possibly soon.