Anesthesia

Nitrous oxide was discovered in 1772, but for decades the gas was considered no more than a party toy. People knew that inhaling a little of it would make you laugh (hence the name “laughing gas”), and that inhaling a little more of it would knock you unconscious.

In 1844, Horace Wells, a dentist in Connecticut, had an idea after witnessing a nitrous mishap at a party. A friend of Wells took some gas and fell and suffered a deep gash in his leg, but he didn’t feel a thing.

To test his theory, Wells arranged an experiment with himself as the guinea pig. He knocked himself out by inhaling a large does of nitrous oxide, and then had a dentist extract a bad tooth from his mouth. When Wells came to, his tooth had been successfully pulled.

After further experiments, Wells was jailed while high on chloroform and he committed suicide. In 1864 the American Dental Association formally recognized him for his discovery.

Speaking of Sleep

Dolphins and whales do not sleep for the first month of their life.

Giraffes. the tallest land-living animal, sleep only 4 to 6 hours a day.

Cats along with mice, pigs, and cheetahs can sleep for 12 hours per day.

Rats, gerbils and lions can sleep for 13 hours a day.

Squirrels sleep about 14 hours a day.

A human baby of age 1-12 months can sleep 16 hours a day (in between feedings and diaper changes).

The Lemur sleeps for 16 hours a day.

Owl Monkeys will sleep 17 hours a day.

Armadillos and tigers go to sleep for about 18-19 hours a day.

Brown Bats  sleep for 20 hours a day and Koalas sleep up to 22 hours a day.  I'm tired just thinking about this stuff.

Printing Skin

The range of uses for three-dimensional printers is increasing all the time, but now scientists have 3D "bioprinters" that print out skin, cartilage, bone, and other body parts. 3D printers print by depositing material line by line and then vertically layer by layer. They have been used to make sculptures and more.

Professor James Yoo, from the Institute of Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science his group is developing a system that will allow them to print skin directly onto burn wounds. Their research is funded by the US Department of Defense.

The bioprinter has a built-in laser scanner that scans the wound and determines its depth and area. The scan is converted into three-dimensional digital images that enable the device to calculate how many layers of skin cells need to be printed on the wound to restore it to its original configuration. The system has successfully printed skin patches 10 cm (almost 4 inches) square on a pig.

Day of the Geese

Antzar Eguna, is a Spanish tradition in which a greased goose is suspended over water and young men jump from boats and attempt to rip off the head of the goose. This competition serves as a way for young men to prove their strength and eligibility to females. The winner also gets to keep the goose. Although this tradition was once practiced all over Spain with live geese,  it is now only held during the San Antolin festival in Lekeitio, with a dead goose.

Happy Friday

The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret to freedom is courage.

I have the courage and freedom to celebrate a Happy Friday!

Google Art

If you like ancient masterpieces, Google has a real treat for you. Google staff have been photographing art from various galleries around the world the pictures are available for free on the web. It is called the Google Art Project and it is spectacular. You can zoom in on pictures to great detail. It is like going to a museum with a magnifying glass. It is worth a look and a good link to share with children going to school. Here is the LINK.

Art in Sweden Subway

Here is a site of pictures that show the Swedish subway. A beautiful blend of natural and new. LINK

Worlds Fastest Computer

The fastest computer in the world belongs to the Chinese. The Tianjin National Supercomputer Center's Tianhe-1A system benchmarked a performance of 2.67 petaflops (A petaflop is 1,125,899,906,842,624 calculations per second - a thousand trillion or quadrillion), surpassing the U.S. Department of Energy's Cray XT5 Jaguar system at a slow 1.75 petaflops. IBM is building two mega machines, a 10 petaflops and a 20 petaflops system, both to be running in 2012. We are approaching the Singularity faster than predicted.

A human brain's probable processing power is around 100 teraflops (100 trillion calculations per second), according to Hans Morvec, principal research scientist at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. We do have one edge over computers, they have not been able to build a computer that fast as small as our brain. . .  yet.

Less than forty years ago, we were wondering when the computer would be able to do a million operations a second. Less than three years ago we hailed the fastest computer for running teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second).

BTW, IBM's Watson, of Jeopardy fame, runs at a miserably slow speed of 80 teraflops.

Modern Healthcare

According to the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, one of every three people who died in the U.S. in 2007 died in a hospital. The leading principal diagnosis for patients who died while receiving inpatient care was septicemia, or infection of the bloodstream. That does not speak well for modern medicine.

Electric Nose Lift

For those who might feel probiscisally challenged, here is the answer. You need only three minutes with the Beauty Lift High Nose and the handy gadget will give you a beautiful nose.

Slip the gadget onto your nose, turn on the switch and you can feel gentle electric vibrations coming from the bottom and thus lifting your nose up and up. I tried one and it was too small. Hmmm!

What's in a Name

US soldiers in World War 1 were called doughboys. The name is believed to have originated in reference to large round brass buttons worn by American infantrymen which looked like little round doughnuts called doughboys. The term was first used to describe the buttons and then became the common slang for the infantrymen themselves and was especially popular during World War I.

'Sieg Heil' means 'Hail to Victory.'

Also D-Day comes from 'Designated Day' for Operation Overlord, the code name for the Allied invasion of Northern France on June 6, 1944, during World War II.

Historic Photos

Historypin is a very interesting website that is a global project in partnership with Google. The site allows people to view and share historic places pictures online. It’s an open community, which means everyone can upload an old photo, locate the place on a Google Map and Google Street View and pin it.

When uploading a photo you’ll need to enter date and location. The site then pins the historic picture to a current picture in an overlay, to show past and present. There is a timeline across the top so you can look for pictures during various years. Great for history buffs, or those interested in genealogy. it also allows you to add a story to the picture. LINK It only has about 32,000 pictures so far, but this is the type of site that gets better as more folks add pictures.

What's for Breakfast

You can make approximately 11 1/2 omelets with 1 ostrich egg. Hmmm, I wonder if there is Ostrich bacon?

Speaking of Breakfast

How about something for that new child or grandchild. Here is just the thing, Bacon flavored formula. Mmmm!