Thought of the day: Synaesthesia

As some of you may or may not have heard, there are people in the world who have the ability to smell sounds, see smells or even hear colours. The ability is called Synaesthesia – from the Greek “syn” and “aisthesis” meaning with sensation.

…consists of the pairing of two bodily senses by which the perception of a determined stimulus activates a different subjective perception with no external stimulus (in science, the evoker stimulus is called inducer and the additional experience concurrent)

Now why am I bringing this up you may ask, well, this morning I thought “Imagine if people could see a fart, would they be so quick to let one go if they knew there is the chance that a trail of colour could be following them around like a bright rainbow from there ass“. Then I remembered a very interesting documentary about people who saw numbers in colours and people that were in accidents which now see sounds and taste colours.

Even in early days of my eplipesy I used to get strange tastes just before a seizure. So there are many unexpected things that can happen and that the human body can do.

So my thought of the day boils down to a question… Is there anyone out there that can see a fart?

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Today’s funky science: smart pills

Philips–you know, the guys that make TVs–also happen to make hospital electronics, so it’s not just entertainment and lightbulbs. They’ve managed to invent a smart pill that is designed to not only release medication in certain parts of the body, but also monitor patients from the inside. The pill is still a prototype, but it may just be soon that we start seeing these around instead of the standard pills.

So here’s my question: are these recyclable? Doe the doctors want stool samples in order to retrieve the pills? Would you want to take the pill if you know that its already been through someone’s system?

[Link: InventorSpot - Scientists develop "intelligent pill"]

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Today’s insanity: human electricity! (well, almost)

Scientists have found a way to create bio-batteries, similar to the electrocytic cells of electric eels and other such electric animals. The idea behind this is to power artificial limbs and internal machinery, but of course, the idea could be taken a step further and into the creation of “wetware”, or cybernetic implants. Mind you, according to the article:

There’s a long way between the drawing board and the cyber-implant in the world of biotechnology, at least for those of us outside of Marvel, and several “How do we actually build this?” questions have to be answered.

Ok, so it’s not quite reality yet, but the fact that there are blueprints means that at least it’s a big step toward seeing this come to light.

I’ve recently been watching Doctor Who, so of course, the first thing to that came to mind was that, if these cybernetic implants come to be, we might need The Doctor to come and bail us out…

[Link: The Daily Galaxy - Super Cells to Power Cyborgs]

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Something’s afoot …

And it’s smelly: Fifth human foot found in Canada.

A human foot has been found on a beach near the west-coast city of Vancouver, Canadian police say.

It is the fifth human foot to wash up on beaches in the area in the past year. The latest find is a left foot, whereas the other four were right feet.

Hmmmm … I am trying to come up with a pun-like ending to this … thoughts anyone?

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A natural prevention for HIV–estrogen???

An Australian zoologist, Dr Andrew Pask, has found that by rubbing oestrogen on the tip of a human penis, a thickened layer of skin keratin can be formed that might help prevent the spread of HIV. The thinking behind this is that skin keratin helps prevent viral infections.

The epithelium of the human penis is richly supplied with oestrogen receptors suggesting it could respond to topical oestrogen.

Furthermore, according to the article:

To confirm its effect, topical oestrogen was applied to the human
foreskin for a two week trial. This resulted in a rapid and substantial
increase in keratin thickness.

This begs the question, though–does it affect circumcimsed men differently from uncircumsized men?

[Link: Science Daily via BoingBoing]

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Today’s insanity: strange diseases

Askmen.com has an entertaining, though frightening, article about the strange kinds of diseases that can be obtained if you try hard enough (and maybe one or two that you’d have difficulty contracting at all). Mind you, these diseases are very rare, very frightening, and very insane. Some of the diseases, such as reflex sympathetic dystrophy which causes severe pains in your limbs ALL THE TIME, sound like they’re a source of constant hell for the patient. According to the article, for some sufferes of reflex sympathetic disorder, part of the treatment involves being placed under a KEtamine coma just to reset the pain connectors in the body.

And then there’s Morgellon’s disease, which is still a hotly disputed topic, because some doctors say it exists, and some say it doesn’t. Some of the symptoms include:

…skin lesions accompanied by pain or intense itching, fibrous material in and extending out of the lesions, crawling sensations like insects under the skin who are moving, stinging or biting, and joint and muscle pain, among others.

In fact, this disease is so strange that it’s widely considered to be phychological in nature (more details at Wikipedia, which even disputes the neutrality of the article).

If that isn’t insane, I don’t know what is.

[Link: Askmen.com]

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