Grass found growing on baby’s lung
Chinese surgeons who operated on a baby girl with breathing problems were amazed to find grass growing on her lung.[…]
Finally, doctors decided to perform open-chest surgery.
“We were surprised to find a 3cm piece of grass growing on the baby’s right lung,” said chief surgeon Li Qun.
Doctors removed the grass, and the baby is now recovering. The parents say the grass is the same type as in their yard at home where the little girl often plays.
Doctors says it’s possible grass seed was blown into the baby’s nose and through her respiratory system to the lung and found suitable growing conditions there. But they’ve never seen such a thing before.
Blinded by Science
Comment of The Day: Praise Reality and Pass The Ammunition
PZ Myers has written a cracking polemic suggesting, in short, that we atheists should all become a lot more aggressive in attacking the root of religion, unreason.
Go read it, it’ll give you a little Monday morning backbone to face another week of dumbassed people. It prompted Jim Heber to comment:
When I am tempted to become mesmerized by the brainpower spent on erecting the magnificent edifice that is theology, I remind myself that a lot of smart people can speak Klingon.
They even wrote dictionaries about it.
But you know, it’s still made up!
Just because a subject has lots of information written about it and just because it’s internally consistent doesn’t mean it’s real, or true.
Posted by: Jeff Hebert | September 17, 2007 1:43 AM
That one’s going right into my own personal anti-unreason armoury.
I’m An Endangered Species, Official
Bloody hell, I’ve been reading the Daily Mail for five minutes and already I’m in fear for my life.
“What happens to us in the future? Do we become assholes or something?”
The online world’s near-unanimous reaction to this science news in today’s Daily Telegraph was immediate: yay! Hoverboards! Is there any hope for us or are we just too trivial to survive?
Physicists have ‘solved’ mystery of levitation
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists.
In theory the discovery could be used to levitate a person. In earlier work the same team of theoretical physicists showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible.
Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created an ‘incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together.
Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.
Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.
The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the world of atoms and subatomic particles that is not only the most successful theory of physics but also the most baffling.
The force is due to neither electrical charge or gravity, for example, but the fluctuations in all-pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between the objects and is one reason atoms stick together, also explaining a “dry glue” effect that enables a gecko to walk across a ceiling.
Now, using a special lens of a kind that has already been built, Prof Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin report in the New Journal of Physics they can engineer the Casimir force to repel, rather than attact.
Because the Casimir force causes problems for nanotechnologists, who are trying to build electrical circuits and tiny mechanical devices on silicon chips, among other things, the team believes the feat could initially be used to stop tiny objects from sticking to each other.
Prof Leonhardt explained, “The Casimir force is the ultimate cause of friction in the nano-world, in particular in some microelectromechanical systems.
Such systems already play an important role – for example tiny mechanical devices which triggers a car airbag to inflate or those which power tiny ‘lab on chip’ devices used for drugs testing or chemical analysis.
Micro or nano machines could run smoother and with less or no friction at all if one can manipulate the force.” Though it is possible to levitate objects as big as humans, scientists are a long way off developing the technology for such feats, said Dr Philbin.
The practicalities of designing the lens to do this are daunting but not impossible and levitation “could happen over quite a distance”.
Prof Leonhardt leads one of four teams – three of them in Britain – to have put forward a theory in a peer-reviewed journal to achieve invisibility by making light waves flow around an object – just as a river flows undisturbed around a smooth rock.
Hang on…. invisiblity, you say? Oh, well then, that’s different.
Yay! Invisible hoverboards!
Absolutely amazing
A comparison in sizes of various planets and stars, going from Mercury up to W Cephei, all to scale. If you think the jump in size up from Jupiter, the largest of the planets, to the Sun is big, wait until farther in the sequence when even the Sun is but a speck compared to some of the really big stars.