Hulleye Comes By!

On Wednesday, Fateh Mohammad of Multan, Pakistan underwent surgery to have a lightbulb removed from his rectum. The prison inmate says he has no idea how it ended up there. From Reuters:

Mohammad, who is serving a four-year sentence for making liquor, prohibited for Muslims, said he was shocked when he was first told the cause of his discomfort. He swears he didn’t know the bulb was there.

“When I woke up I felt a pain in my lower abdomen, but later in hospital, they told me this,” Mohammad said.

“I don’t know who did this to me. Police or other prisoners.”

Link to Reuters article, Link to the classic Rectal Foreign Bodies page

aCK! my faith in joss whedon may drop significantly very soon if priyanka ends up as wonder woman.

speaking of optimus prime, paramount just released a super small teaser for next year’s transformer’s movie, though they really don’t reveal anything in it as such but hopefully it won’t be as cheesy as i expect it to be.

oh and also, next year spiderman 3 is being released, and finally it looks like it’s gonna kick ass.

this is a fascinating compilation by new scientist of 13 things that don’t make sense. here is entry #4 on homeopathy.

MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These “basophils” release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn’t contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths’ claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this “mother tincture” in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. “We are,” Ennis says in her paper, “unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon.” If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

i highly recommend you to read the whole article. it covers everything from dark matter, to placebo’s, to the Kuiper cliff.

guess who’s blog i found? uber jeopardy champ ken jennings himself. go read this and then be amazed if you got no clue who he is.

No one knows who built this 40-foot sculpture of Transformer’s Optimus Prime in Yunnan, China - or why. From the website:

Deep in the mountainous regions of southern China, in a province named Yunnan, or “over the clouds”, by Emperor Wu in 109 BC due to its remoteness from the capital, there is a 40 ft statue of the new great Chinese leader, Optimus Prime. My pilgrimage to find him wasn’t without trial, but as they say:

Nothing of real value is easy.