* In the New Scientist blog recently there was mention of the surprising long term memories of ... pigeons. Apparently they can memorise around 1,000 pictures. Who'd have thought? Sounds like pretty tedious research to do for the lab technician, though.
* From Slate, a short piece on the increasing need for plastic surgery to make "deflated" obese people look half decent again by removing all the baggy skin and flattened breasts left over after large weight loss. If you really want to see how bad some of the deflated look, you can go here. But not during breakfast, perhaps.
* I've recently been recommending Scott Adam's Dilbert blog. Apart from the humour, it's been interesting to read that he recently re-gained his normal voice, after losing it about 18 months ago. The condition he suffered, Spasmodic Dysphonia, first affected his hand years ago. When he suddenly lost his voice, and several doctors could not diagnose the reason, Adams used Google to find that it was related to the same neurological condition. The story is told by Adams in two posts here and here. This Washington Post story from 2005 talks about the problem in his hand, and has a picture of Adams too. It's a very interesting story, well worth reading.
3 comments:
Actually those pics are pretty 'ordinary' in the loose skin stakes.
Even on the Oz "Biggest Loser" - of which I did watch some of the second half of the series - it was obvious, and somewhat ironic, that the prize winner was going to need to spend around $50 K of his winnings just to make his body resemble something vaguely normal. No idea what the non-prize winners did with their newly acquired swathes of loose skin.
It must be distressing for formerly obese people to have put in the hard work of losing astronomical amounts of weight, only to find themselves with a body that would give a deflated kiddy jumping castle a run for its money.
Yes I guess they could have been worse. But what surprised me most was what massive weight loss did to breasts!
Alas, the poor old breast has no muscle, other than a bit of a support network going on - but the muscles are rather useless if they have, um, nothing much to support. Worse: when women lose weight, the first vanishing act is their breasts. *Sigh*
Post a Comment