Ordinarily if something happens that causes a chunk of your body to be removed (like, say, a shark bite) there isn't a whole lot that can be done to fill it back in. Scar tissue will form over the wound and skin will eventually cover over it, but that doesn't cause lost muscle and bone to come back. It's kind of scary, when you think about it - what's lost is lost. But that may not be the caes for much longer. A research team active in the field of regenerative medicine at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the …

Let's cut through some FUD: Human stem cells are pretty easy to come by. Embryos have not been involved in the process for well over ten years that I can recall off the top of my head, and probably closer to twenty. Every human body has stockpiles of them that can be extracted with minor surgical procedures. The procedures in question usually involves scarily long needles that reach deeply enough inside the body to extract them, which might be why research into re-embryonization of other kinds of cells has proceeded at a good clip. To summarize, medical science has been …

As I've said a few times, all the nights I spent at the gym prior to moving into our new house really paid off. While I'm nowhere near as strong as the movers were I can still pick stuff up and put it down again without a whole lot of trouble. At least, until Lyssa pointed this out to me:

The left-hand image was taken an hour after Lyssa noticed; the right-hand image was taken a week later.

It seems that, while cleaning up the basement last friday I managed to give myself a subconjunctival haemorrhage. To put it another …

I haven't been posting a whole lot lately since Lyssa and I got back from Pittsburgh two weekends ago; we'd gone home to finalize the wedding plans that remained, such as getting hold of the marriage license, agreeing on the floral arrangements, and whatnot. Unfortunately, this involved a lot of driving, totalling out in the neighborhood of twelve hours behind the wheel, a bit more if you factor in actually driving to and from Pennsylvania itself.

The first thing we ran into was the wedding license. To save ourselves some time and energy we decided to go to the Greene …

Fascinating!

Ron Huebner, a sewer maintenance worker in Minneapolis, Minnesota was treated to a much more rude surprise than usual while cleaning out a sewer pipe last month: Blood. Gallons and gallons of animal and human blood dumped into the sewer by a nearby medical research facility.

The company that owns the facility, as it turns out, has a permit to dump blood in just this way. Still, Huebner is pretty shaken up, because he was doused with the stuff, and wound up with it in in most of the orifices of his body. That's not something that you just shake …

It is all too common for people who have been in accidents of some kind to require donated blood to stay alive, but there's only so much to go around. Pluswhich, humanoid biology complicates matters: There are four major blood groups (A, B, AB, and O), and two Rhesus groups (positive and negative). People with type A blood can recieve blood from type A and O donors only; similiarly, people with type B blood can recieve type B or O blood only. A lucky few with type AB blood can recieve blood from any of the four groups, but people …