Gwnewch y pethau bychain

Tag: science

Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out

This is positively, without a doubt, the dumbest thing I have heard since….well, it’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard today, at least.

Ananova reports that a company is developing an mp3 player which can be included in breast implants:

Computer chips that store music could soon be built into a woman’s breast implants.

One boob could hold an MP3 player and the other the person’s whole music collection.

BT futurology, who have developed the idea, say it could be available within 15 years.

BT Laboratories’ analyst Ian Pearson said flexible plastic electronics would sit inside the breast. A signal would be relayed to headphones, while the device would be controlled by Bluetooth using a panel on the wrist.

According to The Sun he said: “It is now very hard for me to thing of breast implants as just decorative. If a woman has something implant

Admittedly, there might be some useful application of this technology, as the article mentions offhandedly in its final paragraph:

The sensors around the body linked through the electrical impulses in the chips may also be able to warn wearers about heart murmurs, blood pressure increases, diabetes and breast cancer.

But seriously, consider the ramifications of this. What if it starts playing randomly during a moment-of-passion short-circuit. If you think your (ABBA|Rick Dees|Winger|Carpenters|Bone Thugs ‘n’ Harmony) collection is embarrassing now, just wait until it’s blaring out of your left nipple at a volume of 11.

What an amazing world we live in.

EDIT: Does this mean that in the future when you say a woman has a “nice rack”, you’ll just be talking about her stereo?

Ovaries replenlish eggs, study suggests

Diane Duane (outofambit) points to article in the Boston Globe about a study which indicates that one of the things we thought we knew about the function of mammalian reproduction may be fundamentally wrong:

In a finding that could someday revolutionize fertility treatments, researchers yesterday reported evidence that appears to topple a decades-old tenet of reproductive biology: that girls are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have, a pool that dwindles and degenerates with age.

[…]

Clearly, they needed even better evidence. They gathered more. In particular, they took a mouse that had been genetically engineered so that every cell in its body glowed green under fluorescent light, cut its ovary in half, and grafted onto it pieces of a normal mouse’s ovary.

In three or four weeks, they found green-glowing eggs that had been surrounded by a layer of nongreen supporting cells to make what is called a follicle. That mixture, Tilly said, indicated that green egg stem cells had migrated into the nongreen pieces of ovary and started to produce new eggs that then attracted the supporting cells they needed to form follicles.

If the study can be reproduced and substantiated, this could be a truly revolutionary development in biology. Very nifty!

The Neuroscience of Morality

aolscalzi links to a facinating article in Discover magazine about the fledgling studies of the neuroscience of moral reasoning.

Excerpt:
Many of the world’s great conflicts may be rooted in such neuronal differences, Greene says, which may explain why the conflicts seem so intractable. “We have people who are talking past each other, thinking the other people are either incredibly dumb or willfully blind to what’s right in front of them,” Greene says. “It’s not just that people disagree, it?s that they have a hard time imagining how anyone could disagree on this point that seems so obvious.” Some people wonder how anyone could possibly tolerate abortion. Others wonder how women could possibly go out in public without covering their faces. The answer may be that their brains simply don’t work the same: Genes, culture, and personal experience have wired their moral circuitry in different patterns.

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