DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The Chronicle Magazine ran an interesting article about Cynthia Kenyon, a biochemist at UCSF working in the area of lifespan research. Or more specifically, lifespan extension.

By suppressing a single gene, her team has extended the life span of a particular variety of worm by a factor of six. If she could perform the same trick on me, I’d live to be 400, which would be a good thing. (For example, I’d have more time to update this website.)

Tiny, transparent worms are not genetically similar to humans, except for a few ex-roommates I could mention. But there is good news for any of you who happen to be mammalian vertebrates:

Other researchers have conducted versions of Kenyon’s age-bending experiments to increase the life spans of flies and yeast — and, far more significantly for humans, of mice. Conducted by Martin Holzenberger of the French Biomedical Research Agency and independently by Ron Kahn at the Harvard Medical School, the mouse tests genetically coaxed mice to live 33 percent longer than normal.

Here’s the full article: Finding the Fountain of Youth

The SF Chronicle reports:

San Francisco city officials are investigating a popular exhibition of plasticized corpses and body parts at the Masonic Center, including whether the bodies pose a public health problem and were improperly obtained.

The immediate issue is that some of the corpses — which have been injected with plastic and dissected to reveal muscles, bone and nerves — are leaking.
…
The fluid leaking out of the bodies could be either polymer or body fat, said Dr. Robert Henry, a professor of anatomy at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Leaking can occur if not enough of the lipid, or fat, is removed from the body before injection with the polymer.

The process of removing the fat “can take a real long time — two to four months, depending on what is used,” said Henry, treasurer of the International Society for Plastination. “If that wasn’t done long enough, and these people seem to be novices at it, a larger percentage of the fat is left in the body than is ideal, so it’s going to leak out.”

(Previous plastination news and photos.)

… it is possible to express the concept “vegan” in German.

We were at Dusseldorf Airport when Raphael spit up all over my leg: a hand-sized puddle of used breast milk, all curdled and lumpy. We’d barely begun our 17-hour journey home and already I needed a change of clothes.

We had a couple minutes before preboarding — not that Lufthansa actually does preboarding; they just “welcome” everyone all at once, and a crowd of between 200 and 600 irate travellers stand up and press in a mob toward the gate, where they’re reduced to single-file impatience, and while I’m on the topic WFT is up with that?! — so I mopped most of the nastiness from my pants leg with the bib (which ironically was spotless) and hurried to the nearest rest room.

The first thing I noticed was the lack of a hot-air hand dryer. I muttered “Crap!” to no one in particular, although in Germany that’s probably something you can order at the Imbiß, which might explain the funny stares. I got more stares, none of which could honestly be described as “funny,” when I took my pants off and began washing them in the sink.

Yes, I had to wash out the spit-up. I was not willing to breathe sour milk for 17 hours. Although had I known then that the elderly Gypsy woman in the baseball cap who would be sitting four seats away on the long flight to SFO would not have bathed any time in recent memory and would be exuding a rich body odor redolant with aromas of garlic, fermented grains, and feet, I might have opted for the sour milk smell after all.

The wet spot wasn’t huge, but by the time I’d washed it out, my pants were soaked from knee to crotch. I had to improvise drying solutions, lest I navigate the boarding line with an enormous, fresh wet stain on my pants. “Sorry, had to piss,” I imagined saying to people with a cheery wave and a British accent, for no reason I can adequately explain.

So I wrung out the pants, squeezed the wet areas with paper towels and finally resorted to flapping my hand inside the pants leg. I was leaving sweaty sock-prints on the tile floor from the stress and exertion. But it more or less worked: my pants were damp but not obviously so. And I hadn’t missed the first (only) boarding call.

An hour later, at the Munich airport, Raphael’s diaper overflowed and seeped through two layers of cloth to stain my other pants leg. (He doesn’t always manage his own secretions.)

I’d actually anticipated this to some degree, so I caught the problem before it became the sort of thing they refuse to let people get on airplanes for.

“What’s next?!” I cried to no one in particular, although since we were still in Germany it’s likely everybody within earshot assumed I was asking for a sausage.

On the next flight, I fully expected the stewardess to spill orange juice on me, but in fact she did not. Instead, a recalcitrant container of salad dressing squirted a half-ounce of vinegar, oil, and some damn Krauter herb blend six inches up the sleeve of my shirt.

(Previous vomit stories.)

I suppose it was inevitable that when transplanting the restaurant chain that invented the “Lover’s Line” of pizzas — including the Cheese Lover’s, Meat Lover’s, and for those meat lovers who are amorous about specific varieties of flesh, the Pepperoni Lover’s and Sausage Lover’s — local accomodations to the menu might be made. Thus, I should not have been surprised by the big Spargel Lover’s Pizza sign in the local Pizza Hut window.

But I was surprised to see a competing vendor 50 meters away that offered a Spargel Pizza with Hollandaise sauce. I mean, that’s just gross.

I didn’t check the other neighborhood fast-food franchises but I suspect I’d have found Spargel McNuggets, Bacon Bacon Spargelburger, 7-layer Spargel BellGrande, etc.