The Sunday Sidebar.
April 27, 2008 by Liz Lewis
Filed under Extreme, Health, Medicine, Misc., Morning News, Oddities, The Sunday Sidebar
From Reuters….
“Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.”
Black magic, it seems, is alive and well in Congo. Thirteen suspected sorcerers have been arrested and accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises. The victims claim that these ’sorcerers’ touched them and that made their genitals shrink or even disappear. Fact or Fiction?
Could the ‘curse’ become the cure?
Japanese scientists at Keio University have harvested connective tissue from menstrual blood and from it managed to grow sheets of heart muscle. Turns out that the cells in menstrual blood has similar properties to embryonic stem cells.
They Studied What?
I sometimes wonder how many of the ’self-evident’ university studies conducted ever got funded. Turns out I’m not the only one. Check out this list of 10 university studies that never should have been funded and discover some of the most money-wasting studies around. Here’s my favorite – ‘Talking on your cell-phone AFTER you go to bed makes you tired the next day’. Duh!
Packs of cigarettes put to good use.
I’d classify this a real DIY. A Chinese man patched up his fairly large hole in his chest with cigarette packs. The chest wound was the result of unfinished surgery, which removed part of his ribs and skin, in 1998. Unable to pay for the rest of the required surgery, Rao Jiacang simply took the DIY approach and patching it himself, often two to three times a day. (Picture)
And finally…
How would you cope stuck in an elevator….for 41 hours?
Seems it’s something everyone wants to know. This video from The New Yorker shows Nicholas White who was trapped in an elevator in New York’s McGraw-Hill building on October 15, 1999. (Full Story)
