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Anime Dad
Joined: 19 Jun 2006
Posts: 8614
Location: オーストラリア
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 Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 8:46 am Post subject: |
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John Wayne Bobbitt is currently begging for a vial of that powder 
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Tu_triky
Joined: 15 Jun 2004
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Location: Los Skandolous, California
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| Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 8:48 am Post subject: |
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| Anime Dad wrote: | | John Wayne Bobbitt is currently begging for a vial of that powder |
I think it's a bit too late for that guy  |
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bmwracer
Joined: 07 Jul 2003
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| Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 8:50 am Post subject: |
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| Anime Dad wrote: | | John Wayne Bobbitt is currently begging for a vial of that powder |
LOL. 
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Anime Dad
Joined: 19 Jun 2006
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| Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 8:51 am Post subject: |
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| Tu_triky wrote: |
I think it's a bit too late for that guy |
True 
It's just as well it only "regrows", or we would be in for a new round of spam emails
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Tu_triky
Joined: 15 Jun 2004
Posts: 33898
Location: Los Skandolous, California
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| Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2008 8:52 am Post subject: |
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| Anime Dad wrote: |
True
It's just as well it only "regrows", or we would be in for a new round of spam emails |
Haha...seriously. |
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bmwracer
Joined: 07 Jul 2003
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| Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 10:50 pm Post subject: |
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From Yahoo! News:
Japan Goes Bananas For New Diet
Michiko Toyama Fri Oct 17, 2:30 am ET
Keiko Akai is very annoyed. The attractive 21-year-old university student has been planning to do a banana diet for some time now, but she can't get started - and not for lack of trying. "I keep going to OK Store, my local supermarket every single day," she says. "In fact, I've just been there. There are no bananas on the shelves, and it's been like that for a month."
Akai has never weighed more than 100 pounds, and is so slim that her waist is swimming in Zara's smallest size XS skirt. She doesn't need to lose any weight. But Japanese girls obsessed with diets tend to jump at any trendy new ones, so, when Akai heard about a popular actress who'd lost 26 pounds through the Morning Banana Diet, she had to try it. And the dearth of bananas as her local supermarket, and many others, is testimony to the popularity of the new dieting fad.
"Large stores don't have any bananas from noon, and even Ito Yokado (a major supermarket chain) runs out of them after 3 p.m.," says Tomoyuki Horiuchi, sales representative of Tokyo Seika Boeki Co., Ltd., fruit and vegetables wholesale company. Hiromi Ohtaki of Dole Japan, a leading banana importer, sees the boom in sales as largely due to Morning Banana Diet - bananas don't normally sell well during summer, and this year's summer has been especially hot. Still, over the past 4 months, demand has driven Dole Japan to increase its banana imports by upward of 25%, and even then supplies could not keep pace with demand. "In a way this is an emergency," explains Ohtaki. "We've been importing bananas from the Philippines for the past 40 years, but this is the first time something like this happened to us, and we find it very difficult to cope."
The Morning Banana Diet regime is simple: A banana (or as many as you want) and room temperature water for breakfast; eat anything you like for lunch and dinner (by 8 p.m.). A three o'clock snack is okay, but no desserts after meals, and you have to go to bed before midnight. Sumiko Watanabe, a pharmacist in Osaka designed this stress-free diet to help increase the metabolism of her husband Hitoshi Watanabe, who had been rather overweight. In due course, Mr. Watanabe lost 37 pounds and introduced the diet on mixi, one of Japan's largest social networking services. Morning Banana Diet books published since March have sold over 730,000 copies, and some have been translated and published in South Korea and Taiwan. The diet became even more popular after a TV program featured a singer who had lost 15 pounds in just six weeks. It was literally the day after that program aired that the shortage of bananas first became evident. "Bananas suddenly flew off the shelves, there was a 70%-80% increase in weekly sales compared to the same period last year," says Takeshi Ozaki, a spokesperson of Life Corporation that runs 201 supermarkets throughout Japan.
Professor Masahiko Okada of Niigata University School of Medicine questions the hype around the banana diet. The human body has three essential nutrients - carbohydrates, fat and protein - , he says, and "the golden rule is to balance these three nutrients and a daily calorie intake. Once you understand that, you don't have to be swayed by the fad diet any more, whether it is a konnyaku (alimentary yam paste) or a banana diet." But a nation prone to dieting fads often ignores such sober advice.
According to Ministry of Finance, Japan's banana imports were 970,000 tons in 2007, mostly from Taiwan and the Philippines. "It takes from 10 to 15 months to harvest bananas, so it is not at all easy to meet a sudden increase in demand," says Dole's Ohtaki. Dole Japan is trying to make up the shortfall by negotiating distribution deals with Dole corporations in other countries. Supplying the spike in demand will be lucrative, because banana prices in Japan have risen about 20% as a result of supply shortages that have coincided with the diet fad.
Bananas are hardly the first fad diet to create shortages in Japan's consumer markets. During the 1970s, there were similar runs on black tea fungus, oolong tea and konnyaku; during the 1980s it was baby formula, banana and boiled egg; then, in the '90s, came apple, nata de coco, cocoa and chili pepper; and during this decade black vinegar, carrot juice, soy milk, beer yeast and toasted soybean flour (kinako). Last year's fermented soybean (natto) diet emptied supermarket shelves. Based on experience, Horiuchi predicts that the banana boom will last only another month or so. "In the past, there were all kinds of hit diets. But they never last, do they? So, we don't really want to end up with an uncontrollable banana surplus."
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Tu_triky
Joined: 15 Jun 2004
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Location: Los Skandolous, California
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| Posted: Fri Nov 21, 2008 10:34 am Post subject: |
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I thought this was fascinating. From CNN:
Woman given windpipe created in laboratory
LONDON, England (CNN) -- Doctors have given a woman a new windpipe with tissue engineered from her own stem cells in what experts have hailed as a "milestone in medicine."
The breakthrough allowed Claudia Castillo, 30, to receive a new section of trachea -- an airway essential for breathing -- without the risk that her body would reject the transplant.
Castillo was given the stem cell surgery, the controversial branch of medicine that some say could lead to human cloning, after suffering a severe lung collapse.
The condition, caused by long-term tuberculosis left Castillo, a Colombian now living in Barcelona, unable to carry out simple domestic duties or care for her two children.
The only conventional option was a major operation to remove her left lung, a risky procedure with a high mortality rate.
A team from the universities of Barcelona, Spain; Bristol, England; and Padua and Milan, Italy, decided instead to replace Castillo's lower trachea and bronchial tube to her left lung with a lab-grown airway.
The operation, reported Wednesday in the British medical journal The Lancet, has been hailed as a major leap for medicine that could offer new hope for patients suffering from serious illness.
"Surgeons can now start to see and understand the very real potential for adult stem cells and tissue engineering to radically improve their ability to treat patients with serious diseases," said Martin Birchall, professor of surgery at the University of Bristol, who was part of the team that did the operation.
"We believe this success has proved that we are on the verge of a new age in surgical care."
To create the new windpipe, the team took a seven-centimeter (2.75-inch) segment of trachea from a 51-year-old who had died. Over a six-week period, the team then removed all the cells from the donor trachea, because those cells could lead to rejection of the organ after transplant.
All that remained of the donor's stripped-down trachea was a matrix of collagen, a sort of scaffolding onto which the team then put Castillo's own stem cells -- along with cells taken from a healthy part of her trachea. Birchall had already taken Castillo's stem cells from her bone marrow and grown them into a large population in his Bristol lab.
"We are terribly excited by these results," said Paolo Macchiarini of the University of Barcelona, who performed the operation in June. Watch Macchiarini describe the operation »
Macchiarini said just four days after the operation, the transplanted windpipe was "almost indistinguishable" from the patient's normal bronchi. After one month, he said, the blood vessels had successfully grown back.
"We think that this first experience represents a milestone in medicine and hope that it will unlock the door for a safe and recipient-tailored transplantation of the airway in adults and children," the authors said in their report. "We hope that these future patients will no longer suffer the trauma of speech loss, severe shortness of breath and other limited clinical and social activities."
The doctors said Castillo is now able to care for her children and enjoy a normal quality of life. She can walk up two flights of stairs and occasionally even go out dancing at night.
In a comment accompanying the Lancet report, Toshihiko Sato and Tatsuo Nakamura of Kyoto University in Japan said the operation should be highly regarded, but follow-ups from longer evaluation periods are needed to better evaluate the results. |
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