Love stinks in 2007
With Valentine’s Day nearly a week away, it seems evident that world news is trying to tell us something: Love Stinks.
A Fetid Flower for Your Sweetheart? Global warming forces the world’s god-awful smelliest plant to bloom early. The UK’s Eden Project’s Sumatran Titan Arum, also dubbed the Corpse Flower, is also the world’s largest, a towering 6′4″ display of stench. It uses its unique odor (categorized by spectators as a combination of “rotten cheese, dog poo and something dead”) to attract flesh flies and beetles for pollination. It traps the insects, pollen-coats them, then releases them in a couple of days when the blossom begins to wither. The foul flower usually blooms every six to nine years, but with the unseasonably warm weather, we can expect more frequent future malodor blooms.
Stinky Flower facts: Ladies first – the female flowers bloom a few days before the males. Tallest Titan ever: 9′6″ tall in Wilhelma Garden in Germany. Ted the Titan at UC Davis is only 3′8″ but it bloomed for the longest on record – four days.
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No Naked Sexy Time with Cadavers Necrophilia is nothing new, but cadavers to be studied by future Australian doctors have been recently violated and that’s just wrong. The corpses of female citizens who donated their bodies to science were fondled, and the head of one used in “a degrading way” by a staff member (no pun intended). The bodies were housed at the University of New South Wales, who had its anatomy course license revoked last November because they didn’t properly Martha Stewart (organize and label) the bodies. They also haphazardly threw multiple body parts into the same coffins, like some awful remake of Re-Animator.
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My Big Fat Heart So you’ve read or heard about all those health reports that say to stay away from fatty foods for a healthy heart, right? Well cardiologists may soon be putting fat directly into patients’ hearts to save lives. Technically, adult stem cells extracted from fat tissue were implanted into the the heart of a 67-year-old man in a Madrid hospital on January 30th. “In just five hours approximately the cells were extracted, purified, selected and implanted with the aim of regenerating new blood vessels which may allow them to flow blood properly to the heart of the patient”, the hospital quoted. “Cells extracted from fat do not need to be cultivated for three weeks, like other types of stem cells, so in just two hours 28 million cells were ready for implanting”, notes Reuters.com
The hospital’s cardiologists are developing this new procedure with the Texas Heart Institute in Houston and they plan to operate and study 35 more patients.
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Out of This World Love Obsession Mother of three and NASA astronaut extraordinaire Lisa Nowak attempted to kidnap and allegedly murder Colleen Shipman, who was rumored to be her romantic rival. Nowak wrote a love letter to fellow astronaut Bill Oefelein, donned some diapers (astronauts wear diapers during launch and re-entry) so she wouldn’t have to stop and pee during her 900 mile trek from Houston to Orlando to confront the “other woman”.
It would have seemed less suspicious if Nowak hadn’t surprised Shipman in a parking garage wearing a wig and trench coat, armed with pepper spray and a BB gun that possibly belonged to her teenage son. Nowak also brought a 4″ pocket knife, a steel mallet, rubber tubing and trash bags. Seems like a friendly visit to me. Yahoo! calls it Space Rage.
