Oh that would be vaccinia. Not smallpox. I read the story when I was doing my master's in a poxvirus lab and had several ear cartilage and nipple piercings. My reaction was, if you have a fresh body piercing and you keep twiddling with it under any circumstances let alone while working in an infectious disease lab,…

In this day and age it's probably illegal in most countries or at the very least against organization-level SOPs to to lab work with cultures of even Risk Group 2 pathogens under the conditions that Bedson's group had. (Risk Group 2 = things that will make you sick but not very, like regular flu).

You won't die if you cut only your windpipe. It's called a tracheotomy and it's occasionally done on purpose by doctors and paramedics in emergency situations when there's something stuck in the upper airway. Or like when smokers get throat cancer and have to have their vocal cords or whatever removed and there's a…

Great explanation. I was thinking there's no way stuff is that colourful and they had to have either stained the sample or false-coloured the photo in postproduction.

This instantly reminded me of a 19th century cartoon "Monster Soup commonly called Thames Water". people apparently thought it was healthy and the cartoon shows a lady dropping her cup in horror after viewing the water through a microscope. http://vintageprintable.com/wordpress/vint…

Sorry to be mean, but this really jumped out at me...aren't you being a massive class snob then? Aren't the loopy nontraditional names people have been tossing around in this thread, in spirit the same as the "kreatif" and "youneek" names you're looking down on? Just because other people don't have the time, money, or…

A hypothesis I haven't seen before is that maybe he's a grown up version of "We Need to Talk About Kevin". It's a novel of a bunch of letters by the mother of this horrible sadistic psychopath child who grows up to do a Columbine-style massacre, got made into a movie recently.

@corsair130: ThinkGeek sells a mini sundial ring, is this what you're referring to? [www.thinkgeek.com] There's also a stardial for good measure.

It certainly won't be easy for them as they grow older, but hopefully they'll work things out. There is a pair of American twins who are conjoined in a similar way but they get along with each other. On the other hand, there were two Iranian sisters who wanted to be separated so badly that they were willing to risk a…

The spill isn't aluminium oxide guys, it's the waste left over from refining it. [www.nytimes.com]

@BGR: Maybe it's for people who don't want enormous phones. Such as a) women, most of whom don't have gorilla paws and b) people who have better things to do with their lives than watch 3-hour movies on a phone by themselves =P The Evo sounds awesome, but I would never get one just because it's way too big. Even my…

@PierceTheVin: Disney Mulan is a wimp. In the original story she made it all the way up to general before retiring and outing herself.

@92BuickLeSabre: They're not HIS dryers. I admire Sir James but his claims to have invented that "airblade" type of hand dryer are kind of bogus considering I saw one in a Japanese airport several years before the Dyson company made that announcement. #jamesdysoninterview

@DeadWriter: The reason I never really found X-Men convincing is because when I was a little kid I saw the photos of the kids born with no arms after Chernobyl first... #ctscanradiationoverdoses

@bmoctta: They're called Medical Physicists, they handle the fancy equipment. I know a couple of girls who did their PhDs in that field. But not all hospitals have them. #ctscanradiationoverdoses

@PersonalBest: Maybe parents want a shortcut to make up for all those years they didn't sit down for dinner with their kids and actually teach by example. Social skills are a lot more complicated and subtle than, let's say, technical skills. You have to SEE things like table manners in action to really learn them. A…

btw @Gwailo : love your nickname.

If you're a woman in a stereotypically geek-dominated field, the odds are good but the goods are odd. (I'm quoting PhD Comics but I'm not sure if it's actually Jorge Cham who came up with that).