Browsing: Health/Medicine

A Brief History On December 21, 1898, the chemical element radium (Ra) was discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie who had isolated it from uranium. Digging Deeper When radium decays, it produces ionizing radiation that causes radioluminescence, in other words, it glows in the dark.  This characteristic led to the use of radium-laced paint for measuring devices such as watches, clocks, aircraft switches and instrument dials, so that they could be used at night.  Due to their smaller hands being able to do extra fine craftsmanship, women were employed by factories to apply the self-luminous paint to the aforementioned products.  The women would routinely…

A Brief History On November 29, 2009, career criminal Maurice Clemmons killed four Lakewood, Washington police officers with shots to the head while they were sitting in a coffee shop.  Clemmons was a career criminal and apparently some kind of nut who that had been released early from prison in 2000 by then Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee in what turned out to be a blunder of epic proportions. (Thanks a lot, Governor.) Digging Deeper Returning to a life of crime upon release, Clemmons racked up numerous felony charges in Arkansas and then Washington State where he had moved to in 2004. …

A Brief History On October 1, 2014, the findings of a medical study of adults between the ages of 57 and 85 published in the online journal PLOS ONE created a little stir on the internet when it was reported that a loss in one’s sense of smell could be indicative that one has less than five years to live! In other words, how good or bad one’s olfactory system is operating could be an indicator of one’s mortality and remaining life expectancy.  The exact mechanism, i.e. the correlation between the nose and general health, for this discovery is yet unknown, and further studies are necessary. Digging…

A Brief History Well, not exactly… But it probably seemed so!  Since the days of Confucious, nudity, even in art, has been viewed by the Chinese as immoral and was strictly prohibited.  This stance was so extreme that doctors could not look upon the naked bodies of their female patients to help treat them (more on this later). Digging Deeper For her series on instances of female nudity that were socially, culturally or historically significant, the author wanted to include examples from the Far East so that her lists would be more inclusive.  In the midst of her research, she discovered that there are very…

A Brief History On November 1, 1951, the U.S. military conducted Operation Buster-Jangle in which U.S. soldiers were exposed to atomic explosions in Nevada so that the effects could be studied.  Nobody asked the soldiers for consent, and many of them were probably draftees as well.  6,500 of these unfortunate men were used in 7 separate explosions, 5 of which were above ground (atmospheric), and the remaining 2 were underground (“cratering”).  Of course, the men were lied to about the “safety” of these tests, and they were exposed to harmful radiation from inhaling radioactive dust and marching on irradiated ground. Over the years, the U.S.…