Soldier charged with manslaughter for rifle-based cure for hiccups

tl;dr he ain’t got the hiccups no mo,

Unrelated badass shotgun (img US Army/Sgt. Joe Padula)

@CNN:

A soldier trying to scare another soldier out of hiccups shot his comrade in the face, killing him, authorities said Tuesday.

Both soldiers, joined by a third man, were drinking alcohol and watching football at the time of the Sunday night incident, authorities said.

“The victim had the hiccups. The suspect pulled out a gun to scare him in order to stop the hiccups,” said spokesman Carroll Smith of the Killeen, Texas, Police Department. (more…)

Wildfire Tees

You don’t actually have to care about wildfire people these tees are that sexy.

All of our time, designs, and efforts are donated so that 100% of our proceeds go to support victims of Colorado wildfires through the following charitable organizations (50% to each):

Care and Share Food Bank (50%)

Colorado Red Cross (50%)

Both organizations have recently requested monetary support so they can prioritize and address the most pressing needs.  We’d like to help in a big way.

Ah, wildfire season. When sunsets are all gorgeous and asthmatics go all hypoxic and blue in the lips… Remember this year’s wildfires by donning these stylish tees the profits of which go help people who are getting boned by wildfires, ($20).

What’s killing us, then and now

You’re gonna die. (img by New England Journal of Medicine)

The New England Journal of Medicine celebrates its 200th birthday this year with a retrospective on what’s been killing us since they first published under the impressive title New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and the Collateral Branches of Science.  The size of the business card necessary to hold that title may have contributed to the mortality rate and you can check that fact by playing with their cool interactive graphic on the Top Ten Causes of Death.

Early reports from the Journal looked at things that are still killing us today, asthma, gunshot wounds, spina bifida but our current understanding medicine makes others rather entertaining to read.

Apoplexy, a syndrome of fainting spells that might mean stroke, seizure, or syncope today, was understood to arise from a “nervous sympathy” by which the stomach influenced the head. Doctors agreed that even a near miss by a cannonball — without contact — could shatter bones, blind people, or even kill them. Reports of spontaneous combustion, especially of “brandy-drinking men and women,” received serious, if skeptical, consideration. And physicians were obsessed with fevers — puerperal, petechial, catarrhal, and even an outbreak of “spotted fever” in which some patients were neither spotted nor febrile. The bill of mortality from 1811 contains both the familiar and the exotic. Consumption, diarrhea, and pneumonia dominated the mortality data, but teething, worms, and drinking cold water apparently killed as well. (more…)

US Cleared for Giving Guatemalans Syphilis

Not pictured: syphilis, because we love you. Link goes to printable syphilis awareness promo stuff, which is actually kind of cool if you’re into syphilis awareness. We totally are, obviously. (img by CATIE)

tl;dr holy shit we gave a bunch of Guatemalans the siph, and it was legal!

@Courthouse News:

The United States has immunity from a class action related to the gov’t-led infection of hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis, a federal judge ruled, calling the study “a deeply troubling chapter in our nation’s history.”

During the 40 years that the Venereal Disease Research Laboratory within the U.S. Public Health Service conducted limited experiments on black men already infected with syphilis in Tuskegee, Ala., it also secretly infected other human subjects. The agency set its sights on Guatemala after unsuccessfully trying to infect prisoners at a Terre Haute, Ind., federal penitentiary with gonorrhea, according to the March 2011complaint.

A Presidential Commission of the Study of Bioethical Issues, convened by President Barack Obama in 2010, confirmed these claims. (more…)

Hundreds of pet owls abandoned after Harry Potter craze fades

@Mirror:

Hundreds of owls are being abandoned across the country after being bought as pets by Harry Potter fans.

Sanctuaries are full of the birds now the craze has faded after the release of the final Harry Potter film last year.

And it’s feared many more have been illegally released into the wild and will have starved to death or taken over territory inhabited by smaller wild owls.

There was a surge in demand for pet owls from fans who fell in love with Harry’s cute companion ­Hedwig. (more…)

11 extinct (or going) sounds

Aw, why’d you trash that? You could gut it and install a computer in there more powerful than all of Bletchley Park (bonus if you make the rotary the numpad). (img by inoneear)

Who knew that some noises could eventually become as extinct as the passenger pigeon? Depending on your age, you or your kids or grandchildren may have only heard some of the following sounds in old movies, if at all.