Posted May 13, 2015in News of the Weird
Already, healthy people can donate blood, sperm and eggs, but now the nonprofit OpenBiome offers donors $40 for bowel movements — to supply “fecal transplants” for patients with nasty C. difficile bacterial infections. (“Healthy” contents are transplanted into the infected gut via endoscope or frozen swallowed capsules so that the
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Posted May 06, 2015in News of the Weird
Saudi Arabia’s very first sex accessory shop (in the holy city of Mecca) should be opening soon, according to news reports — operated by a Moroccan Muslim, backed by the German adult mega-retailer Beate Uhse, and supposedly fully compliant with Islamic law. Owner Abdelaziz Aouragh told Agence France-Presse he would
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Posted April 29, 2015in News of the Weird
It seemed like a good idea when the town of Celoron, New York, agreed in 2009 to pay for a bronze statue honoring the village’s only celebrity. Lucille Ball had spent her childhood years there, and even today, everyone “Loves Lucy.” The result was apparently a monstrosity, described in news
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Posted April 22, 2015in News of the Weird
In March, offensive lineman John Urschel of the Baltimore Ravens added to his curriculum vitae by co-authoring the latest of his several peer-reviewed academic articles — “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians” in the Journal of Computational Mathematics. If Urschel can understand, and even
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Posted April 15, 2015in News of the Weird
On Feb. 9 a single traffic stop in Alderson, West Virginia, resulted in the arrest of six people from the same family, trafficking in stolen power tools (including one man who traded a leaf blower, hedge trimmer and weed trimmer for Percocet pills). However, a month later, members of an
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Posted April 08, 2015in News of the Weird
An unarmed man, suspected of no crime, who three years ago was shot 16 times by police while lying in his bed, told a Seattle Times reporter in March that he bears no ill will for the cops who shot him. Said Dustin Theoharis, now 32, “Sometimes (police) make mistakes.”
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Posted March 31, 2015in News of the Weird
Researchers are now preparing a study seeking to confirm that dog slobber, by itself (and not just the psychological advantages of playing with and petting a dog), might provide human health benefits (such as relief from asthma, allergies and inflammation). Specialists from the University of Arizona and University of California
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Posted March 25, 2015in News of the Weird
Even dangerous felons sometimes serve short sentences, but Benito Vasquez-Hernandez, 58 — guilty of nothing — has been locked up for nearly 900 days (as of early March) as a “material witness” in a Washington County, Oregon, murder case. The prosecutor is convinced that Vasquez-Hernandez saw his own son, Eloy,
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Posted March 18, 2015in News of the Weird
“This will be upsetting,” cautioned Justice Robert Graesser, addressing jurors in February in the Edmonton, Alberta, murder trial of Brad Barton. At issue was the cause of the victim’s having bled to death from her genitals, and the judge, ruling that jurors would benefit by inspecting the actual wound, admitted
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Posted March 11, 2015in News of the Weird
Shooting “upskirt” photos of a 13-year-old girl is not illegal in Oregon, declared Judge Eric Butterfield in February, thus acquitting Patrick Buono, 61, of the crimes of invasion of privacy and “encouraging child sexual abuse.” Buono’s behavior was “appalling,” Judge Butterfield noted, but since the girl was in a public
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