This TV ad for Alka-Seltzer evokes the spirit of gastroenterology in the decade 1960-69.
Tag: stomach
Podcast 83: Journeys of Toothbrushes
Toothbrushes journey — somehow, and other — to the depths in humanity, in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams discusses medical reports about toothbrushes that mysteriously found their way into people’s stomachs and other deeply secret places. Harvard chemist Daniel Rosenberg gives dramatic readings and opinions: Toothbrush journey #1: “The Swallowing of […]
The medical dilemma posed by a Mobile Phone in the Stomach
When a mobile telephone lodges in a person’s stomach, it can cease to be quite so mobile. A new medical paper offers proof of that: “An Ingested Mobile Phone in the Stomach May Not Be Amenable to Safe Endoscopic Removal Using Current Therapeutic Devices: A Case Report,” Obinna Obinwa, David Cooper, and James M. O’Riordan, International Journal of […]
Resurrecting an extinct, odd frog, using an Ig Nobel winner’s discovery
Ed Yong reports on Mike Archer‘s ambitious project to resurrect — so to speak — an unusual species of frog that went extinct not long ago. The frog’s oddity was researched, and reported in 1981, by Mike Tyler, who later was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for studying and cataloguing odd smells produced by different frogs. Detail […]
Headline of the Day: Cancer/Crab/Robot/Stomach
Today’s Headline of the Day is from a Reuters report by Tan Ee Lyn. The headline manages to implicitly make both the mythic, astrological connection between cancer and crabs and the dietary connection between crabs and the stomach, and to include a trendy mention of robots (which are in fact the focus of the story): […]
Memoirs of a stomach: written by himself
This week’s Book of the Week is Memoirs of a stomach: written by himself, that all who eat may read, by Sidney Whiting, published by W.E. Painter in London in 1853. A typical passage: My chief uses were these — To receive with becoming courtesy and politeness all nourishment that arrived in my parts, through […]
7500 artificial stomachs
“The world’s leading supplier of artificial laboratory stomachs just sold their 7500th unit, and they want the world to know about it,” writes investigator Alan Dove. These electromechanical stomachs are more angular than their biological distant brethren. The Stomacher 400, pictured here, possibly in the act of vomiting, is also the subject of a narrated […]