The King’s Birthday Vasectomy Festival: 25th Anniversary!

December 5 will be the 25th anniversary of the historic 1987 King’s Birthday Vasectomy Festival, which may have been the most biomedically intriguing King’s Birthday Vasectomy Festival of them all: “No-Scalpel Vasectomy at the King’s Birthday Vasectomy Festival,” by Apichart Nirapathpongporn, Douglas H. Huber and John N. Krieger, The Lancet, no. 335, 1990, pp. 894- 895. The […]

Grimaces of mice and men (and rats)

Scientists are interested in whether mice’s facial expressions can be used as an index of pain.  To test the idea, they compared the Mouse Grimace Scale (pictured below) with more traditional behavioral measures in examining mice’s levels of discomfort after having surgery on their manhood—er, mousehood. “The Assessment of Post-Vasectomy Pain in Mice Using Behaviour and […]