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The man who received the first penis transplant in the United States left a hospital on Wednesday, three and a half weeks after the operation. He is recovering well, with good blood flow to the transplanted organ and no signs of rejection, his doctors said.
“Everything seems to be healing,” said the patient, Thomas Manning, 64, a bank courier from Halifax, Mass. “Everything’s fine. It’s going to get better, too.”
Mr. Manning needed the transplant because his penis was removed in 2012 to treat cancer. The replacement organ, from a deceased donor, was attached during a 15-hour operation on May 8 and 9 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
“He’s doing great,” said Dr. Curtis L. Cetrulo, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon. “So far, so good. We’re very pleased.”
Dr. Cetrulo and Dr. Dicken Ko, the director of the hospital’s regional urology program, said that the operation had accomplished two main objectives: to restore normal-looking genitals and urinary function.
“He’s standing up and he’s aiming, just like the good old days,” Dr. Ko said.
The doctors said that they were hopeful that sensation and sexual function would also return, but that the process involved nerve regeneration and would occur over months. In hand transplants, Dr. Cetrulo said, sensation “comes back rapidly at a rudimentary level, but we’ve then seen continuing improvement for five years.”
Mr. Manning must take anti-rejection drugs every day for the rest of his life, and he will see doctors twice a week for the next few weeks to check for signs of rejection and adjust medicine doses.
His surgery was experimental, part of a research program with the eventual goal of helping veterans who sustained pelvic injuries in combat, as well as cancer patients and accident victims.
Another patient, burned in a car accident, will receive a transplant as soon as a matching donor becomes available, Dr. Cetrulo said.
Surgeons at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are also planning to perform penis transplants and have had a combat veteran, injured in Afghanistan, on a waiting list for several months. [Reply]
The polar bears in Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park Zoo are so glam rock, they’re literally pooping glitter. CNET reports that, for the last two years, zookeepers at Assiniboine have been feeding their bears different colors of glitter in order to differentiate between each bear’s feces. Zookeepers say the sparkly droppings allow them to track the health and happiness of each polar bear.
CBC News explains that zookeepers use the same regular non-toxic glitter you can find at any art supplies store. They did some research to identify the safest possible glitter for bear consumption and chose a color ranging from a dark purple to a shiny gold for each bear. Currently, eight of the nine polar bears at the zoo regularly consume glitter with meals of ground-up horse meat. Samples are collected from the time bears are first brought to the zoo until they reach sexual maturity.
Zookeepers say you can learn a surprising amount about a bear’s wellbeing from a little bit of sparkly poop. In addition to using the fecal matter to identify current health issues, researchers are performing a longitudinal study on the bears’ ability to acclimate to zoo life. They track stress hormones in fecal samples, observe bear behavior, and then attempt to draw conclusions about both the animals and their own care-taking strategies.
"We want to know, are we doing it right? Are there ways we can improve?" Stephen Petersen of the International Polar Bear Conservation Centre told CBC News. “To really have a science based way of saying, well this really worked for the bears or, this really didn’t.” [Reply]
Vanderbilt biologist Kenneth Catania has accidentally discovered that electric eels make leaping attacks that dramatically increase the strength of the electric shocks they deliver and, in so doing, has confirmed a 200-year-old observation by famous 19th century explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. [Reply]
A famous dagger found in the wrapping of Egyptian King Tutankhamun's mummy was made with iron from a meteorite, a study confirms.
An analysis of the dagger's blade led by Daniela Comelli, a professor of materials science at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy, showed that it contains 10 per cent nickel and 0.6 per cent cobalt, the researchers report in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.
The analysis was conducted using a technique called X-ray fluorescence, which identifies different elements from the characteristic colours of X-ray light they give off when hit with higher-energy X-rays. Then they compared the composition of the dagger's blade with that of 11 metallic meteorites and found it to be very similar.
The dagger was found by archeologist Howard Carter in 1925, three years after he discovered King Tut's tomb. The dagger was in the wrapping surrounding the right thigh of the boy king's mummy. It had a decorated gold handle with a pommel of rock crystal, and the iron blade was protected with a gold sheath decorated with a pattern of lilies on one side, feathers on the other, and a jackal's head, the researchers reported.
The dagger dates back to the 14th century BC and is one of very few iron artifacts ever found from the ancient Egyptian culture, which isn't thought to have developed iron smelting until the 8th century BC — later than neighbouring countries, Comelli told CBC News in an email.
'High manufacturing quality'
"The problem with iron working is related to its high melting point (1,538 C). Because of it, early smiths couldn't heat ore enough to extract iron and couldn't forge the iron into weapons," she wrote.
Earlier iron objects were typically ornamental or ceremonial and made of meteoritic iron that was considered more valuable than gold, the researchers wrote.
It was shaped by hammering, Comelli said. King Tut's dagger had been suspected to have been made with that type of iron, but it had not been confirmed.
"In this context, the high manufacturing quality of Tutankhamun's dagger blade is evidence of early successful iron smithing in the 14th C. BCE," the researchers wrote in their paper.
They added that the finding also provides insight into Egyptian descriptions of iron that appeared around 100 years later, which use the term "iron of the sky."
"The introduction of the new composite term suggests that the ancient Egyptians … were aware that these rare chunks of iron fell from the sky already in the 13th C. BCE," the authors wrote.
King Tut was the first Sword of the Morning. Who knew?
So the dagger wasn't smelted but hammered into shape? That's pretty crazy. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Donger:
Oh. Then I'm guessing either acoustic change based on thrust output variation or the thrust going from subsonic speed to supersonic.
Yeah, it's a cool concise visual representation of the unpredictability of the sub to supersonic transition. /spoiler unlocked [Reply]
Originally Posted by Baby Lee:
Yeah, it's a cool concise visual representation of the unpredictability of the sub to supersonic transition. /spoiler unlocked
Neat. I was leaning toward acoustics based on the sound suppression that they employed.
I remember having to convince someone in high school that the "sparklers" didn't actually ignite the SSMEs.
