What if waiting for treatment in the emergency room was like waiting for your toaster to ding, and you knew exactly how long you were going to wait? Many healthcare providers are hopeful that by banding together to coordinate information about how congested their waiting rooms are they can help people make the best decision about where to seek medical attention, according to the Los Angeles Times:
In part to ease the minds of those seeking emergency care — or at least disclose how bad the wait will be — a growing number of suburban emergency rooms around the country are advertising wait times.
Some post the times on their websites. Others tweet, send text messages or display the times on huge highway billboards. A few are testing a service by a start-up company, InQuickER, that allows patients to register online, pay a small fee and hold their place in line while they wait at home.
Thanks to the winter devastation wrought by this weekend’s storm, my weekend holiday travel plans were put on hold until, well, now. So from 36,000 feet above the ground, courtesy of Delta’s free wifi (it’s the least they could do, seeing how they put me on hold all weekend with “Let it Snow” playing on a loop), I bring you a story of a flight canceled not by weather, but by a typo.
Back on March 20th at Melbourne Airport, a United Arab Emirates (UAE) aircraft’s tail made contact with the runway during take-off (known as a tail-strike), and the plane was having trouble taking off at all. In fact, the tail hit the ground three more times beyond the runway and the landing gear took out a strobe light and a localizer antennae. Through some slick piloting, the airplane’s captain was able to get off the ground, dump fuel, and return to the same airport.
The cause for the tail-strike? A number 3 where a number 2 was supposed to be, as reported by IEEE Spectrum:
As we won’t be posting at NCBI ROFL until our move to Discover Magazine in January, we will be posting owned, pwned, and failed science at our new blog, and welcome submissions… (ahem).
“Using a modified six cartoon-face rating scale, employed in the health care field to help judge pain being experienced by young children, the facial expressions of 300 youngsters queued up to visit Santa Claus were observed and rated as showing indifference to the impending visit.”
The author followed up with similar studies published in 2005, 2006 and 2008. Apparently he had nothing better to do while waiting in that long line with his kids…
Visiting Santa: another look. “An informal enquiry of the facial expressions of children as they queued up to meet Santa Claus during the 2003 Yuletide season showed that about 82% of the 300 children appeared to be indifferent to seeing Santa. As this finding seemed perhaps different from what conventional wisdom would suggest, that most children would be exhilarated or happy to visit with Santa, this study was replicated in 2004.”
“An informal enquiry of the facial expressions of children as they queued up to meet Santa Claus during the 2003 Yuletide season showed that about 8 out of 10 children appeared to be indifferent to seeing Santa. This replication of the study in 2004 resulted in an approximately similar finding. A repeat of these enquiries, in 2005, suggested that the indifference rate appeared to lessen (being somewhat more cheerful) the closer was Christmas.”
“Four recent informal successive yearly enquiries of the emotions of 1,050 children (total) immediately before their visit with Santa Claus at a shopping mall suggested that about 80% displayed facial expressions, judged by an observer, as indicating indifference. To investigate possible change in emotions of children immediately after their visit with Santa, this study was conducted in 2007. Of the 280 exiting children observed, about 60% appeared to be indifferent.”
Happy Holidays to all our fans. This will be the last post in this incarnation of NCBI ROFL, but we look forward to seeing you all in January at DiscoverMagazine.com!
Cocaine and heroin are generally acknowledged to be fairly dangerous chemicals to put in your body. And that’s not even considering that cocaine could well be tainted with opossum de-worming medication and heroin may be laced with anthrax—that’s right, anthrax.
Yes, it’s been a week of dangerous and deadly adulterants showing up in recreational drugs. DISCOVER actually highlighted the story of the tainted cocaine back in September, when the Drug Enforcement Agency first announced that they had found cocaine tainted with levamisole. The drug is used to treat cancer in humans and as a de-worming agent in livestock, but can have dire effects on the immune system. Just how it got into cocaine nobody knows for sure, though scientists think it may spark a more intense high for users.
Over 50 hours (!) of hi-def footage was captured of this western Pacific ocean volcano, which is 1,200 meters underwater, by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV)—named Jason—from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The footage was unveiled recently at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
A Newsweek writer better known as Fake Steve Jobs is so fed up with AT&T’s service for his iPhone that he’s calling on his fellow AT&T customers to clog up the 3G wireless network today in protest of AT&T’s plan to impose service fees on “bandwidth hogs.”
Dan Lyons, blogging as Fake Steve Jobs, has called on AT&T users to show their service dissatisfaction by trying to overwhelm the network with data-intensive tasks. “Operation Chokehold”, as he called his incitement to flash-mob mischief, hopes to shut down the US AT&T 3G network at 3pm today and appears to have gained some support from the iPhone rabble.
Trigona carbonaria is a bee without a stinger, one of the 10 or so out of 2,000 Australian bee species to lack the feature. This doesn’t appear to have been any concern… at least not until the hive beetle Aethina tumida showed up. This invasive insect may have reached the island continent along with a flock of athletes during the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, and as the name suggests, it like to invade beehives. But it hasn’t been very successful in this case, thanks to creative defensive tactics by the bees.
Since the worker can’t sting, they instead make the beetles into mummies. Workers swarm to the approaching beetle, which adopts the turtle defense–tucking in its head and legs, according to researcher Mark Greco, whose team used CT scans to see the action inside the hive. Then the construction onslaught starts. From BBC News:
“The term ‘beer belly’ expresses the common belief that beer consumption is a major determinant of waist circumference (WC). We studied the gender-specific associations between beer consumption and WC (partially in relation to body weight and hip circumference (HC) change)… A positive association in men and no association in women were seen between beer consumption and WC at baseline. Men consuming 1000 ml/d beer were at 17% higher risk for WC gain compared with very light consumers. Significantly lower odds for WC gain (odds ratio=0.88; 95% confidence interval 0.81, 0.96) were found in beer-abstaining women than in very-light-drinking women… Decreasing beer consumption was related to higher relative odds for WC loss, although not statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS: Beer consumption leads to WC gain, which is closely related to concurrent overall weight gain. This study does not support the common belief of a site-specific effect of beer on the abdomen, the beer belly.”
Thanks to Jean-Michel for today’s ROFL!
And speaking of beer bellies, don’t forget the celebration tonight at 6pm (’til whenever we decide to leave) at Jupiter in Berkeley. The first two people to buy us a round will get a free NCBI ROFL beer stein! Hope to see you there!
For those too busy (or self-important?) to pocket the iPhone while walking down the street and too safety-conscious to blunder out into traffic while texting, we’ve got just the app for you, via Gadget Venue:
The application is called Type and Walk and makes use of the camera on your iPhone to push video in to the background of an application where you can type on top of the video, thus being able to see obstacles as you are walking.
Type n Walk was designed to work with your favorite apps — not try to replace them. Use it to compose your email, text message, status update, or tweet and paste it into your target app (or the browser) to send.
Yes, the app shows you the same thing you’d see if you just looked ahead of you without the iPhone, the same way people have for thousands of years, and animals before them for millions of years. Is it genius? A signal that our species has really, finally gone too far with this technology thing?
Discoblog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. Email tips and suggestions to vgreenwood [at] discovermagazine [dot] com.
Cocaine and heroin are generally acknowledged to be fairly dangerous chemicals to put in your body. And that’s not even considering that cocaine could well be tainted with opossum de-worming medication and heroin may be laced with anthrax—that’s right, anthrax.
A Newsweek writer better known as 
Trigona carbonaria is a bee without a stinger, one of the 10 or so out of 2,000 
