A Cure For Sore Throats?


Performers at fairs and in the streets keep us entertained with twirling fire-staffs, fire breathing and sword swallowing. The acts are very dramatic, even sensational if well done and I guess if their not well done, the performers won’t be doing much of it in the future. But even for the expert there are side effects to these extreme spectator sports.

Minor burns and swallowing hydrocarbons are serious enough, but catching your hair or clothes alight is much more serious and although our local club has fire blankets on hand, this may not be the case in front of a bus-queue.

Swallowing swords can have other side effects and Witcomb and Meyer carried out an international survey and wrote up their findings in the British Medical Journal (1). There were 110 sword swallowers from 16 countries who were invited to outline side effects that they’d experienced. Swords range in length from 17 inches to 31 inches, so not too wimpy. The authors excluded exotic items like spear guns and jackhammers so as not to confuse the issue.

The main side effect reported was “sword throat” which occurred when learning or performing too often in one day. A sword throat is a sore throat and was treated by over the counter remedies and cutting out swords from their diet for a few days.

Perforations did occur occasionally. Distractions made this more likely. Two examples mentioned were that of a swallower with a macaw on his shoulder that started to misbehave, and a belly dancer, with three sword down at once, who got a surprise when someone started to stuff dollar bills down her belt. The wriggling caused the blades to turn into scissors and chop at her oesophagus.

This may seem hard to swallow, but the prognosis for such injuries was for a better outcome than perforation injuries from other causes.

  1. http://www.bmj.com/content/333/7582/1285.abstract

Thanks to the Annals of Improbable Research for bring this to light.


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iSkivvies, Action Ready


Intelligent or igadgets are everywhere from your smartphone, tablet or MP3, so it’s not surprising that the concepts have spread to unsuspecting corners or crevices of our existence. The aim, of course, is for your gadget to understand what you want almost before you do yourself and pass the information to the appropriate facility, rather in the manner of your ideal PA or (if you’re of the old school) your perfect butler.

A new twist in the yarn has appeared with some engineers furiously knitting skivvies for the next gen soldiers (1). These iSkivvies have comfy gel sensors intimately measuring and sending your current state back to base.

What data you will surely be asking? The report suggests altitude effects, burns, respiratory distress, blunt trauma etc. so that fighting condition can be assessed and wounded more rapidly identified and evacuated.

One can visualize platoon leaders checking their iPhones with Bluetooth connection to their men’s iSkivvies using the appropriate App to see who is feeling up to the job of taking out that machine gun up ahead.

The report mentions another new exciting sensor  – an acoustic sensor to evaluate ballistic impact and thoracic noise indicative of trauma. Let’s hope that the cooks aren’t serving beans for lunch.

The idea of getting a digital readout for action readiness becomes interesting when the soldiers go off-duty and hit the local bars and dancehalls.


  1. http://news.discovery.com/tech/thinking-underwear-120119.html


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Drink And Drive?


The news media and the blogosphere seem to be awash in news about aqua vitae – aka uisge beatha – or simple whisky. The Scottish single malt of course. While it’s nice to have a little on hand for medicinal purposes, it seems that the Scots have decided that they have a new way to make money from the wondrous liquor.

The fermentation process produces other alcohols as well as ethanol. The latter of course we love and large volumes of ethanol/water blends flavored with various natural flavors are consumed in large quantities worldwide. But higher alcohols are also produced. The principle one is butanol. Now, we can metabolize butanol, although it is three times as toxic as ethanol, but too much effects the taste and the resulting headache.

A new company, Celtic Renewables Ltd., has been spawned by Napier U with the intent of harvesting the butanol (1,2). A good whisky still condenses out most of the butanol so it doesn’t end up in your glass and so the target is the waste from the process. That is, the undistilled liquor known as pot ale by the cognoscenti and also there is potential in the wet grain mash remaining from the fermentation process (draff).

So what are they going to do with all this butanol? Biofuel, of course, as it can be blended easily with gasoline to higher percentages than ethanol and packs more punch liter for liter.

Soon we’ll see breweries and wineries getting into the act. Don’t know about the cider makers though, those old English farmhouse scrumpy makers seemed to be happy slurping down exciting blends of various alcohols and related organics.

Soon it seems that we’ll be helping to save the planet by making our daily ‘wee dram’ (for our health’s sake, of course) into a ‘muckle dram’ even if it’s from a combination of several mickle ones.


  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-16701335
  2. http://www.napier.ac.uk/randkt/rktcentres/bfrc/Pages/Butanol.aspx 


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Shelling Out On Defense


Defense budgets are always controversial, but usually get voted through if there is a perceived threat. The military/industrial complex can consume as much resource as we can throw at it. Guns before butter can be ruinous.

“Perceived” is the problem and we humans seem very good at using our big brains to imagine all sorts of things – and lots of money can be made.  The question is how do other species respond to perceived threats? The ultimate threat is that something bigger is going to come and eat you, so what is the cost/benefit of avoiding being predated upon?

This issue interested Brönmark et al from Lund U who chose snails as a sensible phlegmatic species who have evolved defense strategies (1). They wanted to see whether the snails grew and reproduced as effectively if there were predators about, or did they put more resources into defense.

They set up eight large tanks with five smaller snail habitats in each containing hiding places. Half of the tanks were stocked with tench. Tench like to eat snail, so snails in tench tanks had to cope with a significant threat, which was totally absent in the controls.

The threatened snails came out to feed less and also grew thicker shells in the hope that heavy armor would offer some protection. As a consequence they grew less, showing that there was a significant cost coming along with their defense strategy.  Being busy defending themselves, they produced fewer offspring. The experimenters do not appear to have removed the predators to see if a baby-boom resulted.

With the tanks that were more heavily stocked with snails at the beginning of the experiment, less fish induced defense effects were observed. Clearly if you are in a large crowd (do snails have herds?) the perceived threat is less. Just like people.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030467


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