Scientific Gossip (38-5)
Contains 100% gossip from concentrate
There's a Song in My Stomach
The microchip revolution continues to claim new victims. A German brewing company has been forced to scrap its plans to attach voice synthesizer chips inside some of its beer cans. The microchips were to announce in song that the lucky consumer had won a prize. However, some of the singing microchips were improperly affixed to the aluminum cans, and were ingested by unlucky beer guzzlers.
The Passing of Things Remembered
People with hypertension often perform poorly on memory tests compared to those who do not suffer from high blood pressure. Garisson Kapventy of the Belinka Institute in Helsinki is exploring the possibility that this leads to a vicious circle of afflictions. According to Kapventy’s theory, non-hypertensive (i.e., normal blood pressure) individuals who continually worry about suffering memory loss tend to develop hypertension, thus bringing on the very condition they fear.
The Omni-Drug Revolution
In the campaigns against disease, researchers have attained some success by utilizing two or more drugs together. Recently, this approach has led to the development of omni-drug therapy, in which hundreds of different drugs are administered together. Proponents argue that the body's immune system selects only those drugs which are beneficial, and renders the other drugs inert. Opponents argue that the claim is farfetched and extremely dangerous. Omni-drug therapy has received much favorable attention in the general press. Patient support groups for several diseases are applying political pressure to allow experimenters to skip preliminary laboratory trials with animals and proceed directly to human clinical trials.
© Copyright 2003 Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)
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