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Tag Archives: science!

Interesting medical conditions

Just to be clear, I’m not actually a hypochondriac.  Sometimes I like to pretend that I am one so that I can have all these really cool diseases.  Um…I’m obviously not much like other people.  I like diseases.  And the agents that cause disease.  They’re really interesting to me.  But I generally don’t really believe that I have said diseases no matter how convincingly I might portray a sufferer of the disease in question.  So anyway, to the story!

Recently, I was looking into various medical conditions because I thought I might have broken my throat and later on, a few toes.

The throat story: One day last week, my right tonsil started hurting.  No reason as to why.  It just decided to hurt intermittently.  Then it decided to hurt all the time.  I was kind of annoyed with it.  Tonsils that hurt kind of interfere with swallowing and sometimes with turning my head.  So, I decided to look into causes on tonsil hurt.  I found a few.  The most interesting one to me was tonsilloliths.  Did you know such things existed?  It’s like a kidney stone…but in your tonsil.  They can get quite large too and look something like a tooth.  Can you imagine a tooth growing out of your tonsil?  I wonder if it would be any good for chewing.  Probably not.  You can use your teeth for chewing because they’re firmly seated in bone.  Tonsils aren’t really known for their sturdiness.  Anyway, tonsilloliths generally cause bad breath and sometimes will cause sore throats, difficulty swallowing, coughing fits, etc.  You can often remove them yourself.  Apparently, a lot of people post videos of that on youtube.  Otherwise, here is an image search for tonsilloliths.  And the wiki article for it.  It’s all so interesting!

The broken toe(s) story: A few days after breaking my throat, I was trying to get ice some ice for my coffee so I wouldn’t have to wait so long for it to cool off.  That involved removing the ice tray.  That involved a large frozen block of something falling off the top shelf of the freezer.  That involved my right foot being smashed by this frozen block of something because I didn’t realize that a large frozen block of something had fallen from the top shelf of the freezer.  My toes are quite black.  Even now.  At first, I thought I might have broken some of them.  Since then, I’ve decided that while I might have cracked the bone, it’s probably just some pretty bad bruising.  But still, this was excuse to look up different conditions that involve painful toes.  Did you know there is something called turf toe?  I thought it might be some interesting and exotic condition involving your toe.  Maybe there’s so much fungus growing out of your toe that it resembles an athletic field.  I don’t know.  But…it’s not that.  It’s just a really bad sprain of your big toe.  It was so anticlimactic.  Disappointing even.  I guess it makes people feel better to have some interesting sounding condition instead of “badly sprained big toe”?  Anyway, apparently people also post videos of turf toe on youtube.  And here are a bunch of images again.  Here’s the wiki for it, which is actually filed under a much cooler sounding name.

So…yeah.  Interesting medical conditions.  I might sample some of them.

Zombee apocalypse! Zombee apocalypse!!

Yes, zombee.  Yes, I did spell that correctly.  For I talk of zombified bees.  A zombee.

Here, read this.

Honeybees have been dying off for awhile now and there have been a lot of theories as to why that’s been happening.  Well, here’s another one.  They’re becoming zombies.  Or zombees.

Honeybees have been observed behaving in weird, zombie-like ways, like wandering off at night and walking around in circles (and crawling into people’s ears to get at their brains…ok, not really).  The reason for this is because of…A PARASITE!  Yes, it’s another one of those zombifying parasites.  I would link you to all the other posts I’ve written about zombifying parasites, but I’m too lazy to look through my archives right now.  But if you click on the “zombies” tag, you’ll probably find a fair amount of them.

Interestingly enough, no one has observed this particular fly attacking honeybees before and it is likely part of the cause of the mass bee die-offs.  So then, scientists need your help to study the zombees and they are enlisting the whole of the US to aid them!

There is a citizen science project over at zombeewatch.org where you can join said project and collect (dead or dying) honeybees for observation.  After you gather all these honeybees, you just need to observe them from time to time to see if any fly pupae hatch from those bees.  You report your findings to the site and a TEAM OF SCIENTISTS can sort through the data you have collected and get to sciencing (which I assume is their superpower).

It sounds pretty interesting and I’ve found some bees wandering around my yard at night recently.  They say that parasitism in California starts in June and peaks in fall to winter.  I guess this is prime time for me to be out collecting and observing bees.  Maybe I will.  Maybe you should too.  And together, we can stave off the zombee apocalypse (which really would be a good thing, not just for our brains, but for all the crops that depend on pollination by honeybee, nod).