This just in from the New Scientist, http://www.newscientist.com/weird/bizarre3.html linked from the Mad Scientist website.
BLOW ME UP Don't try any of the following at home. Or if you must, at least make sure there's a doctor in the house. SOBERING THOUGHTS NORMALLY it takes between four and ten hours to sober up a drunk. Now the University of Georgia is patenting a high-speed method (patent WO 96/39174). The drawback is that a catheter has to be pushed up the nose or the rectum. The patient is given an enzyme, yeast alcohol dehydrogenase, mixed with an acetate buffer to stabilise the stomach's pH. A catheter is then inserted. This feeds pure oxygen into the small intestine. The enzyme and oxygen accelerate the conversion of blood alcohol into acetates and regenerate enzymes in the liver. Severe alcohol intoxication may be fatal. The technique can lower the concentration of alcohol in the blood to below the lethal level of about 1 per cent in less than half an hour. (29 March 1997) .......................................................... SPORTING CHANCE GUT REACTIONS: Understanding Symptoms of the Digestive Tract by W. G.Thompson, Plenum Publishing, pp 337, £17·25/$22·95 Did you know that in preparation for the 1976 Olympics, German swimmers suffered the indignity of having 1·8 litres of air pumped into their colons to improve buoyancy? Thompson says: "It apparently helped crawl and backstroke specialists, but a breaststroker complained that the gas-filled gut caused his feet to stick out of the water. Perhaps sports authorities will need to test athletes for flatus, as well as steroids." (13 January 1990) .......................................................... OXYGERIATRICS AMID the growing public concern over hallucinogenic drugs, researchers from the State University of New York, Buffalo, School of Medicine have unveiled the mind-expanding properties of a very common and easily accessible substance--oxygen. E. A. Jacobs, P. M. Winter, H. J. Alvis and S. M. Small treated 13 senile male patients with doses of pure oxygen at pressures of 2·5 atmospheres for 90 minutes, twice a day over a period of 15 days. They found that the old boys improved markedly as evidenced by psychological testing, unsolicited comments from the nurses and remarks of the subjects themselves. Control groups who breathed 10 per cent oxygen did not show improvement. Studies of oxygen deprivation on laboratory animals indicates impairment of memory and learning abilities, and ageing may inhibit flow of oxygen to the brain. The hyperbaric exposures produced marked improvement of cerebral oxygenation, the effects of which lasted at least 24 times longer than the exposure time, (New England Journal of Medicine, vol 281, p 753). It is known that past the age of 20, many people start on the road to senility. Perhaps high-pressure oxygen will be society's panacea for elderly statesmen and absent-minded professors. (30 October 1969) .......................................................... From New Scientist, 21 March 1998 © Copyright New Scientist, RBI Limited 1998 John and Valerie Surgeon [email protected] -- The silver-list is a moderated forum for discussion of colloidal silver. To join or quit silver-list or silver-digest send an e-mail message to: [email protected] -or- [email protected] with the word subscribe or unsubscribe in the subject: line. To post, address your message to: [email protected] List maintainer: Mike Devour <[email protected]>
