Newsworthy but not its own thread worthy

[chokes999]

Pornhub's 2022 Year In Review Reveals World's Darkest And Dirtiest Searches

http://zerohedge.com/markets/pornhubs-year-review-reveals-darkest-and-dirtiest-searches

[pelham456]

apparently i am the only person on planet earth who has ever viewed pr0n on a laptop....?



make my mother so proud!

[alexora]

These women received, respectively, 15 and 20 years in the slammer:

Colorado ex-funeral directors
jailed for selling body parts

An ex-funeral home owner and her mother have been sentenced to prison in Colorado after dissecting hundreds of bodies and selling the body parts.

Prosecutors said Megan Hess, 46, and Shirly Koch, 69, dissected some 560 corpses and sold body parts without permission between 2010 and 2018.

Both women pleaded guilty to fraud earlier this year.

Hess will jailed for 20, while Koch was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

According to federal prosecutors in Colorado, the mother-daughter duo harvested body parts, and entire bodies in some cases, for sale.

Hess - who ran the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in the town of Montrose - charged families up to $1,000 (£834) for cremations that never took place and offered them free of charge in exchange for body part donations in some cases, prosecutors said.

"These two women preyed on vulnerable victims who turned to them in a time of grief and sadness," Leonard Carollo, the FBI's special agent in charge in Denver, said in a statement.

"But instead of offering guidance, these greedy women betrayed the trust of hundreds of victims and mutilated their loved ones."

The case was triggered by a Reuters investigation, which led to an FBI raid of the home in 2018. It is illegal in the US to sell organs, but the sale of body parts is currently not regulated by US federal law.

Emotional victim statements dominated Tuesday's sentencing hearing.

"When Megan stole my mom's heart, she broke mine," said Nancy Overhoff, according to the Denver Post. Erin Smith said: "We came today to hear the handcuffs click."

Describing it as "the most emotionally draining case I have ever experienced on the bench", Judge Christine Arguello ordered the two women be sent to prison immediately.

Source:

http://bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-64159612

[ghost2509]

Scientists Link Male Pattern Balding to Wildly Popular Beverage

Futurism
msn.com
Story by Noor Al-Siba
01/03/2023

A new study out of Tsinghua University in Beijing has found a new link between sugary drinks and male pattern hair loss, with beverages ranging from soft drinks to artificially-sweetened juices to energy drinks being some of the primary culprits.

In short,*it's depressing news:*all the stuff that tastes really great may make you lose your hair.

The paper, newly published in the*journal Nutrients, is hardly the first we've heard about the ill health effects of sugary drinks.*And doctors have long suspected a link between excess sugar and hair loss.

But the study's wider-lens examination of the connection is intriguing. The researchers at Tsinghua's Vanke School of Public Health anonymously surveyed 1028 men online between the ages of 18 and 45 on the Chinese mainland last year, asking them their sweetened drink intake, any health issues they may be experiencing, whether they smoked or drank, and if they were experiencing hair issues, as well as psychological questions.

The results were striking. Respondents with male pattern baldness, they found, were drinking an average of 4,293 milliliters per week — that's more than a gallon, or more than two of those two-liter bottles of Pepsi you can buy at the grocery stores — while respondents with full heads of hair drinking just 2,513 milliliters.

More research is needed, but the Tsinghua researchers hypothesized that the root cause could be sugary drinks' propensity to heighten blood sugar. Diabetes studies have shown that heightened blood sugar levels appear to be associated with hair loss, and with sweet drinks being a major risk factor for developing or worsening diabetes, so the logic may hold up.

Given that this research linking sugary drinks and male pattern hair loss is so preliminary, the paper's authors noted that further study is needed.*Nonetheless, it's an intriguing — and disturbing — new reason not to pound down too many sodas or Red Bulls.

[alexora]

Originally Posted by ghost2509

Scientists Link Male Pattern Balding to Wildly Popular Beverage

I have no doubt that a remedy to this unfortunate condition will be found, someday.

The person, or corporation, that comes up with a sure thing cure for male pattern baldness, will be richer than those who invented Viagra and Prozac combined...

[ghost2509]

Woman finds out she is her daughter's mother - and uncle

jpost.com
By WALLA!
DECEMBER 28, 2022

The mother's DNA tests showed that she’s also the uncle of her daughter. Doctors realized that the mom was a human chimera with DNA from more than one fetus.

Last year two cases of human chimeras made headlines. The first was singer Taylor Muhl from California who discovered that she has two types of DNA: hers and her non-existent twin sister. That is, in her mother's case, two separate eggs were fertilized by two different sperm cells yet Taylor absorbed the genetic traits of the second embryo in the first stages of development.*

In Greek mythology, the chimera is a monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a snake. But in biology, a chimera is a person made up of cells of more than one DNA set.*

The second case is a father who discovered that his son wasn’t his, but rather his unborn twin brother's. That is, he has two genetic structures: his own and that of his twin brother who died in the womb in the early stages of pregnancy. He absorbed the genetic load of his twin brother and passed it on to his son, so he discovered that he was actually his son's uncle and that his nonexistent twin brother was the biological father.

In recent years, more and more such cases have been found and recently, researchers concluded that human chimeras are much more common than they thought. One case that intrigued researchers was that of a woman who discovered that she was both the mother and the uncle of her daughter.*

Joanne Unis, a researcher in DNA testing at Columbia University, said there is no information on how often this medical anomaly occurs but after seeing about 20 confirmed cases, she said that she believes there are many more.

The case of Taylor Muhl

Unis spoke about the case at the International Symposium on Human Identification in Washington, DC last month. What started as a routine biological parenting check for a young girl quickly turned into a case involving many experts.*

Parts of the exam showed that the mother isn’t actually the child's mother, which is called maternal exclusion. Other results have shown that the child's father isn’t her father, a result of paternal exclusion.*

Also, the birth mother's blood sample tested as male, containing the XY chromosomes found in biological males, not the two XX chromosomes expected for females. Some intersex people have XY chromosomes and develop female sexual anatomy, but they are usually infertile.

Unis said her first reaction was that someone made a mistake; there was an uproar in the lab and all tests had to stop. Yet the team found identical results when they repeated the test with the original blood samples. When scientists removed the mom from the equation, the test showed that the father is indeed a biological parent and the other male genes in the result weren’t present.

Unis suggested that this was a human chimera based on a case from 2002. She was part of a team that reported on a 52-year-old woman named Karen Keegan whose genetic testing for a kidney transplant showed that she was a tetragametic chimera: Tetra means four and gametes means sex cells, like sperm and egg.*

Keegan's genes were a mixture of four egg cells and sperm cells instead of the usual two. Her genetics came from two separately fertilized eggs that fused when her mother was pregnant with her. In Keegan's case, both embryos were XX or biologically female, according to a report on her case in the New England Journal of Medicine.

For Muhl, the XY genetic signature dominated her blood and saliva samples, which confused the paternity test. However, her hair and cheek cells showed cell proliferation of XX.*

Is chimerism becoming more widespread?*

Robert Wenk, a genetic pathologist in Baltimore, stated that the child's mother is a natural chimera. There are usually very few external signs that indicate this condition, which allows it to go under the medical radar.

Although there are few published cases of chimerism to date, it’s estimated that the condition may exist in up to 10% of the population. This is indicated by findings that show in 30% of births initial tests show signs of twins, although only one baby is born. This is called disappearing twin syndrome.*

Wenk added that in rare cases of chimerism where neither XY nor XX cells dominate the reproductive organs, chimeric individuals can develop both male and female anatomy and are termed intersex which is very unusual. Because many chimeras appear normal and may not show functional reproductive defects, most human chimeras go undetected.*

John Butler, a fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and president of the International Society of Forensic Genetics, said that chimerism can be hard for people to wrap their heads around because those with the condition do not exist within the normal binary sex paradigm.

Butler added that we may see chimeras more often because of the global increase in babies born through IVF technology - more than 8 million in the last two decades. Often more than one embryo is implanted in the mother in fertility treatments which increases the possibility of merged embryos.

Chimerism can cause legal problems in parentage tests, Unis said, from alimony to divorce to fraud cases like that of Lydia Fairchild from Washington state who almost lost her children after genetic tests showed that she wasn’t the biological mother of her kids.

Returning to The Muhl case, Unis and her team also tested her two older children, a daughter and a son, to see if they had received some of the chimeric genes. Butler stated that there are signs that some of the chimeric genes of their "uncle" may have been transferred to them, but researchers must conduct further testing to rule out the possibility that these are everyday DNA mutations.

No one is actively seeking out and testing people for chimerism, so we don't know how many people living with it exist among us now. Unis added that this is why the team chose to look at the whole family when they found out about the case. They tried to fully check this phenomenon.

The paternity testing team primarily tested whether the previously born son possessed the male chromosome of her missing twin, Unis said, to see if this is the first case of a Y chromosome being passed from mother to son, yet it wasn’t.

[alexora]

Welcome to Scotland's Pianodrome...

‘We're saving 100-year-old pianos from landfill’

“Pianos do kind of take on the character of 100 years of playing, you know?” says Tim Vincent-Smith, co-founder of Pianodrome - a project that saves old pianos from ending up in landfill.

Along with bandmate Matthew Wright, the pair receive donations of pianos from all across Scotland and bring them back to life with a little bit of love and care.

While some pianos can be restored back to their former glory, others past their playing age are given a second life by reusing the materials to create sculptures, furniture and Pianodromes – amphitheatres built entirely from upcycled pianos.

“When you are in the Pianodrome you really feel sort of held by all of these pianos and all of their histories,” says Matthew Wright.

Source + video here:

http://bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-scotland-64175072

[ghost2509]

Amateur archaeologist decodes 20,000-year-old cave drawings across Europe, study says

Miami Herald
yahoo.com
Aspen Pflughoeft
January 5, 2023

Ancient cave drawings, like animal figures and handprints, are generally thought to have meanings, but the specifics of these millennia-old shapes have long eluded experts. An amateur archaeologist set out to change that in a study.

Bennett Bacon, a researcher and furniture conservator in London, took an interest in cave art drawings, BBC reported. “The meaning of the markings within these drawings has always intrigued me so I set about trying to decode them,” Bacon said in a Thursday, Jan. 5, news release from University College London.

Spending hours at the library and searching for photos of cave art online, Bacon collected “as much data as possible and began looking for repeating patterns,” he explained in the UCL release.

As Bacon’s ideas progressed, he reached out to academics to collaborate with him. The result? A “proto-writing system” over 10,000 years older than the earliest cuneiform writing from Sumeria, Bacon and co-authors write in a study published Jan. 5 by Cambridge University Press.

The researchers focused on three abstract symbols — a dot, line and Y-shaped symbol — repeatedly found near animal figures in 20,000-year-old cave drawings from across Europe, the study said. Bacon and his team hypothesized that the symbols were part of a notational system used to mark important biological events of the animals depicted nearby.

These markings, however, would only make sense with a reference point consistent and obvious to people 20,000 years ago, the study said. The team hypothesized the markings were one-month units within a calendar that began in spring, after the snow and ice melted.

To test this hypothesis, Bacon and his collaborations collected over 800 examples of these symbols from European caves throughout the Paleolithic time period. The researchers compared the cave drawings to data on seasonal animal behavior in a statistical analysis.

The findings supported Bacon’s hypothesis, suggesting the dots and lines were not random but correlated with the mating or birthing seasons of the animals depicted nearby, the study said.

“The study shows that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systematic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar,” one of the study’s collaborators, Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University, said in the news release.

For Bacon, the findings had even more significance. “As we probe deeper into their world, what we are discovering is that these ancient ancestors are a lot more like us than we had previously thought,” he said. “These people, separated from us by many millennia, are suddenly a lot closer.”

[ghost2509]

No cash, no bank heists in Denmark; criminals now go online

apnews.com
January 3, 2023

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — For the first time in years, Denmark hasn’t recorded a single bank robbery. There wouldn’t have been much point.

Cash transactions in the Nordic country have become virtually obsolete, with Danes increasingly opting to use cards and smart phones for payments.

The Danish bank employees’ union on Tuesday welcomed the news that 2022 had been robbery-free.

“It is just amazing. Because (robberies) put an absolutely extreme strain on the affected employees every time (they) happened,” spokesman Steen Lund Olsen said in a statement.

Finance Denmark, the banking sector’s association, said only about 20 bank branches across the country have cash holdings. But then the number of bank branches has fallen from 219 in 1991 to 56 in 2021, it said.

News reports noted that cash withdrawals in Denmark have been dropping by about three-quarters every year for the past six years.

In 2000, 221 bank robberies were recorded, Finance Denmark said. In 2021, there was just one.

Initially, robbers switched their attentions from bank branches to Automatic Teller Machines, with such attacks peaking at 18 in 2016. But those too have come down to zero amid better surveillance and technical protection, the industry association said.

Finance Denmark said criminals in recent years have turned to defrauding people online.

[alexora]

Originally Posted by ghost2509

No cash, no bank heists in Denmark; criminals now go online

Finance Denmark said criminals in recent years have turned to defrauding people online.

Not to mention the banks themselves...