An unusual case of vaginal tumour.

“A young unmarried woman aged 24 years, suffering from cancerophobia, came to the clinic in an acute anxiety state, convinced that she had a malignant growth, having, she stated, only that morning felt a hard lump in the vagina.

She was a well-nourished person and there was no history of loss of weight, menstrual iregularity, or vaginal discharge; nor was there any previous history of gynaecological or other relevant disorder. She did, however, exhibit signs of emotional distress with sweaty palms and tachycardia.

Examination.
A large, hard, smooth lump filed the vagina. On removal it was found to be a globular circumscribed object, possessing no capsule, and on section was seen to have a laminated structure (Figure). It was identified as a specimen of “liliaceaeoma” or an Allium cepa.

The encyclopaedia defines the Allium cepa as one of the family Liliaceae. It has been cultivated from ancient times and probably originated in Asia. The edible part is the bulb containing an acrid volatile oil, giving a strong flavour. The allium is a bienial, the common species producing a bulb in the first season and seeds in the second. The example shewn is evidently of the first season.

Result.
On being informed that she had no cancer, but rather an onion, the patient shewed no signs of pleasure or of gratitude on being so quickly cured of her complaint and relieved of her anxiety. Instead she exhibited signs of anger, the reason for which was the same as had caused the presence of this unexpected vegetable in such an unusual garden. It appeared that her male consort and herself had indulged very freely in alcohol on the previous evening and that he had departed sometime during the night leaving her in a deep sleep on the bed. The removal of the onion from a bunch of its fellows hanging on the back of the door, and its subsequent insertion, had been his parting gesture of affection.”

[This is the full article, but the free PDF is also available here.]

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The Roman Goddess of beauty and love, and the brightest object in the night sky after the moon.  Venus appears as a glowing, bright blue star; beautiful, calm, serene, distant, cool.

Venus over the Pacific Ocean Image; Mila Zinkova, all rights reserved

That’s the image, anyway.  When you get closer to Venus, you start to see some serious cracks in the “love and beauty” image.

For one thing, Venus is hot.  Very hot.  There is a runaway greenhouse effect at work on the planet, making its surface temperature about 460 degrees C (860 F).  This is hotter than the surface of Mercury.  Venus is isothermal, meaning its temperature is constant; pole to pole, night and day.  What a steam bath.

The atmosphere on Venus is very dense, too.  About 93 times denser than on Earth.  You’d have to go about 1 kilometer below the ocean to experience the same crushing pressure as the atmosphere on Venus.  Above the CO2 layer, there are thick clouds of sulfuric dioxide and sulfuric acid.  There is a huge atmospheric vortex on the south pole of the planet, and the cloud layers produce lightning, much like the clouds on Earth.  They also make it impossible to see the surface.

So much for serene, calm, and cool.

Surface of Venus from Soviet lander Venera 13. Image PD/USGOV

Venus has an interesting retrograde orbit; it rotates clockwise instead of counter-clockwise with a near circular orbit.  On Venus, the sun rises in the West and sets in the East.

In orbit, Venus overtakes the Earth every 584 days, changing it from the Evening Star to the Morning Star.  Whether she appears in the morning or the evening, Venus is hard to miss.  In fact, she is so bright in the sky, she has been reported as a UFO several times.

Hans Glaser woodcut, 1566 Public Domain

However Venus appears close up, from a distance she is our beautiful Morning and Evening Star.  I like to look up and find Venus in the night sky.  She is, indeed, hard to miss… and she is a true beauty in the night.

Moon and Venus in conjunction three consecutive nights; Image by fdecomite, some rights reserved

Greetings from sunny Houston. The hotels are overrun with basketball fans donning the colors of Duke, Baylor, and other colleges playing basketball here tonight. But the NCAA tournament isn’t the competition that brought DISCOVER deep in the heart of Texas.

We’re here for the Shell Eco-marathon Americas. All weekend long in downtown Houston, students from 29 universities and 9 high schools will he going head-to-head with their prototype ultra-high mileage vehicles. Most of the 50 vehicles are powered by combustion engines, but a smattering of vehicles running on ethanol, hydrogen fuel cells, solar, and petroleum gas have come down to challenge the traditional engine.

Check Discoblog over the weekend, as we’ll be continually updating on the wild cars and their brilliant young designers. Official competition runs Saturday and Sunday. However, given that winners of past eco-marathons have reached efficiencies in the thousands of miles per gallon, these vehicles might just keep on going.

First the smog, then the stink. Beijing’s white hot economic growth has led not just to smoggy skies but also stinky landfills that are literally taking people’s breath away.

Faced with overflowing landfills across the city, Beijing residents have been complaining about the rising stench of garbage that can be overpowering when the wind blows. So, the government decided to remedy the situation by installing 100 giant deodorant guns aimed at the city’s stinkiest landfill–the Asuwei dump site on the edge of Beijing.

The high-pressure cannons, like the one seen here being used at a public gathering, can spray dozens of pints of fragrance per minute over a distance of 160 feet. In addition to being bathed in sweet perfume, the Asuwei dump site will also get extra plastic layers to cover the garbage so that the smell doesn’t waft towards the city when the wind blows.

But The Guardian reports that it would take more than a few plastic sheets and perfume guns to zap Beijing’s garbage problems away:

According to the local government, the city of 17m people generates 18,000 tonnes of waste every day — 7,000 tonnes more than the capacity of municipal disposal plants.

The city recycles less than four percent of its rubbish each year, and the city’s residents continue to churn out trash too fast for the city to either bury or burn it. City officials want to build more incinerators, but those have pollution problems of their own–six incinerator projects within Beijing have been put on hold due to public protests. So, till those projects are approved, or the till the government figures out another way to take out the collected trash, Beijing residents will just have to spritz and bear it.

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Image: The Register