Interesting, Non Political News

“I was born with a little bit of brain,” he told BBC News. “It just grew bigger and bigger and bigger,” the boy said.

Noah was born on March 6, 2012, via c-section because his head had grown so large due to hydrocephalus, a condition where cerebrospinal fluid builds in the brain and causes the pressure in the skull. After his birth, surgeons performed a double operation where they closed up an opening in his back and placed a shunt inside his head to drain life threatening fluid from his brain. In the womb, a cyst in his brain destroyed the organ leaving behind a small segment at the front of his head.

His father, Rob, told Good Morning Britain: “It’s a very emotive subject. Some people say you can’t grow a brain, some say his brain was there, all squashed up, so when he’s had his shunt fitted, it’s gone back to where it should be—but if his brain was so squashed up, he should have been severely mentally disabled.”

Now, he is able to sit up without assistance as well as kneel on all fours, Good Morning Britain broadcaster ITV reported. The young boy now hopes he will one day be able to walk, and even surf, he said.

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Two Japanese men were recently arrested in Osaka prefecture on suspicion of trying to smuggle fertilized eggs and sperm of wagyu, or Japanese-bred cattle, to China. Wagyu is treated as a national treasure, as the cattle are exclusively bred to have intensive marbling and tenderness in their meat. Since the 1990s, the Tokyo government has prohibited the export of the cattle’s genetic resources. Today, exports of wagyu are still very limited; thus, the meat commands high prices.

According to the sources, the two are suspected of conspiring to export the sperm and fertilized eggs from Osaka Prefecture to Shanghai via a ferry last summer without the required Japanese quarantine inspection. The sperm and fertilized eggs were frozen and placed in a metallic container in an amount that would fill several hundred straws. The government has banned the export of the sperm and fertilized eggs of wagyu since 2000.

By tracking the sales route of the container, police determined that the sperm and fertilized eggs in question came from a livestock farmer in Tokushima Prefecture, according to the sources. The farmer told police he had sold them to a stranger for several million yen. As the farmer failed to issue a certificate at the time of the sale as required by the Improvement and Increased Production of Livestock Law, police are also investigating the incident.

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When Marilyn Holley took a bite of her beef taco earlier this year, she didn’t expect to have a severe reaction like the intense abdominal pains, vomiting, diarrhea that ensued. “I thought I had a virus because my boyfriend wasn’t sick so I knew it wasn’t contaminated food,” she said.

Two weeks before, Holley, went camping with her boyfriend at their property in Gretna, Virginia, when she found tick bites on her feet. Three days after her reaction to beef tacos, Holley, who lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia, ate a pastrami sandwich and suffered similarly severe symptoms. “About six or seven bites into my sandwich, I started getting the same abdominal pains, and I ended up breaking out in severe hives and getting sick in my stomach again,” she said.

It took a specialist to diagnose her with a rare allergy to red meat that is associated with bites from the lone star tick. The doctor, Dr. Robert Radin, told her that the condition could take decades to go away, if it does at all, she said. The mystery allergy has only been known about since around 2004, and is sometimes known as Alpha-Gal syndrome or Mammalian Meat Allergy. Symptoms can include anaphylactic shocks, stomach pain, hives, and swelling. In some cases, it can lead to death. Not everyone who is bitten by the lone star tick is affected. Some people have stronger reactions than others, and no one knows why.

Unfortunately, the allergy is likely to spread as the lone star tick is cropping up in more places. It used to only live in the Southeast, but over the past decade it has been reported in the Midwest and even as far north as Maine. One theory as to why it is spreading is that the population of white-tailed deer, which is the most common host for the ticks, has been on the rise.

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Tomer Dror, head of Traffic Management Division at the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality, says the aim is to reduce accidents caused by "pedestrians that are focused too much on the smartphone, and less on the traffic around them." Dror says the idea is to "put the road into their eyes."

Similar systems have already been used in Australia, Singapore and the Netherlands. For now, the pilot program is limited to a single intersection in central Tel Aviv, but the municipality says it will expand the zombie lights if it proves effective.

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