I guess it makes me a dork that I think this is really cool. Via Archaeology Magazine:

CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND—The skeleton of a horse estimated to have died 2,000 years ago has been unearthed at the construction site of a new biomedical campus. The almost complete skeleton shows that the horse had suffered a broken leg that had begun to heal before the animal died. “It was in a pit around it which we think were dug for quarrying gravel in the Roman period. The other signs were fragments of pottery and fragments of other animals. It was probably just on the edge of a settlement, there is certainly a Roman settlement to the north of it and it’s in the general area of Roman activity,” Alison Dickens of the Cambridge Archaeology Unit told Cambridge News. She suspects that the horse died or had to be put down after a “specific incident,” since it is unusual to find the intact remains of an animal. “It is a fascinating discovery. The horse may have been just a workhorse for the quarries, which supplied construction materials for the nearby Roman settlement, or it might have been someone’s prize thoroughbred; we won’t know until tests are done,” commented Keith McNeil, chief executive of Cambridge University Hospitals. To read in-depth about excavations at one of the most important ancient Roman sites, see “Rome’s Imperial Port.”

I just love this:

Take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together… take wine and bullocks gall, mix with the leek… let it stand nine days in the brass vessel…

So goes a thousand-year-old Anglo Saxon recipe to vanquish a stye, an infected eyelash follicle.

The medieval medics might have been on to something. A modern-day recreation of this remedy seems to alleviate infections caused by the bacteria that are usually responsible for styes. The work might ultimately help create drugs for hard-to-treat skin infections.

The project was born when Freya Harrison, a microbiologist at the University of Nottingham, UK, got talking to Christina Lee, an Anglo Saxon scholar. They decided to test a recipe from an Old English medical compendium calledBald’s Leechbook, housed in the British Library.

Some of the ingredients, such as copper from the brass vessel, kill bacteria grown in a dish – but it was unknown if they would work on a real infection or how they would combine.

Careful collection

Sourcing authentic ingredients was a major challenge, says Harrison. They had to hope for the best with the leeks and garlic because modern crop varieties are likely to be quite different to ancient ones – even those branded as heritage. For the wine they used an organic vintage from a historic English vineyard.

As “brass vessels” would be hard to sterilise – and expensive – they used glass bottles with squares of brass sheet immersed in the mixture. Bullocks gall was easy, though, as cow’s bile salts are sold as a supplement for people who have had their gall bladders removed.

After nine days of stewing, the potion had killed all the soil bacteria introduced by the leek and garlic. “It was self-sterilising,” says Harrison. “That was the first inkling that this crazy idea just might have some use.”

A side effect was that it made the lab smell of garlic. “It was not unpleasant,” says Harrison. “It’s all edible stuff. Everyone thought we were making lunch.”

The potion was tested on scraps of skin taken from mice infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This is an antibiotic-resistant version of the bacteria that causes styes, more commonly known as thehospital superbug MRSA. The potion killed 90 per cent of the bacteria.Vancomycin, the antibiotic generally used for MRSA, killed about the same proportion when it was added to the skin scraps.

A cheap cream that removes tattoos!

Falkenham’s topical cream works by targeting the macrophages that are filled with ink at the site of your tattoo. New macrophages move in to consume the ink-filled ones, and then migrate to the lymph nodes.

Macrophages are the white blood cells that gobble up cellular debris — like tattoo ink. With this topical cream, there is supposedly no injection, and no inflammation. This has led to questions on how effective it is compared to current laser removal options available.

“I’m curious to see how the cream penetrates and breaks down the particles. Current particle size is too big, so macrophages can’t gobble it up, per say,” says Dr. Nazanin Saedi, a researcher and director of Jefferson Laser Surgery and Cosmetic Dermatology. She is unaffiliated with Falkenham and has conducted studies on effective tattoo removal processes over the past several years.

Falkenham’s working with his university to patent his technology and just secured funding to further develop his research, so we’ll have to see for ourselves.

I always wondered about this…

This new David Graeber books sounds fascinating. Cory Doctorow explains:

Bureaucracy lies. The point of coming up with rules is to ensure that they’re evenly applied. But everyone knows that rules aren’t evenly applied. When we replace informal, arbitrary systems with formal sets of rules, the arbitrariness moves up a level — moves up to “who has to follow the rules and who doesn’t.” Sell a joint, go to jail. Launder billions for the Sinaloa cartel, defer some of your bonus for a few weeks.

“Everybody knows” would be a good alternative title for this book. Like the Leonard Cohen song, reading this book (especially the introduction, which is the sort of thing that someone should turn into a 20-minute info-video) makes you recognize that there’s a huge, awful, lying center to the world as we inhabit it. As Graeber says, bureaucracies are supposed to be meritocracies where people are hired and promoted based on talent, not because of birth or personal connections. But we all know that’s bullshit — and we also all know that the only way to rise in the Bureaucratic Utopia is to pretend that it isn’t bullshit.

Graeber wants us to demand the impossible. To stop making capitalism. To wake up in the morning and just walk away from the lie. To refuse the intimidation of latent violence. To reclaim the critique of rules and privilege that was the Left’s to take to the streets in 1968.

In these three essays, a brilliant introduction, and a fabulous afterword (about the relationship of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies to Occupy and capitalism), Graber manages to tease out something wordless and important, about how we might imagine a world where we don’t need violence to keep us in check and stop letting the people who say we do run the show.

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy