iBiome

must have been a nano

 

clipped from www.liquidgeneration.com iPod Used In Domestic Homicide MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE (HLN) - A Memphis woman was arrested                 and charged with first-degree murder after she bludgeoned her                 boyfriend to death with an iPod.                 According to law officers, Mathers was hysterical when police                 arrived and told them that she killed her boyfriend only after                 he accused her of illegally downloading music and erased about                 2,000 of her MP3s. Mathers complained that it took 3 months to                 build her music collection.                 “It took him a while to die,” Dr. Klamut said. “She                 must have stabbed him 40 to 80 times with that iPod. His death                 was not instantaneous, that’s for sure”

The Woman with a Breast on her Foot

Just a week or so ago I was speaking to a physician friend of mine who was telling me about patients with breast tissue growing at odd parts of their bodies.  I thought "huh, that's weird, never heard of anything like that before".  I guess a breast always seemed to me such a complex organ that it couldn't just randomly pop out just anywhere.  As if on cue, Pharyngula links to a paper about a woman with a breast on her foot:

A 22-year-old woman sought medical care for a lesion in the plantar region of her left foot, a well-formed nipple surrounded by areola and hair. Microscopic examination of the dermis showed hair follicles, eccrine glands, and sebaceous glands. Fat tissue was noted at the base of the lesion. Clinical and histopathologic findings were consistent with the diagnosis of supernumerary breast tissue, also known as pseudomamma. To our knowledge, this is the first report of supernumerary breast tissue on the foot....Supernumerary nipples, and less frequently supernumerary breasts, are present in about 1-5 percent of the population [1]. Such alterations are more common in women, usually occurring along the embryonic milk line, which extends from the axilla to the groin [1, 2]. Supernumerary breast tissue (SBT) is rarely found beyond the mammary line...

Putting aside the thought of how strange it must be to walk on that thing, I wonder if, as PZ Myers suggests, it would be relatively easy to grow a breast in vitro, and does this have implications for reconstructing breasts post-mastectomy.