Thinkin’bout Stuff

From FoxNews:

Marijuana use may increase the risk of developing testicular cancer, in particular a more aggressive form of the disease, according to a U.S. study published on Monday.

Well ain’t that a swift kick in the you know whats… you can bet that men everywhere are cringing.

If that’s not a reason to quit (or even better, not start) smoking pot, don’t know what is.

More:

The study of 369 Seattle-area men ages 18 to 44 with testicular cancer and 979 men in the same age bracket without the disease found that current marijuana users were 70 percent more likely to develop it compared to nonusers.

70 percent more likely!

This appears to be preliminary data and will require more studies and examination, but still… 70 percent!

Does make me wonder why, after so many years of studying the effects of this drug, this is the first time this particular correlation was observed.

Preliminary or not, men who value their family jewels might want to factor in this additional risk before taking that next (or first) hit.

I just have a bad cold.  That stuffy nose just slipped down a bit and became a stuffy belly.

From FoxNews:

Obesity can be “caught” as easily as a common cold from other people’s coughs, sneezes and dirty hands, scientists said Monday.

The condition has been linked to a highly-infectious virus which causes sniffles and sore throats.

Nikhil Dhurandhar, an associate professor at The Pennington Biomedical Research Center, in Baton Rouge, La., said the virus, known as AD-36, infects the lungs then whisks around the body, forcing fat cells to multiply and also causing sore throats.

“When this virus goes to fat tissue it replicates, making more copies of itself and in the process increases the number of new fat cells, which may explain why the fat tissue expands and why people get fat when they are infected with this virus,” Dhurandhar said.

In one test, a third of obese people had the rare and highly contagious virus compared to just 11 percent of thinner people. Weight gain can last three months until the body has built up resistance to the bug.

So for up to three months, if you have this virus, you will grow new fat cells, which if I am not mistaken, never go away.

All this time I thought it was because of all that food I was eating which was taking up so much time I didn’t have any time left to exercise.

So… the ground at Yellowstone Park has been rising at a rate of about 3 inches per year for the last three years, leading experts to believe that magma is filling a crustal magma chamber:

From AP: That is more than three times faster than ever observed since such measurements began in 1923, the researchers said.

“Our best evidence is that the crustal magma chamber is filling with molten rock,” Smith said in a statement. “But we have no idea how long this process goes on before there either is an eruption or the inflow of molten rock stops and the caldera deflates again.”

It’s not unusual for ancient volcano sites like Yellowstone and Long Valley, Calif., to rise and fall, according to the researchers.

The Yellowstone volcanic field was produced by what the researchers described as a plume of hot and molten rock beginning at least 400 miles beneath Earth’s surface and rising to 30 miles underground, where it widens to about 300 miles across.

Blobs of molten rock sometimes rise to refill the magma chamber beneath Yellowstone.

The volcano at Yellowstone produced massive eruptions 2 million, 1.3 million and 642,000 years ago, all larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.

So I’m thinkin’…  2 million years ago… 1.3 million years ago… 642,000 years ago….   that’s just about a major eruption every 700,000 years.  We’re due!  Sometime in the next 50,000 to 100,000 years, we are going to have a major volcano erupting in the middle of the US… and some Democrat in the year 52,007 is gonna try to blame this on George Bush.

For those stargazers among us, here is something you don’t want to miss:

From AP - A comet that has unexpectedly brightened in the past couple of weeks and now is visible to the naked eye is attracting professional and amateur interest.

The comet is exploding and its coma, a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the sun, has grown to be bigger than the planet Jupiter. The comet lacks the tail usually associated with such celestial bodies but can be seen in the northern sky, in the constellation Perseus, as a fuzzy spot of light about as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper.

“This is truly a celestial surprise,” Lewis said. “Absolutely amazing.”

A similar burst in 1892 led to the comet’s discovery by Edwin Holmes.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime event to witness, along the lines of when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter back in 1994,” Lewis said.

Experts aren’t sure how long the comet’s show will last, but estimate it could be weeks — if not months. Using a telescope or binoculars help bring the comet’s details into view, they said.

Hoping to check this out tonight…