September 27, 2010
In Swifterbant, Flevoland, the country’s famous province entirely made from reclaimed land and known for remains of all kinds, claims to have found remains of the oldest Dutchman. The excavation of a grave revealed some bones which date back to about 7000 BC, making it the oldest remains ever found in the Netherlands.
Note: we still can’t bring you new pics, bear with us, we’re waiting for it to be sorted.
(Link: destentor.nl, Photo: Salem graves by by Alanna Ralph, some rights reserved)
Tags: Flevoland
August 14, 2010
A study showed last year that 1 in 5 senior citizens in retirement homes are bullied by their fellow residents.
Hester Trompeter, student behavioural sciences at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, interviewed 121 residents. According to Trouw, the bullying took the shape of ignoring people, gossiping and systematically shutting others out from common activities. Study coordinator Ron Scholte added that since the interviewees represented the people willing to talk, the real problem might even be bigger.
Last week the Ouderenfonds (National Fund for the Elderly) called for a protocol for dealing with bullying among the elderly. On the fund’s website its director Jan Romme gave a harrowing example of a man who was afraid to leave his room for seven years and finally died in complete loneliness.
Romme sees as one of the causes of the bullying problem that the elderly no longer can choose which retirement home to live in. “Bullies are put in the same homes as their former victims, and have the advantage of having all the time in the world now, and of having been able to perfect their techniques.”
(Photo by Frank Mayne, some rights reserved)
July 29, 2010
Someone was telling me at a dinner party about this beer (not the one in the picture) and the (pardon the pun) pissing contest it became to brew the world’s strongest beer. Back in February Scottish brewery BrewDog could still claimed it brewed the world’s strongest beer called Sink the Bismarck! at 41 per cent. It has now been surpassed by Almere’s Jan Nijboer of brewery ‘t Koelschip with a beer called Start the Future that comes in at a whopping 60 per cent.
Game on.
(Link: spitsnieuws.nl)
Tags: beer
July 27, 2010
On Saturday in Utrecht’s busiest shopping mall, Wim Hof, aka the Ice Man, broke his record of sitting in ice for 1 hour and 13 minutes by a whopping 31 minutes 23 seconds (1 h 44 min 23 sec).
Back in May, after having put Hof through tests, two Dutch scientists in Nijmegen concluded that what he can do “is medically impossible”.
He’s just the definition of cool.
Read and watch more about The Ice Man being a freak of nature.
(Link: rtvutrecht)
July 22, 2010
As of September, a sports park in Eindhoven (three football pitches, four tennis courts and the rest of the place) will be entirely lit using LED lights, made popular in its mordern-day version sometime around 1999 by Dutch firm Philips, headquartered in Eindhoven.
Local newspaper Eindhovens Dagblad claims that this is a world first, as they couldn’t find anyone else who did this. LED lighting is much less energy consuming that regular lighting, up to 60% according to measurements quoted in the newspaper.
(Link: nuzakelijk.nl, Photo of LED lighting project by Velo Steve, some rights reserved)
June 11, 2010
A woman from Hoogezand near Groningen recently showed up angry at the doctor’s office with the cremated remains of her dead husband who died seven months ago. She had been receiving reminders from the doctor for her husband to get a flu shot and for a bone density scan.
The ‘missing link’ in this story is that for whatever reason, the doctor’s office did not know or had not yet entered the death of this woman’s husband in their mailing database. The assumption is that this was communicated to them, but not dealt with, although it could be the woman’s fault, I don’t know.
“My husband could only participate in the bone density scan if he had recently shrunk by three centimetres and weighed less than 60 kilos. Since he’s been in an urn for months, he meets the requirements,” said the widow.
This is dry Dutch humour at its best. The nurse who handles the scans apparently didn’t appreciate the humour at all.
(Link: rtvnoord.nl)
Tags: humour
June 9, 2010
Coming to a theatre near us: On 1 July, surgeons of Amsterdam’s Slotervaart hospital are going to perform a laparoscopic gastric bypass, a stomach operation that is done through small incisions, and project it live in the capital’s Pathé Tuschinski theatre. The operation is a big matinee from 8:30 to 11:30 and will be performed on someone who is obese and needs the operation to survive. According to the hospital, it is a ‘very difficult operation that is only performed by a few Dutch hospitals’.
The audience will be able to ask questions about the operation to a doctor in the room who will then ask the surgeons performing the surgery.
Tickets are free, scroll down here to Gastric Bypass to send an e-mail and score some tickets.
(Link: Depers.nl)
April 19, 2010
Team Daisy, made up of Elsbeth Geukers and Nicole de Bakker, has won the 2010 Philips Innovation Award with a diagnostic technique that should drastically reduce the amount of operations required to treat strabismus (aka “cross-eyed”) in young children.
One of the problems that apparently plague doctors when trying to measure the angle of ‘crossed’ eyes is that young children do not sit still enough for an accurate measurement. Sprout.nl claims that this can lead to a failure rate of the operations of up to 50%.
The technique developed by the TU Delft students will simply measure from different angles simultaneously.
Earlier this year Geukers and De Bakker proved not only to be successful inventors but also promising businesswomen, when they won first prize (1500 euro) in the Writing a Business Plan course at their university.
(Photo by Flickr user net_efekt, some rights reserved)
Tags: awards, entrepeneurs, eyes, strabismus, TU Delft
April 16, 2010
According to a study carried out by doctor and reseacher Anne Vrieze at the Academic Medical Center (AMC) in Amsterdam, fat people have a different gut flora than thin people and you can use thin people’s poop, insert it into fat people and help them lose weight. It already works with rats, now it’s being rested on humans.
The idea is not new and dates back to 1955, where in one trial of ‘poop transplant’, a woman was cured from an intestinal disease by having her son’s healthy poop injected into her own intestines.
Vrieze explains that gut flora is as unique as fingerprints, and science still does not know why. Fat people shold have the chance to have more efficient bacteria in their intestines, which would help them poop out the bad stuff easier, which is what happens with thin people.
Vrieze was also surprised that so many men (they didn’t test women) were willing to have a tube shoved down their noses down to their intestines with poop to see if this could increase their chances of losing weight. Never mind the fact that so many things are just not tested on women for reasons that include getting sued because a woman might be pregnant, this time, the reason was that “we don’t know what influence hormone levels could have on gut flora.”
If the effects are temporary, getting a month poop transplant does not sound like much of a solution. The idea Vrieze has is to develop a capsule that could be taken, which would contain the ‘thinning’ bacteria. She responsibly adds that this would not replace proper dieting and exercise.
(Link: kennislink.nl)
Tags: diseases, intestines
April 15, 2010
Our current governement is on its way out, and there are elections in early June. This means no major decisions can be taken, and it’s more about tying up loose ends and cleaning out desks. But hey, let’s stir things up and give one million euro for research into eating bugs. Nom!
For the next three years, the Wageningen University & Research Centre gets to research which insects are worth eating. And then, the clichés: scientists say they’re just as good for you as meat, it’s good for the environment, and also my favourites, people in Asia and Africa eat them, they’re good with chocolate (bye bye health argument) and so on.
Why not just ask the Asians and Africans for recipes and/or their research instead of throwing all that money out the window? No, wait, why not start a marketing campaign to eat bugs? Wait, we don’t eat bugs, and unless we totally run out of food, we’re not going to consider eating bugs any time soon.
I grew up near one of the only, if not the only place where you can gawk at insects and then eat some: the Montréal Insectarium. If only they did that at the farm with burgers. Or maybe fast food chains should sell bug burgers. Nom!
(Link: telegraaf.nl, Photo of Worms by Wahj, some rights reserved.)
Tags: insects, Wageningen
