Doctors Pull Plug,
Comatose Woman Wakes Up
Jill Finley
recalls asking for Mexican food after husband prepared for worst
by Mike Celizic, MSNBC
Imagine being 31 years old and having to make the agonizing decision
to discontinue the life-support keeping your comatose spouse alive.
Now imagine that spouse waking up and asking for Mexican food.
“It’s crazy. It’s absolutely crazy,” Jill Finley, the woman who was
supposed to die, told TODAY co-host Meredith Vieira during an
interview Monday. “It is truly a miracle that I’m here talking to
you today.”
On the morning of Saturday, May 26, Jill’s husband, Ryan Finley,
tried to wake her up and found her unresponsive.
The couple would learn later that Jill had a congenital condition
that had caused her heart to stop. When Ryan realized she wasn’t
breathing, he reached back 10 years to a CPR course he had taken,
dragged her out of bed and onto the floor, and started to apply
those never-used lessons...
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"Electromagnetic
Wormhole" Could Make Objects Invisible
by Joab Jackson, National
Geographic News
An "electromagnetic wormhole"
could make objects traveling through it invisible, scientists
say.
A group of mathematicians, including Allan Greenleaf of the
University of Rochester, recently thought up a way to build such
a device.
It would not be what is commonly known as a wormhole—a
theoretical bend in space and time that could serve as a
shortcut for traveling over vast distances.
Instead, once something entered one end of the newly theorized
tunnel, the object would be electromagnetically invisible to
outside observation until it emerged from the other side,
Greenleaf said.
"It would create a complete a disconnection between the outside
world and stuff inside the cloaking region," Greenleaf said.
"It's good for hiding things... "
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Power Plants are
Focus of Drive to Cut Mercury
by Larry Wheeler, Gannett News
Service
Despite decades of government
attempts to regulate it, ban it and erase it from household use,
the poisonous metal mercury remains a threat to the environment
and public health, especially to children and to women of
childbearing age.
As many as 600,000 babies may be born in the USA each year with
irreversible brain damage because pregnant mothers ate
mercury-contaminated fish, the Environmental Protection Agency
says. Medical researchers are just beginning to explore such
mercury exposure in adults, which can leave some people
struggling through life in a disorienting "fish fog."
Nationwide, more than 8,000 lakes, rivers and bays are
compromised by mercury's toxic effects.
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Ladybugs Help New
York as Pest Killers
by Verena Dobnik, Associated
Press
NEW YORK — It sounds like a horror
movie: 720,000 ladybugs on the attack in Manhattan.
In this real life story, however, the red-and-black bugs have
been unleashed on the 80-acre grounds of one of New York's
biggest apartment complexes with a mission: eat pests infesting
the neatly landscaped property.
The ladybugs from Bozeman, Mont., arrived at the Stuyvesant Town
and Peter Cooper Village complex on Manhattan's East Side on
Thursday afternoon, packed in boxes shipped by a natural
gardening company.
From mesh bags filled with wood shavings, groundskeepers
scattered them in clusters of 72,000 per box. The ladybugs
quickly took to the skies of the 80-acre rental complex.
In the next days and weeks, they will crawl into plants, flowers
and shrubs in search of insects whose smell attracts them —
soft-bodied, leaf-sucking aphids and mites...
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'Everywhere
Chemicals' in Plastics Alarm Parents
by Elizabeth Weise and Liz Szabo, USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO — Consider the
BornFree baby bottle. It's made from a plastic five times as
expensive as the one routinely used for baby bottles. It has to
be shipped all the way from Israel. And its retail price — $9.50
— is about triple that of a conventional bottle.
It's also a big seller in stores catering to parents who want
the safest possible environment for their babies, stores where
items labeled "bisphenol A-free" and "phthalate-free" line up
next to the cloth diapers and breast pumps.
BornFree is "so popular, their products have been on back order
because we can't keep them in stock," says Cara Vidano of
Natural Resources, a store here for new and expectant parents.
To anyone not contemplating parenthood, phthalates and bisphenol
A sound like something children bring home on chemistry quizzes,
not cuddle in their cribs. But these chemicals are at the heart
of worldwide scientific investigation and a debate over whether
they are harmful to the very young.
Parents, activists and many scientists are concerned that if a
baby drinks from a bottle made with bisphenol A or gums a toy
made with phthalates, he or she could suffer serious, even
permanent, harm...
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