Who said trying to quit smoking couldn’t be fun? On 1 March, Lianne Sleebos of the Delft University of Technology will be launching My Stop Buddy, an app to help people stop smoking. For a mere 2,99 euro, you can choose an English or Dutch app that will support you for 21 days. Fill in a personal profile and you will get activity suggestions to help you not reach for a ‘cancer stick’, lots of jokes about health and information on how much money you saved by not smoking. You can also push buttons according to you mood and you’ll be told why you’re going for a smoke according to it. It sounds like a nagging grandmother so far, but hey, I haven’t seen it yet and I do hope it works. I am curious about the English version, translations and all.
And although 2,99 euro is much cheaper than a pack of cigarettes, the iPhone isn’t, but OK you can get one for free with a certain telecom provider here in the Netherlands.
Dutch singers Sjarrel & Sjaan wrote a Christmas song for the Dutch Apple website, One More Thing. Oh, and you can buy it from iTunes if you are so inclined. No worries, the English subtitles are very good. The video mostly deals with Jobs’ and Schiller’s eating habits and respective physique, but also touches on Apple’s success and has a lovely image of the duo dancing around “the apple Christmas tree.”
Thanks to a new production process, Koen van Dijke of the University of Wageningen has come up with a way of making mayonnaise using less oil, but with the same taste as full on fat mayonnaise. When you make mayonnaise, you need egg yolks or lemon as an emulsifier to stabilise the mixture. To do this right, you need to use a lot of oil, which makes mayonnaise fattening.
Van Dijke developed a microscale system that adds very little oil to a lot of water, producing a stable emulsion. Then this mix is added to more water, producing a new emulsion that is mostly water, but that retains the same taste.
Oh dear, students are selling their Ritalin online! Six boxes of pills for 150 euro, saving you a trip to the doctor’s with someone’s annoyingly hyperactive child. No wait, they actually prescribe Ritalin to students so they can concentrate better on their exams. And then there’s this famous American telly programme where a mom with four children took her eldest son’s Ritalin to be able to get the household chores done and be the perfect wife and mother. Scary.
Apparently, the party people get off on the similar effect it has to speed or cocaine. I talked to someone younger recently who tried it and said it did help him concentrate better than too much coffee or drinking litres of water, which would explain why students are into Ritalin. Other friends from way back used to just do cocaine with their teachers at university. It was ‘the only way’ to get so many projects done without sleeping.
Healthcare inspectors aim their crackdown efforts on professional sellers of the drug, not students trying to make some extra cash, which they say is a huge problem. I’m saving my last codeine-laced ibuprofen pill for a worthy headache.
The link (pic) shown here has been removed, but the Internet has a good memory.
If you can stomach it, have a look at x-rays showing a whole bunch of cutlery eaten by 52-year-old Margaret Daalman, a Dutch woman with an eating disorder called pica (I think it’s pica; oddly no one mentions it), which is an urge to eat non-food items. She ate 78 different items of cutlery and went to the hospital in Rotterdam with stomach pain. Although this happened some 30 years ago, the x-rays were apparently published for the first time this week in a Dutch medical magazine.
One of the most famous entertainers with pica (or just plain bonkers) was Michael Lotito aka Monsieur Mangetout (’Mr Eat-it All’), a Frenchman who holds the Guinness Book of World Records for eating undigestables.
He apparently had the ability to consume 900 g of metal a day. Since 1966, he had consumed 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, seven television sets, six chandeliers, two beds, a pair of skis, a computer, and a Cessna light aircraft. He died of natural causes in 2007.
Almost 15% of the Dutch have become more selective in who they kiss because of the Swine flu.
A study held by vitamin sellers Centrum also shows that 7.5% avoid physical contact with others, Blik op Nieuws reports. Also, 6.3% have stopped shaking hands, and 1.4% have taken the ultimate step of no longer going to the office.
Filed under: Health, Science by Branko Collin @ 8:09 am
Fifty-one percent of all Dutch children think there is too much reporting on swine flu, with only 1% saying there is too little. Seventeen percent say news about swine flu scares them.
A poll held by Jeugdjournaal (kids’ TV news show) among more than 2,000 children and published yesterday also shows that 82% of the children are not afraid of swine flu.
Per year between 250 and 2,000 people die of the regular flu in the Netherlands. So far the swine flu has contributed to 17 deaths since the start of the outbreak last Spring, a little over 1 % of the known infections.
Filed under: General, Health by Branko Collin @ 8:58 am
Jan H. thought he was playing the Silent Hill video game when he shut down the electricity at the Sophia hospital in Zwolle last Queen’s Day.
Last Tuesday a court found him not guilty, simply because he had no idea of the true consequences of his deeds. H. has volunteered to undergo treatment.
Telegraaf reports that the 35-year-old was suffering a psychosis when he stepped into the hospital’s basement. By pulling levers and switches, he thought he could win a tooth brush. The power was down for 45 minutes during which patients in the intensive care unit had to be respirated manually and lifts got stuck. No patients suffered any lasting consequences, according to RTV Oost.
Silent Hill is a survival horror game, a sub-genre of the action adventure.
Family doctors Erik Jansen and Bart Brandenburg from Nijmegen have taken their pratice online and become the Netherlands’ first Twitter doctors. By following @tweetspreekuur you can ask questions about your health. They provide as much advice as they can, and will tell you to consult your own doctor or to call an emergency number if they think something is really wrong.
Of course, you can also get some privacy by getting a login at tweet.webspreekuur.nl (type it in your search engine).
And I’m very happy the working stethoscope I bought for EUR 0,20 on Queen’s Day from a nurse this year was put to good use.
Filed under: Health, Science by Branko Collin @ 10:01 pm
Two scientists from Leiden University, Joke Bouwstra and Robert Rissman, invented a gel that has the same healing properties as “the buttery coating that protects and nurtures a foetus’s developing skin,” reports New Scientist. Apart from helping premature babies, the ‘baby butter’ could also be used for other applications. Writes the magazine:
Natural vernix caseosa contains a mixture of fatty compounds that waterproof the foetus. Crucially, it also contains dead cells called corneocytes, which store large amounts of water and ensure that the foetus does not get dehydrated. Vernix may also act as a barrier to infections.
To mimic this versatile substance, Joke Bouwstra and Robert Rissman [...] mixed a range of fatty compounds including lanolin, fatty acids, ceramides and cholesterol with particles made of a water-storing hydrogel. When they rubbed this white cream on mice missing a patch of their outer skin, the mice healed three times faster than untreated ones, Bouwstra says.
Illustration by Leonardo da Vinci. Somehow I cannot remember the Florentine one mentioning “baby butter.”
Almost 15% of the Dutch have become more selective in who they kiss because of the Swine flu. 
Fifty-one percent of all Dutch children think there is too much reporting on swine flu, with only 1% saying there is too little. Seventeen percent say news about swine flu scares them.
Jan H. thought he was playing the Silent Hill video game when he shut down the electricity at the Sophia hospital in Zwolle last Queen’s Day. 
Two scientists from Leiden University, Joke Bouwstra and Robert Rissman, invented a gel that has the same healing properties as “the buttery coating that protects and nurtures a foetus’s developing skin,” reports New Scientist. Apart from helping premature babies, the ‘baby butter’ could also be used for other applications. 
