It must have been terrifying!

Being a teen in the 60s wasn't terrifying for me. Exciting really. I may have found it a bit more terrifying as a parent.

More fun news from Science!!

Scientists Find Way to Mass Produce Human Skin

This development from the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Science Institute in Germany has made the creation of human skin much cheaper:

The basic skin production system, which Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft hopes to start selling next year, can produce 5,000 little swatches of human skin a month, for a total of over 600 square inches of mass-produced tissue. Each 0.12-square-inch section of skin would cost around $49 to produce, far less than the current cost.

The system, which should be available in 2010, is fully automated, with computers controlling the solution that the skin grows in, monitoring the vats for infection, guiding the blade that cuts the swatches, and even testing the quality of the final product. So far, this project has generated 19 patents for Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

Potential applications include not only helping burn victims, but replacing lab animals in product safety testing. Also, robots probably won’t have to forage as much for the taste of human flesh.

Being a teen in the 60s wasn't terrifying for me. Exciting really. I may have found it a bit more terrifying as a parent.

Oh yeah, definitely exciting! I can just imagine being a person who was happy with the status quo of the day...

I can just imagine being a person who was happy with the status quo of the day

These people were better known as the "Silent Majority" and participated in white flight (from the cities to the 'burbs). My mom told me about how, in the summer of 1969, she and my dad were moving from the tiny little bungalow they lived in with the three of us kids to a much larger ranch house (1600 square feet--massive!!). One of the couples that came to look at the bungalow happened to be black, and boy, did they hear it from their neighbors who saw them come to see the place. "You'd better not be selling your house to one of Them!" was the standard comment.

My mom said she was soooo glad to get out of there.

Edited to clarify--not because they were fleeing any incoming minorities, but because she was fed up with the reactionary conservatives in the old neighborhood. She always said that, when there was protesting going on in the city, her dad would call and half-jokingly say he was expected to see her on the 10:00 news, complete with a kindergartner, toddler, and baby in the carriage, and all of us getting taken off to prison. She said if it wasn't for us kids and husband, she probably would have.

My eye doctor emailed me the pictures he took of my retinas yesterday, and I keep looking at them just as people come into my office, so now my eyeballs are a topic of conversation on the floor.

my eyeballs are a topic of conversation on the floor.

You finally rolled them hard enough!

HEE!

My older brother spent the moon landing jumping out of his cot and giving himself concussion. You could say he got caught up in the moment.

One clumsy bounce for babykind...

Tiny Dwarf Goat Surfs On The Back Of A Sheep (VIDEO)

Beware of the blob, Kristin and Drew!

Huge blob of Arctic goo floats past Slope communities

Hunters from Wainwright first started noticing the stuff sometime probably early last week. It's thick and dark and "gooey" and is drifting for miles in the cold Arctic waters, according to Gordon Brower with the North Slope Borough's Planning and Community Services Department.

Brower and other borough officials, joined by the U.S. Coast Guard, flew out to Wainwright to investigate. The agencies found "globs" of the stuff floating miles offshore Friday and collected samples for testing.

Nobody knows for sure what the gunk is, but Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer says the Coast Guard is sure what it is not.

"It's certainly biological," Hasenauer said. "It's definitely not an oil product of any kind. It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter.

"It's definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it's some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism."

Something else: No one in Barrow or Wainwright can remember seeing anything like this before, Brower said.

"That's one of the reasons we went out, because in recent history I don't think we've seen anything like this," he said. "Maybe inside lakes or in stagnant water or something, but not (in the ocean) that we could recall ...

"If it was something we'd seen before, we'd be able to say something about it. But we haven't ...which prompted concerns from the local hunters and whaling captains."

The stuff is "gooey" and looks dark against the bright white ice floating in the Arctic Ocean, Brower said.

"It's pitch black when it hits ice and it kind of discolors the ice and hangs off of it," Brower said. He saw some jellyfish tangled up in the stuff, and someone turned in what was left of a dead goose -- just bones and feathers -- to the borough's wildlife department.

"It kind of has an odor; I can't describe it," he said.