Senator Edward Kennedy had a successful operation at Duke University Medical Center today for a brain tumor. Kennedy, 76, was diagnosed with having a malignant glioma in the left side of his brain after suffering a seizure two weeks ago. After recovering from surgery, Kennedy will undergo radiation and chemotherapy at Massachusetts General Hospital. 

Malignant glioma is the most common form of brain cancer. This type of tumor is very difficult to remove because it travels quickly and can migrate to other parts of the brain. Kennedy’s surgery was to partially remove the tumor to reduce its size. Prognosis varies but patients typically live between one and four years. Kennedy is aggressively dealing with his tumor and plans to return to the U.S. Senate and continue support for Barack Obama to be elected as the next president.  

Since Spencer and I seem to be consumed by pornography today, remember when I wrote about how there has been this strange “penis theme” happening in my life? Everywhere I turned, there was something phallic begging for my attention. And it’s still happening… My roommate and I have had this on-going discussion regarding penises of the avian kind.

“Have you ever seen two birds doin’ it?”

“Why, no! Come to think of it, I haven’t. Weird! I have no idea what that would look like!”

And just the other night, she came home saying, “OMG, BRITTANY! I just saw…. A DUCK DICK!”

“No. Way. What does it look like?”

“A CORKSCREW!!!!”

At first I was like, nah-uh. But then I Googled it, sho ’nuff:

Mmm… funyun anyone? It also reminds me … isn’t there something about the Devil having a curly penis? Why do I feel like I’ve seen a drawing of Satan with a corkscrew dick? I KNOW I’ve seen something somewhere, but I can’t find it. Anyway, I’ll save the religious porn studies for another post. THIS ONE is strictly for science and nature. Further research shows that a kind of duck is actually one of the the most well-endowed (proportionally) of all the animal kingdom:

The Argentine Blue-bill or Argentine Lake Duck (Oxyura vittata) is a small South American stiff duck. What’s paradoxical in this equation is that most birds do not even have a penis, except ostriches (and related groups, like kiwi and tinamous), ducks, geese and swans.

Bird penis in flaccid state curled up inside the cloaca. Well, a specimen of Argentine blue-bill duck had a remarkable 42.5 cm (17 inches) long penis (photo center) (the average length of this species is 20 cm (8 inches))!

The flaccid penis is coiled but fully erect is twice the size of the bird: it is like us having a 3.5 m (12 feet) penis…

Biologists believe that the duck’s penis evolved into the great length it is today due to competitive breeding. The males will actually use his curly pee pee to “chimney sweep” another male’s sperm out of a female duck.

Meanwhile, the actual largest penis in the world belongs to the Blue Whale, which is approximately 8 feet. Gorilla penises are surprisingly about the size of a pencil. The only thing that beats a duck’s dick is a barnacle dick. Because barnacles are sedentary animals, their penises grow to great lengths (40 times bigger than themselves) so they can tap that ass of their neighbor. And your last Phallic Fun Fact Of The Day is that cephalopods (squids, octopuses) has one of their arms (hectocotylus) turned into a penis. Now you know!

When sonar picked up a large mass at the bottom of the Columbia River earlier this year, scientists feared that part of the nearby Bonneville Dam had started eroding away. However, when the dive team they sent in got down to the riverbed, what they found surprised everyone: a massive ball of 60,000 or more white sturgeon, some more than 14-feet long.

The mountain of white sturgeon contained around 60,000 fish, according to a rough estimate by Michael Parsley, a research fisheries biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Columbia River Research Laboratory in Cook, Skamania County. He described that estimate as “probably conservative.”

It was an aquatic phenomenon nobody had ever seen at such a monstrous scale, offering a startling glimpse into the life of the Columbia’s largest and most ancient fish. If the estimates are anywhere near correct, the congregation of sturgeon may represent 5 to 10 percent of all the white sturgeon in the lower Columbia River, Parsley said. The conclave apparently broke up in March as the corps increased water releases through the dam to help salmon.

Sturgeon are no punks, man. They can live to be OVER A HUNDERD!

This is the most badass, entertaining, captivating thing I’ve seen on the Internet since… porn. That’s right. I said it. Not only is it PG, it’s scientific, and it’s educational. Um, sure, it might be a little cruel, but hey! It’s better than cock fights, dog fights, and bum fights! Here’s a user-submitted video because I don’t have the code to embed the official JBF vids… I highly recommend them, though.

This morning, NPR’s Morning Edition ran a story on the potential for Lab-Grown meat. Much like how scientists grow sheets of skin for medical use from cells, animal muscle can also be grown..and hey! animal muscle is meat. Mmmm….delicious, test tube meat.

Almost any meat eater who went to college or has a hippie friend (or reads the Synthesis Blog) has seen at least one video of animals at the slaughter and the absolutely horrendous conditions there, so it’s apparent that meat eaters don’t care where their food comes from as long as it tastes delectable. So why not meat from the lab? No animals harmed, no animal waste; it will still take energy to create the “shmeat,” but not as much as traditional meat-producing facilities. Oh, you wonderful futuristic world, you! Now WHERE’S MY FUCKING HOVER BOARD?

From NPR:

Though the idea of growing animal parts in a lab rather than on a farm has been around for a century, it has never seemed like a good time to talk about man-made meat. But the concept has had some famous proponents, including Winston Churchill in his 1932 essay “Fifty Years Hence”: “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

Churchill was likely inspired by the work of Alexis Carrel, who at the time of Churchill’s comment had been keeping alive a cultured piece of chicken heart tissue for 20 years.

Even PETA and other animal rights activists are into the idea.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA recently announced a $1 million contest to create commercially viable chicken meat, sacrificing neither chicken nor egg. The deadline is 2012, the contest rules Herculean and the prize money paltry. But the thinking is pragmatic: If people must have meat, and factory farming is an animal nightmare, why not find a high-tech alternative?

Peter Singer, author of the 1975 treatise Animal Liberation, is all for it.

“I always thought it would be a good thing,” he says. “The same way that I think it’s good that the abuse of horses for pulling loads has ended. … I think it would be good if the abuse of animals for raising them for meat were to end, because we had a technological solution to that. We had an alternative.”

So here we are at the doorstep of the animal-less meat culture future. Next stop, Soylent Green.

Scientists in the UK can now legally combine human and animal embryos. Manimals. Why? For the sake of finding cures for diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

From Times Online:

The Minister admitted that the Bill was not a promise that cures for diseases could be found. “It is an aspiration that it may.”

The main kinds of admixed embryo permitted by the Bill are “cytoplasmic hybrids” or “cybrids”, which are made by moving a human nucleus into an empty animal egg. These are genetically 99.9 per cent human. As well as true hybrids, it also allows chimeras that combine human and animal cells, and transgenic human embryos that include a little animal DNA.

Of course, they can’t really (legally) grow a mermaid or centaur or whatever weird manimal (yet). Scientists can only cultivate the embryos for 14 days, and it is illegal to transfer them into a human or animal womb. BUT, rules were made to be broken and chances are if they make it illegal, someone will do it. Mother nature, prepare to be f*cked with.