If The Truth Fits

I often feel that I’m focusing on the negative’s a bit much on this blog, so I’m really happy (good breeds good, it’s self-perpetuating!) that I’ve found enough stories in the news today that genuinely make me think that some pretty awesome things have been happening on Earth recently.

U.S. teen lives for 118 days without heart. When I saw that headline I was hoping for some Mike the Headless Chicken style action, but the reality was actually far more impressive (yes, more impressive than a headless chicken that didn’t die). A 14 year-old girl from South Carolina who suffered from “dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the patient’s heart becomes weakened and enlarged and does not pump blood efficiently,” spent 118 days having her blood pumped by an artificial device until a transplant became available. The girl did find the whole situation distressing, I imagine I would too if I were living without a heart, but I think its pretty incredible that modern medicine can keep people alive when they can’t pump their own blood, and apparently adults have been kept alive for up to a year with the same process. Incredible.

Scientists, having almost completed sequencing the DNA of a wooly mammoth, are getting all cocky and saying that they can create a living mammoth for less than $10 million dollars. Considering how little you can do with $10 million dollars nowadays, I’d say that resurrecting a long extinct animal is actually a pretty good deal. Apparently this is still firmly in the realms of science theory rather than science practise, which drops this a notch on the awesome-o-meter, but the very possibility that ‘we’ could bring back a beast that last lived around 60,000 years ago is pretty cool.

Next up on the “hey, cool things are happening” list, Shaq, aka The Big Aristotle, is now on Twitter (a micro-blogging network where people post short messages), which makes me feel like less of a nerd for also being a member and tweeting about things that happen during my day. I was under the impression that the jury was still out over whether @The_Real_Shaq was actually the real Shaquille O’Neal, so I did a bit of hunting aqround, and it turns out that its true, Shaq is actually tweeting along with the rest of us. The account was set up after someone created a fake account pretending to be the legendary center (for fun, there was no malice intended), and he wanted to set the record straight. What I really like about this story is that the messages are actually coming directly from the big man himself, most celebrities on Twitter don’t actually write the messages themselves, their assistants and PR reps will do it for them (Britney Spears & Barack Obama are good examples), which I don’t particularly have a problem with, but I think its really cool to see a sports star who is a role model to a lot of kids connecting so directly with his fans.

Guns N’ Roses have finally, finally, released ‘Chinese Democracy’ the bands first release in approximately 75 years. I say released, you can’t actually buy it until Monday, but that album has more leaks than a Welsh village (note: joke may not translate internationally, basically, that’s a lot of leaks), you could just be surfing CNN and somehow end up downloading one of their songs. I know that this item doesn’t really fit in with the spirit of the other stories I’ve mentioned, but I am just so glad that the Chinese Democracy ordeal is coming to an end, not because I’m a particularly big fan of the band, I’m just utterly sick of that album being a punchline, maybe now we can all move on. Oh, and from what I’ve read, the most expensive album of all time kinda sucks.

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