Author: Discover Main Feed

[This is an update to my previous post, Texas conservatives screw history, so you should read that first to get your blood to a rapid boil before reading this.]

The Texas State Board of Education member Don McLeroy — creationist, antireality promoter, and stander-upper to experts — was interviewed on ABC TV’s Nightline program. Give this a listen, just in case you were thinking of cutting him a break… for whatever reasons I cannot fathom.

Yes, how magnanimous of the rich white men to allow women the vote, or to give the blacks equal rights!

[If the video doesn’t load for you, go to the Nightline web page and click on Thursday’s listing of Texas Textbook controversy, which should be up for a few more days.]

I have been active on Twitter today mocking the new textbook standards, and a handful of people have taken me to task thinking I was mocking all Texans. That’s ridiculous; I am clearly ridiculing the ten people on the Board who rammed this revisionist nonsense through… though you may feel free to expand that to the people who support them.

And to the commenters on my original post and elsewhere defending McCarthy because there were in fact communists in America: shame on you. Seriously, shame on you. What McCarthy did — and yes, it was a witch hunt — was directly opposed to all the ideals of this nation: free speech, liberty, presumed innocence until proven guilty, and many more. He was only able to ferret out a handful of so-called communists, but even if he had been 100% successful in his efforts what he did was an abomination for anyone in this country, let alone a seated Senator in the United States Congress. He engendered fear and suspicion, a paranoia and chilling climate from which it took years to recover. He betrayed precisely what he claimed to be trying to protect, and will stand as an object lesson for future generations on what happens when our system fails so utterly.

That is, he’ll stand as that lesson for those who will listen. Clearly, some people didn’t. It’s a crying shame that this includes a majority of the Texas State Board of Education, because now it’s entirely likely the lesson will be missed by a decade’s worth of schoolchildren, too.

Tip o’ the ten gallon hat to Robert Luhn of the wonderful National Center for Science Education for the link to the ABC interview.

Today is the much celebrated pi-day . Ok, perhaps it’s not that big a holiday – I don’t think Hallmark is selling any pi-day cards yet – but anyone who uses google today knows that something mathematical and geeky is being honored. I promise not to go into diatribes about calculations of the first few million digits of pi, or how many digits one needs to keep in order to calculate the radius of the universe to atomic accuracy. Instead, I merely want to relay a simple short story a colleague of mine recounted to me years ago.

Several years ago, before pi-day was famous, a student called the phone number associated with the digits in pi that appear after the decimal point, i.e., 1-415-926-5358. Apparently this is rather common now, and in fact, appears to be promoted as a mnemonic for the first 10 decimal places for those folks we need to have those numbers handy at all times. But this story happened in earlier times, back before the Bay Area split into several area codes. And, as the clever reader has already guessed, that student reached the SLAC main gate. How cool to phone pi and reach the main gate of a major national scientific research laboratory!

Alas, time and phone numbers march on, and nowadays phoning pi yields a “your call cannot be completed as dialed” message. (And I’m told that I cannot publish this post without noting that 3-14-15 will be a more accurate pi day.)

I recently posted that Don McLeroy, a Texas conservative creationist buffoon on the State School Board of Education, lost his re-election bid. That was good news, but I also warned that in his last months on the BoE, lots of damage could still be done.

Sometimes I hate being right.

In a 10-5 party line vote last week, the BoE rammed through a vast number of changes to the Texas state history standards, all of which conform to the über-far-right’s twisted view of reality. In these new standards, Hispanics are ignored, Black Panthers are added to provide balance to the kids learning about Martin Luther King, Jr., and get this, Thomas Jefferson was removed^*.

It’s insanity, pure and simple. The absolute and utter denial of reality generally is.

In typical McLeroy nutball fashion, he said:

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

“Balance”. Feh. As Colbert once said, reality has a well-known liberal bias.

The problem here isn’t one of balance, it’s of revisionism. As one of the more reality-based members of the BoE said, “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.” As another example, the new history standards downplays and questions the separation of Church and State. And this was no accident by the religious zealots on the Board; when a more moderate Democrat tried to insert language about why the Establishment Clause was put in the Constitution, it was voted down by the Republicans.

There’s tons more. And there’s one that totally blows me away. I hope you’re ready for this — they added apologetics for the McCarthy hearings.

Yes, you read that right. They added to the standards that America was being infiltrated by Communists, and therefore McCarthy was right.

Holy crap.

So, is Texas doomed? Well, I can hope that teachers across the state will see through this sort of revisionist garbage, but I also know that bucking the standards is very difficult for educators, especially when those standards guide how tests are made, both in the schools and in statewide standardized testing.

And even worse, Texas has such a huge school system that textbook publishers will base their books in large part on the Texas standards, and these books will then be sold in other states. So these handful of ultra-conservative rabid far-right lunatics will actually be affecting the way children are taught all over the country. That means my kid. Your kids. All of them.

Congratulations, Texas State Board of Education. And thanks for dragging the rest of us down with your insanity.

My thank to everyone who sent me links about this.

[^* Update: It was Jefferson’s contribution to the Enlightenment that was removed, not Jefferson himself. Sorry for any confusion there.]

Oh dear. Sometimes it’s so hard to let go.

And most importantly, don’t forget to join us MARCH 13, at 1pm for the PLUTO IS A PLANET PROTEST MARCH AND RALLY. The march starts at the Greenwood Space Travel Supply store (8414 Greenwood Ave N) and will end at Neptune Coffee (8415 Greenwood Ave N).

But really, Greenwood Space Travel Supply is all kinds of awesome, even if they’re weirdly co-dependent with small rocks in the outer solar system. They’re the Seattle branch of the 826 network, which is a non-profit writing center for kids.

They also have cool t-shirts.

A few weeks ago, International Space Station astronaut Soichi Noguchi took an amazing picture of Endeavour re-entering Earth’s atmosphere.

He has been busily snapping away at the Earth and posting the pictures on his Twitter feed. You really should be following him!

Recently, he unknowingly did me a big favor by posting this incredible shot of Egypt:

Yes, those are actual pyramids in the picture! Amazing. And by doing that, he made it very easy for me to answer the question I still get about once a month from people: “Is the Great Wall of China the only man-made object you can see from space?”.

I already knew the answer is no; you can see cities easily, as well as agricultural formations, big roads, and more. But this one shot makes it very plain and simple: yes, humans have made quite an impact on the planet, and you can easily see it from space.

“INTRODUCTION: Erotic film clips are used in sex research, including studies of female sexual dysfunction and arousal. However, little is known about which clips optimize female sexual response. Furthermore, their use is not well standardized. AIMS: To identify the types of film clips that are most mentally appealing and physically arousing to women for use in future sexual function and dysfunction studies; to explore the relationship between mental appeal and reported physical arousal; to characterize the content of the films that were found to be the most and least appealing and arousing. METHODS: Twenty-one women viewed 90 segments of erotic film clips. They rated how (i) mentally appealing and (ii) how physically aroused they were by each clip… RESULTS: The most appealing and physically arousing films tended to exhibit heterosexual behavior with vaginal intercourse. The least appealing and least physically arousing films tended to depict male homosexual behavior, fellatio, and anal intercourse. CONCLUSIONS: Erotic film clips reliably produced a state of self-reported arousal in women. The most appealing and arousing films tended to depict heterosexual vaginal intercourse. Film clips with these attributes should be used in future research of sexual function and response of women.”

Photo: flickr/thebittenword.com

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A year and a half ago, the team led by Alexander Kashlinsky of NASA proposed the controversial and ominously named “dark flow,” a massive gravitational force that is tugging at galaxy clusters, and that Kashlinsky says could be coming from beyond the limits of our own visible universe. Now the team is back with a follow-up study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and Kashlinsky says the team has tracked the dark flow out twice as far as before.

A quick note on dark flow: The reason Kashlinsky noticed it is thanks to the cosmic microwave background, a signature left over from 380,000 years after the Big Bang that permeates the universe. “The hot X-ray-emitting gas within a galaxy cluster scatters photons from the cosmic microwave background (CMB),” the NASA press release says. “Because galaxy clusters don’t precisely follow the expansion of space, the wavelengths of scattered photons change in a way that reflects each cluster’s individual motion.” Using data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which mapped the microwave background, the team managed to find this tiny effect when they looked at huge clusters of galaxies, and found something totally unexpected.

What the 2008 find showed was that these galaxies were moving in a way that the distribution of matter in our visible universe couldn’t explain, traveling a million miles per hour in a particular direction. Says Kashlinsky: “This is not something we set out to find, but we cannot make it go away” [US News & World Report]. The new study confirms this weird effect, and finds that it extends farther out, to at least 2.5 billion light years away. Where Kashlinsky’s first study relied upon three years of WMAP data and 700 galactic clusters, the new study grows those numbers to five years of data and double the number galactic clusters. The clusters appear to be zooming along on one particular line aimed at Hydra, Kashlinsky said, but “right now our data cannot state as strongly as we’d like whether the clusters are coming or going,” to or from Earth [USA Today].

While the universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding in all of the directions it can whiz, no one direction should be preferred, which is why the dark flow is so damned interesting. According to our best understanding of how the matter in the Universe was distributed, there’s no way of accounting for this flow. The obvious alternate explanation is a little unnerving: something outside of our visible universe is pulling on the matter that we can see [Ars Technica].

For another explanation of dark flow, check out Phil Plait’s at Bad Astronomy, written after the initial 2008 study.

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Image: NASA, the Coma Galaxy Cluster

Today the Enlightenment and Thomas Jefferson were disappeared from Texas.

Here’s a live blog from this morning’s hearings at the Texas State Board of Education. (Emphasis mine.)

9:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

9:40 – We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

9:45 – Here’s the amendment Dunbar changed: “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” Here’s Dunbar’s replacement standard, which passed: “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.” Not only does Dunbar’s amendment completely change the thrust of the standard. It also appalling drops one of the most influential political philosophers in American history — Thomas Jefferson.

Incidentally, Thomas Jefferson was arguably America’s first paleontologist. Which certainly didn’t help his case in Texas.

Here’s a message from Radiolab to my tattoo’d readers (you know who you are):

Hi, all, I’m with the National Public Radio-syndicated science show ‘Radiolab,’ that has a large national and international following (http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/). Mr. Zimmer appeared on our show last season, in the ‘Parasites’ episode.

I’m in search of people who have tattoos of extinct species of plant or animal, ideally people in the greater New York City area. We’re trying to gauge the feasibility of doing a video piece on this subject for Radiolab. Please let us know via [email protected] if you are itching to share your extinct species tattoo story with our funky radio show!

Perhaps we’ll be calling it VideoLab soon?

Update: Be sure to send a copy to me, too, for the Tattoo Emporium.

Via Emily at the Planetary Society blog comes this amazing animation, a three-dimensional flyover of Candor Chasma on Mars generated using HiRISE data.

Holy cow. And the timing of this video… will some kid in middle school watch this video, wonder what it would be like to really do this, and then, in 25 more years, be sitting at the stick of a Martian flyer?

I’ve just been checking out one of the oldest pieces of sculpture made by humans. The Smithsonian Institution has set up a major web site on human evolution. There’s lots of stuff worth exploring on the site, although there are still some bugs and some of the stuff is unnecessarily obscure for a site intended for us non-paleoanthropologists. I’m particularly fond at the moment of the 3-D scans of ancient artifacts that you can rotate around on your computer. Check out the lion-man, for starters.

[Image: Wikipedia]

Eleanor Maguire can’t read your mind. But she’s getting closer.

Two years ago the neuroscientist’s team used functional MRI scans of the brain to predict where in a virtual reality environment a person was “standing” just by looking at their brain activity. And now, in a study for Current Biology, she’s used fMRI scans, interpreted by a computer algorithm, to pick out the patterns of brain activity that indicate whether a person is remembering one movie versus another.

An fMRI scan measures the brain’s blood flow—associated with neuron activity—on the scale of voxels, three-dimensional “pixels” that each include roughly 10,000 neurons. The algorithm then interprets the changes voxel by voxel to learn the brain’s patterns of activity over time [ScienceNOW]. In this experiment, Maguire’s team showed their 10 participants three different movies. Each was short, only about seven seconds, but featured a different actress doing a different simple activity, like mailing a letter or drinking coffee. The scientists then asked the subjects remember the films while the team scanned their brains.

Maguire says they found a few striking things. In the first stage, the scientists asked the participants to remember the films one at a time so they could try to find a brain pattern for each of the three. Maguire says it was a success: “We’ve been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory — to look at actual memory traces” [AFP]. In addition, she says, the traces of activity the researchers saw in the hippocampus for each memory remained consistent over the course of the study, and showed similarities from person to person.

While that’s impressive, it’s not foolproof “mind-reading”—yet. The computer program was not good enough to predict which film a person was thinking about every time. With three films to choose from, a blind guess would be right 33% of the time on average. The computer predicted the right film 40-45% of the time [The Guardian]. Also, Maguire says, they can’t be sure what they’re looking at in these brain patterns from their small sample—whether the people are remembering the setting of the movie, the action, or something else.

Even though the results are preliminary, experts say the rapidly advancing technology may soon raise ethical questions. Neuroscientist Marcel Just notes that the ability of machines to detect what someone is thinking is progressing with remarkable speed. “At the extreme, maybe we could decode somebody’s dream while they’re dreaming,” Just says. “Is that possible? Not this year. Not next year. But I think that’s doable.” Just says once the technology reaches that point it’s likely to touch off a societal discussion about who is allowed to see what’s in our brains [NPR].

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Image: NASA

The show with Andy Revkin just went up! Here’s a sample from the write-up:

In this conversation with host Chris Mooney, Revkin discusses the uncertain future of his field, the perils of the science blogosphere, his battles with climate blogger Joe Romm, and what it’s like (no joke) to have Rush Limbaugh suggest that you kill yourself. Moving on to the topics he’s covered for over a decade, Revkin also addresses the problem of population growth, the long-range risks that our minds just aren’t trained to think about, and the likely worsening of earthquake and other catastrophes as more people pack into in vulnerable places.

I will have much more to say about the show soon enough–I’m proud of this one–but for now, listen and download here.

Pluto’s declassification as a planet may have drawn some disappointed murmurs from the grown-ups, but the pain is apparently even more real for a bunch of little school kids.

In his book, “The Pluto Files,” celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson showcases his collection of hate mail from third graders who were disappointed at Pluto’s reclassification in 2006 to a dwarf planet. The little Pluto fans demanded the immediate reinstatement of their beloved chunk of rock back into the official roster of the solar system’s planets.

The letters start as far back as 2000, when Tyson, as director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, omitted Pluto from a new solar system exhibit because he didn’t consider it a planet.

Seven-year-old Will Gamot immediately noticed the missing exhibit and shot the director a letter with a helpful illustration (see below). Gamot wrote: “You are missing planet Pluto. Please make a model of it. This is what it looks like. It is a planet.”

In 2006, The International Astronomical Union endorsed Tyson’s position and yanked Pluto’s title as the solar system’s ninth planet. Scientists had realized that the distant Kuiper belt where Pluto resides probably has dozens of large icy objects, some of which may rival Pluto in size; rather than adding more and more planets to our list, researchers opted to create the dwarf planet category. This prompted howls of protest from other kids.

In her letter to Tyson, Madeline Trost of Plantation, Florida worried: “Do people live on Pluto? If there are people who live there they won’t exist.” She then demands a response from Tyson. “Please write back,” she implores. “But not in cursive because I can’t read in cursive.”

You can browse through an entire sideshow of what the kids had to say here; but here’s a sampling of their irritation at the whole affair.

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Image: The Pluto Files

Well, isn’t this flattering? The Times Online science blog, called Eureka Zone, picked Bad Astronomy as one of its top 30 best science blogs. It’s always nice to get some recognition, even if it doesn’t come with a wheelbarrow full of money and a free trip to Tahiti.

You listening, Times Online? Just a suggestion.

Anyway, I don’t agree with every single blog on that list — I leave it as an exercise to you to figure out which ones — but almost everything else on there is worth your time checking out. If your feed reader is looking a little pale and thin, this should help beef it up. There’s always room for science!

Gather around all ye LOLcat lovers, YouTube watchers, rabid facebookers and diligent tweeters, for there is good news for you. Our beloved Internet is in the running for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

The Nobel committee’s decision last year to award the Peace Prize to the freshly elected President Obama was considered by many to be an unusual choice, but the committee could top itself this year. The list of potential winners contains 237 nominees, including human rights activists like Russian Svetlana Gannushkina and Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo, but also our very own Internet.

The effort to get the net nominated was spearheaded by the Italian edition of Wired magazine. The editors propose that apart from being a place for people to nurture their vanity and satisfy their need to look at kittens in costumes, the Internet is also a forum for peaceful dialogue and communication. Thus, they say, it plays a valuable role in building peace.

Riccardo Luna, editor-in-chief of the Italian edition of Wired magazine said:

“The internet can be considered the first weapon of mass construction, which we can deploy to destroy hate and conflict and to propagate peace and democracy….What happened in Iran after the latest election, and the role the web played in spreading information that would otherwise have been censored, are only the newest examples of how the internet can become a weapon of global hope.”

So far, the Internet has found a bunch of early backers, including the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and designer Giorgio Armani. You can support the net’s nomination by signing an online petition at Internet for Peace. The results will be announced on October 8th and the winner will walk away with 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million). Which brings us to our next question–who picks up the award if the net wins? And who gets to pocket the cash? And most importantly, who gets to blab the acceptance speech?

While we work those out, here’s the video for the Internet for Peace campaign.

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Image: LOLcats

After six years of legal wrangling, a New York judge is set to approve a $657 million settlement package for thousands of rescue workers and volunteers who became sick after working on the cleanup of the World Trade Center site. The workers, who had sued the City of New York and other officials for their subsequent illness, can now settle their injury claims. Marc Bern, one of the lawyers representing the workers, said many of his clients were “first responders” at the site when the twin towers collapsed on September 11, 2001. After the work, some found their health deteriorated, with many suffering from asthma, other respiratory issues and blood cancer [CNN].

The money for the claims will come from a $1 billion federal grant to the WTC Captive Insurance Co., created to indemnify the city and its contractors against the flood of lawsuits [Daily News]. The workers have 90 days to look through the proposed settlement and decide if they like it. If 95 percent of the plaintiffs approve of the package, then the settlement will stand at $575 million. If 100% approve, the settlement goes up to $657 million [Daily News].

The individual payments will be made based on a point system that depends on the severity of the worker’s illness, his past health history, and the role the smoke at Ground Zero played in his current illness. Rescue workers can claim anything from a few thousand dollars to more than one million. The settlement would also fund a special insurance policy, which provides additional compensation to any plaintiff contracting certain types of cancer in the future [CNN]. New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg said the settlement was a “fair and reasonable resolution to a complex set of circumstances.”

DISCOVER has reported in the past that when the twin towers collapsed on September 11, two million tons of dust containing cement, asbestos, glass, lead, and carcinogens rained down on lower Manhattan. Phillip Landrigan, who heads the Department of Preventive and Community Medicine at Mount Sinai, said the concentrations of dust in the air were so high that they overwhelmed all the normal defenses of the human respiratory tract, and people inhaled ounces of dust into their trachea or their bronchi. The apparent results were the persistent “World Trade Center cough,” inflamed sinuses, and in the case of some workers who worked amidst the debris and smoke, thyroid and lung cancer.

For many long-suffering workers, news of the settlement drew mixed reactions. Carpenter James Nolan, who said he helped recover bodies and build ramps for firehoses at the WTC site, said the settlement would help pay the medical bills for his for lung and leg problems–which he claimed were a result of working at Ground Zero. “We’ve had to fight for what we deserve,” said Nolan, 45. “I’m glad it’s coming to an end” [Associated Press]. Others like Gary Klein, a retired cop with lung scarring and stomach problems, wasn’t so sure. “A million dollars is not a lot of money if you have cancer and need chemotherapy,” Klein said. “What’s going to be left for your family after you die?” [Daily News]

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Image: Wikimedia

This week the federal government released its 2010 report, “The State of the Birds,” examining the health of the United States’ native fowl. According to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the state of our union’s birds is precarious.

The 2010 report focused on climate in particular. In it, scientists reviewed data for 800 species nationwide, and ranked their sensitivity to climate change based on factors including how many young they produce each year, how able they are to move to new habitats, and how unique their food and nesting needs are [San Jose Mercury News]. Each of the 800 then received a designation of low, medium, or high vulnerability. You can see the methods for scoring here.

Birds that rely on coastal areas are in the most threatened position, Salazar says. Seabirds tend to have low reproductive potential and often nest on islands that can be inundated by rising sea levels, changes in water chemistry and other disruptions to the marine ecosystem [AP]. Hawaii birds are especially troubled, as they many are already under the gun by invasive species and disease, the report says. All 67 species of ocean-reliant seabirds ranked with a medium or high level of vulnerability. Birds native to forests or to arid regions, however, showed less climate vulnerability.

Kenneth Rosenberg of Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, a contributor to the report, says, “Birds are excellent indicators of the health of our environment, and right now they are telling us an important story about climate change. Many species of conservation concern will face heightened threats, giving us an increased sense of urgency to protect and conserve vital bird habitat” [AFP]. Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, Forest Service, and other organizations compiled the 2010 report (the full list at the bottom of the press release).

Meanwhile, a separate study published in the journal Oikos found a different but interesting effect on American birds. In biology, there is a general rule of thumb that animals tend to become smaller in warmer climates: an idea known as Bergmann’s Rule [BBC News]. Biologists aren’t totally settled on why Bergmann’s Rule should be so, but Josh Van Buskirk and colleagues wanted to see if that was happening in the United States over the past decades, as global warming has gradually increased temperatures. Luckily, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Rector, Pennsylvania, has kept measurements of hundreds of thousands of birds, coming from more than 100 different species, that migrated through the area since 1961.

Van Buskirk found birds getting slightly smaller no matter their migratory season: 60 of 83 spring migrating species, 66 of 75 for autumn, 51 of 65 for summer, and 20 of 26 for winter. In a spot of good news, though, the study says that the populations of these birds aren’t in decline, and are perhaps adapting to their changing world. “So many of these species are apparently doing just fine, but the individual birds are becoming gradually smaller nonetheless,” says Dr Buskirk [BBC News].

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Image: flickr / Wili_hybrid

Hot on the heels of the post the other day about the winds on Mars blowing the sand dunes and visibly moving them across the planet’s surface comes this new satellite image of a huge sandstorm raging across the planet:

Of course, I’d forgive you if you interpret my saying “the planet” as meaning Mars. However, this picture is of Earth! Specifically, the Middle East. This March 4^th image from the Terra satellite shows a plume of sand 100 km (60 miles!) across sweeping from Saudi Arabia over Kuwait and into Iran.

In some ways, Mars and Earth are very similar. Sometimes, it’s even hard to tell them apart…

‘Lint ball’ omphalitis, a rare cause of umbilical discharge in an adult woman: a case report

“Umbilical discharge in adult is rare and is usually induced by foreign material, most commonly hair. Rarely, it may be due to embryonal anomalies. We are reporting an unusual case of umbilical discharge in adult secondary to an impacted lint ball… A 55-year-old obese woman presented with a 4-month history of hemorrhagic discharge from the umbilicus. Deep from the base of the umbilicus, a 0.8 cm gray-tan mass was removed that on microscopic examination revealed a lint ball. Conclusion: An impacted lint ball may be a rare cause of umbilical discharge in adult.”

Bonus quote from the full text of the paper:

“A 55-year-old obese white American woman of European descent presented with a 4-month history of slightly hemorrhagic discharge from her umbilicus. There was no history of fever, abdominal pain or any other systemic disease. Physical examination revealed a deep umbilicus with a barely visible opening. There was no redness, edema, or crusting of the periumbilical skin. The deeper aspect of the umbilicus was exposed by using a spatula. A dark, rounded polypoid mass was noted. The clinical impression was that of fibro-epithelial polyp or some other tumor. An attempt was made to remove the mass by excising the base; however, the mass easily came out of the umbilical cavity implying that either it was necrotic or it was not firmly attached to the umbilical tissue at the base. The gray-tan 0.8 cm size round mass on cut section revealed white fibrous appearance. On microscopic examination, it was composed of lint material with typical morphology of refractile bean-shaped and elongated colorless structures, red spindle-shaped keratin material, granular red debris, rare hair fragments and polymorphonuclear leukocytes (Figure 1Figure 1.). Under polarized light, the lint particles showed brilliant blue-green birefringence (Figure 2Figure 2.). A diagnosis of ‘lint ball’ omphalitis was made.”

Photo: flickr/brenbot

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