Eideard

A spill of frozen bull semen bound for a breeder in the state of Texas triggered a scare on Tuesday that temporarily shut down a U.S. interstate highway during the morning rush hour.

The incident began when the driver of a Greyhound bus carrying the freight alerted the fire department he had lost a part of his load while negotiating the ramp on a highway near Nashville. “We didn’t know what it was, but we were told (the canisters) were non-toxic,” said Maggie Lawrence, a fire department spokeswoman.

When firefighters arrived on the ramp, they saw “four small propane-sized canisters (that) began to emit a light vapor,” Lawrence said. In addition to the vapor, the canisters also let off an unpleasant odor and the ramp was closed while emergency personnel tried to determine what was in the containers.

The bus driver turned around to retrieve the canisters. Once emergency personnel learned the smoking canisters were nothing hazardous and that they simply contained frozen bull semen that had been stored on dry ice, Tennessee Department of Transportation and fire department workers cleared the ramp.

There’s apparently no truth to the rumor the shipment was for Rick Perry’s weekly inoculation against brains and learnin’.

Frozen for storage

Hospitals and other organizations routinely urge people to give blood, bone marrow and even some organs, but Texas Children’s Hospital is launching a different kind of donor program: breast milk.

The Houston pediatric hospital is asking nursing mothers in the area to donate their excess milk, which has proved life-saving for prematurely born babies whose mothers are unable to produce enough to meet the infant’s needs.

“The evidence is overwhelming that these critically ill preemies do best on mother’s milk, the reason we only feed breast milk in our neonatal intensive care unit,” said Nancy Hurst, a Texas Children’s nurse and director of the new donor milk program. “Ideally, they get their own mother’s milk, but donor milk is the next best thing.”

Around the nation, the use of donor breast milk has grown dramatically in recent years. The nation’s nonprofit donor milk banks last year processed and dispensed 1.8 million ounces, up from about 325,000 in 1999. The increased demand has caused the banks to issue urgent appeals for donors.

That demand mostly relates to the nation’s roughly 51,000 very low birth weight babies who survive childbirth every year, babies who weigh 3.3 pounds or less. It would take nearly 9 million ounces of donor milk to provide all those babies what the mothers themselves can’t produce…

Since 2009, Texas Children’s had got its donor milk from the Mothers’ Milk Bank at Austin, one of 10 U.S. nonprofit banks, all of which screen the donor mothers’ blood and pasteurize the milk. Texas Children’s will now maintain its own bank, though the pasteurizing will be done at a for-profit plant in California…

In another form, donor milk dates to more than 2,000 years before Christ, when the Code of Hammurabi set forth the qualities for a good wet nurse, women who breast-fed others’ babies. Wet nurses fell out of favor in the developed world around the turn of the 20th century, after researchers found the milk could transfer diseases to newborns. Milk banks emerged not long after.

The appeal of donor breast milk is particularly strong because it’s common for mothers of premature babies to struggle to produce milk…Also, premature infants often arrive at hospitals such as Texas Children’s well before the mother, transferred from remote locations.

All good news AFAIC. Real healthcare for children that need it the most.

I hope they’re not screwing around with too many plastic additives. Natural ain’t bad.

Switzerland may soon be as famous for its haste at freezing shady money as for its zeal for looking after it.

After blocking bank accounts of the deposed Tunisian and Egyptian presidents, the country has done the same with what it calls the “possible assets” of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, whose family fortune, according to the wildest estimates, may be in the tens of billions of dollars.

But the problem of corrupt dictators isn’t new, and would be better addressed ahead of time. It’s nice to freeze the money. It would have been better not to accept it.

Doing so is not as tricky as it sounds. Banks and governments have the financial and legal tools to clamp down on dictators’ looting of their countries’ resources even while they’re still deemed legitimate leaders…

Those rules, agreed by all countries that are part of an international body called the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), impose a duty on banks to investigate whenever they suspect unusual financial activity by a political leader with past or present responsibilities. But in the case of sitting leaders, it seems that banks haven’t been looking very hard…

Another serious problem is international politics. It’s easy enough to freeze out discredited regimes like North Korea and Iran. But it would have been harder for, say, a French or Italian bank to treat Gaddafi as a pariah when he was setting up his tent in Rome or Paris before shaking hands with those countries’ leaders…

As long as western banks and governments deliberately look the other way and accept cash in the name of raison d’etat, there’s little hope the looting will stop. But if they really wanted to change, they could start by applying the existing rules.

They all should be filling out SAR’s [Significant Activity Reports] at a minimum. Keeping their government apprised of what appears to be suspicious funds entering the country’s banking system,

I don’t agree 100% with Pierre Briançon’s editorial. I’d rather see the money come in the door exactly so that it may be frozen when circumstances require it. Otherwise, who knows where it may be?

High temperature, here in La Cieneguilla, New Mexico, was 3ºF. Wind chill hit -19ºF.

Preserving embryos by freezing has become commonplace in fertility treatment to allow women to attempt multiple cycles without repeatedly creating new embryos. Now scientists have announced that a baby boy was born in May to a 42-year-old woman after being adopted as an embryo from a couple who created it 20 years ago.

Previously the oldest successful frozen embryo was 13 years old.

The couple who created the embryo had completed their own family through IVF and anonymously offered their remaining frozen embryos to other couples. The children are all biological siblings although born 20 years apart…

Inter-generational donation has already been raised as a possibility.

In 2007 a mother froze some of her own eggs so they could be used by her then-seven-year-old daughter who was likely to be infertile because of a medical condition. If the girl used the eggs she would effectively give birth to her own half brother or sister.

Amazing stuff. And taken in concert with relevant advances, another positive avenue for families concerned with reproductive problems.

The corpse of an American mountaineer who fell to his death in the Canadian Rockies more than two decades ago has been found.

Hikers in Jasper National Park, Alberta found the body of William Holland, 38, last month. He tumbled down a mountain in 1989 when a snow outcrop collapsed.

The climber’s body had been preserved by glacial ice, said Garth Lemke, public safety expert with Parks Canada.

“He was basically in a deep freeze for the last 21 years,” Mr Lemke said.

Holland of Gorham, Maine, had reached the summit of an ice climb on Snow Mountain. An outcropping of snow he was standing on gave way and he plunged 1,000ft…

Mr Lemke said at least two other climbers since the 1970s who went missing in Jasper National Park have never been found.

Sooner or later, someone would have invented frozen food. Clarence Birdseye just happened to be first on the street with a satisfactory product.

Hey – it makes as much sense as some of the comments we get.

Using an iPhone in the cold presents a quandry. You don’t want to freeze your fingers, but gloves make the touchscreen difficult to use. Unless you’ve got Dots Gloves.

Or sausages.

In South Korea, CJ Corporation noticed a sharp increase in sales of their frozen sausages. Not because they’re especially tasty, because cold commuters have discovered that they make an effective iPod stylus. It seems that they’re electrostatically compatible with the iPod’s touch screen, and nearly as effective as using a human finger.

The folks at TUAW said they were going to try something from Jimmy Dean. They must be vegans or sumpin’. I don’t know of anything that Jimmy sells that is the right shape.

Now – Slim Jims? That might be just right.

Mexico’s navy has seized more than a ton of cocaine stuffed inside frozen sharks, as drug gangs under military pressure go to greater lengths to conceal narcotics bound for the United States.

Armed and masked navy officers cut open more than 20 shark carcasses filled with slabs of cocaine after checking a container ship in a container port in the southern Mexico state of Yucatan.

“We are talking about more than a ton of cocaine that was inside the ship,” Navy Commander Eduardo Villa told reporters after X-ray machines and sniffer dogs helped uncover the drugs. “Those in charge of the shipment said it was a conserving agent but after checks we confirmed it was cocaine,” he said.

Drug gangs are coming up with increasingly creative ways of getting drugs into the United States — in sealed beer cans, religious statues and furniture — as Mexico’s military cracks down on the cartels moving South American narcotics north.

Best one I recall was the mule who had his leg broken so he could have a cast made of cocaine. He figured he’d get through the x-ray easier with proof of injury.

Thinking it just another dog turd emerging from the melting snow (Whitehorse is awash in canine feces at this time of year), I at first ignored it. But dog crap is rarely rectangular, so I had another look. And, hey, there was an iPod emerging from a block of ice.

It was frozen in the bottom layer of snow near Takhini School. The thing has obviously been there since early winter.

I pried it out of the ice (it was frozen solid), and brought it home to see if it still worked. The thing booted up right away and after a few minutes of charge was in full operating order. It even had the correct date.

So I’m impressed, that’s one hardy machine. Like some ice age caveman emerging from the depths of an ancient glacier, this iPod has thawed its way out of a block of months-old Yukon ice. The only difference is, the iPod has emerged alive.

There’s a name attached to the device; so, if you lost an iPod in Whitehorse around the beginning of the last Ice Age – email Andrew and tell him your name and the capacity of the iPod. You have a week. After that – Finder’s Keepers.

In warmer weather…

The face of a man’s body encased in ice startled groundskeepers working near the 16th hole of a north metro golf course Friday.

While checking conditions of the Majestic Oaks Golf Course in Ham Lake at about 1:15 p.m., they discovered what appeared to be a face sticking out of the ice covering a pond, said Lt. Paul Sommer of the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office.

Initial reports indicated that the head had been severed, but the body appears to be intact, Sommer said Friday night. Because the body was contorted, with its head partially above the ice and body below, along with the apparent toll animals had taken, authorities were initially misled. Most of the face and head appeared to have been eaten at, exposing the throat, Sommer said. It is too early to determine an age of the victim or cause of death, although authorities suspect foul play. Other than damage to the face, the cold appears to have preserved the remainder of the body, Sommer said.

Only a portion of the body was exposed when the workers found it. The remainder was trapped in 2 feet of ice. Authorities used a steamer from the Anoka County Highway Department to remove the body from the ice so as not to damage it.

“There’s no straight protocol for removing a body encased in ice, so we used the steamer rather than chipping it out,” Sommer said.

I guess if you don’t find bodies encased in ice – very frequently – you don’t need to establish a standard protocol.

UPDATE: He’s been identified as Jeffrey Scott O’Donnell, homeless. No autopsy results yet for COD.