Nature Gone Wild
Customers and employees at a shopping mall at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, were surprised when a black bear triggered the automatic doors and wandered in, stole a peach and defecated on the floor before leaving, KTUU reported on July 7. “My coworker, who is cutting hair in front of me, she yelled, ‘Bear!’ And I looked up from my phone, and the bear was walking into the barber shop right in front of me,” barber Kory Godbout said. “And we all ran into the break room and shut the door behind us.” Conservation Law Enforcement officers were able to herd the bear into the woods, away from the mall.
What Is This, a Center for PLANTS?
Lacking a green thumb? Take your plant(s) to Hilda Houseplant Hospital, run by Rosanna Costello of Edinburgh, Scotland. According to a July 11 report from the Good News Network, the hospital is run by horticulturalist Rosanna Costello, who remembers going into plant shops and wishing she had more guidance to help her care for her own plants. Costello works up a “patient history” when customers bring in their plants, and chats with them about possible diagnoses and treatments. Like their human counterparts, “patients” in the plant hospital can be “put on drips,” quarantined or even undergo “surgery” – which usually just means something like repotting or removing pests. “Once they’ve been repotted and trimmed, we feed them, give them a really good cleaning, and let the customer know they’re ready to collect,” Costello said. “There’s an awful lot of feelings and emotions attached to the houseplants that we see, and when they come to collect and get care information, there’s so much relief and joy.”
Just What the Doctor Ordered
At the advice of her doctor, an elderly woman consumed one and a half liters of Diet Coke to dissolve a mass in her stomach … and it worked! Oddity Central said on July 9 that a team of doctors reported the case in the New England Journal of Medicine. An elderly woman presented with a bezoar, or a large mass, that resulted as a side effect of taking a GLP-1. She lost 40 pounds over the course of a year, but reported continued stomach pain. After an endoscopy revealed the bezoar, she discontinued her medication, and, in an effort to avoid surgery, doctors suggested drinking carbonated beverages to help dissolve the mass. “Existing evidence, largely from case series and anecdotal experiences, supports the administration of 3 liters of cola, either orally or through a nasogastric tube, within a 12-hour window,” the doctors said in the report. “It is not well understood whether acidity, carbonation, or another mechanism accounts for dissolution of the bezoar.” As the woman was diabetic, her “prescription” was adjusted to one and a half liters of diet cola. After just a couple of days on the cola regimen, the woman reported relief from her symptoms, and another endoscopy revealed the mass had dissolved. See, soda can be healthy!
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