"We made it as a tribute to women, because African women are defined by the shape of their bottoms," DJ Mix says. "Move your bottom, jump, you see..."

Ivory Coast's 'big-bottom' craze

A national dance craze in Ivory Coast has spawned a black market in treatments claiming to increase one's bottom size.

The dance in question has been inspired by DJ Mix and DJ Eloh's hit song Bobaraba, which means "big bottom" in the local Djoula language.

When it plays you can be guaranteed that the dance floor will be packed with people shaking their derrieres.

Even Ivorian footballers have adopted the moves and could be seen wiggling their bottoms in a curious on-pitch dance after each goal scored during the just-ended Africa Nations Cup.

However, doctors have warned of the possible dangers of some of the concoctions on sale.

While the dance has been embraced by both sexes, DJ Mix says it was inspired by women.

Chinese Eat Dinosaur Bones As Medicine

Villagers in central China spent decades digging up bones they believed belonged to flying dragons and using them in traditional medicines. Turns out the bones belonged to dinosaurs, and now scientists are doing the digging.

Until last year, the fossils were being sold in Henan province as "dragon bones" at about 25 cents a pound, scientist Dong Zhiming said Wednesday.

The calcium-rich bones were sometimes boiled with other ingredients and fed to children to treat dizziness and leg cramps. Other times they were ground up and turned into a paste applied directly to fractures and other injuries, he said.

Full Story: Washington Post

Alternate Tags: Tags: Dragons, Fed To Children

Surgeons remove gallbladder through patient's vagina

Doctors in New York have removed a woman’s gallbladder with instruments passed through her vagina, a technique they hope will cause less pain and scarring than the usual operation, and allow a quicker recovery. The technique can eliminate the need to cut through abdominal muscles, a major source of pain after surgery.

The operation was experimental, part of a study that is being done to find out whether people will fare better if abdominal surgery is performed through natural openings in the body rather than cuts in the belly. The surgery still requires cutting, through the wall of the vagina, stomach or colon, but doctors say it should hurt less because those tissues are far less sensitive than the abdominal muscles.

Interest in this idea heightened after doctors from India made a video in 2004 showing an appendix being taken out through a patient’s mouth. The patient had abdominal scars that would have made conventional surgery difficult.

The New York patient, 66, had her gallbladder removed on March 21 and is recovering well, said her surgeon, Dr. Marc Bessler, the director of laparoscopic surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. Dr. Bessler said he thought it was the first time the operation had been performed in the United States, and he plans to show a video of the operation at a gastroenterology meeting in Las Vegas on Sunday.

“Going through a natural orifice, the mouth or rectum or vagina, to get into the abdomen and do an operation, is being excitedly worked on by a whole lot of people,” Dr. Bessler said, adding that companies were beginning to make special surgical tools for the operations and that doctors had formed an organization called Noscar (www.Noscar.org), which stands for Natural Orifice Surgery Consortium for Assessment and Research.

Full Story: NEW YORK TIMES

Depressed? Go Play in the Dirt

Exposure to friendly soil bacteria could improve mood by boosting the immune system just as effectively as antidepressant drugs, a new study suggests.

Researchers exposed mice to a harmless soil microbe called Mycobacterium vaccae and had the rodents perform a behavioral task commonly used to test the efficacy of antidepressant drugs.

The mice were placed in a large beaker of water for five minutes and watched to see how long they continued swimming and searching for an exit before giving up. The researchers found that the bacteria-exposed mice continued paddling around much longer than the control mice.

“At the risk of anthropomorphizing, you could say the [bacteria-exposed] mice had a more active coping style,” said study leader Chris Lowry of the University of Bristol in England.

Full Story: Live Science.com

Stomach tore open

A 31-year-old mother got a horrifying shock after a Caesarian section at St. Olav's Hospital in Trondheim.

Tone Lise Johannessen bore a daughter by Caesarian section at St. Olav's, and on Sunday a midwife removed the outer stitches from the operation, newspaper VG reports.

"When I got up, I felt my entire stomach tear. I got help from hospital staff and was put into a bed. Then I saw that my intestines and the contents of my abdomen had fallen out," Johannessen said.

According to VG, the thread used to sew up after the Caesarian has been under discussion at the hospital, and several doctors at St. Olav's have contacted management to try and have it replaced by a different type used earlier.

"When a new purchasing contract began, we said that there was some dissatisfaction from our surgeons. The maternity hospital made a request saying we wanted to use a different thread than the one chosen," maternity hospital leader Fredrik Sunde told VG.

Full Story: AFTENPOSTEN (Norway)