Learned about this in school...but jeez.

Credits to NPR

Trigeminal neuralgia is a rare condition that causes pain so intense it used to be known as the suicide disease. And people who get it usually have vivid memories of their first severe episode.

Sandra McGee was in the shower when she felt something like an electric shock on the right side of her face.

"I just jumped up, you know, fell against the wall and started screaming because I was being electrocuted," she says.

The pain started about an inch above her upper lip, McGee says, and traveled up to her right eye. The episode lasted about 45 seconds

McGee, 51, lives in the Los Angeles area and works as a cake decorator at Costco. She says that before she had trigeminal neuralgia, she was a pretty happy person.

That changed as the flashes of pain became more frequent and she realized they could be triggered by almost anything: a gentle touch, a drop of water on her cheek, even a smile.

"I couldn't be happy. I couldn't be sad," she says, because those emotions required facial expressions that might cause excruciating pain.

Trigeminal neuralgia is rare, affecting about one out of every 15,000 people.

But when it does strike, it can be devastating, says Dr. Neil Martin, the chair of neurosurgery at UCLA.

"In years past when we didn't have effective treatments, it was severe enough that some patients would commit suicide to escape the pain," Martin says.

The pain comes from the trigeminal nerve, which carries sensory information from the face and scalp to the brain.

There's a place near the brainstem where the trigeminal nerve can get pinched by a blood vessel. Martin says as the blood vessel expands with each pulse, it exerts pressure on the nerve, gradually wearing away the outer sheath that insulates nerve fibers.

Eventually, the nerve fibers begin to short circuit. "So a normal sensation like touching the face becomes distorted into a tremendous flash of pain," Martin says.

In the 1960s, surgeons at UCLA developed an operation to fix the problem. But many patients still don't get the surgery because doctors attribute their pain to some other cause, like dental problems.

McGee was pretty sure she had trigeminal neuralgia. She had looked it up on the Internet and seen several doctors. But she still agreed to have a root canal redone to see if that would help.

McGee also tried taking powerful painkillers.

"I took them like every eight hours. And then it got to be like every six hours, then four hours, then three hours," she says. "I was taking way too much."

So a few months ago, McGee decided it was time to try something else. She called her insurance company and asked for help finding an answer.

The company sent her to see Dr. Martin at UCLA.

Martin recalls that when he first met McGee in early August she was having up to 100 episodes a day of "sharp, shooting, stabbing electric-shock-like pain. She was in absolute agony. It was completely disabling."

Martin told McGee that surgery was her best hope for permanent relief.

The surgery still carries risks, Martin says. But it's become steadily safer and more effective over the years.

One major reason is new technologies that create detailed, three-dimensional images of a patient's brain. Those images make it easy for surgeons to plan an operation.

Martin studied a lot of those images before doing surgery on McGee.

A video of that surgery shows him creating a hole in her skull behind the ear, and gently teasing apart layers of tissue as he works his way toward the brain stem.

Within a few minutes he's exposed the problem. A pulsing red blood vessel is wedged beneath the nerve and has actually worn a visible groove in the white fiber sheath.

Martin tugs on the blood vessel and it springs free.

At that point in the surgery, Martin says, he was pretty sure he had solved the problem. But he wouldn't really know until his patient regained consciousness.

McGee remembers that the first thing she did when she woke up was touch the right side of her face. Then she smiled and made other faces. She tried all the things that had triggered pain, "just to see if it was gone," she says, "and it was gone."

Nearly three months since the surgery, McGee says there's not even a hint of the pain that dominated her life for three years.

She expects to start decorating cakes again next week.

Riding the Waveeeee

What a beauty

Check out this amazing house/greenhouse project at NYTimes

Shoe dreamin...

The Secret Topography of Antarctica

Credit to NPR

A NASA DC-8 plane equipped with lasers, ice-penetrating radar, and a gravity meter is revealing a dynamic and complex world beneath the massive ice sheet that covers Antarctica.

The plane is flying over Antarctica for six weeks as part of a mission to use airplanes to replace a dying NASA satellite that's been monitoring polar ice.

But the stopgap measure is providing a major scientific bonus: The DC-8 flies just 1,500 feet above the ice and carries instruments that let scientists see right through the ice.

"It's going to change the way that we look at Antarctica," says Thomas Wagner, a NASA Cryosphere Program scientist.

The Antarctic ice sheet covers an area larger than Europe. In places, it's miles thick. If the sheet ever melts, sea level will rise by dozens of feet.

Beneath The Ice

Scientists have known for years that there are volcanoes, mountains, rivers and lakes beneath the ice. But they haven't known many details about these things.

The NASA flights offer a way to learn a great deal more, says William Krabill, a member of the NASA team flying on the DC-8. For example, the plane carries a special radar that lets scientists study the topography of the land beneath the ice sheet, he says. Another instrument detects tiny changes in gravity fields and can reveal liquid water beneath the ice.

The flights are letting scientists burrow down through the layers of ice to see rivers and lakes and the valleys carved by moving glaciers, Krabill says, like "peeling an onion."

And scientists have already found some really surprising stuff happening inside the ice itself:

Antarctica is almost completely covered by ice sheets, which are more than a mile thick on average, and nearly 3 miles thick in places. New data from the plane flyovers is helping scientists learn about the landscape buried below the sheets of ice.

Antarctica is almost completely covered by ice sheets, which are more than a mile thick on average, and nearly 3 miles thick in places. New data from the plane flyovers is helping scientists learn about the landscape buried below the sheets of ice.

"There are these lakes that form and they literally seem to pop and deflate," Wagner says. "We just learned about this literally in the last couple of years, and we're finding new ones all the time."

If the water in those lakes gets under the ice, it could act as a lubricant and speed up a glacier's movement toward the ocean. That could speed up sea-level rise, scientists say.

For the same reason, scientists are curious about something going on at the place where glacial ice is carving a channel through dirt and rock, Wagner says.

"One of the most important unknowns right now is what is the shape of the bed under the ice," he says. "You need to know that in a very, very precise way to make models that accurately reproduce ice flow."

Seeing Through Ice With Radar

Much of that information is coming from special radars on the DC-8 that produce images in vivid colors on a computer monitor as the plane flies over a targeted area. The images provide a rough sketch of the bed beneath the ice, says Chris Allen from the University of Kansas, who is in charge of the radars.

The radar data will be refined in the coming months, and then combined with information from the lasers and the gravity meter to create a more complete picture of an Antarctica that's been hidden for millions of years.

"We are looking at structures like you see along the coast of Norway, these kinds of deep fiords," says Michael Studinger of Columbia University, who runs the gravity meter.

Right now, these Antarctic fiords are filled with ice, Studinger says. But global warming could eventually change that.

Those Bastards...

It's called lock-in, folks: The tactic that works by ensuring that once you sign on with a product or a company, you have virtually no way to escape. You're stuck for life. Apple does this with the iPod by locking iTunes to its music player. Online e-mail providers do this regularly by making it impossible to get your email out of their system and onto another.

But perhaps the most notorious example of electronics lock-in is the good-old cell phone contract early termination fee. Every carrier has one: If you want to get out of your contract early, you'll pay at least a hundred bucks for the privilege. The carriers justify it by saying you get a better deal on your cell phone when you make the initial purchase, but for many, hanging on to a crummy phone for two years just isn't worth it, and many people find that after the first year has passed, they want out of the deal (usually so they can get an iPhone).

And that termination fee is always painful.

Well, if you sign up for new service with Verizon beginning November 15 or later, that early termination fee is about to start hurting much worse. According to Boy Genius Report, Verizon is preparing to double its ETF to a whopping $350 if you cancel your service before your contract is up. For users with a simple calling plan, that amount of money can be close to the fees for a year's worth of service.

Oh, there's a little bone thrown in there for you: For every month of your contract fulfilled, the company knocks $10 off the ETF. Great deal? Hardly: Cancel your 24-month contract in the 23rd month and you're still on the hook for a $120 termination fee. Ouch.

It's unclear if the new fee will apply to all devices or just mysterious "advanced" ones (see the link for further speculation), but either way this is a bad omen for all cell phone users, as all the carriers tend to raise prices and fees in lockstep with each other whenever they think they can get away with it. (See also: Text messaging fees.) And they usually do.

Brings me back to 2nd year..

Credit to Associated Press

PARIS – Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100.

The French intellectual was regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing structuralism — concepts about common patterns of behavior and thought, especially myths, in a wide range of human societies. Defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity, structuralism compared the formal relationships among elements in any given system.

During his six-decade career, Levi-Strauss authored literary and anthropological classics including "Tristes Tropiques" (1955), "The Savage Mind" (1963) and "The Raw and the Cooked" (1964).

Jean-Mathieu Pasqualini, chief of staff at the Academie Francaise, said an homage to Levi-Strauss was planned for Thursday, with members of the society — of which Levi-Strauss was a member — standing during a speech to honor his memory.

France reacted emotionally to his death, with government officials, politicians and ordinary citizens populating blogs with heartfelt tributes.

Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner praised his emphasis on a dialogue between cultures and said that France had lost a "visionary."

Born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Brussels, Belgium, Levi-Strauss was the son of French parents of Jewish origin. He studied in Paris and went on to teach in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and conduct much of the research that led to his breakthrough books in the South American giant.

Levi-Strauss also won worldwide acclaim and was awarded honorary doctorates at universities, including Harvard, Yale and Oxford, as well as universities in Sweden, Mexico and Canada.

He was down to earth.

A skilled handyman who believed in the virtues of manual labor and outdoor life, he was also an ardent music-lover who once said he would have liked to have been a composer had he not become an ethnologist.

He is survived by his sons Roman and Laurent.