‘Dead’ Chinese baby wakes up before cremation
A Chinese baby that had been declared dead by a hospital was saved from cremation when it started crying at a funeral parlour in China’s Anhui province on Wednesday.
The baby boy, less than a month old, was sent back immediately to the Anhui Provincial Children’s Hospital for emergency treatment after he was found to be alive by a staffer of the funeral parlour in Hefei, the provincial capital, Xinhua reported.
The hospital had earlier issued a death certificate for the boy. He would have been cremated under normal procedures, according to the Hefei Municipal Funeral Parlour.
The baby had suffered from congenital respiratory system malformation since birth and was critically ill. His parents agreed on Nov 12 to stop his medical treatment, according to a hospital staffer.
“Because the baby still had life signs, we continued to give him transfusion to maintain his life for humanitarian reasons,” the staff member said on condition of anonymity.
The reasons for the baby being mistakenly confirmed dead need further scrutiny, according to the staff member.
The baby is still receiving emergency treatment at the hospital.
A doctor and a nursing worker who were on duty on Wednesday were judged responsible for the accident and were suspended and laid off respectively, according to the hospital.
It is investigating the case and said it would release the results to the public in time. (IANS)
A 4000-year-old Egyptian statue that rotates
The mystery behind a 4000-year-old Egyptian statue that was caught on camera rotating for no apparent reason has finally been solved.
Curators at Manchester Museum in the UK were confused by the 25cm statue, which was made in about 1800BC, when it began to move without any apparent intervention.
The statue was created as a medium for the soul of an ancient Egyptian man called Neb-Senu. Some enthusiastic observers had even suggested Neb-Senu’s spirit was moving the artefact.
But that theory has been trumped by a more scientific explanation.
The British TV program Mystery Map, which investigates mysterious stories, enlisted vibration expert Steve Gosling to place a special three-axis sensor under the statue’s cabinet to pick up the vibrations from passing footsteps and traffic.
Gosling found the statue’s movement coincided with the vibrations. When foot traffic stopped overnight, the statue stopped rotating. (ANI)
Frog named after Darwin croaks its last
A frog named after Charles Darwin has gone extinct because of a deadly amphibian skin disease, scientists believe.
Darwin’s frogs were named after the father of evolution, who discovered them in 1834 in Chile during his voyage around the world on the ship HMS Beagle.
They are notable for having evolved to escape predators by looking like a dead leaf, with a pointy nose, and the fact that the males carry young tadpoles around inside their vocal sacs.
Researchers think the northern Darwin’s frog, one of two species, has been killed off completely by a fungal disease called chytridiomycosis that infects their skin. Numbers of the related southern species have plunged dramatically.
An analysis into the spread of the disease by a team from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Chile’s Universidad Andres Bello found that habitat loss contributed to the decline, but this alone could not explain the animal’s demise. (Reuters)
‘Selfie’ beats ‘twerk’ as word of the year
‘Selfie’ – a self portrait usually on a smartphone or webcam – was selected word of the year on Tuesday by the Oxford Dictionaries.
‘Selfie’ was chosen after it “gained momentum in 2013 as it evolved from a social media buzzword to mainstream shorthand for a self-portrait photograph”, Oxford Dictionaries said in a statement.
‘Selfie’ beat a number of other buzzwords of 2013, including ‘twerk’ referring to dancing in a sexually provocative manner. (Reuters)