The Lestina family of Bagley, Iowa were greeted with a wonderful Halloween surprise on the morning of October 3, when they awoke to find 5 inches of animal blood, fat, and bones flooding through the basement.

Two weeks later, it's still blooding.

The Lestinas have lived next door to a meat locker for the last decade. But the building was transferred to new ownership this past April 2019, and, well, something clearly went wrong., because the drainage from the kill room backed up and clogged the shared pipelines, which spilled over into the Lestinas' house.

(It took two weeks for the meat locker to reach and offer to help pay for the mess, too, although they were cooperating with local health and sanitation services before that.)

From the Des Moines Register:

Two weeks later, the blood is still seeping into the basement and the Iowa Department of Public Health told the family it's not safe to live in the home.

They are staying with relatives in Panora until the mess can be cleaned up.

"I've had a company come out for cleaning and sanitizing, but they can't start that process until it stops coming up the drain," Lestina said. "I've been talking to different excavation people. It hasn't been a promising deal. I need dry weather."

According to KTIV, the family was hoping to put their house on the market soon, too. But that plan might hit some snags. Read the rest

Last night I saw HBO's The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and her company/cult, Theranos. It's very good and surprisingly unsettling.

UPDATE: I've looped her intensely unpleasant stare for 10 minutes and set it against a nice slow performance of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Enjoy the embedded video above.

Here's an infinitely looping GIF of it, sans music.

Read the rest

The FDA has issued a warning advising Americans not to engage in the practice of infusing plasma taken from young people's blood, a "treatment" promoted to treat "normal aging and memory loss... dementia, multiple sclerosis, heart disease and post-traumatic stress disorder." Read the rest

We are in serious bad sci-fi movie territory here.

Ambrosia is a start-up offering "young blood" to people who are not "young." This blood is supposed to make you all awesome again! Like before your blood got all old! Only problem being the scientists who conducted the study say it is dangerous.

Apparently, folks are lining up to get injected with the blood of the young.

Business Insider:

Does young blood hold the keys to a long and healthy life? Startup founder and and Stanford Medical graduate Jesse Karmazin believes it might, so he launched a startup called Ambrosia Medical that fills older people's veins with fresh blood from young donors.

But researchers who study the procedure say it poses major risks for patients, including an elevated risk of developing several serious conditions later in life, such as graft-versus-host disease, which can occur when transfused blood cells attack the patient's own cells, and transfusion-associated lung injury.

Irina and Michael Conboy, two University of California at Berkeley researchers who've published research on young blood transfusions in mice, called Ambrosia's plans "dangerous."

"They quite likely could inflict bodily harm," Irina Conboy told Business Insider.

The Conboys' concern stems from an awareness of what happens in the body when it receives foreign blood from a donor.

"It is well known in the medical community — and this is also the reason we don't do transfusions frequently — that in 50% of patients there are very bad side effects. You are being infused with somebody else's blood and it doesn't match," Conboy said.

Blood is complicated: it changes texture, color and thickness depending on where it's flowing from and how fast. Though you can make a convincing fake blood with water, food coloring, flour and corn syrup, getting the proportions right depends on a scientific understanding of the context in which your fake blood is appearing. Read the rest

Alice Potts engages in what she calls "human body design," creating bioplastics by soaking materials in body fluids to embed them with crystals. Read the rest

YouTuber Brainiac75 got a lot of questions about the possible dangers of a supermagnet affecting the iron in his blood, so he did an experiment with real blood. Read the rest

German police, spotting a car that appeared to have been in a horrifying collision, pulled over the driver for a chat. But the enormous blood-spatter was just a realistic decal, and they sent the man on his way. Read the rest

Psychology professor Dr. Emyr Williams of Glyndwr University in Wales, UK researchers "real vampires" and often appears on television to discuss their blood-drinking lifestyle.

“We are talking about a group of individuals who believe they have a psychological need to consume blood," Williams has said.

Now an employment tribunal has revealed that after a female student somehow got a cut while in class, Williams allegedly wiped up the blood with his fingers and then licked them. The young woman reported the unusual behavior to one of Williams's PhD student, Helen Coleman, who reported it to school officials. Coleman alleges that the school didn't reprimand Williams but instead punished her, kicking her out of the PhD program.

“This is an extraordinary case," said Coleman's attorney. "We have never dealt with anything like this before.”

"'Extraordinary' claims Glyndwr University student 'turned vampire'" (Daily Post via Mysterious Universe) Read the rest

My cars and bikes have the batteries in hard to reach places. This 10mm battery terminal rachet helps out!

In prepping the Vanagon Westy for a long roadtrip, I found I've killed my house battery. I ordered up a replacement but dreaded getting into the battery box. In a Vanagon, Volkswagen hides the batteries underneath the passenger and drivers seats. Getting at these battery terminals is a comedy of errors and blood. I'd go so far as to say the blood was compulsatory until I got this handy rachet at Harbor Freight.

It is small. It fits where I need it to. It is a rachet, and as such I am not constantly trying to re-seat the fucker while zapping myself against a grounded battery box in a thoughtlessly engineered tight space. At least VW put a cover on the battery box, albiet a conductive metal one. My '78 Audi 5000, the model with occasional self-determination, had a passenger bench burnt with splashed battery acid from another VW/Audi underseat battery adventure.

10mm Side-Terminal Battery Reversible Ratchet Wrench Chrome-Plated via Amazon Read the rest

Indecline made headlines with a series of naked Trump statues that popped up around the country. Now they are back with Rise Up Thy Young Blood, a project extolling American diversity, created from their blood. Note: if you don't like blood or needles, this video is not be for you. Read the rest

The Australian Red Cross Blood Service is testing a technology to project a vein map on the arms of blood donors during the phlebotomy.

"Vein visualisation technology uses near infrared technology to project an image of the vein onto the skin," says Dr. Dan Waller, a senior researcher with the organization. "Veins have a lot of deoxygenated haemoglobin that absorbs near infrared light and the device is able to use this information to project the image. The machines have settings to manage individual differences.

"World-first vein viewing tech trial is... not in vain!" (Australian Red Cross) Read the rest