Friday, November 16, 2007

Three odd stories concerning women

1. Menstrual blood could be rich source of stem cells - New Scientist

Menstrual blood: it's not far behind paedophilia and child murder in the ranks of topics about which it is absolutely impossible to come up with any comment that could plausibly be called "witty". So, moving right along:

2. Apparently, some Australian women breastfeed their kids up to age 7. Very, very few I gather, but some. Mind you, I heard a caller to talkback radio today say that as a student teacher, she had seen women attend school for the purpose of breastfeeding their kid in grade 1! (She also claimed some women protracted breastfeeding as a tactic to help defeat an estranged husband's custody or visitation rights!) Can this be true? She sounded sane, but I have just never heard anything like this.

3. They are working on a new design for a female condom. The first version never caught on. This is how they plan to improve it:
The old design hung passively from the rubber ring, which could shift around and sometimes hurt; the new design has dots of adhesive foam that adhere to the vaginal walls, expanding with them during arousal.
Err, somehow I just can't imagine that the idea of having such a device stuck in place with adhesive foam is ever going to be an easy sell to women. In fact, I reckon the developers may as well just give up now.

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