Breathing Heavy And Sweating After An Earthquake May Save Your Life [Science]

Earthquake rescues are difficult. Rescuers try to listen for victims, spot them with cameras and use dogs to sniff them out. Someday, they may use metabolite sensors to pick up their stench.

Developed by researchers in the UK, metabolite sensors detect ammonia and carbon dioxide produced by victims when they breathe, sweat and urinate. They are sensitive and let rescuers detect small amounts of these compounds in the air pockets of a collapsed building.

Rescue dogs also detect these metabolites but the sensor technology is better. Dogs, like people are limited physically. They get hungry, tired and distracted. And the search itself can be dangerous to both the animal and its handler. Sensors, well, they just keep processing data without stopping for food or water until they die from battery depletion.[Australian Geographic]

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Microchip Implant Brings a Lost Kitten Home After Five Years and 1,800 Miles [Cats]

Five years ago, a cat named Willow went missing in Boulder, Colorado. She turned up this week 1,800 miles away in New York City. How'd her owners track her down? A tiny microchip, and huge heaping helpings of luck.

Willow is (must be) some kind of Achillean battle kitty. Her estranged owner explained that the family gave up hope after a while because of the "tons of coyotes" and owls in the area, assuming she'd been eaten. Nope. She was living it up in New York City.

We'll never know exactly how she got to New York. Maybe she just hoofed it the whole way; maybe she fell in with some kitty-lovin' hitchhikers; or could be she rode the rails and lived off of cans of baked beans cooked over barrel fires the whole way across the country. A spokesman for the New York's Animal Care & Control said Willow's in "very good condition, clean, a little chunky," so obviously she's had someone taking care of her once she got to the city.

Pet microchips are passive RFID devices, and don't require an internal power source, so they can last the lifetime of a pet. They're about the size of a grain of rice and generally cost under $100. Scans for the chips are standard when a lost or stray animal is found by authorities, and the biggest hassle is figuring out which of the why-are-there-this-many services has the owner's information.

Willow's owner joked that all of his pets are microchipped, and he'd microchip his kids if he could. But really, if it's this easy to reunite a cat with its family across five years and half the country, why aren't we microchipping basically everything in our lives? [NY Times, The Atlantic, Wikipedia, LA Times]

Image credit: Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press

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Navy Commander Fired after Shooting at Innocent Fishing Boat [War]

Hey, everyone screws up at work sometimes. It's natural. It's normal. It's usually not a big deal—unless you're commanding a Navy destroyer, and start lobbing shells at a local fishing boat off the coast of North Carolina. Darn!

This little oopsie cost Commander Mark Olson, his job, the Navy Times reports, after it was determined that incident caused "a loss of confidence in his ability to command." I'd say so! Luckily, the salvo didn't hit the fishermen, who I'm sure had ceased singing fishing shanties and began shitting their fishing pants as a 505-foot guided missile destroyer USS The Sullivans starts shooting at you out of nowhere. The rounds were inert, but more than enough to put a hole or five in a fishing boat.

Eleven years ago, terrorists tried to blow up The Sullivans, but were sunk before they could detonate. Maybe things have been a little jittery onboard since then? [Navy Times via Information Dissemination]

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The Next Version of Android After Ice Cream Sandwich Will Be Called Jelly Bean [Android]

This is my next is reporting that the next version of Android after Ice Cream Sandwich will be called Jelly Bean. It's supposed to pack "game-changing stuff" that was originally supposed to be on Ice Cream Sandwich but didn't quite make it in time.

Of course, we're still impatiently waiting for Ice Cream Sandwich so looking even past that is kinda crazy at this point but at least we know the name! I'd have much rather seen Jell-O (probably nixed for copyright issues since they have enough of that) or just jelly (jelly sounds incredibly funny by itself) though.

And if you want to take a look back into history at how far Android has come, these have been the updates to Android so far: Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Gingerbread, Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich. [TIMN, Image Credit: Buried in Betsy's Closet]

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How Did A Man Survive After Being Impaled Through His Eye Socket with Pruning Shears? [Wtf]

Leroy Leutscher, an 86-year-old man from Arizona, was out on his yard when he dropped his pruning shears. As he reached down to grab them, he slipped and fell, landing face down on the handle. The handle went through his eye socket and down into his neck. Amazingly, he's okay.

That x-ray above was taken right after the horrifying accident, and it pretty much speaks for itself. Still, even in such ridiculous circumstances, the surgeons managed to remove the shears from his face, rebuild Leutscher's orbital floor with metal mesh AND save his freaking eyeball. Leutscher still has some slight swelling on his face and a little bit of double vision but Jesus H. Christ doctors are amazing. [Telegraph UK via BoingBoing, Image Credit: Shutterstock]

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Bubble Boys Treated With Gene Therapy Still Healthy After Nine Years [Science]

It's been a big month for gene therapy: first a breakthrough for leukemia last week, now today scientists announced they've successfully treated kids with "bubble boy" disease.

We've heard this before - back in 2000 gene therapy successfully treated the same immune disease, but by 2007 five out of the 10 boys had developed leukemia (ironically, the disease successfully treated in the study announced last week), and one died. This time, the researchers smartly waited NINE YEARS to declare success with 14 out of 16 boys. It's hard to argue with nearly a decade of good health.

The boys reportedly are in school like normal kids, which without treatment could have killed them. That's because they have an immune disorder called severe combined immunodeficiency, or SCID, a rare inherited disease that leaves them with basically no immune protection. (You know The Boy in the Plastic Bubble was true, right?).

Today's studies (there were two, both published in Science Translational Medicine) is exciting news both for boys (only boys inherit the gene that causes it, and many die in infancy) with the disease but also for gene therapy, which researchers have been trying to make work for 20 years. Jesse Gelsinger's death following a gene therapy clinical trial in 1999 was a huge setback, as was the development of leukemia in the SCID boys after the 2000 clinical trials.

Scientists have modified the gene therapy to try to prevent patients from developing leukemia, but the risk of developing the disease still exists - one boy in the latest study developed it. But parents are choosing gene therapy over the alternatives: a bone marrow transplant could cure SCID, but only one in five patients finds a match; with a partial match, one in three will die.

[Science Translational Medicine; Image: Jaman]

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