My car turned over 140,000 miles today. Wow!!! I bought it new, way way back in the 90s and I keep cars until they drop dead, or nearly drop dead. None of this trade-in every year crud, not with the obscene property taxes my town levies every single year on the car. I think the rust will kill the car before anything happens to the engine.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,218369,00.html
Scientists at the Bradford Unversity in England are modifying an ancient technique used before WW II, when penicilin became popular. Maggots! But instead of applying actual maggots, the scientists developed a new wound dressing impregnated with purified excretions and secretions from live greenbottle blowfly larvae. The researchers tested their prototype dressings against layers of human and mouse cells grown on lab dishes, which were scratched to simulate wounding. They found the dressing markedly accelerated closure of the wounds. The maggots produce juices that kill bacteria, thus preventing infection. Antibiotics pretty much put maggots out of favor, but now there are wounds that just don't heal with antibiotics, so they break out the bugs, er, larvae.
Cool stuff.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}