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13 April 2009

LALALALALALALALALA * hands over ears *
post by: mudpuppie at: 17:12 | 41 comments
PIC NSFL AHHHHHHHHHHHH
posted by ThePinkSuperhero 13 April | 17:15
OMG, remind me never to breathe again.
posted by amro 13 April | 17:34
Sorry, totally calling BS on that one.
posted by Specklet 13 April | 17:42
You would need sunlight to form green needles. . .how the hell is sunlight going to get into a lung?

how the hell is sunlight going to get into a lung?


(among questions I never thought I'd ask. . .)
posted by danf 13 April | 17:47
without light, it wouldn't have been green and wouldn't have been able to grow
posted by DarkForest 13 April | 17:47
Oh god.


...

I think I'm going to have to research that all day tomorrow.
posted by sperose 13 April | 17:55
Thanks for pointing out the photosynthesis catch, danf. I'll rest easier now.
posted by mudpuppie 13 April | 17:56
It is obvious that a five-centimeter branch is too large to be inhaled or swallowed, doctors say. They suggest that the patient might have inhaled a small bud, which then started to grow inside his body.


They need a second opintion frmo a botanist, or perhaps a competitive eater.
posted by box 13 April | 17:57
Scalpel...

Clamps...

Let's get some suction in here, stat...

Pruning shears...

Okay, let's bag it and get this guy all sewn up.
posted by Hugh Janus 13 April | 18:05
They need a second opintion frmo a botanist, or perhaps a competitive eater.

Or he was really really drunk
posted by lysdexic 13 April | 18:18
Oh, for God's sake - it's not like none of you ever inhaled a little bud...
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson 13 April | 18:26
Yeah, I'm rejecting this as pretty much impossible. Not only would the plant need sunlight to photosynthesize, but uh...plants don't just spontaneously grow inside the human body. Did it put down roots? Did it have nutrients? CO2? N? I'm pretty sure plants can't grow on human blood. (And if they could, I'm assuming the patient would've been in much more discomfort, as the vampire plant infiltrated his blood supply.)
posted by unsurprising 13 April | 18:27
This isn't the first time I've heard of this!

There was a young girl here in the States, who'd had chronic bad breath her whole life. Somehow the doctors finally figured out she had a little bit of evergreen tree in her lung, probably ingested from a Christmas tree when she was a baby, and it was still green when they took it out.

And of course, Google is ONLY bringing up this new story, since it's all over the blogs right now. I'm going to keep looking for the older story though... it was sometime in the last ten years, I'm sure of it.
posted by BoringPostcards 13 April | 18:32
Wow, that is amazing.

Have you read this one? Nail in man's nasal cavity for up to 30 years.
posted by LoriFLA 13 April | 19:12
You would need sunlight to form green needles. . .how the hell is sunlight going to get into a lung?

I may very well be wrong but: Leaves and stuff are green because of chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is needed for photosynthesis. But I don't think sunlight is needed for green-osity, chlorophyll is just green to begin with.

And buds/seeds/whatever usually have enough nutrients and stuff for a plant to get started before it requires photosynthesis (I mean they start in the ground, I don't think there is much light down there).

I think this is plausible.
posted by CitrusFreak12 13 April | 19:23
The more I think about it the more confident I get that this thing would not need sunlight to be green.
That's why they're called evergreens, right? Because they're green year round, even when the sun's rays are not strong enough for leaves and all that.
posted by CitrusFreak12 13 April | 19:26
Oh, for God's sake - it's not like none of you ever inhaled a little bud...


And that is the Internet Quote Of The Day©

IRFH, please pick up the white courtesy phone and pick up your prize..
posted by lysdexic 13 April | 19:39
o_O
posted by redvixen 13 April | 19:41
I thought evergreens were named such because they could survive cold temperatures and/or dry conditions (i.e., winter) and not periods without sun?

Yeah, you don't need sunlight for chlorophyll to simply ..be green, but without the sunlight driving the light-dependent reactions of photosynthesis, plants tend to die, taking that green with them.

This knowledge is all at a very general level, though, so maybe evergreens have evolved some distinct photosynthetic pathway. I'm trying to search the literature for the specific differences (from deciduous trees or whatever), but I'm not really getting anywhere.

Apparently one of the magic phrases is "shade tolerance." Plant biology is so much less interesting than human biology.
posted by unsurprising 13 April | 20:02
Yeah, you don't need sunlight for chlorophyll to simply ..be green, but without the sunlight driving the light-dependent reactions of photosynthesis, plants tend to die, taking that green with them.

No. From what I remember from cell biology, plant cells won't generate chlorophyll without adequate light. We're not just talking shade here, but total darkness.
posted by DarkForest 13 April | 20:20
Oh god, the whole biology nerd thing is actively happening to me right now. I finally looked through my high school bio textbook, which is the last time I did any real plant biology. This is what the esteemed Campbell & Reece have to say about the life cycle of a pine (not a fir, but still a conifer):

- "Even during winter, a limited amount of photosynthesis occurs on sunny days."

- After fertilization of the egg cell by the sperm nucleus, "the pine embryo, the new sporophyte, has a rudimentary root and several embryonic leaves. A food supply, consisting of the female gametophyte, surrounds and nourishes the embryo. The ovule has developed into a pine seed, which consists of an embryo (new sporophyte), its food supply (derived from gametophyte tissue), and a surrounding seed coat derived from the integuments of the parent tree (parent sporophyte)."

I don't know at what point the seedling runs out of that food supply and has to photosynthesize to keep from dying. I remain skeptical.

Yeah, DarkForest (eponysterical!), you're totally right about chlorophyll-generation being a separate light-dependent pathway, but doesn't the point end up being moot when the plant dies because it has no light, so it cannot photosynthesize anyway? I don't know which happens faster, though - the plant running out of energy or the plant stopping the production of chlorophyll.
posted by unsurprising 13 April | 20:34
DarkForest (eponysterical!)

Ha! Good catch!
posted by DarkForest 13 April | 20:44
ikkyu2 points out that the other story blurbs on that page do not inspire confidence in the news source.
posted by occhiblu 13 April | 21:04
Totally not possible.

I note that the other top stories on the linked page are Bigfoot, an astrology prediction, and a story about Russian children training with police. We are not exactly talking Pulitzskaya-class journalism here.
posted by ikkyu2 13 April | 21:05
Bigfoot totally exists.
posted by unsurprising 13 April | 21:20
Nice catch, ikkyu2. Okay, everybody - keep your eyes out for Russian children and their hirsute nannies, especially while mars is in retrograde. The little bastards are spies!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson 13 April | 21:21
I kind of wish this were true. It seems reasonable that an inhaled seed could sprout and maybe put out a little root, though I don't know about lung pH. Depending upon the type of seed and how much air it needs, of course. Wild rice, maybe?
posted by notquitemaryann 13 April | 21:56
Ikkyu2 is a big pooh-pooh head.
posted by mudpuppie 13 April | 22:06
Totally unpossible. Me rock biology.
posted by special-k 13 April | 22:19
Would it really be that dark in side a lung, though? If you can shine the light from a powerful torch through your hand, why can't the sun shine through your chest? Shade-tolerant plants can get by on surprisingly little sun. Also, the photo shows that the needles were not all that green, which is common in plants that have insufficient sun.

I mean, I'm sure it's bullshit, but not necessarily because of the lack of sunlight. There's plenty of air in there, plenty of moisture ...
posted by dg 13 April | 23:34
I note that the other top stories on the linked page are Bigfoot, an astrology prediction, and a story about Russian children training with police. We are not exactly talking Pulitzskaya-class journalism here.

Yeah, Mosnews is notorious for posting bizarre stories like this. At the same time, though, they've apparently built quite a reputation for their breaking "real" news and analyses.
posted by Daniel Charms 14 April | 01:52
On the plus side: in the pic, the needles are brownish, not particularly green.

On the questionable side: (maybe esteemed ikkyu2 could weigh in here) in the pic it looks like a HUGE section of lung (?) with a small bit of branch... would it make sense to cut out such a huge section of the guy's lung when, once they realized what the problem was, they could just pluck out the foreign body and nearby damaged tissue?
posted by Meatbomb 14 April | 07:34
Yeah, and what's that tube-y like stuff that the lung is resting on?
posted by amro 14 April | 10:29
I was curious about that, too, but wasn't sure I wanted to know.
posted by lysdexic 14 April | 10:48
The Piece of Lung With The Little Fir Tree is one of my all-time favorite stories from childhood.
posted by Lipstick Thespian 14 April | 10:54
without light, it wouldn't have been green and wouldn't have been able to grow
posted by DarkForest 13 April | 17:47

Eponysterical.
posted by essexjan 14 April | 11:53
Yeah, and what's that tube-y like stuff that the lung is resting on?

I'm pretty sure it's a gauze pad.
posted by LoriFLA 14 April | 12:47
there's gauze, but there's something else as well.
posted by amro 14 April | 12:57
You know what though, I think the "something else" is fingers in rubber gloves.
posted by amro 14 April | 12:58
Well, I hope they're attached to a hand. But then, surgeons can get careless too ...
posted by dg 14 April | 19:57
Perhaps whenever the man was exposed to the sun and his body started manufacturing Vitamin D and happy chemicals and whatever other as yet unknown things our bodies make out of sunlight, it benefited the tree.
posted by serena 15 April | 00:50
← My Wife is Queen Malaprop. . . || That song always makes me cry, anyway. →

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