Ireland reports record numbers of young people getting the mumps this year. Most are students in the 18-24 age group who are reporting inflammation of the salivary glands as the main symptom.

Geez, I thought mumps was a thing of the past. Looked up its history–hard to find on the web–but got this tidbit:

“…some older virology textbooks that still included some historical background information on viruses.

• Hippocrates described an outbreak of mumps in the 5th century B.C.
• Hamilton in 1790 emphasized the importance of orchitis and thought some CNS complications also were related to this glandular infection.
• In 1934 Johnson and Goodpasture demonstrated a filtrable virus was present in the saliva after successfully transmitting the virus to rhesus monkeys…
• Habel in 1945 was able to cultivate the virus in chick embryo …

Wonder if the Irish were preoccupied with something else (like bombing each other?) 15 or 20 years ago and didn’t bother to follow routine with the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (for kids 15 months of age or older). Anyway, if you’re inclined, here’s a site on modern Irish history. Might be fun to know some of that stuff for St. Patrick’s day coming up.

Sometimes a solution comes along for a terrible problem that’s so elegant in its simplicity you wonder what in the hell took so long.

At a Chicago conferenc recently somebody figured out a way to save nearly half the 6000 people hanging onto life while waiting for kidney transplants. Voila–if your relative’s blood type doesn’t match yours, why not use a computer database to trade with somebody else’s relative who does–and who can use yours.

The U.S. isn’t the first country to think this up; Netherlands, Israel, and South Korea already operate similar programs. Database technology, which provides searchability in a hundred ways across millions of pieces of information–and which is as close as we can get to the way the human brain works–gives us ever-more-exciting ways to help people in our own backyards and people around the world.

Of course, it also gives the government–and enemies–frighteningly increasing power to know everything about you, too. But we’ve weathered world wars, raised a generation of kids to hide in the bunker from possible atomic bombs, got through the cold war, and are coexisting with soldiers having to fight wars that were unprovoked, so I guess we’ll manage to come up with a way to coexist with vast numbers of people knowing incredible amounts of stuff about us. Already, studies show that our young people are far less concerned about privacy than earlier generations.

Good thing. And it looks like this time, the rebels among us are using computers–including blogs–to fight injustice instead of homemade bombs like the underground freedom fighters in the 60s. Truly, computers have brought home the truth: The pen is mightier than the sword.

Now may be we can get our government to switch weapons–and save a few tens/hundreds/thousands of lives. We don’t need another generation where so many of our good young men don’t live to marry and father the next generation.

Now here’s what sounds like a good use for nano-materials–and hopefully not a dangerous one. ‘Twould be grand if this were brought to market soon. Though I love wireless devices for their convenience, I hate the constant purchasing, replacing and feeling-guilty-when-trying-to-decide-how-to-dispose of the typical ones. “Please discard properly. Batteries can leak… blah, blah” — the little environmental consciousness part of my conscience nags me every time I throw them in the garbage…

Happy news from Nokia: Using nanocrystals, Nokia has invented (it’s still in testing)“a rechargeable battery that can be fully charged in just 6 minutes, lasts 10 times as long as today’s rechargeables and can provide bursts of electricity up to three times more powerful is showing promise in a Nevada lab.”