You'd Never Guess What the Surgeons Removed From This Baby's Brain


Image: The New England Journal of Medicine

Doctors have removed teeth from the brain of a 4-month-old infant. In what is believed to be the first in medical history, the teeth are formed as a result of a rare type of brain tumor.

"It's not every day you see teeth in any type of tumor in the brain," Dr. Narlin Beaty, a neurosurgeon at the University of Maryland Medical Center who performed the surgery, said to Live Science.

The tumor, according to Beaty, is a craniopharyngioma, a rare brain tumor that can grow to be larger than a golf ball and is known to contain calcium deposits. "But when we pulled out a full tooth ... I think that's something slightly different," added Beaty.

The child is doing well, all things considered. Live Science has the full story.


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First of all, thank you for the thoughtful reply - this is one of the things I love most about running this site.

I'm not saying that we should turn Neatorama into (yet another) Buzzfeed or Viralnova clone, but having run this blog since 2005, I've learned that one thing is constant: we have to adapt and evolve.

The web that this blog "grew up" in has changed. The way that content is discovered and consumed has changed. Commenting habit has changed (drastically, if I may add).

I'm not worried about pageviews: We were one of the first big blogs that eschewed splitting posts into multiple pages for the sake of pageviews. We've avoided slideshows for the exact same reason. You can view comments straight on the front page - no need to click to another page to do so. But I am worried about growing the unique visitors (a very hard metrics to grow).

One person's clickbaity title is another person's teaser headline, and it's a damned fine line we'd have to walk to experiment with new ways to grow traffic versus not losing our souls doing so. But one thing is certain: we have to experiment with new ways or risk dying a slow death.
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AFAIK, Buzzfeed and their ilk gain their "much higher traffic" by resorting to petty clickbait and other tricks to get clicks. Heck, there are many unsavoury ways to increase click/traffic:

- Slideshows that require you to click multiple times. "30 cute kittens doing amazing things you won't believe! Wow!", now you have to click 30 times to see all the pictures, instead of having just one page to scroll through. Super annoying for the reader, but a sure fire way to abuse your readers' curiosity for clicks.

- Get rid of the brief description/preview of the article and have just a picture accompanied by a clickbait headline. This will encourage more people to click on things that they normally wouldn't read. Sure, it'll piss off people who click and find that the content is not interesting, but who cares, all for the clicks!

- Porn, because sex sells. Get more traffic to your site by incorporating articles, pictures, videos that are highly suggestive, if not outright pornographic, and watch your traffic soar! "25 buildings that look like boobs? LOL!", "OMG! You won't believe what this sexy grandma does at the bank!"

I suppose if the site wants to sink to such a level to gain traffic, that's their choice. But if it were my site, I would feel so incredibly dirty.
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