Every spring, many thousands of Westerners travel high in the Himalayas to climb Everest and other mountains. Because of them, many thousands of Nepalese work  to guide them, carry their belongings, and build facilities for the tourists -all at altitudes at which people do not normally live. Dr. Luanne Freer established a medical clinic at Everest Base Camp in 2003 to address the health issues that come with high-altitude tourism. Not only was the base camp area lacking medical expertise, but local people who worked in the tourism industry (and could not pay for care) were being ignored elsewhere.

The ER’s locale might be glamorous, but the work is often not. Headaches, diarrhea, upper respiratory infections, anxiety and ego-related issues disguised as physical ailments are the clinic’s daily bread and butter. And although the clinic’s resources have expanded dramatically over the past nine years, there is no escaping the fact that this is a seasonal clinic housed in a canvas tent located at 17,590 feet. When serious incidents do occur, Freer and her colleagues must problem solve with a severely limited toolbox. Often the handiest implement is duct tape.

“There is no rule book that says, ‘When you’re at 18,000 feet and this happens, do x.’ Medicine freezes solid, tubing snaps in the icy winds, batteries die—nothing is predictable,” says Freer. But it’s that challenge that keeps Freer and many of her colleagues coming back. This back-to-basics paradigm also engenders a more old-fashioned doctor-patient relationship that Freer misses when practicing in the States.

Read more about Dr. Freer and she clinic she established at Smithsonian. Link

(Image credit: Molly Loomis)

It is once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what the pictured item is? Do you know what it is?

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

For more clues, check out the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!

Update: no one knew what these items were for, even hours after the What Is It? blog posted the answers. These are tools used in Europe for oyster farming! Galen won a t-shirt for the funniest answer: Early open heart surgery kit. Sternum crackers with built in chest cavity hooks. Or maybe that was supposed to be a serious answer... anyway, Galen is a winner!

Ed Wozniak, who brought us lists of Norse and Hawaiian dieties, has a list of gods in the pantheon of the Inuits, whose homelands stretch all around the northernmost regions of the world. Some have downright scary stories, like the sea goddess Sedna.

She was the daughter of the god and goddess Anguta and Isarrataitsoq and, like countless female figures in Inuit myths, she refused all prospective husbands. Sedna instead had sexual relations with dogs and the “freakish” offspring of these unions were said to be white people and Native American tribes that the Inuit were often at war with. A ghoulish twist to the story is how Sedna took to using her parents as food (a recurring theme in Inuit myths because of the scarcity of food in the frozen north at times and how instances of cannibalism during such famines were much-discussed). Sedna devoured both of her mother Isarrataitsoq’s arms and had finished eating one of her father’s arms before he was able to subdue her and take her out to sea in his canoe, intent on banishing her to the sea. Continuing to struggle, Sedna clutched the sides of the canoe as her father tried to submerge her, prompting him to take his long knife and cut off her fingers. Since, to the Inuit, loss or mutilation of the hands was often seen as a horrific transformation into something new, the myth states that Sedna now embraced her fate, transforming her now-fingerless hands into flippers and transforming her severed digits into the various species of sea animals.

Read more about Sedna and eleven other Inuit deities at Balladeer's Blog. Link

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Bill Hammock, the Engineer Guy, tears a hard drive apart to show us what's inside and what the parts do. -Thanks, Bill!

Some cuttlefish can mimic the shape of objects around them for camouflage purposes. But recent research shows they can also mimic the shapes of two-dimensional photographs of objects! National Geographic has a photo gallery of cuttlefish doing their best to mimic their backgrounds, whether natural, plastic, 2D, or 3D. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!

(Image credit: Justine Allen, Marine Biological Laboratory)

Michael Powell and Juergen Horn are continuing their living experiment in moving to a new city every three months, and writing about them on their blog 91 Days. Now in Sucre, Bolivia, they took a train excursion to Potosi, high in the Andes.

The trip takes almost seven hours, but it’s seven hours of the most beautiful landscapes imaginable, particularly if you’re able to snag the front seat next to the driver. Amazingly, this train isn’t a touristic draw. We were the only foreigners on board (and among a minority who wasn’t carrying a bag full of potatoes or chickens).

Tickets were about $3.50 apiece, already worth the price after the first 15 minutes. Vertigo-sufferers may want to take a pass on the trip… the train never feels especially steady, and I felt my stomach jump while looking down over some bridges. But if you’re a fan of mountain scenery, and not on a tight schedule, this trip is definitely something to consider. It’s also a slow, healthy way to ascend to Potosí’s 4000+ meter altitude.

See photographs and video of the trip at For 91 Days. Link -Thanks, Juergen!

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Where is the strangest place you can affix a tiny GoPro camera to get a radical "point of view" video? I would have never come up with the inside of a hula hoop, but someone did, and that's awesome. -via I Am Bored

Pedigree in New Zealand has launched an online toy that analyzes your face and matches you with a dog that is up for adoption. I was matched with Shadow, a 7-month-old male Huntaway {wiki} mix, which is a breed of New Zealand sheep dog. He's a cute dog; too bad he's in Auckland. http://www.doggelganger.co.nz/ -via Pawesome

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I hear there's an extra joke in the music if you understand Portuguese. -via The Daily What

For eleven years now, American Idol has been feeding the dreams of talented and not-so-talented singers and audience members alike. For many contestants, being on the show is a year-long commitment -and more. BankRate looks at the financial costs and rewards of such a venture. What expenses are involved in being a contestant? How much does it pay? How are the winners doing? And is it worth it even if you don't win? Of course, some former Idols have done better than others, and it doesn't always hinge on how successful they were on the show.

Once chosen for the top 12, Idol contestants are provided room and board, although the accommodations have varied widely from season to season.

"There have been years where they want to show it on the air so they put them up in mansions in the Hollywood hills; other years, they've put them up in this apartment complex that's not seen on the air," says Rushfield. "It's nothing fancy, but it's not squalor. They have roommates all the way through, and when their roommates get cut, they consolidate them to save on the rooms."

Link -via TMZ

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The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema enforces old-fashioned theater etiquette. They have two rules: no talking during a movie, and no phone usage. After a woman was ejected from the theater for texting during a film, she left an angry voice mail. The theater promptly turned her message into a public service announcement. In discussions at the Drafthouse site, Roger Ebert's blog, SlashFilm, reddit, Fark, and Metafilter, most commenters applaud the theater for enforcing silence during films. Link (video at the site contains unedited NSFW language)

Yes, it's fetching, and there's a real story behind this dress, as well. The parachute saved the life of pilot Maj. Claude Hensinger when he bailed out of his disabled B-29 over Japan in 1944. It was his blanket and pillow as he waited for rescue. In 1947, he gave it to his girlfriend when he proposed to her, and she made it into the skirt portion of her wedding dress. The dress was also worn by their daughter and then by their son's bride in later weddings. Now it belongs to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Link -via Boing Boing

Frontier Airlines called in a report that sparked a response from the Milwaukee Fire Department's Hazardous Materials Unit. A suspicious white powder was found on board a flight from Phoenix to Milwaukee -on a diaper changing table. You can see where this is going.

The white powdery substance was found on a diaper changing counter in one of the aircraft's lavatories by a flight attendant making her final check before landing Friday afternoon, Frontier spokesman Peter Kowalchuk said.

The powder appeared to be in a dotted pattern, there was as diaper in a waste bin and there were two infants onboard the flight, Kowalchuk said.

Yes, it was determined to be, in fact, baby powder. Kowalchuk said the TSA was called "out of an abundance of caution." Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Flickr user Enokson)

Could you recognize the United States presidents from their baby pictures? Then you should do well in today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss! Yeah, the more recent presidents are easier, but I still managed to score 70%. Can you beat that? Link

Very busy artist Mike Bukowski has a project going in which he is illustrating each and every creature found in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. In many cases, he has only a short description (or sometimes none at all) to work with, but they all seem to be at home in the nightmares those stories can induce. Picture is Deep One, from The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Some images are NSFW. Link -via Laughing Squid