A Canadian man was taken to the St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver for an emergency procedure called fasciotomy to save his limbs. The operation was a success but what the doctors found along the way reminded them of old Star Trek episodes.

The patient actually had blood with a dark-greenish shade similar to the character Mr. Spock in the famed TV series. Upon further investigation, the doctors found out what was causing the change in color.

As it turned out, the patient was taking medication for his migraine and was popping in 200 milligrams of a drug called sumatriptan into his system every day. Doing so resulted in a very rare condition called sulfhaemoglobinaemia, which happens when components of the drug mix with the color-causing hemoglobin in red blood cells.

The doctors, led by Dr. Alana Flexman, ordered the patient to stop taking the drug immediately. After five weeks of observation, the man's blood was back to normal and the legs that were operated on had almost fully recovered.

It's a scary fact, but you don't find any Metal Gears in Zanzibar island. What you get is pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacteria that almost took out a British Columbian girl's eyesight.

Trasey Plouffe's dream vacation turned out to be a nightmare, when she woke up with bacteria eating her eyes. The 18 year old experienced great pain with veins in her eyelids popping out. "I was hoping it would just fade away during the next night," cried the girl.

We won't be too graphical about it, but imagine bacterias making holes out of your cornea. The local first-aid station couldn't help because of language barriers; they couldn't understand each other.

Rubbing her eyes only caused more trouble, spreading the microscopic culprits making her suffer. Even after turning blind, she caught a bus to reach a clinic the next day. All she got from the doctor was: "You're losing your eyes. You better get out of here."

Not losing hope, she took a 10-seater plane to Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam immediately. The hospital could only do as much as give her painkillers and advise to get to a hospital in Canada.

Thanks to a kindhearted member of the Canadian High Commission in Tanzania, she was able to reach Vancouver General Hospital. This was the last stop after five days of her ordeal.

Cornea transplants were able to give her vision back, but it's still blurry after having 17 stitches in her right eye and 24 on the other. Plouffe can only go through this with a positive mind, saying "The cataracts will get bad and I will lose my eyesight, but it's temporary and it will get fixed."

A report by the Associated Press informs that Daniel Dzurisin, a geologist at the US Geological Survey's Cascades Volcano believes that Mount St. Helens may be following the example of Kilauea in Hawaii in that it has become an "open system." Basically this means that magma is being replaced from a reservoir beneath the volcano as fast as it emerges as lava at the surface.

The Geologist notes that this was observed from the domebuilding eruption that started last 2004 and that continues at a relatively unchanged pace.

Analysis of digital elevation models made from high-resolution aerial photographs reveal that, the flow has grown from roughly eight cubic yards, per second, to slightly more than one cubic yard per second. Since last April it has been fairly constant at 0.6 cubic yards per second. They note that this is about equivalent to nine truckloads of lava every two minutes

Dzurisin notes that the longer the eruption continues, the more likely that a direct pathway has developed for molten rock to emerge from the beneath the earth's crust to the planet's surface. Dzurisin does note however, that it will take them another year the reach a more definite conclusion.

The experts say that they know that St. Helens is capable of eruptions that could last for decades. Moreover, one has to note that the ongoing eruption at Kilauea started in 1983. All those "lava flows in our backyard" stories come from Hawaii and Kilauea. Will we be hearing about lava flows in Vancouver in the near future? Time will tell.

Does the Earth hum? Scientists say it does. In 1998, researchers in Japan detected a mild, rumbling sound in the lithosphere even when there aren't any earthquakes detected. 

To test this yourself, try holding your ear close to the ground and listen- do you hear a sound that goes "thump, thump, thump?" If you can, seek medical help because something is very wrong with you. Either that or you were somewhere in Kenya with gazelles stampeding in the distance at the time you were doing the test.

That's because the earth's hum, although very real, is well below the hearing range of humans. Detectable only by the most sensitive seismometers, the hum is only about 10 millihertz in frequency.

The researchers who made the discovery hypothesized that the rumble may not actually coming from the earth itself, but from the force of air downdrafting on soil and pounding it to create the steady rhythm. However, American scientists recently concluded an elaborate research suggesting that the thump emanates from waves in the coastline hitting the shores and not from wind. Barbara Romanowicz, from the University of California at Berkeley, spearheaded the American research team and deployed seismometers worldwide to determine the source of the rumbling.

Meanwhile, Goran Ekstrom demonstrated in 2005 in Columbia University that the amplitude of the rumbling coincided and showed correlation to the energy picked up at coastlines worldwide. Now, Spahr Webb, a colleague of Eksrtom, says that he can demonstrate how exactly the ocean waves drive the humming. Webb says that when two waves of the same frequency travel at different directions, they alternately (the waves amplify and cancel each other out) create a pattern in which the surface of the sea becomes wavy, then flat, then wavy again. The motion creates a standing wave and ultimately, the thumps.

The waves then double in frequency, generating the humming of the earth from the seabed to the continents. That coincides with the Berkeley research which also noted that along coastlines, the hum signature is at its strongest, most notably in Vancouver right off the Canadian coast.

Webb also points out that Mars may have a hum similar to Earth's but, due to the absence of oceans in the red planet, the hum is most probably caused by "Marsquakes."