>> ^EndAll:
...it's not just fluid, I think - it looked like a clump under the skin with bits being broken off with the pressure applied.. so it's more viscous and cheese-like...


This is Keratin - a semi-solid material consisting principally of sebum and dead skin cells.
They mention how badly it smells which suggests to me that it is probably infected, but given it's size I agree with deathcow that his immune system will handle this fine.

>> ^dag:
The fact that the top 3 all broke the world record says A LOT about the new Speedo suits.


I hope that was tongue-in-cheek. Speedo has been making "sharkskin" and "aquablade" suits for years with the same goal of less water resistance and better muscle compression. If you watch more of the races you will see plenty of events where the athletes only wear jammers (knee length) or legs. If the new suit material offered a distinct advantage, you'd see body suits in every event.

It all comes down to what will make the athlete "feel" fastest in the water. (This is the same reason why swimmers shave. Removing the layer of dead skin cells makes you feel much faster through the water, and is as important as removing the resistance causing hairs.) Claiming that these suits somehow enabled such great swims is akin to attributing Adrian Peterson's NFL single-game rushing record last season to the plastic pads and helmet he wears that athletes 50 years ago didn't have access to.

After all, those suits aren't the ones in the water for 6 hours a day for the past 4 years.

Hmmm. I'm an atheist, but the arguments he's making here are kind of illogical. First, he makes it sound like we don't know when conception occurs. Actually, from a biological standpoint it seems pretty clear--as soon as the egg and sperm nuclei fuse you get a human zygote with unique DNA. From that point on it's going to develop (barring interruptions) into a unique human being. There doesn't seem to be any vagueness about that at all.

Next, he tries to justify stem cell research by saying a fly would feel more pain than an embryo. This is kind of a strange argument. The logical conclusion here seems to be that it's ethically okay to kill humans if they don't feel any pain. So, suddenly it becomes okay to kill people who are in comas or who are heavily sedated since they won't feel a thing. After all, we might need to harvest their organs for research.

Finally, he makes an argument about potentiality that doesn't make any sense to me. He basically compares dead skin cells scraped from your nose to a developing embryo. The argument rests on the idea that those nose cells could be developed into a human clone. This seems like a vast overstatement of our scientific abilities at the moment. But leaving that aside, those nose cells have no innate potential to develop into a unique human being, unlike the embryo which would naturally develop without any help into a unique person. It's comparing apples and oranges.

I can understand him being frustrated by religious nut jobs who try to shove their beliefs down other people's throats, but there's a very real ethical debate here about what constitutes a human being and I don't think he contributed anything helpful to it.