Free Republic

Pediatricians have to deal with all kinds of interesting situations in their daily work with children, and kids eating random objects is one of them. Children just love to stick stuff in their mouths, and while parents do their best to keep tiny toys away from eager eaters thereÂ’s always a chance that something like a Lego finds its way into the stomach of a youngster. A half-dozen pediatricians decided to see what effect, if any, a tiny yellow Lego head would have on their own bodies by volunteering to swallow them. Their findings were reported in the Journal of...

A pill that unfolds into a little robot could one day give parents everywhere a little more peace of mind. Once swallowed, it can open up inside a person's stomach, crawling across the stomach wall to retrieve a single-cell button battery, and even patch wounds. This is no small thing. In the US every year, over 3,500 incidents of swallowed button batteries are reported in the US, and most cases of battery swallowing involve toddlers. Although most of these batteries are safely digested, sometimes they can leak and cause tissue burns, bleeding, and death. Developed by an international team of...