The CBC has an article about a medieval recipe found in a 1,000-year-old book that can kill antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
The recipe's ingredients include: garlic, onion or leek, wine, and oxgall (bile from a cow's stomach). Oh, yeah, it's also supposed to be "brewed in a brass vessel, strained and then left to sit for nine days before use."
From the article:
A recipe for the potion, originally an eye salve, was found in Bald's Leechbok, a 10th-century book of Anglo-Saxon medical advice and recipes for medicines, salves and treatments found in the British Library.
...
When tested in mice on wounds infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), it performed at least as well as conventional antibiotics, reported scientists at the Annual Conference of the Society for General Microbiology this week in the United Kingdom.
"We were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of ingredients was," Freya Harrison, the University of Nottingham microbiologist who led the study, said in a statement.
Apparently, this recipe is even effective against biofilms which modern antibiotics really struggle to combat.
More details from The University of Nottingham and BBC News.
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Thursday April 09 2015, @02:20PM
You descriminate against some of your flowers? J/K
How long have you been doing that? Are you really just dumping them in there? I would expect that composting them in a separate pile and then moving them to the flower bed after they have rotted into soil already woudl be good. Likewise tilling them into the soil in either the spring or fall when the flowers aren't there so that they are well mixed, not concentrated in lumps might be good. Hopefully worms would do most of the processing rather than fungi.
Just dumping them.. you might get fungi growing in them which could eventually kill the flowers.