Dick Smith?

If you compare the amount of my hair in this old photo with that in the recent photo below, you will realise that many years have intervened between these photos.



And that's how long it took me to find out where they make that solid thing!
















OK lah, let's stop horsing around and get intellectual:

ZEN Results Raise Early Hopes for DES in Erectile Dysfunction

PDE-5 inhibitors easily make baby boomers the lucky generation.

Unfortunately some are not so lucky and do not respond to the vasodilating effect of PDE-5 inhibitors like Cilais, Levitra and Viagra.

These include men with focal atherosclerotic narrowing of one or both internal pudendal arteries. (The internal pudendal artery in the male is a blood vessel that branches off the artery of the pelvis, providing blood to the dorsal and deep arteries of the penis)

But even among these not so lucky ones, there is hope.

50 men this group were enrolled in a ZEN trial sponsored by Medtronic to test a drug-eluting stent (DES) of the internal pudendal artery (not the penis itself, :-).

Dr Jason Rogers (UC Davis Medical Center, Sacramento, CA) unveiled the early results at the recent VIVA: Vascular InterVentional Advances, 2011 Conference in Las Vegas, which suggest that this novel use for a DES is safe and associated with significant improvement in erectile function and satisfaction.

He stressed that the "exciting" positive results nevertheless mark a very early first step toward a treatment that will never be for all men with erectile dysfunction. A lot more investigation is required

A stent is a tiny tube placed into an artery, blood vessel, or other duct (such as one that carries urine) to hold the structure open. A drug-eluting stent is coated with a medicine that helps further prevent the arteries from re-closing

Penis Itself May Be Source of Male Hormones

Here’s another good news for aging baby boomers that Dr. Kathleen Hwang, currently an assistant professor of surgery/urology at Brown University described as “actually very exciting”

Textbooks have long listed the centers of male hormone production as the testes and adrenal glands. Kathleen and colleagues harvested testes, prostate, penile and adrenal gland tissue from two 3-month old mice, subjected them to high-tech microscopic analyses and found three key proteins known to be involved in androgen production in both prostate gland and penile tissue.

Kathleen presented the findings at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) annual meeting in Orlando, Florida. on October 19, 2011.

Dr Edward Kim, president of the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology at the University of Tennessee's graduate school of medicine in Knoxville opined that more research with humans is required "to get a real handle on what's going on."