Weight Reduction Implants

Implantable device shows promise in treating obesity less invasively: study

Fri Jun 27, 12:44 PM

An implantable device that blocks a stomach nerve has shown promise in treating obesity in a less invasive way than traditional surgery, a study has found.

The device is implanted under the skin in the abdomen and is regulated by patients through a switch.

It emits a low-level electrical charge that blocks the vagal nerve, which signals a person when to eat. This blocking causes obese patients to feel full after a normal-sized meal rather than to continue eating.

The study, a collaborative effort by the Mayo Clinic and researchers in Norway, Mexico and Australia, is published in the June issue of the journal Surgery. EnteroMedics, the manufacturer of the device, funded the research.

The device is being touted as a less invasive alternative to bariatric surgery, in which the stomach is surgically decreased in size or removed. It is reversible, unlike the surgery, and can be shut off by patients during the night.

According to researchers, there is no damage to the vagal nerves or stomach.

Followup study underway

In the study, 31 obese patients who wore the device over six months in three medical centres lost an average of almost 15 per cent of their weight.

The researchers are working on a followup double-blinded study involving 300 patients.

"All patients will have the device implanted, but one-third will not have it turned on during the first year of the study, so that after meals, it won't be blocking the nerve signals; this is called 'sham' treatment," said Michael Camilleri, a Mayo Clinic researcher who helped design the study.

"Neither the patients nor their doctors will know whether the blocking signals are going through or not. This pivotal study will tell us whether a placebo effect is responsible for some of the weight loss."

The research centres that conducted the study are Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide, Australia, Instituto Nacional de la Nutricion in Mexico City and St. Olav's University Hospital in Trondheim, Norway.

An Army of Scientists are Searching for 96 Percent of the Universe

Scientists say there's nothing to fear from atom-smasher

Sun Jun 29, 12:02 PM

By Douglas Birch, The Associated Press

MEYRIN, Switzerland - The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August.

But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists' wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth? Or spit out particles that could turn the planet into a hot dead clump?

Ridiculous, say scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials CERN - some of whom have been working for a generation on the $5.8-billion collider, or LHC.

"Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on," said project leader Lyn Evans.

David Francis, a physicist on the collider's huge ATLAS particle detector, smiled when asked whether he worried about black holes and hypothetical killer particles known as strangelets.

"If I thought that this was going to happen, I would be well away from here," he said.

The collider basically consists of a ring of super-cooled magnets 27 kilometres in circumference attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors. The ring, which straddles the French and Swiss border, is buried 100 metres underground.

The machine, which has been called the largest scientific experiment in history, isn't expected to begin test runs until August, and ramping up to full power could take months. But once it is working, it is expected to produce some startling findings.

Scientists plan to hunt for signs of the invisible "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up more than 96 per cent of the universe, and hope to glimpse the elusive Higgs boson, a so-far undiscovered particle thought to give matter its mass.

The collider could find evidence of extra dimensions, a boon for superstring theory, which holds that quarks, the particles that make up atoms, are infinitesimal vibrating strings.

The theory could resolve many of physics' unanswered questions, but requires about 10 dimensions - far more than the three spatial dimensions our senses experience.

The safety of the collider, which will generate energies seven times higher than its most powerful rival, at Fermilab near Chicago, has been debated for years. The physicist Martin Rees has estimated the chance of an accelerator producing a global catastrophe at one in 50 million - long odds, to be sure, but about the same as winning some lotteries.

By contrast, a CERN team this month issued a report concluding that there is "no conceivable danger" of a cataclysmic event. The report essentially confirmed the findings of a 2003 CERN safety report, and a panel of five prominent scientists not affiliated with CERN, including one Nobel laureate, endorsed its conclusions.

Critics of the LHC filed a lawsuit in a Hawaiian court in March seeking to block its startup, alleging that there was "a significant risk that ... operation of the Collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet."

One of the plaintiffs, Walter L. Wagner, a physicist and lawyer, said Wednesday CERN's safety report, released June 20, "has several major flaws," and his views on the risks of using the particle accelerator had not changed.

On Tuesday, U.S. Justice Department lawyers representing the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation filed a motion to dismiss the case.

The two agencies have contributed $531 million to building the collider, and the NSF has agreed to pay $87 million of its annual operating costs. Hundreds of American scientists will participate in the research.

The lawyers called the plaintiffs' allegations "extraordinarily speculative," and said "there is no basis for any conceivable threat" from black holes or other objects the LHC might produce. A hearing on the motion is expected in late July or August.

In rebutting doomsday scenarios, CERN scientists point out that cosmic rays have been bombarding Earth, and triggering collisions similar to those planned for the collider, since the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.

And so far, Earth has survived.

"The LHC is only going to reproduce what nature does every second, what it has been doing for billions of years," said John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist at CERN.

Critics like Wagner have said the collisions caused by accelerators could be more hazardous than those of cosmic rays.

Both may produce micro black holes, subatomic versions of cosmic black holes - collapsed stars whose gravity fields are so powerful that they can suck in planets and other stars.

But micro black holes produced by cosmic ray collisions would likely be travelling so fast they would pass harmlessly through Earth.

Micro black holes produced by a collider, the skeptics theorize, would move more slowly and might be trapped inside Earth's gravitational field - and eventually threaten the planet.

Ellis said doomsayers assume that the collider will create micro black holes in the first place, which he called unlikely. And even if they appeared, he said, they would instantly evaporate, as predicted by the British physicist Stephen Hawking.

As for strangelets, CERN scientists point out that they have never been proven to exist. They said that even if these particles formed inside the Collider they would quickly break down.

When the LHC is finally at full power, two beams of protons will race around the huge ring 11,000 times a second in opposite directions. They will travel in two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space.

Their trajectory will be curved by super-cooled magnets - to guide the beams around the rings and prevent the packets of protons from cutting through the surrounding magnets like a blowtorch.

The paths of these beams will cross, and a few of the protons in them will collide, at a series of cylindrical detectors along the ring. The two largest detectors are essentially huge digital cameras, each weighing thousands of tonnes, capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

Each year the detectors will generate 15 petabytes of data, the equivalent of a stack of CDs 20 kilometres tall. The data will require a high-speed global network of computers for analysis.

Wagner and others filed a lawsuit to halt operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state in 1999. The courts dismissed the suit.

The leafy campus of CERN, a short drive from the shores of Lake Geneva, hardly seems like ground zero for doomsday. And locals don't seem overly concerned. Thousands attended an open house here this spring.

"There is a huge army of scientists who know what they are talking about and are sleeping quite soundly as far as concerns the LHC," said project leader Evans.

Post Earthquake Epidemic Panic

China seals off quake town over epidemic fears: report

2 hours, 7 minutes ago

BEIJING (AFP) - One of the towns worst hit in last month's devastating China earthquake has been sealed off to prevent epidemics from spreading, after having been opened just briefly, state media said on Saturday.

More than 600 police officers have been posted around southwest China's Beichuan town, which was nearly flattened in the May 12 quake, to prevent anyone from entering, Xinhua news agency reported.

Tan Jiamin, Beichuan county's head of police, said the empty city would remain closed down for "a long time" because the rising temperatures increased the risk of epidemics, according to Xinhua.

Beichuan, a town of about 12,000 which lost half its residents in the disaster according to Xinhua, was reopened only recently.

The move was to allow people to go back to their former homes to find vital possessions left behind after last month's quake.

However, the chaotic scenes that followed once the town was reopened forced authorities to close it down again.

"Some local residents were digging for their family members with their bare hands, which can easily cause infection," Tan told Xinhua.

Contaminated carcasses could trigger diseases like avian influenza, encephalitis B and rabies, while the earthquake may also heighten the risk of infection of anthrax or tetanus, earlier reports said.

The death toll from the earthquake, China's most lethal in a generation, stood at 69,186 as of Friday noon, while 18,457 were counted as missing, according to Xinhua.

Australia's Future Fat Bomb

Australians more obese than Americans, study finds

Thu Jun 19, 8:17 AM

SYDNEY (AFP) - Australia has a higher proportion of obese people than the United States, with the health system facing a "fat bomb" unless action is taken, a study warned Thursday.

The report from the Baker Heart Institute found that 70 percent of men and 60 percent of women aged 45-65 had a body mass index of 25 or more, meaning they were overweight or obese.

Titled "Australia's Future Fat Bomb," the study compiled the results of height and weight checks carried out on 14,000 adult Australians in 2005.

The institute's head of preventative cardiology professor Simon Stewart said the results meant Australia probably had the highest rate of obesity in the world, outweighing even the United States.

"As we send our athletes off to the Olympics let's reflect on the fact that we would win the gold medal problem now in the world fat Olympics if there was such a thing," he said.

Stewart said obesity was the major threat to Australia's future health, with an estimated nine million of the 21 million population obese or overweight.

"That is a whole million more obese adults than we had thought," he said.

The study predicted there would be an extra 700,000 heart-related hospital admissions in the next 20 years due to obesity and almost 125,000 people would die because of the condition in that period.

The report calls for a national weightloss strategy on the scale of smoking and skin cancer campaigns, including subsidising gym memberships and personal training sessions.

It suggested hospital waiting lists could be prioritised on the basis of weightloss, to give obese people incentive to slim down.

"These are some of the controversial things we need to deal with because the healthcare system is going to be overwhelmed by weight-related hospitalisations from knee replacements through to heart attacks and strokes," Stewart said.

The report was submitted to a federal government inquiry into obesity.

Sexual Intolerance in Singapore

Armpit sniffer gets jail and cane

Fri Jun 13, 11:45 AM

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A Singapore man with a penchant for sniffing women's armpits was sentenced to 14 years in jail and 18 strokes of the cane for molesting his victims, a local newspaper reported Friday.

The 36-year-old, who the Straits Times said was mentally unstable, had previous convictions for drug and sex-related offences.

He molested 23 women over the course of 15 months, smelling their armpits and touching them in lifts, staircase landings and their homes, the paper said. He was caught after a housewife reported him to the police.

The court meted out the jail term, normally reserved for hardcore criminals, saying the man was likely to commit crimes again, the paper reported.

Caning on the buttocks is an additional punishment for male criminals in Singapore for offences ranging from vandalism to illegal possession of drugs and rape.

(Reporting by Melanie Lee, editing by Miral Fahmy)

Scatology in Advertising VI

Super Colon

The Super Colon is an inflatable 8 feet tall and 20 feet long replica of a human colon. The interactive organ teaches people about cancer, will be on display at Peabody's (Massachusetts) Relay for Life.

The colon is part of the large intestine and extends to the rectum. Inside the inflatable horseshoe-shaped reproduction, people get a close look at what healthy tissue looks like. As the colon progresses, its sides transform to depict tissue with nonmalignant diseases, as well as tissue with various stages of colorectal cancer.

Kafkaesque Moments in Legal History

LA obscenity trial suspended over judge's website

Wed Jun 11, 10:09 PM

By Greg Risling, The Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif. - A federal judge has suspended the obscenity trial of a Los Angeles porn distributor following a newspaper report that the judge had sexually explicit material on his own website.

Judge Alex Kozinski on Wednesday granted a joint motion to suspend the trial after the prosecution said it needed time to look into the issue of the judge's website.

The judge has told the jury to return on Monday. The panel spent hours at the Pasadena offices of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals watching videos depicting bestiality and extreme fetishes.

Kozinski is chief justice of the 9th Circuit but is serving as a trial judge in the obscenity case.

A Universe Without Knowing it

Hints of 'time before Big Bang'
By Dr Chris Lintott
Co-presenter, BBC Sky At Night, St Louis, US

Cosmic microwave background could hold clues about the Big Bang

A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old.

Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow.

Details of the work have been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.

The CMB is relic radiation that fills the entire Universe and is regarded as the most conclusive evidence for the Big Bang.

Although this microwave background is mostly smooth, the Cobe satellite in 1992 discovered small fluctuations that were believed to be the seeds from which the galaxy clusters we see in today's Universe grew.

Every time you break an egg or spill a glass of water you're learning about the Big Bang


Dr Adrienne Erickcek, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and colleagues now believe these fluctuations contain hints that our Universe "bubbled off" from a previous one.

Their data comes from Nasa's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has been studying the CMB since its launch in 2001.

Their model suggests that new universes could be created spontaneously from apparently empty space. From inside the parent universe, the event would be surprisingly unspectacular.

Arrow of time

Describing the team's work at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in St Louis, Missouri, co-author Professor Sean Carroll explained that "a universe could form inside this room and we’d never know".

The inspiration for their theory isn't just an explanation for the Big Bang our Universe experienced 13.7 billion years ago, but lies in an attempt to explain one of the largest mysteries in physics - why time seems to move in one direction.

Nasa's WMAP has been studying the CMB since 2001

The laws that govern physics on a microscopic scale are completely reversible, and yet, as Professor Carroll commented, "no one gets confused about which is yesterday and which is tomorrow".

Physicists have long blamed this one-way movement, known as the "arrow of time", on a physical rule known as the second law of thermodynamics, which insists that systems move over time from order to disorder.

This rule is so fundamental to physics that pioneering astronomer Arthur Eddington insisted that "if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation".

The second law cannot be escaped, but Professor Carroll pointed out that it depends on a major assumption - that the Universe began its life in an ordered state.

This makes understanding the roots of this most fundamental of laws a job for cosmologists.

"Every time you break an egg or spill a glass of water, you're learning about the Big Bang," Professor Carroll explained.

Before the bang

In his presentation, the Caltech astronomer explained that by creating a Big Bang from the cold space of a previous universe, the new universe begins its life in just such an ordered state.

The apparent direction of time - and the fact that it's hard to put a broken egg back together - is the consequence.

Much work remains to be done on the theory: the researchers' first priority will be to calculate the odds of a new universe appearing from a previous one.

In the meantime, the team has turned to the results from WMAP.

Detailed measurements made by the satellite have shown that the fluctuations in the microwave background are about 10% stronger on one side of the sky than those on the other.

Sean Carroll conceded that this might just be a coincidence, but pointed out that a natural explanation for this discrepancy would be if it represented a structure inherited from our universe's parent.

Meanwhile, Professor Carroll urged cosmologists to broaden their horizons: "We're trained to say there was no time before the Big Bang, when we should say that we don't know whether there was anything - or if there was, what it was."

If the Caltech team's work is correct, we may already have the first information about what came before our own Universe.

When Metaphors Violate the Everyday

St. John's neighbours reeling over discovery of dismembered body

Mon Jun 9, 2:34 AM

Residents of a quiet neighbourhood in the west end of St. John's say they are trying to cope with the gruesome discovery on Friday of dismembered body parts.

Four boys found a suitcase in a wooded area near a Warbury Street home while playing on Friday afternoon. They discovered human remains inside.

Warren Patrick White, 35, was charged Saturday with second-degree murder and performing an indignity to a dead body. On Sunday, he was remanded in custody until June 16 while he undergoes a psychiatric assessment.

The remains were identified as those of Amanda Power. Residents said White and Power had moved into a Warbury Street apartment about six months ago.

Michael Strickland lives five houses away from where White and Power lived.

"It's not that just the woman got killed. It's just the manner. That's the horrible part about it," Strickland said.

"This is like something you see on TV, but to happen five houses down - it's shocking, to know that somebody could actually do that."

Strickland's mother, Carol, said that when she last spoke with White, he told her this girlfriend was pregnant.

Resident Scott Miller, who has been watching police do their work since being called to the scene late Friday afternoon, still cannot get over what the boys had to witness, and the inhuman treatment of Power's body.

"Shocking," Miller said.

"I have a seven-year-old son, I have a wife [and] for the neighbours around the area, to me it's just way too close.

The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary has been searching the area, including an open field near where the body was found, as well as the nearby Waterford River.

"Anyone was OK. I came alone."

Man stabs shoppers in Tokyo street, killing seven

Sun Jun 8, 6:56 AM

By David Dolan

TOKYO (Reuters) - A man who said he was tired of life went on a stabbing rampage on Sunday in a crowded Tokyo shopping street, killing seven people and wounding a dozen others.

The man drove a rental truck into a crowd of pedestrians at lunchtime and then walked down the street knifing passers-by in Akihabara district, known for its discount electronics and maid cafes.

"I came to Akihabara to kill people," Kyodo news agency quoted the attacker as telling police. "I am tired of the world. Anyone was OK. I came alone."

A Tokyo police spokesman said at least seven people had been killed and 12 wounded.

"The man jumped on top of a man he had hit with his vehicle and stabbed him with a knife many times," Kyodo quoted a 19-year-old witness as saying. "Walking toward Akihabara Station, he slashed nearby people at random."

The dead were six men aged 19 to 74 and a 21-year-old woman, the news agency said.

The police said a man had been arrested, and television stations showed a slight, blood-splattered 25-year-old being herded into a police car.

Witnesses said the rampage was stopped when a policeman armed with a gun confronted the man, who NHK television said was shouting as he cut down his victims.

The street, usually crowded with tourists and locals seeking cheap gadgets, was cleared by police, who searched for evidence amid pools of blood.

"It's pretty shocking, considering that I come here all the time," a man told NHK.

The rampage came on the seventh anniversary of a massacre at a Japanese primary school, when a knife-wielding janitor and former mental patient killed eight schoolchildren. He was later executed for the killings.

Although Japan has relatively little violent crime, such high-profile cases have raised public concern about violence.

Shooting deaths remain rare in Japan, although there have been some recent cases involving "yakuza" criminal gangs.

As well as electronics, Akihabara has become known in recent years as a centre for Japan's expansive "nerd" culture of video games, comic books and outlandish fashion -- including street performers and cafes with waitresses dressed as French maids.

(Editing by David Fogarty)

Scatology in Outer Space

Space station incommoded by broken toilet

Thu May 29, 11:20 AM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronauts aboard the NASA space shuttle Discovery will be carrying an extra piece of cargo when they launch on Saturday -- a new toilet pump.

Crew members aboard the International Space Station have been fumbling with plastic bags since their zero-gravity toilet went made "a loud noise" and stopped working properly last week.

"We will be taking some spare parts up," NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

The three station crew members want the toilet working properly for obvious reasons -- but on Saturday they will be sharing facilities with seven space shuttle astronauts.

"You can imagine you are having guests over and your one and only bathroom is broken. Clearly this is something you want to have working," Beutel said.

Discovery will carry a pump and other spare parts for the toilet, which is still disposing of solid waste.

The seven Discovery crew members will carry out other handyman tasks after they dock on Monday, including fixing a paddle wheel that turns one of the station's solar wing panels and replacing nitrogen tanks needed to pressurize the station's ammonia cooling system.

A second toilet is also planned. The space toilets vent waste matter into space and work using carefully designed vacuums so nothing unpleasant escapes into the gravity-free station.

They are helping prepare the station for an expanded permanent six-member crew.

NASA has two years to complete the space station before retiring the shuttle fleet.

(Reporting by Maggie Fox, editing by Will Dunham and Jackie Frank)

Ectopia

Australian doctor stunned by baby which grew outside womb

Fri May 30, 3:27 AM

SYDNEY (AFP) - An Australian doctor on Friday hailed as a "miracle" a baby girl who survived a full-term pregnancy outside the womb.

Durga Thangarajah was delivered by caesarean section at Darwin Private Hospital on Thursday, after spending almost nine months growing inside her mother's right ovary -- stretching the organ's tissue as thin as paper.

Obstetrician Andrew Miller said the chances of a foetus lodging in an ovary were one in 40,000 but that the chances of such a pregnancy producing a healthy baby were almost nil.

Asked whether the birth was miracle, Miller said: "Oh yes."

"It's an extraordinarily unusual outcome and I am not aware of anyone who has seen a (full) term ovarian pregnancy as we have here," he told AFP.

"I deliver anything up to 520 (babies) a year here privately and I've never seen anything like this before."

An ectopic pregnancy, in which the foetus develops outside the womb, usually involves the fertilised egg lodging in the fallopian tubes which link the ovaries to the uterus.

The condition places the woman's life at risk because of the likelihood the foetus will cause a rupture resulting in pain and blood loss, and is usually resolved by a miscarriage or termination.

Miller said the condition had not been detected in this case because the mother, 34-year-old Meera Thangarajah, had not had early pre-natal scans and had had a trouble-free pregnancy.

Until he performed the operation on Thursday, he thought he would deliver the baby normally from the womb while also removing a large fibroid which scans had detected.

It was only after he made the incision that he released that what doctors had misdiagnosed as a fibroid, an overgrowth of the muscle of the womb, was in fact the mother's womb and the baby was in the ovary.

"And you can't believe that the baby, just by normal movement and that, wouldn't have caused the sac (inside the ovary) to rupture. It was so paper thin you could see the baby's hair," Miller said.

"She's very lucky to be here with baby Durga this morning."

The baby's father, Ravi Thangarajah, said his wife had no idea there was anything unusual about the pregnancy.

"We came in around 6.30 am and expected it to be a normal caesarean and to go like expected," he told the Nine Network.

The 40-year-old said his wife did not know about the remarkable delivery until she awoke from a general anaesthetic after the operation.

"The doctor and the paediatrician came in and told me it was like a miracle baby, you're one of the luckiest men in the world at the moment," he told the Nine Network.

The Taste of Wax

Hitler wax figure sparks controversy

Mon Jun 2, 1:19 PM

By Kerstin Gehmlich

BERLIN (Reuters) - Plans to include an Adolf Hitler figure in the new Berlin branch of Madame Tussauds wax museum are being condemned by critics who say displaying the dictator is tasteless and could attract neo-Nazis.

Madame Tussauds, which is due to open its Berlin museum next month, argues Hitler is part of German history and deserves a place in the exhibition near the Brandenburg Gate.

"Our surveys show people want to see him because he belongs to Germany's past," said spokesman Natalie Ruoss.

Hitler would be featured as a broken man in a dark, bunker-like setting, with panels providing explanations on the dictator, Ruoss said, adding a figure of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill would be shown in the same room.

Opponents of the Hitler waxwork say the man who led Germany into World War Two and ordered the extermination of Europe's Jews should not be shown in the same style as popstars, statesmen and famous soccer players.

"It's tasteless," said Johannes Tuchel, from the Gedenkstaette Deutscher Widerstand, a memorial for opponents of the Nazi regime. "A waxworks museum is meant to entertain and to amuse. It's not appropriate to have a Hitler figure there."

Tuchel said Germany had many historical museums which informed citizens about the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, adding a waxworks exhibition could hardly provide the necessary explanation and context to treat this chapter of history.

"It's embarrassing that this part of German history should be exhibited like this," he said. "There's also the danger that young people could try to take pictures with Hitler."

UNDER CAMERA SURVEILLANCE

In the Madame Tussauds museum in London, a Hitler figure is on display in the same section as other world leaders from the past and present, including U.S. President George W. Bush and former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit, whose waxworks image will also be part of the exhibition, has written a letter to the museum, asking for more information on how Hitler will be presented and urging organizers to treat the matter in a sensitive way.

Uwe Neumaerker from the foundation for Germany's central Holocaust memorial site, based just a few hundred meters away from the museum, said the Hitler figure was tasteless.

"This is all about producing a shock effect and attracting clients," he told Berliner Zeitung daily.

Apart from Hitler, the new museum will also feature waxworks of scientist Albert Einstein, Chancellor Angela Merkel and sports stars including former tennis champion Boris Becker.

Madame Tussauds spokeswoman Ruoss said visitors would not be able to pose with the Hitler figure, which would be sealed off and be under camera surveillance.

"We have considered this problem and have taken precautions," she said. It is illegal in Germany to display artwork glorifying Hitler.

In recent years, Germany has begun to treat Hitler with less caution.

The country's first mainstream film about Hitler, the 2004 movie "Downfall" sparked a heated debate because it portrayed the "Fuehrer" in more human terms, showing his mental and physical erosion during the final days of the war.

Last year, a taboo-breaking Hitler comedy by Swiss-born Jewish director Dani Levy was released in Germany.

(Reporting by Kerstin Gehmlich; editing by Ralph Boulton)