Fantastic voyage

Journey to the small bowel. Splendid news, we report, for medical science in general and sufferers from something nasty in the nether areas in particular: experts have devised a pill that can travel through the body, transmitting video images from the stomach, bowel and caecum, removing the eye-watering necessity for the insertion of fibre-optic bundles and other impedimenta from the rear.

Journey to the small bowel. Splendid news, we report, for medical science in general and sufferers from something nasty in the nether areas in particular: experts have devised a pill that can travel through the body, transmitting video images from the stomach, bowel and caecum, removing the eye-watering necessity for the insertion of fibre-optic bundles and other impedimenta from the rear.

Others will be better qualified to assess the wider implications of the video pill; we are left to marvel at the timetable details of its pioneer journeys, powered only by nature: mean small bowel transit time, for example, was 90 minutes, with a range among volunteers of 45 to 140 minutes; mouth to evacuation time was 24 hours. High-quality images were received throughout the transmissions, which lasted up to six hours.

It was that last piece of information, though, that set off a tiny and entirely unscientific bleep of alarm, as, up until now, we have been unable to envisage anything worse than being asked round by the neighbours to watch a couple of hours of their holiday videos.