Technology
purepedantry | July 15, 2006Surgeons are experimenting with ways to use cryogenics to aid in surgery. If you can put someone in suspended animation, it would make the process of surgery much easier. Here is a description from Wired Magazine about such an experiment in a porcine test subject:
"Make the injury," Alam says. Duggan nods and slips his hands into the gash, fingers probing through inches of fat and the rosy membranes holding the organs in place. He pushes aside the intestines, ovaries, and bladder, and with a quick scalpel stroke slices open the iliac artery. It's 10:30 am. Pig 78-6 loses a quarter of her…
purepedantry | July 10, 2006The next steak you eat could be grown in the lab:
Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.
Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They…
purepedantry | July 4, 2006Neurodudes has an excellent article on software intended to reduce medical errors.
Just from my limited personal experience, I would say that such software would be useful if people understand that it is limited in scope. There are three general reasons I think that software is useful in medicine:
Standardization. There are many diseases for which there are clear standards of care. For example, chest pain has a very straightforward heuristic that we follow in diagnosing a patient, and for each possible diagnosis there is a clear set of treatments. In areas for which there is not a lot…
cevans | July 3, 2006
The history of information -- which is to say, the history of everything -- is littered with codes. Some are cryptic, designed to be understood by only a few, while others are made to be cracked. Numbers, for example, are symbols which translate the abstraction of mathematical information into a code we can understand. Language, too, is such an idea code. The Dewey Decimal System was a code for organizing all knowledge into ten distinct classes. Morse code broke meaning into short pulses of sound. HTML and other computer programming languages are codes which make the arrangement of graphics…
purepedantry | July 2, 2006Popular Science has a great article on the recent advances in prosthetics. They hit on one of the topics that I think has been really under-researched: neural to machine interfaces. What you would really like to do with a prosthetic is have it communicate directly to and recieve information directly from the central nervous system. To whit:
Once science figures out better ways to attach artificial limbs, prosthetics themselves need to become smarter, able to act on signals sent directly from the brain. Consider the case of Jesse Sullivan, a power lineman from Dayton, Tennessee, who lost…
purepedantry | June 15, 2006SciAm's Invention is reporting the filing of a patent for a vomit ejector -- a ultrasonic pulse that irritates the wall of the trachea triggering the patient too cough:
Patients who overdose on drugs or alcohol can easily drown on their own vomit because they are too intoxicated to cough. Doctors must dread the thought of giving mouth-to-mouth to such a patient in an emergency.
So inventor John Perrier from Queensland, Australia, has come up with an ultrasonic device that promises to make anyone cough, no matter how ill or sedated they are.
The handheld device, which resembles a rechargeable…
cevans | February 26, 2006If we take at least as hypothetical truth my previous assumption that the Internet bears uncanny parallels to the Universe, it is in interesting to begin a discourse on the translation of both the conceptual and physical properties of the Universe onto its microcosm -- the man-made web of chaos and information that is the Internet. After all, the guiding laws of the world are physical ones -- properties of physics. Are graphical web browsers, designed to aid people in their navigation through an otherwise conceptually baffling system, analogous to natural structures? After all, they must have…
cevans | February 25, 2006
I've always considered myself to be computer-savvy. After all, my Dad works for a major semiconductor manufacturer, I hung out deeply with MS-DOS when I was six, taught myself HTML in high school, and -- I promise you -- I have been on Myspace.com for much longer than you have. I've always scoffed at the kind of people who type with just their pointer fingers, have trouble installing software, and refer to that endless database of ours as the "internets." And, yet, when a friend of mine earnestly asked me, just the other night, "so, where is the internet, exactly?" I found myself stammering…