Apr 30
“How long has it been since you could hear?” The doctor stared into my ear. “A long time?” “Years,” I said. “But this weekend it was really bad.” And it was. I could not even hear myself urinate. My wife had her birthday party and I muddled through as I often do, nodding and guessing …
Apr 08
ROBOT COCKROACH SWARM unleashed in Sheffield lab: If you’re ever under some rubble just take a deep breath and relax: Any minute now, robotic cockroaches will swarm over you. The medical benefits of a programmable group of nanobots are pretty obvious, but the swarm could also have military applications such as search and rescue operations …
Sep 19
These models were made between 1810-1830. Biomedical Ephemera says: It’s unknown if these models were intended as a darkly comic “memento mori” sort of novelty, or a teaching aid, or both. The skeletons are accurate enough to have been used to teach students how the articulations line up in the living body, so even as …
Jun 15
A ten year old girl has been the first to receive a bio-engineered vein though a transplant. It’s quite possible that other children have received them as gifts. I really don’t know. Nature reports: A team led by Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson at the University of Gothenburg took a 9 centimeter-long snippet of vein from the groin of a deceased donor, stripped it of …
Feb 24
Harvard scientists have created tiny DNA robots that can search and destroy cancer cells. The Week sez: The tiny devices were constructed out of DNA strands and folded into a shape resembling a clamshell. Researchers call it the “DNA origami” method. The devices are pre-programmed to open up in the presence of cancerous cells. Once open, …
Feb 21
Schizophrenia has been linked to genetic variants that are common to everyone. The risk factors may reach a tipping a point that overwhelm our ability to compensate. A new research method found that: . . . 23% of liability for the brain disorder could be traced back to a set of variations, most of which …
Feb 16
Drug Companies (the legal kind) are working to create pills that will monitor how your body responds to the medication, report this to your smartphone then relay that information to your doctor. Like he doesn’t already have enough problems. According to a press release from the American Chemical Society: Sanofi, a pharma company, and AgaMatrix, …
Feb 09
“Are you depressed?” begins every article on this subject. I’m just going to go ahead and assume you are. But don’t kill yourself yet. Scientists from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine have invented a smartphone that’s sure to annoy as well as depress you. A smart phone spots symptoms of depression by harnessing all the sensor …
Dec 12
That smell might be telling you something. In a paper published by The Journal of Sexual Medicine, Russian scientists have discovered that women find the smell of a man infected with gonorrhea to be “putrid.” As if they don’t have enough problems. IBN Live reports: “Our research revealed that infection disease reduces odour attractiveness in humans,” …
Apr 08
Those men in the white coats are attempting to make pills to improve morality. Dr Guy Kahane, deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and a Wellcome Trust biomedical ethics award winner says: “Science has ignored the question of moral improvement so far, but it is now becoming a big debate. There is already a …
"This ultra-sharp, darkly satiric, hyper-speed novel is set in a world where multi-level mega malls serves as city states and everything on the outside lies in ruin. On the lower red levels, gang violence and media saturation and bio-tech designer drugs rule. During the weekend, slummers from the green levels leave their safe lives of jobs and families to partake in risky, sometimes deadly, fun on the red levels. And on every level, TV and advertisements literally penetrate the mind. Death is easy and life cheap, until that life is your own or your beloveds. Extreme stylization, great characters, and a high-level of intensity is maintained throughout. This is a whip-smart, truly violent novel that has at its core a still very human pulsing heart."
