Tag: medicine

"The only living Canadian with no pulse"

Sounds like the set-up to a joke about some ancient Senator, doesn’t it? But it’s really a remarkable story about a 65-year-old-man whose heart has been replaced (*SEE UPDATE*) by an artificial “turbine heart” designed to last for 10 years. As Paul Simon sang (many years ago now), “This is an age of miracles and …

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Yeah, but cleaning the print heads is murder

What exotic device do you need to cause a single population of adult stem cells to form a variety of types of tissues? What else? An ink-jet printer.

Good news for fighting viral pandemics:

A 60-second test for virus infections. Best bit: “You could actually apply it to a person walking off a plane and know if they’re infected.”

A new way to kill disease-causing bacteria

Clay: not just for pottery any more.

Talk about a chill down your spine…

From Live Science: “…a team headed by Dr. Moshe Shoham of Haifa’s Technion has created a novel propulsion system for a miniature robot to travel through the spinal canal, powering through cerebrospinal fluid.”

Antimatter: not just for powering warp drives any more

Turns out it also kills cancer.

The curious case of Dr. Carefoot

Bob McDonald, director of membership and legal services for the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan,, recently tipped me to the strange case of a Dr. Carefoot, disciplined by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Province of Saskatchewan in the 1920s for diagnosing and treating patients using an Abrams Machine. “A …

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A cure for cat allergies?

Do pets make you sneeze? Well, you’re not alone: an estimated ten percent of the population is allergic to animals. And the animal responsible for the majority of those allergies is Felis domesticus–your basic household cat. Being the cat person that I am, this strikes me as a terrible, terrible, thing, worthy of serious research. …

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Brain fingerprinting

It sounds like science fiction: strap a few electrodes onto someone’s head and determine whether his or her brain contains certain information. But in fact “brain fingerprinting” is here today. Brain fingerprinting is based on the “ah-ha” response, an involuntary response by the brain to information it has been exposed to before. Dr. Lawrence Farwell, …

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From tennis elbow to hot-tub lung

Once upon a time, most of the injuries people suffered were the result of the hard physical labor they had to perform day-in and day-out to survive. Today we have a whole new set of injuries and ailments that are the result, not of hard work, but of recreation. Take hot-tub long, for instance. This …

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Joint replacement: what’s a nice joint like you doing in a dame like this?

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.” So began each episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. Twenty-some years after that TV series aired, we still don’t have bionic people capable of superhuman feats of strength and speed, but we do have lots of people walking around with artificial parts: especially, artificial joints. My …

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21st century dentistry

I had to have my last remaining wisdom tooth pulled on Friday. It was not, I hardly need add, something I enjoyed. But the number of teeth that have to be pulled in the future (from everyone, I mean, not just me) may be lower than the number being pulled today, thanks to new advances …

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