20
Apr 14

Blood Factory

Every day, millions of people end up in hospitals from some accident or another.  Depending on the severity of the injury, the patient may or may not need a blood transfusion.  Hospitals use hundreds of gallons of blood a day in order to meet the demand for blood transfusions.  More often than not, there ends up being a shortage of certain blood types; people must then donate more blood to meet this demand and the hospital must hope that the donors have the correct blood types.  As you can see, this cycle is extremely inefficient.  Luckily, this cycle may end in the future.

Professor Marc Turner and his team of researchers have created a way to manufacture red blood cells.  “Production of blood on an industrial scale could become a reality once a trial is conducted in which artificial blood made from human stem cells is tested in patients for the first time.”  This is the latest breakthrough in what some people are calling “bio-hacking”, a term that describes things like 3D printed bones and prosthetic limbs.  Dr. Turner has developed a technique that creates red blood cells from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells).  iPS cells are cells that have been taken from adult humans and “rewound” into stem cells, which can then be turned into any kind of cell given the correct conditions.  “Biochemical conditions similar to those in the human body are then recreated to induce the iPS cells to mature into red blood cells – of the rare universal blood type O-.”  O- is the universal donor so now if this process of creating red blood cells works, hospitals won’t have to worry about getting enough of certain blood types.  Because of the safety standards, hospitals also won’t have to worry about receiving infected blood that carry diseases.

The production of blood on an industrial scale could become a reality

“‘Although similar research has been conducted elsewhere, this is the first time anybody has manufactured blood to the appropriate quality and safety standards for transfusion into a human being,’ said Prof Turner.”  If everything goes as planned, the trials will conclude in late 2016 or early 2017.

But this technique isn’t without problems.  Currently, a huge problem faced by Dr. Turner is the cost of creating the blood.  The current system of donating blood makes the blood free of cost.  Turner’s method will “cost approximately £120 (approximately $202) to transfuse a single unit of blood” but more than 2 million units of blood are transfused in the UK alone each year.  Most of the cost stems from the need to keep the process 100% sterile.  The cost also means that Turner’s method isn’t replicable on an industrial scale.  However, “if Prof Turner’s technique is scaled up efficiently, it could substantially reduce costs.”  Although current results do look promising, “Dr. Ted Bianco, Director of Technology Transfer at the Wellcome Trust, said, ‘one should not underestimate the challenge of translating the science into routine procedures for the clinic.'”  Although “blood factories” still remain the stuff of fiction, there is hope that some day in the future Turner’s method of creating blood will become viable.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10765132/Artificial-blood-will-be-manufactured-in-factories.html


11
Apr 14

Like air for water

I think that we can all agree on the fact that water is a valuable resource that’s necessary for life.  However, I also think that we often forget how necessary it is for survival since water is such a readily available resource here in the United States.  The reality is that nearly one billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water.  That’s one out of every eight people on the planet.  In places like Ethiopia or Kenya, finding drinkable water may take up to six hours!  “The United Nations estimates that Sub-Saharan Africa alone loses 40 billion hours per year collecting water; that’s the same as a whole year’s worth of labor by France’s entire workforce!”

The problem of supplying clean drinking water to communities in third world countries has plagued inventors and philanthropists for years.  How can we create a low maintenance, yet durable system that will provide clean water to rural communities?  It’s impossible to integrate modern technology since remote villages don’t even have a repair man that could fix such complex technologies.

However, industrial engineers Arturo Vittori and Andreas Volger may have solved this problem by creating a product that extracts fresh water from air.

It’s called Warka Water.  “At first glance, the 30-foot-tall, vase-shaped towers, named after a fig tree native to Ethiopia, have the look and feel of a showy art installation. But every detail, from carefully-placed curves to unique materials, has a functional purpose.”  The outer frame is made from lightweight junca stalks which are woven in a pattern that provides stability.  The inside is made from a mesh or polypropylene net that collects dew droplets as warm air cools.  As the water vapor condenses, the droplets roll to the bottom of the net into a container where people on the ground can access the water from a faucet.

So just how much water can you harvest from the air?  Field tests have shown that one Warka Water tower can supply more than 25 gallons of water throughout the day.  Vittori says that “the most important factor in collecting condensation is the difference in temperature between nightfall and daybreak; the towers are proving successful even in the desert, where temperatures, in that time, can differ as much as 50 degrees Fahrenheit.”

In addition to providing a surprising amount of water, the entire structure is made of biodegradable materials.  The entire contraption is also easy to clean and can be set up in less than a week without any mechanical tools.  Vittori hopes that once the Warka Water has been accepted by one community, they will spread the news and teach other communities how to build their own Warka Water.  It’s also very affordable too; each structure only costs $500 while other proposed ideas cost more than $1000.

“‘It’s not just illnesses that we’re trying to address. Many Ethiopian children from rural villages spend several hours every day to fetch water, time they could invest for more productive activities and education,’ he says. ‘If we can give people something that lets them be more independent, they can free themselves from this cycle.'”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-tower-pulls-drinking-water-out-of-thin-air-180950399/?no-ist

http://www.architectureandvision.com/projects/chronological/84-projects/art/492-073-warkawater-2012?showall=&start=1

http://thewaterproject.org/poverty


03
Apr 14

Chocolate!

Last week I said that I would be talking about a breakthrough in cancer treatment this week.  However, I forgot to bookmark the website and I can’t seem to find it again.  In order to make up for this folly, I’ll be writing about some good news I recently learned: chocolate is healthy for you*! (*chocolates with a high cocoa percentage)

For the longest time, people have believed that chocolates make you gain weight.  And they may be right; the chocolate candies we eat are full of fats and sugars which are bad for your body in excessive amounts.  However, chocolate in its purest form, cocoa, has many health benefits.  Scientists have already known that dark chocolates, which contain higher cocoa percentages than milk chocolates, can “improve thinking, decrease appetite and lower blood pressure.”  In the latest study involving cocoa, scientists have discovered that an antioxidant in cocoa prevented mice from gaining weight and it also lowered blood sugar levels as well!  It seems counter-intuitive, right?

cocoa-powder

It turns out that cocoa is one of the most flavanol rich foods available.  Flavanols are a type of antioxidant that help fight weight gain as well as type 2 diabetes!  However, not all flavanols are created equal.  Some provide more benefit than others.  The research team involved in the study attempted to find out which flavanols do what.  They did this by feeding mice different types of diets supplemented by different types of flavanols.  Through their research they discovered that a set of compounds known as oligomeric procyanidins (PCs) consistantly kept the mice’s weight down, even with a high fat diet.  Other foods that include oligomeric procyanidins are red wines, cranberries, blueberries, tea (green and black), onions, grape seed, and grape skin to name a few.  But cocoa contains the most PCs by far.

Oligomeric procyanidins found in cocoa are also known to improve glucose tolerance which aids in the prevention of type 2 diabetes.  “‘Oligomeric PCs appear to possess the greatest anti-obesity and anti-diabetic bioactivities of the flavanols in cocoa, particularly at the low doses employed for the present study,’ the researchers say.”

darkchocolate

A different set of researchers at the Louisiana State University have found “dark chocolate can reduce blood pressure and improve heart health.” Cocoa becomes beneficial through the way our digestive system ferments the fiber in cocoa.  “Researcher Maria Moore said: ‘We found that there are two kinds of microbes in the gut: the ‘good’ ones and the ‘bad’ ones. ’The good microbes, such as Bifidobacterium and lactic acid bacteria, feast on chocolate. ’When you eat dark chocolate, they grow and ferment it, producing compounds that are anti-inflammatory.’ This naturally forming anti-inflammatory enters the bloodstream and helps protest the heart and arteries from damage.”

This is great news for me since I love chocolate.  I’m not a huge fan of dark chocolate but dark chocolate is better than no chocolate.  Well, that concludes this week’s passion blog; hopefully you know a bit more about cocoa and why it’s beneficial.  Now go and eat some (dark) chocolate!

http://dathealth.com/scientists-say-antioxidant-cocoa-stops-weight-gain-lowers-blood-sugar/

http://www.med.nyu.edu/content?ChunkIID=21765

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-5-best-dark-chocolate-bars-in-the-world/


27
Mar 14

27 Degrees from Death

I found two very interesting articles that I could post about today, but since I talked about cancer last week, I’ll be saving that article for next week.  This week’s blog post (as will next week’s) deals with a major breakthrough in modern medicine.  One difficultly all hospitals face is a lack of time and doctors during a disaster.  For example, during the Boston bombing last year, hundreds of injured people were rushed to nearby hospitals.  During this time, many hospitals had a shortage of doctors and supplies; time was also a concern.  This happens nearly every time there is an unforeseen disaster like a hurricane or act of terrorism.

This problem may soon be a thing of the past as new technology allows doctors to place seriously injured victims in suspended animation.  Patients that have received gun shot wounds or stab wounds can now be placed somewhere in the murky void between life and death allowing doctors to either tackle more pressing matters or wait to receive the correct supplies for the operation.  Doctors at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh are now using this technique to buy them time when there are too many patients to handle or when the patient has lost too much blood.  “‘We are suspending life, but we don’t like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction,’ says Samuel Tisherman, a surgeon at the hospital, who is leading the trial. ‘So we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation.'”

The new technique involves removing all of the patient’s blood and quickly replacing it with a cold saline solution.  The saline solution quickly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity, essentially freezing the patient in time.  “‘If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can’t bring them back to life. But if they’re dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed,’ says surgeon Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique.”

Floating in that murky void between life and death

Let’s look at this from a different perspective.  Imagine that you’ve suffered a gun shot wound to the thigh and are profusely bleeding.  “This is it,” you think to yourself, watching the sidewalk turn red, “I’m going to die.”  The ambulance picks you up and rushes you to the hospital, but you’re certain that it’s too late.  Your vision blurs and you pass out but not before hearing “he has lost too much blood, we have to suspend him.”  You’re now in the ER as surgeons open your chest and pump cold saline solution through your heart and brain, the areas most vulnerable to low oxygen.  You don’t realize any of this, though, since you’ve already passed out and the nurses have drugged you up.  Within fifteen minutes your body temperature drops to 10 °C.  The normal human body temperature is 37 °C.  You are literally twenty seven degrees from death.  At this point, there is no blood in your body, you’re not breathing, and your brain stopped.  Congratulations, you are now clinically dead.  The doctors now have two extra hours to work on the gun wound.  When the surgery is done, the saline solution is replaced with blood.  If your heart doesn’t restart itself, as it usually does, then the doctors manually resuscitate you.  The blood slowly warms your body, preventing any injuries from the sudden exposure to heat and oxygen.  The nurses wheel you to the patient room where you slowly awaken, amazed that you didn’t die.  Or did you?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129623.000-gunshot-victims-to-be-suspended-between-life-and-death.html?page=2

http://www.tomorrowstarted.com/2011/05/thisll-give-denis-a-run-for-his-money/.html/floating-man


21
Mar 14

The Future of Cancer

The cure to cancer may be coming soon, but not in the form that you would expect.  IBM has announced that they will be “teaching” Watson how to choose treatments for cancer patients.  For those that don’t know, Watson is the system developed by IBM that participated in Jeopardy and beat the top two human competitors (If you haven’t seen Watson playing Jeopardy, I highly recommend watching it).  Watson can do more than play Jeopardy, though; he is the only computer system in the world that can integrate and analyze knowledge to come up with a solution.  Healthcare professionals are now hoping that Watson can analyze a patient’s cancer well enough to suggest the best treatment.

Watson wins in Jeopardy

So how does a computer go about finding a specific treatment for cancer anyways?  Well, the machine has been given lists of biochemical pathway information as well as the entire National Institute of Health’s PubMed database, “which contains abstracts of nearly every paper published in peer-reviewed biomedical journals,” to sift through.  Ideally, Watson would then analyze a specific patient’s cancer based on previously learned information by using black magic of some sort (AKA a convoluted computer program) and suggest the best treatment specific to that patient’s cancer.

The problem most doctors deal with while treating cancer is the signaling redundancies within a cell.  If the doctor uses one drug to block a protein, then other signalling networks within the cell will make up for its absence.  Doctors use multiple treatments to fight cancer but its hard to ultimately see which signalling pathways within the cell are being blocked and which ones aren’t due to the number of treatments being used.  The hope is that Watson will be able to create the correct combination of drugs to “target multiple arms of the network” in order to block the correct pathways.  Thus, only cancer cells are targeted so the patient will suffer little to no side effects.

A cell signalling pathway

Doctors, in addition to having trouble analyzing the signally pathways, are also not suited to handle the sheer volume of information when dealing with the genome of a cancer.  In order to fully analyze the genome of a cancer cell, a team of highly skilled geneticists, genomics experts, and clinicians are needed in addition to a lot of time.  This just isn’t viable for patients with cancers like glioblastoma where “the median survival time after diagnosis is only 14 months.”  Thus, this flood of information needed to decode the genome will be left to Watson who can hopefully find the correct treatment within a few days’ time.

The only problem here, though, is that I don’t believe Watson actually understands the information.  Philosopher John Searle argued that Watson cannot actually think despite the fact that Watson can “learn” by listening to suggestions and integrate them with his previously learned material.  If this is the case and Watson cannot actually “think”, then this project may end badly.  Watson may end up suggesting incorrect treatments since he cannot interact with the patients the same way doctors can.

As of right now, the project is only starting.  Twenty to twenty-five patients with glioblastoma will be selected to be the first patients to have a treatment suggested by Watson.  However, at this stage in the process Watson can only suggest treatments.  The final decision is still left to the doctor.  If everything goes as planned, systems like Watson will soon be in all hospitals diagnosing patients with cancer.  Why stop there?  Maybe someday Watson will be able to diagnose and suggest treatments for any disease.  Maybe we’ll see other implementations for Watson in the future as well; I’m sure we can find a use for him in physics or chemistry.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/ibm-to-set-watson-loose-on-cancer-genome-data/

http://www.geekwire.com/2013/ibm-takes-watson-cloud/


06
Mar 14

The Next Generation

Earlier this year, I made a blog post on the new (well it’s not too new anymore) Apple iPhone 5s.  Now, Samsung is rolling out their next generation phone, the Galaxy S5.  I don’t know about you, but this made me very excited.  I love seeing what innovations in technology come about the Apple vs Samsung rivalry.

Galaxy S5

There are several new features that make me very excited for the Galaxy S5.  First is the new dimpled, soft-touch plastic back casing.  I know that this may seem trivial, but I couldn’t stand the previous Samsung Galaxy phones that had the solid plastic casing; the plastic casing made the phone feel like it was low quality.

The next new feature is the camera.  As you would expect the camera quality has been upgraded.  Specifically, the rear facing camera increased from thirteen megapixels to sixteen megapixels.  What really excites me about the camera, though, is the new sensor that allows for extremely fast auto focus and high dynamic range among other things.  The front facing camera didn’t change.

Samsung Galaxy S5 vs Galaxy S4 camera

The previous generation S4 is on the left and the S5 is on the right

The next feature, I believe, is one that all phones should have.  Are you tired of accidentally breaking your phone by dropping it into a puddle of water or having dust build up in all its little crevices?  Well now you don’t have to worry about accidentally spilling water on your phone or getting sand in its charging port.  The Galaxy S5 has an IP67 certification (I’m not exactly sure what that certifies, but the S5 has an IP67 certification), making it “resistant to sweat, rain, liquids, sand and dust, so your phone is protected for any activity and situation.”

In addition to all of the previously mentioned features, the new S5 upgraded most of its technical specifications.  The processor has been upgraded from 1.9 GHz to 2.5 GHz; it’s crazy how fast technology advances since that’s almost as fast as my computer.  The battery of the S5 is also worth mentioning.  According to Samsung, they have developed a “ultra power saving mode” which allows over 24 hours of use with only 10% battery remaining.

Galaxy S5

Now that we’ve mentioned all the features I’m excited about, we can talk about the features I’m not so enthusiastic about.  One of the new features that didn’t surprise me was the finger print sensor.  Apple started a trend with the 5s and now Samsung is just copying them.  I was hoping for something more innovative.  The Galaxy S5 does have a heart rate monitor, though, but I’m not sure how useful that will be.  The last thing I’m not too happy with on the S5 is the screen size.  The screen size grew from a 5″ display to a 5.1″ display.  Personally, I don’t like the giant phone screen trend that’s happening.  After a certain point, the phone gets too big and becomes a hassle to carry around in your pants pocket.  Before we know it, we’ll be carrying around tablets as phones.  Are you getting a new phone soon?  What’s your opinion on the Galaxy S5?

P.S. Don’t forget to comment on my previous week’s blog.  I put them up on Saturday since the blog website wasn’t working on Friday.

 

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/smartphones/1306306/samsung-galaxy-s5-vs-galaxy-s4-specs-comparison

http://www.androidcentral.com/samsung-galaxy-s5-hands-and-initial-review

http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxys5/features.html


02
Mar 14

Storm the B∆STILLE

If you have been listening to music on the radio recently, you’ve probably hear the song Pompeii by Bastille.  If you haven’t, then you should probably click on the link and listen to it right now.  I don’t usually listen to or enjoy listening to pop music often, but there was something about Pompeii that really grabbed my attention; it might have been the catchy chorus, the singer’s unique accent, the thumping drums, or a combination of all three.  Either way, the song got me hooked.

BΔSTILLE started as a solo project by Dan Smith in 2010, but he later decided to form a band.  They released their first official studio album, titled “Bad Blood”, on September 3, 2013.  Soon after, they released a double album, titled “All This Bad Blood”, with Bad Blood on the first disk and new recordings on the second disk.

Bastille’s double album “All This Bad Blood”

Bastille has been described as a fusion between alternative, pop, and indie.  I guess what really got me hooked was how different they sounded from all the other pop songs.  Critics describe their songs as “the exploration of any and all sounds; the delicate use of strings to heighten emotion, the touching piano-based ‘Oblivion‘. There are moments, instruments, timings, buried within his experimentation that take you entirely by surprise.”  Personally, I really enjoy how they incorporate instruments like the piano, violin, and cello (which are absent in basically all other current pop songs) into many of their songs.  They have been compared to bands like Coldplay in how they feature “booming male choirs, string effects, echoey pianos, [and] allusions to Greek mythology.”

Another reason why I enjoy listening to Bastille is how many of their songs tell a story or a lesson.  I’ve stated this sentiment before in a previous blog post about Of Monsters and Men, and my opinion still stands.  You can experience the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in Pompeii or learn to control your pride in Icarus.

Lead singer, Dan Smith

Although many of their individual songs are great, their album doesn’t seem to support and overarching theme.  Additionally songs like Oblivion are trite and boring; it sounds like any other melancholy piano ballad.  Many critics chastised them for these faults.  But despite these faults, I still think the majority of their songs are great.  One of my personal favorites is the song “Of the Night” which is a mash-up of two 90s dance songs (The Rhythm of the Night by Italian Eurodance act Corona and Rhythm is a Dancer by German Eurodance act Snap! if you were wondering).  I think they did a great job reinventing two nineties songs into a modern alternative/indie/pop song.

I believe Bastille still has a huge amount of untapped potential.  They are still a relatively new band with only one album out, but they already have a few great songs.  I’m definitely looking forward to their sophomore album.  Hopefully it will be as good as or better than their first.

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/02/24/pop-psychology-bastille-shows-off-their-history-chops-with-pompeii/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/23/bastille-bad-blood-album-charts_n_4843374.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/7808accb-6395-4b25-858c-678bbb73896b


06
Feb 14

The feels

If you could only choose one of your five basic senses (sight, taste, touch, hearing, smell) to live the rest of your life with (as in you lose the other four), which would you choose?  Most people will usually choose sight or hearing since we rely on those senses so much to perceive the outside world.  A sense we often forget about is touch.  People who have lost limbs due to accidents must deal with this issue every day.  Many amputees have prostheses to replace their lost limb.

A typical prosthetic arm

While many prosthetics nowadays allow the user to control the arm and fingers up to a certain degree, they are missing a key element.  Touch.  Without the sense of touch, prosthetic users can’t tell if they are holding something as solid as a rock or something as delicate as a flower.  As you can tell, this poses many problems and risks to people who use prosthetics; maybe you’re holding your pet guinea pig too tightly and you break a rib or maybe you’re not holding the mug tight enough and you drop it.

The sense of touch is extremely difficult to replicate due to the vast number of nerves and neural connections it requires.  However, a team of engineers and researchers seemed to have solved the problem.  “Silvestro Micera, a neural engineer at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in Switzerland, led the team that developed the feeling bionic hand” (Lewis).  Essentially, they embedded touch sensors into a prosthetic hand which were then connected the nerves in a patient’s arm.  A computer receives signals from the sensors and, using complex computer algorithms, converts them into electrical impulses that can be detected by the nerve cells.

The touch sensitive prosthetic hand

The researchers have actually already tested the bionic hand on a human test subject.  “With the hand, Sørensen [the test subject] was able to recognize different objects by their feel, and grasp them appropriately…In a month-long clinical trial, Sørensen tested the hand, sometimes wearing a blindfold and earplugs so he could rely only on his sense of touch when using the hand. Sørensen was able to control how forcefully he grasped objects, and feel their shape and stiffness. He could tell the differences among hard, medium and soft objects, and identify the shapes of specific objects such as a cylindrical bottle or round baseball.” (Lewis).  Sørensen claims that the sensations produced by the bionic hand are similar to the natural feeling of touch he experiences in his other hand.  So far, Sørensen has been the only one to test out the hand.

Testing out the prosthetic hand

Researchers are looking to test the hand on other willing participants in order to perfect the technology.  Although it will probably be many years before prosthetics like this one are available for clinical use, this is definitely a step in the right direction.  In the future I hope to see prosthetic hands that give the user full control over them as well as an accurate and realistic sense of touch.  What are your thoughts on this topic?

http://www.livescience.com/43124-images-bionic-hand-that-can-feel.html

http://www.livescience.com/43125-man-gets-first-bionic-hand-that-feels.html

http://media-dis-n-dat.blogspot.com/2010/08/johns-hopkins-applied-physics-lab-aims.html


31
Jan 14

LORDE

“The biggest night for music,” aka the Grammys, happened on Sunday January 26th.  Before you read any further, I’ll admit it, I didn’t actually watch the Grammys.  I didn’t even know they were happening until my friend sent me a snapchat saying “watching lorde win the grammys!”  Until I received that snapchat, I had absolutely no interest in the Grammys whatsoever; however, there was one word in my friend’s message that changed that.  Lorde.  Okay, time for a second confession.  Although I don’t usually listen to pop music, I’ve recently been obsessing over Lorde and her music.

Lorde Q&A: New Zealand Star On Next Single, Nicki Minaj & Staying Mysterious

Ella Maria Lani Yelich-O’Connor, better known as her stage name, Lorde

This obsession didn’t stem from listening to her hit song “Royals“, though.  In fact, when I first heard Royals, I hated it.  I thought it was a terrible song and always changed radio stations when it came on.  Since then, my opinion has changed about the song, but I believe many of her other songs are better (one of the biggest factors in changing my mind was listening to Puddles the Clown cover her song).

Back to the Grammys.  Lorde was nominated for four Grammys and ended up winning two; one for Song of the Year and another for Best Pop Solo Performance.  Both were won for her debut single, Royals.  This is hugely significant for a number of reasons.  First of all, she is the third youngest person to win a Grammy (she’s only 17!).  She is also the youngest ever to be nominated for the Record of the Year award.

Now, if the only song you’ve heard by Lorde is Royals (or if you haven’t heard any of her songs at all), you should change that.  She currently has an EP out called The Love Club and an album called Pure Heroine, which just released in September of last year.  I personally like Pure Heroine better.  Her music has been described as having minimalistic beats overlaid with enchanting vocals.  Two of my favorite songs by Lorde are 400 Lux and Buzzcut Season.  Another reason why I like Lorde and why she stands out from other pop artists is because there is actually substance in her songs.  Royals stands out from the millions of other pop songs because it criticizes the disparity between what many artists write songs about and what they actually do as well as denouncing the “allure of hedonism and materialism.”  Her lyrical themes have been said to “social anxiety, romantic yearning, debilitating ennui, booze-soaked ragers – with an eerie, zoomed-out detachment” according to the Rolling Stone Magazine.

Lorde in September 2013

Although she is only seventeen, she is anything but an ordinary teenager.  People have described her as extremely knowledgeable and wise.  Despite the fact that she is still in high school, she is extremely well read.  She has read works by Vonnegut and Carver beginning at age twelve.  By age fourteen, Lorde edited her mother’s (who is an award winning New Zealand poet) master’s thesis.  By age sixteen, she became the youngest artists to hold the US number one song in more than twenty five years.

I hope this post convinced you to listen to more of Lorde’s music (that isn’t Royals) if you haven’t already.  I’ll leave you with another one of my favorite songs, A World Alone.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/lordes-teenage-dream-20131028?page=2

http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/5687330/lorde-qa-new-zealand-star-on-next-single-nicki-minaj-staying

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/24/lorde-interview_n_3644831.html


06
Nov 13

Heart in a box

These ten weeks have passed by so fast; it seems like it was just yesterday when I wrote my first post about immortality.  For my final blog post this semester, we will come full circle as I will be posting about another advance in science and technology.

For years doctors have been performing heart transplants, and for years they have relied on the same procedure to get the heart from the donor to the recipient.  This procedure, namely removing the heart from the donor, placing it in an ice box full of ice and transporting it to the recipient, should have been outdated long ago.

http://pilladvised.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/heart%EF%80%A6-904x1024.jpghttp://hunterfreeman.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/plus-sign-22.jpg?w=900http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/suslik83/suslik831206/suslik83120600128/14258614-melting-ice-cubes-on-glass-table.jpghttp://www.outblush.com/women/images/2012/08/organ-transplant-lunch-cooler-big.jpg

Using this method, the ice can only keep the heart viable for up to six hours.  Now, in terms of an organ transplant, that is not a lot of time.  Many times, the heart can’t be used because it’s been disembodied for more than six hours.  Let’s first put this into perspective and take a step back to first consider how doctors even get a heart to transplant.  As one would imagine, the supply of heart donors is extremely low.  Of the number of donors, only 4% have a heart healthy enough to be considered for a transplant.  Of the 4% of healthy hearts, only 30% actually make it to the recipient.  Going back to the six hour time limit, those six hours are the most important six hours of a person’s life.  If the transportation and transplant of the heart fails because of time constraints, two people needlessly die.

http://images.lazygamer.net/2013/04/vlcsnap-2013-04-24-11h24m00s31.png

Surgeon Simulator game 

Doctors have recently come up with a better alternative to the ice box transportation method.  This new method, dubbed “heart in a box”, doubles the time constraint to twelve hours.  This new technology no longer relies on ice to preserve the heart.  Instead, the heart is hooked up to a machine that will keep it beating and pumping blood.  With a longer time limit, doctors can now focus more on the procedure and do a better job rather than hastily completing the transplant to get the heart in on time.  Furthermore, donors can know that their hearts will most likely not go to waste because of this new technology.  For more information you can check out this video. (warning: video contains blood and disembodied beating heart)

Source:

http://www.upworthy.com/it-looks-like-something-you-should-never-see-meet-a-medical-advancement-that-is-hard-to-forget-5

Image sources:

http://images.lazygamer.net/2013/04/vlcsnap-2013-04-24-11h24m00s31.png

http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/suslik83/suslik831206/suslik83120600128/14258614-melting-ice-cubes-on-glass-table.jpg

http://www.outblush.com/women/images/2012/08/organ-transplant-lunch-cooler-big.jpg

http://pilladvised.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/heart%EF%80%A6-904×1024.jpg

http://www.blograzzi.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/arrow.jpg

http://hunterfreeman.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/plus-sign-22.jpg?w=900


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