by frostfire on October 25, 2010
The pain of losing a body part is twofold, as patients not only suffer from wound pain. Often they are also affected by so called phantom pain. Unlike bodily wounds which will eventually heal, phantom pain often lasts for years and sometimes a lifetime.
“Phantom pain is very difficult to treat,” says Professor Dr Thomas Weiss from the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. “Mostly they prove to be highly therapy-resistant,” the professor at the Department for Biological and Clinical Psychology says. In many cases the symptoms persist, in spite of high dosages of painkillers. This puts patients at a high risk of medication addiction, according to the pain research scientist.
But now scientists of the University of Jena give cause for hope to the affected patients. Together with the trauma surgeons of the Jena University Hospital, business partners and supported by the German Social Accident Insurance (Deutsche Gesetzliche Unfallversicherung, DGVU) Professor Weiss´s team modified conventional hand prostheses in order to reduce phantom pain after an underarm amputation.
A stimulation unit which is connected to the remaining part of the upper arm by a cuff plays a crucial part in the newly developed medical device.
“There are pressure sensors between thumb and index finger as well as on the thumb of the hand prosthesis,” Professor Dr Dr Gunther Hofmann, Director of the Jena Department for Trauma, Hand and Reconstructive Surgery explains.
Originally they were only meant to regulate the strength of grip of the artificial hand — depending on what the patient wanted to pick up — a raw egg or a hammer.
“Our system is now able to transmit this sensory information from the hand to the upper arm,” says trauma surgeon Hofmann. “Thus the brain picks up the feedback from the prosthesis as if it was one´s own hand,” Professor Weiss adds, explaining the cause for phantom pain: The brain structures that were originally responsible for the stimulus processing of the arm are suddenly “out of work” after the loss of the limb. This induces a functional re-organization of these brain regions.
more via science news
Popularity: 13% [?]
by frostfire on October 22, 2010
James Gilpin has Type 1 Diabetes — his pancreas doesn’t work, forcing him to take shots of insulin to process glucose from food. Gilpin got to thinking about elderly patients with diabetes, like his grandmother, who secrete tons of unprocessed medicine and sugar in their urine. A great idea dawned upon him — well, perhaps it’s a gross idea but we’ll leave that up to you — and he started the Gilpin Family Whisky project, a high end line of single malt whiskey made from the sugar-laden urine of people with diabetes. His grandmother was the first patient to recycle her pee into whiskey!
The project actually came as an idea to Gilpin after he heard a story — which probably isn’t true — about pharmaceutical workers who set up a lab next to a retirement home in order to extract unprocessed drugs from elderly patients’ urine for re-use in new products. Gilpin thought, why not use the water purification systems utilized in whiskey distilling to make use of the sugar in the same elderly patients’ pee? He told Wired in an interview that it is, “plausible to suggest that we start utilising our water purification systems in order to harvest the biological resources that our elderly already process in abundance.”
Thankfully Gilpin Family Whisky is more of an art stunt than a new product line you’ll be seeing in your local liquor store. Gilpin will be exhibiting the line of whiskeys — each labeled with the name and home town of the patient who provided the goods — at 100% Materials, a London design event coming up this month. He’ll also be setting up a tasting session, in case you’re brave and interested. His project is meant to call attention to the world of biomedical technologies and how we can improve our medical care as well as the issues surrounding living with Type 1 Diabetes.
Via Wired.CO.UK
Popularity: 4% [?]
by frostfire on October 20, 2010
No matter how mixed-up it is, the Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves or fewer, say a team of researchers who used computer time donated by Google to run complex algorithms to prove it.
That means all the 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 positions of the Cube require no more than 20 steps to get the Cube in shape.
“It took 15 years after the introduction of the Cube to find the first position that provably requires 20 moves to solve,” says the team on their webpage. “It is appropriate that 15 years after that, we prove that 20 moves suffice for all positions.”
The Rubik’s Cube, a 3-D puzzle, was invented in 1974 by a Hungarian sculptor and professor Erno Rubik. Rubik licensed it to be sold as a toy and since then it has turned into the world’s top-selling puzzle. As of January 2009, at least 350 million cubes have sold worldwide.
Solving the Rubik’s Cube can take anywhere from seconds to hours. The official championship record for 2008 is 7.08 seconds.
The shortest sequence of moves that the most efficient algorithm takes to solve the Cube is known as “God’s number.” In 1981, it was thought a maximum of 52 moves was required. By August 2008, it had been reduced to 22.
To get their number, the group — comprising math teachers, a Google engineer and a programmer — broke the larger problem of solving the Rubik’s Cube into 2,217,093,120 smaller problems. Each of these smaller problems had 19,508,428,800 different positions.
The subproblems were small enough to fit in the memory of a modern PC. But it would take an Intel four-core, 2.8-GHz Nehalem chip-based desktop computer 1.1 billion seconds, or about 35 years, to perform the calculation. So the team turned to the impressive computing power that Google has to solve the problem. (Google won’t disclose exactly what kind of computing resources it offered to the group.)
Popularity: 40% [?]
by frostfire on October 18, 2010
Gadget lovers have long held to the secret belief that the right camera, smartphone or large-aperture lens will make them sexier.
Now dating site OK Cupid has proof.
According to OK Cupid’s survey of 552,000 user pictures, digital SLRs make you look more attractive, Panasonic cameras make you sexier than Nikons, while using a flash will make you look 7 years older, and large-aperture lenses make you hotter.
And iPhone users have more sexual partners than BlackBerry or Android owners. By age 30, the average male iPhone user has had about 10 partners while female iPhone users have had 12. By contrast, BlackBerry users hover around 8 partners and Android users have a mere 6.
As the blog’s author’s wryly observe: “Finally, statistical proof that iPhone users aren’t just getting fucked by Apple.”
That should give iPhone and iPad users some comfort for being considered ‘selfish elites,’ as another recent survey found.
OK Cupid has been analyzing the behavior of the site’s millions of users for some time, and has discovered many interesting tidbits: People tend to lie on their profiles, people’s political preferences change as they age, and men can increase their chances of getting a date by being open to older women. The site’s massive dataset, huge volume of activity, and interesting slicing and dicing combine to produce some keen observations on human nature.
But for gadget heads, there’s no more pertinent observation than (hard) data. The Panasonic Micro 4/3 camera will make you look far more attractive than a Canon DSLR, which in turn is better than a Nikon or Sony DSLR. And forget about cameraphones: Android, Nokia, BlackBerry and Windows phones all make you look less attractive, with Motorola phones at the absolute bottom of the list.
Similarly, the type of camera you wield makes a big difference. There’s a dramatic illustration showing how the same woman looks photographed with a cameraphone, a point-and-shoot camera, and an SLR. That makes sense: As we’ve explained before, larger image sensors give you better-quality images.
Along the same lines, a larger-aperture photo lets you put the background out of focus, increasing the apparent attractiveness of the person you’re taking a picture of.
So if you wanted an excuse to buy a fancier camera with a bigger lens, OK Cupid’s got all the rationale you need.
As for switching from Android or BlackBerry to an iPhone? Well, that’s up to you. Unlike with the photos, it’s hard to tell whether iPhone use is the cause, or the effect, of having more notches in one’s bedpost.
OkTrends
Popularity: 4% [?]
by frostfire on October 12, 2010
The problem with head injuries is that people who receive them often don’t realize how serious they actually are, until it’s too late. That’s why BAE Systems developed the Headborne Energy Analysis and Diagnostic System (HEADS) helmet sensor back in 2008. Used by the US Army and Marine Corps, the sensor is mounted inside soldiers’ helmets, and indicates when it has received concussive force sufficient to cause a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Last week at the Farnborough International Air Show, BAE announced the launch of the second generation of HEADS sensors.
“Diagnosing mild to moderate combat-related TBIs can be challenging. For example, following an explosion from a roadside bomb, soldiers will sometimes continue with their mission, unaware that the concussion from the blast may have lingering effects,” said Joe Coltman, VP of BAE’s Personnel Protection Systems business. “With the Generation II HEADS sensor, even if the injury isn’t obvious, the sensor is equipped with a programmable color LED light that can be set to activate during a blast event, providing immediate notification of a possible combat-related TBI which should be checked out by medical personnel.”
The sensors are also equipped with an RF transmitter, the signal of which will be picked up by receivers when the soldier returns to their base. If a soldier has sustained a harmful blow, the signal from his sensor will alert base officials to the situation.
The Generation II HEADS sensor doesn’t simply record the fact that a blast occurred, but also indicates the impact direction, magnitude, duration, blast pressures, angular and linear accelerations, plus the exact times of single or multiple blast events. This data can be downloaded through a USB or wireless connection, for analysis by medical teams.
Delivery of the new HEADS sensors is scheduled to begin next April.
Via Gizmag
Popularity: 7% [?]
by frostfire on October 9, 2010
Designer Ludwig Zeller has created the CubeBrowser, a six-sided mix of ingenuity and art that allows the enjoyment of photos in a whole new way.
The Cubebrowser resembles nothing so much as the first part of its name – a cube. The second part comes into play when you learn that it is connected to the Internet and more specifically sites like Flickr.com that allow for the display and browsing through of multiple photo albums that the user creates.
Behind the idea of the CubeBrowser lies the much-ignored concept that information is often more fun to abosrb if it’s tactile as well as simply visual. The Browser is designed to display one image on each of its six sides, and allow the user to rotate and shake the cube in order to change not only picture they are looking at, but what set of pictures the device displays.
Moving the cube horizontally causes the images to scroll in a pre-defined set, and allows a user to progress through an album and feel as though they are actually more a part of the experience than simply viewing static photos on the standard glossy “for the love of God only handle the edges” paper.
Moving the cube vertically will allow the user to switch between sets of photos that are stored online and linked to the Cube, giving it a larger range of functionality. At rest, the Cube can display one similar or six different images on its sides, but this can quickly be altered by human input and interaction – something current technology all too often lacks.
The product is not currently in production, so there is no word on how many photo sets could be stored or exactly what the CubeBrowser will be made out of, but presumably it will be relatively large in photo capacity and robust in terms of just how much handling it can take.
Sure, it’s still a digital photo display, but cooler.
Source: YankoDesign
Popularity: 8% [?]
by frostfire on October 5, 2010
The James Dyson Award has chosen a U.S. winner out of ten U.S. finalists on the country’s shortlist of student invention winners who ‘solved a problem.’ It is The Copenhagen Wheel, invented by a team of students at MIT‘s SENSEable City Lab. Though created with the topography of the city of Copenhagen, Denmark in mind, The Copenhagen (Smart) Wheel has the ‘wheels’ to become a very hot bike item, no matter where in the world you live. I mean doesn’t every biker need a boost now and then to get up those 45 degree hills?
The Copenhagen Wheel, which can be fitted to any bike, contains a motor, batteries, and an internal gear system that can provide that boost up hills and during long journeys. The Wheel also includes GPS sensors that provide environmental data for mobile applications that can connect you to other cyclists, help you find the safest bike routes, and help you fulfill your exercise goals.
The James Dyson Award has selected its top winners from 18 countries. The next round of winners will be announced on August 24, and then there will be one more round to select the (final) finalists. The international student invention winner of the James Dyson 2010 Award will be announced on October 5, 2010. Check out some of the many other award winners at JamesDysonAward.org.
Popularity: 3% [?]
by frostfire on October 4, 2010
These dazzling lights, called Triangle Light Objects or Transparent Light Origami, are rainbow-colored OLED panels that are evocative of stained glass windows. Created by Emory Krall for Universal Display, their hinged design makes them interactive – you can actually fold different colors over one another, creating new and exciting hues. So instead of buying multiple bulbs, you can achieve many different types of lighting depending on your mood with this one product. Check out a video of these TLOs in action here.
Popularity: 3% [?]
by frostfire on September 30, 2010
It seems like we get everything from automated vending kiosks these days, from cash to DVDs to postal service to gasoline. The French have simply taken the next logical step. Putting a modern (and greener) spin on an old way of doing business, a French vendor has begun selling wine by volume from 500- and 1,000-liter vending pumps in French supermarkets. All customers need is a container.
Reaching back to a time when wine was sold in exactly the same fashion – that is, out of huge casks from which customers drew their desired quantity into their own containers for transport – the wine pumps achieve two separate goals that are often at odds with one another by providing at inexpensive product that also has a decreased carbon footprint. The wine goes for something like $2 a liter and, because it cuts down on costly packaging materials as well as packaging mass, it’s greener to transport as well.
The machines are currently installed in eight supermarkets in France, but Dr. Vino seems to think the scheme will come stateside within a year. Which is great, from an eco-lifestyle standpoint. If the more – how do the French say? – prétentieux, glass-swirling, Whole Foods-patronizing wine snobs among us will apply a bring-your-own-container mindset to something as precious as our Viogniers and Pinot Noirs, it might just catch on with other packaging-intensive staples as well (Milk? Eggs? Those individually wrapped yogurt snacks?). Such a return to the commercial mores of a century ago could do a lot to reduce carbon footprints, and costs, across the board.
[Dr. Vino]
Popularity: 1% [?]
by frostfire on September 29, 2010
China has been exploring every possible means of saving giant pandas, one of the world’s most endangered species, from becoming extinct, even if it means resorting to cloning them. Chen Dayuan, a senior scientist who specializes in cloning at the institute of zoology in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, introduced the idea of performing cloning techniques on giant pandas in 1998.
Using initial funding of 100,000 yuan ($14,780), Chen successfully produced blastocysts by transplanting the somatic nucleus from sample pandas into the enucleated egg cells of rabbits, the Beijing Morning Post reported on Thursday.
The move was reported as one of the 10 biggest achievements of science and technology in 1999. It won an award of 6 million yuan and further funding of 5 million yuan for the project from the Ministry of Science and Technology.
According to the report, two embryos were created from a surrogate mother cat who became pregnant after being injected with a blastocyst, but the experiment was abandoned after the cat died of pneumonia.
Chen and his team then experimented with surrogacy on black bears. After three years of effort, a black bear became pregnant and the shape of a fetus could be seen on an ultrasound scan.
However, the research was allegedly suspended in 2005 because the fetus did not completely develop before the project deadline.
“Those opposed to cloning have made their voices heard throughout the research project on cloning giant pandas. Some people find cloning goes against nature, but it is actually a pioneering technology. If successful, it is a way to save endangered animals,” Chen was quoted as saying in the report.
“While I agree that research on cloning is significant, it is inappropriate to use giant pandas in this type of experiment. The number of pandas is limited and human beings have yet to master knowledge about pandas’ pregnancy,” said Wang Dajun, a researcher at the school of life sciences, Peking University.
Based on statistics from the State Forestry Administration, 1,590 giant pandas live in the wild in China, while 210 of them have been bred in captivity.
There are two problems with captive breeding. Pandas in captivity are unable to survive in the wild and it becomes increasingly difficult to find suitable natural habitats for them, Wang said.
“Too much human intervention has caused problems for giant pandas. The most important thing is that we should protect pandas’ natural habitats. Cloning would do little to save the endangered species,” Wang added.
In response, Chen said that he was used to criticism and vowed to continue his research.
Via China Daily
Popularity: 11% [?]
