This prototype of a birth control pills case from Yanko Design Ltd. is made to sound an alarm every day at a specified time. Twisting and opening the case silences the ringer.
More at Gizmodo…
Archives: 5/2006
BreastCancerMail.com is a free email service for those that want to support the cause. We are being told that the service is brand new. The unobtrusive sponsor messaging above the user inbox helps fund breast cancer education through a charity partner, BreastCancer.org.
We were browsing through one of our alumni magazines when we saw an article touting one of the medical library’s holdings: an old anatomy book bound in a tan leather, which was made from human skin. Indeed, a quick search found many such books in libraries across the land. The Boston Globe covered this macabre topic, a few months ago:
A number of prestigious libraries — including Harvard University’s — have such books in their collections. While the idea of making leather from human skin seems bizarre and cruel today, it was not uncommon in centuries past, said Laura Hartman, a rare book cataloger at the National Library of Medicine in Maryland and author of a paper on the subject.
An article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from the late 1800s “suggests that it was common, but it also indicates it wasn’t talked about in polite society,” Hartman said.
The best libraries then belonged to private collectors. Some were doctors who had access to skin from amputated parts and patients whose bodies were not claimed. They found human leather to be relatively cheap, durable and waterproof, Hartman said.
In other cases, wealthy bibliophiles may have acquired the skin from criminals who were executed, cadavers used in medical schools and people who died in the poor house, said Sam Streit, director of Brown’s John Hay Library.
Here’s another take on the practice, with a hint at motivation:
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia has four bound by Dr. John Stockton Hough, known for diagnosing the city’s first case of trichinosis. He used that patient’s skin to bind three of the volumes.
“The hypothesis that I was suggesting is that these physicians did this to honor the people who furthered medical research,” Hartman said.
What would the 21st century equivalent of this practice be? Perhaps inkjet printing of human tissues…
The device, designed for sufferers of pelvic organ prolapse, has a catchy slogan: “It’s easy. It’s uplifting. It’s… Colpexin™ Sphere.” Our guess is that anything that relieves urinary stress incontinence (and other nasty stuff down there) is uplifting by definition. At least one can cough or laugh without fear! The company, Poland-based Adamed Sp. z o.o. (not clear to us what the “z o.o.” stands for), says that its product is FDA approved.
The Colpexin Sphere is a smooth, round sphere made of medical grade polycarbonate plastic with an attached braided nylon string for easy removal. It provides dual benefits for the management of pelvic organ prolapse and improvement of pelvic floor muscle weakness. The Colpexin Sphere is available only by prescription.
The Colpexin Sphere is an intravaginal device that elevates and supports the pelvic organs that may be used with pelvic floor muscles exercises to treat pelvic organ prolapse (sometimes called “POP”). The Colpexin Sphere is inserted into the vagina using the provided applicator or by hand and should be used as part of a program that includes pelvic floor muscle exercises.
How to do the exercises? Read here.
The product page…
IBM is teaming up with the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other organisations to make some of its software open-source. The idea is to fight more effectively the spread of infectious diseases, including the H5N1 influenza:
With growing concerns over potential outbreaks of new strains of disease, and their ability to spread more easily because of modern transportation, IBM scientists have formed a steering committee with worldwide health organizations and universities to guide efforts to address the issue. Together, they will explore the use of advanced analytical and computer technology as part of a global preparedness program for responding to potential infectious disease outbreaks around the world…
Among the technologies that will be used is a software framework IBM developed to allow electronic health information to be more easily shared and mined for trends, such as the outbreak of disease. Called the Interoperable Healthcare Information Infrastructure (IHII), the technology is designed to improve communication and collaboration among medical professionals and researchers by helping them collect and share health data. IBM will expand the role of IHII to include public health issues, responding to global calls for pandemic preparedness by facilitating the sharing of clinical data among medical facilities, laboratories and public health agencies.
IBM also plans to build a community of users around its epidemiological modeling framework, called Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeller (STEM), which can tap the information collected from IHII, along with additional information such as roadmaps, airport locations, travel patterns, and bird migration routes around the world. It will allow users to rapidly develop models for how a disease is likely to geographically spread over time. These models can help public health experts and governmental planners develop more effective preparedness plans.
Ultimately, those plans could include development and distribution of more effective and timely vaccines as IBM taps into knowledge gained through a planned collaborative initiative known as “Project Checkmate,” in which IBM and The Scripps Research Institute propose to conduct advanced biological research on influenza viruses. The collaboration is designed to predict the way viruses will mutate over time using advanced predictive techniques running on high performance computing systems, such as IBM’s BlueGene supercomputer, allowing effective vaccines to be developed by drug-makers, drawing on the immunology and chemistry expertise at Scripps.
IBM scientists at the company’s Research Labs in China, India, Israel, Japan, Switzerland and the U.S. will serve as focal points for the collaboration.
More at IBM…
(hat tip: LinuxMedNews)
We are not yet done with electronic noses for today. The Jerusalem Post is reporting that an instrument manufactured by Oridion Systems Ltd. can noninvasively determine whether a patient has hepatitis C or some other infectious liver disease, with the results available in 40 minutes or so.
The instrument is named Oridion BreathID® and the description of it as follows:
The BreathID® system is unique in many ways. It is able to diagnose and monitor a multitude of functional GI and internal disorders through testing applications such as Helicobacter pylori, Liver Function and Gastric Emptying Rate. The system is ideal for a wide range of patients that suffer from functional dyspepsia, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, a wide range of liver diseases such as Hepatitis (HCV, HBV), NAFLD, NASH diseases, and those related to alcoholism.
State-of-the-Art Technology and Design for Every Environment
The BreathID’s remarkable benefits and unbeatable performance are a result of its unique and proprietary technologies: Microstream®, MCS™ (Molecular Correlation Spectroscopy) and CRT (Continuous Real Time) technology on-line analysis algorithms. The use of these technologies enables BreathID® to offer several distinct advantages over other testing systems and methods. These advantages include automatic operation, immediate test results, the shortest
possible testing times, no need for active patient cooperation and more clinical information in each measurement due to the continuous sampling.
BreathID® was designed with the needs of both the physician/operator and the patient in mind. Simple single-button operation, self-calibration and a user-friendly interface enable easy test administration by any member of the staff with no need for prior training or orientation.
The product page over at the Oridion…
The product brochure (.pdf)…
European investigators have designed a novel olfactory bioelectronic sensor with potential clinical applications, reports EU’s Information Society Technologies (IST):
“The potential uses of smell technology are endless,” notes Josep Samitier, the coordinator of the SPOT-NOSED project that developed nanobiosensors to mimic the way human and animal noses respond to different odours.
This new nose biosensor is unusual in how it’s made. By placing a layer of proteins that constitute the olfactory receptors in animal noses on a microelectrode and measuring the reaction when the proteins come into contact with different odorants, the system is capable of detecting odorants at concentrations that would be imperceptible to humans.
“Our tests showed that the nanobiosensors will react to a few molecules of odorant with a very high degree of accuracy. Some of the results of the trials surpassed even our expectations,” Samitier says. These tiny bioelectronic sensors, he says, represent a ‘major leap forward’ in smell technology and a clear example of a biomimetic devices obtained by converging Nano-Bio-Info technologies.
Several hundred different proteins, which the SPOT-NOSED researchers genetically copied from rats and grew in yeast, would be needed for an electronic nose to detect almost any smell because different proteins react to different odorants and it is the resultant combination of reactions that identifies a certain smell. Nanotechnology makes such an electronic nose feasible, the coordinator notes, even though the human nose uses 1,000 different proteins to allow the brain to recognise 10,000 different smells.
While the SPOT-NOSED project focused on replicating the physical reaction that takes place in animal noses, the project partners are now planning to continue their research and develop the instrumentation and software tools necessary for an electronic nose to recognise smells – the role played by the brain in the olfactory system. In this sense, new high accuracy electronic instrumentation capable of performing electrical measurements at the nanoscale level has been developed and adapted to an atomic force microscope with atofarad precision (10-15).
This, Samitier says, could lead to medical applications to diagnose organ failure, bacterial infections or diseases such as cancer being made commercially available within a few years, as well as devices that would have a major impact on other sectors.
The IST press release…
The SPOT-NOSED project page…
Flashbacks: Chemical Sensors, Neural Network for Human Breath Analysis; The Breathmeter™; Can Dogs Smell CA?; Detecting Infection With E-nose; The Breathscanner 1.0
New shock ad campaign by the Swiss Aids Federation, with actors in their birth suits, has a simple message: “no action without protection”. Got it?
The BBC explains…
At the Albany College of Pharmacy, researchers have found that estrogen supplementation to ovariectomized rabbits restored smooth muscle contractility. The results are published in the May edition of Neurology and Urodynamics. From the abstract:
Ovx resulted in significantly decreased bladder contractile function, whereas bladders tested after estradiol administration showed increased contractility. Ovx resulted in a decrease in SM/collagen ratio, whereas estrogen resulted in an increase.
The present study demonstrates that estrogen supplementation mediates a “functional hypertrophy,” that is a hypertrophy characterized by increased contractile responses to all forms of stimulation, and an increased ratio of SM/collagen.
