This sort of thing might have come directly from a science-fiction action story, where the hero is patched up in an unbelievably short time between epic space battles. Who says the future is always far away?
Archive of posts filed under the Medicine category.
“Your Personal Placebo Profile”
I’ve often wondered if there might be a way to harness the placebo effect to actually help people get better. It seems that I’m not the only one, either.
“iPhone doc will detect cancer, diabetes – boffins”
I never thought that I’d live to see a working Star Trek-esque medical tricorder, but it seems that I might… at least a poor-man’s version of one, that requires placing a sample on or in the device. Even better, the smartphones we’re toting around today might already have all the hardware needed, if I’m reading [...]
“Phages: The powerful new bio-ammo in superbug war”
A medical breakthrough in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria! In a nutshell, these things render such bacteria vulnerable to antibiotics again, and it looks like bacteria have no way to defend themselves. This is the kind of science I love to hear about.
“Autism boom: an epidemic of disease or of discovery?”
The LA Times recently published a four-part investigation of autism. It’s pretty good, it has more information on it than I’ve been able to find in my own research elsewhere. I’m not a scientist, and I’m operating solely on my own experience and what I’ve read of others, but it seems to me that autism [...]
“How Much Sleep Do You Actually Require (and Why)?”
I’ve always wondered about people who only sleep a few hours a day. I’ve found that I need at least seven and a half hours a day to feel rested (which usually means an afternoon nap since I can rarely stay asleep more than six hours at night). But it seems that a single brain [...]
“Japan, Russia in plan for elephant to birth CLONE MAMMOTH”
This sort of thing has been talked about for decades (it was the idea that spawned the book Jurassic Park, published in 1990, after all). I look forward to seeing the results, but I have to wonder how much mammoth behavior in the wild was learned and passed down from the herd. I suspect that’s [...]
“Microsoft researchers build spam filter for HIV”
Speaking of unpredictable consequences, here’s another one: techniques developed to combat spam turn out to be useful against HIV. I always thought that spammers had a lot in common with viruses, in that both are annoying and potentially dangerous, but I didn’t expect the metaphor to stretch that far!
“I Live in the Future and Here’s How it Works”
A small excerpt from that excerpt: A few years ago, researchers quizzed more than thirty surgeons and surgical residents on their video-game habits [...] Then they put all the surgeons through a laparoscopic surgery simulator, in which thin instruments akin to extremely long chopsticks are inserted into one or more small incisions through the skin [...]
“Bill Gates drops $1m on laser-based malaria fighter”
I’ve had this vision for years of a machine that identifies mosquitoes in a house or around people in a backyard area at dusk, targets them, and ruthlessly burns them down with a precision blast from a small, high-powered laser. I’m generally a peaceful person, but I have no mercy toward fleas, ticks, and blood-suckers [...]