bioengineering
revere | October 11, 2007Most people act locally, even if their behavior has a global appearance. Like birds. Starlings are a case in point. In many locales they can be seen swarming to roosting sites, huge clouds of them wheeling an gyrating at dusk before settling into trees or on buildings. If attacked, the swarm splits, merges and splits again, then comes back together. They don't just scatter, literally to the four winds. This kind of emergent behavior -- where local interactions produce global patterns -- has attracted scientists. Statistical physicists have been particularly interested, as this behavior…
revere | January 1, 2007Everybody should think of starting a new career once in a while, and New Year's Day seems as good a time as any for US taxpayers to embark on their new jobs as Venture Capitalists. Medgadget, a site that brings us news of advances in medical technology, now tells us about a private Salt Lake City company, TechniScan Medical Systems, who just received $2.8 million in taxpayer money, from NIH no less, to develop a noninvasive ultrasound device for detecting breast cancer.
Medgadget is offended by the use of public dollars for this purpose, and frankly, so am I. NIH supports basic research and…
revere | December 5, 2006I had to laugh when I saw this piece in New Scientist. It's about a new high tech ultrasound stethoscope supposedly immune to background noise.
The stethoscope is a useful tool for quickly diagnosing damage to the heart or lungs, which many victims of traumatic injuries can suffer. But they can be difficult to use when background noise reaches about 80 decibels ? the same as a busy street. These surrounding sounds can then drown out audio information that is crucial to an accurate diagnosis.
Street noise, nothing. How about the ground floor of an inner city hospital of some repute in a ward…