Science and engineering usually create consistent results. Generally, when you figure out how to make something, you can repeat that at will to make more of something. But what if, one day, you ran the same process, and got different results? You double-checked, and triple-checked, and you kept ending up with a different end product instead?
Perhaps it wasn’t the process that changed, but the environment? Or physics itself? Enter the scary world of disappearing polymorphs.
Humans are very good at anthropomorphising things. That is, giving them human characteristics, like ourselves. We do it with animals—see just about any cartoon—and we even do it with our own planet—see Mother Nature. But we often extend that courtesy even further, giving names to our cars and putting faces on our computers as well.
A recent study has borne this out in amusing fashion. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that human attitudes towards a device can change if they are required to take actions to look after it. Enter the slime mold smartwatch, and a gooey, heartwarming story of love and care between human and machine, mediated by mold.
Continue reading “Slime Mold-Powered Smart Watches See Humans Fall In Love With The Goo”
It feels like it doesn’t matter where you go, health systems are struggling. In the US, just about any procedure is super expensive. In the UK and Australia, waiting lists extend far into the future and patients are left sitting in ambulances as hospitals lack capacity. In France, staff shortages rage furiously, frustrating operations.
It might seem like hope is fruitless and there is little that can be done. But amidst this horrid backdrop, one London hospital is finding some serious gains with some neat optimizations to the way it handles surgery, as The Times reports.
Continue reading “British Hospital Blasts Through Waiting Lists By Slashing Surgeon Downtime”
Take a little time to watch the history of Radithor, a presentation by [Adam Blumenberg] into a quack medicine that was exactly what it said on the label: distilled water containing around 2 micrograms of radium in each bottle (yes, that’s a lot.) It’s fascinatingly well-researched, and goes into the technology and societal environment surrounding such a product, which helped play a starring role in the eventual Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. You can watch the whole presentation in the video, embedded below the break. Continue reading “Radioactive Water Was Once A (Horrifying) Health Fad”
There are a wide variety of protein-based drugs that are used to treat various serious conditions. Insulin is perhaps the most well-known example, which is used for life-saving treatments for diabetes. New antibody treatments also fall into this category, as do various vaccines.
A significant cost element in the production of these treatments is the purification step, wherein the desired protein is separated from the contents of the bioreactor it was produced in. A new nanotech discovery from MIT could revolutionize this area, making these drugs cheaper and easier to produce.
It perhaps goes without saying that one nuclear bomb can really ruin your day. The same is true for non-nuclear dirty bombs, which just use conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material over a wide area. Either way, the debris scattered by any type of radiation weapon has the potential to result in thousands or perhaps millions of injuries, for which modern medicine offers little in the way of relief.
But maybe not for long. A Phase 1 clinical trial is currently underway to see if an oral drug is able to scour radioactive elements from the human body. The investigational compound is called HOPO 14-1, a chelating agent that has a high affinity for metals in the actinide series, which includes plutonium, uranium, thorium, and cerium curium. Chelating agents, which are molecules that contain a multitude of electron donor sites, are able to bind to positively charged metal ions and make the soluble in aqueous solutions. Chelators are important in food and pharmaceutical processing — read the ingredients list on just about anything from a can of soda to a bottle of shampoo and you’re likely to see EDTA, or ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, which binds to any metal ions that make it into the product, particularly iron ions that come from the stainless steel plumbing used in processing equipment.
The compound under evaluation, HOPO 14-1, is a powerful chelator of metal ions. Its structure is inspired by natural chelators produced by bacteria and fungi, called siderophores, which help the microorganisms accumulate iron. Its mechanism of action is to sequester the radioactive ions and make them soluble enough to be passed out of the body in the urine, rather than to have the radioactive elements carried around the body and incorporated into the bones and other tissues where they can cause radiation damage for years.
HOPO 14-1 has a number of potential benefits over the current frontline chelator for plutonium and uranium toxicity, DTPA or diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid. Where DTPA needs to be injected intravenously to be effective, HOPO 14-1 can be made into a pill, making stockpiling and administering the drug easier. If, of course, it passes Phase 1 safety trials and survives later trials to determine efficacy.
In the constant pursuit of innovation, it’s easy to overlook the wisdom of the past. The scientific method and modern research techniques have brought us much innovation, which can often lead us to dismiss traditional cultural beliefs.
However, sometimes, there are still valuable kernels of truth in the folklore of yesteryear. This holds true in a medical study from Finland, which focused on the traditional use of spruce resin to treat chronic wounds, breathing new life into an age-old therapy.
Continue reading “Revisiting Folk Wisdom For Modern Chronic Wound Care”
