lickypickystickyfree:

First ‘Heartless’ Man: You Don’t Really Need A Heart, Or A Pulse

Two doctors Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier from the Texas Heart Institute successfully replaced a dying man’s heart with a device—proving that it is possible for your body to be kept alive without a heart, or a pulse.

In the short film ‘Heart Stop Beating’ by Jeremiah Zagar of Focus Forward Films, Zagar documents the process of the doctors—from cutting out the whole heart of 50 calves and replacing it with centrifugal pumps, to finally implanting it into their patient Craig Lewis.

The turbine-like device, that are simple whirling rotors, developed by the doctors does not beat like a heart, rather provides a ‘continuous flow’ like a garden hose.

After the doctors experimented on one of the calves, Abigail, Doctor Cohn told NPR: “If you listened to her chest with a stethoscope, you wouldn’t hear a heartbeat. If you examined her arteries, there’s no pulse. If you hooked her up to an EKG, she’d be flat-lined.”

Craig Lewis was a 55-year-old, dying from amyloidosis, which causes a build-up of abnormal proteins. The proteins clog the organs so much that they stop working, according to NPR.

But after the operation, with the ‘machine’ as his heart’s replacement, Lewis’ blood continued to spin and move through his body.

However, when doctors put a stethoscope to his chest, no heartbeat or pulse can be heard (only a ‘humming’ sound)—which “by all criteria that we conventionally use to analyze patients”, Doctor Cohn said, he is dead.

This is proof that “human physiology can be supported without a pulse”.

WHAT? wow.

this is huge.

ikenbot:

This Is NASA’s Cancer-Sniffing Cellphone Sensor

What if you could use your phone to test the air for toxins? What if you could monitor your health simply by blowing on it? Sounds amazing, right? Nanosensor technology developed by NASA Ames is going to make that a reality.

Jing Li, a scientist at NASA Ames, has been working for years on what will be the greatest phone accessory of all time. It’s a small chip (about the size of a postage stamp) that houses 32 nanosensor bars. Each bar is composed of a different nano-structure material. Because each sensor bar is unique it can respond to different chemicals in different ways, enabling it to not only differentiate between them, but also to monitor their relative levels, in real time.

In its current state (which is looking mighty close to production-ready), it’s housed in a small case that attaches to a smartphone. For legal reasons they wouldn’t say which smartphone it’s built to attach to, but you can probably guess. Eventually, it will be built to attach to many other popular models. The idea is to develop a low-cost version so that consumers can afford to have them for health and safety applications. But let’s back up a second.

This nanosensor technology was originally developed by NASA Ames for space applications. This is NASA, after all. The first usage was monitoring for fuel leaks around launch vehicles. They’ve been on the International Space Station since 2008, monitoring air-quality and checking for formaldehyde in the air. Future applications could include taking samples on asteroids and Mars missions. So that’s where it started, but the Department of Homeland Security is now funding this project in order to bring it back down to earth—and to consumers.

The most exciting potential use, though, is how it could diagnose and monitor people with medical conditions. For example, for diabetes patients there is a direct correlation between the level of acetone in their breath and the level of sugar in their blood. The nanosensor could be used as a completely non-invasive diagnosis and measurement method. Just breathe on your phone. No more pricking your finger a million times a day. We have a pretty serious aversion to the word revolutionary here, but this thing fits the bill.

Full article

THIS IS WHY NASA IS SO IMPORTANT.

cwnl:

Could Neutrons be Swapping Through The Multiverse?

Illustration: Energy // The idea that there are multiple universes present in further dimensions of space isn’t new, but a team of scientists think they may be able to lend it some credence by observing neutrons jumping from one universe to the next.

Physicists Hope to Catch Neutrons in the Act of Jumping from Our Universe to Another

The notion of multiple universes is one that cosmologists like to theorize about but generally don’t relish proving, mainly because doing so would be very difficult.

But a team of researchers that showed a few years ago how matter might travel between our universe and others now think they ought to be able to observe this phenomenon in action using existing technology, lending credence to the multiverse theory. All they need is a neutron bottle, some neutrons, and a year.

The experiments would require bottling neutrons in an ultracold state, a process that physicists have been performing for years to measure how quickly neutrons decay. These bottles—made of ordinary matter imbued with magnetic fields—are able to trap these super-cooled neutrons and keep them moving slowly enough that they can be observed. Physicists can measure the rate at which these trapped neutrons strike the walls of the bottle and how quickly this rate declines as the neutrons decay.

In a perfect experiment, the neutrons would always decay precisely at a rate equal to the beta decay rate, but this is never the case because neutron bottles aren’t perfect—the rate of decay is always a bit faster, presumably because some of the neutrons escape by means other than decay.

Or maybe they don’t. Michael Sarrazin at the University of Namur in Belgium and a few colleagues have postulated that maybe these neutrons simply depart for another universe. They have already shown how, theoretically, large enough magnetic potentials could provide the basis for inter-universe matter swapping.

Now, in a paper available at arXiv, they’ve used decay rate data to place an upper limit on how often this might be able to happen. They found that it’s probably quite rare if it happens at all—according to their figures, the probability of a neutron making the leap to another universe is smaller than one in a million.

But that doesn’t rule it out completely, especially considering how many neutrons there are out there. Moreover, Sarrazin thinks he has a way to observe this experimentally. A change in the gravitational potential should also affect the rate of matter swapping, and the gravitational potential here on Earth changes as the planet moves around the Sun.

Run a neutron trapping experiment for a full year, and you could see if there is a modulation in the rate of neutron decay based on some kind of annual cycle. If so, that means the neutrons probably aren’t just decaying, but swapping universes as well.

discoverynews:

Magic Mushrooms Could Treat Depression

The active ingredient in the trippy fungus could help users treat depression, anxiety and stress.

keep reading

alligatorteeth:

UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen.

more here