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I Can’t Imagine A Wound Horrifying Enough To Justify This Piranha Clamp
Looking like a cross between a piranha’s jaws and an extra-large office binder clip, the ITClamp is designed to almost instantly close a severely haemorrhaging wound when there’s no time, or no one around, to apply staples or stitches. Primarily targeted at battlefield scenarios where wounds need to be dealt with as quickly as possible, the ITClamp also seems like a useful addition to a first-aid kit where serious injury is a possibility.
Science Discovered A New Human Body Part
A funny thing happened in the field of anatomy during the first half of this year. Researchers found a previously unknown human body part. It’s inside the eyeball, and it’s very small. At 15 microns thick, the newly discovered layer of material is so small that even calling it a new body part feels inappropriate. That’s what it is though. A new body part. Right there in your eye.
This Instagram For Doctors Lets You See Medicine’s Most Bizarre Cases
There are not — nor will there ever be — any filters in Figure 1, a new iOS photo-sharing app that approximates the fruit of an unholy union between Instagram and the Discovery Health Channel. Instead, clarity is key; the app supplies users with a steady photo stream of very real, very not-for-the-faint-of-heart medical oddities and diseases.
How Fallout From Nuke Tests Just Proved That Brain Cells Regenerate
Before the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 barred all aboveground, sea and orbital nuclear weapons testing, the world’s nations were popping off nukes like champagne bottles on New Year’s. Surprisingly, that sprinkling of high-energy particles was actually quite beneficial, to science at least, as it’s just helped solve a long-standing dispute in human physiology — can the brain regrow neurons? Short answer: sort of.
Awesome Doctors Give Children Superhero Formula To Fight Cancer
Cancer sucks. Always. But it might be at its absolute suckiest when it strikes kids. Thank God for awesome doctors like these ones in Brazil. Instead of doling out regular chemotherapy medication, the doctors repackage the medication into a superhero formula complete with its own superhero case.
How Smartphones Are Trying To Replace Your Doctor (But Can’t Yet)
For most of time, medicine was a guessing game. Doctors, or witch doctors, or shaman would inspect a patient, stir a potion and hope it would work. With some notable exceptions, modern medicine isn’t so different. The data collection — blood pressure, heart rate, weight, reflexes — is largely rudimentary. We’re getting by, but technology can take us so much further. Even technology that fits in your pocket.
How A Supercomputer May Have Finally Unlocked A Way To Beat HIV
There’s no easy answer for HIV; the sly virus uses our own immune cells to its advantage and mutates readily to shrug off round after round of anti-retrovirals. But thanks to the efforts researchers from the University of Illinois and some heavy-duty number crunching from one of the world’s fastest petaflop supercomputers, we may be able to stop HIV right in its tracks.
The World’s Newest Artificial Heart Is Half Cow, Half Machine
Using cow parts to save ailing human hearts isn’t anything new — you could even be sitting next to one of our more bovine brethren right now and think nothing of it. But the newest cow-to-heart integration takes a bit of a deeper dive into science fiction land. Soon, a French medical company will begin testing a “bioprosthetic” heart on actual human patients that is part cow, part synthetic, and loaded with software.
Scientists Found The Itch Molecule — And They Know How To Turn It Off
It is not the louse we hate. Nor is it the mosquito, shirt tag, wool sweater, chicken pock or sudden rash that torments us — the itching itself is what drives us mad. But, finally, scientists have finally been able to identify the molecule that signals our brain to start scratching us raw — and removing it kills itchiness forever. But don’t we itch for a reason?
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