A 71-year-old man who was paralysed in a 2008 car accident has regained motor function in his hands thanks to Washington University doctors who rewired his nerves to bypass the damaged ones. Though the patient could move his arms, he had lost the ability to pinch and grab with his fingers. Until now, that is.
Hey you angsty little jerk, listen up! If you can stop rolling your eyes and cut the whole brooding thing for like 10 seconds, I have something very important to tell you: CUT YOUR HAIR. I don’t say this as some out-of-touch baby boomer threatened by the slightest tinge of change, but rather someone concerned with preventing a lazy eye epidemic.
Electronic implants that restore sight to the blind aren’t anything new, but one of their major stumbling blocks has been the need for an external power source. Now, that’s about to change, because a team of researchers has built a digital implant out of infrared-slurping photovoltaic pixels — so it can power itself.
There’s evidence that adding more spiciness in your diet can help curb your appetite. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston are taking that idea to a whole different level — one that requires anaesthesia. They’ve found that surgically manipulating the vagus nerve by applying capsaicin, the active component inside a chilli pepper responsible for its burning sensation, can help with weight loss.
Dr Dong Kim, the surgeon who treated US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot in the head in 2011, is currently removing a brain tumour from one of his patients. That’s not unusual considering his occupation. However, today, another neurosurgeon happens to be live-tweeting events as they unfold. No pressure.
While many artworks might require you sell an organ to afford them, at least with this one you could survive: The Immortal is an installation made up of life-support machines, designed to makes us contemplate our dependence on medical technology.
Childbirth, though wonderful, can also be quite traumatic. That can be particularly true for the parents of premature infants, who often spend several weeks in a neonatal ICU while their children rest in incubators that, while life-saving, are typically very impersonal and serve as de-facto barriers between parent and child. The BabyBloom Incubator aims to change that experience. It’s a super-innovative solution to a host of problems.
Gizmodo’s Developers Cubed series offers a behind the scenes look into Australia’s up and coming dev scene. This week: We chat with the recent winners of the Australian leg of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, Team Stethocloud about how you go about developing a new and hugely less expensive stethscope as a smartphone app, what happens next for the team and why medical development might be the overlooked field that Aussie developers should target next.
