bionic man features 14 technologies currently being developed: a powered prosthetic leg that helps users achieve a more natural gait, a wireless brain-computer interface that lets people who are paralyzed control computer devices or robotic limbs using only their thoughts, and a micro-patch that delivers vaccines painlessly and doesn’t need refrigeration.
Month: September 2014
Ebola
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rushed to complete a computer program it had been developing to track outbreaks; the program needed to be translated into French so it could be used in Guinea. The C.D.C. also dispatched a team, which grew to more than 12 and was led by Rollin, who arrived in Guinea on March 30. Some 3000 biohazard suits were flown in. Experts and volunteers poured in from the World Health Organization and the Red Cross.
The international health community doesn’t seem to have strong internet technologies, and wastes too much time forwarding shit to each other. In the US, there are too many dumb laws like HIPPA to make rational systems possible, but surely that’s not the case around the world?
Without additional interventions or changes in community behavior, CDC estimates that by January 20, 2015, there will be a total of ~1.4M Ebola cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone
It’s not looking good, between the rock (hard to get around, poor communications, not enough trained workers) and the hard place (religious practices that require touching the dead).
2015-05-11: That sounds like movie-plot science but is apparently real.
When he was released from Emory University Hospital in October after a long, brutal fight with Ebola that nearly ended his life, Dr. Ian Crozier’s medical team thought he was cured. But less than 2 months later, he was back at the hospital with fading sight, intense pain and soaring pressure in his left eye. Test results were chilling: The inside of Dr. Crozier’s eye was teeming with Ebola.
2015-08-13: There’s now a Ebola vaccine, which is great news. Let’s hope there’s never an outbreak in southern California with all the anti vaxxers there.
The outbreak of Ebola fever in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, which has killed more than 11K people, has dropped out of the news as it has been brought under control. Although new cases are now measured in 10s, rather than 100s, a week, the disease has not been stamped out—and a new epidemic could flare up somewhere else at any time. A vaccine against the virus responsible would be of enormous value. And a paper in the Lancet suggests one is now available.
See also
Ebola is no longer an incurable horror disease. The new vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV, was used in the last outbreak in the Republic of Congo. It protected over 90K. Health responders deployed it in social rings: firstly those in contact with known cases, then their contacts. It’s the same strategy used against smallpox 40 years ago. And that was wiped out.
Amid unrelenting chaos and violence, scientists and doctors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been running a clinical trial of new drugs to try to combat a year-long Ebola outbreak. On Monday, the trial’s cosponsors at the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health announced that 2 of the experimental treatments appear to dramatically boost survival rates.
Did Industry Cause Nations?
In 1800 almost nobody in France thought of themselves as French. By 1900 they all did. Unlike farming, industry needs steel, coal and other resources which are not uniformly distributed, so many micro-states were no longer viable. Meanwhile, empires became unwieldy as they industrialized and needed more actual governing. So in 19th-century Europe, micro-states fused and empires split.
Wave Hill
nice bike ride up to Wave Hill but the google maps biking directions were hilariously inaccurate: it took 150, not 90 min.
Solid light
Researchers at Princeton University are transforming light into crystal. “It’s something that we have never seen before. This is a new behavior for light.” In the future, they hope to observe exotic phases of light such as superfluids and insulators.
LA is the real hellhole
some school districts in LA have so many dumb parents with “belief exceptions” that their immunization rates are like Chad and South Sudan. i wonder when immunization rates will start to be factored into real estate. do you want your kids to grow up next to these savages?
Evolutionary fitness is predictable
A massive statistical study suggests that the final evolutionary outcome — fitness — is predictable.
Love, Grampa and Grandmaster Flash
Grandmas accidentally tagging Grandmaster Flash plus things your grandmother would share on Facebook
College admissions are broken
Harvard and other elite universities are wasting their resources on athletes and musicians, and should select students by standardized test scores.
Evolution of marriage advice
this is interesting, from a better angels of our nature perspective. things do get better eventually.
The early ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ columns have an unpleasant chiding tone. Popenoe, along with his organisation’s marriage counsellors, thought of female clients as unrealistic babies: immature, and expecting too much glitz from their marriages. There was a strong element of intergenerational critique in their counsel – a sense that young women were seduced by popular culture, and hopelessly unable to ‘keep house’ and make sacrifices. ‘Don’t expect too much romance’.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 