The practice of modern medicine is surprisingly primitive. My doctor only recently started to provide printed prescriptions instead of the usual scrawl. Incorrectly filled prescriptions can be serious and computer printed prescriptions are an obvious response yet even today only 25% of physicians use some form of electronic health records and only 10% really use electronic records to follow a patient’s entire history. My credit card company knows far more about my shopping history than my physician knows about my medical history.
the last area of artisanal production needs standardization, measurement
A new study using telemetry to monitor hydration and temperature status found that the athletes own body adequately regulated temperature and found no relationship between hydration status and temperature. Temperature and measures of dehydration (sodium and urine concentration) stayed within normal ranges. Even large losses of fluid do not lead to heat illness.
As if the body would not protect itself given its sophisticated homeostatic mechanisms; mechanisms so complex they are still not fully understood. It is a grandiose claim that research or sports products can improve these evolved homeostatic mechanisms that serve not only we homo sapiens, but all mammals.
Professor Noakes smacks down the guidelines as “linked to an extensive marketing campaign, directed by the sports drink industry.”
Tiles to reduce air pollution in a city, respiratory oases. I love it when architecture solves problems instead of creating them (ie suburbia):
The tiles are coated with titanium dioxide (TiO2), a pollution-fighting technology that is activated by ambient daylight. TiO2 is a photo-catalyst already known for its self-cleaning and germicidal qualities; it requires only small amounts of naturally occurring UV light and humidity to effectively reduce air pollutants into harmless amounts of carbon dioxide and water. When positioned near pollution sources, the tiles neutralize NOx and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) directly where they are generated. They transform previously inert urban surfaces into active surfaces, re-appropriate polluted spaces for safer pedestrian use, and invert problem spaces – dark, polluted, uninhabitable – to benevolent spaces that benefit communities.
PigeonBlog enlists homing pigeons to participate in a grassroots scientific data gathering initiative designed to collect and distribute information about air quality conditions to the general public. Pigeons are equipped with custom-built miniature air pollution sensing devices enabled to send the collected localized information to an online server without delay. Pollution levels are visualized and plotted in real-time over Google’s mapping environment, thus allowing immediate access to the collected information to anyone with connection to the Internet.
Air pollution has decreased even though population and the number of cars on the roads have increased. The shift is the result of regulations, technology improvements and economic change. New York City has seen a 32% decrease in nitrogen dioxide between the 2005-2007 and 2009-2011 periods.
2014-11-26: Pollution can be cleaned up quickly. This should make China’s pledge to improve air quality / reduce greenhouse gases quite feasible.
In 2002, South Korea was ranked 120th for air quality, and 43rd in 2014
2015-09-23: VW 1M tons of pollution. It is time to get tough, and destroy VW.
Volkswagen’s intentional fraud resulted in an extra 1M metric tons of air pollution being spewed into the skies over America; if they’d extended the con to Europe (where there are far more diesels), it would have been orders of magnitude worse.
In regions that lean heavily on coal-fired power plants, plug-in cars can end up polluting more heavily at the smokestack than gasoline cars at their tailpipes. But as grids get greener, that’s becoming less true nationwide.
2017-06-17: Schlieren Imaging. This is what the world would look like if you could see invisible air currents, temperature gradients, and differences in pressure or composition of the air
2018-01-22: Far UVC disinfection. There’s part of the uv spectrum that kills viruses & bacteria, but does not damage skin.
If CO2 can affect sleep quality, that would explain how it could produce a whole-day effect. Strøm-Tejsen tests this on 16 subjects and finds that “objectively measured sleep quality and the perceived freshness of bedroom air improved significantly when the CO2 level was lower, as did next-day reported sleepiness and ability to concentrate and the subjects’ performance of a test of logical thinking.” Good things about this study: subjects were blinded to condition, the paper contains a pilot experiment and a main experiment which mostly replicate each other’s results. Bad things about this study: the experiments were about n = 15 each, the researchers didn’t correct for multiple comparisons, and they admit to manipulating the statistics surrounding their logical reasoning tests to get better results.
Ditching fossil fuels would pay for itself through clean air alone. Over the next 50 years, keeping to the 2°C pathway would prevent 4.5m premature deaths, 3.5m hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and 300m lost workdays in the US.
air filtration and UV disinfection can greatly reduce SARS-COV-II in hospital wards. The authors installed portable air filters with UV disinfection on 2 COVID hospital wards in the UK. The air was tested for viruses, bacteria and fungi before the filters were turned on, during the time the filters were on and then again after the filters were turned off. Airborne SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the ward on all 5 days before activation of air/UV filtration, but on 0 of the 5 days when the air/UV filter was operational; SARS-CoV-2 was again detected on 4 out of 5 days when the filter was off.
“Far-UVC rapidly reduces the amount of active microbes in the indoor air to almost 0, making indoor air essentially as safe as outdoor air” The lamps inactivated more than 98% of the airborne microbes in 5 minutes. The low level of viable microbes was maintained over time, even though microbes continued to be sprayed into the room. The efficacy of different approaches to reducing indoor virus levels is usually measured in terms of equivalent air changes per hour. In this study, far-UVC lamps produced the equivalent of 184 equivalent air exchanges per hour. This surpasses any other approach to disinfecting occupied indoor spaces, where 5-20 equivalent air changes per hour is the best that can be achieved practically.
2022-08-19: Startups are entering this space to bring the cost down.
Beam ($5000) is an LED-based, upper room disinfection device that uses 265-nanometer ultraviolet light to create a disinfection zone located above people in a room. Vive ($3000), meanwhile, uses a wavelength known as far-UVC at 222-nanometers to inactivate harmful microorganisms in the air and on surfaces, even while people are present. While the Beam works in large open spaces, like classrooms and office lobbies, the Vive can be installed in smaller spaces, such as conference rooms and bathrooms. “What we have come to realize is that there is not one-size, fits-all for infection protection. What Arc competes with is some form of chemical intervention. For Beam and Vive, it’s HVAC upgrades.”
2022-10-28: Without massive improvements to LEDs, far UVC is not practical due to cost. Unclear what the deal with these startups is but I suspect they don’t output enough power to be effective.
$2000 is a ballpark retail price for a lamp installed by specialists, and the lamps have an expected lifetime of 15 months if they run continuously. There’s hope that far-UV lamps based on LEDs will eventually provide cheaper and longer-lived alternatives to the gas lamps currently being used, but prototype LED far-UV lamps are currently restricted to impractically low levels of power.
China’s pollution levels in 2021 had fallen 42% from 2013. The improvement means the average Chinese citizen’s lifespan is now 2.2 years longer. Chinese cities used to dominate global rankings of the world’s worst air quality; while some are still on those lists, in many cases they have been overtaken by cities in South Asia and the Middle East. In 2021, Beijing recorded its best monthly air quality since records began in 2013. There is still work to do as China remains the world’s 13th most polluted country. And Beijing’s particulate pollution – the tiny but highly dangerous pollutants that can evade the human body’s usual defenses – is still 40% higher than in the most polluted county in the United States.
Light in the 200-235 nm range, or far-UVC, is one of the most promising tools for dramatically reducing airborne transmission from day one of almost any pandemic caused by airborne pathogens. If adopted widely, it could also have a dramatic impact on seasonal flu, colds, and endemic COVID-19.
Unfortunately, progress on development and adoption has been much slower than one would have hoped. One bottleneck is the high cost and low efficiency of the only commercially available source at this wavelength range, 222 nm krypton chloride excimer lamps. For example, by our calculations, equipping a classroom with far-UVC would cost >$10k/classroom/year in lamps alone.
While directly supporting solid-state far-UVC R&D to accelerate availability is important, growing the far-UVC market in general and enabling greater private investment is even more critical.
In July 2005 he became the first disabled athlete to compete at an IAAF Grand Prix event, running in the 400m in Helsinki. Disabled and able-bodied athletes have both claimed that him being a double amputee gives him an advantage.
Electrical brain stimulation rouses people from deep coma sometimes and is bound to wreak havoc with ethics and braindead determinations. Terri Schiavo was nothing.
For someone left for dead 12 years ago, Candice Ivey seems to be doing pretty well. She’s still got her homecoming queen looks and A-student smarts. She has earned a college degree and holds a job as a recreational therapist in a retirement community. She has, however, lost her ballerina grace and now walks a bit like her feet are asleep. She slurs her words a little, too, which sometimes leads to trouble. “One time I got pulled over. The cop looked at me and said, ‘What have you been drinking?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ He said, ‘Get out here and walk the line.’ I was staggering all over the place. He said, ‘All right, blow into this.’ Of course I blew a 0, and he had to let me go.”
Soon after insertion of the nVPL electrode, the patient noted that stimulation also produced erotic sensations. This pleasurable response was heightened by continuous stimulation at 75% maximal amplitude, frequently augmented by short bursts at maximal amplitude. Though sexual arousal was prominent, no orgasm occurred with these brief increases in stimulation intensity. Despite several episodes of paroxysmal atrial tachycardia and development of adverse behavioral and neurological symptoms during maximal stimulation, compulsive use of the stimulator developed. At its most frequent, the patient self-stimulated throughout the day, neglecting personal hygiene and family commitments. A chronic ulceration developed at the tip of the finger used to adjust the amplitude dial and she frequently tampered with the device in an effort to increase the stimulation amplitude.
2013-06-25: Consider: brain computer interfaces. Without this, this poor guy would have a pretty miserable life.
But with our injectable electronics, it’s as if it’s not there at all. They are 1m times more flexible than any state-of-the-art flexible electronics and have subcellular feature sizes. They’re what I call ‘neurophilic’ — they actually like to interact with neurons.
Last year, Kennedy, a 67-year-old neurologist and inventor, did something unprecedented in the annals of self-experimentation. He paid a surgeon in Central America $25K to implant electrodes into his brain in order to establish a connection between his motor cortex and a computer.
A group of neurosurgeons round up a set of dire, terrifying warnings about the way that neural implants are vulnerable to networked attacks. Most of the article turns on deep brain stimulation devices, which can be used to stimulate or suppress activity in different parts of the brain, already used to treat some forms of mental illness, chronic pain and other disorders. The researchers round up a whole dystopia’s worth of potential attacks on these implants, including tampering with the victim’s reward system “to exert substantial control over a patient’s behavior”; pain attacks that induce “severe pain in these patients”; and attacks on impulse control that could induce “Mania, hypersexuality, and pathological gambling.”
2021-07-06: Perhaps everyone could lead better lives with a bit of DBS.
Why is Deep Brain Stimulation so transformative – not just eliminating OCD symptoms, but increasing self-confidence and openness to the world? And how can we make sense of self-confidence in the context of electrically induced changes in the brain? It could be that changes in the brain and an increase in self-confidence are both needed to set the sick person right. Understanding the effects of DBS on the brain might therefore be only a part of the explanation of how DBS changes the person.
It is the whole person who responds to DBS, and not only the parts of their brain where the electrodes are implanted. DBS changes many aspects of how a person engages with the world. Their social interactions, tendency to reflect and ruminate, mood, interests and, more generally, their self-confidence in life. Even for those without a pathology, the experience of over- and under-confidence can be common throughout life. Think of going into an interview where your dream job is at stake. In this kind of situation, many might experience a lack of self-confidence. Overconfidence on the job, on the other hand, can lead to precipitous calculations and risks. Too much self-confidence can tip over into impulsive acts that appear pathological; too little self-confidence can lead to anxiety and lack of trust in oneself and the world.
The so-called biohybrid system sports a power pack and computer all contained within the prosthesis and uses sensors to allow more realistic movements than static, strap-on devices. The first systems have noninvasive sensors attached to the prostheses. In 2 years scientists will implant sensors into study volunteers’ nervous systems.
the state of the art of medical implants / prosthetics
Gregor J. Rothfuss 