This Artificial Heart Will Work Forever

The artificial heart is not something completely new. There are a number of options available, but there is only one that is approved for human use and even that is only intended to keep the patients going until they can get a heart transplant. However, a device being developed by the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is hoped to be a permanent fix.

The OHSU artificial heart was invented by the Dr. Richard Wampler, who is now retired, with the spinoff company OregonHeart. The device has been in the works since 2014. The company stopped working on the device so the University took over its development last year.

(Source: Medical Xpress)

The chance of mechanical failure increases with the increased number of moving parts and the device has been kept simple with just one moving part so no valves can get stuck. The moving part is a titanium alloy-coated hollow rod that shuttles back and forth inside a titanium tube.

This is suspended within the tube on hydrodynamic bearings. This is used to serve the same purpose as that of the lower chambers of the heart. The first step is to move blood to the lungs and then through the rest of the body. One thing that the OHSU artificial heart has is that it creates a blood flow that mimics a natural human pulse as opposed to others that create a continuous flow. This minimizes the blood damage and clotting and reduces the risk of a stroke.

(Source: New Atlas)

The device gets its power from a combined control unit/rechargeable battery pack. This can be carried in the pocket or can be worn on the belt. There are talks about further developments that would allow the battery to be implanted under the skin and recharged through external sources.

The OHSU artificial heart has been tested successfully in cows and sheep for short periods. The scientists are now developing a smaller model that is hoped to be implanted for three months. If this proves successful, then they will look forward to human trials. We will have to wait for the results to know if a permanent heart solution is going to become a reality or not.

source: Wonderful Engineering

SpaceChain, Aim to Archive Human Knowledge in Space

SpaceChain on Monday announced that it has entered a partnership with theArch Mission Foundation to use open source technology to launch an ambitious project involving the storage of large data sets in spacecraft and on other planets.

Arch Mission will load large quantities of data onto SpaceChain's satellite vehicles with the eventual aim of storing data on other planets.

"The goal of archiving and preserving knowledge of future generations will advance archiving science and human knowledge by itself," SpaceChain cofounder Zheng Zuo said. "The ambitious goal of disseminating this knowledge throughout the solar system is finally achievable today, thanks to greatly reduced launch costs through new space launch providers."

SpaceChain's decision to support the Arch mission to archive human data in space will help launch the Earth Library -- a ring of backup data orbiting around the Earth -- said Nova Spivack, cofounder of the Arch Mission Foundation.

The goal of the foundation is to "preserve and disseminate humanity's most important information across time and space, for the benefit of future generations," he told LinuxInsider.

Data Preservation

Among the data sets that are included are Wikipedia, the human genome, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and the Rosetta Project, Spivack said. The project ultimately will include a vast library of books, music, photos, film, video and other data sets.

The partnership would allow SpaceChain's long-term goal of storing data archives throughout the solar system come to fruition.

The venture follows an earlier partnership involving Elon Musk's Space X, which launched its Falcon Heavy rocket into space last month. Among other things, the launch carried a cherry red Tesla Roadster into space. The car is expected to circumnavigate the sun for at least 30 million years.

The Arch Mission included its first library, including the Isaac Asimov Foundation Trilogy, in that Falcon Heavy payload. There are plans to include additional libraries on future space flights, including a Lunar Library scheduled for delivery to the moon by 2020, and a Mars Library that is designed to accompany the first human settlers to the red planet.

SpaceChain, which was co-founded by CTO Jeff Garzik, a pioneer in the blockchain field and a key Linux kernel engineer, recently entered a critical venture with Qtum Foundation, in order to launch the world's first blockchain node in space.

Qtum launched a CubeSat into space that uses its blockchain technology on a Raspberry Pi.

"Blockchain is an interesting technology as a foundational infrastructure for future space colonies," said Aditya Kaul, research director at Tractica.

"Beyond the secure storage of data, I am personally very excited about how these could come together to create decentralized economies and possibly even governing mechanisms," he told LinuxInsider.

"There is an interesting conference on some of these themes coming up in June in London," Kaul noted.

Race to Space

The efforts to put a decentralized ledger into space follow an earlier effort involving nanosatellite firm Vector and blockchain firm Nexus to develop a cryptocurrency that is hosted in space, noted Jessica Groopman, industry analyst at Kaleido Insights.

Blockstream last year announced plans to launch Blockstream Satellite, a venture to enable satellites to broadcast real-time bitcoin data down to Earth from space, she told LinuxInsider.

"The general push 'to the outer limit' is one driven by intense distrust not only in existing centralized structures, but in the potential for the blockchain market itself to float too far in that direction, as more and more of the world's largest institutions are investing in the technology," Groopman pointed out.

In the early days of the sharing economy, that same sensibility existed in the peer-to-peer community, she recalled, but firms like Uber and Airbnb eventually became dominant.

Source : technewsworld

Scientists Have Discovered A New Organ We Never Knew About

Just when we think, we know everything there is to know about the human body, we are proved wrong. The use of a new microscopic technique led a team of scientists to identify a previously unknown human anatomical feature. There are calling it the interstitium. It was previously thought to be simply dense connective tissue sitting below the skin’s surface and surrounding the organs but it is actually a complex series of interconnected, fluid-filled compartments.

While examining a patient’s bile duct with a new type of endoscope that uses laser and fluorescent dyes to examine the living tissue, researchers identified a pattern of cavities that didn’t fit with the known anatomy of the bile duct. They took their results to pathology expert Neil Theise and the team proceeded to take bile duct biopsies in a way that did not dehydrate the samples.

(Source: New Atlas)

Theise explained to ResearchGate, “Rather than process the sampled bile duct tissue as usual, with dehydration and chemical fixation to make slides, we quickly froze the tissue, keeping the resected piece as close to the normal living tissue as possible.”

The previously assumed dense connective tissue was actually revealed to be a network of tiny fluid-filled cavities supported by a lattice meshwork of proteins. It could never be identified before as prior microscopic analysis involved some degree of cellular dehydration.

(Source: New Atlas)

“We would often see little “cracks” between collagen bundles in these layers,” says Theise. “I was taught, and in turn taught many of my trainees, that these cracks were artifacts of processing. We had pulled the tissue too hard in preparing the slide and separations had formed. But these were not artifacts: these were the remnants of the collapsed spaces. They had been there all the time. But it was only when we could look at living tissue that we could see that.”

Once identified, it was seen across the entire human body from the linings of organs to the surrounding muscles. The aspect of the research that has gained the most traction is the suggestion that the interstitium should be classified as a new organ. Theise says that it fulfills the criteria for the definition of a new organ and could be the 80th organ to be classified in the human body.

“The definition of ‘organ’ is imprecise, but usually implies that there is a unity and uniqueness of structure or of function,” says Theise. “This space has both: unique properties and structures not seen elsewhere and functions that are highly specific and dependent on the unique structures and cell types that form it.”

(Source: The Daily Beast)

Everyone is not convinced that it is enough to be classified as a new organ and even though they agree that this is a huge scientific discovery and will help in understanding the human body better, they feel that it is not enough to be classified as a new organ.

“I would think of this as a new component that is common among a variety of organs, rather than a new organ in and of itself,” says Nathanson in an interview with CNN. “It would be analogous to discovering blood vessels for the first time, in that they are in every organ but they aren’t an organ themselves.”

The coming months will give us a better idea of what this discovery signifies.

Source : wonderful Engineering