A snake is probably the last thing you’d ever want crawling around your heart. But in the case of a new American-Israeli invention called the CardioARM, this medical ‘snake’ device may one day save your life. The new Israeli-American invention came by way of some brainstorming between Israel’s Dr. Alon Wolf and his American colleague Prof. Howie Choset, when Wolf was working as a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. ‘Both Howie and myself are experts in snake robotics,’ says Wolf, who is now based at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. ‘We are working with robotic snakes for search and rescue operations. So we started in the back of our minds thinking: if we can send snakes to crawl inside buildings to look for survivors, then why can’t we send the same snake inside our body to fix it?’ A few weeks later, Choset and Wolf had a eureka moment, and found a way to design a robotic snake small enough, strong enough and flexible enough to fit inside the human body. They partnered with the world-renowned Italian surgeon Prof. Marco Zenati, now at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and formed […]
ARDINGLY, England — A seed bank that is trying to collect every type of plant in the world is now under threat from the global financial crisis, its director says. The Millennium Seed Bank Project aims to house all the 300,000 different plant species known to exist to ensure future biodiversity and protect a vital source of food and medicines, director Paul Smith said. The project is on track to collect 10 percent of the total by 2010 but the financial crisis is drying up funding, casting serious doubts on future collections, he said. About half the funding comes from the National Lottery and the rest from corporate donations. But with businesses tightening their belts in the economic downturn and preparation for the 2012 London Olympics sapping lottery money, the pot is about to run dry. Smith hopes government money and international groups will come through with the nearly 10 million pounds per year needed to keep the bank going. But if that does not happen, new collections and research will stop, he said. ‘We would say that this is an exceptional bank and that the assets within it, the capital that we have […]
The oceans have long buffered the effects of climate change by absorbing a substantial portion of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. But this benefit has a catch: as the gas dissolves, it makes seawater more acidic. Now an international panel of marine scientists says this acidity is accelerating so fast it threatens the survival of coral reefs, shellfish and the marine food web generally. The panel, comprising 155 scientists from 26 countries and other international groups, is not the first to point to growing ocean acidity as an environmental threat. For example, a group of eminent scientists convened by The Nature Conservancy issued a similar assessment in August. But the new report’s blunt language and international backing give its assessment unusual force. It called for ‘urgent action’ to sharply reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. ‘Severe damages are imminent,’ the group said Friday in a statement summing up its deliberations at a symposium in Monaco last October. The statement, called the Monaco Declaration, said increasing acidity was interfering with the growth and health of shellfish and eating away at coral reefs, processes that would eventually affect marine food webs generally. Already, the group said, there have been detectable […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
