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First Robotic Coronary,
Artery Bypass Surgery in Iran
A robotic coronary artery bypass surgery (closed chest) was conducted for the first time in Iran at Iranshahr Hospital on Wednesday by professor Mehrdad Mahmoudi.
With access to this technology, Iran joined the few countries that are capable of undertaking surgery by using robots, Mehr News Agency reported.
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Robotic cardiovascular surgery depends on the age of the patient, the type of heart ailment and the extent of need for surgery.
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Previously, robots were used in open heart surgeries, but Mahmoudi, who is a professor of surgery in Germany, fulfills the task through a totally endoscopic method.
Robotic cardiovascular surgery depends on the age of the patient, the type of heart ailment and the extent of need for surgery.
The robot used in this surgery can transfer 3-dimensional images to the surgeon and help him during coronary artery bypass.
Robots have been used in cardiovascular surgeries worldwide for quite a few years. Currently, robotic arms are used in highly complicated heart surgeries.
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Thin line Between
Desire, Dread
The chemical dopamine induces both desire and dread in adjacent regions of the brain, according to new research at the University of Michigan.
Dopamine is commonly known to motivate animals and people to seek positive rewards. The study breaks new ground by showing dopamine is also involved in negative feelings such as fear. This perhaps explains why dopamine dysfunction is implicated in drug addiction, which involves excessive desire, and in schizophrenia and other phobias involving anxiety and fear, physorg said.
Kent Berridge, a U-M psychology professor who oversees U-M’s Affective Neuroscience & Biopsychology Lab, and his U-M colleagues identified dopamine’s dual effect at the nucleus accumbens, a brain region that motivates people and animals to seek out pleasurable rewards such as food or drugs, but is also involved in fear.
They found that inhibiting dopamine’s normal function prevented the nucleus accumbens from inducing both rewarding and fearful behaviors, suggesting that dopamine is important in both.
In previous research, Berridge and colleagues showed that a distance of only a few millimeters separate desire and dread functions in the nucleus accumbens. Because dopamine is an important neurotransmitter in this brain structure, the researchers investigated its role in generating these functions in the current study.
When dopamine was allowed to act normally, injection of a chemical in the front of the nucleus accumbens caused rats to eat nearly three times as much as they normally do. In contrast, injection of the chemical in the back of the nucleus accumbens caused rats to display fearful behavior normally shown in response to a predator.
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World’s First 16-Layer Optical Disc Developed
Pioneer Corporation has succeeded in developing a 16-layer read-only optical disc with a capacity of 400 gigabytes for the first time in the world.
Its per-layer capacity is 25 gigabytes, which is the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc (BD). This multilayer technology will also be applicable to multilayer recordable discs, Physorg reported.
For multilayer optical discs, it has been difficult to obtain clear signals from each recording layer in a stable manner due to crosstalk from adjacent layers and transmission loss.
Utilizing the optical disc production technology that it has developed in the DVD field, Pioneer solved these problems by, among other things, using a disc structure that can reduce crosstalk from adjacent layers, resulting in a 16-layer optical disc that can playback high-quality signals from every layer.
As for the read-out system, Pioneer achieved stability in the playback of recorded signals by employing a wide-range spherical aberration compensator and light-receiving element that can read out weak signals at a high signal-to-noise ratio in the optical pick-up mechanism.
Since the optical specifications of the objective lens, such as NA (Numerical Aperture), are the same as those for the existing BD discs, it is possible to maintain compatibility between the new 16-layer optical disc and the BD discs.
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New Vaccine May Offer New Immunity
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This handout photo displays a dish showing minimal growth of Salmonella (l) and a dish containing
the sugar arabinose showing enhanced growth of
Salmonella.
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A new type of vaccine that sneaks into the body and then self-destructs--all without needles--may offer a new way to protect against a range of diseases, US researchers reported.
The researchers genetically engineered a type of Salmonella bacteria to carry a little piece of Streptococcus and dripped it into the mouths of mice, Reuters said.
Reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they said the vaccine protected the mice, and the Salmonella carrier blew itself up.
“We have developed a technique of biological containment where the microorganism self-destructs,“ Roy Curtiss of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
“Not only does the bacteria lyse (break open) and die and have no survival, but it can be used with an antigen,“ Curtiss added.
An antigen is a protein that can be recognized and attacked by the immune system.
Curtiss and colleagues used an antigen found in Streptococcus pneumonia, which causes bacterial pneumonia. They put it into Salmonella, bacteria that invades cells and then reproduces out of control until it bursts the cell.
The vaccine protected mice from infection, carrying the strep antigen into cells. Then, before the Salmonella could do any damage, it burst open.
Curtiss believes the approach could be used against not only bacteria, but viruses, fungal infections and parasites.
It might solve the problem of using so-called live vaccines, Curtiss said. Such vaccines are highly effective but even when the bacteria or virus used to make the vaccine is attenuated, or weakened, it can escape and mutate into a dangerous form to cause disease.
The live polio virus vaccine, which is given orally as drops, is one example of where this has happened.
Curtiss developed a way to weaken the live Salmonella bacteria so it cannot live for long outside a laboratory dish.
“We used a gene that is regulated by the presence of the sugar arabinose,“ he said. This can be supplied in growth media used in lab dishes but is not found in the bodies of animals, including humans.
The bacteria can be grown in a way that prevents them from making a cell wall--so they cannot survive and replicate.
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Heart Attack Risk
Although heart attacks are rare among young women, becoming pregnant doubles or even triples the risk of heart attack in young women, a new study indicates. Physicians should not dismiss chest pain in young women as being symptom of heart attack.
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Most Sunscreens
Offer Inadequate Protection
The simple rule of sunscreen--the higher the SPF, a laboratory measure of the effectiveness of sunscreen, and the thicker the slather, the better--has come under doubt.
According to LiveScience, the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a Washington-based research group and habitual gadfly to the business world, has found that four out of five of the nearly 1,000 sunscreen lotions analyzed offer inadequate protection from the sun or contain harmful chemicals. The biggest offenders, the EWG said, are the industry leaders: Coppertone, Banana Boat and Neutrogena.
While three out of three industry leaders are rather upset with the EWG report, and while some dermatologists criticize it for hyperbole, the report does underscore several long-standing health concerns:
Sunscreens do not offer blanket protection from the sun and do little to prevent the most deadly form of skin cancer; reliance on them instead of, say, a hat and protective clothing, might be contributing to skin cancer; and the Food and Drug Administration has yet to issue new safety standards, mysteriously sitting on a set of recommendations drafted 30 years ago.
Sunlight contains ultraviolet radiation, largely in two forms: UVA and UVB. Aside from sunburn, UVB exposure causes the most common forms of skin cancer--basal cell carcinoma, which is rarely deadly and mostly only disfiguring, and squamous cell carcinoma, which can turn deadly about 1 percent of the time.
Nano-Powder Reveals Clearer Fingerprints
A powder made up of zinc oxide nanoparticles can provide a clear image of fingerprints even on wet surfaces, Australian researchers say.
Dr. Andrew McDonagh at Sydney’s University of Technology (UTS) says the 20-nanometre zinc oxide particles form a solid one micrometer sized flower-like crystals, giving a much clearer picture of fingerprints, ABC Science reported.
Traditional powders reveal fingerprints by sticking to the oily residues left on the surface, but sometimes the prints are found on sinks and bathtubs or are partly washed away.
Tested on glass, polyethylene and aluminum and illuminated with ultraviolet light, the new powder fluoresces without any extra fluorescent dyes, ABC said.
“When you dust with a powder, you’re hoping that it will stick only to the fingerprint, but often it will stick to everything,“ said McDonagh.
“The nanoparticles are very good at sticking to the fingerprint residue but not to the background surface,“ he concluded.
Reconsidering Tattoo Removal Method
Lasers are used routinely in plastic surgery to remove tattoos and other skin blemishes. But surgeons have to be careful that the radiation doesn’t heat the skin above 70 ¡C, the threshold above which cell damage causes scarring.
To prevent this, they usually spray the skin with a cold, volatile liquid such as tetrafluoroethane which reduces the temperature of the skin to around 3 ¡C as it evaporates. Precooling can increase the amount of heating the skin can safely accept by a factor of two, allowing the surgery to proceed more quickly, NewScientist reported.
Tetrafluoroethane is currently the liquid of choice because it does not damage the ozone layer, but recent work has shown that the chemical is a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide.
John Stuart Nelson Medical Director at the Beckman Laser Institute of the University of California, Irvine, US, says that laser surgeons can ease their eco consciences by switching to a carbon-dioxide spray that does the job just as well, while reducing the impact on the environment.
His idea is to store liquid CO2 under pressure and spray it onto the skin undergoing laser treatment. This produces a fine mist of solid CO2 particles--dry ice--that cool the skin before sublimating into gas.
Jet Turbine Armor Designed
When operating in the desert, the turbines in jet engines and helicopter engines are continually blasted by sand.
According to NewScientist, this eventually causes the leading edge of each aerofoil on the turbine to fold over on itself forming a bur and reducing the efficiency and lifetime of the engine.
The American engine maker General Electric, funded by the US Office of Naval Research, has come up with an anti-erosion coating consisting of alternating layers of an extremely hard ceramic such as tantalum carbide and a metal such as niobium, which can absorb the stresses that might otherwise cause the ceramic to crack.
The company says this should prevent the formation of burs, making turbines destined for the desert more efficient and longer lasting.
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