A liver grown from umbilical cord blood. Leon Kass can’t be happy about this.

Virtual worlds?

One of the arguments against space tourism as a long-term market is that as the VW technology advances, the real thing may actually be viewed as boring compared to the possibilities offered by programmable realities. I suspect that this will be true to some limited degree (particularly given the cost differential of doing things in cyberspace as opposed to meat space), but I’m sure that there will always be “Luddites” who refuse to hide in virtual worlds, protected from real consequences, but will prefer to go out and test their bodies and senses against the real thing.

Firefox 2.0 has a spell checker built into its text boxes. Handy for blogging. It doesn’t like the word “spellchecker.”

Literally, from this medical breakthrough:

Composed of peptides, the liquid self-assembles into a protective nanofiber gel when applied to a wound. Rutledge Ellis-Behnke, research scientist in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and Kwok-Fai So, chair of the department of anatomy at the University of Hong Kong, discovered the liquid’s ability to stop bleeding while experimenting with it as a matrix for regrowing brain cells in hamsters.

The researchers then conducted a series of experiments on various mammals, including rodents and pigs, applying the clear liquid agent to the brain, skin, liver, spinal cord, and femoral artery to test its ability to halt bleeding and seal wounds.

“It worked every single time,” said Ellis-Behnke. They found that it stopped the bleeding in less than 15 seconds, and even worked on animals given blood-thinning medications.

The wound must still be stitched up after the procedure; but unlike other agents designed to stop bleeding, it does not have to be removed from the wound site.

The liquid’s only byproduct is amino acids: tissue building blocks that can be used to actually repair the site of the injury, according to the researchers. It is also nontoxic, causes no immune response in the patient, and can be used in a wet environment, according to Ellis-Behnke.

Is this a drug, or a de-vice? I hope that the FDA won’t get in the way of immediate field use. We need it on the battlefields, both in Iraq and in the emergency rooms of the inner cities. It seems to me that if what’s stated is true, unnecessary (e.g., for further animal or even human testing) delay in deploying it should be considered criminal negligence.

[Note: misspelling of de-vice necessary for some arcane reason known only to the creators of Moveable Type (if they know)]

For those morons who continue to think that I am a reflexive defender and fan of the Bush administration, there’s no better argument against it in my opinion than its apparent worship of the likes of Leon Kass.

A continuous-flow artificial heart:

Frazier and his team have implanted pairs of commercially available ventricular-assist de-vices* into calves that had their hearts removed. The researchers say the de-vices* were able to pump blood and respond to the animals’ needs based on their activities. “You put this in cattle and they stand up and moo and eat and wonder why everyone is looking at them so weird,” says William Cohn, a collaborator on the research and director of minimally invasive surgical technology at the Texas Heart Institute.

…Cohn hopes that in the future, artificial heart technology will become much safer and easier to use, broadening the potential pool of patients. “It wouldn’t surprise me if at the 2050 Olympics, there were standard and modified [competitor] divisions,” he says.

Ahhh, life in the twenty-first century.

* Note: misspelling deliberate. For some weird reason, MT won’t allow me to create a post with the word “dev i ces” in it. The script actually breaks.

The Methusaleh Foundation just got a major donation.

The conservative case for life extension.

Here’s an interesting article at Wired about spam blogs, a problem that could take down the blogosphere if the search engines can’t get it under control. I’ve had to ban blogspot.com from comments and pings a few months ago because there were so many comments and pings coming from blogspot splogs. One other warning for people like Jeff Foust:

Another giveaway: Both Some Title and the grave-robbing page it links to had Web addresses in the .info domain. Spammers flock to .info, which was created as an alternative to the crowded .com, because its domain names are cheaper

Popular Mechanics has a new podcast up on prospects for nuclear power, who’s right about “net neutrality” (hint–everyone’s being disingenuous), and nanotech. Along with a Ted Stevens “tubes for rubes” remix…