Category Archives: Technology and Society

Technology and Society

How Do You Check Their Pulse?

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.

Technology and Society

Splog Overload

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