Space travel barrier removed as docs freeze and revive human for first time
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Space travel barrier removed as docs
freeze and revive human for first time
Process is initially intended to save
lives on Earth, rather than to send astronauts on long haul flights
ByMichael Moran13:20, 20 NOV 2019 UPDATED14:42,
20 NOV 2019
Journeys
to other star systems will forever be out of reach unless a massive
breakthrough in physics makes faster-than-light travel a reality, or a
breakthrough in medicine makes suspended animation possible. Now, at least, one
of those things has happened.
Samuel Tisherman, a professor at
the University of Maryland School of Medicine, is the leader of a team that has
successfully put a human being in suspended animation.
The
technique allows surgeons to 'press pause' on life while they look for a
solution
Describing the
successful operation as “a little surreal,” Professor Tisherman told New
Scientist how he removed the patient’s blood and replaced with ice-cold saline
solution.
The patient, technically dead at
this point, was removed from the cooling system and taken to an operating
theatre for a two-hour surgical procedure before having their blood restored
and being warmed to the normal temperature of 37C.
Prof Tisherman says he will be producing a full account of the
procedure in a scientific paper in the new year.
He says that his focus is on
pausing life long enough to perform emergency surgery rather than sending
astronauts on interstellar journeys.ED
ARTICLES
He tells the story of a young man who was stabbed over a row in
a bowling alley: “He was a healthy young man just minutes before, then suddenly
he was dead. We could have saved him if we’d had enough time.”
His suspended animation technique
is intended as a way of securing that extra time.
“I want to make clear that we’re
not trying to send people off to Saturn,” he says. “We’re trying to buy
ourselves more time to save lives.”
But
inevitably space agencies such as NASA and the ESA – as well as more ambitious
tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos – will be taken a keen
interest in Prof Tisherman’s paper when it is published in 2020.
A journey to Saturn can take up
to seven years, so keeping the crew on ice might be easier than keeping them
healthy and happy for all that time.
While Prof Tisherman has released
this news of one successful trial, there is no word on how many previous
attempts were made with critical patients before this.
The
experiment was given the go-ahead by the US Food and Drug Administration. The
FDA waived the usual requirement for patient consent in this case as the
patient could not be saved by any other means.
At the moment, the biggest
obstacle to reliable animation of a patient who has been super-cooled in this
way is cell damage as they are re-warmed – so-called reperfusion injuries.
Prof Tisherman says that there may be a drug, or cocktail of
drugs, that can help minimise these injuries but, he says: “but we haven’t
identified all the causes of reperfusion injuries yet”.
Once he has, whether or not he
wants to send a refrigerated crew to Saturn, it’s likely that sooner or later
that’s exactly what will happen.
World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China Published time: 17 Mar, 2019 13:12 · A Chinese surgeon has performed the world’s first remote brain surgery using 5G technology, with the patient 3,000km away from the operating doctor. Dr. Ling Zhipei remotely implanted a neurostimulator into his patient’s brain on Saturday, Chinese state-run media reports . The surgeon manipulated the instruments in the Beijing-based PLAGH hospital from a clinic subsidiary on the southern Hainan island, located 3,000km away. The surgery is said to have lasted three hours and ended successfully. The patient, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is said to be feeling well after the pioneering operation. The doctor used a computer connected to the next-generation 5G network developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei. The new device enabled a near real-time connection, according to Dr. Ling. “You barely feel that the patient is 3,000 kilometers away,” he said.
Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 21, 2022 - 04:15 AM A supercomputer is a machine that is built to handle billions, if not trillions of calculations at once. Each supercomputer is actually made up of many individual computers (known as nodes) that work together in parallel. A common metric for measuring the performance of these machines is flops , or floating point operations per second . In this visualization, Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu uses November 2021 data from TOP500 to visualize the computing power of the world’s top five supercomputers. For added context, a number of modern consumer devices were included in the comparison. Ranking by Teraflops Because supercomputers can achieve over one quadrillion flops, and consumer devices are much less powerful, we’ve used teraflops as our comparison metric. 1 teraflop = 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) flops. Supercomputer Fugaku was completed in March 202
BMW traps alleged thief by remotely locking him in car Stealer's Wheel? Seattle police department quotes "Watchmen" movie in a recap of the recent arrest. Tech Culture by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper December 4, 2016 5:00 PM PST It's maybe the most satisfying arrest we can imagine. Seattle police caught an alleged car thief by enlisting the help of car maker BMW to both track and then remotely lock the luckless criminal in the very car he was trying to steal. Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, deputy director of communications for the Seattle Police Department, posted a witty summary of the event on the SPD's blog on Wednesday. Turns out if you're inside a stolen car, it's perhaps not the best time to take a nap. "A car thief awoke from a sound slumber Sunday morning (Nov. 27) to find he had been remotely locked inside a stolen BMW, just as Seattle police officers were bearing down on him," Spangenthal-Lee wrote. The suspect found a ke
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