Stopping bleeding, closing wounds, repairing organs—these are everyday challenges in medical and surgical practice. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, French researchers have now introduced a new method that employs gluing by aqueous nanoparticle solutions to effectively control bleeding and repair tissues. In animal tests, their approach proved easy to apply, rapid and efficient even in situations when conventional methods are traumatic or fail. Sutures and staples are efficient tools for use in surgery and treating wounds. However, the usefulness of these methods can be limited in inaccessible parts of the body or in minimally invasive surgeries. In addition, stitching damages soft tissues such as liver, spleen, kidney, or lung. A good adhesive could be a useful alternative. The problem is that the adhesion must take place in a wet environment and that the repaired area is immediately put under strain. Previous adhesive technologies have had problems, including insufficient strength, inflammation due to toxic substances, or complicated implementation because a chemical polymerization or cross-linking reaction must be carried out in a controlled manner. Read more at: Phys.org
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Last year the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) approved a low-intensity ultrasound system, known as Exogen, for use in the NHS on bone fractures that fail to heal after nine months. Now, Turkish industrial designer Deniz Karasahin wants to make that healing a more beautiful, and patient-friendly experience.
"The process started itself, somehow," Karasahin told Wired.co.uk of his Osteoid cast development. "I was asked to make a small informative presentation about 3D technologies at the Izmir Chamber of Commerce. At the time I was also following the growth of the industry very closely and wanted to contribute. The cast idea was the most promising area because it added the most benefit compared with contemporary applications."
3D printing hearts and livers might be in the early development stages, but 3D printing medical devices and parts has been ongoing for years—in 2013, iLab Haiti began using MakerBot printers to create umbilical cord clamps on the spot. And if anything is ripe for disruption, it's the sweaty, stinky, itchy plaster cast that has remained relatively unchanged for decades.
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Proposed setup for generating optomechanical “cat states,” a form of micro-macro entanglement in which the quantum states of photons and phonons are in superposition. Credit: R. Ghobadi, et al. ©2014 American Physical Society In Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, a cat’s quantum state becomes entangled with the quantum state of a decaying nucleus, resulting in the odd situation that the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. The thought experiment was originally intended to convey the absurdity of applying quantum mechanics to macroscopic objects, but recently physicists have been questioning whether “quantum” effects such as entanglement and superposition may apply on all scales. In order to extend quantum effects to the macroscopic level, physicists are working on creating entanglement between a macroscopic and microscopic system. This situation is very similar to that of the entanglement between the quantum state of the macroscopic cat and that of the microscopic decaying nucleus. So far, micro-macro entanglement has been experimentally demonstrated in optical systems, and is currently being pursued in other areas, such as electro-mechanical and opto-mechanical systems. In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, physicists Roohollah Ghobadi, et al., have proposed a method for generating optomechanical micro-macro entanglement. One of the most intriguing outcomes of bringing
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Neutron crystallography shows this iron catalyst gripping two hydrogen atoms (red spheres). This arrangement allows an uncommon dihydrogen bond to form between the hydrogen atoms (red dots). Credit: PNNL/Liu et al 2014 Like a hungry diner ripping open a dinner roll, a fuel cell catalyst that converts hydrogen into electricity must tear open a hydrogen molecule. Now researchers have captured a view of such a catalyst holding onto the two halves of its hydrogen feast. The view confirms previous hypotheses and provides insight into how to make the catalyst work better for alternative energy uses. This study is the first time scientists have shown precisely where the hydrogen halves end up in the structure of a molecular catalyst that breaks down hydrogen, the team reported online April 22 in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. The design of this catalyst was inspired by the innards of a natural protein called a hydrogenase enzyme. “The catalyst shows us what likely happens in the natural hydrogenase system,” said Morris Bullock of the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “The catalyst is where the action is, but the natural enzyme has a huge protein surrounding the catalytic site. It would be hard to see what we have
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