Emperor’s Missing Heart, Vibrant Gut, More Trivial Superpowers, Greenfieldwashing

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Find the emperor’s heart — Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great certainly wasn’t, in the purest medical sense, heartless. But now he is. The search is on to find his missing heart, though it isn’t abundantly […]

And the heartbeat goes on: Nurse’s gift memento of patients’ final thumps

Becker’s Hospital Review reports: How this Intermountain nurse comforts deceased patients’ families Written by Mackenzie Bean A registered nurse at Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Medical Center is responsible for spearheading an initiative to comfort the families of patients who died at the hospital’s respiratory intensive care unit, reports KSL TV. To comfort patients’ relatives, Lisa Beglarian, […]

Echocardiography – the wild side

Performing echocardiography (ultrasound examination of the heart) is now so widespread that it might be called a routine procedure. But using the diagnostic technique is not always straightforward. What happens, for example, it the patient has feathers? Or a perhaps even a shell? Guidance for echocardiographing animals is at hand from Yolanda Martinez Pereira, LdaVt […]

Scarle’s XBoxian firsts

Dr. Simon Scarle of Warwick University tells us some merits of his study “Implications of the Turing completeness of reaction-diffusion models, informed by GPGPU simulations on an XBox 360: Cardiac arrhythmias, re-entry and the Halting problem”: In this paper I used an XBox 360’s GPU to simulate cardiac tissue and carry out research on the […]