| Robots making heart bypass surgery less invasive
PHILADELPHIA - Stand around a fishing hole long enough and you're likely to hear a few lies. But this month Joseph M. Hendrickson went fishing for trout on the Octoraro Creek and told a story no one believed: Six weeks prior, surgeons used robotic arms to bypass three of his plaque-choked arteries, sewing the grafts onto his beating heart through an incision the size of your average fishing lure. Two men who had undergone bypass surgery stepped forward to tell him they knew better. Each carried at least 6-inch scars from where doctors had sawed through their chests to get at their hearts. "Does it still hurt when you tie your shoes? Can you remember everything?" they asked, referring to complaints that stopping the heart and putting patients on heart-lung machines can diminish cognitive ability.
EAU 2007 - AUA Lecture at the EAU 2007 - “The Role of Robotics in ...
BERLIN, GERMANY (UroToday.com) - EAU 2007 - Mani Menon, MD Detroit, Michigan, USA presented "The Role of Robotics in Urology" as the AUA Lecture at the plenary session of the EAU on Friday March 23, 2007. He started with a 3-D video of a robotic laparoscopic radical prostatectomy. His technique was discussed with the video, which was received with applause. Dr. Menon has completed 3,100 of these cases. Despite no clear evidence that robotic RP has no huge advantages over open surgery, there is a significant growth in this market. The market is primarily coming from patient "advertising" to other patients by word of mouth and use of the internet. The perceived benefit is likely based upon decreased blood loss and quicker recovery. He hypothesized that this leads to decreased surgical and medical complications.
Latest Mitsubishi Robot Installed In ‘High Tech Garden Shed’
Robotics and industrial automation are commonly associated with capital intensive, large volume manufacturing, high-speed repetitive processes and advanced products. Yet Brass Products, a name redolent of traditional engineering and craftsmanship, employs a comprehensive level of automation at its three-man operation near Ashford, Kent. Furthermore, in what owner Duncan Rye describes as the most high tech garden shed youll find, robotics specialist Barr & Paatz has just installed and commissioned one of the latest generation of Mitsubishi six-axis articulated robots for feeding a CNC milling machine, a previously tedious and potentially hazardous manual operation.
Developed specifically for handling low payloads up to 6kg and aimed particularly at small and medium scale enterprises, the Mitsubishi RV-6S has a precision repeatability of 0.02mm and working speeds of up to 9500mm/sec, enabling it to complete the 12-inch test in less than a second.
Alamut, marriage of nature and history
TEHRAN. April 2. KAZINFORM. Alamut Fort was once a mountain fortress in the arid hills by the Alborz Mountains, south of the Caspian Sea. It is in the vicinity of Gazor Khan, a village about 100 km from Qazvin. According to Hamdollah Mostowfi (1281-1349), a well-famed Iranian historian, geographer and epic poet, the fortress was built in 840 at an elevation of 2,100 m. It was built in a way that had only one passable artificial entrance that wound its way around the cliff face. However, there was one natural approach which was a steep gravel slope, being too dangerous to use. All these and even more, made the conquering of the fortress a Herculean task. The fort has an unusual system of water supply. The top of the castle was extremely narrow and long (perhaps 400 meters long), and no more than 30 meters wide in any place, and usually less.
Physicist needs $20000 for time-travel experiment
The Seattle scientist who wants to test a controversial prediction from quantum theory that says light particles can go backward in time is, himself, running out of time.
It's not a wormhole or warp in the space-time continuum. The problem is more mundane -- a black hole in the time-and-money continuum spawned by today's increasingly risk-averse, "performance-based" approach to funding research.
"I guess you could say we're now living on borrowed time," wryly joked John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington. "All we need to keep going is maybe $20,000, but nobody seems that interested in funding this project."
It's a project that aims to do a conceptually simple bench-top test for evidence of something Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." The test involves using a crystal to split a photon, a light particle, into two reduced-energy photons that -- through careful manipulation -- Cramer thinks could reveal a flash of time traveling backward.
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