I must get this.
John F. Wasik’s new book on Nikola Tesla (Lightning Strikes: Timeless Lessons in Creativity from the Life and Work of Nikola Tesla) includes an AR app.
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Looking for that perfect gift for the medical student in your life? Search no more.
Is it wise to make medical students feel like renegade fictional genius Tony Stark, magically waving human bodies apart like the holographic diagrams in the Iron Man basement lab? Should we use technology to make millennials feel like superheroes? Stop asking difficult philosophical questions and look at how cool this is.
This augmented reality app is called Project Esper. It uses hand gestures to allow the users move and study anatomy. Users can pull the human body apart and investigate the organs and limbs piece by piece. Look—just look at this magical Star Trek karate:
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Luv this.
Archaeology isn’t an easy job, but it becomes easier in virtual reality, if you can walk around ancient buildings as if they were still there.
Lithodomos VR, an Australian virtual reality archaeological startup, knows this and has raised $900,000 in Australian dollars ($679,000 in U.S. dollars) in a seed funding round.
Melbourne-based Lithodomos VR creates what it calls breathtaking, archaeologically accurate reconstructions of the ancient world in VR for use in the tourism, education and entertainment industries. It has contracts for content in Spain, museum installations, a video in the Berlin Film Festival (VR category), an app in Jerusalem, and that is just a start.
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Someday, we will have glasses or contacts that will be able to detect tumors and notify us or even contact doctor’s office to set up the appointment for us.
Researchers have shown that they could efficiently capture and simultaneously filter out the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) permanently from cancer patients’ whole blood, which otherwise could gain access into the blood and invariably cause metastasis.
(Representative image)
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Interesting study on brain receptors.
Researchers from UZH have discovered how the perception of meaning changes in the brain under the influence of LSD. The serotonin 2A receptors are responsible for altered perception. This finding will help develop new courses of pharmacotherapy for psychiatric disorders such as depression, addictions or phobias.
Humans perceive everyday things and experiences differently and attach different meaning to pieces of music, for instance. In the case of psychiatric disorders, this perception is often altered. For patients suffering from addictions, for instance, drug stimuli are more meaningful than for people without an addiction. Or patients with phobias perceive the things or situations that scare them with exaggerated significance compared to healthy people. A heightened negative perception of the self is also characteristic of depressive patients. Just how this so-called personal relevance develops in the brain and which neuropharmacological mechanisms are behind it, however, have remained unclear.
Researchers from the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at Zurich University Hospital for Psychiatry now reveal that LSD influences this process by stimulating the serotonin 2A receptor, one of the 14 serotonin receptors in the brain. Before the study began, the participants were asked to categorize 30 pieces of music as personally important and meaningful or without any personal relevance. In the subsequent experiment, LSD altered the attribution of meaning compared to a placebo: “Pieces of music previously classified as meaningless suddenly became personally meaningful under the influence of LSD,” explains Katrin Preller, who conducted the study in conjunction with Professor Franz Vollenweider and the Neuropsychopharmacology and Brain Imaging research team.
Scientists, have identified a brain hormone that can trigger fat burning in the gut.
Researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in the US found a brain hormone that specifically and selectively stimulates f at metabolism, without any effect on food intake.
The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, in animal models could have implications for future pharmaceutical development.
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TDP-43 Protien tied to Alzheimers according to a Mayo Clinic Study.
Since the time of Dr. Alois Alzheimer himself, two proteins (beta-amyloid (Aβ) and tau) have become tantamount to Alzheimer’s disease (AD). But a Mayo Clinic study challenges the perception that these are the only important proteins accounting for the clinical features of the devastating disease.
In a large clinico-imaging pathological study, Mayo Clinic researchers demonstrated that a third protein (TDP-43) plays a major role in AD pathology. In fact, people whose brain was TDP positive were 10 times more likely to be cognitively impaired at death compared to those who didn’t have the protein, showing that TDP-43 has the potential to overpower what has been termed resilient brain aging. The study was published in the journal Acta Neuropathologica.
Most of us probably don’t think too much about the foodstuffs we buy in the supermarket. But behind the scenes, today’s food production system relies on a centralized, industrial-scale supply chain that’s still dependent upon soil-based agriculture for the majority of our food crops.
In many instances, that means that food has to travel long distances from farm to table, meaning that food has lost much of its freshness and nutritional value by the time it reaches your table. There’s also a growing awareness that this model isn’t sustainable: the pressures of increasing urbanization and loss of arable land, rising populations and the increased frequency of extreme weather events like droughts and floods — brought on by climate change — means that slowly but surely, we are going to have to change the way we grow our food.
There are some indications of this shift: the appearance of urban rooftop farms, an explosion of interest in automated hydroponic systems. The problem with all these systems is that their platforms are proprietary, and the lack of a common platform between them means these won’t necessarily scale up.
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My doctor needs one of these.
CAE Healthcare announced the release of CAE VimedixAR, an ultrasound training simulator integrated with the Microsoft HoloLens, the world’s first self-contained holographic computer. The announcment marks CAE Healthcare as the first company to bring a commercial Microsoft HoloLens application to the medical simulation market.
VimedixAR delivers an unprecedented simulation-based training experience, allowing learners to interact and move freely within a clinical training environment that is augmented with holograms. For the first time, students will be able to examine 3D anatomy inside the body of the Vimedix manikin. As learners practice scanning an animated heart, lungs or abdomen, they will observe in real-time how the ultrasound beam cuts through anatomy to generate a ultrasound image.
Learners can elevate the VimedixAR hologram above the body to gain an understanding of human anatomy and how its circulatory, respiratory and skeletal structures are integrated. The hologram of the heart, for example, can be isolated and enlarged, rotated, and turned as it floats at eye level. If a learner is struggling to understand a concept, he or she will be able to walk around the hologram to gain a different perspective.
Choosing a New System Architecture
Posted in business, food, sustainability
The food retail, foodservice and industrial cooling industries are in the midst of a momentous transition in refrigeration system architectures. Regulations are driving the need to implement sustainable systems with options growing exponentially. Emerson’s natural refrigerant expert, Andre Patenaude, provides advice on the best alternatives to future proof your system.
To get to what many call the “end game” of achieving compliance and meeting corporate sustainability objectives, more businesses are looking at systems based on natural refrigerants to help them achieve these goals.
The term “natural refrigerant” refers to substances that naturally occur in the environment. Unlike the synthetic refrigerants that have commonly been used in refrigeration applications — including hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) — ammonia (NH3 or refrigerant name R-717), propane (refrigerant name R-290) and carbon dioxide (CO2 or refrigerant name R-744) are three naturally occurring refrigerants that pose very little threat to the environment.
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