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For the first time in Israel, a doctor at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva has used a da Vinci robot to perform the complex surgery of untrapping a man’s ureter from behind his vena cava — the largest vein in the body that carries blood to the heart from other areas.

Last month, a 41-year-old patient checked in to Beilinson suffering from the effects of retrocaval ureter, a ureter that abnormally encircles the inferior vena cava. Only one in 1500 people are born with this deformity, which worsens over decades until eventually it leads to sepsis.

With a retrocaval ureter, the ureter passes behind the large vein instead of in front of it or right by it. The only way to cure the person is to perform a complex operation to move the ureter.

Usually “open” surgery is performed, meaning the patient is cut open. But Dr. Shay Golan, head of the Urologic Oncology Service at Beilinson, decided to try something new and, for the first time in Israel, a robot performed the surgery in 50 minutes, making only three very small incisions (each less than 1 centimeter) in his belly and without any blood loss.


High-energy #lasers are moving quickly from prototype to deployment for the #USArmy and #USNavy. We’ve helped make that happen.


A brief history of high-energy lasers.

The U.S. military has had electromagnetic spectrum weapons in mind since the 1960s. Throughout the 1980s, industry and military laid the groundwork for figuring out how to reach practical power levels, beam control and adaptive optics. The Department of Defense officially recognized lasers as a plausible future weapon in 1999, marking the beginning of formal research and development.

%{[ data-embed-type= image data-embed-id=6105d4fd38fdfbe3338b45e7 data-embed-element= span data-embed-size=320w data-embed-align= left data-embed-alt= Raytheon has installed the prototype High Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) aboard a Polaris MRZR all-terrain vehicle to defend military forces from enemy unmanned aircraft. data-embed-src= https://img.militaryaerospace.com/files/base/ebm/mae/image/2…max&w=1440 data-embed-caption= Raytheon has installed the prototype High Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS) aboard a Polaris MRZR all-terrain vehicle to defend military forces from enemy unmanned aircraft. ]}%However, researchers did demonstrate limited-use lasers earlier than that, with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) firing a 100-kilowatt laser in 1968 and the Navy-ARPA Chemical Laser producing 250 kilowatts in 1975.

When the Human Genome Project reached its ambitious goal of mapping the entire human genome, it seemed the world was entering an era of personalized medicine, where evidence from our own specific genetic material would guide our care.

That was 2003, and nearly a generation after that spectacular collaborative achievement, we are still waiting for that promise to materialize. We may know that a person carries a gene associated with breast cancer, for example, but not whether that person will go on to develop the disease.

New research by McMaster University evolutionary biologist Rama Singh suggests the reason is that there is another, hidden layer that controls how interact, and how the many billions of possible combinations produce certain results. That layer is composed of largely uncharted biochemical pathways that in cells through chemical reactions.

Summary: Combining artificial intelligence, mathematical modeling, and brain imaging data, researchers shed light on the neural processes that occur when people use mental abstraction.

Source: UCL

By using a combination of mathematical modeling, machine learning and brain imaging technology, researchers have discovered what happens in the brain when people use mental abstractions.