Organ Care Systems

Antes nos maravillaba ver a una persona poder vivir sin un órgano (como el corazón). La medicina moderna acaba de dar ahora el siguiente paso: mantener un órgano vivo “sin la persona”.

La empresa de aparatos médicos y quirúrgicos Transmedics desarrolló estas increíbles “incubadoras” OCS (Organ care systems) para mantener vivos órganos como corazones, pulmones e hígados.

¿Porqué me interesó? Me hizo pensar que quizá no está tan lejos el momento en que podamos mantener vivo el cerebro de una persona, como ya se ha planteado desde hace mucho en la ciencia ficción (Trascendence, Robocop, Brain that wouldn’t die), lo que cambiaría por completo nuestra percepción de “vida humana consciente”…

Me la encontré por una pagina de Facebook llamada “Science & Nature”, que comparte mucho material sobre las maravillas de la medicina moderna, ultimós vances y casos insólitos.

Les recomiendo seguirla (si tienen el hígado suficiente)…

A breakthrough in heart preservation. The World’s Only Portable Heart Perfusion System

Heart transplantation programs around the world face significant challenges in transplantation volume, patient outcomes, and overall cost of patient care.  Progress in surmounting these challenges has been limited by the current cold storage heart preservation method.

TransMedics developed the OCS™ HEART system to overcome these challenges. This portable, warm perfusion and monitoring system is designed to

• Increase transplantation volume
• Improve patient outcomes
• Reduce cost of patient care

http://bit.ly/2071BQU

Proof of alien life

Un equipo dirigido por el profesor Milton Wainwright, del Departamento de Biología Molecular y Biotecnología de Sheffield, encontró pequeños organismos que podrían haber llegado desde el espacio. Las muestras fueron recolectadas por los globos enviados a la estratosfera, a 27 kilómetros por encima de la atmósfera de la Tierra, para examinar los desechos espaciales.

Esto tiene dos principales repercusiones en lo que sabemos sobre la vida:
1. La de la tierra no es la única que existe.
2. Se refuerza la teoría evolutiva que se conoce como Panspermia, donde se sugiere que toda vida en este planeta (incluídos nosotros mismos) proviene del espacio exterior.

“En la ausencia de un mecanismo por el cual las partículas grandes como estas puedan ser transportadas a la estratosfera, sólo podemos concluir que las entidades biológicas fueron originadas desde el espacio. Nuestra conclusión es, entonces, que la vida está continuamente llegando a la Tierra desde el espacio, la vida no se limita a este planeta y es casi seguro que no se originó aquí ”.

Tomen eso, católicos…

“The organisms are not usual,” said Professor Wainwright, who works at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. “If they came from earth, we would expect to see stuff that we find on earth commonly, like pollen.”

“We’re very, very confident that these are biological entities originating from space,” he said, acknowledging that absolutely certainty is hard to achieve in science.

The team believes that the entities are coming from comets, which are big balls of ice shooting through space. The samples were collected during a meteorite shower from a comet. As they hit the earth’s atmosphere, the comets melt – ablate, to give it a technical term – releasing the organisms as they break down.

“The particles are very clean,” added Prof Wainwright. “They don’t have any dust attached to them, which again suggests they’re not coming to earth. Similarly, cosmic dust isn’t stuck to them, so we think they came from an aquatic environment, and the most obvious aquatic environment in space is a comet.

http://ind.pn/1Fgjetf

Oldest living things

Seres que viven 5,500 años (y contando). El proyecto de esta artista de Brooklyn, basado en encontrar y fotografiar los organismos vivientes mas viejos del planeta, le ha valido exposiciones por todo el mundo, la publicación de un libro, y una TED talk. Vale la pena conocerlo…

What’s the oldest living thing you’ve ever seen? A 2,200-year-old sequoia in California, perhaps? That’s a relatively teenage specimen to the artist Rachel Sussman, who has spent the last ten years looping the globe on a wild adventure to meet and document the world’s oldest “continuously living” organisms.

Working closely with biologists and researchers, and often taking multi-day expeditions just to see her subjects in person, Sussman photographed 30 species of elders, ranging from a multi-acre aspen grove to a small, predatory fungus. Along the way, Sussman has reported on her progress in a TED talk, kept a delightful blog, and, most recently, been named a Guggenheim Fellow…

https://vimeo.com/90498615

Living portraits 1918

It’s almost impossible to comprehend the scale of these historic photographs by Englishman Arthur S Mole and his American colleague John D Thomas, who were commissioned by the US government to take the pictures as a way to raise morale among the troops and raise money by selling the shots to the public during WWI.

In the photo above, “there are 18,000 men: 12,000 of them in the torch alone, but just 17 at the base. The men at the top of the picture are actually half a mile away from the men at the bottom,” explains Arthur’s great nephew Joseph Mole, 70.

Mole and Thomas were the first to use a unique technique to beat the problem of perspective after they devised a clever way of getting so many soldiers in the pictures. Joseph explains: “Arthur was able to get the image by actually drawing an outline on the lens, he then had the troops place flags in certain positions while he looked through the camera. It would take a week to get all the outlines right, but just 30 minutes to move all the men into position to take the shot. It must have been amazing to watch.”

What’s makes the story even more fascinating is that instead of profiting from the sale of the images produced, the photographers donated the entire income derived to the families of the returning soldiers and to this country’s efforts to re-build their lives as a part of the re-entry process…

http://bit.ly/tsigIX

Living portraits 1918