- Email: [email protected]
Heart ops shrink thanks to surgeon in your vein
For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology
ONE PER CENT
Heart ops shrink thanks to surgeon in your vein LAST year, a tiny heart surgeon This allowed them to build the entered the neck of a pig, slipped tool by laying down layers of down its jugular vein and into its metal and create moving parts still-beating heart. that are only a few microns across. With the pig’s heart pumping, The tubular section of the the device cut a small hole in device is strong enough to hold the wall between the two upper the heart tissue in place while chambers before being removed. it’s beating, allowing the cutting The successful test, which head to remove tissue. Pieces mimicked a procedure to fix a that are cut off are whisked down heart defect in children, showed the tube and out of the body. that the device could one day be This could be particularly useful used on a range of operations, for an operation called a septal including those that currently myectomy, in which excess heart require cutting open a child’s chest and ribs to get at the heart. “The tubular surgeon will allow heart defects to be A team of researchers led by Pierre Dupont at Boston Children’s fixed in children without opening the chest” Hospital built and tested the device, which consists of a long tube with cutting teeth at the end muscle needs to be cut away to (see diagram). Surgeons can use restore blood flow to the body. external ultrasound images to Sam Kesner, a bioengineer at guide it to the heart, and then Harvard University’s Wyss switch the teeth on remotely Institute, says the device is unique (The International Journal of because the tubing that slides it Robotics Research, doi.org/wmc). into the heart is stiff enough to To make such a small and give the cutting tool purchase. dexterous cutting tool, Dupont’s “Normal catheters can’t provide a team turned to a technique called lot of force. Cutting tissue away is microelectromechanical systems. very hard,” he says. Hal Hodson n
Hey everybody, I made a #smell Civilisation as we know it is over. Laura Cornet, a student at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, has designed toys that let babies use social networks. They include a dangling mobile with soft Twitter and Facebook icons that your little bundle of joy can squeeze to post photos and videos, a squashable GPS tracker and cute booties that upload pedometer activity to Nike+. The project, dubbed New Born Fame, is intended to ask questions about our relationship with social media.
“In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out” Elon Musk on his fears about us not being able to control artificial intelligence, at the AeroAstro Centennial Symposium at MIT on 24 October. He described AI as our biggest "existential threat"
Route out of trouble A tiny heart surgeon can perform operations in a still-beating heart, removing the need to cut open the chest A millimetre-wide tube with cutting teeth is inserted along a vein until it reaches the heart JUGULAR VEIN
Fed up of dull health and safety notices? Just let a computer loose on them. Chris Callison-Burch of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia used software to read blocks of prose and identify possible paraphrases. Humans, recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace, pick out the most poetic matches, then make these fit a meter that the computer has chosen, like iambic pentameter. The technique might be useful for turning dull public health guidelines into catchy jingles.
Print a mini-me in minutes
Once inside, its two sets of cutting teeth can shave away any excess tissue, which is removed through the tube
Sometimes you need a 3D version of yourself and you need it now. A kiosk called Shapify turns a body scan into a plastic “shapie”, rather than selfie, in minutes. The Artec Group in Palo Alto, California, hopes the booths, shown last week at an exhibition in Santa Clara, will be as common as photo booths.
1 November 2014 | NewScientist | 23
laura cornet
CATHETER
Instant jingles with auto-poetry
ONE PER CENT
Heart ops shrink thanks to surgeon in your vein LAST year, a tiny heart surgeon This allowed them to build the entered the neck of a pig, slipped tool by laying down layers of down its jugular vein and into its metal and create moving parts still-beating heart. that are only a few microns across. With the pig’s heart pumping, The tubular section of the the device cut a small hole in device is strong enough to hold the wall between the two upper the heart tissue in place while chambers before being removed. it’s beating, allowing the cutting The successful test, which head to remove tissue. Pieces mimicked a procedure to fix a that are cut off are whisked down heart defect in children, showed the tube and out of the body. that the device could one day be This could be particularly useful used on a range of operations, for an operation called a septal including those that currently myectomy, in which excess heart require cutting open a child’s chest and ribs to get at the heart. “The tubular surgeon will allow heart defects to be A team of researchers led by Pierre Dupont at Boston Children’s fixed in children without opening the chest” Hospital built and tested the device, which consists of a long tube with cutting teeth at the end muscle needs to be cut away to (see diagram). Surgeons can use restore blood flow to the body. external ultrasound images to Sam Kesner, a bioengineer at guide it to the heart, and then Harvard University’s Wyss switch the teeth on remotely Institute, says the device is unique (The International Journal of because the tubing that slides it Robotics Research, doi.org/wmc). into the heart is stiff enough to To make such a small and give the cutting tool purchase. dexterous cutting tool, Dupont’s “Normal catheters can’t provide a team turned to a technique called lot of force. Cutting tissue away is microelectromechanical systems. very hard,” he says. Hal Hodson n
Hey everybody, I made a #smell Civilisation as we know it is over. Laura Cornet, a student at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, has designed toys that let babies use social networks. They include a dangling mobile with soft Twitter and Facebook icons that your little bundle of joy can squeeze to post photos and videos, a squashable GPS tracker and cute booties that upload pedometer activity to Nike+. The project, dubbed New Born Fame, is intended to ask questions about our relationship with social media.
“In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out” Elon Musk on his fears about us not being able to control artificial intelligence, at the AeroAstro Centennial Symposium at MIT on 24 October. He described AI as our biggest "existential threat"
Route out of trouble A tiny heart surgeon can perform operations in a still-beating heart, removing the need to cut open the chest A millimetre-wide tube with cutting teeth is inserted along a vein until it reaches the heart JUGULAR VEIN
Fed up of dull health and safety notices? Just let a computer loose on them. Chris Callison-Burch of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia used software to read blocks of prose and identify possible paraphrases. Humans, recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace, pick out the most poetic matches, then make these fit a meter that the computer has chosen, like iambic pentameter. The technique might be useful for turning dull public health guidelines into catchy jingles.
Print a mini-me in minutes
Once inside, its two sets of cutting teeth can shave away any excess tissue, which is removed through the tube
Sometimes you need a 3D version of yourself and you need it now. A kiosk called Shapify turns a body scan into a plastic “shapie”, rather than selfie, in minutes. The Artec Group in Palo Alto, California, hopes the booths, shown last week at an exhibition in Santa Clara, will be as common as photo booths.
1 November 2014 | NewScientist | 23
laura cornet
CATHETER
Instant jingles with auto-poetry