Arlen Ward dot com

An anatomy lesson provided by The Brain, of Pinky and the Brain fame.

That ought to keep the little squirts happy.

Thanks,
Pinky

You can find lots of things on the internet. But potentially none will be more important than this.

It is a link to the Developing Intelligence blog over at ScienceBlogs and a post called “Caffeine: A User’s Guide to Getting Optimally Wired”.

For those of you that are too wired to pay attention through the whole thing, here is a short excerpt. You really should read the whole thing, though. The explanations in the details are the best part.

1) Consume in small, frequent amounts.

Between 20-200mg per hour may be an optimal dose for cognitive function.

2) Play to your cognitive strengths while wired.

Caffeine may increase the speed with which you work, may decrease attentional lapses, and may even benefit recall – but is less likely to benefit more complex cognitive functions, and may even hurt others. Plan accordingly (and preferably prior to consuming caffeine!)

3) Play to caffeine’s strengths.

Caffeine’s effects can be maximized or minimized depending on what else is in your system at the time.

4) Know when to stop – and when to start again.

Although you may not grow strongly tolerant to caffeine, you can become dependent on it and suffer withdrawal symptoms. Balance these concerns with the cognitive and health benefits associated with caffeine consumption – and appropriately timed resumption.

5) Finding good sources of caffeine

Despite the huge variety of sources of caffeine – including caffeinated soap, candy, and of course chocolate – the optimal use of caffeine is likely to involve small, hourly doses along with some cardioprotective agent. Given the high solubility of caffeine, absorption time should not be an issue (but if for some reason it is, try gum).

And as a final enabling link, here is an interactive map showing Starbucks’ (Starbuckses? Starbuckae? Starbuckorum?) locations.

It looks like that future we have heard about has arrived. At the Greener Gadgets Conference in New York, there was a Bluetooth enabled touch screen that is designed to be inserted between the skin and the muscle. That’s right, an animated and interactive tattoo. But that is not the awesome part.

The basis of the 2×4-inch “Digital Tattoo Interface” is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity. After blood flows in from the artery to the fuel cell, it flows out again through the vein.

It runs off energy from your blood. How cool is that.

Turns out that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Medtronic today, saying that a company that manufactures an FDA approved device can not be sued under state laws if that device causes injury.

The Supreme Court upheld the lower federal courts on Wednesday, with Justice Antonin Scalia writing for the majority that Medtronic and other manufacturers were protected under the Medical Device Amendments of 1976, which in its section on pre-emption bars states from imposing on medical devices “any requirement which is different from, or in addition to, any requirement applicable under this chapter.”

Interesting. It kind of ups the pressure on the FDA during the approval process, doesn’t it?

There is a distinct lack of faith in juries to understand the risk vs. reward thing too.

“It may thus approve devices that present great risks if they nonetheless offer great benefits in light of available alternatives,” Justice Scalia wrote, noting that the F.D.A. approved a ventricular assist device for children with failing hearts “even though the survival rate of children using the device was less than 50 percent.”

The National Academy of Engineering has listed the grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. You can even go to their web site and vote for which you think is the most important challenge to meet in the next 100 92 years

They listed challenges in four areas: sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living.

• In the area of sustainability, they identified challenges in environmentally friendly power, nuclear fusion, capturing carbon dioxide, countermeasures for nitrogen cycle problems, and providing acess to clean water.
• For the area of health, “reverse-engineering” the brain, computer catalogs of health information, and developing new medicines.
• The section on vulnerability covers a counter to the nuclear threat, sustaining the aging infrastructure of cities and services, and could potentially include the improved medicine challenge mentioned earlier.
• For the joy of living area, challenges in personalized learning, improved virtual reality, securing cyberspace, and my personal favorite, engineering the tools used for future scientific discovery.

While I have to agree that these are all noble pursuits, and these would really solve some of the major problems we currently face, I really feel like it is a bit short sighted. If you look at the list of the greatest engineering achivements of the 20th century, I really doubt anyone would have even hit half that list when making predictions in 1908. I would say we are in for things in this century that are barely on the radar for anyone at this point.

A tribute song to Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplfication for DNA samples.

I know it is an ad from Bio-Rad, but this is damn funny.

I was using the downtime during this time of year to catch up on some reading. In the Machine Design trade magazine there was an interesting article that caught my eye. Testing of copper as an anti-microbial surface. The comparisons with stainless steel are interesting, because most of the metal surfaces in an operating room are stainless of some sort (304 or 316 stainless).

E. coli, a food-born pathogen, that in the elderly and children can lead to life-threatening hemolytic uremia syndrome, was one of the first bacteria tested. Room-temperature results showed that on pure and 99%-copper substrates extremely high levels of the bacteria dropped two orders of magnitude in only 45 min and were completely gone in 75 min. There was a similar pattern at 4°C (39°F). It took between 75 and 180 min for a drop in bacterial counts from 100 million to total eradication.

It even seems effective against MRSA (Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus), the bane of hospitals everywhere.

I was aware that copper was toxic to living cells, mostly through design work where biocompatibility was tested, but the mechanism was news to me. Copper’s toxicity to cells comes from the Oligodynamic effect, where some metal ions demonstrate this toxicity. The mechanism is not yet understood, but possibly the cause is the denaturing of the bacteria’s proteins. Silver also demonstrates this effect, and this is why it is used in the treatment of burns via silver nitrate impregnated gauze (something else I can attest to).

I wonder if more of the touch surfaces in hospitals and operating rooms will be designed with at least a minimum amount of copper, with that minimum determined by an effectiveness at killing bacteria. There is also the question of allergic reactions, the effect of oxidation, or the allowable contact time before there is a noticeable effect on healthy tissues.