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As mentioned in the Cliff’s notes version regarding April, I spent a few days in Munich last month. It was part of the 10th International Conference on Hyperthermic Oncology. The trip was quick (yay for direct flights), and unfortunately the family didn’t get to join me. I did get to present a poster of one of the measurement tools we are using in my dissertation research, so that was a plus.

The conference venue was a hospital that was located about six or seven kilometers from the hotel, so I quickly learned the layout of the subway system in order to get back and forth each day. The hotel was close to the center of town, so there was a chance to see the Rathaus and wander around downtown each night.

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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.

As a professed data presentation nerd, I have always liked the postings over at Strange Maps.

Recently there was a post with a map of the United States, shaded by leading church body in each county.. This one caught my eye, just with the clustered groups of various denominations. No conclusion, I just thought it was interesting.

If I had an observatory at my house, I would be out there all the time. If I had big telescopes at my house, you would have to pry me away with a crowbar. People would be sick of hearing me talk about the stars and planets, and they would run and hide every time I got out the pictures.

But alas, it is not so for everyone.

As reported in the Independent, Pope Benedict XVI is moving the observatory off the grounds of his summer residence.

Science is to make way for diplomacy at the Pope’s summer residence, with the dismantling of the astronomical observatory that has been part of Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, for more than 75 years. The Pope needs more room to receive diplomats so the telescopes have to go.

Moving it to make more room to receive diplomats? I think the stars would be more interesting, but nobody died and made me Pope.

This is a nod to J. Willard Gibbs, who happens to have a birthday today. I’d get him a cake, but he’s been dead for 105 years.

Not only was he awarded the first Ph.D. in Engineering in the United States, but he also is the Gibbs in Gibbs Free Energy, G, a key concept used in the work for my dissertation.

Gibbs described it as the “available energy”, the amount of energy free to do work given the conditions internal energy, U, pressure, p, volume, V, temperature, T, and entropy, S:

The greatest amount of mechanical work which can be obtained from a given quantity of a certain substance in a given initial state, without increasing its total volume or allowing heat to pass to or from external bodies, except such as at the close of the processes are left in their initial condition.

Looking at the change in Free Energy, you can determine if the change in the system is going to be spontaneous (ΔG<0) or not (ΔG>0).

And tomorrow is Darwin’s birthday!

I know that I have said disparaging things about LOLcats in the past. This one is too funny to pass up. Hopefully it doesn’t drive down the massive biologist readership for this blog.

Before you get any ideas, I saw it on LOLscience.

Every once in a while, an e-mail comes through that reminds me that I work in a strange place.

_________________________________________________________________________________
From: LAB MANAGER
Sent: Yesterday
To: EVERYONE THAT WORKS WITH TISSUE

Subject: Missing Liver

If anyone is missing a liver, it’s in the RF Ablation lab with Tony’s name on it.

Just in time to make the rest of us feel better about the cold temperatures around here, the National Science Foundation opened the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

Just to make the single digit temperatures here feel like nothing, take a look at the webcam of the site, and note the current weather.