Tech

Implantable defibrillators currently on the market apply between 600 and 900 volts to the heart, almost 10 times the voltage from an electric outlet, says Ajit H. Janardhan, MD, PhD, a cardiac electrophysiology fellow at the Washington University's School of Medicine.

After being shocked, he says, some patients get post-traumatic stress disorder. Patients may even go so far as to ask their physicians to remove the defibrillator, even though they understand that the device has saved their lives.

Researchers at Aalto University, Finland have developed a method for producing lithium batteries that is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than previously used methods. This new process has succeeded in replacing the harmful methylpyrrolidone (NMP) solvent, which is traditionally used in the manufacturing of electrodes, with water. Removing this harmful solvent from the production process makes the production of batteries simpler and safer for employees. Production costs of batteries can be decreased by as much as 5 percent.

Researchers in Turkey describe a method for treating ingrown toenails that prevents recurrences.

Reviewing outcomes from a series of 348 proximolateral partial matricetomies and phenol ablations in 225 patients with stage 2 or 3 ingrown toenail, they found only one recurrence during the 24-month follow-up period, no severe complications and excellent cosmetic results.

The authors assert the surgical technique, which is more invasive than simple partial nail avulsion and easier to perform than wide wedge excision, is the most important determinant of the success rate.

It's a simple, transparent acrylic plate – nothing embedded within it and nothing printed on its surface. Place it at a certain angle between a white wall and a light source, and a clear, coherent image appears of the face of Alan Turing, the famous British mathematician and father of modern computer science.

Recognizing that imaging can sometimes produce unexpected or incidental findings that have consequences for patients and lead to further expensive and potentially harmful investigations, researchers find that clinically relevant incidental findings on chest radiographs in primary care adult patients with acute cough are uncommon.

A new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy finds many children may be at heightened risk for fire and scald burns by virtue of living in substandard housing. Researchers surveyed the homes of 246 low-income families in Baltimore with at least one young child, and found homes with more housing quality code violations were less likely to have a working smoke alarm and safe hot water temperatures. The report is published in the December issue of the journal Pediatrics.

The heavy ion collisions at CERN should be able to produce the shortest light pulses ever created, according to computer simulations at the Vienna University of Technology which projects pulses so short that they cannot even be measured by today's technological equipment. Now, a method has been proposed to create the world's most precise stopwatch for the world's shortest light pulses, using a detector which is going to be installed at CERN in 2018.

After cellulose, xylan is the most abundant biomass material on Earth, and therefore represents an enormous potential source of stored solar energy for the production of advance biofuels. A major roadblock, however, has been extracting xylan from plant cell walls. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have taken a significant step towards removing this roadblock by identifying a gene in rice plants whose suppression improves both the extraction of xylan and the overall release of the sugars needed to make biofuels.

"Pennsylvania has opened up its doors to fracking in ways that many other states in the U.S. have not," said David Dausey, Ph.D., chair of the Mercyhurst University Public Health Department. "We don't know enough about the environmental and human health effects of fracking and, as a result, Pennsylvania has become the home of experimental fracking."

Dausey discusses his concerns in this month's episode of The Dausey File: Public Health News Today.

Research physicists have demonstrated the first device capable of amplifying the information in a single particle of light without adding noise.

The research collaboration, involving Griffith University, The University of Queensland and University of Science and Technology of China, was able to amplify the noisy quantum state of a single photon subjected to loss, without adding noise in the process; in fact, their amplification reduced the noise in the quantum state.

Traditional Swedish bonad paintings can contain toxic substances such as arsenic, reveals new research from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, in which painting conservator and conservation scientist Ingalill Nyström analysed the paint and techniques used in the traditional painted wall hangings from southern Sweden.Previous research into bonad painting has always originated in the humanities, from an art/cultural history perspective.

After emerging sometime before 1000 BC, the Maya rose to become the most advanced Pre-Columbian society in the Americas, thriving in jungle cities of tens of thousands of people, such as the one in Guatemala's Tikal National Park. But after reaching its peak between 250 and 900 AD, the Maya civilization began to wane and exactly why has been an enduring mystery to scientists.

How can solar energy be stored so that it can be available any time, day or night, when the sun shining or not? EPFL scientists are developing a technology that can transform light energy into a clean fuel that has a neutral carbon footprint: hydrogen. The basic ingredients of the recipe are water and metal oxides, such as iron oxide, better known as rust. Kevin Sivula and his colleagues purposefully limited themselves to inexpensive materials and easily scalable production processes in order to enable an economically viable method for solar hydrogen production.