As we get older, our eyes get worse. That’s just a fact of life. It is a rite of passage the first time you leave the eye doctor with a script for “progressive” lenses which are just fancy bifocals. However, a new high-tech version of bifocals promises you better vision, but with a slight drawback, […]
It takes but an ill-fated second to break a bone, and several long weeks for it to heal in a cast. And even if you have one of those newfangled fiberglass casts, you still can’t get the thing wet, and it’s gonna be itchy under there because your skin can’t breathe. Isn’t it high time […]
As Neuralink works towards getting its brain-computer interface technology approved for general use, it now has two human patients who have received the experimental implant. The second patient, [Alex], received the implant in July of 2024 and is said to be doing well, being able to play games like Counter Strike 2 without using his […]
Beta thalassemia and sickle cell are two red blood cell disorders which both come with massive health implications and shortened lifespans, but at least for UK-based patients the former may soon be curable with a fairly new CRISPR-Cas9 gene therapy (Casgevy) via the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). Starting with the NHS in England, the […]
The BiVACOR THA hooked up with the CTO Dianiel Timms in the background. (Credit: BiVACOR) Outside of the brain, the heart is probably the organ that you miss the most when it ceases to function correctly. Unfortunately, as we cannot grow custom replacement hearts yet, we have to keep heart patients alive long enough for […]
[Ultimate Robotics] has been working on designing and producing an extremely small ECG that can stream data real time. Typical electrocardiogram equipment is bulky: miniaturization doesn’t do much for a hospital where optimizations tend to lean towards, durability, longevity, and ease of use. Usually a bunch of leads are strung between a conductive pad and […]
Everyone one of us is likely aware of what lead — as in the metal — is. Having a somewhat dull, metallic gray appearance, it occupies atomic number 82 in the periodic table and is among the most dense materials known to humankind. Lead’s low melting point and malleability even when at room temperature has […]
There’s something fascinating about humanoid robotic hands, if only because of how they are such close approximations of our own hands. One could almost picture them with tendons and skin covering them. Sadly, making your own is quite prohibitive because in addition to being complex bits of machinery, making one of these marvels of engineering […]
Earlier this month, a group of biohackers installed two Rasberry Pis in their legs. While that sounds like the bleeding edge, those computers were already v2 of a project called PegLeg. I was fortunate enough to see both versions in the flesh, so to speak. The first version was scarily large — a mainboard donated […]
I’m often asked to design customer and employee tracking systems. There are quite a few ways to do it, and it’s an interesting intersection of engineering and ethics – what information is reasonable to collect in different contexts, anonymizing and securely storing it, and at a fundamental level whether the entire system should exist at […]