Victorian surgery

I initially stumbled upon this article at Listverse and it spurred me to search Victorian surgery. What I found was nothing short of horrific.

From one surgery (from the link below for dailymail.co.uk):
The assembled crowd of anxious medical students dutifully check their pocket watches, as two of Liston’s surgical assistants – ‘dressers’ as they are called – take firm hold of the struggling patient’s shoulders.
The fully conscious man, already racked with pain from the badly broken leg he suffered by falling between a train and the platform at nearby King’s Cross, looks in total horror at the collection of knives, saws and needles that lie alongside him.
Liston clamps his left hand across the patient’s thigh, picks up his favourite knife and in one rapid movement makes his incision.
A dresser immediately tightens a tourniquet to stem the blood.
As the patient screams with pain, Liston puts the knife away and grabs the saw.
With an assistant exposing the bone, Liston begins to cut.
Suddenly, the nervous student who has been volunteered to steady the injured leg realises he is supporting its full weight. With a shudder he drops the severed limb into a waiting box of sawdust.
Liston, however, is still busy, tying off the main artery of the thigh with a reef knot and then tying off other smaller blood vessels, at one point even holding the thread in his mouth. As the tourniquet is loosened, the flesh is stitched.
The operation is over. And it has taken just 30 seconds.

I’m still reading more on this and I suggest you do too.

Other interesting articles to read:
dailymail.co.uk
UCL Institute of Child Health

Higgs Boson on the horizon?

Otherwise known as the “God Particle”, the theoretical Higgs Boson is the elemental particle crucial to forming the universe after the Big Bang. Research at the Large Hadron Collider are progressing faster than expected and  a whole new world of physics seems to be on it’s way. The race is on. The Tevatron particle accelerator is also hot on the trail of the Higgs Boson.

I’m not very well read in physics but I can see the importance in this. This could take the theory of the Big Bang (please don’t take the word “theory” as creationists do; this is a theory of great evidence, not just a random idea) and elevate it into a fact of science.

Article found at Reuters.

Edit: Just found this article on Yahoo! as well.

Sorry Cartman, stem cells remember

Some people may remember a South Park episode entitled “Kenny Dies” where Cartman, upon learning that stem cells can develop into “anything” starts collecting aborted fetuses and their stem cells to replicate into a Shakey’s Pizza.

Scientists have recently discovered that stem cells have a memory, for example, a stem cell from a rat’s tail isn’t good at becoming a blood cell. Certain types of stem cells are better at becoming certain cells.

Article here.

Beautifully Ugly

These beautiful space like pictures are taken with UV light to help detect otherwise undetectable by the naked eye traces of oil.

From National Geographic:

Late last week coastal geologist Rip Kirby was on the seashore as part of an effort to detect oil by shining UV lights—widely used to spot blood at crime scenes—on Gulf beaches. The method, he hopes, will allow scientists and cleanup crews to tackle hard-to-spot oil, such as crude mixed with mud or light stains on sand, that’s washed ashore from the sinking of the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig.”

Full article and more pictures in an article on National Geographic

Leviathan mellvillei

Leviathan melvillei is named after Livyatan, the Hebrew word for large mytholigical sea monsters, and of course, melvillei is named in honor of Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick.

Aside from the great name, this fossil has some importance. The skull and jawbone is about 75 percent complete with teeth that measure up to 36 centimeters (the largest T.rex tooth found measure 27cm!). The fossil also has teeth on the upper jaw with marks on the teeth hinting towards a shearing motion. This implies that the Leviathan was able to tear off flesh, rather than the way modern sperm whales eat by sucking in giant squid. The first article I linked to below also mentions the spermaceti organ. Mostly thought to be a sort of bladder similiar to many fish that enables the sperm whale to dive to large depths, some scientists are thinking that it has to do with using the head as a battering ram.

You can find many news articles with a simple Google search for Leviathan melvillei but here is a great article as well as here and here.

Bionic Cat

Oscar, a three-year old British cat, has joined the rarefied ranks of bionic animals. After a horrifying accident chopped off his hind legs, Oscar has gotten a second lease on life through two bionic leg implants.

Oscar lost his legs to a combine harvester last October. With heavy blood loss and bits of missing flesh, he needed to draw on his nine lives to make it. And he found help from veterinary surgeon Noel Fitzpatrick.

It’s refreshing to see someone fix the cat after such an accident rather than the common euthanasia. This cat has the rest of his life ahead of him.

Click here to see a video of the lil’ guy walking.