Taoski, of Inside the Blue Talent Triangle has a couple of posts on his adventures wearing a Holter monitor (a.k.a ambulatory ECG) and meeting with an Ewok. I’d be interested to wear one and see what my ECG looked like as I went about my life, doing things like spontaneously running after the St.Charles bus as it slips off into the distance.
Monthly Archives: January 2006
Do-it-yourself E(K/C)G Kit
It’s pretty difficult to make an ECG, at least if you’re not an electronics expert. Everyone in my electronics lab during undergrad had trouble with theirs.
Nonetheless, if you’d like to try making one, this do-it-yourself kit (via medGadget) should help.
I can’t see too many uses for this besides watching your own signals, but who knows. Be creative.
Guidant Merger Madness
medGadget has an article on the continuing merger madness occurring with Guidant. For those of you not familiar with the company, they’re one of the top manufacturers of ICDs in the world. As the timeline that medGadget links to briefly notes, Boston Scientific and Johnson & Johnson have been fighting over the company for a while, despite their recent issues with faulty device programming.
New process for creating biocompatible fibers
Biosingularity » Scientists develop process for creating biocompatible fibers
Scientists at Virginia Tech have developed a single-step process for creating nonwoven fibrous mats from a small organic molecule – creating a new nanoscale material with potential applications where biocompatible materials are required, such as scaffolds for tissue growth and drug delivery.
This is an important step forward. Incidentally, I just started my cell and tissue engineering class (in which I am a student), and read an article on something similar yesterday for that class. Apparently, most cells prefer to be suspended in an intricate, tangled web of fibers, rather than sitting on a relatively flat surface. This article discusses a new method for making tangled webs of fibers.
Furthermore, anything not of the body that is placed in the body is generally attacked by the immune system. As these fibers are made from the very stuff of cell membranes, there’s a good chance that they’ll be well-accepted in vivo. They have not, per the article, been tested for biocompatibility or cytotoxicity yet.
I’ve added that blog to my aggregator. If you have an interest in bioscience, you might take a look at it as well.
Technorati Tags: biocompatibility, tissue, nanotechnology
Sweet, Sweet Internets
Last week I missed the first lecture of a class just to wait for the cable guy to come hook things up.
Yesterday I left lab at 15:00 to run some errands, one of which was picking up a cable modem from Cox.
I now have sweet, sweet internets in my apartment once more.