Smart Knife

Science Fridays

Post # 86 

      When I say "smart knife" what I don't mean is "ouch! that knife smarts!" like a friend exclaimed while digging through a wooden box containing a knife made of obsidian.  He just barely grazed the edge and his knuckle was bleeding like a stuck hog.  Nor do I mean that the knife seemed smarter than the person wielding it, like the time a (different) friend used his high carbon steel Scottish dirk to cut a piece of nearly frozen butter for a concoction he was cooking.  He ended up in the hospital, with several stitches and a bad case of humility.  I also don't even mean that there is something new created in Silicon Valley,  or Kyoto, or Samsung or whoever called the "Smart Knife" that can slice, dice, chop, fillet, and let you download movies, check your E-mail, and give you GPS directions to the pantry, for that "very useful" invention hasn't been invented yet.  If it ever is invented, then remember that you saw the idea here first - and let me know, so that I can claim some kind of royalties for it.  And I definitely don't mean "Mac the Knife." 
      What I do mean when I say "smart knife" is a knife, or rather a scalpel, that has its own ability to distinguish between cancerous tissue and healthy tissue while it is being used (by capable doctors, of course).  
      This little gem, called the "Intelligent Knife" was created by researchers at Imperial College in London.  They published their findings in the medical journal, Science Translational Medicine on July 17.  The "iKnife" can't let you check you E-mail, but what it can do is instantly inform surgeons if the tissue they're cutting is cancerous or not.  

      Up until now the best a surgeon could do was make a cut, send a small sample to the lab to be tested, and wait about a half hour for the results to come back.  it's virtually impossible to tell the type of tissue by sight.  Even with the test, surgeons would often cut out a lot of healthy tissue "to make sure that they got it all."  With all that they would also often miss some of the cancer and the poor patient would have to come back for a second surgery.  That's both a sad and surprising shame, because the technology used for the knife was created in 1920.  

      The nearly 100 year old technology employed by the knife is called electrosurgery.  The knife is electrified with enough current to burn the tissue as it cuts, instantly cotterizing it.  Smoke is produced.  

                                          Dr. Zoltan Takats, the inventor of the iPhone
 
      Zoltan Takats, of Imperial College of London, the inventor of the iKnife, understood that the smoke would be rich in chemicals.  Using a mass spectrometer he analyzed the smoke as to its chemical make up.  Using it he analyzed the tissue samples of 302 patients and recorded the results.  While doing so they analyzed and recorded thousands of different tissues, both cancerous and healthy, of everything from the brain and spinal cord, through every organ in the body to the skin, bone, and muscles.  All of these were added to the iKnife's database.  

      The mass spectrometer is hooked up directly to the iKnife.  Using the information in its database it has been able to give results in less than three seconds.  It has an accuracy rating of 100%, and has been used to diagnose tissue from 91 patients.  
      Takats said, "We believe it has the potential to reduce tumor recurrence rates and enable more patients to survive.  The iKnife can determine things other than cancer.  For instance it can also identify tissues with an inadequate blood supply.  

      I will be at a historical reenactment all weekend, so there will be no new posts until after I come back. 

Where's All the Gold?

Post # 85  

      It is one of the most malleable metals.  In fact it is so malleable that it is really kind of useless.  You can't make a usable knife out of it, unless you're going to cut something really soft, like a fungus.  You definitely can't use it to make an axe.  As armor it would be more effective to use a second shirt, or a jacket.  But it's shiny, and people like shiny.  It's shininess alone doesn't give gold its value though, for both brass and bronze can be made to shine (their value lies in their strength).  Silver gleams.  Gold however is rare.  
      It is very rare - not just here on earth, but also in the universe.  Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, silicon, and even iron are found in abundance wherever in the universe you look.  But gold is hard to find.  Because of its rarity people want it.  It makes them stand out.  They can say, "I have something you don't."  When rulers have gold it shows that they have power, for they can have something you don't.  And if you do have some gold, they have more - much more.  They have it in abundance.  Pirates sail the roughest seas to get their hands on some more gold.  Highwaymen held people up for it.  Miners dug and panned for it, politicians lie to get more of it, and we work our butts off every day for it, and we rarely see any of it, and the measly amount of gold substitute we get is spent before it ever arrives.  Everybody wants gold.  

                                            Pirates have always had a fondness for gold

      Why?  Why should everyone want something shiny, yet metallically useless just because it's so rare?  If you knew the full answer to that you would also be able to ponder and know why a bowl of petunias would say, "Oh no, not again" before crashing to the ground.  Face it.  People want that rare crap.  
      A scientific team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics  have just figured out why gold is so rare.  It is rare because of the process by which it is made.  Gold and other heavy elements are produced as the result of a collision between two neutron stars.  Neutron stars aren't the most common thing as it is, but to find them in a pair is truly rare. 
      Neutron stars are what is left after a star explodes in a nova.  All that is left of it is neutrons.  They are so dense that they are only a few miles wide, but a mere teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh 100 million tons.  

      When neutron stars collide it produces an explosive event called a short gamma ray burst.  This is what creates the gold and other heavy elements.  Last month the researchers at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics recorded one such event.  They witnessed a glow that lasted for days, which they say would have created a very large amount of heavy elements, including gold.  
      "We estimate that the amount of gold produced and ejected during the merger of the two neutron stars may be as large as ten moon masses - quite a lot of bling!"  lead author Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.  Berger presented his team's findings at a press conference on July 17. 

 

 

      Gamma ray bursts are flashes of high level energy produced by massive explosions.  They can be created either by two neutron stars colliding, or by a black hole swallowing up a neutron star, as in the series of pictures above.  

      Berger and his team of researchers from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have submitted their results for publication in the Astrophysical Journal of Letters.  

      Getting all that gold wouldn't be easy.  First of all the Gamma ray burst that was witnessed was 3.9 billion light years away in a "galaxy far far away."  Secondly the ejected material extends over a vastness of space of many, many light years across.  You couldn't exactly pan for it. 

Some Cool Night Shots

post # 84 

The Arts

      These are some pictures I took using my digital camera and long to medium exposures.  I had some that were surrealistic, but they somehow vanished completely from my computer using extremely long exposures.  And the disk I saved them to isn't working either.  It somehow got damaged and when I put it in the drive I get a message that reads, "Data unreadable."  I'll just have to set it all up sometime and shoot them again.  
      The ones I'm posting tonight I only have because I posted them at one time to Facebook.  

      The first three here are the moon (obviously).  All I used was a tripod, and I played with the exposure, and some of the effects.  

          This one came out so crystal clear you can almost feel the texture of the moon's craters. 

      This next batch was of the full moon again, but as it back lit the clouds that were out that night.  They remind me of the skies in those horror/monster movies made mostly by Universal Studios back in the late 1930's, 40's, and the early 50's.   These were the Frankenstein, Wolfman, and Dracula movies starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney Jr.  

In this picture (above) the exposure was about two whole minutes.  At that exposure time, the clouds look like they are just whizzing by.  

      In this last one, take note of how light the sky is.  Then look at the direction of the shadows.  They appear to be going the wrong direction - toward the light sky.   This picture was taken at about 1:30 to 2:00 AM.  Again I used a two minute exposure time (which is the max for my camera).  That light sky is actually straight north.  Although here in Northern Minnesota we still well over a thousand miles, or maybe two thousand miles (I don't really know) from the Arctic Circle, and we don't see the sun, or even a twilight throughout the night, the northern sky in the middle of the summer never gets completely dark.  There is always a mild glow like from a city (that isn't there).  The sky never actually gets black or even dark blue, but varies between a royal blue color to a medium blue.  The light that is making all the long shadows is from a full moon to the south. 

Taking a Different Look at the Earth

Post # 83 

      The Cassini spacecraft has been sending us pictures since the late 1990's.  It sent some great close up pictures of asteroids early on in its photographic career.  Then it took some great pics of Jupiter's moons.  Now some fifteen years later, it is back at it again.  
      The Cassini has finally reached Saturn.  It's flying in close and taking pictures of Saturn's many moons.  It will also be looking at the field of small rocks and other debris that encircle Saturn as a belt, otherwise known and recognized as its rings. 
      While they were at it though, the Cassini looked homeward.  It took some pictures of the Earth.  In the pictures we can clearly see both the Earth and the Moon - as very tiny specks.  The earth should look small from that far away.  It is 900 million miles away from its home. 

                         This is an enhanced view.  NASA hasn't cleaned up any of the images yet  

      Not to be out done, the Messenger spacecraft took pictures of the Earth too.  Messenger is presently orbiting Mercury, and sent us pictures from the opposite direction.  Mercury is only a "mere" 61 million miles away.  That's not exactly a walk to the local convenience store, but compared to the 900,000,000 miles to Saturn, it's almost close.  It's all relative.