Give Him the Finger

Regeneration has been a dream of medicine for centuries. If a lizard can grow a new tail, why can’t a man grow a new arm? That dream may soon be reached if clinical trials prove successful.

Hobbyist Lee Spievak lost the tip of his finger to a spinning propeller blade. He lost about one half inch, severed down to the bone. The examining doctors told him he’d lost it for good.

Lee Spievak’s brother Alan works in the field of regenerative medicine. When he heard of Lee’s mishap he sent him a powder called Extra Cellular Matrix, a substance derived from the scrapings of a pig’s bladder. He was instructed to dip his finger in the powder regularly for the next ten days. Instead of forming scar tissue the finger began to regrow normal cells. In four weeks the finger had completely sealed and now Lee Spievak’s fingertip is completely regrown, with nail, nerves, blood vessels, even fingerprint. To look at the finger one would never know it had been severed at all. He does have one complaint, though. Mr. Spievak say the fingernail now grows so fast he has to trim it every two days.

From BBC News

—ADDENDUM—
There may be both more and less to this story than recent reports would suggest. According to a post on a Nature blog this same story was reported in February of last year by CBS and AP. A hand surgeon calls it “junk science”, a university says that an Extracellular Matrix can have profound effects on cell physiology, and the U.S. Army has been investigating. Lee Spievak (or Spievack) says he’s not going to give up any more body parts for research.

Oh, Those Muppets

The well known and sticky song Mah Nà Mah Nà was made famous by The Muppet Show, a family TV program created by Jim Henson and running from 1976 to 1981. The song was written by the Italian film score composer Piero Umiliani and originally accompanied a softcore porn movie called Svezia Inferno E Paradiso. Tsk-tsk. What next? Kermit cavorting with Teletubbies?

Skipping the Barcode Tattoo

The Human Genome Project was an effort to sequence the entire human genome. The human genome contains about 23,000 genes and 3 billion base pairs. The project was completed in 2003, took 13 years and cost over 3 billion dollars.

Today a human genome can be sequenced in about 6 weeks at a cost of $60,000. Researchers who predicted that the cost may be as low as $1000 in three years have been leapfrogged by two companies who claim to be able to do it in one day for $100. At this cost it will soon become part of the standard physical.

The Department of Homeland Security is set to begin collecting the DNA of any citizen who is arrested and any foreigner who is detained. As usual, the U.K. is way ahead on this. British police want to collect the DNA of potential criminals including children as young a 5 years old if they exhibit anti-social behavior.

Let’s Call It National Barbecue Month

Hoof and mouth disease, a virus deadly to livestock, has been researched since 1954 in a government lab on Plum Island, NY. Since that time there have been some accidental releases of the virus, but none escaped the island. That’s why the lab in ON an island.

In 2002 the government ran a simulation of a hoof and mouth outbreak. It resulted in tens of millions of cattle killed by National Guardsmen, riots and protests and a 25-mile burial trench for the carcasses. “It was a mess,” said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who played the president.

Now the government wants to move Plum Island’s lab to the mainland and Kansas is one of the proposed sites. What does Senator Roberts have to say about that, huh? “It will mean jobs,” he says. It will mean research and development, he says.

Yeah, and if all else fails it will mean jobs digging that 25-mile barbecue pit.

The Stuff We Leave Behind

The European Space Agency has just published some pictures of the space debris surrounding Earth. Ancient civilizations have often been identified by the garbage heaps they leave behind. I guess it’s no different in space.

Your Next Surgeon May Be Robot.

Carnegie-Mellon University has developed a snake-like robot called the CardioArm. It is inserted into an incision in the chest and is then guided by joystick. The robot’s “head” has both a camera and end effectors capable of performing cardiac ablation, a procedure that delivers electrical pulses to the heart and can destroy problematic tissue.

In 2006 an Italian man in Milan had heart surgery performed by an autonomous robot. The surgery was initiated and monitored by a surgeon in Boston, but the robot performed the surgery without further intervention. Knee surgery[video] is often performed by a doctor sitting at a console and manipulating a 3D image.

Robots are not just getting smarter, they’re getting smaller. Brain researchers use tiny gene probes that seek out specific areas of the brain, allowing an fMRI to monitor activity. They enter the body as eyedrops. “Liu and his colleagues hitched a common MRI probe to a DNA sequence….” The military has developed a surgical robot small enough to carry into battlezones. The robot is controlled remotely by a surgeon in a safe location. Nanoparticles[video] can be guided to specific areas in the body where they release microdoses of drugs. Since the drugs are delivered directly to the problem area the doses can be as much as one thousand times lower.

[Obligatory grovel]
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

Creating a Zombie Horde? No Worry, They’re Not Moving.

Kids watch a lot of TV. According to the FCC most children will have watched 3 years of it by the time they are 6 years old. Since sleep takes up about one third of our lives this means that 75% of a child’s waking life is spent in a stupor, as Wolfram Hahn’s creepy photos document.

The report continues with more disturbing statistics. Americans have the TV on for 8 to 11 hours a day. 66% of American children have a TV in their bedroom.

In all fairness, the FCC report says these children spent the time in front of the television, so I guess they could have been sleeping at the same time. How this might invade dreaming is too scary to even think about.

eHarmony’s Dissonant Chords

I’ve tried a few online dating services over the years, but never got too serious about them. The dates that I did go on never led to a second one. The matches were poor and if I had to go by the flattering photos alone I’d have never recognized the woman in a crowd. Of course, that doesn’t stop all the services from sending me recruitment spam. I doubt that I’m part of their target demographic. I am not interested in the “Hot 23 year old in YOUR AREA!” or “Russian beauty looking for love!”

Regardless, I find something oddly appealing about creating profiles. Maybe it strokes my ego and iconoclastic nature to see that few people share my array of interests. Maybe it’s a way to look like my ideal self. Most of these services allow you to check off negative properties in your match preferences but I’ve yet to see any that allow you to describe yourself as lazy, drug addict, egotistical, reclusive, pedantic, sloppy, fat, depressive, or psychotic – not that I’m any of these things, mind you.

These dating profiles usually languish after an initial rush, just like my Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Google, and drive-by forum profiles. I can’t even remember many of them.

It was a slow day and I didn’t feel like pursuing my latest essay (a history of drug advertising.) The eHarmony dating service has been pestering me of late to take their FREE personality analysis. In the past I’ve found these things to be about 50% accurate or so general that they’d fit most anybody, but I was bored. I waded through the several pages of multiple choice questions. As expected, some of it was accurate, some way off. Undoubtedly, my aversion to pigeon-holing and my general ambiguity has something to do with this. I tend to see things from several angles which makes generalization difficult.

In addition to the personality analysis eHarmony has an extensive checklist of profile descriptors. In most cases there is an “other” field for free-form text entry.

The matches they recommend don’t always “match.” They use something called “Flexible Matching” which will ignore any preferences marked less than “very important”. The result is quantity over quality. As they explain it, you should look beyond your expectations. Good advice, but no matter what they say I’m not going to begin a relationship with someone on the other side of the country or who thinks that a good weekend is seeing the wilderness from the window of an SUV.

eHarmony utilizes something called “Guided Communications”. When a match is made, both parties are informed. One party initiates communication by sending a list of five questions chosen from a set. The other party answers then sends their own five questions. The next step involves the two of you exchanging “Must Haves” and “Can’t Stands”, checklists of qualities you look for in another person. Another round of questions ensues, again chosen from a pre-packaged list, but this time they are essay-type rather than multiple choice. Finally, after reading an essay by the founder of eHarmony, you are allowed open communication.

Managing my account has started to feel like a job. Every day I get a half-dozen matches. As soon as I clear those, another half-dozen shows up. Currently there are thirty of them. eHarmony keeps prodding me to participate, often by using one of their extra, additional-fee services. My inbox is filled with emails from them.

I gotta go. Debbie from Dallas has some questions for me.

Killing Our Own

The death toll in Iraq of 4000 Americans has been widely reported and one is led to assume that they died while doing the dangerous job of soldiering. Such is far from the case. Fully one fifth of them are “non-hostile” deaths, such as illness, accident or suicide. Some of these 800 deaths were by electrocution while taking a shower.

Cheryl Harris, the mother of electrocuted Sgt. Ryan Maseth, has now filed suit against KBR, one of the largest contractors operating in Iraq. Initially informed that her son had died after bringing an electrical appliance into the shower, later reports revealed the cause was a faulty water pump that shorted out and electrified a metal shower hose.

Pre-trial investigation discovered that Maseth’s death was not unique. At least eleven other soldiers have died by electrocution as a result of faulty wiring and construction. The Pentagon says they are investigating. KBR says it’s not their fault.

Greg Mitchell goes into detail about non-hostile deaths in Iraq in his book So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits — and the President — Failed on Iraq.

Console Wars, Round Two

There is no doubting that the Wii has out sold by an enormous margin both Microsoft’s XBox and Sony’s Playstation. Nintendo’s focus on it’s innovative controller instead of shinier graphics allowed it to reach beyond the core gaming market and into the hands of the casual, first-time gamer.

Now they are ready to break open the market for downloaded games. The Wii Store has two channels, the Virtual Console for purchasing games of yesteryear, and WiiWare for purchasing new content. Established gamers may purchase childhood favorites from the Virtual Console but new gamers are unlikely to get excited about the original Mario Brothers, Kirby or Street Fighter. Until now the new content offerings from the WiiWare channel have been limited to updates and the Opera web browser.

On May 12 (U.S. projected date) all that is going to change. Nintendo has been hard at work lining up developers to produce downloadable games. This in itself is not a new idea; Microsoft and Sony consoles both offer downloadable games. But Nintendo’s Wii has several aspects that are attracting developers. First, by not jumping on the shiny graphics treadmill they keep development costs down. It takes thousands of man-hours to create all that high-polygon, texture-rich content required on the XBox and Playstation, content that a small studio cannot afford. Second, their Software Development Kit(SDK) is one half to one quarter the price of the other consoles. The Sony SDK is notoriously difficult to use. According to one developer, “The cost of making a game for WiiWare can be significantly less than that of an XBLA [XBox Live Arcade] or PSN [Playstation Network]game, firstly because the hardware is a lot cheaper and secondly because the SDK Nintendo provides is very detailed.”

But lower cost isn’t the only thing attracting developers to the Wii. Nintendo has adopted an open arms approach to third party games. Instead of exerting strict control they have given the responsibility of quality assurance (QA), maturity ratings and marketing to the development studios. As Nic Watt of Nnooo games put it, “We found trying to get a downloadable title approved on other platforms prohibitively expensive as we needed to supply artwork and demos to be looked at and if that demo is not signed we could have spent three to six months worth of development money and be nowhere. Nintendo’s stance has been about getting studios with good ideas and letting them decide what content to make rather than trying to dictate everything which goes on the channel.”

Simple and casual have been the watchwords for many of the Wii titles, but some studios are thinking beyond the party game. As the cost of a WiiWare game will be between $5 and $15, some have been thinking about long form games in episodic form, where both play and story can get as complex as a traditional boxed game.

In the end, it will be the consumer who decides the success or failure of the WiiWare channel, but if developer excitement is any indication, Nintendo has another genre-bending success on their hands.

Develop Magazine’s WiiWare Week Roundup