Archive for the 'Medicine' Category
whack job, bangle building – 08.10.08
me dave tony and jen get retarded. it was nice to see you angela and mike. quote of the night was from rich when he asks what kind of boat i went tubing on… i say motor boat. dude says “im a sail boat type of guy”. list of things to do; photoshop rich on a tube attached to a sailboat.
Albert Hoffman creator of lsd dies, 102
No commentsNEW YORK – Albert Hofmann, the father of the mind-altering drug LSD whose medical discovery grew into a notorious “problem child,” died Tuesday. He was 102.
Hofmann died of a heart attack at his home in Basel, Switzerland, according to Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, in a statement posted on the association’s Web site.
Hofmann’s hallucinogen inspired — and arguably corrupted — millions in the 1960′s hippy generation. For decades after LSD was banned in the late 1960s, Hofmann defended his invention.
“I produced the substance as a medicine … It’s not my fault if people abused it,” he once said.
The Swiss chemist discovered lysergic acid diethylamide-25 in 1938 while studying the medicinal uses of a fungus found on wheat and other grains at the Sandoz pharmaceuticals firm in Basel.
He became the first human guinea pig of the drug when a tiny amount of the substance seeped on to his finger during a repeat of the laboratory experiment on April 16, 1943.
“I had to leave work for home because I was suddenly hit by a sudden feeling of unease and mild dizziness,” he subsequently wrote in a memo to company bosses.
“Everything I saw was distorted as in a warped mirror,” he said, describing his bicycle ride home. “I had the impression I was rooted to the spot. But my assistant told me we were actually going very fast.
Read more
It’s a small world after all
Imagine a machine so small that it is imperceptible to the human eye. Imagine working machines no bigger than a grain of pollen. Imagine thousands of these machines batch fabricated on a single piece of silicon, for just a few pennies each. Imagine a world where gravity and inertia are no longer important, but atomic forces and surface science dominate. Imagine a silicon chip with thousands of microscopic mirrors working in unison, enabling the all optical network and removing the bottlenecks from the global telecommunications infrastructure. Image buying a three centimeter plasma tv for your ant farm. You are now entering the microdomain, a world occupied by an explosive technology known as MEMS. A world of challenge and opportunity, where traditional engineering concepts are turned upside down, and the realm of the “possible” is totally redefined.
MEMS are quietly changing the way you live, in ways that you might never imagine. The device that senses your car has been in an accident, and fires the airbag is a MEMS device. Most new cars have over a dozen MEMS devices, making your car safer, more energy efficient, and more environmentally friendly. MEMS are finding their way into a variety of medical devices, and everyday consumer products. What’s interesting is that the micro machines etched from silicon wafers you see above can go no further and nanotechnology’s focus now is on manipulating matter on an atomic or molecular scale.
