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Shoulders are complicated joints.. (photo: NIH).
From the so strange it must be true file: a doctor volunteering for Médecins sans Frontières in the Democratic Republic of Congo has amputated a 16 year-old's arm at the shoulder with only texted instructions to guide him.
The incredibly gory details are such that the boy's arm was very badly damaged (the reason was unclear - but I think our imaginations are quite capable of filling in the gaps) and had become infected. It was gangrenous, so the boy had only two or three days to live.
Thankfully Dr David Nott is a general and vascular surgeon, so clearly has skills in wielding a scalpel but hadn't ever done such an amputation before. He says he remembered a colleague had and so asked for instructions, which were duly texted back to him, step by step.
The surgery involved removing the shoulder blade and collar bone, and Dr Nott completed it using only one pint of blood...
The good news is that the teenager made a full recovery. But the mind boggles as to how you send through details specific enough to be able to amputate someone's arm, including removal of other supporting structures and so on...
For anyone interested in the surgical aspects of shoulder disarticulation and subsequent amputation, this article concentrates on tumours etc, but it highlights that the surgery is more than slightly involved.
An Athenian trireme (image: wikipedia commons)
I was talking with a couple of colleagues the other day about rowing. A strange topic of conversation perhaps but Jess is a rower and we were talking about her coaching a team of more mature ladies and comparing the way the boat travels through the water compared to when on a men's boat.
The other member of this conversation was Zac, whose family is very Greek (should try his Mum's rice pudding - divine) and he commented that athletes these days are sooks compared to the Athenian oarsmen of 427 BC.
He wasn't quite this specific of course, but it twigged something in my memory of a story I read a while ago specifically about these astonishing athletes.
The story is as follows (and I have pasted this from the story as it's succinctly put):
In 427 BC, the Greek city-state of Athens crushed a revolt in Mytilene on the Aegean island of Lesbos. The Athenian assembly decided that all men in Mytilene should be killed in punishment and dispatched the order by the fastest means it knew - a trireme, the classic oared warship of the ancient Mediterranean. The next day, the assembly relented and sent a second trireme to call off the massacre. Mytilene was 340 kilometres away and the first ship had a day-and-a-half start - but by rowing non-stop for 24 hours, the crew of the second ship arrived in time to stop the slaughter.
This sounds like it could only be the stuff of legend, but there are enough accounts that it is taken to be true, and this was not the only occasion on which the oarsmen rowed fast and long. Although the exact accounts did vary, they were all consistent on the speed: a trireme crew could row at up to 7 or 8 knots (13-15 km/hour) for more than 16 hours.
Modern crews have tried to replicate these speeds in the Olympias, a reconstructed trireme. The most recent of these crews were highly trained and very fit but the best they could manage was 9 knots - ramming speed - but only for a few seconds. Over long distances they managed a top speed of 5 knots, which is slower than an average Athenian crew. There's a great blog post from one of the guys involved in a 1987 trial.
Now, to be fair to the modern-day crews, it's worth noting that the design of the trireme was a best guess given historical information (no wreck of one has ever been found) and they found that the boat was too short and the oar system wasn't as effective as it could be. This means that not all of the energy being put into the boat was efficiently propelling it forward.
However, the fact remains that metabolic testing showed that a sustained seven knots was more than modern athletes were capable of delivering. This would suggest that the intrinsic aerobic capability of Athenian oarsmen was greater than that we can deliver now.
Apparently there were around 34,000 of these oarsmen in the 4th century - and that no matter the explanation the modern crews "were left feeling distinctly inferior".
2008 TC3 burning up (photo: Daily Mail)
Was driving home from work tonight listening to the radio as usual, and was genuinely surprised to hear that an asteroid was headed our way.
Wow.
I was also amazed to hear that astronomers only provided the warning on Monday as they hasn't spotted it earlier as it's so dark and small. But this was a first as no-one has previously been able to predict one coming our way at all.
They also hadn't initially been sure whether it would hit us, as they were working on a surety of plus or minus the radius of the earth. That's a pretty wide margin of error, but still impressive enough.
I guess the biggest thing to be thankful for, knowing that an asteroid is coming our way, is that was sized between one and five metres and was going to burn up in the atmosphere. No Deep Impact in sight.
It seems that asteroids are a constant source of interest for astronomers (and film makers). Just last month European scientists and engineers announced their desire for a potential new mission to drill into an asteroid and bring some of it back.But if it goes ahead, that won't be until 2017, so let's not hold our collective breath.
So vale 2008 TC3, and thanks for giving our astronomers the chance to see you coming.
September 21st 2008 12:12
Ironic that I'm promoting AIPS when they won't promote their own winners
My last post was concerned with Prof Ian Frazer winning the Balzan Prize and at the time it rightly received a fair amount of media attention. I'm fairly sure that's the point of these kinds of awards - that a given group puts up an award to recognise outstanding effort of one sort or another and then shouts loudly about how great the winners are, which in turn makes the group look good for choosing the winners in the first place. It follows a simple rule and normally PR people are tripping over themselves to get good news stories such as these under the media's collective nose.
Except, apparently, the organisers of the Tall Poppy Campaign. The web site says "The Tall Poppy Campaign was created by the Australian Institute of Policy & Science to recognise and celebrate Australian scientific and intellectual excellence and to encourage younger Australians to follow in the footsteps of our outstanding achievers... The Young Tall Poppy Science Awards which are held each year in different states. Award winners are engaged in an education program to foster a stronger interest in science in schools and the broader community
[ Click here to read more ]
September 10th 2008 12:24
Damn the LHC - hurrah for Ian Frazer! (photo: CNN.com)
It's a big week in science.
You might expect that I would be writing about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, given that the experiment began today. It seems that the world has reacted to this in only a few ways: ambivalence ("isn't that near Paris?" asked a colleague today), to excitement, to fear (the nay-sayers concerned that the small black holes the LHC creates will expand and eat the world - but we've all heard these
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Oscar is always watching
There have been a number of interesting dog stories lately but I'm a cat person and thus was amused to read that cats and dogs can successfully live together - but it's more likely to be happen if the cat was there first and was fairly young when the canine interloper appeared.
I've not lived in a household with a dog and cat, but I have lived with three felines who were old when they came together (It was messy) and they're clearly going to be dominant over a dog given a chance. They will not bend unless they absolutely have to so it comes as no surprise to me that a dog will more readily read dominance and other relationships in a household and fit in accordingly
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Sunbaking is never a good idea but can moisturisers really contribute to skin cancer? (pic: theage.com.au)
Today AAP is reporting a study out of Rutgers University linking moisturisers and skin cancer in people who were heavily sun-exposed as youngsters.
The reason the scientists chose to look at moisturisers was that they contain sodium lauryl sulphate or mineral oil and these are known irritants. It would appear their hypothesis was that irritating the skin somehow increases the skin's susceptibility to UV radiation, and thus increases the risk of developing skin cancer
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B - my favourite little boy in the whole wide world
Yesterday a friend's Facebook status update stated that she was pondering how one side dish of asparagus can go through the milk and turn a baby's poo green for three days. This in itself was a little more than I had really ever wanted to consider - in my world, green baby poo is someone else's problem.
But you can imagine my surprise when New Scientist and the BBC told me that breast milk can be imbued with different favours according to what the mother had eaten
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Comment by Janine
on Not the LHC, but God's gift nonetheless
I'm guessing you're opposed to vaccination based on the way you've phrased your first sentence, which isn't a view I share. Yes, there can be side-effects in some cases and clearly no-one wants to be that case in a thousand that has a serious adverse reaction. However, I firmly believe that the benefits for individuals and the population as a whole outweigh the risks - and nothing in life is ever risk-free.