Friday, August 28, 2009
Wooden legs and coffee filters
This almost seems like a step backward, but instead it is incredibly cool:
Italian scientists have developed a new procedure to turn blocks of wood into artificial bones, which may be implanted into large animals and eventually humans, allowing live bones to heal faster and more securely after a break than currently available metal and ceramic implants.
For more exciting out-of-the-box medtech innovation, check this out.
José Gómez-Márquez's lab at MIT seems to be part toy store, part machine shop, and part medical center. Plastic toys are scattered across the bench tops, along with a disassembled drugstore pregnancy test, all manner of syringes, and a slew of fake body parts. Coffee filters have been transformed into paper-based diagnostics; a dime-store helicopter provides the design for a new asthma inhaler; even a toilet plunger has been put to use, rigged with tubes and glue to form a makeshift centrifuge.
Good stuff.
2 Comments:
By 
Sheep_dog, at
Fri Aug 28, 01:06:00 PM:
now to get Jose Goemz to create a fusion generator - he seems quite skilled at this sort of thing...
By 
, at
Sat Aug 29, 02:00:00 PM:
Italian scientists have developed a new procedure to turn blocks of wood into artificial bones, which may be implanted into large animals and eventually humans, allowing live bones to heal faster and more securely after a break than currently available metal and ceramic implants.
So that Steven Wright routine about seeing a man with wooden legs and real feet will one day be possible...? ;)
