A woman held her old heart in her hands while the new transplanted Heart was beating inside her!
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Penny Smith holding her own heart. The photo became an Internet sensation when it was posted on the site Imgur with the caption: “This is my friend Penny. She is holding her own heart. She has survived cancer and crippling heart failure but never lost hope.”
She held her own heart in her hands, then became an Internet sensation, but Penny Smith of Lake Elsinore, Calif., is just happy to be alive — and overwhelmed by the attention a single photo of her has received.
The photo of a hospital-masked but clearly smiling Smith, cradling her first heart while the new one beats in her chest, was posted on social media site Imgur by a nursing school friend, and immediately drew attention
Smith, 35, received her heart transplant in September 2012. She had known for years that she might one day need one.
“I was 3 and a half when I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins T-cell lymphoma and I went into remission at age 6,” she told the Daily News. “From there in 1994 I developed a heart problem, which my mom knew about. (The doctors) had told her when I went through chemo that I would have it.”
Doctors monitored her condition closely over the years, but, Smith says, “I went downhill in 2007. I couldn’t breathe, I could barely walk.
“So they put me on more meds, and I ended up going into the hospital for my heart transplant.”
Smith’s operation took place at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego last fall. “I went on the (transplant recipient) list Aug. 17 and got my heart on Sept. 13,” she said.
Doctors left her chest opened up initially, she said, because the donor heart was too big. “I was in there for four months (recovering),” she said. “I had two cardiac arrests.”
Smith doesn’t know her donor’s identity, just that he was a young male.
The amazing photo was taken months after the operation, in January.
“That was in the hospital in the pathology lab,” Smith said. “I was saying goodbye to my heart, actually, because I felt like it got me through half of my life and I needed to say goodbye to it. So I was saying goodbye, and getting to know my new heart.
“My doctors made me wait because they didn’t think I was ready. I wanted to be able to hold it, and they didn’t want me to drop it.
“I was happy to see it again-well, see it for the first time, I guess.
“My husband even got to hold it. It felt really weird for both of us, but it was amazing to get to hold something that was once in someone.”
The EEG results for a target and a non-target stimulus
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The idea is simply this: have your brain mapped by sensors (here, an EEG or Electroencephalograph is used), which pick up crucial brain activity and then sophisticated software can help understand what it is that the brain is trying to do! These are called ‘brain-computer interfaces’ (or BCI’s) for obvious reasons.
These can actually help you mentally control your computer using specific thought patterns.
What is interesting is how a computer can browse through your mental database and steal away some pieces of sensitive information. Security researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Geneva and University of California, Berkeley have developed a program to be used by the software that has only one purpose – finding information like home address, debit cardPIN and date of birth. They found 28 willing participants, who didn’t know about the hacking (of course, otherwise the whole exercise is futile, right?) and tested this program on them. The success rate varied from a mere 10% to a respectable 40% for different fields of sensitive data.
The technique is a lot like hacking passwords. The key response tracked by the program is known as a P300 response – the brainwave activity that the brain undergoes when it recognizes something familiar, like a known face, own neighbourhood, own debit card PIN and so on! The peaks in the P300 activity were noted and the analysis of this data can give a very good indication of what the right answers are!
Cholesterol is Good for You! (Photo credit: Mr Jaded)
An Indian Research Team Has developed a new process by which the Cholesterol level can be found.
This is from The Sree Sastha Institute of Engineering and Technology ,Thanjavur,Tamil Nadu
Story:
Researchers in India have developed a total cholesterol test that uses a digital camera to take a snapshot of the back of the patient‘s hand rather than a blood sample. The image obtained is cropped and compared with images in a database for known cholesterol levels.
Writing in the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, N.R. Shanker of the Sree Sastha Institute of Engineering and Technology and colleagues describe how they have developed a non-invasive way to test cholesterol levels in patients at increased risk of heart disease. Their approach is based on the creation of a large database of cholesterol levels recorded using standard blood tests and linked to a standardized photograph of the hand for each patient; cholesterol is concentrated in the creases of one’s fingers. They developed an image-processing computer program that compares the image from a new patient with the thousands of entries in the database and matches it to a specific cholesterol reading.
Measuring the amount and type of cholesterol circulating in the blood is an important risk factor in cardiovascular disease. Excess cholesterol not used by the body in making hormones and building cells is laid down on the inner wall of arteries as a waxy plaque, which can reduce the normal flow of blood potentially causing heart problems and increasing the risk of cerebral stroke. Total cholesterol is a useful early indicator, although more detailed testing that distinguishes between the HDL high-density lipoprotein) and LDL (low-density lipoprotein) and triglycerides are needed for a more accurate health assessment of patients found to have high total cholesterol. It is LDL, so-called “bad” cholesterol that contributes to the formation of arterial plaques, atherosclerosis. The presence of different total levels of cholesterol can be revealed through image analysis of the skin.
A non-invasive and inexpensive method for cholesterol screening would allow this risk factor be determined in much larger patient populations without the need for costly and inconvenient blood tests. The team will also soon publish details of the extension of this work to classifying cholesterol type using their approach.
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“Non-invasive method of detection of cholesterol using image processing” in Int. J. Medical Engineering and Informatics, 2012, 4, 223-230
Scopolamine, otherwise known as “The Devil’s Breath,” was tested by the CIA as a truth serum during the Cold War, and it was also reportedly used by Nazi interrogators during World War II, was /is being used in Relaxation Technic for Stress and other Related Disorders.
Alistair McLean describes its effects in his Book The last Frontiers.
CIA is known to use this quite frequently at the time of Debriefing its own Agents , Assets and Double Agents.
Now the real danger of the Drug is being revealed now.
Story.
Scopolamine, otherwise known as “The Devil’s Breath,” was tested by the CIA as a truth serum during the Cold War, and it was also reportedly used by Nazi interrogators during World War II, he added.
Likewise, Beth Stebner of the Daily Mail said that “stories surrounding the drug are the stuff of urban legends, with some telling horror stories of how people were raped, forced to empty their bank accounts, and even coerced into giving up an organ.”
VICE correspondent Ryan Duffy interviewed a drug dealer operating out of the Columbian capital of Bogota, who told him that the drug was, in Stebner’s words, “frightening for the simplicity in which it can be administered” and prevents a person from remembering anything that happened to them while under the influence.
Duffy himself described his experiences as it relates to the drug on the VICE website.
“When VICE initially asked me to go down to Colombia to dig into this Scopolamine story… I had only a vague understanding of the drug, but the idea of a substance that renders a person incapable of exercising free-will seemed liked a recipe for hilarity and the YouTube hall of fame. I even spent a little time brainstorming the various ways I could transport some of it back to the states and had a pretty good list going of different ways to utilize it on my buddies,” he said.
“The original plan was for me to sample the drug myself to really get an idea of the effect it had on folks,” Duffy said. “The producer and camera man had flew down to Bogota ahead of me to confirm some meetings and start laying down the groundwork. By the time I arrived a few days later, things had changed dramatically. Their first few days in the country had apparently been such a harrowing montage of freaked-out dealers and unimaginable horror stories about Scopolamine that we decided I was absolutely not going to be doing the drug. All elements of humor and novelty were rapidly stripped away during my first few days in town. After meeting only a couple people with firsthand experience, the story took a far darker turn than we ever could have imagined.” redOrbit (http://s.tt/1bDbQ)
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