A review of The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers – How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death by Dick Teresi
368 pages. Random House, 2012

Dick Teresi will hold your hand, incite you to argument, and dare you to contradict him. But first, he needs to be perfectly blunt. “You, the reader, will die,” he proclaims within the first five pages. He wants you to think about death as much as he does, which is quite a lot, according to his therapist who declares him not so much clinically depressed as exceptionally morbid. But for Teresi, it’s not so interesting that you’ll die but rather, how we’ll know you’re dead.

Known for his journalistic musings on the God Particle and our understanding of the number zero, in his humorous and extensively researched third book, The Undead, Teresi tackles how modern society and its past counterparts have decided when people are dead. As it turns out, it’s not nearly as straightforward as it sounds and most people can’t tell the difference between a dead guy and a plate of jello (really, they have similar brain scan readings). While he states at the beginning of the book, “My job as a journalist is to reveal data. You can do with that information what you wish,” it is clear he has strong opinions on the matter. Full Review »

Take a look around your city. There’s the old man walking his dog, the flocks of pigeons on the roof, and the constant honk of cars rushing by the smeared windowpanes. But these images and sounds are more than fleeting. This is all data.

Data from taxis in New York, data from cell phone conversations in Brazil, data from trash collectors in Spain. Lines and lines of unending data are created every day, every second, by people going about their lives, including you. 2008 was the first time in the history of civilization that 50 percent of the people on earth lived in what is classified as an urban area. It’s not all data from companies or government entities either. It’s data from the average, plugged-in person, like his rants about traffic on Twitter or her images of potholes on Instagram.

The question is, what does this data mean? What can it do? Given a little exercise, a little insight, and a dash of design, the SENSEable City Lab at MIT hopes to explain. They want to use that data to turn a mere “city” into a “smart city.”

A city is like a clock, filled with interlocking parts that are dynamic and changeable but governed by the complex mechanics whirring just beneath the surface. Pry open the back and the inner contents are revealed, a mess of information from each user in the city. Full Article »

In 1997, the ride’s ideal patron took the form of my ten- and twelve-year-old Californian cousins and, by extension, their foolish Minnesotan ally. A nine-year-old sucker, my sole ambitions were Advanced Math class and snowpants without shoulder straps. I was a sitting duck. Full Article »

“There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.” So said detective Sherlock Holmes whose debut at the close of the nineteenth century in A Study In Scarlet coincided with a discovery that would become the black thread of physics, a mystery whose knots and tangles remain unexposed. That discovery, now known as matter’s twin, was antimatter.

Matter, quite simply, matters. Broken down to its smallest parts, it’s a bunch of miniscule particles. (What kind of particles? Elementary, my dear Watson.) Matter is the stuff that you, your house, 221B Baker Street, and the whole entire universe is made of. Except, there’s something more. The universe, we’ve now discovered, also contains a tricky substance called antimatter. Also made of individual particles, antimatter, though rare, can be produced by objects as varied as cosmic rays and decaying radioactive substances.

Sometimes referred to as matter’s equal but opposite, antimatter is the devious Moriarty to matter’s shrewd Holmes. Like these two intellectual rivals, anti-matter insists on being perfectly contrary to matter. Where a proton, for example, prides itself on its positive electrical charge, its antimatter mate, the antiproton, teasingly possesses a negative charge. And the negative electron finds its antimatter twin is the aptly named positron. Where matter says positive, antimatter cries negative and where matter demands negative, antimatter insists on positive. Full Article »

It had been projected years before that an asteroid named Icarus would come dangerously close to earth in the summer of 1968. Named for the mythological figure who flew too close to the Sun, the mile-wide rock was first discovered in 1949.

Graphs plotting Icarus’s orbit drew a deep “U,” bottoming out at just 4 million miles—nearly 17 times the moon’s distance from the earth, closer than any contemporary celestial body had advanced toward our planet. The popular press was abuzz with speculation—what if it had been a collision course? Robert Richardson wrote in a famous Scientific American article, “A change of only a few degrees in the position of the descending node of Icarus’ orbit … would make it possible for Icarus and the earth to be at the same place at the same time.” Put less lightly, were this collision to occur, Icarus would crash into earth with nearly 33,000 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb, decimating millions. Full Article »

Years after Walt Whitman sung the body electric, researchers have discovered your inner ear can act as a battery.

Experts speculate this battery could be used for cochlear implants, surgically inserted devices used to restore hearing to deaf patients. Unlike external batteries currently used to power implants, the biological battery of the ear never needs recharging and will exist until the host’s death. It also reduces the risk of medical complication when removing and reinserting an implant to replace a battery. The energy also has the potential to power sensors for use in non-hearing related biotechnology and medicine.

Tested in guinea pigs, a study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found at least 1.12 nanowatts, about one billionth of a watt, could be extracted from the ear. “We’ve known about this power source for a very, very long time … but I don’t think anyone’s every thought about using them as a power source to drive things like a battery,” says Ed Rubel an auditory researcher at the University of Washington.
While mammals can also generate energy through heat and muscle movement, the energy from the inner ear has been determined in recent years to be the most suitable for potential electric-powered implants. Importantly, it doesn’t require the user to wear a bulky, outer apparatus to extract the energy. Full Article »

Printing books and photographs is nothing new, but researchers have developed a new technique to print something slightly more complex: body tissues.

Experts have alluded to two major issues in creating tissues for human use: how to make it and what material to use. New 3-D printing technology hopes to help solve the former and its products may lead to the latter.

3-D printing bears very little resemblance to your office print job. Instead of droplets of ink spraying down on a page, the printer builds objects layer by layer in three dimensions, stacking cross-sections of the object on top of one another.

Started in the 1980s, 3-D printing was first used to model prototypes for industries, like a new car design for Ford Motor Company, and can now create nearly anything from toys to packaging to medical models. Full Article »

Dieting dilettantes can delight in new findings that weight loss may be as easy as avoiding soda.

Obesity, particularly in children, has been a pressing issue for researchers and changing kids’ habits has been the subject of scrutiny, including New York City’s new super-sized drink ban. While many factors contribute to an overweight nation, researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital targeted sugary drinks to find out their contribution.

What they found was that providing unsweetened drinks instead of sweetened ones, could change teen drinking habits. The ninth and tenth graders studied were split into two groups. The first set continued to knock back soda and 100 percent fruit juices, while the other participants had bottled water and diet soda delivered to their homes every two weeks. Full Article »

Previously thought of as more common in scripture than in nature, scientists have discovered the first case of virgin birth in the wild.

Two species of wild pitviper were found to create fatherless progeny through a phenomenon known as “facultative parthenogenesis.”

Scientists believe less than 0.1 percent of vertebrates reproduce without a mate. The rare occurrence, often referred to as “captive syndrome,” has only happened, until now, in zoos or labs where females were isolated without male contact.

This fact led researchers to wonder if it may have evolved to help females continue their lineage without males. “It could sometimes allow populations to preserve in an environment where there are hardly any males or there’s low population density and individuals can’t find mates,” says Demian Chapman at Stony Brook University.

However, Chapman cautioned against jumping to evolutionary significance: “I wouldn’t call it an alternative reproductive strategy… I think if it was an alternative strategy, we would’ve seen it much more commonly.” Full Article »