Clipmarks | Mohir's clips

Robot removes woman's brain tumour

Sun, 18 May 2008 22:17:37 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

CALGARY - Calgary doctors have made surgical history, using a robot to remove a brain tumour from a 21-year-old woman.

Doctors used remote controls and an imaging screen, similar to a video game, to guide the two-armed robot through Paige Nickason's brain during the nine-hour surgery Monday.

Surgical instruments acting as the hands of the robot -called NeuroArm - provided surgeons with the tools needed to successfully remove the egg-shaped tumour.

This is the first time a robot has performed surgery of this kind,

"Paige's brain surgery represents a technical achievement in the use of image-guided robotic technology to remove a relatively complex brain tumour,"

NeuroArm has the distinct advantage of being able to move in smaller increments than a surgeon's hand, Sutherland said.

Typically, the human hand can steady itself and move in increments of one or two millimetres. NeuroArm can move in increments of 50 microns.

Tags: surgery, robotics, brain

New release at archive.org: The Hoodlum (1951)

Sun, 18 May 2008 19:15:48 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.boingboing.net

Did you know archive.org has lots of cool old feature films in the public domain you can download for free? Here's one they just added to the archive that looks promising: The Hoodlum, from 1951.

(Here's the RSS feed for recent additions to the movie archive.)

Lawrence Tierney ("Reservoir Dogs") plays an unreformed, hardened criminal who has just been released from prison. Working at his brother's gas station, he becomes very interested in the armored car that makes regular stops at the bank across the street.

Tags: movies, free, archive, internet, web

Parrot Fossil 55 Million Years Old Discovered In Scandinavia

Sun, 18 May 2008 15:50:26 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Palaeontologists have discovered fossil remains in Scandinavia of parrots dating back 55 million years. Reported May 14 in the journal Palaeontology, the fossils indicate that parrots once flew wild over what is now Norway and Denmark.

Parrots today live only in the tropics and southern hemisphere, but this new research suggests that they first evolved in the North, much earlier than had been thought.

The fossil parrot was discovered on the Isle of Mors in the northwest of Denmark – far from where you’d normally expect to find a parrot. It’s a new species, officially named 'Mopsitta tanta'. However, already its nick-name is the ‘Danish Blue Parrot’, a term derived from a famous comedy sketch about a 'Norwegian Blue Parrot' in the 1970s BBC television programme ‘Monty Python’.

At around 55 million years old, this is very much an ex-parrot. Indeed, Mopsitta represents the oldest and most northerly convincing remains of a parrot ever to have been discovered.

Tags: parrot, evolution

Exploring The Mechanics Of Judgment & Beliefs

Sun, 18 May 2008 15:43:05 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: "We already knew that some parts of the brain are involved in specific aspects of perception and motor control, but many doubted that an abstract high-level cognitive process like understanding another person's thoughts would be conducted in its own private patch of cortex," Kanwisher says.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

How do we know what other people are thinking? How do we judge them, and what happens in our brains when we do?

MIT neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe is tackling those tough questions and many others. Her goal is no less than understanding how the brain gives rise to the abilities that make us uniquely human--making moral judgments, developing belief systems and understanding language.

Using fMRI, she has identified an area of the brain (the temporoparietal junction) that lights up when people think about other people's thoughts, something we do often as we try to figure out why others behave as they do.

That finding is "one of the most astonishing discoveries in the field of human cognitive neuroscience," says Nancy Kanwisher, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and Saxe's PhD thesis adviser.

Tags: brain