Cool Story, Wyss

This is pretty cool:

BOSTON -- The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University announced today that it has been awarded a $12.3 million, four-year grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a treatment for sepsis, a commonly fatal bloodstream infection. Sepsis is a major cause of injury and death among combat-injured soldiers in the field, as well as patients in hospital intensive care units.

The proposed treatment would involve a miniaturized, dialysis-like device that could rapidly clear the blood of a wide range of pathogens, much as a living human spleen does, without removing normal blood cells, proteins, fluids, or electrolytes. This novel "Spleen-on-a-Chip" would be portable, self-contained, and easily inserted into the peripheral blood vessels of a septic patient or soldier.

The award is part of DARPA's Dialysis Like Therapeutics program, which seeks to develop ways to dramatically decrease the morbidity and mortality of sepsis, thereby saving thousands of lives and billions of dollars in the United States each year. Worldwide, more than 18 million cases of sepsis are reported every year, with more than six million resulting in death.

The Last Taboo

I've come across the topic of vulgarity vis-a-vis HBO's new fantasy series, Game of Thrones, twice now.  The first time was in a thread at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen: I compared Game of Thrones to Deadwood:

I watched Game of Thrones a bit, and I was actually surprised you didn’t mention the foul language in Deadwood for comparison purposes. Both shows try so hard to beat the viewer over the head with the fact that they are for adults for adults for adults that even a small amount of reflection fosters the realization that they are quite oviously for men between 20 and 35. As a man between 20 and 35, I’d feel uncomfortable watching either show with someone not of that demographic.

The second was from this Daily Beast article, on the plethora of dick-shots in today's Hollywood films:    

No aspect of the minotaur’s penis was left to chance in the recently released Your Highness,

The fearsome appendage, which is revealed at a key moment in April’s medieval stoner comedy, came courtesy of extensive internal debates within and outside the film’s distributor Universal Pictures. How to light the half-man/half-bull’s prosthetic member? How big the balls? The penis’ startling physical dimensions, the state of its, ahem, romantic rectitude—all were subject to boardroom discussions between filmmakers, concept artists and studio executives, resulting in a breakthrough for the R-rated action farce.

“When we filmed it, the creature’s manhood is swinging back and forth between his legs,” said Your Highness director David Gordon Green. “It was actually the head of the studio who had the idea to give him a boner.

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The Billion-Year War

There were good reasons for this sense of priority and urgency. First, influenza viruses mutate constantly and are notoriously unpredictable. Second, influenza was known to cause both seasonal epidemics of disease, and on occasion, much larger global outbreaks of disease, known as pandemics. Influenza pandemics occur when a new influenza virus appears and spreads around the world in populations which previously have not been exposed to the virus. History has shown that influenza pandemics can range enormously in their impact but that it is impossible to accurately predict the eventual impact at the beginning. What is seen early may be very different from what has been experienced by the end. The 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, started with relatively mild waves of illness and then evolved into the most severe influenza pandemic in history.

- Dr. Keiji Fukuda on behalf of WHO at the January 26, 2010 Council of Europe hearing on pandemic (H1N1) 2009

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