Megan Cully

Altering the surface of orthopaedic implants has already helped patients – and nanotech can fight infections too

One of medicine’s primary objectives is to trick the body into doing something it doesn’t want to do. We try to convince our immune systems to attack cancer cells (our immune systems don’t normally attack our own bodies), we try to convince neurons to regrow (another unnatural phenomenon), and we try to convince the body to accept foreign bits, such as someone else’s kidney or a fake bone. In order to accomplish this, we try to make parts of our bodies we don’t want, such as cancers, look foreign. We try to make foreign bits that we do want, such as orthopaedic implants, look natural. Nanotechnology, as you might have guessed, can help us do just that.

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Written By: Cameron Scott

Hands-free devices like Google Glass can be really transformative when the hands they free are those of a surgeon. And leading hospitals, including Stanford and the University of California at San Francisco, are beginning to use Glass in the operating room.

In October, UCSF’s Pierre Theodore, a cardiothoracic surgeon, became the first doctor in the United States to obtain Institutional Review Board approval to use the device to assist him during surgery. Theodore pre-loads onto Glass the scans of images of the patient taken just before surgery and consults them during the operation.

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The seven deadly sins of health and science reporting

By Avi Roy, University of Buckingham and Anders Sandberg, University of Oxford

Benjamin Franklin said two things are certain in life: death and taxes. Another one we could add to this list is that on any given news website and in almost all print media there will be articles about health and nutrition that are complete garbage.

Some articles that run under the health and nutrition “news” heading are thought provoking, well researched and unbiased, but unfortunately not all. And to help you traverse this maze – alongside an excellent article about 20 tips for interpreting scientific claims – we will look at seven clichés of improper or misguided reporting.

If you spot any of these clichés in an article, we humbly suggest that you switch to reading LOLCats, which will be more entertaining and maybe more informative too.

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