360 DEGREES Weblog

Twenty-seven stroke victims are alive and well today because of a new tool that vacuums clots out of blood vessels in the brain. Known as the Penumbra System of Continuous Aspiration Thrombectomy, the technology was developed at the Seaman MR Research Centre at Canada’s University of Calgary. If used within a few hours of a stroke, it can restore blood flow to the brain, thus reversing the effects of the stroke and preventing any permanent brain damage.

The iBand is made from a material produced by a company called d3o. They make a flexible polymer that falls within the category of Non-Newtonian fluids. In a nutshell, these “fluids”, um, flow under normal conditions but harden quickly upon sudden impact. Some of you may have seen that Mythbusters episode where they run around barefoot on a mixture of cornstarch and water. This product is kind of like that. Only now you can have it as armor for your iPhone. Used normally, it’s like a rubber case but if you drop it it’ll harden instantly and provide up to 134% more impact protection than most other cases.

We’re not sure about price or availability but the product page is here.

We can’t travel to any of the other 100 billion galaxies in the universe yet, but their photons can travel to us. Capturing those photons over a ten-day period results in the most profound and humbling image ever created, the 2004 image known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Now it’s brought to life in 3D, letting you fly through 10,000 galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago.

As you float through this Hubble Space Telescope image (watch it in HD for the best view), consider that last galaxy — it’s the farthest-away object anyone has ever seen. It’s hard to believe each one of those shapes contains billions of stars. Are any of them home to other lifeforms? Are any of them aware of the existence of any others? Anyone out there?

 Top Gear’s James May rides in a Lockheed U2 spy plane to the edge of the earth’s atmosphere and gets very emotional to say the least due to the spectacular views at 70,000 feet.

Somewhere in sleepy Wisconsin - actually in Oshkosh - Virgin Galactic displayed the mothership Eve to the general public for the very first time. The plane soared over thousands of people attending the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual AirVenture convention and then landed so people could get a closer look.

 

I’ve often wondered if I’d be able to land an airplane should the need ever arise. I mean back in the day I spent a lot of time playing MS Flight Simulator, what more training could I possibly need right? Well reading through this wikiHow article entitled “How to Land an Airplane in an Emergency” does make me second-guess my actual knowledge of the whole procedure. While the wiki is a bit vague at times, there’s still some pretty good information there, at least enough to keep you in the air until you get in touch with air traffic control. And it doesn’t hurt to bookmark the site on your laptop or phone, just in case you ever happen to need to reference it again.

“It’s science fiction made real,” a doctor from Tel Aviv University told Reuters, as he demonstrated how a new laser the university has developed is better than stitching up a patient. The laser allows a wound to be welded shut as opposed to sutured, which makes it far more watertight and there’s less tearing. It’s done by very carefully controlling the temperature of the beam, and Israeli patients treated with the laser have already enjoyed faster healing times and less scarring.

 

The realignment of our bio-tech reality has hit a new milestone courtesy a group of cloning scientistsfrom Japan. For the first time in human history the group managed to clone an animal from 16 year-old frozen animal tissue. The development makes wild scenarios such as the one seen in the filmJurassic Park, in which prehistoric animals are resurrected to co-exist with modern man, less sci-fi and closer to sci-fact.

The scientists managed to produce four healthy mice from the frozen tissue, raising the possibility that still undiscovered prehistoric mammals hidden in the arctic tundra may one day find their way into our present-day reality. Although the scientists confirm that cloning a human is far more difficult than cloning a mouse, this new turn in science opens the door to a new biological landscape that will prove hard to map with any real accuracy.