Replace Broken Bones With A 3D Printer

A sea turtle injured by a collision with a boat’s propeller has had its jaw replaced – using a 3D printer.

Scans of the turtle’s head were used to generate a prosthetic beak, made of titanium, to replace the damaged bones and tendons. A rehabilitation centre in Turkey found the animal, and reached out to Turkish company BTech innovation, known for creating custom-made medical prosthetics and implants for humans.

Medicine applicants should consider how 3D printed technology can be applied to human physiology. Prosthetic limbs are frequently required as a result of trauma, and so a quick solution such as this might pave the way for shorter recovery time for many patients. Students applying for Biological Sciences should consider the chance of rejection as a result of the transplant. How equipped are scientists to deal with transplants, either organic or inorganic, across different species?

The turtle is currently under medical supervision to see whether or not the transplant will be rejected, after which, the turtle will return to sea. Engineering applicants should investigate whether or not 3D printing should be a source of remedial technology in the future, or if there are better alternatives moving forward. 3D printing has been used for many technological solutions, from creating windpipes to fixing airplanes.

A woman born without a finger and thumb has grown them back – as a phantom limb.

The women, identified only as RN, was born with three fingers on her right hand, and subsequently lost her hand to a car accident when she was 18. Following the accident, she developed a phantom hand, but the hand had not only 3 fingers, but the full complement of 5.

While the two ‘missing’ phantom fingers were shorter than the other three, this phenomenon indicates that the brain has a hardwired idea of what a body should look like, independent of our own perception. Matthew Longo, of Birbeck University of London, argues that this study adds to the growing idea that our conscious experience of the body is dependent upon some intrinsic, hardwired understanding, and not just as a result of experience.

HSPS applicants should think about this woman’s experience in the larger frame of ‘habitus’, a sociological concept that argues against this idea and instead says we are formed by repeated, social stylizations from our experiences. Medicine applicants should think on the balance between a patient’s perception of their illness narrative, and what a doctor perceives to be the illness narrative, when treating a patient.

Apple developers, in the build up to the launch of the new smartwatch, have outlined one group who might not get the most out of their new product – anyone with a tattoo.

The smartwatch has many functions which operate by light sensors on the watch’s back, which may be interfered with by dramatic changes in skin tone such as darker tattoo ink. The ink of some tattoos can block light from reaching the sensor, making functions such as a heart rate sensor prone to failure and misreading.

The watch works by using green LED lights to detect the amount of blood flowing through the wrist, which as Medicine and Natural Biological Sciences applicants will know is how the heart rate is measured at the wrist. Further to this problem, another investigation by Reuters has found that the soft ping signals that alert a user to an incoming message do not work on people with tattoos where the watch is worn. Fundamentally, ink on the wrist makes it difficult for the watch to detect that a wrist is there at all.

This problem is not, however, unique to Apple. Many sensor-based technologies have found failures with not only tattooed skin, but darker skin in general. The amount of light reflected back from darker pigmentations of skin is typically less light than the technology is designed to cater for. Engineering applicants should explore further on why it is important to ensure technologies are fit for purpose across large and diverse sample sizes, and HSPS applicants should explore further on how and why consumer products cater to majoritarian groups.

In a recent interview with The Telegraph, the head of the OCR exam board Mark Dawe has argued that students should be able to use Google when sitting GCSE and A-level exams.

Mr Dawe argued that introducing Google to exams will allow examiners to assess how students draw on and interpret information. Similar to allowing calculators in a Mathematics exam, this would mean that each student had access to the same computational ability, but their skill at utilising that would be the measure of their ability.

He further argued for using Google in exams because that is how people access information in day-to-day life, rather than memorising all of the information, stating “that’s not how the modern world works”. Mr Dawe has been criticised by Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, who argues that with allowing access to the internet will lower the standards of examinations further, and will not test a pupil’s knowledge and understanding.

Applicants for vocational courses such as Law and Medicine should consider how useful examinations with access to the internet will be in testing career rigour, when those careers require vast, immediate knowledge.

While it sounds like something from Science Fiction, new MRI technology has been created that can read minds.

Milenium Magnetic Technologies (MMT) has created Cognitive Engram technology which can record brain patterns, and make inferences about the thoughts and emotions of the participant. The idea emerged from lead researcher, Donald Marks, discovering different brain activity patterns when participants were shown different faces. Psychology applicants should investigate to what extent emotions can be investigated in objective, scientific conditions.

Subsequent research found that through MRIs, thoughts could be reconstructed from the patterns without the need of the face stimulus – all external stimuli changed the activity patterns of the brain and thus allowed interpretations as to the mood of the participant to be made.

While the technology to record thoughts is advancing rapidly, the ability to play back these memories is very limited. Marks likens it to having low resolution or “fuzzy” images playing back through a video connection. While the visual reconstruction is not clear, the ability to store memories in a raw data form holds great potential for Medicine students interested in memory-deteriorating diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia.

A new study by psychologists at Northwestern University suggests that naturally creative thinkers find it more difficult than others to block out distractions.

The psychologists asked participants of varying ages to memorise names and faces while listening to music, and found a correlation between the career of the participant and a decline in their ability to recall information when music was a factor. Workers in art and design, for example, showed a noticeably lower ability to remember information when music was playing, finding that their brain more naturally focused on external stimuli than less creative figures.

The researchers concluded that creative thinkers have ‘leakier’ sensory filters; stimuli that the majority of the population filters out as irrelevant becomes stuck in creative’s minds, with the researchers arguing that many of history’s greatest minds had such leaky sensory filters, enabling some of their greatest discoveries. English students should consider Kafka’s famous saying “I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ — that wouldn’t be enough — but like a dead man” to see how many infamous hermit authors this research might apply to. Psychology and Medicine students should also consider the overlap between this leaky sensory filters and ADHD symptoms to gauge how creativity may be partnered with hyperfocus and a large intake of sensory data as typical of people with ADHD.

The study also found that the ability to be distracted was also linked to age. College age adults showed no difference in their ability to recall information when music was playing, while older adults showed a 10% decline in ability when there was background music. Working in silence, or listening to background white or pink noise, is therefore recommended for any easily distracted students, rather than music.

A recent pet owners only veterinary conference in Birmingham discussed the ever present question for all pet owners: how do vets decide when euthanasia is the right decision? A question with no clear ‘right’ answer, this is something that all students applying for Veterinary Medicine should consider their own perspective on.

One vet uses a ‘Quality of Life Scale’ in order to help owners make a decision. This scale scores based on pain, hydration, hygiene, mobility, and general enjoyment of life. He repeats the questionnaire every sixth months or so, so that the owners can see an objective measurement of their pet’s deterioration. He believes this process helps owners to prepare for the final farewell, as they can clearly see that the pet as deteriorated to the stage where death is preferable.

However, students interested in Philosophy should consider the concept of ‘Quality of life’ and whether this is indeed something we can quantitatively measure, or whether there are other, less tangible aspects we should consider. Theology students can investigate religions that might find issue with animal euthanasia.

Known by pet owners as having your pet ‘put to sleep’,  animal euthanasia is not only used for old and dying animals, also by animal shelters (particularly in the US) to counteract overcrowding, a practice from which much of the debate comes. Students interested in Politics or Law can look into the laws and practices of Euthanasia across the world, both for animals and people.

Medicine students should also consider the wider implications of this debate in the wider discussions over euthanasia and assisted suicide. Some worry that although today we are only assessing the quality of life of animals, and our pets, we may not be far away from using the same criteria to assess elderly or terminally ill humans.

The French government is set to come out in support of draft legislation banning catwalk models deemed to be excessively thin.

The bill will also impose fines on the fashion house or modelling agencies involved in hiring the offending models. Some fashion agents, it is claimed, could even be sent to jail if found guilty of promoting size-zero culture. When the new laws are passed, France will join Italy, Spain and Israel, which have all enacted legislation to ban overly thin models from participating in fashion events.

The law would make it mandatory for models to have frequent weight checks. If the law is broken, models found to be breaking the law could be hit with fines of up to €75 000. Any staff breaching the law could face half a year in jail, according to the magazine Le Parisien. Applicants for Medicine will be interested in the health implications which result from being extremely thin – will proposals such as these help combat the scourge of anorexia, which is so prevalent in the 21^st century?

Law applicants could pick up on the legal aspects of the story, in considering what challenges legislators face when drafting a law which is designed, in effect, to outlaw a particular lifestyle choice.

Finally, HSPS applicants might wish to consider the sociological issues involved. How do role models in society affect human behaviour, particularly that of young people?

IBM’s famous Watson computer now has a new profession to add to its repertoire – chef.

The Watson Computer came to public attention following an episode of Jeopardy, in which the computer beat out two of the show’s best contestants to answer the trivia questions. Such computational power was unheard of when the episode aired in 2011, and since, IBM have worked to diversify the skills that Watson can accomplish.

Watson was created to search huge databases of information in order to act as an aid to humans in highly technical areas, and Computer Scientists should read more on how Watson formulaically parses large volumes of data to work in creative disciplines such as cookery and art. In regards to its new role as a chef, Watson is tasked with creating new recipes by analysing volumes of data ingredient combinations and historical recipe data.

Watson can add to, rather than compete with, human creativity because it holds no biases. Medicine and Law are discipline which rely on amassed knowledge which can lead to implicit or explicit leanings in judgement, while Watson holds no such bias – Chef James Briscione, who wrote a cook book using Watson’s findings, explains that Northern European styles of cooking suggest apples should be cooked in butter if cooked at all, and Mediterranean cooking uses olive oil but rarely are apples cooked because they struggle to grow in arid climates. Watson does not account for these biases, however, and created recipes based on frying apples in olive oil because they share a better flavour profile.

All research based disciplines should be excited by this innovation, which has taken artificial intelligence from giving evidence-based answers to innovating new ones.

A dream team of scientists and mathematicians at Arizona State University have applied the tools of mathematics, and various other scientific disciplines, to research bodies of already existing bodies of research in an attempt to predict breakthroughs.

The team studied breakthrough research, following trains of thought back to the original source. They found through this process of ‘meta-analysis‘, pulled together from the research of around 300,000 authors, a few key innovators that could be attributed as the source of major discoveries in their disciplines.

Mathematicians and Engineers should note that the analysis drew on concepts from graph theory, electrical engineering and applied mathematical tools for analysing large networks.

Whilst this research itself is inter-disciplinary, it also points to the fruitfulness of inter-disciplinary collaboration. The researchers noted that major breakthroughs often coincide with the confluence of many areas of research.

There are practical and political implications too. It is hoped that the analysis can be constantly applied to current research and guide funding bodies in their attribution of support. Medicine applicants might like to contemplate the consequences for research in their field, as this could indicate which research areas may have the most potential to grow.