Last week, we announced our My Medical Museum Contest inviting you to investigate the curious lives of medical gadgets, historical clinicians and much more at your local medical museum.
So come play medical detective with us!
Where, you say? Elementary, my Dear Watson. It could be an overlooked building in the center of your city, or a hospital library. Inside, you’ll find bizarre specimens, VIDs (very important documents), and even mysterious medical gadgets. It’s your perfect excuse to spook little Matthew out (and it’s not even Halloween yet!), throw down bets with cousin Vinny (ahah!) and walk Gramps down medical memory lane (oh the things he never knew!).
So Watson — go sleuthing and enlighten us of your medical museum’s treasures, local medical history and how clinicians and scientists in your area contributed to medicine. Make a presentation and tell us a fascinating story by Sunday, June 13, 2010.
The Grand Prize is a spanking-new Wi-Fi 32GB Apple iPad.
Our only request is that you be creative, learn a lot and have fun!
GlaxoSmithKline has begun an experiment with open-source development of malaria drugs by releasing the structural and activity data for 13,500 compounds that may be good candidates for further study. The Wall Street Journal profiles Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD), a Silicon Valley company, that’s hosting much of the data about these compounds. Essentially CDD provides free access to a social network style interface and access to a large database, harnessing the power of groups to find needles in a haystack.
From WSJ:
CDD’s Web service combines elements of a Facebook-like social network with an Oracle-style database. Any researcher who registers on the CDD site will be able to see graphical depictions of Glaxo’s compounds and relevant chemical and biological data. The database will allow them to upload their own data to be viewed by other researchers.
The service is free of charge. If a researcher wants to combine the data with proprietary information, CDD alsooffers a fee-based, secure version of its site that allows researchers to lock up information they want to keep secret.
Researchers including James McKerrow, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, have used CDD since 2007 to share data about diseases including malaria and schistosomiasis, a parasite that can cause liver and kidney damage. The group shared data on tens of thousands of compounds to speed up the process of picking a handful of compounds (for diseases such as malaria) that are the best options to try on animals, Dr. McKerrow said.
Demo of CDD’s software:
Read on at WSJ: Glaxo Tries a Linux Approach
More from CDD: GSK and Online Communities Create Unique Alliance to Stimulate Open Source Drug Discovery for Malaria
It’s taken longer than I thought it would, but I’m starting to see results from my trainers intense workouts.
This vest is similar to the one I wear during my personal-training sessions.
He has had me wear a 20-pound weight vest during our sessions. The blue, nylon vest, which looks like a floatation device, is slightly too large for me and shifts back and forth as I turn, punch and run.
When I first wore it, each step felt as though magnets in my shoes stuck to a metal floor. Now, after several weeks, I see why I’m wearing it: I’ve run a personal-best 5K, and I feel lighter and stronger with day-to-day activities.
It sounds crazy, but I now look forward to slipping into the weight vest each week. Maybe carrying a little extra weight isn’t so bad after all.
Serious game development company Grendel Games presented a very unique product today at Games for Health: A laparoscopy training game that has almost nothing to do with laparoscopy. To paint a clearer picture, last time we checked there weren’t any mad scientists, robots, or goop that turn into monsters in laparoscopic procedures. However, this is exactly the point. The speaker, Tim Laning, boldly proclaimed “This is not a simulator, this is a seriously entertaining game.”
He went on to say while ultra-realistic laparoscopy simulators are effective and impressive pieces of technology, they are expensive and more importantly, they aren’t fun. Residents don’t seem to train as much on simulators as they should be. His solution is to create a game that gives the user the psychomotor training he needs to be an effective minimally invasive surgeon, while also being fun and interesting.
The game is in an early prototype phase, and while it will be available for the Wii and the PS3 Move, only the Wii version was demonstrated. As shown in the picture, the hardware utilizes the Wii controllers to translate the motion of the laparoscopy tools to the game on-screen.
In order to prove its effectiveness Grendel Games is piloting a study to compare people using their software, people using 3D simulators, and people with no training at all.
While Grendel Games wants surgeons to train using their software, they are also targeting the retail market. They figure that young budding surgeons-to-be can get a head start and would be willing to shell out a little bit of extra dough for the unique hardware set-up.
This idea is definitely an astonishingly unique take in the highly active field of minimally invasive surgery training. While the prototype is still too early to make any judgments, we worry that it might be a bit too out there for established surgeons and residents, and might be a little too complex for the average retail customer. We hope for the best for Grendel and will continue to follow this brilliant and innovative technology.
Unfortunately, the demo wasn’t working quite right. See a video of the simulator in action (somewhat) below:
Rajesh Durbal of Orlando has been competing in triathlons for 3 years. (Jacob Langston/Orlando Sentinel)
A few years ago, Rajesh Durbal — a 32-year-old engineer for the City of Orlando — was looking for ways to challenge himself.
When you are a triple amputee like Durbal, the possibilities are endless.
“I was just looking for things to do,” Durbal said. “I thought about things I could do that were impossible.”
Make that seemingly impossible. The idea of competing in a triathlon crossed Durbal’s mind and intrigued him.
He competed in a sprint triathlon three years ago, then graduated to Olympic-distance races and earlier this month finished the Rohto Ironman 70.3 Florida — a half-Ironman distance. Durbal proudly said he finished that race, consisting of a 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike ride and 13.1-mile run, in six-and-a-half hours.
“I felt strong throughout,”Durbal, who was born with a congenital deformity of both of his legs and his right arm, said of the half-Ironman. “It was historical.”
Next up for Durbal is the Rotary Pineapple Man sprint triathlon (three-tenths of a mile swim, 15-mile bike ride, 3.3-mile run) on June 6 at Melbourne Beach. He plans to do another triathlon this summer in New York and won a lottery spot into the Ford Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii on Oct. 9.
Suffice it to say this isn’t a guy who allows his perceived physical limitations to keep him on the sideline. Besides triathlons, his other interests include skiing, snowboarding and handball.
“Your body and your mind can go alot further than you think they can,” Durbal said when asked whatcompeting in athletics hastaught him. “Perseverance, teamwork, that has helped in otherareas of my life. You become more self-sacrificing. It’s veryrewarding.”
GlaxoSmithKline has begun an experiment with open-source development of malaria drugs by releasing the structural and activity data for 13,500 compounds that may be good candidates for further study. The Wall Street Journal profiles Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD), a Silicon Valley company, that’s hosting much of the data about these compounds. Essentially CDD provides free access to a social network style interface and access to a large database, harnessing the power of groups to find needles in a haystack.
Serious game development company Grendel Games presented a very unique product today at Games for Health: A laparoscopy training game that has almost nothing to do with laparoscopy. To paint a clearer picture, last time we checked there weren’t any mad scientists, robots, or goop that turn into monsters in laparoscopic procedures. However, this is exactly the point. The speaker, Tim Laning, boldly proclaimed “This is not a simulator, this is a seriously entertaining game.”
