It’s a disconcerting thought, but somewhere out there lies a cadaver… blinking.
Beyond the fright, however, lies the hope for the suffering–scientists have found a way to make an eyelid blink using electrical charges. It’s a big development that can help people with eyelid paralysis who face the possibility of going blind.
Currently, eyelid paralysis is treated either by transferring a muscle from the leg into the face–a lengthy process that may not be suitable for elderly or sick patients–or suturing a gold weight inside the eye, which helps close the eye with the aid of gravity. But neither solution has many takers. Searching for an alternative, surgeons at the University of California at Davis experimented with artificial muscles with six donated human cadavers.
LiveScience reports:
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Newsweek health writer Tina Peng reports on the rise of “natural orifice surgery,” in which organs like the appendix, gallbladder, or even kidney are removed through the mouth, vagina, or anus. Despite its potential for inciting a gag reflex (both in readers and patients), the still-experimental procedure is potentially quicker, cheaper, less painful, less scarring, and faster healing than the laparoscopic techniques that—until you read this blog post—seemed so advanced.
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The original seven deadly sins laid out by the Catholic Church—pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath, and sloth—are the classics of immorality, the same basic flaws humans have evinced since coming out of the trees (and, perhaps, even before). But in our booming, globalized, highly networked world, there are some new and very harmful errors at our disposal. And while the Vatican doesn’t have a Facebook page yet (unlike Discover), they do recognize that modern times call for modern vices.
In an interview headlined “New Forms of Social Sin,” Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Vatican’s Apostolic Penitentiary, insisted that “new sins have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalization.” The list of “mortal sins,” as they have now been classified, came at the end of a week-long seminar in Rome that intended to deal with the dismal turnout at recent confessions. Seems logical: If a wider range of souls are in danger of eternal damnation, more will seek absolution. So, what are the new ways to fall from grace?
Girotti devotes some space to a familiar type of don’t-treat-your-brother-poorly admonitions—like social injustice that causes poverty or “the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few”—but many of the new rules concern modern science, stuff that the sixth-century pope Gregory the Great never dreamed of.
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