When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone on June 29, 2007, he couldn’t have anticipated the tidal wave he was about to unleash on the world. To be sure, Jobs was a technological visionary. He recognized the potential power of combining into one device, an internet-connected cell phone with a mini-computer capable of hosting email, playing music, surfing the web and a crude digital camera that meant people could share selfies the instant they heard the shutter click. Perfect for the generation of instant gratification. Jobs would have been hard-pressed to anticipate the raw power of something as compact as the smartphone and its long-term impact on society and human behavior.…
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I’ll Show You How It’s Done Once you hit 84, maybe there are certain things you should leave alone.
It’s been more than ten years since I lost my mom. Frankly, I’m glad she’s gone. Now, before you accuse me of being a shallow, selfless, ingrate, let me explain. I loved my mom. I really did. But technology made the decade beginning in 2008 brutal for old people. First there were self-driving cars. Then came the Amazon Kindle, followed by the Mars rover and the Hadron Collider. Even I felt overwhelmed. No sooner did my mom learn how to retrieve re-runs of Bonanza using her TV remote, someone went and moved all the controls to her cell phone. Her cell phone! “Let me get this straight,” she said. “I’m…
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Life on the Body Farm What really happens to our bodies after death?
When Mary Scarborough wrote the lyrics to “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” in 1923, she probably didn’t have a research facility in mind. She wouldn’t find cows, chickens or pigs at “The Body Farm” – just scores of rotting human bodies, covered in maggots. The Body Farm (officially known as the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility) was the brainchild of Dr. William Bass, a Forensic Anthropologist from Kansas who helps law enforcement agencies estimate how long a person has been dead. Determining the time of death is crucial in confirming alibis and establishing timelines for violent crimes. After 11 years of watching human decomposition, Bass realized how little was…
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Ten Minutes that Could Save Your Life Coronary calcium scanning: a new way to look at your risk for heart disease
Each year, more than 800,000 Americans will suffer a heart attack. More than 150,000 will die before they experience their first symptom. Could they have been saved? A relatively new and effective way to screen people at risk for heart disease is called coronary calcium scanning. Calcium scanning has been around since the late 1990s, and started capturing people’s attention when President Bill Clinton had his. Coronary calcium screening uses specialized medical equipment to look at the structure of the heart’s coronary arteries. Much like standard x-rays, calcium scanning can be done using electron beam computed tomography (CT), multidetector CT (MDCT) or electron beam CT (EBT) scanners. The scanners are…
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Great Achievements in Medical Fraud How the foot operated breast enlarger and Recto Rotor revolutionized medicine
If you were diagnosed at the turn of the century with lumbago, puking fever, black vomit, consumption, decrepitude, falling sickness, milk leg, ship fever, softening of the brain, St. Vitas dance, trench mouth, dropsy or heaven forbid, dyscrasy then you were in big trouble. Not only did the “modern” medical community misunderstand most of these diseases, they were also clueless as to how to treat them… until medical fraud appeared. To the Rescue Facing a life of interminable pain and suffering, many sufferers of these diseases resorted to hundreds of unfounded medical treatments – sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t. Here’s a brief list of some of the more…
