Prehistory, when giant mushrooms roamed the Earth. Okay, we not roamed exactly, but towered 25 feet high and were forest like. Que hookah smoking caterpillars in 3 2 1 (grokked from Alex Renwwick)
"Researchers from North Carolina State University have confirmed that blood vessel-like structures found in an 80 million-year-old hadrosaur fossil are original to the animal, and not biofilm or other contaminants. Their findings add to the growing body of evidence that structures like blood vessels and cells can persist over millions of years, and the data not only confirm earlier reports of protein sequences in dinosaurs, they represent a significant advance in methodology." BWA?! Who needs insects in amber! (Grokked from Steven Gould)
So, some eggheads have taken an Xbox Kinect and repurposed it as an x-ray assistant. Well, actually, I did predict this (this is one of the few areas left for automation). And I'm all for ALARA (as low as reasonably possible, our guiding principle for radiation exposure to patients). But I've never used calipers on a patient. AEC (automatic exposure controls), which they then go on to talk about in this paper on their "breakthrough", have fairly well eliminated their use in all but the most outdated equipment rooms. I've also been trained to use the exposure charts to accurately estimate technique (roughly your exposure to get a good x-ray) when patients aren't "ideal" (overweight, old, young, have some other disease process going on which alters the anatomy). A few times that doesn't work well (but this wouldn't help those times as there are conditions you really can't measure or compensate for before taking an exposure), and I've seen the seasoned techs that have trained me also be fooled by a patient. While help for positioning would be fabulous, there again are times that when positioning a patient correctly, I've made minor adjustments and come out with a better exposure (human bodies are similar, but not exactly the same), and that has to do with palpating the patient (which this wouldn't be able to do), and such minor changes because of experience (more intuitive guesses) that I don't believe this is the perfect solution they're touting. But I think it would help. (Grokked from Dan)
The 10Tb hard drive. Also with some deep geekery on the engineering behind hard drives (including using a laser to melt parts of the magnetic medium and thereby free up more atoms to change their polarity and the write head passes over). (Grokked from John)
Brilliance in marketing, combining two things the American public love, TV and guns, and adds in the convenience of the home shopping network. Genius.
But they're only going to focus on the positive parts of Presidential Nominee Trump. Yea, that'll work out well. Actually, with the way our legislative districts have been gerrymandered, it probably will.
"'Even if [the President] won’t sign them into law, we will put out specific proposals and give the people a real choice,' (Speaker Paul) Ryan will say. 'And I don’t mean just undo what the president has done—as if we could time-travel back to 2009. I mean show what we would do, what our ideal policy would be—looking forward to 2017 and beyond.'" Looks at chart, let's see, that'll be the 8th year in a row he's promised to do that. Not holding my breathe.
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