‘Who knows where you will put your hand when you say the Pledge of Allegiance?’

Texas man lives for five weeks with beatless heart

Doctors have implanted the world’s first beatless heart into a living human being. Craig Lewis, a 55-year-old Texas man, lived for five weeks without a pulse. He died due to underlying disease – but doctors said the heart worked perfectly.

The device is formed by intricately tying together two ventricular assist devices, replacing the entire heart. It whirls instead of pulses, spinning blood through the body in a continuous flow. ‘I listened,’ Mr Lewis’s widow Linda told NPR. ‘It was a hum, which was amazing.’

She said she knew the procedure was risky. ‘He wanted to live, and we didn’t want to lose him,’ she said. Mr Lewis got the new heart after his wife approached Dr Billy Cohn and Dr OH ‘Bud’ Frazier at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston in March.

He had been in a coma-like state. But with the new heart he was able to sit up and talk to his family before his kidney and liver eroded. The family ultimately decided to turn the heart off to allow him to die humanely. ‘You never know how much time you have but it was worth it,’ Mrs Lewis said.

The pair had already tested their invention, first on a calf named Abigail. ‘If you listened to [Abigail's] chest with a stethoscope, you wouldn’t hear a heartbeat,’ Dr Cohn told ABC News. She had no pulse, he said, and would be flat-lined on an EKG. ‘By every metric we have to analyze patients, she’s not living.’ But, he said, instead she was happy and in good health. The doctors tested the device on a further 38 calves, and were thrilled with the results.

Every animal has a pulsatile heart, Dr Cohn explained. The problem with existing artificial hearts is that to do the same job, they have to beat 100,000 times a day, 35million times a year. They wear out, he explained. With a car, you can change the oil and spark plugs – with an artificial heart, it is not so easy to keep the device going. The new device whirls instead of pulses – something that Mrs Lewis said her husband, who worked for the city of Houston maintaining its vast system of wastewater pumps, would have appreciated. The continuous flow it creates helps alleviate problems with artificial hearts such as clotting, thrombosis and bleeding. It also provides more options for those in stages of advanced heart failure.

Previously, patients with full heart failure had just two options: artificial heart, with all its limitations; or join the transplant list. Those with only the left side of the heart failing also has the help of left ventricular assist devices, such as the one keeping former Vice President Dick Cheney alive. The new device offers a third option to those with full heart failure – and, designed to accommodate both sides, can also save those with right-side failure.

Doctors hailed it was ‘the wave of the future’ and ‘the logical next step’. It does raise a few psychological questions, however. ‘Who knows where you will put your hand when you say the Pledge of Allegiance?’ wondered Dr Cohn.

Courtesy of IndiaPost -
http://www.indiapost.com/texas-man-lives-for-five-weeks-with-beatless-heart/

Portable reputations and collective accountability - The Sharing Economy

This could be your life: You wake up and whip up omelets with tomatoes fresh from your SharedEarth.com garden before dressing your toddler in Gap cargo pants you scored on ThredUp. Your Zimride whisks you to the office, where you race to your Freecycle laptop to book your anniversary getaway -- a cozy Parisian flat -- on AirBnB. To zip around to the afternoon meetings you arranged at LiquidSpaces, you unlock your VW RelayRide in the parking lot. When you realize you forgot to buy those new nightstands, you hire a runner on TaskRabbit to swing by Ikea, pick them up, and assemble them with a drill borrowed from NeighborGoods. After this exhausting day, you arrive home to a hot filet mignon dinner for two from Gobble and two copies of Fodor's Paris from BookCrossing resting on your new nightstands. Does that sound good? If so, these sites can make the dream reality -

SHAREDEARTH.COM
A free net linking landowners with gardeners and farmers.

THREDUP.COM
A marketplace for used kids clothes and toys, swapped out by the box; not sentimental, but certainly practical!

ZIMRIDE.COM
Ride sharing for coworkers and students.

FREECYCLE.ORG
If you've got stuff that you're ready to part with for free, this site will direct you to new owners -- not the landfill.

AIRBNB.COM
Arguably the hottest sharing net, this is the place to rent other people's floors, rooms, homes, yachts -- even igloos.

LIQUIDSPACE.COM
A mobile app for finding available work spaces, anywhere from a corporate campus to a spare conference room.

RELAYRIDES.COM
Insured car-sharing with neighbors.

TASKRABBIT.COM
Matches people who need tasks done with runners -- aka "rabbits" -- willing to do them, for a price.

NEIGHBORGOODS.NET
It's the backyard fence, online. Here, neighbors can share home appliances, sports equipment, tools, and more.

GOBBLE.COM
Meals prepared and delivered by neighborhood chefs.

BOOKCROSSING.COM
Readers trade books with other readers and track them as they travel the globe.

READ MORE ABOUT THE SHARING ECONOMY AT FASTCOMPANY.COM/THESHARINGECONOMY or http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/155/the-sharing-economy.html

How dirty is your Data ?

Courtesy of CrunchGear - 

Greenpeace ranks data centers, names Yahoo cleanest and Apples the dirtiest !

Greenpeace just released its latest snapshot of major corporation’s impact on the planet with IT data centers the main target. The 35 page report details just how much energy is required to run the massive centers powering the so-called cloud. It’s huge according to Greenpeace, consuming 1.5%-2% of the world’s total power consumption and growing at a rate of 12% a year. Somewhat surprisingly Greenpeace sort of applauds the virtues of living in a massive data cloud, pointing to the advent of the smart grid and increased amount telecommuting. Even digital streaming music gets props for having a smaller carbon footprint than physical media.

But this is Greenpeace and so there has to be some finger pointing and letter grading. The main purpose of this report is to reveal top company’s impact on the environment by mainly examining their dependency on fossil and nuclear fuels rather than using renewable sources. However, even Greenpeace notes that these numbers might not be exact since they were calculated without all the facts. Simply put, these ten companies didn’t divulge this info; Greenpeace pieced together their data. It’s a bit dirty itself, actually.

The main chart in the report lists ten major data hosting services. Yahoo, Google, and Amazon score top marks on the Clean Energy Index for their investment in renewable energy services such as geothermal power and wind farms. (higher number wins) The Coal Intensity column indicates the company’s dependency of coal. (low number wins)

Greenpeace applauds Yahoo’s practice of situating data centers near sources of clean energy. The report also notes that Yahoo no longer purchases carbon offsets and is striving towards energy efficiency with a self-set goal of reducing data center’s carbon intensity by at least 40% by 2014.

Apple scores at the bottom of both scales partly because of its massive new data center that will draw its power off of North Carolina’s coal-powered grid. Facebook and Google also have large data centers located in the same NC area, an area dubbed the dirty triangle by Greenpeace. Facebook is right there with Apple in the rankings, but Google’s commitment to clean energy, including a $100 million wind farm investment, helps offset the coal in Greenpeace’s eyes.

Still, it’s important to remember that Greenpeace admits it does not have all the facts here. The Transparency column grades these companies on their willingness to share energy data publicly. Understandably, most don’t want to share their energy and accompanying financial data.