Wednesday, March 30, 2011

First Shot of Mercury Orbit

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The first image of Mercury ever taken from an orbiting craft shows the large rayed crater Debussy (upper portion of photo) and a smaller crater called Matabei. The lower part of the image shows part of Mercury’s south polar region not previously seen by any craft.

NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft has returned the first image of Mercury ever taken by a probe orbiting the solar system’s innermost planet. The image, recorded early on March 29 by MESSENGER’s wide-angle camera and released later that day, shows two craters as well as a part of Mercury’s south polar terrain not previously imaged by any craft. The image resolves features as small as about 5 kilometers across.

This article interests me because its the first image of Mercury ever taken from an orbiting craft and I am living so it will be a mark in history and I cant tell my children and grandchildren that I was 14 when this happened. This article is SOOOO cool! Hundreds of years will pass and this picture will be seen by many people and I am living when this happened! :)

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Brain Implant Surgeries Dramatically Improve Symptoms of Debilitating Condition

ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2011) — Implanting electrodes into a pea-sized part of the brain can dramatically improve life for people with severe cervical dystonia -- a rare but extremely debilitating condition that causes painful, twisting neck muscle spasms -- according to the results of a pilot study led by Jill Ostrem, MD and Philip Starr, MD PhD at the University of California, San Francisco.

Today, people with cervical dystonia can be treated with medications or injections of Botox, which interrupt signals from the brain that cause these problems. However, those treatments do not provide adequate relief for all patients. Over the last decade, doctors at UCSF and elsewhere have turned to a technique called deep brain stimulation to help people with debilitating dystonia. Also used to treat Parkinson's disease and the neurological disorder essential tremor, the technique is like putting a pacemaker inside a heart patient's chest, except that deep brain stimulation requires a neurosurgeon to implant electrodes inside the brain.

I got interested with this article because I know about many types of inplants, but I never heard about a brain implant. It is very intresting that a brain implant can change the way a part of your body functions. This may facilitate cervical problems, but I am worried that it may damage or affecft some part of your brain or your body. It is a very cool invention and I hope it works.

Right now I can not connect it really to my daily life, but my mom had a cervical problem so she had to get operated, if this implant would have excisted when she got operated she may had put that implant because it may be easier. She still suffers of back hurts and maybe if she would have had the implant she wouldn't suffer anymore. This brain implant scares me a little because the brain is very delicate so it's kind of risky. I hope I will never have cervical problems, but if I do and this implant is successful I may get one if I need to.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110308172958.htm