#artificial hearts

[wackiestarticles-blog]

Living Zombies: People Living Without A Heart

Living Zombies: People Living Without A Heart

610 thousand people die every year from heart disease that’s, one in every four deaths at any. Given time there’s up to four thousand people waiting for a heart transplant and 20 people die each day waiting for a heart transplant.

The problem with heart transplants is, of course, somebody has to die for you to get one, and generally people are trying to avoid that, plus they have to die in a way…

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[spontaneous-science-blog]

“Having heart” has an entirely new meaning with artificial hearts.

(Transcript under the cut)

So imagine lifting a 15-pound dumbbell. It may not seem too difficult for a short amount of time but imagine doing that for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Like any muscle it can get tired, and trust me, the heart isn’t something that you want to get tired.

Now I want you to ball your fist and that is about the size of your human heart. Now keep flexing your fist and imagine doing that forever, that’s your heart beating! Hearts are divided into four chambers and, without bogging you down in vocabulary, just know that the right side pumps blood into the lungs to receive that tasty oxygen, and the left side receives that blood to pump to the rest of the body.

Artificial hearts are the bridge to actual heart transplants; most people don’t live with them forever. However, many of the popular ones have a backpack that helps pump blood using a system of balloons to simulate the chambers in the heart. 

With this advance in technology, “having heart” has an entirely new meaning.

[max-clyde]

Foam heart could pump inside you just like the real thing

By Jacob Aron

Recent years have seen the development of soft robots that mimic snakes and tentacles. They are made from flexible plastic and powered by compressed air that makes the bots flex and move.

But the network of tubes required to deliver air limits most of these bots to simple, flat shapes, says Robert Shepherd of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. That’s why his team build their robots out of a solid, porous plastic foam, which naturally has an interconnected network of tubes to let air flow – just as our muscles are permeated by blood vessels. A solid coating of plastic seals everything inside like a skin.

Existing artificial hearts have multiple moving parts, which increases the chance of failure, but this new device is just a single piece of material.

Journal reference: Advanced Materials DOI: 10.1002/adma.201503464

THE IMPLICATIONS

Seen as a viable replacement for a heart, this model has yet to be tested in temperatures and conditions found in the human body. Since the foam heart tears when it over-inflates, more research will be done to optimize pumping speed and material design

[dr-archeville]

The Atomic Energy Commission Once Put A "Nuclear Heart" In A Cow

We've seen the many ways that the Atomic Energy Commission tried to find peaceful uses for nuclear weapons   . Here's a new crazy twist. They hired a physicist and a doctor to create a nuclear-powered heart.

The project that united Michael DeBakey, a cardiologist, and Glenn Seaborg, a physicist, wasn't as crazy as it sounds at first.  In 1965, the Atomic Energy Commission was casting around for peaceful uses for nuclear weapons. Plutonium-239 was as small an energy source as anyone could hope to find.  Glenn Seaborg, formerly of the Manhattan Project, was skilled at manipulating it.

[violencejakku]

"I give out hearts for Valentine's Day. But- those usually don't work out."

[fororchestra]

Jonathan Coulton 'Nemeses' For Orchestra

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