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Best podcasts about aldini

Latest podcast episodes about aldini

Oral Arguments for the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

Aldini, AG v. Silvaco, Inc.

aldini
El búnquer
Giovanni Aldini, intentava ressuscitar els morts aplicant-los electricitat pel recte

El búnquer

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2023 51:09


Programa 4x42. Encetem un nou leitmotiv que ens continuar

El búnquer
Giovanni Aldini, intentava ressuscitar els morts aplicant-los electricitat pel recte

El búnquer

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2023 51:09


Programa 4x42. Encetem un nou leitmotiv que ens continuar

morts ressuscitar encetem aldini electricitat
Non ho sonno
Giovanni Aldini, il Frankenstein italiano

Non ho sonno

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2023 10:57


Il famoso romanzo di Mary Shelley potrebbe essere stato ispirato da uno scienziato, Giovanni Aldini, che compì i suoi macabri esperimenti verso la fine del Settecento. Ascolta l'episodio e scopri l'incredibile storia del Frankenstein italiano…

True Story
[Spécial horreur] Les origines sordides de l'histoire de Frankenstein

True Story

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 19, 2023 12:44


Bienvenue dans Les Fabuleux Destins. À l'occasion de la période d'Halloween, nous vous avons prévu une série d'épisodes spécial horreur. Aujourd'hui, nous allons vous parler d'un des premiers romans de science-fiction. Ce récit est devenu un mythe, et un des protagonistes a rejoint le panthéon des créatures les plus connues au monde. Son nom : Frankenstein. De sa création à son ampleur dans l'imaginaire collectif, découvrez son fabuleux destin. La créature du Dr. Frankenstein Le 17 janvier 1803, dans une salle du collège royal de chirurgie à Londres, le physicien Giovanni Aldini prépare son expérience. Célèbre pour ses démonstrations électriques sur des animaux décédés, Aldini cherche à franchir une nouvelle étape dans ses recherches. Son objectif est clair : redonner vie à un être humain grâce à l'électricité. Il explique à son audience, chaque étape de son expérience. Les scientifiques retiennent leur souffle, le moment tant attendu est arrivé : Aldini actionne la machine électrique...  Pour découvrir d'autres récits passionnants, cliquez ci-dessous : Le mystère du village de Montchavin, l'énigme médicale Pierre Goldman, le révolutionnaire de gauche le plus controversé de son époque Michael Jordan, l'icône du basketball au destin hors normes Un podcast Bababam Originals Ecriture : Clémence Setti Production : Bababam (montage Gilles Bawulak, Antoine Berry Roger) Voix : Andréa Brusque Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Midnight Facts for Insomniacs
Real-Life Mad Scientists

Midnight Facts for Insomniacs

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2022 55:23


Did you know that the mad doctor from Mary Shelly's Frankenstein was based on a real-life scientist named Giovanni Aldini? And even Aldini's corpse-reanimating experiments were mild compared to some of the bizarre and horrifying travesties that have been committed in the name of scientific progress. Join the boys as they explore two-headed dogs, telekinetic pong-playing monkeys, and the history of unhinged science. ~ Support the show by becoming a Midnight Minion, Menace, or Maniac, and unlock exclusive bonus content over at PATREON ~ Join the MFFI community and vote on episode topics via DISCORD ~ In this episode:   Vladimir Demikhov Head Transplants Shavka and Brodyaga Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado Shiro Ishii Unit 731 Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night (Disease Fleas) Giovanni Aldini, the OG Frankenstein Galvanism The Postmortem Electrocution of George Forster Andrew Ure, Frankenstein Part 2 The Postmortem Electrocution of Matthew Clydesdale Elon Musk and Neuralink Pager the Mind-Pong Monkey Cryonics Alcor, the Life-Extension Foundation M.E.A.R.T, the Semi-Living Artist Join the Midnight Masses! Become an Insomniac by dropping a review, adding us on social media, and contacting us with episode ideas.  And we now have Midnight Merch! Show your Insomniac pride and pick up a tee shirt or coffee mug to spread the word!  Midnight Merch  ~ Leave an Audio Message! ~  Instagram ~ Podcast Website ~ Episode Transcript        

Skill On Air
Ep. 34 - Il sistema integrato di compliance. Con l'avv. Stefano Aldini (Of Counsel di SZA Studio legale)

Skill On Air

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2022 5:31


Skill on Air presentaSkill Pro Il sistema integrato di compliance Con l'avv. Stefano Aldini (Of Counsel di SZA Studio legale)

Midnight Train Podcast
Mary Shelley, The Birth of Frankenstein

Midnight Train Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 14, 2021 83:38


We've all heard the story of "Frankenstein's Monster." A bat shit crazy scientist wants to reanimate dead tissue and basically create a fucking zombie baby… BECAUSE THAT'S HOW YOU GET FUCKING ZOMBIES! Anyway, Dr. Frankenstein and his trusty assistant, Igor, set off to bring a bunch of random, dead body parts together, throw some lightning on the bugger and bring this new, puzzle piece of a quasi-human back to "life." At first, the reanimated corpse seems somewhat ordinary, but then flips his shit and starts terrorizing and doing what I can only imagine REANIMATED ZOMBIES FUCKING DO!    Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, in 1797. She was the second child of the feminist philosopher, educator, and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the first child of the philosopher, novelist, and journalist William Godwin.  So, she was brought into this world by some smart fucking people. Mary's mother died of puerperal fever shortly after Mary was born. Puerperal fever is an infectious, sometimes fatal, disease of childbirth; until the mid-19th century, this dreaded, then-mysterious illness could sweep through a hospital maternity ward and kill most new mothers. Today strict aseptic hospital techniques have made the condition uncommon in most parts of the world, except in unusual circumstances such as illegally induced abortion. Her father, William, was left to bring up Mary and her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, Mary's mother's child by the American speculator Gilbert Imlay. A year after her mother's death, Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which he intended as a sincere and compassionate tribute. However, the Memoirs revealed Mary's mother's affairs and her illegitimate child. In that period, they were seen as shocking. Mary read these memoirs and her mother's books and was brought up to cherish her mother's memory. Mary's earliest years were happy, judging from the letters of William's housekeeper and nurse, Louisa Jones. But Godwin was often deeply in debt; feeling that he could not raise Mary and Fanny himself, he looked for a second wife. In December 1801, he married Mary Jane Clairmont, a well-educated woman with two young children—Charles and Claire SO MANY MARY'S! Sorry folks. Most of her father's friends disliked his new wife, describing her as a straight fucking bitch. Ok, not really, but they didn't like her. However, William was devoted to her, and the marriage worked. Mary, however, came to hate that bitch. William's 19th-century biographer Charles Kegan Paul later suggested that Mrs. Godwin had favored her own children over Williams. So, how awesome is it that he had a biographer? That's so badass.  Together, Mary's father and his new bride started a publishing firm called M. J. Godwin, which sold children's books and stationery, maps, and games. However, the business wasn't making any loot, and her father was forced to borrow butt loads of money to keep it going. He kept borrowing money to pay off earlier loans, just adding to his problems. By 1809, William's business was close to closing up shop, and he was "near to despair." Mary's father was saved from debtor's prison by devotees such as Francis Place, who lent him additional money. So, debtor's prison is pretty much EXACTLY what it sounds like. If you couldn't pay your debts, they threw your ass in jail. Unlike today where they just FUCK UP YOUR CREDIT! THANKS, COLUMBIA HOUSE!!!  Though Mary received little education, her father tutored her in many subjects. He often took the children on educational trips. They had access to his library and the many intelligent mofos who visited him, including the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the former vice-president of the United States Aaron Burr. You know, that dude that shot and killed his POLITICAL opponent, Alexander Hamilton, in a fucking duel! Ah… I was born in the wrong century.   Mary's father admitted he was not educating the children according to Mary's mother's philosophy as outlined in works such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. However, Mary still received an unusual and advanced education for a girl of the time. She had a governess, a daily tutor, and read many of her father's children's Roman and Greek history books. For six months in 1811, she also attended a boarding school in Ramsgate, England. Her father described her at age 15 as "singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible." My father didn't know how to spell my name until I was twelve.  In June of 1812, Mary's father sent her to stay with the family of the radical William Baxter, near Dundee, Scotland. In a letter to Baxter, he wrote, "I am anxious that she should be brought up ... like a philosopher, even like a cynic." Scholars have speculated that she may have been sent away for her health, remove her from the seamy side of the business, or introduce her to radical politics. However, Mary loved the spacious surroundings of Baxter's house and with his four daughters, and she returned north in the summer of 1813 to hang out for 10 months. In the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, she recalled: "I wrote then—but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered."   Mary Godwin may have first met the radical poet-philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley in between her two stays in Scotland. When she returned home for a second time on 30 March 1814, Percy Shelley became estranged from his wife and regularly visited Mary's father, William Godwin, whom he had agreed to bail out of debt. Percy Shelley's radicalism, particularly his economic views, alienated him from his wealthy aristocratic family. They wanted him to be a high, upstanding snoot and follow traditional models of the landed aristocracy. He tried to donate large amounts of the family's money to projects meant to help the poor and disadvantaged. Percy Shelley, therefore, had a problem gaining access to capital until he inherited his estate because his family did not want him wasting it on projects of "political justice." After several months of promises, Shelley announced that he could not or would not pay off all of Godwin's debts. Godwin was angry and felt betrayed and whooped his fuckin ass! Yeah! Ok, not really. He was just super pissed. Mary and Percy began hookin' up on the down-low at her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, and they fell in love—she was 16, and he was 21. Creepy and super fucking gross.   On 26 June 1814, Shelley and Godwin declared their love for one another as Shelley announced he could not hide his "ardent passion,." This led her in a "sublime and rapturous moment" to say she felt the same way; on either that day or the next, Godwin lost her virginity to Shelley, which tradition claims happened in the churchyard. So, the grown-ass 21-year-old man statutorily raped the 16-year-old daughter of the man he idolized and dicked over. In a graveyard. My god, how things have changed...GROSS! Godwin described herself as attracted to Shelley's "wild, intellectual, unearthly looks." Smart but ugly. Got it. To Mary's dismay, her father disapproved and tried to thwart the relationship and salvage his daughter's "spotless fame." No! You don't say! Dad wasn't into his TEENAGE DAUGHTER BANGING A MAN IN THE GRAVEYARD!?! Mary's father learned of Shelley's inability to pay off the father's debts at about the same time. Oof. He found out after he diddled her. Mary, who later wrote of "my excessive and romantic attachment to my father," was confused. Um… what? She saw Percy Shelley as an embodiment of her parents' liberal and reformist ideas of the 1790s, particularly Godwin's view that marriage was a repressive monopoly, which he had argued in his 1793 edition of Political Justice but later retracted. On 28 July 1814, the couple eloped and secretly left for France, taking Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with them.  After convincing Mary's mother, who took off after them to Calais, that they did not wish to return, the trio traveled to Paris, and then, by donkey, mule, carriage, and foot, through France, recently ravaged by war, all the way to Switzerland. "It was acting in a novel, being an incarnate romance," Mary Shelley recalled in 1826. Godwin wrote about France in 1814: "The distress of the inhabitants, whose houses had been burned, their cattle killed and all their wealth destroyed, has given a sting to my detestation of war...". As they traveled, Mary and Percy read works by Mary Wollstonecraft and others, kept a joint journal, and continued their own writing. Finally, at Lucerne, lack of money forced the three to turn back. Instead, they traveled down the Rhine and by land to the Dutch port of Maassluis, arriving at Gravesend, Kent, on 13 September 1814. The situation awaiting Mary Godwin in England was packed with bullshit, some of which she had not expected. Either before or during their journey, she had become pregnant. She and Percy now found themselves penniless, and, to Mary's stupid ass surprise, her father refused to have anything to do with her. The couple moved with Claire into lodgings at Somers Town, and later, Nelson Square. They kept doing their thing, reading, and writing and entertained Percy Shelley's friends. Percy Shelley would often leave home for short periods to dodge bill collectors, and the couple's heartbroken letters would reveal their pain while he was away. Pregnant and often sick, Mary Godwin had to hear of Percy's joy at the birth of his son by Harriet Shelley in late 1814 due to his constant escapades with Claire Clairmont. Supposedly, Shelley and Clairmont were almost certainly lovers, which caused Mary to be rightfully jealous. And yes, Claire was Mary's cousin. Percy was a friggin' creep. Percy pissed off Mary when he suggested that they both take the plunge into a stream naked during a walk in the French countryside. This offended her due to her principles, and she was like, "Oh, hell nah, sahn!" and started taking off her earrings in a rage. Or something like that. She was partly consoled by the visits of Hogg, whom she disliked at first but soon considered a close friend. Percy Shelley seems to have wanted Mary and Hogg to become lovers; Mary did not dismiss the idea since she believed in free love in principle. She was a hippie before being a hippie was cool. Percy probably just wanted to not feel guilty for hooking up with her cousin. Creep. In reality, however, she loved only Percy and seemed to have gone no further than flirting with Hogg. On 22 February 1815, she gave birth to a two-months premature baby girl, who was not expected to survive. On 6 March, she wrote to Hogg: "My dearest Hogg, my baby is dead—will you come to see me as soon as you can. I wish to see you—It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. It was dead then, but we did not find that out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions—Will you come—you are so calm a creature & Shelley (Percy) is afraid of a fever from the milk—for I am no longer a mother now." The loss of her child brought about acute depression in Mary. She was haunted by visions of the baby, but she conceived again and had recovered by the summer. With a revival in Percy's finances after the death of his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, the couple holidayed in Torquay and then rented a two-story cottage at Bishopsgate, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. Unfortunately, little is known about this period in Mary Godwin's life since her journal from May 1815 to July 1816 was lost. At Bishopsgate, Percy wrote his poem Alastor or The Spirit of Solitude; and on 24 January 1816, Mary gave birth to a second child, William, named after her father and soon nicknamed "Willmouse." In her novel The Last Man, she later imagined Windsor as a Garden of Eden. In May 1816, Mary, Percy, and their son traveled to Geneva with Claire Clairmont. They planned to spend the summer with the poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Claire had left her pregnant. Claire sounds like a bit of a trollop. No judging, just making an observation. The party arrived in Geneva on 14 May 1816, where Mary called herself "Mrs Shelley." Byron joined them on 25 May with his young physician, John William Polidori, and rented the Villa Diodati, close to Lake Geneva at the village of Cologny; Percy rented a smaller building called Maison Chapuis on the waterfront nearby. They spent their time writing, boating on the lake, and talking late into the night. "It proved a wet, ungenial summer," Mary Shelley remembered in 1831, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house." Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company amused themselves with German ghost stories called Fantasmagoriana, which prompted Byron to propose that they "each write a ghost story." Unable to think up an account, young Mary became flustered: "Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative." Finally, one mid-June evening, the discussions turned to the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated," Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things." Galvanism is a term invented by the late 18th-century physicist and chemist Alessandro Volta to refer to the generation of electric current by chemical action. The word also came to refer to the discoveries of its namesake, Luigi Galvani, specifically the generation of electric current within biological organisms and the contraction/convulsion of natural muscle tissue upon contact with electric current. While Volta theorized and later demonstrated the phenomenon of his "Galvanism" to be replicable with otherwise inert materials, Galvani thought his discovery to confirm the existence of "animal electricity," a vital force that gave life to organic matter. We'll talk a little more about Galvani and a murderer named George Foster toward the end of the episode. It was after midnight before they retired, and she was unable to sleep, mainly because she became overwhelmed by her imagination as she kept thinking about the grim terrors of her "waking dream," her ghost story: "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." She began writing what she assumed would be a short, profound story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she turned her little idea into her first novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. She later described that time in Switzerland as "when I first stepped out from childhood into life." The story of the writing of Frankenstein has been fictionalized repeatedly, and it helped form the basis for several films. Here's a cool little side note: In September 2011, the astronomer Donald Olson, after a visit to the Lake Geneva villa the previous year and inspecting data about the motion of the moon and stars, concluded that her waking dream took place "between 2 am and 3 am" 16 June 1816, several days after the initial idea by Lord Byron that they each write their ghost stories. Shelley and her husband collaborated on the story, but the extent of Percy's contribution to the novel is unknown and has been argued over by readers and critics forever. There are differences in the 1818, 1823, and 1831 versions. Mary Shelley wrote, "I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world." She wrote that the preface to the first edition was her husband's work "as far as I can recollect." James Rieger concluded Percy's "assistance at every point in the book's manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator." At the same time, Anne K. Mellor later argued Percy only "made many technical corrections and several times clarified the narrative and thematic continuity of the text." Charles E. Robinson, the editor of a facsimile edition of the Frankenstein manuscripts, concluded that Percy's contributions to the book "were no more than what most publishers' editors have provided new (or old) authors or, in fact, what colleagues have provided to each other after reading each other's works in progress." So, eat one, Percy! Just kidding. In 1840 and 1842, Mary and her son traveled together all over the continent. Mary recorded these trips in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843. In 1844, Sir Timothy Shelley finally died at the age of ninety, "falling from the stalk like an overblown flower," Mary put it. For the first time in her life, she and her son were financially independent, though the remaining estate wasn't worth as much as they had thought. In the mid-1840s, Mary Shelley found herself in the crosshairs of three separate blackmailing sons of bitches. First, in 1845, an Italian political exile called Gatteschi, whom she had met in Paris, threatened to publish letters she had sent him. Scandalous! However, a friend of her son's bribed a police chief into seizing Gatteschi's papers, including the letters, which were then destroyed. Vaffanculo, Gatteschi! Shortly afterward, Mary Shelley bought some letters written by herself and Percy Shelley from a man calling himself G. Byron and posing as the illegitimate son of the late Lord Byron. Also, in 1845, Percy Shelley's cousin Thomas Medwin approached her, claiming to have written a damaging biography of Percy Shelley. He said he would suppress it in return for £250, but Mary told him to eat a big ole bag of dicks and jog on! In 1848, Percy Florence married Jane Gibson St John. The marriage proved a happy one, and Mary liked Jane. Mary lived with her son and daughter-in-law at Field Place, Sussex, the Shelleys' ancestral home, and at Chester Square, London, and vacationed with them, as well. Mary's last years were blighted by illness. From 1839, she suffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis in parts of her body, which sometimes prevented her from reading and writing, obviously two of her favorite things. Then, on 1 February 1851, at Chester Square, Mary Shelly died at fifty-three from what her doctor suspected was a brain tumor. According to Jane Shelley, Mary had asked to be buried with her mother and father. Still, looking at the graveyard at St Pancras and calling it "dreadful," Percy and Jane chose to bury her instead at St Peter's Church in Bournemouth, near their new home at Boscombe. On the first anniversary of Mary's death, the Shelleys opened her box-desk. Inside they found locks of her dead children's hair, a notebook she had shared with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a copy of his poem Adonaïs with one page folded round a silk parcel containing some of his ashes and the remains of his heart. Romantic or disturbing? Maybe a bit of both. Mary Shelley remained a stout political radical throughout her life. Mary's works often suggested that cooperation and sympathy, mainly as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view directly challenged the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and Enlightenment political theories. She wrote seven novels / Two travel narrations / Twenty three short stories / Three books of children's literature, and many articles. Mary Shelley left her mark on the literary world, and her name will be forever etched in the catacombs of horror for generations to come. When it comes to reanimation, there's someone else we need to talk about. George Forster (or Foster) was found guilty of murdering his wife and child by drowning them in Paddington Canal, London. He was hanged at Newgate on 18 January 1803, after which his body was taken to a nearby house where it was used in an experiment by Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini. At his trial, the events were reconstructed. Forster's mother-in-law recounted that her daughter and grandchild had left her house to see Forster at 4 pm on Saturday, 4 December 1802. In whose house Forster lodged, Joseph Bradfield reported that they had stayed together that night and gone out at 10 am on Sunday morning. He also stated that Forster and his wife had not been on good terms because she wished to live with him. On Sunday, various witnesses saw Forster with his wife and child in public houses near Paddington Canal. The body of his child was found on Monday morning; after the canal was dragged for three days, his wife's body was also found. Forster claimed that upon leaving The Mitre, he set out alone for Barnet to see his other two children in the workhouse there, though he was forced to turn back at Whetstone due to the failing light. This was contradicted by a waiter at The Mitre who said the three left the inn together. Skepticism was also expressed that he could have walked to Whetstone when he claimed. Nevertheless, the jury found him guilty. He was sentenced to death and also to be dissected after that. This sentence was designed to provide medicine with corpses on which to experiment and ensure that the condemned could not rise on Judgement Day, their bodies having been cut into pieces and selectively discarded. Forster was hanged on 18 January, shortly before he made a full confession. He said he had come to hate his wife and had twice before taken his wife to the canal, but his nerve had both times failed him. A recent BBC Knowledge documentary (Real Horror: Frankenstein) questions the fairness of the trial. It notes that friends of George Forster's wife later claimed that she was highly suicidal and had often talked about killing herself and her daughter. According to this documentary, Forster attempted suicide by stabbing himself with a crudely fashioned knife. This was to avoid awakening during the dissection of his body, should he not have died when hanged. This was a real possibility owing to the crude methods of execution at the time. The same reference suggests that his 'confession' was obtained under duress. In fact, it alleges that Pass, a Beadle or an official of a church or synagogue on Aldini's payroll, fast-tracked the whole trial and legal procedure to obtain the freshest corpse possible for his benefactor. After the execution, Forster's body was given to Giovanni Aldini for experimentation. Aldini was the nephew of fellow scientist Luigi Galvani and an enthusiastic proponent of his uncle's method of stimulating muscles with electric current, known as Galvanism. The experiment he performed on Forster's body demonstrated this technique. The Newgate Calendar (a record of executions at Newgate) reports that "On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion."  Several people present believed that Forster was being brought back to life (The Newgate Calendar reports that even if this had been so, he would have been re-executed since his sentence was to "hang until he be dead"). One man, Mr. Pass, the beadle of the Surgeons' Company, was so shocked that he died shortly after leaving. The hanged man was undoubtedly dead since his blood had been drained and his spinal cord severed after the execution.   Top Ten Frankenstein Movies https://screenrant.com/best-frankenstein-movies-ranked-imdb/

Choses à Savoir HISTOIRE
A quoi servit le “galvanisme” ?

Choses à Savoir HISTOIRE

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 25, 2021 2:13


Aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, les travaux de Luigi Galvani et Alessandro Volta sur l'électricité permettent d'en mieux comprendre les mécanismes. Ils débouchent également sur le "galvanisme", dont l'un des buts n'était rien de moins que de ressusciter des cadavres !Des expériences sur l'électricitéComme tous les naturalistes de cette fin du XVIIIe siècle, l'anatomiste Luigi Galvani a l'habitude de disséquer des grenouilles pour mieux comprendre certains mécanismes corporels.Au cours de l'une de ces expériences, il place la patte du batracien, qui est reliée à un crochet de cuivre, sur un objet métallique. En touchant la patte de la grenouille, il s'aperçoit qu'elle est agitée de vives contractions.Il est persuadé qu'il vient de démontrer, par hasard, l'existence de l'électricité animale. Mais, pour le physicien Alessandro Volta, cette électricité ne provient pas de la grenouille.Elle est produite par le contact entre deux métaux, le cuivre du crochet et le fer de l'objet sur lequel la grenouille a été déposée. En 1800, pour prouver que la source de l'électricité est bien métallique, il confectionne une pile. Autrement dit des disques de métal empilés les uns sur les autres, qui produisent bien de l'électricité.Une tentative pour ressusciter les mortsCes expériences sur l'électricité font germer une idée, a priori saugrenue, dans l'esprit de certains scientifiques. Si une décharge électrique peut provoquer des contractions musculaires, ne peut-on utiliser cette technique pour ranimer un mort ?Aussitôt dit aussitôt fait. Ainsi, un scientifique italien, Giovanni Aldini obtient l'autorisation de faire une expérience sur des condamnés à la décapitation. On pensait en effet que, pour être efficace, la méthode du "galvanisme" devait s'appliquer sur des cadavres encore chauds.Aldini place alors deux fils métalliques dans les oreilles du supplicié, reliés à une pile. La tête s'anime alors de contractions qui s'emparent des muscles du visage, formant de sinistres grimaces.La même expérience, mais sur un cadavre de pendu, entraîne des contractions dans tout le corps. Le galvanisme suscite l'engouement du public, mais, contrairement aux attentes, il ne ramène pas les cadavres à la vie. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Midnight Train Podcast
REANIMATION - IT'S ALIVE!

Midnight Train Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 9, 2020 113:48


Season 4Ep 18Reanimation Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?- Dr. Victor Frankenstein     From mummies to zombies to the creature himself, Frankenstein's monster, the tales of reanimating the dead span thousands of years.  For many people Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is or was their introduction to the subject of reanimation. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a cautionary tale about the abuses of science — in particular, the potential pitfalls of screwing around with corpses and lightning. If you're not familiar with the story of Frankenstein then see yourself the hell out right now. Are they gone? Good fuck em. If there are any untrustworthy folks left that are still here even though they don't know the story, here's a recap. The actual title, which most of you probably don't know, is "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus''. Shelly began writing the story when she was 18. The first edition was published anonymously in 1818 when she was 20. It began as a short story that unfolded into a novel. Although later versions of the tale popularly have the creature (he is referred to as the Creature, and as we all should know, the creature isn't Frankenstein) he’s essentially sewn together from various bodies parts and reanimated during a science experiment using lightning, this is not how the creature was originally written and conceived. In the original novel the creature was also not a big dumb lumbering idiot as he is usually portrayed. In Shelley's original work, Victor Frankenstein discovers a previously unknown but elemental principle of life, and that insight allows him to develop a method to imbue vitality into inanimate matter, though the exact nature of the process is left largely ambiguous. After a great deal of hesitation in exercising this power, Frankenstein (that’s the doctor for you slower passengers) spends two years painstakingly constructing the creature's proportionally large body (one anatomical feature at a time, from raw materials supplied by "the dissecting room and the slaughter-house"), which he then brings to life using his unspecified process. All of that aside, and all the differences and nuances aside, the idea is the same, the goal of reanimation of dead or inanimate things. While Shelly may have written an early example of the concept, process, and consequences of reanimation, she was not the first to think of this concept. There were scientists and thinkers earlier than her dreaming up ideas of reanimating animals and even humans. Science behind reanimation Okay Jeff, bear with us here, it's gonna get a little nerdy from time to time. You've all heard the old saying, there's nothing sure in life but death and taxes, but what if death wasn’t such a sure thing? Scientists have been attempting to restore life to the dead for hundreds of years. People have used water, electricity, chemicals and other things to try and reanimate dead animals and people.        A basic example of reanimation using water could be that of the ever popular sea monkey! Sea monkeys are actually brine shrimp. Their dried eggs, sold in pet stores, contain embryos that will revive when put in salt water, hatch, swim about, grow to be a quarter-inch long and make good fish food. Another example is the tardigrade. It is so small -- the size of a sand grain -- that most people are unaware of its existence, yet several times a year it performs one of the most astonishing feats known to science. When there has been no rain for a long time and its habitat dries out, the little animal's body loses its own water, shriveling and curling into a wrinkled kernel. Without water, the animal plunges into a profound state of suspended animation. The creature stops eating or crawling. It does not breathe. Its internal organs shut down, no longer digesting food or sending signals through its nervous system. Even metabolic processes inside cells shut down -- the usually busy genes going dormant and the enzymes that normally carry out thousands of biochemical reactions every second cease to function. Its body dries to a crisp. So profound is the loss of activity that, according to a common textbook definition of life, which says metabolism is a hallmark of life, the little animal is… dead. And yet, after days or even months, if moisture returns, the animal soaks up the water and resumes all normal activities. The creature is informally called a water bear or, more formally, a tardigrade, which means "slow walker." On the evolutionary tree, it lies between worms and insects, one of the many small but remarkable life forms on Earth known almost solely to those who study biology. So there is one issue with these guys and others like them. There's an argument on whether they are truly being reanimated or if there is just some weird sort of hibernation going on. The chief hallmark of life, textbooks often say, is metabolism, the sum of all genetic and enzymatic processes that go on inside cells and in interactions among cells. If one accepts that definition, then an organism in suspended animation is not alive. That conclusion, however, raises a semantic problem because if it is not alive, it is dead. If so and if it revives, then life has been created, a phenomenon that would violate a cardinal principle of biology -- that complex life forms cannot be spontaneously generated but only come from living parents. To avoid this logical trap, the few biologists who have studied the phenomenon generally refer to it as cryptobiosis, meaning "hidden life." So strong, however, was the metabolism-centered view of life that until recently most biologists suspected that cryptobiotic organisms were not totally inactive. They argued that enough water remained inside the animals to permit metabolism to continue at a rate too slow to be detected. After all, they knew some higher animals can reduce their metabolic rates by hibernating in winter, and others enter a state of even lower metabolism, called estivation, that allows them to endure dry, summer heat. Cryptobiotic animals, many researchers suspected, were simply extending a familiar capacity to a previously unknown extreme. Recently, however, scientists have established that, although even the driest organisms retain a few water molecules, they constitute only a small fraction of the minimum needed for metabolism. For example, most of the workhorse molecules of metabolism, proteins, must be awakened in water to assume the shape essential to their functions as enzymes. Tardigrades and nematodes, like most animals, are normally 80 percent to 90 percent water. In the cryptobiotic state, the organisms contain only about 3 percent to 5 percent water. Under laboratory conditions, the water content of some has been reduced to 0.05 percent, and they were revived. Most authorities now agree that no metabolism occurs during cryptobiosis. The term no longer means "a hidden form of ordinary life" but rather "a state of being in which the active processes of life are temporarily suspended." In the cryptobiotic state, all that remains of a living organism is its structural integrity. A dry animal may be shrunken, but it maintains all connections that keep together the structures of its cells. In other words, biologists now hold, molecules hooked together in a certain way will metabolize if given water. Life is not the result of some mystical animating force that inhabits proteins or the nucleic acids that make up DNA. It is the structural arrangement of certain molecules that will behave chemically in specific ways in the presence of water. So what does that all mean? Fuck if we know. But essentially it seems that in these tiny organisms, if the law of the land is followed to a T, then it seems they are dead, dried, shriveled up things with no metabolisms, thus no life, that can actually be reanimated with water. Interesting indeed. There's a ton more cool info on this in an article from the Washington Post titled "Just Add Water" from 1996 that this information was taken from. If you're really into the science behind this stuff we definitely recommend this article!  Electricity Now if one were to think that Frankenstein, despite being an early foray into the world of reanimation, was possibly influenced by real world attempts at the same result, one would be correct. In the late 18th century many doctors and scientists began toying with dead things and electricity. In 1780, Italian anatomy professor Luigi Galvani discovered that he could make the muscles of a dead frog twitch and jerk with sparks of electricity. Others quickly began to experiment by applying electricity to other animals that quickly grew morbid. Galvani’s nephew, physicist Giovanni Aldini, obtained the body of an ox, proceeding to cut off the head and use electricity to twist its tongue. He sent such high levels of voltage through the diaphragm of the ox that it resulted in “a very strong action on the rectum, which even produced an expulsion of the feces,” Aldini wrote.     People outside of science were also fascinated by electricity. They would attend shows where bullheads and pigs were electrified, and watch public dissections at research institutions such as the Company of Surgeons in England, which later became the Royal College of Surgeons. When scientists tired of testing animals, they turned to corpses, particularly corpses of murderers. In 1751, England passed the Murder Act, which allowed the bodies of executed murderers to be used for experimentation. “The reasons the Murder Act came about were twofold: there weren’t enough bodies for anatomists, and it was seen as a further punishment for the murderer,” says Juliet Burba,  chief curator of an exhibit called “Mary and Her Monster” at the Bakken Museum in Minnesota. “It was considered additional punishment to have your body dissected.” On November 4, 1818, Scottish chemist Andrew Ure stood next to the lifeless corpse of an executed murderer, the man hanging by his neck at the gallows only minutes before. He was performing an anatomical research demonstration for a theater filled with curious students, anatomists, and doctors at the University of Glasgow. But this was no ordinary cadaver dissection. Ure held two metallic rods charged by a 270-plate voltaic battery to various nerves and watched in delight as the body convulsed, writhed, and shuddered in a grotesque dance of death. “When the one rod was applied to the slight incision in the tip of the forefinger,” Ure later described to the Glasgow Literary Society, “the fist being previously clenched, that finger extended instantly; and from the convulsive agitation of the arm, he seemed to point to the different spectators, some of whom thought he had come to life.” Ure is one of many scientists during the late 18th and 19th centuries who conducted crude experiments with galvanism—the stimulation of muscles with pulses of electrical current. The bright sparks and loud explosions made for stunning effects that lured in both scientists and artists, with this era of reanimation serving as inspiration for Mary Shelley’s literary masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. While most scientists were using galvanism to search for clues about life, Ure wanted to see if it could actually bring someone back from the dead. “This was a time when people were trying to understand the origin of life, when religion was losing some of its hold,” says Burba. “There was a lot of interest in the question: What is the essence that animates life? Could it be electricity?” Lying on Ure’s table was the muscular, athletic corpse of 35-year-old coal miner, Matthew Clydesdale. In August 1818, Clydesdale drunkenly murdered an 80-year-old miner with a coal pick and was sentenced to be hanged at the gallows. His body remained suspended and limp for nearly an hour, while a thief who had been executed next to Clydesdale at the same time convulsed violently for several moments after death. The blood was drained from the body for half an hour before the experiments began.Andrew Ure, who had little to no known experience with electricity, was a mere assistant to James Jeffray, an anatomy professor at the University of Glasgow. He had studied medicine at Glasgow University and served briefly as an army surgeon, but was otherwise known for teaching chemistry. “Not much is known about Ure, but he was sort of a minor figure in the history of science,” says Alex Boese, author of Elephants on Acid: And Other Bizarre Experiments. One of Ure’s main accomplishments was this single bizarre galvanic experiment, he says.   Others, such as Aldini, conducted similar experiments, but scholars write that Ure was convinced that electricity could restore life back into the dead. “While Aldini contented himself with the role of spasmodic puppeteer, Ure’s ambitions were well nigh Frankesteinian,” wrote Ulf Houe in Studies in Romanticism. Ure charged the battery with dilute nitric and sulphuric acids five minutes before the police delivered the body to the University of Glasgow’s anatomical theater. Incisions were made at the neck, hip, and heels, exposing different nerves that were jolted with the metallic rods. When Ure sent charges through Clydesdale’s diaphragm and saw his chest heave and fall, he wrote that “the success of it was truly wonderful.”Ure’s descriptions of the experiment are vivid. He poetically noted how the convulsive movements resembled “a violent shuddering from cold” and how the fingers “moved nimbly, like those of a violin performer.” Other passages, like this one about stimulating muscles in Clydesdale’s forehead and brow, are more macabre: “Every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles, united their hideous expression in the murderer’s face, surpassing far the wildest representations of a Fuseli or a Kean,” wrote Ure, comparing the result to the visage of tragic actor, Edmund Kean, and the fantastical works of romantic painter Henry Fuseli. He continued: “At this period several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted.” The whole experiment lasted about an hour. “Both Jeffray and Ure were quite deliberately intent on the restoration of life,” wrote F.L.M. Pattinson in the Scottish Medical Journal. But the reasons for the lack of success were thought to have little to do with the method: Ure concluded that if death was not caused by bodily injury there was a probability that life could have been restored. But, if the experiment succeeded it wouldn’t have been celebrated since he would be reviving a murderer, he wrote. Ure is just one of many scientists and doctors at this time experimenting with reanimation. We’ll discuss some others in a bit. In modern times a case can be made that we reanimate people all the time. Without getting into semantics of clinical death versus biological death versus this versus that blah blah, we can look to the use of a defibrillator as a basic use of electricity to revive a person who is technically dead. Would that not be reanimation? There are arguments being made and in  discussions about reanimation it seems like this usually comes up. Then there is a giant sciencey biology fight and much ink is spilled and pocket protectors destroyed and still no consensus.. so we'll spare you the agony of those arguments.  Electricity seems to be the most popular medium in historical attempts at resurrection, mostly because of its effects on muscles and the ability to move body parts after death. These days we know that this is simply a reflex action due to the stimulation of the muscles and nerves and has nothing to really do with reanimation so to speak. CHEMICAL So what about using chemicals? Can chemicals reanimate cells and bring the dead back to life? Well according to many zombie movies yes, but according to a Yale university study...also yes. Yale neuroscientist Nenad Sestan revealed that his team has successfully reanimated the brains of dead pigs recovered from a slaughterhouse. By pumping them with artificial blood using a system called BrainEx, they were able to bring them back to “life” for up to 36 hours. Also you heard that right… The call it fucking BrainEx. If that doesn't Scream B horror movie..I don't know what does. Admittedly, the pigs’ brains did not regain consciousness, but Sestan acknowledged that restoring awareness is a possibility. Crucially, he also disclosed that the technique could work on primate brains (which includes humans), and that the brains could be kept alive indefinitely. This is interesting because it raises some interesting questions. If consciousness could be restored to the brain if a human… Would it be worth it. What would it be like to just be a brain?  Even if your conscious brain were kept alive after your body had died, you would have to spend the foreseeable future as a disembodied “brain in a bucket”, locked away inside your own mind without access to the senses that allow us to experience and interact with the world and the inputs that our brains so crave. The knowledge and technology needed to implant your brain into a new body may be decades, if not centuries, away. So in the best case scenario, you would be spending your life with only your own thoughts for company. Some have argued that even with a fully functional body, immortality would be tedious. With absolutely no contact with external reality, it might just be a living hell.  According to some, it is impossible for a disembodied brain to house anything like a normal human mind. Antonio Damasio, a philosopher and neuroscientist, has pointed out that in ordinary humans, brain and body are in constant interaction with each other. Every muscle, nerve, joint and organ is connected to the brain – and vast numbers of chemical and electrical signals go back and forth between them each and every second. Without this constant “feedback loop” between brain and body, Damasio argues, ordinary experiences and thought are simply not possible. So what would it be like to be a disembodied brain? The truth is, nobody knows. But it is probable it would be worse than being simply tedious – it would likely be deeply disturbing. Experts have already warned that a man reportedly due to have the world’s first head transplant could suffer a terrible fate. They say his brain will be overwhelmed by the unfamiliar chemical and electrical signals sent to it by his new body, and it could send him mad. A disembodied brain would be likely to react similarly – but because it would be unable to signal its distress, or do anything to bring its suffering to an end, it would be even worse. So, to end up as a reanimated disembodied human brain may well be to suffer a fate worse than death. Now maybe if you had a body things wouldn't be so bad, but as stated earlier many think that it would be extremely tedious to live forever if it was possible. None of us expected to make it this long… Fuck living forever.  Another player in the chemical game actually is a mix of chemical and biological attempts at reanimating recently dead brains.  The company Bioquark, plans to initiate a study to see if a combination of stem cell and protein blend injections, electrical nerve stimulation, and laser therapy can reverse the effects of recent brain death. They're literally trying to bring people back from the dead. "It's our contention that there's no single magic bullet for this, so to start with a single magic bullet makes no sense. Hence why we have to take a different approach," Bioquark CEO, Ira Pastor, told Stat News. As Pastor told the Washington Post last year, he doesn't believe that brain death is necessarily a permanent condition, at least to start. It may well be curable, he argued, if the patient is administered the right combination of stimuli, ranging from stem cells to magnetic fields. The resuscitation process will not be a quick one, however. First, the newly dead person must receive an injection of stem cells derived from their own blood. Then doctors will inject a proprietary peptide blend called BQ-A into the patient's spinal column. This serum is supposed to help regrow neurons that had been damaged upon death. Finally, the patient undergoes 15 days of electrical nerve stimulation and transcranial laser therapy to instigate new neuron formation. During the trial, researchers will rely on EEG scans to monitor the patients for brain activity. Sometimes the dead come back on their own! Lazarus syndrome is the spontaneous return of a birthday cardiac rhythm after failed attempts at resuscitation. Its occurrence has been noted in medical literature at least 38 times since 1982. It takes its name from Lazarus who, as described in the New Testament, was raised from the dead by Jesus. Basically this occurs after a person has died and attempts to revive then using cpr or other means have failed and since time will pass and the heart will start back up on its own! The causes of this syndrome are not understood very well. With some hypotheticals being there build up of pressure on the chest following cpr, hyperkalemia (elevated potassium levels in the blood), or high doses of epinephrine. Some of these cases are pretty crazy. Is this spontaneous biological reanimation? Heres a few tales:  A 66-year-old man suffering from a suspected abdominal aneurysm suffered cardiac arrest and received chest compressions and defibrillation shocks for 17 minutes during treatment for his condition. Vital signs did not return; the patient was declared dead and resuscitation efforts ended. Ten minutes later, the surgeon felt a pulse. The aneurysm was successfully treated, and the patient fully recovered with no lasting physical or neurological problems.According to a 2002 article in the journal Forensic Science International, a 65-year-old prelingually deaf Japanese man was found unconscious in the foster home he lived in. CPR was attempted on the scene by home staff, emergency medical personnel and also in the emergency department of the hospital and included appropriate medications and defibrillation. He was declared dead after attempted resuscitation. However, a policeman found the person moving in the mortuary after 20 minutes. The patient survived for 4 more days.A 45-year-old woman in Colombia was pronounced dead, as there were no vital signs showing she was alive. Later, a funeral worker noticed the woman moving and alerted his co-worker that the woman should go back to the hospitalA 65-year-old man in Malaysia came back to life two-and-a-half hours after doctors at Seberang Jaya Hospital, Penang, pronounced him dead. He died three weeks later.Anthony Yahle, 37, in Bellbrook, Ohio, USA, was breathing abnormally at 4 a.m. on 5 August 2013, and could not be woken. After finding that Yahle had no pulse, first responders administered CPR and were able to retrieve a stable-enough heartbeat to transport him to the emergency room. Later that afternoon, he again suffered cardiac arrest for 45 minutes at Kettering Medical Center and was pronounced dead after all efforts to resuscitate him failed. When his son arrived at the hospital to visit his supposed-to-be deceased father, he noticed a heartbeat on the monitor that was still attached to his father. Resuscitation efforts were resumed, and Yahle was successfully revived.Walter Williams, 78, from Lexington, Mississippi, United States, was at home when his hospice nurse called a coroner who arrived and declared him dead at 9 p.m. on 26 February 2014. Once at a funeral home, he was found to be moving, possibly resuscitated by a defibrillator implanted in his chest.[11] The next day he was well enough to be talking with family, but died fifteen days later.And probably the craziest one: Velma Thomas, 59, of West Virginia, USA holds the record time for recovering from clinical death. In May 2008, Thomas went into cardiac arrest at her home. Medics were able to establish a faint pulse after eight minutes of CPR. Her heart stopped twice after arriving at the hospital and she was placed on life support. Doctors attempted to lower her body temperature to prevent additional brain injury. She was declared clinically dead for 17 hours after doctors failed to detect brain activity. Her son, Tim Thomas, stated that "her skin had already started hardening, her hands and toes were curling up, they were already drawn". She was taken off life support and funeral arrangements were in progress. However, ten minutes after being taken off life support, she revived and recovered. Again… Spontaneous biological reanimation? Who knows! So these are some of the concepts of reanimation. Let's talk about a couple people that were into the reanimation game: Lazzaro SpallanzaniSpallanzani was a Catholic priest, and a professor of natural history at Pavia University in the late 1700s. He started small, adding water to microscopic animals and announcing that he had managed a resurrection when they came to life. But he wasn't really satisfied. For some reason, Spallanzani turned for spiritual guidance to noted French cynic and atheist Voltaire. Spallanzani asked him what he thought happened to the souls of animals after death. Voltaire must have liked the guy, because he replied gently that he believed Spallanzani about the reanimation, and that the priest himself would be best qualified to answer the question. Although the priest's next trick was cutting the heads off snails to see if they'd grow back, he was definitely the least mad of the mad scientists. He was the first person to prove that chemicals inside the body helped with digestion, and was the first to spot white blood cells Andrew CrosseAndrew Crosse was messing around with lightning in 1837. He strung about a third of a mile of copper wire around his estate, and concentrated all the electricity it picked up in his laboratory. Specifically, he focused on a sterile dish of a primordial soup that he'd carefully prepared. After zapping the soup, he noticed that crystals were growing in it. Hoping he could graduate to something way cooler, he tried giving the soup long exposures to weak currents. To his amazement, he found that after long weeks, animals shaped like mites began to form, and then move around. He repeated the experiment again and again, and to modern readers it seems that he kept the environment pretty sterile if he followed all the procedures he described. Still, we have to assume it was contaminated. The Victorians assumed the same thing, but they also assumed that Crosse was a jerk. The scientists believed he was making a play for false glory. The theists assumed he was trying to play god. The neighbors just thought he was going to burn his, and subsequently their, house down. He was disliked by all and had to leave his estate, until the scandal cleared. Johann DippelThis was the actual guy who inspired the Frankenstein legend. He lived in the Frankenstein castle, and signed his name as Frankenstein. Surprisingly, he was less like the good doctor than most people think, since he was more interested in preserving life than reanimating it. He did rob graves in the area — or is said to have — but only because he wanted to mix up an elixir of immortality, and for some reason he thought buried corpse parts might do it for himMyThe Doggie ScientistsIn the first half of the 20th century, it was not a good time to be a dog. People were apt to, say, stick you in a tin can and send you into space. But at least, that way, you got to see something. You really didn't want to be in range of the doggie Frankensteins. Robert Cornish would suffocate dogs and attempt to bring them back to life via emergency medical measures. He actually managed to bring two back, although they sustained brain damage. Sergei Bryukhonenko attached his newly-invented heart and lung machine to a dog's head and kept it alive for quite some time, lying on a plate and eating and drinking. Giovanni AldiniNow this was a Frankenstein extraordinaire that we mentioned earlier. Having learned about how to use electricity to make the muscles of a corpse jump, he took it to the extreme in public. He zapped the heads of slaughtered oxen, in order to get them to twitch in front of audiences. He moved on to the heads of executed prisoners, applying the electrodes to the ears. He cut open corpses so he could zap their spinal cords. He claimed he could zap the suffocated and the drowned, in order to revive them completely. And he bragged that he could "command the vital powers." He also took a sideline into researching whether or not there was a way to make objects and people fireproof. Not much is said about his experiments in the latter area — but perhaps that's for the best. His tireless self-promotion never got him the chance to bring someone back to life, but it got him plenty of attention. He eventually traveled to Austria, where he was made a knight, and awarded a political position. Unlike many of the scientists on this list — and certainly unlike Frankenstein himself — Aldini died a rich and happy man. JAMES LOVELOCKIn the 1950s, the field of cryobiology was so new, it didn't even have a name yet, so budding cryobiologists didn't always have the exact tools they needed for a particular procedure. James Lovelock was one such scientist, and he outlined a method to bring rodents back to life.Lovelock's procedure involved putting a rat in a bath at minus 5 degrees Celsius for 90 minutes. After the rat was good and frozen, Lovelock would attempt to bring it back to life. Back then there weren't fancy lab tools like rat heart defibrillators, so Lovelock brought the rats' hearts back with a warm spoon.By restarting the heart, and gradually warming the body, Lovelock brought the mice back to life. Although we can't say that's what the mice would have wanted. One quick sidebar, is there a difference between resurrection and reanimation? The short answer is yes. As verbs the difference between resurrect and reanimate is that resurrect is to raise from the dead, to bring life back to while reanimate is to animate anew; to restore to animation or life; to infuse new life, vigor, spirit, or courage into; to revive; to reinvigorate; as, to reanimate a drowned person; to reanimate disheartened troops; to reanimate languid spirits. As an adjective reanimate is being animated again. Looking into it more than this leads to an exhaustive ordeal involving many many religious websites trying to explain why Jesus is not a zombie. Which is as ridiculous and hilarious as it sounds and is definitely recommended reading.  The subject of reanimation brings up many different facets of not only biology and chemistry but ethics as well. There are lines that are not meant to crossed, is this one? Would you want to be brought back from the dead? The lines between reanimation, resuscitation, and resurrection seem to be thin and sometimes vague. That's why there are such different topics being discussed in this episode.  Either way it's a hell of a trip!Now with all that being said we are bringing back an old favorite! We are talking top ten movies baby! Today is obviously the top ten movies about reanimation! This list is home to a wide variety of movies that some may consider reanimation related and some may not. But they all involved people coming back in some form.https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=reanimation Here's a top 8 list that's much better https://www.google.com/amp/s/io9.gizmodo.com/8-movies-featuring-reanimation-that-arent-about-zombie-1833752947/amp The Midnight Train Podcast is sponsored by VOUDOUX VODKA.www.voudoux.com Ace’s Depothttp://www.aces-depot.com BECOME A PRODUCER!http://www.patreon.com/themidnighttrainpodcast Find The Midnight Train Podcast:www.themidnighttrainpodcast.comwww.facebook.com/themidnighttrainpodcastwww.twitter.com/themidnighttrainpcwww.instagram.com/themidnighttrainpodcastwww.discord.com/themidnighttrainpodcastwww.tiktok.com/themidnighttrainp And wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Subscribe to our official YouTube channel:OUR YOUTUBE

Copertina
Episodio 33

Copertina

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 20, 2020 31:32


In questa puntata facciamo uno strappo alla regola, dedicando la rubrica "Fidati di chi ne sa" non a un libraio ma ad un edicolante, Francesca Vannucchi dell'edicola Aldini di Bologna. Nella ormai ricchissima sezione "Sgoccioli", la scrittrice, speaker e autrice tv Daniela Collu ci consiglia un libro forse introvabile, ma che vale la pena cercare, e lo scrittore Alessandro Robecchi ci parla di un libro che lo ha molto appassionato.

nella bologna alessandro robecchi aldini
Mary Poppins
Claudia Aldini

Mary Poppins

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2020


aldini
Bologna, dicono di lei
La statua di Galvani

Bologna, dicono di lei

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 3, 2020


"Dalla breccia dei bastioni rossi corrosi dalla nebbia si aprono silenziosamente le lunghe vie. Il malvagio vapore della nebbia intristisce tra i palazzi velando la cima delle torri, le lunghe vie silenziose e deserte come dopo il saccheggio". Dino Campana, La giornata di un Nevrastenico, Canti Orfici Occorreva questo sfondo a Galvani per scoprire, operando su una rana, il legame indissolubile tra vita ed elettricità, aprendo la via agli studi sui segnali nervosi. Studi che il nipote, Giovanni Aldini, trasferì agli esseri umani. "Il 17 gennaio 1803 il pubblico di Aldini si riunì. Il corpo di George Fosters fu portato in sala da mister Pass e fu sdraiato su una barella nel mezzo della pila galvanica caricata al massimo. Aldini piazzò gli elettrodi sulle tempie del cadavere e aggiustò la corrente. Le dita del morto si mossero e gli occhi si spalancarono rivelando due pupille immobili. Da vero showman Aldini procedette alla seconda fase del suo esperimento. Un elettrodo fu attaccato alla tempia di Fosters e un altro nel suo ano e l'elettricità fu aumentata. Il corpo fece un balzo, la schiena si inarcò e la faccia si raggrinzì in una smorfia orribile. La scena era spettrale, la sala era illuminata solo da candelabri e lampade ad olio e gli spettatori temettero che la cosa si sarebbe alzata e avrebbe camminato verso di loro. Aldini aumentò ancora la corrente e il petto dell'uomo si gonfiò come se stesse respirando: era il momento cruciale e l'emozione salì alle stelle". Bob Curran, Frankestein and other man-made monsters ©Elleboro editore - Lorenzo Notte

Scientificast
Rianimare i morti con trapianti di cacca

Scientificast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 11, 2019 53:15


In questo episodio, parliamo del Lucca Comics e dei nuovi metodi per fare divulgazione della scienza, di telomeri nei topi, di edifici ispirati alla natura, di esperimenti curiosi e di trapianti di cacca... Si prega di ascoltare lontano dai pasti.

Night of the Living Geeks
LHAS083 – FOOD WARS: EPISODE NINE

Night of the Living Geeks

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 27, 2018 12:13


Aldini vs. Soma! We debate who we would give the victory to: the one who followed the spirit of the competition or the one who stuck to the letter. We gush a bit more over the great dynamic between the Aldini brothers and their role as rivals for our protagonist. Andy spends more breath defending Erina-waifu-love. Lunch Hour Anime Special is a Night of the Living Geeks podcast. Go to www.NOTLG.com for other great shows or show your support for this program at patreon.com/NOTLG.

night soma food wars aldini living geeks notlg
My Shity Podcast
Ep. 53 Performance Art -Matthew Aldini

My Shity Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2018 53:59


Performance art with Matthew Aldini is not an easy profession. Matthew talks about the struggle from day one being the only boy in his dance class all the way up to current day where the cops in Austin TX jumped him for being falsely accused for crimes not committed. check out Matthews amazing work at  https://www.instagram.com/matthewxohh/    check me out at www.myshitypodcast.com   

Radio Frequenza Appennino
Arrivano i nostri - Puntata 69 - Edmonda Aldini

Radio Frequenza Appennino

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2018 28:42


Arrivano i nostri - Puntata 69 - Edmonda Aldini by Radio Frequenza Appennino

Localmentemosso
Localmentemosso di mer 18/05/16

Localmentemosso

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2016 45:27


Oggi andremo in una delle più vaste aree milanesi oggi inutilizzate per l'inquinamento presente nei terreni, è l'area della Goccia in Bovisa, parleremo del suo futuro. ....Giovanna Ceribelli ha 68 anni e fa la commercialista. Da una sua denuncia è partita l'inchiesta sul sistema odontoiatrico lombardo che ha portato in carcere il leghista Fabio Rizzi. Ora Giovanna Ceribelli è protagonista di un'altra vicenda che riguarda l'inceneritore di Desio. L'abbiamo intervistata.....Torneremo a sentire i rifugiati della squadra di calcio Black Panthers nata nel centro di via Aldini a Milano, hanno scritto una lettera pubblica contro la chiusura del centro.

Localmentemosso
Localmentemosso di mer 18/05

Localmentemosso

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2016 45:27


Oggi andremo in una delle più vaste aree milanesi oggi inutilizzate per l'inquinamento presente nei terreni, è l'area della Goccia in Bovisa, parleremo del suo futuro. ....Giovanna Ceribelli ha 68 anni e fa la commercialista. Da una sua denuncia è partita l'inchiesta sul sistema odontoiatrico lombardo che ha portato in carcere il leghista Fabio Rizzi. Ora Giovanna Ceribelli è protagonista di un'altra vicenda che riguarda l'inceneritore di Desio. L'abbiamo intervistata.....Torneremo a sentire i rifugiati della squadra di calcio Black Panthers nata nel centro di via Aldini a Milano, hanno scritto una lettera pubblica contro la chiusura del centro.

Localmentemosso
Localmentemosso di lun 09/05/16

Localmentemosso

Play Episode Listen Later May 8, 2016 44:32


Oggi pareremo della chiusura di uno dei principali centri di accoglienza dei richiedenti asilo di Milano, quello di via Aldini. Chiusura annunciata a sorpresa dall'assessore Majorino. ....Poi la politica, la possibile sclusione delle liste di Fratelli d'Italia e Fuxia People, Renzi a Milano ieri sera per spingere la candidatura di Giuseppe Sala. Ne parleremo con Luigi Ambrosio. ....E poi andremo in Valchiavenna. Un lago, dei terreni inquinati, un oasi naturalistica. Da tempo si attende la bonifica e invece potrebbe arrivare una nuova fabbrica.....Il lunedì poi la rubrica di Francesco Tragni, le app dal territorio.

milano oggi poi fratelli renzi chiusura giuseppe sala majorino aldini luigi ambrosio francesco tragni valchiavenna
Localmentemosso
Localmentemosso di lun 09/05

Localmentemosso

Play Episode Listen Later May 8, 2016 44:32


Oggi pareremo della chiusura di uno dei principali centri di accoglienza dei richiedenti asilo di Milano, quello di via Aldini. Chiusura annunciata a sorpresa dall'assessore Majorino. ....Poi la politica, la possibile sclusione delle liste di Fratelli d'Italia e Fuxia People, Renzi a Milano ieri sera per spingere la candidatura di Giuseppe Sala. Ne parleremo con Luigi Ambrosio. ....E poi andremo in Valchiavenna. Un lago, dei terreni inquinati, un oasi naturalistica. Da tempo si attende la bonifica e invece potrebbe arrivare una nuova fabbrica.....Il lunedì poi la rubrica di Francesco Tragni, le app dal territorio.

milano oggi poi renzi chiusura fratelli d'italia giuseppe sala majorino aldini luigi ambrosio francesco tragni valchiavenna
Spectrum
Michel Maharbiz & Daniel Cohen, Part 1 of 2

Spectrum

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 24, 2014 30:01


Michel Maharbiz & Daniel Cohen. Michel is an Assoc Prof with EECS-UCB. His research is building micro/nano interfaces to cells and organisms: bio-derived fabrication methods. Daniel received his PhD from UCB and UCSF Dept of Bioengineering in 2013.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we are presenting part one of two interviews with Michelle and Harb is and Daniel Cohen. Michelle is an associate professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley and the Co director of the Berkeley Sensor and actuator center. [00:01:00] His current research interests include building micro and nano interfaces to cells and organisms and exploring bio derived fabrication methods. Daniel Cohen received his phd from the Joint UC Berkeley and UCLA Department of bioengineering program in 2013 his phd advisor was Michelle Ma harvests. Together they have been working on the fronts project and NSF f Free Grant [00:01:30] F re stands for emerging frontiers and research and innovation fronts is the acronym for flexible, resorbable, organic and nanomaterial therapeutic systems. In part one of our interview, we discuss how they came to the challenge of measuring and understanding the so-called wound field. Here's part one, Michelle [inaudible] and Daniel cone. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thanks. How was it that [00:02:00] electrical fields generated by wounds was discovered? So I think Daniel should take this one cause he's the, he's the group historian on this topic. In fact, he gave us a little dissertation during this thesis talk Speaker 4: in the day when electricity was sort of still a parlor trick. There was a lot of work being done to try to figure out where it was coming from. There was a lot of mysticism associated with it. And this is in the mid to late 17 hundreds and so Galvani is a name most people have heard. Galvanism was a term [00:02:30] coined for his work and what he found was all the work with frog legs. So he used to dissect frogs and could show that if you had dissimilar metals in contact with different parts of the muscle and the nerves, the legs with twitch and amputate the frog leg. So his conclusion was that electricity had something to do with life and their living things were made alive by having this spark of life. And this was a really super controversial idea because for a long time there had been a philosophical debate raging about vitalism versus mechanism, which is the idea that all living things are special because of some intrinsic vital force versus the idea [00:03:00] that physical principles explain life. Speaker 4: So the vitalist really liked this idea that electricity is the spark that makes living things special. There's a lot of dispute about this, but eventually Volta who is right after him and who the vault is named after showed that it was really just the movement of ions and things in salt solutions, but it was a little too late and the mystical aspect of this had come along. So the problem then was that this idea prevailed into the early 18 hundreds and so Galvani his nephew Aldini started doing [00:03:30] these experiments in England where he was given permission to take executed criminals and basically play with the corpses and he was able to create a corpus that would go like this. And raise an arm or wink an eye at an audience. And this was the idea of the reanimated corpse. So people were having a lot of fun with this, but it wasn't clear that it wasn't mystical. Speaker 4: And so this is the long answer to the question, but that's the backdrop where the science starts to come in. So the first thing is Frankenstein gets published out of this, and everybody's getting into the whole vitalism idea [00:04:00] at this point. And Frankenstein was written as a part of a horror story competition. It was almost a joke. But the funny thing is Frankenstein. Well, how would you say Frankenstein? The monster came to life to lightning? Like that's a line. It wasn't a Hollywood fabrication and everyone assumed that. But Mary Shelley never wrote anything about lightning or electricity. She in fact, wrote the technology was too dangerous to describe in texts for the average person. But in her preface, she explains that the whole origin of this idea, and this is where the answer to the question comes from, was that [00:04:30] she had writer's block when she was writing the story and she overheard her husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron having an argument about work done by Erasmus, Darwin and Erasmus. Speaker 4: Darwin was a big natural philosopher or scientist at the time who was a big vitalist. So he's really into the idea of the spark of life and also this idea of spontaneous generation that where does life come from when you have a compost heap, fruit flies appear. There was an idea that be composing garbage produced life, and that was part of spontaneous generation. And he did a lot of experiments where he'd seal things like wet flour into a bell jar [00:05:00] and to show that organisms came out in a sealed environment and they just didn't know about microorganisms and things like that. So he did a famous experiment where he dehydrated some species called Vermicelli all. Sorry, I made the mistake. I'm about to talk about 40 cello, which is a little organism. And when he added water again, they came back to life. Now, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley didn't understand any of this, and the conversation that Mary Shelley eavesdropped on was one where they said that Erasmus Darwin had taken Vermicelli Pasta, put it inside the Bell Jar, sealed [00:05:30] it, and through some magic of his own allowed it to twitch. Speaker 4: So he had essentially given life to pasta. Now Mary Shelley wrote that she didn't believe any of this was actually really what happened. But this idea of animating the inanimate gave her the idea for Frankenstein. Then she writes the one line that links it to electricity, which is, and if any technology would have done this, it would probably have been galvanism, which is this idea of applying electricity to something. And so that's where this whole idea of life and electricity came from. By that point, the scientists had finally [00:06:00] caught up with all the mysticism and started to do more serious experiments, and that's when Carlo met Tucci in 18 and 30 something found that when you cut yourself, there's some sort of electrical signal at the injury source. And that was his main contribution that was called the wound current or the wound field and then after him was the guy who really formalized the whole thing, which was do Bob Raymond, who was a German electrophysiologist who found that if you have any sort of injury, he could actually measure a current flowing at the side of the injury. Speaker 4: He could show that that changed over time. He cut his own thumb and [00:06:30] measured the current flow and they didn't have an explanation for why it happened, but they knew that it had something to do with the electric chemistry there. This was the birth of electrophysiology and then he went off and did all these things with action potentials in neurons, which is why almost no one's heard about this injury side and the fact that electricity's everywhere in the body normally and it's not mystical, it's electrochemical. We're much more familiar with the neural stuff and this other stuff on the wound side sort of languished until maybe the late 19 hundreds because it was rare. It was weird. It wasn't clearly important [00:07:00] and a lot of the players involved were so caught up in all sorts of other things that we tend to forget about this. So that was the whole long winded history of where the wound field came from. But it's a good story. It is a good story. Yeah. Speaker 5: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum KALX Berkeley. Our guests are Michael ml harvest and and Daniel Colon. They're both bioengineers in the next segment they talk about the genesis of the fronts [00:07:30] project. Speaker 6: Michelle, when you approached the NSF yeah. For a grant for this idea, how long had you been thinking about it? The smart bandage idea, how far down stream were you with the idea? We had been toying with the idea for quite some time and there's a bit of background to this as well. So my group amongst other things builds flexible electrode systems. [00:08:00] You can call them for neuroscience in your engineering, and most of those systems are intended to record electrical signals across many different points across many electrodes usually honor in the brain. And so we had this basic technology lying around. This is sort of a competence that the group has had for quite awhile. The other thing that was beginning to intrigue us, and I have to credit Daniel for sort of beginning of the discussions and kind of pushing this along in the early years, so Daniel and I have like a tube man club of sitting around thinking of crazy things and [00:08:30] one of the things that Daniel had been interested in was the idea of resorbing or having so some of the materials disappear as they do their job in the body and this is a notion that's become very popular recently actually over the last couple of years in into community in the engineering community in general. Speaker 6: Which brings us to another question I had, which is the difference between resorptionSpeaker 4: and absorption. Absorption might imply that you're taking the components up and they're becoming part of the body. Resorption is really just a very strange [00:09:00] semantic term. That means something like the body's breaking it down or it's breaking down in some form and it's not really the same as that material winding up elsewhere in your tissues. It may just get excreted or it may go somewhere else. So really we use it when we don't really know what's going on. Yeah, we had been looking at this general area and then I think the last piece of the puzzle, I think in our minds looking at the extant literature, the idea that we could take meaningful electrical data from a wound began to really interest us. And so the [00:09:30] two parts of this really are one, can you use portable, resorbable systems? Something like a bandage, you know, something that that isn't going to require you to walk around with a handcart. Speaker 4: Can you use systems like this to measure electrical signals that are relevant to wounds? And then the other question is if you can do that, and if you have, you know, you learn about this, and by the way, we're not the first people to try to do this. There are a number of people that have been measuring electrical signals in the wounds as Daniel set for quite some time. If you can do this, is there a value to [00:10:00] trying to control or modulate that electrical information or those fields or those currents in the wound? Is there a therapeutic value? Perhaps there are scientific value. Is there something you can learn about the way the body works or tissue works? Both of those are open questions and you know we can delve into each of those, but those are really kind of how we think about them separately a little bit. Speaker 4: The flip side is that when we do a lot of this kind of design for medical things, you will want to know what's already happening and how the body handles its own injuries. And this field doesn't just arise passively. So they had no way of knowing [00:10:30] this when it was first discovered. But when you get this electric field, there is a navigational effect for incoming cells to the injury. So it actually helps guide things in like a lighthouse to the wound site. And so a lot of my phd work was showing how you can steer ourselves with a controlled electric field so you can really hurt them like sheep based on how the electric field goes. And that means that that was a source of this bio inspired part of it, which is we're not adding something that's not already there. We're taking something that's already there and we're modulating it to maybe improve. Speaker 4: [00:11:00] So evolutionary tools or things that the body has, it just happened to work well enough for us to survive as a species. It doesn't mean it's optimized and this field tends to go away very quickly. Nobody really knows whether extending the duration of the field would improve the healing or if we could shape it. Maybe you can control how scar tissue forms and things like that. So there's this idea of looking at how the body already heals itself and then figuring out where you might start to control it. And electricity is one of the areas that's really been under utilized in medical technology for the sort of thing. Yeah. I think for those of your audience [00:11:30] that are sort of tech junkies, if you will, the resurgence of this type of thing. Occurrent Lee I think arises because we've gotten very good at building very low power, very small electronics, and there's been a whole slew of new polymers and sort of new flexible substrates that are also conductive or can hold conductors. And so those two things together rekindled interest and trying to build gadgets that sit Speaker 6: on the skin. Or in the NSF case, we're not only doing the skin, but we're trying to develop a tool longterm [00:12:00] for surgeons to do something inside the body. So it'd be nice to be able to leave something that will help you heal, but then it'll be resorts so you don't have to reopen. Right. Speaker 5: Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guests are Michelle. My heart is in Daniel Cohen of UC Berkeley. They want to build a smart bandage for wounds. In the next segment, they talk about the focus of their research. Speaker 6: [00:12:30] So in your approach to the NSF, was there some sort of focus, there's a technological focus and an application focus? The technological focus for the NSF was to point out that there was a lot of fundamental engineering science that had to be done to produce the type of systems that could do this. You know, we're looking at resorbable batteries are real parts wise, how you would build these systems, what polymers you'd use, what the rates of resorption. There's a lot of just fundamental stuff going on. If you posit that there'll be value to [00:13:00] these kinds of things. That's one focus as the other focus. I would say application wise we're looking at two things. The most ambitious is that you could develop systems that a surgeon could use for internal wounds. So the dream is a surgeon is, for example, let's say you have to resect the part of your intestine. Speaker 6: You then have to fuse the two parts that are left behind. There are methods for doing this and there's still research going on into what we know. The clinical methodology for this. It would be very useful if you could leave behind something that [00:13:30] could tell you, if nothing else, the state of how that is healing but would then go away because you're certainly not going to go back and open somebody's abdomen to take out a little piece of sensor that was doing something to intestine. Right? That'd be a not a good idea, and so that idea, that dream that you could leave behind, very small, very thin things that could take data if nothing else. Take data is really what was one of the applications. The other one is surface wounds. There are lots of surface wounds caused by illness. For example, advanced diabetes produces a [00:14:00] lot of problems in the extremities and wounds that are chronic that don't heal very well. Speaker 6: There's just a lot of ongoing interest in surface wounds and not just the technologies for understanding how they may be healing, but in things that maybe could help heal those surface wounds. Those are our full side view welders. I think of them as there are specific things we want to show we can do with our partners at UCLA, but there's also an entire wealth of engineering science that has to be done to build the fundamental. So the NSF was okay with that broad [00:14:30] a portfolio of research. Well, so that's sort of what their mandate is to go broad like that. Cause that seems like you're, you're doing stuff. Speaker 4: I think their main concern here is that they specifically discourage healthcare applications as NIH can fund those. But the difference is that what engineers have found for a long time now is that we don't actually know how to engineer biology. So any technology brings quantification Speaker 6: and an engineering mindset to solving this, like tissue engineering, growing organs. We don't have a lot of engineering for that. But if we start [00:15:00] to monitor everything we can, that chemical signals mechanical, electrical, we build up a set of stimulus and response type rules. We understand how to perturb these systems. So in the same way that you might build a bridge according to a manual of how you build a bridge and how you look at the loads in it and the ways of building a bridge, we might someday build organs. So if that's the pitch, that's much more fundamental science and that's really where it has a medical application. But we can't do it without science and engineering principles that just don't exist right now. There's two points I should mention. First of all, the key is this work [00:15:30] is really looking at the fundamentals of the engineering and the science. Speaker 6: We certainly have our foot into clinical side because I think it informs some of this, right? So that what you're doing is relevant so that someday you could go down that path so you're not in isolation because if you're not assuming that you're headed in this great direction. Exactly. And then you find clinical guys saying less clinically. Right. So the other were very good. And the second thing is that, um, we're funded under a slightly broader grant mechanism than usual. So we have a, what's called an NSF. Every, I think this is emerging frontiers and research and innovation I think [00:16:00] is what it is and these are sort of headline or marquee type thing. So we're very lucky that we were awarded one of these and so I think the NSF has really looking for this broad, far reaching hard-hitting effort. I think there's a good point to mention that this project is really a big collaboration between a number of us and I'd like to mention who they are because some of the material work has done by very talented people in the department on a rds and the Vec Subramanian are two professors in the ECS department and they're very well known for flexible printed systems and [00:16:30] the materials that go into them and we work also with Shovel Roy at UCF and Mike Harrison and Mike is a sort of brilliant pediatric surgeon and shovel. Speaker 6: Roy's well known for the technologies he builds at the interface with clinical need. It's really the fact that all these people come together that we're building all of these tools. Speaker 7: [inaudible]Speaker 3: spectrum is a science and technology show on KALX Berkeley. We are talking with Michelle Mull Harvest Daniel Cohen. [00:17:00] They are researching the electrical field that is generated by wounds in mammals. Their hope is to collect meaningful data from sensors embedded in bandages placed on wounds. Speaker 6: If you approached interpreting and analyzing the electrical field data that you're getting out of the wounds in an animal right now we're being very cautious. We started a first few experiments with rodents over the last six months. What we've [00:17:30] built is a, is a series of systems. You can think of them as insulators with lots of little electrodes all over them. An array of of little electrodes. They're on order of a centimeter or less in terms of you can think of a postage stamp, maybe a bit smaller. We have different varieties of them. Some are stiff, some are very flexible. You can think of it as contact lenses or transparency paper, that kind of thing. And these arrays are connected to electrical sensing equipment. There's a miniaturize a little board that runs everything [00:18:00] and sends data to a block and all this data is collected and what we're currently looking at as a variety of different signals on both open wounds. Speaker 6: So if I, for example, cut the skin and on pressure wounds, pressure wounds or something that people that don't see clinics very often or hospitals aren't familiar with but in fact are huge, huge problem in hospitals right now. Then we lay these arrays over the tissue and we measure a variety of different things. One thing we measure what's known as electrical impedance between different [00:18:30] points on the array and you can think of electrical impedance as how much resistance to an electric current that tissue might produce. It's not a steady current, it's a time bearing current, so we sort of wiggle the current on and off, on and off negative, positive, negative, a sinusoidal and how quickly that current responds and how much of it there is. That allows us to calculate the impedance and there's a lot you can tell from that. You can tell whether things are very wet and conductive. Speaker 6: You can tell whether the tissue is tight knit, so that doesn't let things through a oily. You can tell whether there [00:19:00] might be changes in from one tissue to another. You can infer things about what tissues are might be underneath. The other thing we measure is actually electric potential when the wounds are immediately after they're made. We try to look at what kind of potentials arise and how they're changing. So right now that's in terms of measurement. That's really what we're looking at it. And another thing I should point out as we do these measurements as a function of frequency across a wide range of frequency spectrum up to hundreds of kilohertz. And that's sort of the rapidity with which we wiggle the signal because different components in the tissue [00:19:30] will respond differently at different legal frequencies. Once we have that complete plot, we can look at the difference between them and by to see whether we can build models that tell us, oh well we've, you see this type of distribution. Speaker 6: There's a in tech skin for example. So the dream, in this case, you put your bandaid on and your doctor checks his eye, his or her iPhone every 12 to 24 hours and just gets a different little map of how it's working without ever having to remove the dressing. How are you doing in understanding what those signals mean in terms of healing? [00:20:00] But we just had a meeting, they're doing great. They've basically collected a great deal of data on the latest set of wounds they did and now they're in fact proposing models and seeing how the data fits. They're fitting their models to the data to try to use those fits as ways of discriminating different types of tissues. So we're in the middle of it right now. I couldn't tell you much. We're still putting all that story together for publication. So, and are you able to leverage the work that other people are doing? Oh, absolutely. Sure. Well, I mean you always do that. Like I said, nothing is in a vacuum, right? So absolutely. We follow [00:20:30] the literature and, and we build off of what other people have found and try to add our own contributions. That's, that's how it works. Maybe these ideas came from discoveries from the 18 hundreds and then later on in the 1980s onwards, a bunch of really good developmental biologists have really pioneered a lot of this and gone down as, as showing that Speaker 4: even in an embryo you can detect changes in electrical potential at the surface of the embryo where limbs will form and things like that. So there's a huge amount of stuff out there that gave us the idea for the original thing, but we're barely scratching the surface. [00:21:00] We were technologist, right? We're engineers. So part of one thing and figure it out. Yeah. So the idea of trying to analyze the wound field data, do you have to solve that problem first before you can take on anything else? Like trying to instigate the healing? Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. You would never put this in the body without knowing, knowing that a real lot works. But on the surface it's a different healing mechanism than say a fracture, but it's still the idea that we don't necessarily know what the cause and [00:21:30] effect is yet. So we have to show that getting a field out relates to some state that we can say the wound is in and that we can intelligently put a field back in that actually helps. So we need some metric of success. And without that metric, that number that says the wound is doing better or worse, we're not confident saying that our stimulation is helping. So that's why getting this data first is really important. Speaker 6: The parameter space is fairly large, right? To number of things you could possibly change. Some of the effects are very subtle. And so just willy nilly going [00:22:00] in there and saying, oh, I applied some fields, you know, likely not gonna be very useful. And then there's another subtlety, which is that there are probably clinical contexts in which this is of limited utility, even if it works. And so that is, uh, something we spend a lot of time thinking about. So let me give you an example. Let's say I told you I can make that little cut on your knees heal 5% faster with a $15 bandaid. I'm pretty sure you're not going to buy a $15 [inaudible] except maybe once for the novelty of it. You know it tickles. But [00:22:30] there are contexts where, and Daniel alluded to this earlier, for example, scar formation is a big deal, right? Speaker 6: How a scar forms and the trajectory of the wound healing for certain load-bearing wounds of really big deal, right? Think of your abdomen if you had to go in there and hurt those muscles or hernia. And there are many things like this and so if, and I want to be very careful to say if if it was founded, electrical interventions can affect that type of healing in a way that produces a useful outcome, right? Much better scar developments so that your load bearing properties are [00:23:00] maybe not as good as the original, but a lot better than just letting it sit around with a dressing. That'll be a very big deal. But that's a very big space, right? Speaker 4: And that's why we split it into this in Vivo work on monitoring the surface and wound properties and in vitro work where we have cells and tissues and culture where we can directly stimulate them in culture in a very controlled environment and watch exactly how they respond to different shapes of fields and types of fields and come up with a way of describing how they behave. That doesn't require the Nvivo work. So we have two parallel tracks [00:23:30] right now and hopefully we can put them together. Speaker 5: [inaudible] be sure to catch part two of this interview with Michelle Maha Urbis and Daniel Cohen on the next spectrum in two weeks. In that interview, Michelle and Daniel talk about the limitations of sensors on or in humans, the ethics of sensing and inputs into living systems and moving research discoveries Speaker 8: into startup companies. Spectrum shows are [00:24:00] archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link to get you there. The link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum. We hope you can get out to a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Renee Rao and Rick Karnofsky present the calendar Speaker 9: nerd night east space first show of 2014 will be happening January 27th the show features three great Speakers. [00:24:30] First nerd night, San Francisco alum, Bradley boy tech. We'll guide you through how scientists organize and present some of the vast amounts of data available today. Then the Chabot space centers, Benjamin [inaudible] will discuss the most likely places to find life off of planet earth. Of course, finally KQ Eighties Lisa Allah Ferris will tell you what you need to know about Obamacare. The show will be held this Monday, the 27th at the new Parkway Theater in Oakland. Doors open at seven to get tickets for the HR event. [00:25:00] Go to East Bay nerd night, spelled n I t e.com this February 2nd the California Academy of Sciences will host a lecture on the Ice Age Fonda of the bay area. There's a good chance that wherever you happen to be sitting or standing is a spot where Colombian mamis giants laws direwolves, saber tooth cats and other megafauna. Also Rome during the ice age. Learn about the real giants of San Francisco and how you can embark upon [00:25:30] a local journey to see evidence of these extraordinary extinct animals. The lecture will be held@theacademyonfebruarysecondfromninefortyfiveamtotwelvepmticketsareavailableonlineatcalacademy.orgSpeaker 8: February's East Bay Science cafe. We'll be on Wednesday the fifth from seven to 9:00 PM at Cafe Val Paris, CEO 1403 Solano in Albany, Dr. Harry Green. We'll discuss his book [00:26:00] tracks and shadows field biology as art green, a herpetologist at Cornell blends personal memoir with natural history. He'll discuss the nuts and bolts of field research and teaching how he sees science aiding and in conservation and appreciation of nature, as well as give many tales about his favorite subject. Snakes. For more information about this free event, visit the cafes page on the website of the Berkeley Natural History Museum at BN [00:26:30] h m. Dot berkeley.edu/about/science cafe dot PHP. A feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and Rene Rao present our news in a letter published in January 15th nature. James us or would a locomotor biomechanist at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London and colleagues explain why Birds Migrate In v-shaped [00:27:00] formations. The team fitted several northern bald ibis is with gps trackers and accelerometers to measure wing movement. They found that the birds positioned themselves in optimum positions that agree with their aerodynamic models. Further the birds flap in phase with one another when in such permissions instead of the antifreeze flapping, they performed when following immediately behind each other. This in phase flapping maximizes lifted the plot [00:27:30] and is surprising as a team noted. The aerodynamic accomplishments were previously not thought possible for birds because of the complex flight dynamics and sensory feedback that would be required to perform such a feat. Speaker 9: The tenuous place in the human family tree of artifice guest room, it is a 4.4 million year old African primate has recently been solidified. Fossil remains Ardipithecus Ramidus or rd as a species is known first discovered by UC Berkeley [00:28:00] Professor Tim White and his team in Ethiopia in the 1990s and have proven a consternation to classify ever sense rd displays an unusual mixture of human and ape traits. Fossils reveals small human like teeth and upper pelvis adapted to bipedal motion, but a disproportionately small brain and grasping large toes, best suited for climbing trees. Scientists split over whether rd was our distant relative, essentially an ape that retained a few human features from along a common ancestor [00:28:30] or our close cousin, possibly even an ancestor. Recently Tim white among many others coauthored a paper with Arizona State Universities, William Kimball in which they successfully linked the rd to Australopithecus and thereby to humans. The team examine the basis of rd skulls and found surprising similarities to human and Australopithecines skulls indicating that those had already been may have been small. It was far more similar to a hominids than an apes Speaker 7: in in Speaker 9: [00:29:00] the music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l ex hate yahoo.com. [00:29:30] Join us in two weeks at this same Speaker 10: hi [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Spectrum
Michel Maharbiz & Daniel Cohen, Part 1 of 2

Spectrum

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 24, 2014 30:01


Michel Maharbiz & Daniel Cohen. Michel is an Assoc Prof with EECS-UCB. His research is building micro/nano interfaces to cells and organisms: bio-derived fabrication methods. Daniel received his PhD from UCB and UCSF Dept of Bioengineering in 2013.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we are presenting part one of two interviews with Michelle and Harb is and Daniel Cohen. Michelle is an associate professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley and the Co director of the Berkeley Sensor and actuator center. [00:01:00] His current research interests include building micro and nano interfaces to cells and organisms and exploring bio derived fabrication methods. Daniel Cohen received his phd from the Joint UC Berkeley and UCLA Department of bioengineering program in 2013 his phd advisor was Michelle Ma harvests. Together they have been working on the fronts project and NSF f Free Grant [00:01:30] F re stands for emerging frontiers and research and innovation fronts is the acronym for flexible, resorbable, organic and nanomaterial therapeutic systems. In part one of our interview, we discuss how they came to the challenge of measuring and understanding the so-called wound field. Here's part one, Michelle [inaudible] and Daniel cone. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thanks. How was it that [00:02:00] electrical fields generated by wounds was discovered? So I think Daniel should take this one cause he's the, he's the group historian on this topic. In fact, he gave us a little dissertation during this thesis talk Speaker 4: in the day when electricity was sort of still a parlor trick. There was a lot of work being done to try to figure out where it was coming from. There was a lot of mysticism associated with it. And this is in the mid to late 17 hundreds and so Galvani is a name most people have heard. Galvanism was a term [00:02:30] coined for his work and what he found was all the work with frog legs. So he used to dissect frogs and could show that if you had dissimilar metals in contact with different parts of the muscle and the nerves, the legs with twitch and amputate the frog leg. So his conclusion was that electricity had something to do with life and their living things were made alive by having this spark of life. And this was a really super controversial idea because for a long time there had been a philosophical debate raging about vitalism versus mechanism, which is the idea that all living things are special because of some intrinsic vital force versus the idea [00:03:00] that physical principles explain life. Speaker 4: So the vitalist really liked this idea that electricity is the spark that makes living things special. There's a lot of dispute about this, but eventually Volta who is right after him and who the vault is named after showed that it was really just the movement of ions and things in salt solutions, but it was a little too late and the mystical aspect of this had come along. So the problem then was that this idea prevailed into the early 18 hundreds and so Galvani his nephew Aldini started doing [00:03:30] these experiments in England where he was given permission to take executed criminals and basically play with the corpses and he was able to create a corpus that would go like this. And raise an arm or wink an eye at an audience. And this was the idea of the reanimated corpse. So people were having a lot of fun with this, but it wasn't clear that it wasn't mystical. Speaker 4: And so this is the long answer to the question, but that's the backdrop where the science starts to come in. So the first thing is Frankenstein gets published out of this, and everybody's getting into the whole vitalism idea [00:04:00] at this point. And Frankenstein was written as a part of a horror story competition. It was almost a joke. But the funny thing is Frankenstein. Well, how would you say Frankenstein? The monster came to life to lightning? Like that's a line. It wasn't a Hollywood fabrication and everyone assumed that. But Mary Shelley never wrote anything about lightning or electricity. She in fact, wrote the technology was too dangerous to describe in texts for the average person. But in her preface, she explains that the whole origin of this idea, and this is where the answer to the question comes from, was that [00:04:30] she had writer's block when she was writing the story and she overheard her husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron having an argument about work done by Erasmus, Darwin and Erasmus. Speaker 4: Darwin was a big natural philosopher or scientist at the time who was a big vitalist. So he's really into the idea of the spark of life and also this idea of spontaneous generation that where does life come from when you have a compost heap, fruit flies appear. There was an idea that be composing garbage produced life, and that was part of spontaneous generation. And he did a lot of experiments where he'd seal things like wet flour into a bell jar [00:05:00] and to show that organisms came out in a sealed environment and they just didn't know about microorganisms and things like that. So he did a famous experiment where he dehydrated some species called Vermicelli all. Sorry, I made the mistake. I'm about to talk about 40 cello, which is a little organism. And when he added water again, they came back to life. Now, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley didn't understand any of this, and the conversation that Mary Shelley eavesdropped on was one where they said that Erasmus Darwin had taken Vermicelli Pasta, put it inside the Bell Jar, sealed [00:05:30] it, and through some magic of his own allowed it to twitch. Speaker 4: So he had essentially given life to pasta. Now Mary Shelley wrote that she didn't believe any of this was actually really what happened. But this idea of animating the inanimate gave her the idea for Frankenstein. Then she writes the one line that links it to electricity, which is, and if any technology would have done this, it would probably have been galvanism, which is this idea of applying electricity to something. And so that's where this whole idea of life and electricity came from. By that point, the scientists had finally [00:06:00] caught up with all the mysticism and started to do more serious experiments, and that's when Carlo met Tucci in 18 and 30 something found that when you cut yourself, there's some sort of electrical signal at the injury source. And that was his main contribution that was called the wound current or the wound field and then after him was the guy who really formalized the whole thing, which was do Bob Raymond, who was a German electrophysiologist who found that if you have any sort of injury, he could actually measure a current flowing at the side of the injury. Speaker 4: He could show that that changed over time. He cut his own thumb and [00:06:30] measured the current flow and they didn't have an explanation for why it happened, but they knew that it had something to do with the electric chemistry there. This was the birth of electrophysiology and then he went off and did all these things with action potentials in neurons, which is why almost no one's heard about this injury side and the fact that electricity's everywhere in the body normally and it's not mystical, it's electrochemical. We're much more familiar with the neural stuff and this other stuff on the wound side sort of languished until maybe the late 19 hundreds because it was rare. It was weird. It wasn't clearly important [00:07:00] and a lot of the players involved were so caught up in all sorts of other things that we tend to forget about this. So that was the whole long winded history of where the wound field came from. But it's a good story. It is a good story. Yeah. Speaker 5: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum KALX Berkeley. Our guests are Michael ml harvest and and Daniel Colon. They're both bioengineers in the next segment they talk about the genesis of the fronts [00:07:30] project. Speaker 6: Michelle, when you approached the NSF yeah. For a grant for this idea, how long had you been thinking about it? The smart bandage idea, how far down stream were you with the idea? We had been toying with the idea for quite some time and there's a bit of background to this as well. So my group amongst other things builds flexible electrode systems. [00:08:00] You can call them for neuroscience in your engineering, and most of those systems are intended to record electrical signals across many different points across many electrodes usually honor in the brain. And so we had this basic technology lying around. This is sort of a competence that the group has had for quite awhile. The other thing that was beginning to intrigue us, and I have to credit Daniel for sort of beginning of the discussions and kind of pushing this along in the early years, so Daniel and I have like a tube man club of sitting around thinking of crazy things and [00:08:30] one of the things that Daniel had been interested in was the idea of resorbing or having so some of the materials disappear as they do their job in the body and this is a notion that's become very popular recently actually over the last couple of years in into community in the engineering community in general. Speaker 6: Which brings us to another question I had, which is the difference between resorptionSpeaker 4: and absorption. Absorption might imply that you're taking the components up and they're becoming part of the body. Resorption is really just a very strange [00:09:00] semantic term. That means something like the body's breaking it down or it's breaking down in some form and it's not really the same as that material winding up elsewhere in your tissues. It may just get excreted or it may go somewhere else. So really we use it when we don't really know what's going on. Yeah, we had been looking at this general area and then I think the last piece of the puzzle, I think in our minds looking at the extant literature, the idea that we could take meaningful electrical data from a wound began to really interest us. And so the [00:09:30] two parts of this really are one, can you use portable, resorbable systems? Something like a bandage, you know, something that that isn't going to require you to walk around with a handcart. Speaker 4: Can you use systems like this to measure electrical signals that are relevant to wounds? And then the other question is if you can do that, and if you have, you know, you learn about this, and by the way, we're not the first people to try to do this. There are a number of people that have been measuring electrical signals in the wounds as Daniel set for quite some time. If you can do this, is there a value to [00:10:00] trying to control or modulate that electrical information or those fields or those currents in the wound? Is there a therapeutic value? Perhaps there are scientific value. Is there something you can learn about the way the body works or tissue works? Both of those are open questions and you know we can delve into each of those, but those are really kind of how we think about them separately a little bit. Speaker 4: The flip side is that when we do a lot of this kind of design for medical things, you will want to know what's already happening and how the body handles its own injuries. And this field doesn't just arise passively. So they had no way of knowing [00:10:30] this when it was first discovered. But when you get this electric field, there is a navigational effect for incoming cells to the injury. So it actually helps guide things in like a lighthouse to the wound site. And so a lot of my phd work was showing how you can steer ourselves with a controlled electric field so you can really hurt them like sheep based on how the electric field goes. And that means that that was a source of this bio inspired part of it, which is we're not adding something that's not already there. We're taking something that's already there and we're modulating it to maybe improve. Speaker 4: [00:11:00] So evolutionary tools or things that the body has, it just happened to work well enough for us to survive as a species. It doesn't mean it's optimized and this field tends to go away very quickly. Nobody really knows whether extending the duration of the field would improve the healing or if we could shape it. Maybe you can control how scar tissue forms and things like that. So there's this idea of looking at how the body already heals itself and then figuring out where you might start to control it. And electricity is one of the areas that's really been under utilized in medical technology for the sort of thing. Yeah. I think for those of your audience [00:11:30] that are sort of tech junkies, if you will, the resurgence of this type of thing. Occurrent Lee I think arises because we've gotten very good at building very low power, very small electronics, and there's been a whole slew of new polymers and sort of new flexible substrates that are also conductive or can hold conductors. And so those two things together rekindled interest and trying to build gadgets that sit Speaker 6: on the skin. Or in the NSF case, we're not only doing the skin, but we're trying to develop a tool longterm [00:12:00] for surgeons to do something inside the body. So it'd be nice to be able to leave something that will help you heal, but then it'll be resorts so you don't have to reopen. Right. Speaker 5: Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guests are Michelle. My heart is in Daniel Cohen of UC Berkeley. They want to build a smart bandage for wounds. In the next segment, they talk about the focus of their research. Speaker 6: [00:12:30] So in your approach to the NSF, was there some sort of focus, there's a technological focus and an application focus? The technological focus for the NSF was to point out that there was a lot of fundamental engineering science that had to be done to produce the type of systems that could do this. You know, we're looking at resorbable batteries are real parts wise, how you would build these systems, what polymers you'd use, what the rates of resorption. There's a lot of just fundamental stuff going on. If you posit that there'll be value to [00:13:00] these kinds of things. That's one focus as the other focus. I would say application wise we're looking at two things. The most ambitious is that you could develop systems that a surgeon could use for internal wounds. So the dream is a surgeon is, for example, let's say you have to resect the part of your intestine. Speaker 6: You then have to fuse the two parts that are left behind. There are methods for doing this and there's still research going on into what we know. The clinical methodology for this. It would be very useful if you could leave behind something that [00:13:30] could tell you, if nothing else, the state of how that is healing but would then go away because you're certainly not going to go back and open somebody's abdomen to take out a little piece of sensor that was doing something to intestine. Right? That'd be a not a good idea, and so that idea, that dream that you could leave behind, very small, very thin things that could take data if nothing else. Take data is really what was one of the applications. The other one is surface wounds. There are lots of surface wounds caused by illness. For example, advanced diabetes produces a [00:14:00] lot of problems in the extremities and wounds that are chronic that don't heal very well. Speaker 6: There's just a lot of ongoing interest in surface wounds and not just the technologies for understanding how they may be healing, but in things that maybe could help heal those surface wounds. Those are our full side view welders. I think of them as there are specific things we want to show we can do with our partners at UCLA, but there's also an entire wealth of engineering science that has to be done to build the fundamental. So the NSF was okay with that broad [00:14:30] a portfolio of research. Well, so that's sort of what their mandate is to go broad like that. Cause that seems like you're, you're doing stuff. Speaker 4: I think their main concern here is that they specifically discourage healthcare applications as NIH can fund those. But the difference is that what engineers have found for a long time now is that we don't actually know how to engineer biology. So any technology brings quantification Speaker 6: and an engineering mindset to solving this, like tissue engineering, growing organs. We don't have a lot of engineering for that. But if we start [00:15:00] to monitor everything we can, that chemical signals mechanical, electrical, we build up a set of stimulus and response type rules. We understand how to perturb these systems. So in the same way that you might build a bridge according to a manual of how you build a bridge and how you look at the loads in it and the ways of building a bridge, we might someday build organs. So if that's the pitch, that's much more fundamental science and that's really where it has a medical application. But we can't do it without science and engineering principles that just don't exist right now. There's two points I should mention. First of all, the key is this work [00:15:30] is really looking at the fundamentals of the engineering and the science. Speaker 6: We certainly have our foot into clinical side because I think it informs some of this, right? So that what you're doing is relevant so that someday you could go down that path so you're not in isolation because if you're not assuming that you're headed in this great direction. Exactly. And then you find clinical guys saying less clinically. Right. So the other were very good. And the second thing is that, um, we're funded under a slightly broader grant mechanism than usual. So we have a, what's called an NSF. Every, I think this is emerging frontiers and research and innovation I think [00:16:00] is what it is and these are sort of headline or marquee type thing. So we're very lucky that we were awarded one of these and so I think the NSF has really looking for this broad, far reaching hard-hitting effort. I think there's a good point to mention that this project is really a big collaboration between a number of us and I'd like to mention who they are because some of the material work has done by very talented people in the department on a rds and the Vec Subramanian are two professors in the ECS department and they're very well known for flexible printed systems and [00:16:30] the materials that go into them and we work also with Shovel Roy at UCF and Mike Harrison and Mike is a sort of brilliant pediatric surgeon and shovel. Speaker 6: Roy's well known for the technologies he builds at the interface with clinical need. It's really the fact that all these people come together that we're building all of these tools. Speaker 7: [inaudible]Speaker 3: spectrum is a science and technology show on KALX Berkeley. We are talking with Michelle Mull Harvest Daniel Cohen. [00:17:00] They are researching the electrical field that is generated by wounds in mammals. Their hope is to collect meaningful data from sensors embedded in bandages placed on wounds. Speaker 6: If you approached interpreting and analyzing the electrical field data that you're getting out of the wounds in an animal right now we're being very cautious. We started a first few experiments with rodents over the last six months. What we've [00:17:30] built is a, is a series of systems. You can think of them as insulators with lots of little electrodes all over them. An array of of little electrodes. They're on order of a centimeter or less in terms of you can think of a postage stamp, maybe a bit smaller. We have different varieties of them. Some are stiff, some are very flexible. You can think of it as contact lenses or transparency paper, that kind of thing. And these arrays are connected to electrical sensing equipment. There's a miniaturize a little board that runs everything [00:18:00] and sends data to a block and all this data is collected and what we're currently looking at as a variety of different signals on both open wounds. Speaker 6: So if I, for example, cut the skin and on pressure wounds, pressure wounds or something that people that don't see clinics very often or hospitals aren't familiar with but in fact are huge, huge problem in hospitals right now. Then we lay these arrays over the tissue and we measure a variety of different things. One thing we measure what's known as electrical impedance between different [00:18:30] points on the array and you can think of electrical impedance as how much resistance to an electric current that tissue might produce. It's not a steady current, it's a time bearing current, so we sort of wiggle the current on and off, on and off negative, positive, negative, a sinusoidal and how quickly that current responds and how much of it there is. That allows us to calculate the impedance and there's a lot you can tell from that. You can tell whether things are very wet and conductive. Speaker 6: You can tell whether the tissue is tight knit, so that doesn't let things through a oily. You can tell whether there [00:19:00] might be changes in from one tissue to another. You can infer things about what tissues are might be underneath. The other thing we measure is actually electric potential when the wounds are immediately after they're made. We try to look at what kind of potentials arise and how they're changing. So right now that's in terms of measurement. That's really what we're looking at it. And another thing I should point out as we do these measurements as a function of frequency across a wide range of frequency spectrum up to hundreds of kilohertz. And that's sort of the rapidity with which we wiggle the signal because different components in the tissue [00:19:30] will respond differently at different legal frequencies. Once we have that complete plot, we can look at the difference between them and by to see whether we can build models that tell us, oh well we've, you see this type of distribution. Speaker 6: There's a in tech skin for example. So the dream, in this case, you put your bandaid on and your doctor checks his eye, his or her iPhone every 12 to 24 hours and just gets a different little map of how it's working without ever having to remove the dressing. How are you doing in understanding what those signals mean in terms of healing? [00:20:00] But we just had a meeting, they're doing great. They've basically collected a great deal of data on the latest set of wounds they did and now they're in fact proposing models and seeing how the data fits. They're fitting their models to the data to try to use those fits as ways of discriminating different types of tissues. So we're in the middle of it right now. I couldn't tell you much. We're still putting all that story together for publication. So, and are you able to leverage the work that other people are doing? Oh, absolutely. Sure. Well, I mean you always do that. Like I said, nothing is in a vacuum, right? So absolutely. We follow [00:20:30] the literature and, and we build off of what other people have found and try to add our own contributions. That's, that's how it works. Maybe these ideas came from discoveries from the 18 hundreds and then later on in the 1980s onwards, a bunch of really good developmental biologists have really pioneered a lot of this and gone down as, as showing that Speaker 4: even in an embryo you can detect changes in electrical potential at the surface of the embryo where limbs will form and things like that. So there's a huge amount of stuff out there that gave us the idea for the original thing, but we're barely scratching the surface. [00:21:00] We were technologist, right? We're engineers. So part of one thing and figure it out. Yeah. So the idea of trying to analyze the wound field data, do you have to solve that problem first before you can take on anything else? Like trying to instigate the healing? Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. You would never put this in the body without knowing, knowing that a real lot works. But on the surface it's a different healing mechanism than say a fracture, but it's still the idea that we don't necessarily know what the cause and [00:21:30] effect is yet. So we have to show that getting a field out relates to some state that we can say the wound is in and that we can intelligently put a field back in that actually helps. So we need some metric of success. And without that metric, that number that says the wound is doing better or worse, we're not confident saying that our stimulation is helping. So that's why getting this data first is really important. Speaker 6: The parameter space is fairly large, right? To number of things you could possibly change. Some of the effects are very subtle. And so just willy nilly going [00:22:00] in there and saying, oh, I applied some fields, you know, likely not gonna be very useful. And then there's another subtlety, which is that there are probably clinical contexts in which this is of limited utility, even if it works. And so that is, uh, something we spend a lot of time thinking about. So let me give you an example. Let's say I told you I can make that little cut on your knees heal 5% faster with a $15 bandaid. I'm pretty sure you're not going to buy a $15 [inaudible] except maybe once for the novelty of it. You know it tickles. But [00:22:30] there are contexts where, and Daniel alluded to this earlier, for example, scar formation is a big deal, right? Speaker 6: How a scar forms and the trajectory of the wound healing for certain load-bearing wounds of really big deal, right? Think of your abdomen if you had to go in there and hurt those muscles or hernia. And there are many things like this and so if, and I want to be very careful to say if if it was founded, electrical interventions can affect that type of healing in a way that produces a useful outcome, right? Much better scar developments so that your load bearing properties are [00:23:00] maybe not as good as the original, but a lot better than just letting it sit around with a dressing. That'll be a very big deal. But that's a very big space, right? Speaker 4: And that's why we split it into this in Vivo work on monitoring the surface and wound properties and in vitro work where we have cells and tissues and culture where we can directly stimulate them in culture in a very controlled environment and watch exactly how they respond to different shapes of fields and types of fields and come up with a way of describing how they behave. That doesn't require the Nvivo work. So we have two parallel tracks [00:23:30] right now and hopefully we can put them together. Speaker 5: [inaudible] be sure to catch part two of this interview with Michelle Maha Urbis and Daniel Cohen on the next spectrum in two weeks. In that interview, Michelle and Daniel talk about the limitations of sensors on or in humans, the ethics of sensing and inputs into living systems and moving research discoveries Speaker 8: into startup companies. Spectrum shows are [00:24:00] archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link to get you there. The link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum. We hope you can get out to a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Renee Rao and Rick Karnofsky present the calendar Speaker 9: nerd night east space first show of 2014 will be happening January 27th the show features three great Speakers. [00:24:30] First nerd night, San Francisco alum, Bradley boy tech. We'll guide you through how scientists organize and present some of the vast amounts of data available today. Then the Chabot space centers, Benjamin [inaudible] will discuss the most likely places to find life off of planet earth. Of course, finally KQ Eighties Lisa Allah Ferris will tell you what you need to know about Obamacare. The show will be held this Monday, the 27th at the new Parkway Theater in Oakland. Doors open at seven to get tickets for the HR event. [00:25:00] Go to East Bay nerd night, spelled n I t e.com this February 2nd the California Academy of Sciences will host a lecture on the Ice Age Fonda of the bay area. There's a good chance that wherever you happen to be sitting or standing is a spot where Colombian mamis giants laws direwolves, saber tooth cats and other megafauna. Also Rome during the ice age. Learn about the real giants of San Francisco and how you can embark upon [00:25:30] a local journey to see evidence of these extraordinary extinct animals. The lecture will be held@theacademyonfebruarysecondfromninefortyfiveamtotwelvepmticketsareavailableonlineatcalacademy.orgSpeaker 8: February's East Bay Science cafe. We'll be on Wednesday the fifth from seven to 9:00 PM at Cafe Val Paris, CEO 1403 Solano in Albany, Dr. Harry Green. We'll discuss his book [00:26:00] tracks and shadows field biology as art green, a herpetologist at Cornell blends personal memoir with natural history. He'll discuss the nuts and bolts of field research and teaching how he sees science aiding and in conservation and appreciation of nature, as well as give many tales about his favorite subject. Snakes. For more information about this free event, visit the cafes page on the website of the Berkeley Natural History Museum at BN [00:26:30] h m. Dot berkeley.edu/about/science cafe dot PHP. A feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and Rene Rao present our news in a letter published in January 15th nature. James us or would a locomotor biomechanist at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London and colleagues explain why Birds Migrate In v-shaped [00:27:00] formations. The team fitted several northern bald ibis is with gps trackers and accelerometers to measure wing movement. They found that the birds positioned themselves in optimum positions that agree with their aerodynamic models. Further the birds flap in phase with one another when in such permissions instead of the antifreeze flapping, they performed when following immediately behind each other. This in phase flapping maximizes lifted the plot [00:27:30] and is surprising as a team noted. The aerodynamic accomplishments were previously not thought possible for birds because of the complex flight dynamics and sensory feedback that would be required to perform such a feat. Speaker 9: The tenuous place in the human family tree of artifice guest room, it is a 4.4 million year old African primate has recently been solidified. Fossil remains Ardipithecus Ramidus or rd as a species is known first discovered by UC Berkeley [00:28:00] Professor Tim White and his team in Ethiopia in the 1990s and have proven a consternation to classify ever sense rd displays an unusual mixture of human and ape traits. Fossils reveals small human like teeth and upper pelvis adapted to bipedal motion, but a disproportionately small brain and grasping large toes, best suited for climbing trees. Scientists split over whether rd was our distant relative, essentially an ape that retained a few human features from along a common ancestor [00:28:30] or our close cousin, possibly even an ancestor. Recently Tim white among many others coauthored a paper with Arizona State Universities, William Kimball in which they successfully linked the rd to Australopithecus and thereby to humans. The team examine the basis of rd skulls and found surprising similarities to human and Australopithecines skulls indicating that those had already been may have been small. It was far more similar to a hominids than an apes Speaker 7: in in Speaker 9: [00:29:00] the music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l ex hate yahoo.com. [00:29:30] Join us in two weeks at this same Speaker 10: hi [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

RADIOIMMAGINARIA
La Battaglia di Magenta-Comunichiammmoci

RADIOIMMAGINARIA

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 20, 2013 32:36


Abbiamo condiviso la nostra esperienza e spiegato cos'è Radioimmaginaria ai nostri coetanei studenti dell'Istituto Aldini Valeriani Sirani, a Bologna.L'argomento: "Comunicare". Ed abbiamo sciolto i nostri amici da dubbi e timori!

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Aldini's Beloved

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Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2012 2:31


It's Alive!