the tiny balls of fat that could revolutionize medicine

THE TINY BALLS OF FAT THAT COULD REVOLUTIONIZE MEDICINE CRACKED

Ice cream, for example, is stabilized by tiny ice crystals that cling to the interfaces between the fat and water droplets, creating a rigid physical barrier. To give products such as mayonnaise and sunscreen a reasonable shelf life, manufacturers typically add stabilizing particles to create Pickering emulsions (emulsions stabilized by solid particles that absorb onto the interface between the two phases). A simple emulsion such as vinaigrette takes energy to create (for example, shaking), and over time it will separate out, as the oil or water molecules cluster together again. 4, have important implications for manufacturing processes used in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and foods.Īn emulsion is a mixture of two or more insoluble liquids - usually oil and water. The findings, published in Nature Materials on Dec. “We actually found that the timescale for this process was months to years.” “We knew that the particle would stick to the interface, and other researchers had assumed this event happened instantaneously,” he says. “We were looking at what we thought would be a very simple phenomenon, and we found something very strange,” said principal investigator Vinothan Manoharan, associate professor of chemical engineering and physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). We've got your morning reading covered.By studying the behavior of tiny particles at an interface between oil and water, researchers at Harvard have discovered that stabilized emulsions may take longer to reach equilibrium than previously thought.

THE TINY BALLS OF FAT THAT COULD REVOLUTIONIZE MEDICINE CRACKED

įor more folks whose bad luck turned good, check out 5 Accidental Inventions That Changed The World and 6 Global Corporations Started by Their Founder's Shitty Luck.Īnd stop by Linkstorm to see how Swaim was lucky to be given a conscience.Īnd don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get sexy, sexy jokes sent straight to your news feed.ĭo you have an idea in mind that would make a great article? Then sign up for our writers workshop! Do you possess expert skills in image creation and manipulation? Mediocre? Even rudimentary? Are you frightened by MS Paint and simply have a funny idea? You can create an infograpic and you could be on the front page of tomorrow! Related: 6 Well Intentioned Ways You're Ruining Your Dog Get the Cracked Daily Newsletter! In other words, while you have to be smart to make important scientific discoveries, making world-changing discoveries requires that you be just a bit crazy.Īnd pick up our accidental masterpiece: You Might Be A Zombie. Instead of going to the aortic valve, the dye went straight to the right coronary artery, also known as the subway that delivers blood to both ventricles of the heart, also known as 'the place where you can't inject dye without killing the patient.' And just like every other time you hear the phrase 'the catheter slipped,' this was bad news. In 1958, Sones was just about to inject some contrast dye into the aortic valve of a patient with rheumatic heart disease when the catheter slipped. It's not like the aortic valve could pump dye to the whole heart and give the patient a dye heart attack.

The aortic valve worked for contrast dye, because it's just a one-way train for the blood leaving the left ventricle.

They wanted to get close, but not too close. There was only one hitch: getting the dye to the right heart parts. Researchers discovered that they could use catheters to deliver contrast dye to parts of the heart, and the dye would show up on X-rays, revealing abnormalities. Continue Reading Belowīy the 1950s, however, heart geniuses had a shockingly simplistic solution: dye. Which used to be the same basic therapy for insanity. At the time of Greatbatch's transistor mix-up, there was only one way to treat heart block: by hooking you up to a television-size machine and zapping the bejeezus out of you: In this version, the electrical pulse that controls the rate and rhythm of your heartbeat is all jacked up.

If you have heart block, you have a version of arrhythmia. In the world of diseases of the heart, coronaries are the big men on campus, followed closely by 'total eclipses of the.' One that you don't usually hear much about is heart block, which is shocking, because it's an electrical heart disease. Wilson Greatbatch had just invented the world's first pacemaker, which, in retrospect, was probably a lot more bitchin' than inventing the first internal body-noise recorder. Instead of recording heartbeats, the device promptly started sending out pulses at a rhythm of 60 to 70 a minute - which is a very heartbeaty rate indeed.

The tiny balls of fat that could revolutionize medicine