SCIENCE AND MEDICINE | health & wellness || 19
Supercomputer as doctor A second skin
The IBM Corporation, creator
of the Watson supercomputer,
has released a cloud platform
they call IBM Watson Health.
Simply put, the artificial Watson
intelligence now lives in the
cloud and is being used to ana-
lyze medical data. In particular,
it helps doctors make diagnoses
and select treatment more ac-
curately. Watson was taught to
work with masses of medical
data so that the artificial intelli-
gence could make use of the
experience of researchers from
all over the world. Watson is
constantly collecting new data,
which helps it improve itself, in-
dividualize recommendations,
and, unlike flesh-and-blood doc-
tors, not make mistakes. See also: www.ibm.com/blogs/watson-
health/do-doctors-fear-ai/ Sunburns, pimples, and unwanted
pigmentation are skin conditions
that can now be concealed by
means of an invisible elastic poly-
mer. Second Skin from the Olivo
Labs company can be applied to
the face directly to hide age-re-
lated changes and imitate the
specific properties of young skin,
such as elasticity.
Another variant of very thin poly-
mer covering, this one from the
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, can be used to de-
liver medications and cosmetic
remedies to the sub-surface lay-
ers of the skin, letting them grad-
ually be absorbed under
“camouflage” over the course of
the day. This innovation very much
eases the lives of those suffering
from eczema, psoriasis, and
ichthyosis.
A new artificial blood A miracle thermometer
A group of scientists from the Uni-
versity of Bristol in England has
made a breakthrough in the mass
production of blood. An article
with the results of the studies was
published in the journal Nature
Communications.
Scientists had already learned
how to obtain red blood cells in
small quantities with the help of
hematopoietic stem cells. How-
ever, the British biochemists dis-
covered that at early stages of
development the cells are capa-
ble of very active regeneration.
That fact will allow production of
artificial blood on an industrial
scale. Development of the tech-
nology will be slowed only by the
fact that for the time being labora-
tory blood is more expensive than
donor blood. Measuring body temperature
with ordinary thermometers
takes up to three minutes. But
the Thermo instrument requires
only two seconds to do the job.
The new thermometer—it’s also
a blood pressure gauge—was
designed by Withings, a French
company recently acquired by
Nokia. Sixteen infrared sensors
take more than four thousand
readings from a temporal artery
without touching the skin.
So there’s no longer any need to
coax a small child into lying qui-
etly with a thermometer: it’s
enough to apply the Thermo to
the child’s temple, and the tem-
perature readings will immedi-
ately light up on the indicator’s
LED display, in Centigrade or
Fahrenheit, whichever you pre-
fer.
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