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posted by Marc Abrahams in Arts and Science, Magazine (AIR), Research News | Comments Off on Clicker Training for Surgeons and Other Animals, and other surprises about surgeons
A cough led to a cast—a bronchial cast—for (or rather from) the patient described in this medical report.
“Cast of the Right Bronchial Tree,” Gavitt A. Woodard and Georg M. Wieselthaler, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 379, November 29, 2018, p. 2151. (Thanks to Emily Willingham for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of California, San Francisco, explain:
“A 36-year-old man was admitted to the intensive care unit with an acute exacerbation of chronic heart failure. His medical history included heart failure with an ejection fraction of 20%, bioprosthetic aortic-valve replacement for bicuspid aortic stenosis, endovascular stenting of an aortic aneurysm, and placement of a permanent pacemaker for complete heart block. An Impella ventricular assist device was placed for management of acute heart failure, and a continuous heparin infusion was initiated for systemic anticoagulation. During the next week, the patient had episodes of small-volume hemoptysis, increasing respiratory distress, and increasing use of supplemental oxygen (up to 20 liters delivered through a high-flow nasal cannula). During an extreme bout of coughing, the patient spontaneously expectorated an intact cast of the right bronchial tree.”
The relief did not last long. The patient died a week later.
posted by Marc Abrahams in Research News | Comments Off on Breathing: A Sigh of Relief (medical report)
If you were to take part in a prolonged inline roller-skate street journey involving the rhythmic swaying and waving of your outstretched arms in a circular arc, you might end up suffering from oedema (a.k.a. edema). As did Doctor Sody Naimer[pictured] of the Department of Emergency Medicine, Neve Dekalim, Goosh Katif, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.
Leading the doctor to wonder, en passant, why ice skaters – who are also prone to a lot of arm rotation – don’t as a rule seem to get oedema as a result. His hypothesis is :
“Possible reasons why this problem does not occur during ice skating are the fact that long distances without any stops are uncommon and the cold environment may provide protection through peripheral vasoconstriction.”
“The imagination in the Japanese head is really infinite. The Japanese have won awards for 12 consecutive years from the Ig Nobel Prize, which was founded in 1991. They are also the largest winners after the United Kingdom and the United States. The country, why is it that in such a seemingly orderly and somewhat boring nationality, how can these Japanese people have such ‘abnormal’ thoughts? This question may be found in the weak chicken robot made by a university professor….”
“In 1988, more than a dozen of opera’s greatest superstars—including Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, and Birgit Nilsson [pictured here]—added their names to a petition before the Italian government, asking it to lower the standard pitch at which all orchestras are tuned. At the time, international standard pitch was set at 440 Hz, which is to say that the A above middle C should be tuned to resonate at 440 cycles per second. The petition asked the government to lower this to 432 Hz, claiming that “the continual raising of pitch for orchestras provokes serious damage to singers, who are forced to adapt to different tunings from one concert hall or opera to the next,” and that “the high standard pitch is one of the main reasons for the crisis in singing, that has given rise to ‘hybrid’ voices unable to perform the repertoire assigned to them….”
“This campaign had been originally inspired by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. [pictured here], whose collaborators uncovered the historical evidence that Giuseppe Verdi, Italy’s great composer and nation-builder, had successfully battled to impose a diapason of A=432, based on Middle C=256, as the official tuning of the Italian armed forces in 1884.”
Here’s a video that’s mostly audio, of an orchestra tuning up—trying to become in pitch. See if you can hear what pitch—exactly what pitch—they are trying to attain:
posted by Marc Abrahams in Arts and Science | Comments Off on Dickey’s gander at a quibble about pitch: 432 Hz for orchestras?
