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Dolphin Jumps Again with Artificial Fin
Ant writes "This Yahoo! News story mentions Fuji, a mother dolphin that lost 75 percent of her tail due to a mysterious disease, being able to jump again with the help of what is believed to be the world's first artificial fin. The 34-year-old dolphin held at Japan's largest aquarium in the southern island of Okinawa wears the rubber fin for about 20 minutes a day allowing her to jump and to swim at the same speed of other dolphins."
every year there are a few people with artificial legs at the boston marathon.
and these people can run faster than the typical human. but not fast enough to win, some really thin guy from kenya always does that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
There are more photos in the page of the Aquarium (in Japanese) Chura Umi Aquarium
Fuji was stricken by a mysterious disease causing necrosis - the death of cells - in 2002. To save her life, veterinarians had to amputate three-quarters of her tail with an electronic surgical knife.
So it sounds like it was done intentionally while in captivity.
There's quite a bit going on both in the academic world and by prosthetics manufacturers. One of the bigger struggles is getting an amputee a prosthetic that's suitable for what they're going to be doing - a foot optimized for running looks a lot different from a foot that's designed to look like a foot and that you'd wear with ordinary footwear.
Without turning this into a shill for our products, the company I work for makes an inertial-sensor based activity monitor that helps doctors choose an appropriate prosthetic depending on the patient's activity profile. This is one of our customers
Less is more.
I first heard it on the Simpsons. It's the episode where Homer goes into space and accidently breaks open the ant farm. Kent Brockman sees a close up of one of the ants and thinks that the space ship has been overrun by a super race of giant ants....
"It's unclear whether they will consume the captive crew or merly enslave them But one thing is certain, there is no stopping them...the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overloards. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted media personality I can be useful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves..."
Wow, how sad is it that I can do that from memory. Anyway, that's where I first heard that line. Although it's entirly possible that the simpsons stole it from somewhere else that I don't know about.
I wish I were as sure of anything as some people are of everything
Every time there's a story about some interesting research somebody posts this.
You're wrong.
It is not correct - in the general case - to not do research because the money could have been spent feeding starving children.
There exist numerous organisations that exist solely to collect money to help starving / sick / poor children in third world countries. They could always use more money, but this is no different than it's been in the past fifty years, and it's way better than it was before that.
Research needs to happen. Pure research, with no immediate obvious payback ends up consistantly producing more valuable results per dollar in the long term than pretty much anything else that can be done with money - assuming that civilization is n't horribly broken somehow.
Those water purifiers you mentioned? We wouldn't even have them without pure research having been done in the past.
Now, giving a dolphin an artificial fin may not seem like such a big deal - or even like it would ever matter at all, but it answers some interesting research questions: Can a dolphin adapt to a prosthesis? How long does it take? How do we make one?
Another point: You reference $95,000 as being a lot of money. It's not, especially in the context keeping captive dolphins.
It's not like if the money hadn't been spent on an artificial fin it would have gone to a charity anyway. It probably would have gone to some other dolphin-related expense.
In conclusion: Charity is not, in the general case, a better use of money than research.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
the weak are supposed to die out
So I take it that you've never used antibiotics to fight an infection. You can't use "survival of the fittest" as a law of nature. The quote was actually made by an economist describing the buisness climate of the early 1900's, not by Darwin describing his theory of evolution. The two just have superficial similarities which is why people equate the two together. Remember, "fit" is a relative term compared to the environment at the time.