What is Digg?24 Comments
- nmoog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Ha, that's pretty funny - I have to go and get a tumor removed from my auditory nerve in a couple of weeks. The options were 1) cut it out, 2) blast it with radiation from 3 directions which intersect on the tumor. Both are risky - and apparently there is an (unproven) theory that radiating a tumor can change it from benign to cancerous. They don't seem to like to blast young(ish) dudes with radiation, and surgery can cut or damage the facial nerve.
I wish they had of got this up to speed a couple of months ago (though I am hoping by having some of my skull removed I will reap the benefits of trepanning! ;) - craterburnsu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@ RezSav
"I am a menace and must be stop, before more people like haooken and ugm are created."
Do i have to list the 3 or 4 things wrong with your sentence grammar? Just letting you know you are no where near perfect yourself, so it's not a great idea to put others down. - UGM2099, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5a moron all the time or just now?
- funkytaco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5MIT students and faculty never cease to amaze me.
- Aooogah, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Sweet, now we can get rid of those brain tumors that are cell phones supposedly cause quicker!
- AeonTorpor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@Minos
I bet you didn't know that "pure water" is a diarrhetic.
:D happy hunting.
P.S. diarrhetic isn't in the digg spell checker - haooken, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Very cool stuff
/and RezSav is a f*cking moron. just fyi. - UGM2099, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4is it just me or have there recently been a ton of stories similar this? if these are all steps towards beating cancer that has me very excited.
- cokebottletuque, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Minos is right you know. we were never meant to be eating half of what we eat, we didn't evolve to thrive on nasty chemicals. that said I'm getting some pizza.
- Alex.w, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Good luck nmoog, I think I'd have gone with the cutting too.
- UGM2099, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3good thing Digg makes it easy to block users.
see ya later. - aveyuen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Is it just me, or could they have done the same thing *without* the photonic crystal fiber? What's wrong with a conventional total-internal-reflection based fiber? (the same style that they use for telecomm) Yeah, it's cool to use a PhC, but the output at the end of the fiber is going to be the same anyway, assuming single mode propagation. Anyone know something about photonic crystals that I'm missing here?
Photonic crystals are kind of the new buzz-word in the area of photonics, and Joannopoulous from MIT is pretty much the foremost researcher in this field (his 1995 book, "Molding the Flow of Light", is constantly checked out of the university library). In addition, another 'big' area of research is biophotonics. I wouldn't be surprised if this is just really effective use of PR by MIT. - Minos, on 10/12/2007, -9/+10Beat cancer?
Eat fresh uncooked food and drink pure water.
Avoid consuming processed substances ( foods, drugs, etc ) for they contain toxins which are hard to eliminate.
Fresh air, exercise and smiles.
Well, maybe not the smiles. - marcME222, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3A colleague of mine is actually working on something like this -- it's basically a machine which spins around the patient, with a radiation beam shooting out of a shape-changing lead window. The "moving window" runs on an math (optimization) algorithm to maximize the radiation being sent to the tumor, while minimizing damage to healthy cells.
- alkel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1In addition to bobulooo's comment, conventional fibers can contain defects which generate hot spots. Considering that for surgery they are probably using a pretty high power CO2 laser, these hot spots would result in a lot of heat and in fiber degradation. PC usually contain very small amounts of defects (hence the term "perfect mirror") and therefore generate very low heat . I believe you can also bend them more than conventional TIR fibers with lower losses.
- sstidman, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4While that will certainly help, most diseases, including cancers, are largely hereditary. It would still be nice to have a cure.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1The doctor is wearing glasses.
- alkel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0That makes sense... thanks for the explanation :-)
- bobulooo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0To do laser surgery, you need to deliver much more power than can be pushed through a classical TIR-based fiber. These hollow-core "OmniGuide" fibers have all the power travelling in air, enabling their use in surgery. Cool stuff. Take a look at the actual microstructured photonic crystal fibers too -- http://www.crystal-fibre.com/products/airguide.shtm.
- aveyuen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@boulooo & alkel:
Good point. I feel somewhat ashamed that I didn't pick up on that earlier. alkel, you're right about the high bending (i've seen papers with 120 degree bends with 1um radius of curvature). If you're interested, check out the original paper by Mekis et al:
“High Transmission through Sharp Bends in Photonic Crystal Waveguides”, Physical Review Letters, vol. 77, n. 18, 1996.
also, interestingly, it is not the fact that the PhC has low defects that allow them to be perfect mirrors. It is the fact that the periodicity of the dielectric contrast is such that, when solving Maxwell's equations for a propagating mode, they cannot exist inside the crystal. In essence, the waveguide is the 'defect' in the crystal itself, because that is the only place where that photon is allowed. - Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1What, did MIT just discover total internal reflection?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_internal_reflection - RezSav, on 10/12/2007, -12/+0Please do, because i don't know.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>^
@ crater
Also http://www.geocities.com/neil30330/bleach.html - RezSav, on 10/12/2007, -13/+0That I am, so much so that it affects the people who read my posts to the point where they can't spell or capitalize correctly. I am a menace and must be stop, before more people like haooken and ugm are created.
Oh and http://youtube.com/watch?v=7AIJC9S4Ly0 - RezSav, on 10/12/2007, -28/+0http://www.adultswim.com/
Check out the new & improved 
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