Unseen World!

Have you guys ever wondered when, who, how & where the health technology has evolved? Even I was wondering and pulled this article it has helped me knowing about it better. I hope even you can brush over them!! Let me know if this has been useful!

Recent news says that The Obama administration unveiled $1.2 billion in federal grants for electronic health records systems on Thursday, the first wave of funding under a health-care reform plan to create vast records-sharing networks aimed at cutting costs and improving care in the coming decade.

You can find below the timeline/history of evolutions in Healthcare Technology 

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The total proposed American defense budget for 2008 is more than half a trillion dollars—with $75 billion of that set aside for research and development. For decades, the Pentagon’s investment in science and technology has produced widely hailed achievements like the Internet and the Global Positioning System. It has also backed quixotic and costly failures, like space-based lasers. And sometimes it has gone off the deep end, funding such things as psychic spies and weapons that defy the laws of physics.

The Department of Defense began systematically funding basic and applied research in a big way after World War II. Today the Pentagon’s investment in science R&D remains a cornerstone of the country’s national security strategy. Yet in the aftermath of the low-tech attacks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), like this MQ-9 Reaper, are receiving a great deal of funding.
Image courtesy of USAF/SR. Airman Larry E. Reid Jr.

of 9/11, the growing insurgency in Iraq, and the threat of worldwide terrorism, technology experts both within and outside the Pentagon are questioning whether Defense Department research is producing the results that America needs.

So what are we getting for our money? That $75 billion budget covers a vast array of projects, from perfecting new weapon systems like the Joint Strike Fighter plane to studying pure physics. Focusing on the research side of R&D, DISCOVER looked at four key areas where the military is placing its bets: hypersonic vehicles, laser technology, using information technology and neuroscience to combine human and machine on the battlefield, and employing sociology and psychobiology to combat terrorism.

There are a lot of myths and misconceptions surrounding the current M16A1, M16A2, M4, M16A4NATO 5.56 round and its effectiveness on the battlefield. Now before you make a judgment as a soldier or as a firearm enthusiast (a more euphemistic way of saying “gun nut”), consider your sources. Who is it that is telling you the 5.56mm, or .223 if you prefer, is an ineffective round? Is this source an armchair general who has watched Blackhawk Down one too many times; or a Navy Corpsman who has been attached to a MEF fighting in Fallujah and has seen, treated and inflicted these wounds with his own M-4? People look at the .30-06 round from their grandfather’s M1 Garand and the 7.62×51mm round from their dad’s M-14 and compare it to the M-16/M-4’s 5.56 and think; “Wow, this is considerably smaller. Therefore, it must be less effective.”

M16A1, M16A2, M4, M16A4

Now Joe Nichols had it right when he said, “Size Matters.” However, when you are talking about combat cartridges this is not always the case, and I say that hesitantly. When the 5.56 was derived from Remington’s .223 in the late 1950’s, it was meant as a “force multiplier” if you will. By that I mean a soldier could literally carry twice as much ammunition as one who has the older 7.62 for the same weight. They wanted a soldier who could stay longer in the field without re-supply and could literally out-last and out-shoot the enemy in many aspects. The 5.56 is an incredibly fast and flat shooting round compared to the 7.62, but is under half the bullet weight.

So one might ask; ‘How in the world can a smaller bullet be more lethal than a bigger one?” One word: cavitation. Cavitation is the rapid formation and collapse of a substance or material after an object enters it at a relatively high velocity. I guarantee you have seen cavitation before. Next time you are in the pool or on the boat, look at your hand as it passes through the water or the propeller spinning. In both cases you will notice bubbles on the trailing edge of each. You see this because the liquid water falls below its vapor pressure. Without getting into physics and the hydrodynamics behind it, I’ll just leave it at that. When a human body is hit with a 5.56mm 62-grain bullet traveling at 3,100 feet per second; essentially the same thing happens but much, much more violently. For a split second, the cavity created inside the human body by the round from an M-16/M-4 is about the size of a basketball (if hit dead center of mass). The 5.56 creates this massive cavitation by tumbling through the body initiated by inherently unstable flight.

5.56 ballistic test

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The GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb – the future of ultra-surgical air strikes.

Since the days of the first Gulf War, when it became clear to the world that precision air strikes would be the “go to” option for the opening rounds of nearly any theater scale military operations, the technology of precision guided munitions has increased rapidly.  We have witnessed bombs being guided into their targets by lasers, GPS, and even a human watching through a camera on the nose of the weapon.  Once the concept of precision guidance was no longer a novelty, the virtuous auspices of limiting collateral damage and economic efficiency have led military planners and weapons designers to push the envelope of precision weapon technology even further.

During the Desert Storm era, the smallest precision bombs available packed 500 lb high-explosive warheads, and the 500 pounder was typically used on only the smallest of targets.  They certainly were precise enough on surgical targeting, but the massive explosion and pressure wave still causes widespread devastation to buildings and well, people, that are in the vicinity of the blast.  Now I’m not saying that it’s ever going to be possible to truly eliminate collateral damage, but I believe technology has reached a stopping point concerning precision-guided air-launched munitions.  It’s not as if limiting collateral damage is such a bad thing after all; so I guess we can go ahead and bestow the honorable hallmark characteristic of the next wave of precision munitions:  Efficiency…because accuracy is a given.

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MONTREAL — Canadian soldiers are bringing home from dusty Afghanistan a powerful, drug-resistant superbug that health officials have been worrying about for several years.

Three Canadian soldiers who recently returned from Kandahar carrying so-called "Iraqibacter" are under quarantine at a civilian hospital in Quebec City.

Two civilian patients who came in close contact with the soldiers at Hopital de l’Enfant-Jesus have also been isolated for fear they may have contracted the superbug officially named Acinetobacter baumannii.

The hospital-acquired germ, commonly found in soil and water, strikes weakened immune systems, especially in those recovering from wounds.

It has been known to cause conditions such as pneumonia, meningitis as well as blood, urinary tract and wound infections.

Some people carry the bacteria on their skin without showing symptoms.

Two years ago, the Public Health Agency of Canada warned Canadian hospitals that outbreaks could happen after wounded soldiers returned home from Afghanistan either sickened by the strain, or simply carrying it in their system.

The department did not immediately answer requests for an interview on the subject Thursday.

A 2007 report in the publication Wound Care Canada said incidences of the strain have increased in U.S. military hospitals.

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Inglourious Basterds Reviews:Quentin Tarantino has been a lot of things in his nearly 20-year career (yes, Reservoir Dogs premiered at Sundance 17.5 years ago, and yes, that makes you old), from enfant terrible to Oscar winner to untouchable fanboy icon, but he’s never seemed to strain so hard to just make a Quentin Tarantino Film as he does as writer/director of Inglourious Basterds. An 160 minute farce of historical revision, Basterds unfold in five chapters, all but one featuring a major act of violence padded with lots of footage of people sitting at tables, talking, in four different languages (five if you count Tarantino Speak, that American English dialect clogged with arcane, movie-sourced and invented slang spoken by Bible-quoting hit men and yellow jumpsuited hit women alike). So far so good, right? But the talking is notably lacking in the spark and rhythm that we’ve come to expect from Tarantino, and with a fair four-fifths of the film given over to character exposition and dull chatter, the violent setpieces feel rushed along, devoid of both the poetics of Kill Bill’s fight sequences and the rock n’ roll efficiency of the rest of his filmography.

The titular elite squad of Jewish-American soldiers assigned to hunt and scalp Nazis, led by Brad Pitt’s Jewish hillbilly (cough), is only on screen for about half the film; Pitt himself is glimpsed a scant-seeming three times in its first 90 minutes. We spend much more time in the company of Colonel Hans Landa, otherwise known as The Jew Hunter, played as a cartoon of logical evil by  Christoph Waltz, and Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), a beautiful young French Jew whose family’s murder at Landa’s hands caps off the first iteration of Tarantino’s talk talk, bang bang structure. Later, Shoshana emerges in Paris as the owner of a small cinema. There she becomes the object of infatuation of a German war hero-turned-star of his own Goebbels-produced biopic, and the next thing she knows, she’s agreed to host a gala, no-Nazi-detractors-allowed premiere for the film at her theater. Knowing that the top Nazi commanders will be in the audience, Shoshana and her projectionist boyfriend plot to lock the theater during the film and set it on fire. Meanwhile, the Basterds, in cahoots with a German film star and British film critic-turned-military officer, separately plot to do essentially the exact same thing.

Skip this next paragraph if you don’t want to know anything about the biggest hole in the plot:

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Volkswagen is issuing a voluntary recall for 13,500 vehicles equipped with its DSG transmission. According to Volkswagen, affected models include Jetta, Jetta SportWagen, GTI and Eos cars built between September 2008 and August 2009.

That means the recall applies mostly to 2009 models, but there will be a limited number of 2010 vehicles included as well.

The problem lies with a faulty temperature sensor in the DSG transmission, which may cause warning lights to illuminate in the dashboard or — in rare instances — for the transmission to shift into neutral. This could obviously be a safety hazard.

VW will contact owners of affected vehicles so they can take the cars to local dealers for repairs or replacement sensors. Owners may contact the automaker’s Loyalty Center at 800-444-8982.