Surgeons at the California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) in San Francisco have gotten pretty good at doing kidney transplants; they have done about 200 of them per year since 1968. But over the next two days, a team of five surgeons and over 60 support staff will complete a six-way kidney transplant, operating on 12 individuals: 6 donors and 6 recipients.
When it comes to flying, one of the ways to become a better pilot is through flight simulations, but these can often feel unrealistic.
Doctors at Peking University Third Hospital have successfully implanted the first ever 3-D-printed section of vertebra into the young patient. The boy, named Minghao, had developed a malignant tumor on his spinal cord, and some of his bones needed to be removed. So, during many hours of spinal cord surgery, surgeons at the hospital replaced part of the cancerous vertebra in his neck with the implant.
For eight years now, the DEKA prosthetic arm -- a DARPA-funded project aimed at improving the lives of amputees -- has been moving slowly toward FDA approval. Now, right on schedule, the mind-controlled, robotic prosthetic has been approved up by the Food and Drug Administration.
Since Nebraska first jump-started the trend back in 2010, close to a dozen state legislatures across the country have passed laws banning abortion at 20 weeks. Most of these restrictions are given grave-sounding titles like the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act," or some near-identical riff on the words "fetal," "pain" and "protection." All of them, no matter what they're called, rest on the stated premise that a fetus can experience pain at 20 weeks, and that this is a sufficient justification to ban all abortions after this gestational stage.
