Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Carry Sunbeams Home in a Jar
Move over scalpel, make way for sunlight surgery.Putting Sunlight to Good Use
"Surgeons in Israel have performed the first surgery on a live animal using not scalpels or a laser, but sunlight.
The technique, which was performed on rat livers, could have advantages over laser surgery for two reasons: It's cheaper, and it won't damage the surgeon's eyes...
...While a laser unit costs more than $100,000, the solar concentrator that Gordon and Feueermann built costs about $1,000.
The solar fiber-optic concentrator makes sunlight about 15,000 times stronger than normal. The researchers have been testing the technology on chicken breasts and livers removed from animals for several years, but this was their first experiment on a live animal."
Very interesting article. Read it all.
By the way, their little quip about how Seattle would be out for this sort of thing because it requires constant sunlight is not entirely correct.
While Seattle may be out during the fall and winter months, it really does not rain as much here as everyone thinks it does. I've been roasting right along with the rest of you this summer.
