2015 - Google pairs with Sanofi to move diabetes patients to develop smart insulin delivery devices, smart measurement devices, and an
interface and an integrating platform that helps physicians and patients
see how they’re doing,
2014 - Google agreed to work with Novartis to develop contact lenses
that use tiny sensors to read blood-sugar levels from tears.
2014 - Google is developing disease-detecting nanoparticles, which would enter a patient's bloodstream via a swallowed pill. A wrist-worn sensor will monitor the blood for the unique traces of cancer.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29802581
2014 - Google acquired a company that offer a spoon to counteract the tremors caused by Parkinson's disease.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/25/google-launches-smart-spoon-shaking-hands-liftware
(2) Biomechanics: Replacing a propeller with a flapping fin (2015-09)
Adrian Thomas, a professor of biomechanics at the University of Oxford’s Department of Zoology
(3) Heart repair for stroke patients - Prof Pilar Ruiz-Lozano at Stanford University - soaked a collagen patch in a protein known as Fstl1 and stitched it on
to the hearts of animals who had experienced heart attacks. New muscle cells and blood vessel begins to grow. (2015-09) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34259213
(4) Anti quorum sensing molecule
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/44/17981.short
The Economist | Technology and health: To sleep, perchance http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21651112-screens-bedtime-harm-sleep-effect-biggest-teenagers-sleep?frsc=dg%7Cd via @theeconomist
William Smith (1769-1839) is often referred to as the "Father of English Geology" - a title bestowed on him by The Geological Society, which at first had been reluctant to embrace his vision.
The organisation's first members were drawn from the metropolitan elite, and they took a rather disdainful view of the blacksmith's son turned surveyor.
But the big landowners knew his worth. They brought Smith in to help them maximise the worth of their estates - to drain land, to improve the soil, to find building stone, and, above all, to find coal.
The Geological Society of London was at first disdainful towards the West Country surveyor
It is this work that would have brought him into contact with the rocks and with the fossils that would lead him to his greatest scientific contribution.
John Henry explained: "The concept which enabled him to do the mapping and that drove him along almost obsessively was this realisation that specific fossils were unique to a specific stratum, and that you knew where you were in a sequence if you could see what the fossils were. That was the breakthrough. People had been collecting them for a long time and naming them in the Linnaean way, but without any real idea that they were in a sequence. But Smith knew it."
Today, it is called the "principle of faunal succession", and this idea holds that because fossils succeed one another in order, rocks containing similar fossils are similar in age.
This principle has enabled scientists to construct the geological timescale by which the relative ages of rocks can be measured, and thereby understand the history of the Earth.
No wonder Simon Winchester called his 2001 book about William Smith, The Map that Changed the World.
Monday, 23 March, is Smith's birth date.
Sir David Attenborough is going to unveil a plaque at Smith's former residence at 15 Buckingham Street on London's Embankment.
