Word of the Day - 2 december 2013

Word of the Day

lather
Definition:	(noun) Agitation resulting from active worry.
Synonyms:	fret, stew, swither, sweat
Usage:	"I'm not going to get into a lather over this defeat," said the manager. Quote of the Day Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a  love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who  condescends to be so treated. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) This Day in History Barney Clark Receives World's First Permanent Artificial Heart (1982) In the late 1940s, doctors at the Yale School of Medicine used parts from an  Erector Set to build  the first artificial heart pump. The device bypassed the heart of a dog for more than an hour.  However, an artificial heart would not be implanted in a human until decades later.  Barney Clark, a Seattle dentist with congestive heart failure, was the first recipient. Though the surgery was successful, Clark never recovered enough to leave the hospital and died of complications after how long?.... Artificial heart An artificial heart is a device that replaces the heart. Artificial hearts are typically used to  bridge the time to heart transplantation, or to permanently replace the heart in case  heart transplantation is impossible. Although other similar inventions preceded it going  back to the late 1940s, the first artificial heart to be successfully implanted in a human  was the Jarvik-7, designed by Robert Jarvik and implemented in 1982. The first two  patients to receive these hearts, Barney Clark and William Schroeder, survived 112  and 620 days beyond their surgeries, respectively.[1] An artificial heart is distinct from a ventricular assist device designed to support  a failing heart. It is also distinct from a cardiopulmonary bypass machine, which is  an external device used to provide the functions of both the heart and lungs and  are only used for a few hours at a time, most commonly during cardiac surgery. Origins A synthetic replacement for the heart remains one of the long-sought holy grails of modern medicine.  The obvious benefit of a functional artificial heart would be to lower the need for heart transplants,because the demand for organs always greatly exceeds supply. Although the heart is conceptually a pump, it embodies subtleties that defy straightforward  emulation with synthetic materials and power supplies. Consequences of these issues  include severe foreign-body rejection and external batteries that limit patient mobility.  These complications limited the lifespan of early human recipients to hours or days.