steve barrett

You should probably pull over and check it out.

R&D in knives has been pretty slow for the past few thousand years. This year a company called Wasp announced a new weapon that is leaps and bounds beyond the knives, you, me, and the cavemen were familiar with. The Wasp Knife has a cartridge of compressed air in the handle, when the knife is pressed into tissue the air is forced through the tip of the blade into the body of the victim. The instant balloon of air causes major ruptures which are pretty damn devastating. Enough talk, check it.

I’m all for green energy. I especially love the new wave of smart engineering behind it. Windmills have been around for years - in fact, windmills have been around for thousands of years, and that’s part of what’s so surprising about this video. According to the description of this video the braking mechanism that slows the windmill to tolerable speeds in high winds failed. This allowed the windmill to build up some incredible speed and eventually the whole thing gave out.

Quite impressive.

This little batman villian was born in March 2008 just outside of New Delhi, India. According to an MSNBC rewrite of an AP article the baby is able to drink milk from either mouth. Also, both pairs of eyes blink simultaneously. To me, this indicates there’s one brain - or one identity that controls both faces.

This reminds me of a book I read a year or two ago called the Mind & The Brain by Jeffrey M. Schwartz. The book was about neuroplasticity, which in a nutshell, is the brains ability to reorganize itself at all stages of life. The books author originally started by studying Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

OCD is a well known disorder that gives people strong compulsions to repeat certain tasks endlessly - like washing your hands or organizing things on your desk. It happens when a certain circuit in the brain gets caught in an endless loop. The mechanics behind OCD were a mystery until recent advances in brain imagery like fMRI. Functional MRI is like any other MRI in that it images the brain by way of magnetic resonance. The functional part simply means that the imaging process is repeated over time to allow doctors to see video of what’s happening within the brain as the perform experiments on the patient. By placing dirty rags or other offending objects near a patient while under fMRI they were able to see the process of compulsions acting out against the patient and identify the source of the disorder.

Dr. Schwartz covers dozens of amazing topics like that throughout the book. One that relates to our double faced baby is the layout of the motor complex in the brain, which is where all of the parts of your body connect to your brain. It’s the map that lets the brain move your leg for example, when you are taking a step out of the shower. The purpose of the topic as discussed in the book, was neuroplasticity of the motor complex, mainly in stroke patients. When someone suffers a stroke, part of their brain is often left dormant. Neuroplasticity allows a patients brain to reorganize and utilize another part of their brain as motor complex. It’s the process that lets you slowly recover from a stroke thats left your brain damaged by moving the functions of the dormant brain tissue to other healthy but less-used parts of the brain.

I wonder if this child, later in life, will develop motor skills that allow her to control both faces independently of one another. If anything, this unique deformity will allow for a glimpse into the way the brain works by providing an experiment we could never produce on our own.

I must say the kid is lucky. Very often, birth defects aren’t as clean as this one. If the two faces hadn’t completely separated during development, half-split eyes and other unsightly effects could haunt the poor kid and equate to a less than thrilling existence.

what more could you ask for?