World’s First Robotic Surgeon with a Sense of Touch Developed
• The researchers, including one of Indian-origin, claim to have developed the world’s first robotic surgical system that can give surgeons the sense of touch-while they conduct keyhole surgery using a computer on October 2, 2016.
• The HeroSurg robot is a major breakthrough to current technology, which now limits robotic surgery to the sense of. sight, and means laparoscopic or keyhole/micro surgery will be safer and more accurate than ever before by reducing trauma and lowering risk of blood loss and infection.
• HeroSurg was developed by engineers from Deakin University in Australia and Harvard University in the US, along with Suren Krishnan from the Royal Adelaide Hospital and an Honorary Professor at Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation (IISRI).
• HeroSurg’s unique features which allow it to overcome many of the limitations of existing robotic laparoscopic systems, include collision avoidance capability, modularity and automatic patient/bed adjustment.
• HeroSurg will assist surgeons to perform demanding surgical procedures with comfort, accuracy and safety by providing real-time collision avoidance for medical instruments, and stereo-endoscopic vision.
World’s First ‘3-Parent’ Baby Born in Mexico
• World’s first ‘three-parent baby’, a child who carries genetic information from three different people, was recently born in Mexico on September 29, 2016.
• The baby was created via an In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) procedure that involved three people: the mother, the father and a woman who donated eggs.
• The scientists took DNA from the nucleus of the mother’s egg cell and inserted that genetic material into an egg cell from the donor.
• The nucleus of the donor egg had been removed, but the egg still contained a bit of DNA from the donor woman : That is, it contained genetic material from the mitochondria, or the cell’s energy powerhouses, which have their own DNA. The egg was then fertilized with sperm from the father.
• In this case, the procedure was done because the eggs of the mother contained faulty mitochondria. This caused four miscarriages.and the death of two of her children from a neurological condition called Leigh syndrome.
World’s Largest Radio Telescope Completed in China
• China built world’s largest radio telescope nicknamed Tianyan which means ‘Heavenly Eye’ or ‘The Eye of Heaven’ or the 500 m aperture spherical radio telescope (FAST) on September 29, 2016.
• It has a whopping 1640 feet wide dish the size of 30 football fields’, with the help of which the telescope will be able to detect radio signals from distant planets.
• FAST will also enable scientists to detect many more pulsars, dense, rotating stars that act as Cosmic clocks. This could provide researchers with the capability to detect gravitational waves ripples in space-time that shed light on how galaxies evolved.