August 22, 2019
TOP OF THEIR GAME
Last year, swimmer Ben Lecomte jumped into the ocean in Japan and headed east. Lecomte was swimming to raise awareness of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the vortex of plastic waste that’s accumulated in the Pacific Ocean, and at times during his swim Lecomte reported running into a piece of floating plastic every three minutes. Though bad weather prevented him from crossing the entire Pacific — his original goal — Lecomte did swim as far as Hawaii, which is not exactly peanuts. His feat of endurance was aided by Vivid iq, a laptop-sized ultrasound system from GE Healthcare that allowed medical workers to monitor Lecomte’s cardiac activity. It’s just one way in which GE technology is supporting elite athletes worldwide.
Feats of strength: In New Zealand, the additive-manufacturing company Zenith Tecnica used 3D printers built by Arcam EBM, a GE Additive company, to create a tough-as-nails titanium arm for Anna Grimaldi, a Paralympic athlete whose regular prosthetic was no match for her rigorous weight-training regimens. And in 2017, GE Healthcare’s Athlete Management Solution was able to crunch the data and help the International Olympic Committee determine the cause of a series of crashes that had occurred on a luge test track in the run-up to the 2018 games in South Korea. That helped reduce athlete injuries — as did a GE Healthcare partnership with the NBA, which funded research into improved bone stress injury prevention, early-diagnosis techniques and innovative treatment protocols.
Learn more here about how GE technology and know-how is helping athletes aim for the top.
COSMIC CRYSTAL REVELATIONS
Aside from the existence of black holes, gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are one of the universe’s great mysteries. Rapid flashes of the most energetic form of radiation from the depths of outer space, GRBs were first observed in the 1960s but remain poorly understood. Since 2004, three satellites have been helping unravel the mystery. The most recent, India’s Astrosat, is making what the Indian government describes as “mouth-watering” strides thanks to a trippy sensor developed by GE from a highly sensitive semiconductor crystal. That sensor wasn’t developed to study the farthest reaches of the universe, though — quite the opposite, in fact. It came from GE Healthcare, whose scientists created the technology to help doctors look at the tiniest parts of the human body: its atoms and molecules.
Extra sensitive perception: The sensor relies on a compound of cadmium, zinc and tellurium, CZT, which doesn’t lend itself to simple manufacturing: Crystals take months to grow and can easily end up too flawed or fragile to use. But GE Healthcare scientists developed a proprietary method for growing CZTs more quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively — a boon both in and out of this world, as CZT radiation detectors are able to convert gamma or X-ray radiation into electronic signals with a high degree of sensitivity. In astrophysics, the sky’s the limit in terms of what they’ll be able to achieve. And in healthcare, the technology allows doctors to use smaller doses of radiation on patients, yet still achieve greater image contrast and resolution as they chase down disease.
Get the whole story here, and the black-hole story too — that’s one possible source of GRBs.
— VIDEO OF THE WEEK —
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“I remember walking on the beach with my father as a little kid, and we never saw plastic. Today I walk on the same beaches, and they’re covered in plastic and debris. I decided the best thing I could do to bring awareness to this issue was use my passion for open-water swimming.”
— Ben Lecomte, endurance swimmer
Quote: GE Reports. Image: Ben Lecomte.
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