Baby's Life Saved by World's Smallest Artificial Heart

Italian doctors implanted an artificial heart that weighed only 11 grams, making it the smallest ever used. It kept the child alive long enough to receive a human heart:

"In March, the smallest artificial heart in the world was implanted at the Bambino Gesu Hospital in Rome," Antonio Amodeo, a senior hospital official, said in a statement.

"The device, a titanium pump weighing only 11 grams and that can endure a flow of up to 1.5 litres per minute, was used in an emergency case of a 16-month-old infant suffering from dilated myocardiopathy with a serious infection of the ventricular assistance device that had been implanted previously."


Link -via Gizmodo

Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user o5com

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Also add Harlan Ellison -- multi-award-winning American fantasist, author of "'Repent Harlequin! Said The Tick Tock Man" and "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" -- who, when younger, liked to ocassionally write while starkers. One instance of such behavior --writing "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" while sitting naked in a Las Vegas Hotel room -- resulted in his contracting pneumonia as a result! He's still around, still writing, and was recently nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature.
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You didn't include maybe the most famous nude writer...Jean-Paul Marat, journalist, propagandist, etc. of the French Revolution. He had Very Itchy Skin which he thought he had contracted while hiding out in the sewers of Paris (though some modern day people think he might have suffered from celiac disease) and the only place he could be comfortable was sitting in the bathtub. Therefore, he did mostof his writing while in the bath, and he was murdered in that state by Charlotte Corday, as immortalized in a painting by David.
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Don't forget historian Forrest McDonald. Booknotes Interview:

LAMB: If we could see you in your environment writing this book, what would we see?

McDONALD: You'd see me writing in the nude most of the time.

LAMB: In the nude?

McDONALD: Yes. We live in total isolation out in the country. They don't even read the electric meter because the electric man can't find it. We have to read our own meter. We've got wonderful isolation, and it's warm most of the year in Alabama and why wear clothes? I mean, they're just a bother. You'd see me sitting on the porch. We have a house that's mainly glass and otherwise screen and sitting out on the porch with a big 8-and-a-half-by-14 yellow tablet and writing. I write it out by hand. My wife, who is a very fine harpsichordist and has become a fantastic typist, then transcribes. I do a lot of editing before I turn it over to her, and then she edits with her fingers as she goes along. So we're really at a third or fourth draft by the time we get a first typed draft. We never use word processors, and then we'll let it sit and edit it some more. I'll keep on writing.
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