Over the last 150 years, the field of medicine has accomplished many astonishing things. Some of these medical 【小题1】 are well-known, antibiotics, vaccines and organ transplants, for example. Here are three success stories in the world of medical science.

On July 2, 2008, D’Zhana Simmons from South Carolina was given a heart transplant. She 【小题2】 Kfroma condition called dilated cardiomyopathy(扩张型心肌病), which meant that her heart was weakened and her blood wasn’t being pumped efficiently. Her new heart failed to 【小题3】 properly, so doctors fitted two pumps to keep her blood 【小题4】 while they went looking for a new heart. It was almost four months later, on October 29, that another transplant was carried out successfully. In 【小题5】, she’d lived without a heart for 118 days. This is thought to be the longest a pediatric patient has been kept alive without any heart at all.

In1999, a patient in a persistent vegetative state(植物人状态) due to a motor accident was seen to be twitching(抽动) by one of his nurses. His doctor 【小题6】 a common sleeping pill, zolpidem, in case this twitching was caused by discomfort. The doctor crushed it on a spoon, fed it to the patient, and was shocked when just half an hour later, the comatose(昏迷的)person made a noise for the first time in five years. This simple 【小题7】 has since been tried with several other patients with marvelous results. Not all patients respond--in fact, around forty percent don’t show any improvement--but those who are successfully rescued from their comas are finally able to 【小题8】 their loved ones, and even have conversations.

Blindness is not a single, uniform condition; it can be variously caused by problems in the eyes, the nerves and the brain. Thanks to machine implants, people who were completely blind sometimes become capable of【小题9】 colours and describing objects.

The device works like a digital camera, creating an image and then sending signals through nerve cells to the brain. Doctors were also able to restore sight to a man who had been blind for forty-three years; they did this with the help of stem cells, one of the most 【小题10】 fields in medicine. Neither of these treatments are yet perfect, but they show what science may be capable of in the future.

New Effort To Clean Up Space Junk Reaches Orbit (轨道)

A demonstration mission to test an idea to clean up space debris (碎片) was launched Monday morning local time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Known as ELSA-d, the mission will 【小题1】 technology that could help capture space junk, the millions of pieces of orbital debris that float above Earth.

The more than 8,000 metric tons of debris threaten the loss of services we rely on for 【小题2】 life, including weather forecasting, telecommunications and GPS systems.

The spacecraft works by attempting to -attach itself to dead satellites and pushing them toward Earth to burn up in the 【小题3】.

The mission, which will be run from the U.K., will carry out this catch and release process 【小题4】 over the course of six months. The goal is to prove the servicer satellite’s ability to track down and remove with its target in varying levels of 【小题5】.

Space junk has been a growing problem for years as human-made objects such as old satellites and spacecraft parts build up in low Earth orbit until they 【小题6】, deorbit, explode or crash with other objects, breaking into smaller pieces of waste.

According to a recent report by NASA, at least 26,000 of the millions of pieces of space junk are orbiting along at 17,500 mph, they could “destroy a satellite on impact”. More than 500,000 pieces are a “mission-ending threat” because of their ability to impact 【小题7】 systems, fuel tanks and spacecraft cabins.

The development of other cleanup technologies has been in progress for years. In 2016, Japan’s space agency sent a 700-meter chain into space to try to slow down and 【小题8】 space junk. In 2018, a device called RemoveDebris successfully cast a net around a copy satellite.

The European Space Agency also plans to send a(n) 【小题9】 robot into orbit in 2025, which the organization’s former director general has referred to as a space “vacuum cleaner”.

These efforts could prove 【小题10】 important as private space ventures like SpaceX continue to disorder low Earth orbit with a huge number of satellites.

Having a microchip implanted in a man’s brain may be common in sci-fi movie plots, but it may soon become an actual possibility.

Elon Musk - a U. S. tech mogul(大亨), founder of Space X and co-founder of electric car maker Tesla - has been working on this technology. On August 28, Musk gave a live-stream 【小题1】 of the chip, which was implanted into the head of a pig named Gertrude.

The chip, 【小题2】 by Musk’s company Neuralink, is the size of a coin, but don’t let its size fool you. The tiny chip has over 3,000 electrodes(电极)attached to 【小题3】 threads which can monitor about 1,000 neurons(神经元). It collects neural signals from an area of the brain, and then transmits those signals 【小题4】 to nearby computers, according to MSN. In the live-stream, Gertrude could be seen walking around her pen sniffing the ground while a monitor showed her brain activity.

Though the technology is still in its early stage, it is 【小题5】 for humans. This technology “would solve a lot of brain / spine injuries and is ultimately essential for AI symbiosis(共生),” which allows the human brain to merge(融合)with an artificial intelligence, Musk said in previous interviews.

When the device can be 【小题6】 to humans, its main goal will be to help those who have mobility issues, such as those suffering from paralysis. Musk hopes this technology could also be used to help those with hearing and eyesight issues and one day lead to a cure for epilepsy(癫痫).

Although such a device could, in 【小题7】, repair those problems, putting it into practice is by no means a piece of cake. Currently, the device can transmit signals from about 500 neurons in the pig’s brain. The number is tiny when 【小题8】 to 80 billion neurons in a human brain. And to cover the whole human brain also means the electrodes have to be much smaller.

Also implanting the chip into the brain poses a(n) 【小题9】 danger. There is a risk of the immune system attacking this foreign body.

Right now, the hope of controlling the brain via controlling a few neurons seems 【小题10】 optimistic. “There are many technological challenges to overcome before Neuralink can use its devices to achieve the corrective purposes it foresees for them,” said Yuan Langfeng, an associate professor at the University of Science and Technology of China.