Nasa-Inspired 'Miracle Suit' helping to save new mothers from death

@ https://pixabay.com/under Creative Commons CC0 Washington: Inspired by Nasa research on inflated anti-gravity suit or G-suit, "miracle suits" are helping new mothers survive blood loss after birth in developing countries, including India. California-based Zoex Corporation was the first company to develop commercially available pressure garment suitable for treating shock and blood loss in new mothers. Since the pressure does not need to be as strong as in military and aviation cases, the company scrapped the old-style G-suits for a non-pneumatic version using simple elastic compression. In a recent study by Nasa Ames Research Centre and other researchers, the garments saved 13 out of 14 patients in Pakistan who were in shock from extreme blood loss. In another study in Egypt and Nigeria, the garment reduced both blood loss and mortality from postpartum hemorrhage by 50 percent. "In the field of maternal health, we generally don't see that kind of a reduction, and even more so when it's the result of a single, simple intervention," said Suellen Miller, founder of the Safe Motherhood Programme which aims to reduce pregnancy- and childbirth-related deaths and illnesses across the globe. By 2012, the World Health Organisation and the International Federation of Gynecologists and Obstetricians both decided to officially recommend...
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Football pitch-sized billboard to open in Times Square

Due to open later today, New York's Times Square is now home to one of the world's largest and most expensive digital billboards in the world. Measuring the length of a football pitch, and running the entire length of one city block, it is situated along the front of the Marriott Marquis Hotel, just outside the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Broadway. No exact measurements have been announced prior to the launch, but as a guide a football pitch in the U.S. is 110 metres long, it is said to be six to eight stories high. The site is one of the busiest in the U.S, with more than 300,000 pedestrians entering the area on a normal day. Another 115,000 drivers and passengers pass by it every day. The display feature almost 24 million LED pixels. To advertise on the screen will costs more than $2.5 million for four weeks, ranking it as one of the most expensive pieces of outdoor ad real estate on the market. A digital art exhibition by the Universal Everything studio collective will animate the screen from Tuesday night. Google will take over as the exclusive, debut advertiser a week later, on Tuesday 24 November, with a campaign that runs through the New Year. The screen is the biggest and the only one to cover an entire city block, from 5th Street to 46th Street on Broadway, in the Times Square area. Source: InAVat...
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South Africa’s great white sharks are changing locations – they need to be monitored for beach safety and conservation

South Africa is renowned for having one of the world’s biggest populations of great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias). Substantial declines have been observed, however, in places where the sharks normally gather on the coast of the Western Cape province. Sharks congregate at these locations to feed, interact socially, or rest.In Cape Town, skilled “shark spotters” documented a peak of over 300 great white shark sightings across eight beaches in 2011, but have recorded no sightings since 2019. These declines have sparked concerns about the overall conservation status of the species. Conserving great white sharks is vital because they have a pivotal role in marine ecosystems. As top predators, they help maintain the health and balance of marine food webs. Their presence influences the behaviour of other marine animals, affecting the entire ecosystem’s structure and stability. Marine biologists like us needed to know whether the decline in shark numbers in the Western Cape indicated changes in the whole South African population or whether the sharks had moved to a different location. To investigate this problem, we undertook an extensive study using data collected by scientists, tour operators and shore anglers. We examined the trends over time in abundance and shifts in distribution across the sharks’ South African range....
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