Wait, What!?

• New Age Medical Care: Surgeons treating 4-month-old Teegan Lexcen (born with only one lung and a critically deformed heart) had given up on her, but doctors at Nicklaus Children's Hospital in Miami jury-rigged a surgical tool that saved the infant's life. In a delicate seven-hour procedure, using an iPhone app and $20 Google Cardboard box virtual-reality viewers, doctors guided themselves through Teegan's chest based on two-dimensional body scans that the app had converted to 3-D. (Old-style 3-D images, they said, were too grainy for precision surgery.) [WFOR-TV (Miami), 12-22-2015]

• Too Much Information: In January, the British sex toy company Hot Octopuss, trying for a spurt of publicity in New York City, unveiled a reconfigured pay phone booth at 5th Avenue and 28th Street in Manhattan that offered a seat, a laptop, a Wi-Fi connection, and a "privacy curtain" to help people (mostly men, one imagines) relieve stress "on both your mind and body." A company rep claimed that about 100 men "used" the booth its first day, but what the men actually did there is "private." [ArsTechnica.com, 1- 18-2016]

Comment by clicking here.