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liquid lens

05.06.2004

The Dutch firm "Philips" has created a zoom lens based on the property of an oil drop to spread or concentrate under the influence of an electrical voltage.

Previously, Philips used the same effect, but on a miniature scale, to create a paper-thin television screen. A drop of aqueous electrolyte and a drop of oil are placed in a glass cylinder. Liquids do not mix; a flat interface appears between them. But it is worth applying tension to the ends of the cylinder, as a drop of oil bends, turning into a convex lens.

When the poles are reversed, the oil recedes, forming a concave surface. By smoothly changing the voltage and its sign, it is possible to obtain lenses with different focal lengths - from 50 millimeters to infinity (when the interface between oil and water is flat). Switching across the entire zoom range takes less than ten milliseconds.

Such a lens is useful for digital cameras built into cell phones. It can also be used in medical endoscopes, as well as in laser DVD players for focusing the reading beam on different layers of the disc.

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The Internet makes life worse for both doctors and patients 29.03.2018

Now a lot of people, when they feel health problems, do not go to the doctor, but start searching for symptoms on the Internet. And this has a bad effect not only on patients, but also on doctors.

If you don’t deceive yourself, then it’s worth confessing: almost all people who have the Internet, in one situation or another, instead of going to the doctor, were looking for how to treat this or that “sore” on the Internet with not too serious results.

It turns out that self-diagnosis not only prevents the doctor from starting treatment on time and upsets the patient himself, it also has negative consequences for medicine in general. Patients who spend too much time on medical sites demand serious treatment from doctors, which results in prescribing antibiotics for any reason, and therefore increasing the resistance of bacteria to antibiotics.

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Back in 2013, a Pew Research Center study found that about 35% of Americans use the Internet to diagnose both themselves and those they know. And of course, in 2018, this figure has only increased.

There is no understanding of how to deal with it. There is no easy solution to this problem. In the end, the response of the patient and the degree of his satisfaction with medical services are one way or another part of the medical practice. Medicine unexpectedly faced a rather strange and even ironic problem: doctors have always wanted patients to be more savvy in matters of health, but at least in the case of antibiotics, this can lead to truly terrible consequences.

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