“While breastfeeding has many benefits for a parent and their baby, it has one major drawback: It’s incredibly difficult to know how much milk the baby is consuming.

To take the guesswork out of breastfeeding, an interdisciplinary team of engineers, neonatologists and pediatricians at Northwestern University has developed a new wearable device that can provide clinical-grade, continuous monitoring of breast milk consumption.

The unobtrusive device softly and comfortably wraps around the breast of a nursing parent during breastfeeding and wirelessly transmits data to a smartphone or tablet. Parents can then view a live graphical display of how much milk their baby has consumed in real time.

By eliminating uncertainty, the device can provide peace of mind for parents during their baby’s first days and weeks. In particular, the new technology could help reduce parental anxiety and improve clinical management of nutrition for vulnerable babies in the neonatal intensive care unit.”

From Northwestern University.

“As a segment of the marble business, sculpture is dwarfed by the industrial side, which slices slabs by the millions of tons each year. Robots help these companies mill countertops and shower stalls for markets around the world. But fine art sculpture is big business too, worth billions of dollars a year.

The first robot sculptor appeared in Carrara in 2005. Now there are about 30, and the total worldwide is around 100. Two men play outsize roles in this rapidly evolving business. One is Massari, the more evangelistic of the two. His corporate mothership, publicly traded Litix SpA, trumpets Massari’s vision of the future on the first page of a slick marketing brochure. ‘We Don’t Need Another Michelangelo: In Italy, It’s Robots’ Turn to Sculpt,’ proclaims the newspaper headline he reproduced from a New York Times piece on his company.

The other man is a bluff Midwesterner named Jim Durham… He was the biggest producer of fine art stone sculpture in America, and now, with his Franco Cervietti purchase, the world.”

From Bloomberg.

“More than 2 billion people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water, with global warming and competing demands from farms and industry expected to worsen shortages. But the skies may soon provide relief, not in the form of rain but humidity, sucked out of the air by ‘atmospheric water harvesters.’ The devices have existed for decades but typically are too expensive, energy-hungry, or unproductive to be practical.

Now, however, two classes of materials called hydrogels and metal-organic frameworks have touched off what Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls ‘an explosion of efforts related to atmospheric water harvesting.’ …

In 2023 [University of California, Berkeley chemist Omar Yaghi] and his colleagues reported an aluminum-based MOF that was cheap to make in bulk and that could wring water from desert air. In preliminary, unpublished tests, Yaghi says, prototype devices using a tweaked version of his team’s MOF can produce 200 liters of water per kilogram per day with only small amounts of added heat.

Yaghi has licensed the technology to Atoco, which is exploring using it to generate water to cool data centers, harnessing their waste heat to speed the cycling. Atoco plans to open pilot scale facilities in Texas and Arizona next year to test scaled-up versions.”

From Science.

“In a groundbreaking medical milestone, Dr. Vip Patel, founder and medical director of the Global Robotics Institute at AdventHealth Celebration, successfully performed a robotic prostatectomy on a patient located in Angola, Africa — while operating from the Nicholson Center in Celebration, Florida.”

From AdventHealth.