The Good: I don’t know about you, but I am a huge fan of the Cosby show. Although I was not even born when the show first aired in 1984, the Nick at Nite reruns made all of the Cosbys have a place in my heart. Now to give back, Bill Cosby will be selling the sweaters of Heathcliff Huxtable from the Cosby show. Cosby’s daughter came across the sweaters one day and convinced her dad that this would be a great way to help give back and raise money for needy children. You can find the auction here, and all proceeds will be going to the Hello Friend/Ennis William Cosby Foundation.

The Bad: I was watching the Early Show this morning and saw an interview with an eight-year-old girl and her father. The girl, little Haley Lents, was on television because she swallowed 10 magnets and 20 steel balls from her Magnetix playset because “they looked like candy”. The magnets caused Haley to be in severe pain, and she was taken to the hospital to have them removed. When doctors opened Haley up they found the magnets and eight holes that they had made inside Haley’s intestines. The girl is fine, but her father is speaking up, saying that Magnetix is not doing enough to help keep children safe. I say, if your eight-year-old doesn’t know enough to not eat their toys than the problem is the parent and child, not the manufacturer of the toy. Haley’s father says he doesn’t understand how a girl with As and Bs in school could swallow these pieces.

The Good: Patients in the Intensive Care Unit of a hospital are normally confined to a bed for days. Due to the needs of these patients, many who need constant oxygen, heart monitoring and a ventilator, ICU patients are not given the same opportunity as patients in other wards to get up and walk around. This has been a problem for the physicians who believe that walking will help to decrease depression and the little ailments (bed sores, etc.) that afflict those who are bed bound.

To address the problem, John Hopkins biomedical engineering students were assigned a project to create a ICU compatible walking device. The device had to be able to withstand practical use in the ICU and should take less than four people to accompany a patient in the device. The resulting design has been receiving rave reviews from the Hopkins staff. The device is made up of two parts, one a thin rolling stand that holds monitoring equipment, and a second piece that resembles a modified walker. The walker is extended to fit both the patient and the caregiver within the bars and is on wheels. In addition, there is a ballistic nylon seat to catch patients who suddenly feel weak. The finished device, the ICU MOVER will hopefully be in widespread use within the year.

The Bad: With all the discussion of the space missions, it makes you wonder about life in space. Tasks as mundane as cleaning are different in space and are especially important. Scientists have known since MIR that bacteria can live in the antigravity atmosphere of the space stations. On MIR, the situation was rife with bacteria, from E. coli to various fungi. The current International Space Station is much cleaner, with scrubbings more often than on MIR, but the bacteria still roam free, putting astronauts at high risk for infection. It is believed that space lowers the immune system and leaves astronauts venerable to the bacteria constantly recycled through the air.

The worst part about this is what it might do for future space explorations. If we do go to Mars, all the bacteria we carry with us will be brought as well, potentially changing the Martian ecosystem forever. Something to think about.

The Good: A new technique could mean earlier and easier detection of cancer. Typically doctors MRI and like tests to check for developed tumors using magnetic resonance imaging. While accurate, the test can’t show if or how the tumor is progressing. As you can probably figure out, this means it is very hard for doctors to see if a selected treatment—be it chemo, radiation, or a mix—is working.

To remedy this, researchers at the University of Cambridge found a way to modify current MRI protocol so that normal MRI machines could see and measures the acidity of a human body. While the technique is complex, and involves cooling and heating molecules and reading the baking soda in your body (as odd as that sounds) it has shown to be highly effective in tests. A change in acidity in tumors would indicate to doctors how the treatment is working in each patient. Clinical trials on human beings will start in 2009 and hopefully within the next ten years we will see this method in practice.

The Bad: A very interesting study has emerged from New York and Yale Universities showing that your children can affect your teeth. The study showed that women in any socioeconomic group lose more teeth in their later years depending on how many children they had during their life time. The study showed that each additional child caused the woman to lose on average one more tooth. While the cause is unknown, but it just goes to show moms, it really is your kid’s fault.