Eddy's Good News: Implantable artificial kidneys, and a recycling robot called Sorty McSortface

Virgin Radio

7 Sep 2023, 09:21

Every day during his show on Virgin Radio, Eddy Temple-Morris brings you Good News stories from around the world, to help inject a bit of positivity into your day!

Be sure to listen each day between 10am and 1pm (Monday - Friday) to hear Eddy's Good News stories (amongst the finest music of course), but if you miss any of them you can catch up on the transcripts of Eddy's most recent stories below:

Thursday 7th September 2023

Those living with kidney failure get a huge boost this week thanks to a team of renal experts in San Francisco, who’ve come up with an implantable artificial kidney that can be literally plugged in, and which won’t be attacked by our immune systems.

Say hello to the University Of California, who’ve been working on a way to end dialysis and to plug the huge gap between people who need a new kidney and the much smaller number of new kidneys available. 

The clever little device works much like a pacemaker would, and the cleverest thing is how they stop our immune system from rejecting and attacking it, using a silicon membrane and actual kidney cells to keep it safe from our autonomic internal defence mechanism. It’s been successfully implanted in pigs and it worked a treat. Next step is month-long human trials, then the very real prospect of hugely shortening the queues for a new kidney.

Via Good News Network.

Amazing tech news from the US as we meet the world’s greatest recycling robot that uses AI to sort through rubbish and it’s called Sorty McSortface, of course.

The mainstream press have got everybody scared and paranoid about artificial intelligence, meanwhile here on Virgin Radio mid-morning, for years, I’ve been telling you about the incredible ways AI is helping us, from diagnosing rare and potentially fatal conditions, to farming robots that can identify and kill ruinous bugs or weeds, to this phenomenal bit of kit being used in Boulder Colorado’s sorting centre. 

Like a giant robot chameleon, Sorty McSortface can identify and grab over 80 different things per minute and sort them. It can even recognize brand names and automatically knows what chemicals are in them, so things can be sorted very specifically, saving time and money. It’s already 99 percent accurate and is getting better with practice!

In fact, there are two identical machines at the Colorado centre and the other one is called Sir Sorts-a-lot. Of course it is!

Via Good News Network.