Buttle's World

22 September, 2008

The Glove

Filed under: Posts — clgood @ 9:57

A couple of Stanford biologists have invented an amazing set of gloves.

In the early 1990s, Heller and Grahn first began looking at using controlled heat to halt tremors in patients coming out of anesthesia. When they put their device over the hand and arm of a patient at Stanford Medical Center, “The core temperature went up so fast,” Grahn said, “we thought our recording equipment had broken.” The tremors stopped.

Then they looked at using it for cooling. Katie bar the door.

Their first “aha” moment in cooling came after they talked their assistant Vinh Cao into doing his regular workouts in the lab instead of at the gym. His routine included 100 pull-ups. One day, Grahn and Heller started using an early version of the Glove to cool him for 3 minutes between rounds of pull-ups. They saw that with the cooling, his 11th round of pull-ups was as strong as his first. Within six weeks of training with the cooling breaks, Cao did 180 pull-ups a session. Six weeks later, he went from 180 to 616.

As you can imagine, the DOD is as interested as sports teams.

Update:

Wired has an article on just how interested.

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