Hearts heart new mini measuring device
Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, along with researchers at the German national metrology institute, say they've successfully tracked a human heartbeat with NIST's mini atom-based magnetic sensor, a development that might one day lead to readings more precise than currently possible using electrocardiograms.
The key advantage to using the magnetic signals of the heartbeat, says principal investigator John Kitching, is that they "are not affected at all while propagating from the source--the heart, say--to outside the body because the body is essentially transparent to magnetic fields." Electrical signals, on the other hand, &… Read more