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Is beauty a right, which, like education or health care, should be realized with the help of public institutions and expertise?

For years he has performed charity surgeries for the poor. More radically, some of his students offer free cosmetic operations in the nation’s public health system.

I asked her why she wanted to have the surgery.  “I didn’t put in an implant to exhibit myself, but to feel better. It wasn’t a simple vanity, but a  . . . necessary vanity.  Surgery improves a woman’s auto-estima.”

Eliezer Álvarez made a simple observation: Venezuelan women were increasingly using plastic surgery to transform their bodies, yet the mannequins in clothing stores did not reflect these new, often extreme proportions.

So he went back to his workshop and created the kind of woman he thought the public wanted — one with a bulging bosom and cantilevered buttocks, a wasp waist and long legs, a fiberglass fantasy, Venezuelan style

Now his mannequins, and others like them, have become the standard in stores across Venezuela, serving as an exaggerated, sometimes polarizing, vision of the female form that calls out from the doorways of tiny shops

has a new face.

has a new face.

The transplant from an anonymous donor took place at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in July.

Brain surgeons are bringing artificial intelligence and new imaging techniques into the operating room, to diagnose tumors as accurately as pathologists, and much faster, according to a report in the journal Nature Medicine.

The traditional method, which requires sending the tissue to a lab, freezing and staining it, then peering at it through a microscope, takes 20 to 30 minutes or longer. The new technique takes two and a half minutes.

In addition to speeding up the process, the new technique can also detect some details that traditional methods may miss, like the spread of a tumor along nerve fibers

Many people who get anorexia recover after therapy and counseling. But in about 20 to 30 percent of cases, the disease becomes a chronic condition that gets tougher and tougher to treat.

Neurosurgeons from the University of Toronto tried a technique called deep brain stimulation to see if it might help patients with severe anorexia.

The results didn't meet the statistical tests for significance.

the critical skills of the best surgeons I saw involved the ability to handle complexity and uncertainty. They had developed judgment, mastery of teamwork, and willingness to accept responsibility for the consequences of their choices. In this respect, I realized, surgery turns out to be no different than a life in teaching, public service, business, or almost anything you may decide to pursue. We all face complexity and uncertainty no matter where our path takes us. That means we all face the risk of failure. So along the way, we all are forced to develop these critical capacities—of judgment, teamwork, and acceptance of responsibility.

people admonish us: take risks; be willing to fail. But this has always puzzled me. Do you want a surgeon whose motto is “I like taking risks”? We do in fact want people to take risks, to strive for difficult goals even when the possibility of failure looms. Progress cannot happen otherwise. But how they do it is what seems to matter. The key to reducing death after surgery was the introduction of ways to reduce the risk of things going wrong—through specialization, better planning, and technology.

there continue to be huge differences between hospitals in the outcomes of their care. Some places still have far higher death rates than others. And an interesting line of research has opened up asking why.

I took two ibuprofens that first day. In hindsight, I didn’t need them, but I felt like I should take something. What I really needed was patience pills, and a few distractions

Come to think of it, I bring a lot of medicine with me from the United States, all over the counter, all intended to take away discomfort. The German doctors were telling me that being uncomfortable is O.K.

It reminded me of the poster in my doctor’s waiting room, the one informing us that herbal tea is the first remedy to try when we have a cold. The first remedy I try is the decongestants I bring with me from the United States. I can’t find those in Germany, nor can I find the children’s cough medicine that makes my child drowsy. I also import that.

Hard robots require a sophisticated feedback mechanism to help them determine how much force to apply during surgery so they do not damage our delicate tissues and organs. Soft robots could take advantage of their rubbery appendages to reduce the likelihood of surgical damage

Soft robots can be 3-D printed in a day or two from silicone and other materials that cost about $20.

General anesthesia has transformed surgery from a ghastly ordeal to a procedure in which the patient feels no pain.

“integrated-information theory,” which holds that consciousness relies on communication between different brain areas, and fades as that communication breaks down.

neural markers of consciousness—or more precisely, the loss of consciousness—a group led by Patrick Purdon

Researchers have developed a cheap and rapid test that reveals a person’s full history of viral infections from a single drop of blood.

The test allows doctors to read out a list of the viruses that have infected, or continue to infect, patients even when they have not caused any obvious symptoms. The technology means that GPs could screen patients for all of the viruses capable of infecting people

When a droplet of blood from a patient is mixed with the modified viruses, any antibodies they have latch on to human virus proteins they recognise as invaders. The scientists then pull out the antibodies and identify the human viruses from the protein fragments they have stuck to.

“I have lots of clients that come here and say, ‘I want to look like that mannequin,’ ” Ms. Molina said. “I tell them, ‘O.K., then get an operation.’ ”

Ms. Corro, the co-owner, explained the changes in the mannequins over just a few years: bigger breasts, bigger buttocks, svelte waists. Until recently, “the mannequins were natural, just like the women were natural,” she said. “The transformation has been both of the woman and of the mannequin.”

While Ms. Corro’s mannequins took a quantum leap in body shape several years ago, Ms. Mieles said that the busts and buttocks of her family’s mannequins had grown gradually to keep up with the trends in plastic surgery.

A POPULAR remedy for a conflict of interest is disclosure — informing the buyer (or the patient, etc.) of the potential bias of the seller (or the doctor, etc.)

disclosure: It often has the opposite of its intended effect, not only increasing bias in advisers but also making advisees more likely to follow biased advice.

But my research has found that people are still more likely to follow this advice because the disclosure creates increased pressure to follow the adviser’s recommendation.

For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.

All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’.

On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.

by approaching universality, Instagram Face actually secured its role as an instrument of class distinction—a mark of a certain kind of woman. The women who don’t mind looking like others, or the conspicuousness of the work they’ve had done

Instagram Face goes with implants, middle-aged dates and nails too long to pick up the check. Batting false eyelashes, there in the restaurant it orders for dinner all the food groups of nouveau riche Dubai: caviar, truffle, fillers, foie gras, Botox, bottle service, bodycon silhouettes. The look, in that restaurant and everywhere, has reached a definite status. It’s the girlfriend, not the wife.

Does cosmetic work have a particular class? It has a price tag, which can amount to the same thing, unless that price drops low enough.

Hitchens’s beliefs about his advanced cancer and its treatment were, for a man whose fame rested on his scepticism, uncharacteristically optimistic. I hesitate to use the word delusional, as he admitted that he would be very lucky to survive, but he clearly steadfastly hoped, right to the end, that his particular case of advanced cancer might lie on the sparsely populated right side of the bell-shaped curve of outcome statistics.

I wonder if all that medicine – which was, in fact, a form of poison – was worth it. David got ten more years, and two young children. But he also endured a disfiguring, disabling, brutal physical battering from the surgeries and chemo-sessions that tackling a tough brain tumor allow for. I say “allow for” because “required” is not the right word. What the chemo did to Christopher was beyond description – and what’s left of your body, even if the chemo works, can be extremely vulnerable to infections and diseases that can be worse than the cancer.

It seems odder to me for Christians to be as exercized by life-extension as the atheist. Put that down to the strange extremism of Ratzinger’s innovations on the question of “life”.

Language is very probably the one characteristic that separates us from the chimpanzees, our closest relatives. All other major differences between us likely stem from language.

[Language] allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind and they can attempt to do the same to you without either of you performing surgery

Humans use discrete pulses of sound -- their language -- to alter the internal settings inside someone else's brain to suit an individual's interests. Because language is not a solitary pursuit, language is a form of social learning.

social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.

the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.

I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.

But in China, Ms. Trump is widely adored. Her lavish lifestyle and business acumen resonate with many young professionals who are hungry for fame and fortune in a society that often equates material wealth with success.

“She’s very independent,” said Wang Jiabao, 28, a reality television producer in Beijing. “She represents what we’re looking for — to marry into a decent family, to look good, and to also have your own career.”

Chinese companies have also tried to profit from Ms. Trump’s popularity, filing hundreds of trademark applications using her name — Yi Wan Ka in Chinese — on products and services such as shoes, spa treatments, plastic surgery and pottery.