Helmholtz and League of Legends

The week before Berlin was a little bit more laid back, but still really busy. We went to one of the facilities in Aachen with our program. This particular facility focused on the Cardiovascular System, so they had a lot of things on pumps, blood oxygenaters, valves, and other things that had to do with testing the products already being made to gather some money for the facility. After the short lecture, we took a tour of the labs, which was absolutely amazing to go through. We split up into two groups because bringing 24 people into a lab at one time is absolutely not at all possible. Our guide told us about all the different labs and what they were testing over. We walked through a lab that was making and improving the pumping mechanism for their pulsified artificial heart as well as monitoring the effect that this had on the Vena Cava and Aorta and what the ventricle had to do to get blood up into the Aorta. It was pretty cool because they had reconstructed the ventricle and were making it contract and monitoring it. There was another room that was completely devoted to suturing the stents and valves by hand. Yeah, all of those things are done by hand in every place that makes them either for sale or for research. Another room was devoted to testing blood, while a different one was testing materials and a separate room only tested how long these implants would last (theoretically) once implanted. It was really interesting to go through all these rooms with a researcher that would explain what was going on in the lab at that point in time and what the ultimate goals were.

 The institute we went to

 They make these model hearts to help surgeons figure out how they want to operate

These molds are used to make artificial Aortas to test things with

 

but the week wasn't all science and no play. I actually got a lesson in the strategy of League of Legends from the resident gamer here. I went in to get some work done for the upcoming presentation, but when I got there he was just about to start a match. Since my computer needed to charge anyway, I plugged it in and sat down to watch him. It was interesting to see the different positions that each person could play and how teamwork was such a huge deal to win the game. He explained everything that was going on, what was good or bad, and answered all my questions whenever they cropped up. It was really refreshing to not have something pressing (other than this darn project) that just added more stress in my life and to see one of the real-time strategy games that I haven't had a lot of experience with before.

Erin Z