Surgery to embed a nerve-stimulating implant in a patient in a persistent vegetative state (15 years), resulted in the patient reverting to a "minimally conscious" state.
After lying in a vegetative state for 15 years, a 35-year-old male patient in France appears to have regained minimal consciousness following months of vagus nerve stimulation, researchers report today in Current Biology.
The patient, who suffered severe brain damage in a car crash, had shown no signs of awareness or improvement before. He made no apparent purposeful movements and didn't respond to doctors or family at his bedside. But after researchers surgically implanted a device that stimulates the vagus nerve, quiet areas of his brain began to perk up—as did he.
His eyes turned toward people talking and could follow a moving mirror. He turned his head to follow a speaker moving around his bed. He slowly shook his head when asked. When researchers suddenly drew very close to his face, his eyes widened as if he was surprised or scared. When caregivers played his favorite music, he smiled and shed a tear.
Note that "respond" is on the level of "turning his head when asked, though that took a minute."
A few thoughts on this:
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:28PM (2 children)
Now that systemd has been entrenched for a couple of years in even the most conservative of Linux distros (like Debian), and much longer in Fedora, it's getting harder and harder to find entry-level sysadmins who have experience with Linux distros that don't use systemd. You really start to worry for society when a new Linux sysadmin says, "Where's journalctl? All Linux systems should have journalctl!" while working on a server running Debian 7.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:38PM
I yearn for the days when there were significant differences between Unix flavors, competent sysadmins adapted to whatever they were using at the moment, and incompetent idiots ran away screaming. Linux/systemd is too homogeneous, but "idiot friendly" is what young dumb devops need, because they are stupid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @12:33AM
lol debian in the enterprise hahaha heheh hohohoh HAHAHAHAHAHA