21 February

Australia has a love affair with trades. But almost complete indifference to sophisticated engineering. Like this artificial heart, made of titanium, with the only moving part a single spinning disc suspended in a magnetic field. It doesn’t even try to pump, like an ordinary heart of other artificial hearts (whose pumps always fail). Instead it continuously adjusts the flow of blood as needed - the patient has no pulse, because there’s no pumping. It’s being seen as a possible solution for the thousands of Australians who die of heart failure, whose only hope right now is a heart transplant. Most donor organs come from car crashes, and with the improvements in car safety only just over 100 donor hearts are available every year. This artificial heart can potentially work for the rest of a person’s life, it may be a total revolution. No contacting moving parts means little can fail in it. And all developed by a Queensland biomedical engineer, whose dad died of heart failure. As did mine.