Skip to main content

Slashdot: The World Is Running Out of Helium. Why Doctors are Worried

The World Is Running Out of Helium. Why Doctors are Worried
Published on October 31, 2022 at 12:45AM
NBC News reports: A global helium shortage has doctors worried about one of the natural gas's most essential, and perhaps unexpected, uses: MRIs. Strange as it sounds, the lighter-than-air element that gives balloons their buoyancy also powers the vital medical diagnostic machines. An MRI can't function without some 2,000 liters of ultra-cold liquid helium keeping its magnets cool enough to work. But helium — a nonrenewable element found deep within the Earth's crust — is running low, leaving hospitals wondering how to plan for a future with a much scarcer supply.... [F]our of five major U.S. helium suppliers are rationing the element, said Phil Kornbluth, president of Kornbluth Helium Consulting. These suppliers are prioritizing the health care industry by reducing helium allotments to less essential customers. Hospitals haven't canceled patients' MRIs or shut down machines yet. They have seen helium costs rise at an alarming rate, though — possibly up to 30%, guessed Phil Kornbluth, president of Kornbluth Helium Consulting. But without an end in sight for the helium shortage, the future of MRI remains uncertain.... The problem is that no other element is cold enough for the MRI. "There's no alternative," said Donna Craft, a regional construction manager for Premier Inc. who contracts with helium suppliers for some 4,000 hospitals. "Without helium, MRIs would have to shut down...." GE and Siemens are both developing MRIs requiring less liquid helium. Siemens recently introduced one requiring just 0.7 liters, and, according to Panagiotelis, GE rolled out a machine that's "1.4 times more efficient than previous models." These technologies aren't widely available, though, and replacing the country's 12,000 MRI machines — each weighing up to 50,000 pounds — is anything but a quick fix. Meanwhile, hospitals keep installing additional conventional MRI machines to meet demand for diagnostic scans. The article notes some scientists are already shutting down research projects that require helium. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Wildbear for submitting the article!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Slashdot: Battery Fires At Recycling Centres Are Costing the UK £1bn a Year

Battery Fires At Recycling Centres Are Costing the UK £1bn a Year Published on 2026-08-23T00:29:00Z Wrongly discarded lithium batteries, such as those in vapes, are causing more than 10 fires a week at U.K. recycling centers, according to figures shared with the Guardian: The Environment Services Association (ESA), the trade body for waste management companies, said its members had reported 1,518 fires in the year to March 2026. At least 541 of these fires were directly attributed to lithium ion batteries, the survey found. There were a further 216 battery fires in bin lorries [garbage trucks]. The ESA said the reported number of battery-related fires underestimated the scale of the problem, because in most incidents it was impossible to determine the cause of the blaze. A spokesperson said: "We know 40% of fires at recycling centres are caused by batteries, but we think the actual number is more like 70%." It estimates that annual cost of these fires has increased from ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Slashdot: How the FSF Sysadmins are Blocking Botnets with reaction

How the FSF Sysadmins are Blocking Botnets with reaction Published on 2026-07-11T21:47:00Z For nearly two years the Free Software Foundation has been fighting web crawlers (including many aggressively scraping training data for AI models). A botnet controlling about five million IPs hit one system for six months in 2025. Their systems administrator wrote this week that they view these as distributed denial-of-service attacks. How are they fighting back? We noticed patterns in the scrapers that were abnormal, which gave us material for writing regular expressions. Searching for the regular expression then gave us a large lists of IP addresses. Looking up the origin of those IP addresses revealed that some of the crawlers were using botnets of residential IP addresses to scrape faster and avoid detection. We looked for what kinds of botnets might be generating the kind of traffic that we were seeing, and one that we suspected was called the "Vo1d" botnet, comprised of sma...
Post a Comment
Read more

Slashdot: AT&T Outlines $250 Billion US Investment Plan To Boost Infrastructure In AI Age

AT&T Outlines $250 Billion US Investment Plan To Boost Infrastructure In AI Age Published on 2026-03-10T20:00:00Z AT&T plans to invest more than $250 billion over the next five years to expand U.S. telecom infrastructure for the AI age. The company says it will also hire thousands of technicians while partnering with AST SpaceMobile to extend coverage to remote areas. Reuters reports: Rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and connected devices has prompted telecom operators to invest heavily in fiber and 5G networks as they also seek to fend off intensifying competition from cable broadband providers. AT&T, which has about 110,000 employees in the U.S., said the new hires will help build and maintain its infrastructure. The outlay includes capital expenditure and other spending, the company said. The spending will focus on expanding its fiber and wireless networks, including accelerating deployment of fiber broadband, 5G home internet and satellite co...
Post a Comment
Read more