Italian police use a Lamborghini to deliver a donated kidney 300 miles in two hours

Speaking as the owner of one (1) kidney, its interesting how automatic it is to talk about kidneys. My doctor does it too and he knows full well that I have just the one.

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No. It’s apparently

a refrigerated frunk

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At least as a story, it’s reasonably heart-warming - or kidney, as the case may be.
As for the car, it has been donated, but it’s quite common in Italy to use seized cars as police wagons, so units have often quite the choice of means of transport.
And the driver was indeed trained: if you buy a monster like that, it often comes with a driving course as a courtesy and precaution. Quite easy to go frisbeeing off the highway if you don’t pay attention.
Concerning air transport, I have no idea, maybe it’s less paperwork to sling everything in a car and just drive? Chi lo sa.

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I gotta say, speeds like that on civilian roads get surprisingly dicey fast. Cruising along at 120mph, and one may realize… the braking distance required to avoid the car in the lane “far” ahead is the same as if one were going 60 and had to come to a complete stop due to a boulder in the road. And estimating distances are complicated due to the fact both objects are in aligned motion (not something that’s commonly calculated on the fly).

Safe travels!

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The doctors never told me "one of your kidneys is down 90%, but the other is still good for 30%.

They just talked about “kidney failure”, and now talk about “recovered to about 35%” .

Kidneys must be important since most people have two, the other things I can think of that come in pairs are for function, not redundancy. Eyes and ears give a stereo effect, two legs let us walk rather than hop, etc.

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Testicles.

And ovaries of course.

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One of the late night shows had a clip from a helicopter delivery apparently no one was injured and the heart made it fine… now to try to find clip. Ok people were injured. Now to find one that noted the person tripping is the one who picked up the heart.

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Obligatory a/f:

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Came here to say this. This is what helicopters are for. They’re a tad pricier than a Lambo, and require more maintenance… But these dudes had a lot of luck on their side getting there in one piece.

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There’s a long history of Italian police using exotic cars

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When the objective is to get live organs to a transplant hospital a few traffic fatalities aren’t necessary counterproductive; healthy, young; and massive head trauma if you wouldn’t mind…

If the specialist driver is wearing a proper serious-racing-seatbelt and using the right vehicle; you might even be able to have the delivery vehicle arrive at the destination with more organs than at the origin.

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What I found interesting at the end was the hand-off at the end where there was a lot of deliberate not-handshaking that would have normally going on and instead a bunch of head nodding veering into near proto-bowing. Which has me wondering how long social distancing needs to go on before bowing becomes a social norm like it is in some Asian countries.

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Had patients screaming at me for 14 hours, but this story has healed me in a few minutes.

The huracan is vastly more stylish than a helicopter. Risk benefit analysis be damned!

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:astonished:
I am so sorry!

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Those are a perennial hot topic for evolutionary speculation – why two of them, and why on the outside at a slightly lower temperature?

When things come in pairs, they often seem to “take turns” (nostrils, ovaries, dolphin brain hemispheres), so perhaps nards are like that. That doesn’t explain much, though, as plenty of single organs just work at a constant rate.

If you’re going to have bilateral symmetry anyway, it will make sense to mirror things just to make better use of space, especially if the organ is basically an isotropic bag of cells such that two small ones cost the same as one big one. That’s probably enough of an explanation for kidneys, lungs, lymph nodes etc. But the extra plumbing seems wasteful when the two things are right next to one another.

Maybe it’s just that having two separate ovaries makes sense somehow, so your gonads are laid out that way before they start to specialise, and if they end up as huevos then they just don’t bother to merge back into one.

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To quote a nephrologist I worked with, the standard of care for kidney failure in many countries is a shovel.

I’m glad you only had to get dialysis for a short time. Hemodialysis works pretty well as a kidney substitute, but still has significant issues. Having to get dialyzed 3 times a week is limiting enough, but frequent infections suck too.

Peritoneal dialysis doesn’t work quite as well, and only works for a couple years, but allows more freedom. Still has horrible infections a couple times a year.

But I want to mention a 3rd type of dialysis on the hope someone will pass this on. We were able to demonstrate intestinal dialysis as effective for fluid management (and modestly for urea). People might think losing kidneys means dying of toxic buildup. You actually drown. Intestinal dialysis might still need to be paired with hemodialysis, but imagine only going in a couple times a month. And here’s the real benefit: intestinal dialysis is non-sterile. You avoid the frequent infections of other types.

Treatment can be done at home with any water you normally drink and a few cents worth of sugars and salts. And a bucket and hose. And by any water, I mean any. Live in a village with only muddy river water? It would still work, mud and all.

So if you know anyone who might be interested in pursuing the research farther, please contact me.

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I always thought the Transfomers character “Red Alert”- a Lambo outfitted as a fire/first response vehicle- was ridiculous, but I guess I was wrong. http://www.transformerland.com/image/reference_images/494.jpg

Lamborghini Huracan is basically a cruise missile on four wheels. :slight_smile:

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so why is organ delivery a job for police?

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Because police are supposed to protect and serve.

(add /s for USA residents)

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