A new frontier opened: an unborn baby’s heart

Last weekend the BBC News website carried this article about some remarkable developments that have been made in scanning the hearts of unborn babies.  It is now possible to produce such detailed scans of the heart — which, by the way, normally begins beating as soon as three weeks and one day after conception, and will beat 54 million times before birth — that three-dimensional models can be built and then used, for example, to pick up abnormalities in the heart before birth.  This then gives more time to make plans for treatment, and increases the chance of their success.

But I have to admit that it took me a while to absorb that information because I had been so distracted by the clip at the top of the article, showing the result of an MRI scan, and exactly what is going on when babies kick inside the womb… It is even possible to see the heart beating… a remarkable image.

Time and time again, science vindicates the pro-life cause.

The Queen vs. Marconi Minor (1960) ?

From the Schoolboy’s Science Pocket Book (Evan Brothers, 1960), p.95:

‘Nobody is allowed to operate an amateur transmitting station in Britain without a licence issued by the Postmaster-General.  An applicant has to show that he has the necessary technical knowledge of radio and that he can transmit Morse at 12 words per minute before a licence will be granted.’

I wonder if this law is still in force?  Wouldn’t a modern walkie-talkie set, for instance, or indeed a wireless Internet router, fall under the category of ‘amateur transmitting station’?  To whom would one apply, in any case, given that the office of Postmaster-General has been effectively abolished?  How many people know Morse code at all, let alone fluently?  How many schoolboys, lacking a Science Pocket Book, have come a cropper of this law?