Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Big hospitals still have them to send medications and random lightweight stuff around the complex. My wife has worked in two large hospitals that had pretty extensive tube systems, used especially with pharmacy.
Tom Scott does a youtube video about one in Canada (IIRC) where they send radioactive medicine from the lab a down the road to a hospital due to the half life of the medication making traditional transport (ie vehicles) impractical.
Edit: bothered to look it up
I know of a hospital where the local university sends tracers with F-18 for PET scans in much the same way. Half-life of 110 minutes.
My Walmart has them for a pharmacy drive thru.
The two major hospitals, relatively near me, use a combination of tubes, and robots, to dispense medications. One is working on completely robotic food service, and has completely robotic floor cleaning/polishing. Both, also, have robots that do the basic landscaping maintenance, like mowing/edging. There is more, it is interesting to walk around and see all these infrastructure systems work. Feels, at least partially, like the promised future of sci-fi.