Until a studio light fell from the “sky” near his house, Truman Burbank lived a perfectly normal life. Then he found out that his entire life was spent on the set of a TV show, and everyone he ever knew was in on the ruse.
Imagine being able to draw an organ in a CAD-style program and print it. While this exact scenario is still probably some years away, Organovo, the innovative San Diego-based medtech company founded in 2007, is on its way. Partnered with the product development firm Invetech, Organovo was the first to make the leap from two-dimensional bioprinting to the three-dimensional realm. Together, the collaboration has been involved in all aspects of research, development and logistics to bring 3D bioprinting to medical research facilities. Which begs the question…
Like a hospital room in your pocket, the LifeWatch V is an Android-based smartphone that incorporates a series of sensors letting you perform various medical tests in between checking Facebook and your email. It’s the perfect all-in-one device if you’re managing a medical condition, or just a hypochondriac.
By holding the device in a certain way, ensuring their fingers are touching a series of sensors around its perimeter, users can perform various health tests with the phone including monitoring their ECG, stress levels, heart rate, body fat, and temperature. And while you’ll still need to carry a kit with test strips and a needle, the LifeWatch V also serves as a blood glucose monitor letting diabetics monitor and track their blood sugar levels.
Well, Obamacare is now official, which means that a lot more people in the United States will have health insurance.
And it also means a lot more people will be paying more taxes.
(You didn’t think Obamacare was free, did you?)
Here are some of the new taxes you’re going to have to pay to pay for Obamacare…
A new bionic eye implant could allow blind people to recognize faces, watch TV and even read. Nano Retina’s Bio-Retina is one of two recent attempts to help patients with age-related macular degeneration, which affects 1.5 million people in the U.S. Although a similar implant, Second Sight’s Argus II, has been on the market in Europe since last year, it requires a four-hour operation under full anesthesia because it includes an antenna to receive power and images from an external apparatus. The Bio-Retina implant is smaller because it doesn’t have an antenna. Instead, the implant captures images directly in the eye, and a laser powers the implant remotely. Because of Bio-Retina’s compact size, an ophthalmologist can insert it through a small incision in the eye in 30 minutes—potentially more appropriate for seniors. The Bio-Retina will generate a 576-pixel grayscale image. And clinical trials could begin as soon as next year.
The brain is a wonderful creation and the internet is often used to enhance or complement the capacity and recall within our most important organ. Unfortunately, technology has made it possible for us to actually overload our brains through the speed and volume through which we’re able to multitask online.
How many tabs are open on your computer right now? How many screens are you using? Is your iPad or smartphone close and do they have other things happening on them at the same time that you’re reading this?
Forget x-rays, bin the ultrasound, and say goodbye to MRI as you know it. The future of medical imaging is on its way, and it will give doctors a startlingly realistic view of what’s happening inside your body.
In fact, the idea of throwing out those existing imaging technologies might be a little premature, because the future will rely on all of them. The idea, you see, is to develop new ways to combine the huge quantities of data they all provide into ultra-realistic images. While that’s already possible to an extent, the rapid development of computational power means that they’re going to become ever more life-like. Writing in a paper about the future of medical imaging, Charl Botha from Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, explains:
Today is all about Facebook’s big $100 billion IPO. But how did the social media titan get so titanic to begin with? Harvard Business Review’s David Rock explains that Facebook is so far ahead of human practice, it actually hacks our brains.
While Facebook’s rise took many by surprise, its success was little surprise to the hundreds of researchers who study social interactions in neuroscience labs across the country. Over the last decade, these neuroscientists have uncovered some unexpected quirks of the brain, that all link to one big idea: we are far more socially oriented, at the level of brain structure and systems, than we account for in daily life.
Why does this matter? It certainly matters to Google, or to any organization wanting to get people’s attention. Yet this insight also has a dark side that deserves some airtime too.
Millions of us start the morning with a coffee and think nothing of it. But new medical research suggests that it could be helping you live longer—if you drink enough of it.
The large-scale study, which is published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that men who drank six cups of coffee or more every day were 10 per cent less likely to die during the 14 years of the study. Women who drank six cups or more were 15 per cent less likely to die over that same period. The result, fairly obviously, suggests that coffee drinkers live longer.
The researchers have also shown that the effect is seen across almost all causes of death, including heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes, and infections. The effect, however, seems to decline with lower consumption—and a single cup of coffee a day was found to have negligible effect.
A 76-year-old British woman recently checked herself into a hospital in England with complaints of diarrhea and weight loss. When doctors examined her, they found an unrelated problem: A felt-tipped pen that had been stuck in her stomach for 25 years. The patient recalled having used the blunt end of the pen to “inspect a spot on her tonsils when she slipped, fell, and accidentally swallowed the pen,” says ABC News. The pen had never caused her any problems, despite being in her stomach for more than two decades. When the team of doctors “fished the pen out of its gastrointestinal hiding place, they found that it still wrote clearly.” Here, five other strange objects found in the stomachs of patients across the globe…
