Smartphone Innovations Could Transform Health Care. SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Several new innovations on the way could dramatically change how people receive health care. New products that make use of smartphone technology — such as phone-based systems that track all of a person's health data, and sophisticated hardware and apps that let a person sample and test their own blood, DNA and urine — will allow people to take the clinic home with them, Dirk Schapeler, director of digital health at Bayer HealthCare LLC, said in a presentation Wednesday (Nov. 19) here at the IDTechEx conference.
These innovations will change where and how people get their health needs met, Schapeler said. Moreover, such advances could not only allow pharmaceutical companies to identify patients for whom medicines work best, but also give patients better insight into their health problems and even identify health crises before they occur, he said. [Fantasy Fitness Tracker: 8 Absolutely Must-Have Features] Health care issues Phone-based medicine. Bionic Eye Lets Blind Man See Again. A bionic eye implant is now allowing a blind man to see the outlines of his wife after 10 years in darkness.
The implant, called a retinal prosthesis, consists of a small electronic chip that is placed at the back of the eye to send visual signals directly into the optic nerve. This bypasses the damaged cells in the man's retina. The bionic eye doesn't have enough electrodes to recreate the details of human faces, but for the first time since he lost his vision, the man can make out the outlines of people and things, and walk without a cane. [See Video of Blind Man's First Sight] Degenerative disease The Minneapolis-St.
Amazingly, after 10 years living with the disease, Zderad had figured out how to continue woodworking by relying on his sense of touch and perception of spatial relationships. Zderad's grandson was getting treatment for the same genetic condition from Dr. Iezzi, it turned out, was conducting a clinical trial of a bionic eye implant made by Second Sight. Bionic Humans: Top 10 Technologies. Maggie Koerth-Baker | August 13, 2008 01:43pm ET <div class="countdown_data"><div><h2>Bionic Eyes</h2><p>When you're blind, being able to see even the basics of light, movement and shape can make a big difference. Both the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis, currently in FDA trials, and a system being developed by Harvard Research Fellow Dr. John Pezaris record basic visual information via camera, process it into electronic signals and send it wirelessly to implanted electrodes.
The Argus II uses electrodes implanted in the eye, which could help people who've lost some of their retinal function. Credit: D.H. 10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life. Album: The World's Biggest Beasts. Infographic: Earth's Atmosphere Layers | Ozone Layer | Where Clouds Form. The air you breathe is precious, and the farther from Earth's surface you go, the less there is. But Earth's atmosphere extends farther into space than you might realize, affecting the orbits of spacecraft more than 200 miles high. OurAmazingPlanet looks at what's in the atmosphere, from way out there, to up where the clouds hang out, to right down here [See Also: Earth from the Tallest Mountain to the Deepest Ocean Trench]. (infographic by Telescopes for Beginners) Embed: Paste the code below into your site. <a href=" alt="Oap-atmosphere2-100707-02" src=" /></a><br/>Source: <a href=" Infographic: Earth's Atmosphere Top to Bottom</a>
Huge Brain Scan Database is Revealing Secrets of the Mind. Karen Lazo, multimedia intern at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Researchers are using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans to watch how blood flows through active areas of the brain in real time. The scans can be used to produce "maps" of activity during a brain's thought processes, with the maps changing based on what a person is thinking.
Globally, researchers run more than 2,000 fMRI studies every year, but currently, there is limited infrastructure for sharing results. With support from the U.S. Learn more about the effort in a Science Nation video on the fMRI work, and below Poldrack and Krzysztof Gorgolewski, a post-doctorate student who is also part of the Stanford team, answer questions about the project. NSF: What kinds of tasks do you have people do for the tests? R.P.: My lab studies a fairly broad set of behaviors related to decision making and self-control. R.P.: Yes and No. Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors. By Live Science Staff | May 13, 2011 12:25pm ET Credit: © Fernando Gregory | Dreamstime.com Compared with most animals, we humans engage in a host of behaviors that are destructive to our own kind and to ourselves.
We lie, cheat and steal, carve ornamentations into our own bodies, stress out and kill ourselves, and of course kill others. Science has provided much insight into why an intelligent species seems so nasty, spiteful, self-destructive and hurtful. Author Bio Live Science Staff For the science geek in everyone, Live Science offers a fascinating window into the natural and technological world, delivering comprehensive and compelling news and analysis on everything from dinosaur discoveries, archaeological finds and amazing animals to health, innovation and wearable technology. Live Science Staff on. 7 Absolutely Evil Medical Experiments | Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Nazi Medical Experiments & The Monster Study. Credit: null Medical progress saves lives, but sometimes scientists let the hope of a breakthrough get in the way of ethics. Recently, the United States government issued a formal apology to Guatemala for experiments done there in the 1940s that involved infecting prisoners and mental patients with syphilis.
The Guatemala project is just one of many terrible experiments done in the name of medicine. Some ethical lapses are mistakes by people sure they're doing the right thing. Other times, they're pure evil. Author Bio Stephanie Pappas Stephanie interned as a science writer at Stanford University Medical School, and also interned at ScienceNow magazine and the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Stephanie Pappas on. Bone-Chilling Science: The Scariest Experiments Ever. Since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the popular imagination has been alive with stories of mad scientists and the chilling experiments they conduct.
But sometimes, real life is even more frightening than fiction. From zombie dogs to mind control, here are some of the scariest experiments ever done. 1. Earth-swallowing black holes When physicists first flipped the switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at least a few people held their breath. A popular notion that the collider would create mini black holes that would suck up the Earth has been dismissed by experts as impossible. Though it sounded slightly plausible, there's basically no chance that the LHC will destroy the Earth. Of course, even if the world is destroyed, at least we have a consolation prize: Earlier this year, physicists at the Swiss site announced they had found a particle that may be the Higgs boson, the elusive particle thought to give all other particles their mass. 2. 3.
Talk about a bad trip. 4. 5. Wow! Watch a Drone Fly Through the World's Largest Atom Smasher. It's safe to say the world's largest atom smasher is big. Very big. A new video shot by a drone flying over and through the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provides unique views of the immense particle detector, which is located underground near Geneva in Switzerland. First, satellite images help viewers grapple with the sheer size of the ring-shaped facility, before a drone flies around the particle accelerator and zooms through its innards. The LHC's ring is 16 miles (27 kilometers) long. The collider uses roughly 9,600 huge, heavy magnets to circulate streams of protons and accelerate them to near the speed of light. The LHC's largest magnets weigh 35 tons and are about 50 feet (15 meters) long. It’s the enormity of the LHC that allows it to peer at the smallest scales.
Still, as exciting as the Higgs discovery was, the LHC is designed to run at even more powerful energies than before. Can Airplanes Fly into Outer Space? The tricky thing is the Earth's gravity, which keeps today's standard aircraft out of space just as surely as it keeps you and me regrettably moored to the planet's surface. According to NASA, any vehicle hoping launch into orbit has to travel about seven miles per second (11 kps), or about 25,000 mph (40,000 kph). You're average sub-sonic airliner, of course, doesn't fly near that fast. There's also fuel problem too. The shortest distance between Earth and space is about 62 miles (100 kilometers) straight up, which by general accord is where the planet's boundary ends and suborbital space begins. To reach orbit that way, NASA needs some 520,000 gallons of rocket propellant and two strap-on rocket boosters to loft a 100-ton space shuttle and its cargo into space in just under nine minutes.
Flying horizontal, you can imagine, would require much more conventional fuel than an aircraft — or a space shuttle — could carry. Scientists Finally Figure Out How Bees Fly. Proponents of intelligent design, which holds that a supreme being rather than evolution is responsible for life's complexities, have long criticized science for not being able to explain some natural phenomena, such as how bees fly. Now scientists have put this perplexing mystery to rest. Using a combination of high-speed digital photography and a robotic model of a bee wing, the researchers figured out the flight mechanisms of honeybees. "For many years, people tried to understand animal flight using the aerodynamics of airplanes and helicopters," said Douglas Altshuler, a researcher at California Institute of Technology. "In the last 10 years, flight biologists have gained a remarkable amount of understanding by shifting to experiments with robots that are capable of flapping wings with the same freedom as the animals.
" Exotic flight The scientists analyzed pictures from hours of filming bees and mimicked the movements using robots with sensors for measuring forces. Try this! Top 10 Disruptive Technologies. By Heather Whipps | April 29, 2008 08:38am ET <div class="countdown_data"><div><h2>Top Ten Disruptive Technologies </h2><p>Did the invention of the food dehydrator really change your life?
How about the Internet? Some technologies have little impact on the world around us, while others are like major earthquakes on the seismographs of history. </p></div><div><h2>The Internet</h2><p>Most of us can remember that moment in the '90s when we first chatted online or listened to the blips and beeps of dial-up access. The technology behind the Internet was actually in place by the 1980s, but didn't gain a public face until the first "world wide web" site was published by Swiss-based laboratory CERN in 1991. Author Bio Heather Whipps Heather Whipps writes about history, anthropology and health for Live Science.
Heather Whipps on. Where Did Earth's Water Come From? The exact origin of our planet's water, which covers about 70 percent of Earth's surface, is still a mystery to scientists. Many researchers think that, instead of water forming at the same time as Earth, objects in the outer solar system delivered water to Earth in violent collisions shortly after its formation. Researchers speculate that any water conglomerating on the surface of the planet as it formed 4.5 billion years ago would have most likely been evaporated away by the young, blazing sun. That means that water probably came here from somewhere else. The inner planets (Mars, Mercury, Venus), were also probably too hot to house water during the solar system's formation, so our water didn't come from them, either.
Outer planetary bodies, however, such as the moons of Jupiter and comets, were far enough away from the Sun to retain ice. So what were the objects that delivered the water? Inside Life Science: Antibiotics to Fight the Unfightable | NIGMS. Antibiotics save countless lives and are among the most commonly prescribed drugs. But the bacteria and other microbes they're designed to eradicate can evolve ways to evade the drugs. This antibiotic resistance, which is on the rise due to an array of factors, can make certain infections difficult — and sometimes impossible — to treat. Here are a few examples of how scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health are working to combat antibiotic resistance, from efforts to discover potential new antibiotics to studies seeking more effective ways of using existing ones.
Plumbing the Ocean Depths for New Antibiotics Most antibiotics are derived from natural molecules that bacteria and fungi living in the soil and on plants produce to compete for limited resources. The ocean, too, is a rich source of microbes that could yield infection-fighting natural products. In lab tests, this antibiotic, named taromycin A, impaired the growth of several types of drug-resistant bacteria. How a Jellyfish Protein Transformed Science | Inside Life Science. These days, scientists can track how cancer cells spread, how HIV infections progress and even which male ends up fertilizing a female fruit fly's egg. These and many other studies that offer insight into human health all benefit from a green, glowing protein first found in a sea creature. From its humble beginnings in the bodies of a particular species of jellyfish, green fluorescent protein, or GFP for short, has transformed biomedical research. Using a gene that carries instructions to make GFP, scientists can attach harmless glow-in-the-dark tags to selected proteins, either in cells in lab dishes or inside living creatures, to track their activity.
It's like shining a flashlight on the inner workings of cells. Flatworms, tadpoles and zebrafish are among the creatures whose parts have been programmed to glow in the name of science. GFP can also be used to study aspects of the intracellular environment, such as a cell's pH or calcium concentration. Ancient Origins A Prized Protein. The Enduring Mystery of Light | Electromagnetic Radiation Science. Lightning Still Largely a Mystery | How Does Lightning Work? Elves, Sprites & Blue Jets: Earth's Weirdest Lightning. Top 10 Inventions that Changed the World. Top 10 Emerging Environmental Technologies. Good Trip? LSD May Ease Anxiety.
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