Tag: MEDICAL

It's a tender subject but, really, it's no surprise; dear brothers, our laptops are toasting our testicles. You already knew that the underside of your computing device gets hot enough to sear people's skin like so much Sunday pain perdu, so did you think that your babymakers were free from danger? Well, they're not. Even with one of those laptop cooling pads between your netbook and your ...

Earlier this year, Invetech and Organovo embarked on a joint plan to "print" living tissue (quite different from the more frivolous 3-D printing exploits of other developers). Then, in April, the U.S. Army and Wake Forest University's Institute for Regenerative Medicine started talking up a skin-printing system that laser-maps a wounded area, and -- using two "print heads" -- layers the injury ...

Doctors at McGill University Health Center in Montreal have performed the first ever robot-assisted surgery on a patient, without any direct doctor-to-patient contact. Of course, robotic surgery isn't a new approach in medicine, and, no, these 'bots aren't autonomous. Dr. Thomas Hemmerling and Dr. Armin Aprikian controlled robots named McSleepy and DaVinci, as they administered anesthesia and ...

In San Francisco yesterday, Berkeley Bionics showed off its new eLEGS bionic exoskeleton, which will allow paraplegics to stand and walk without human assistance. The 45-pound robo-braces are made from steel and carbon fiber, and can operate for six hours on a single charge using lithium-ion battery packs, according to Engadget. The eLEGS are adjustable for users between 5'2" and 6'4" and ...

All right, dudes. There's no need to get upset, or overly excited, just because your significant other or love interest just posted on Facebook that she "likes it on the dining room table." The recent trend of "like it on . . . " status updates merely serves as an attempt to get your little boxers in a wad, and -- most notably -- to promote and celebrate October as Breast Cancer Awareness Month. ...

Earlier this season, the University of Oklahoma Sooners football team began wearing In Case of Emergency Dot (ICEDOT) chips during games. The small red disks, which clip onto a jersey, can securely store a patient's entire medical history, and give emergency workers immediate access to it via an eight-digit PIN. Not only is it much faster to access digital records than paper records at the ...

Three years ago, diabetes blogger Amy Tenderich implored Steve Jobs to promote the development of user-friendly iPod apps for diabetics. An iTunes query for "diabetes" now returns hundreds of related offerings for iPods, iPhones and iPads. But, according to Fast Company, cardiologist Dr. Leslie Saxon believes a "revolutionary product" from Sanofi-Aventis could soon provide unprecedented and ...

A couple of years ago, Google launched Google Health, an online forum where users can store their personal health and wellness information, and share it with others. Now, the company has just launched a new and improved version of its online health center, with an eye toward personalizing and streamlining user experience. As Google explains on its blog, the new Google Health features a more ...

When Peter Bentley wrote the 'iStethoscope' app for the iPhone, it was meant, we think, to be entertainment. The $0.99 app has some surprisingly powerful features for recording and measuring heart beats, but the tiny iPhone microphone makes it quite difficult to use and a tad unreliable. In the U.S., the app hasn't seen much success, but, overseas, it's gained traction since Bentley introduced a ...

Forget swallowing pills or being poked by a needle. According to ABC News, scientists at Georgia Tech University have developed a way to inject vaccines directly into cells by using a laser beam to blow holes into that most basic unit of life. In this technique, scientists place blackened carbon nanoparticles (called "soot") next to the cells in question, which are then blasted with infrared ...

A new vaccine delivery system is being developed by Georgia Tech and Emory University: a small patch embedded with 100 "microneedles" that is, supposedly, almost painless. The needles themselves are about 0.65 milimeters long, filled with frozen vaccine and applied to the skin like a Band-Aid. Once the needles have deposited their weakened virus, they dissolve into the skin and leave no trace. ...

Today, most people suffering from hearing loss can choose to either buy a hearing aid, or, in extreme cases, have a cochlear implant placed in their problematic ear. Both options, however, have their drawbacks. Hearing aids can be cumbersome, implants can completely destroy any hearing left in an ear, and neither method ever replicates the same quality of perception that the natural ear allows. ...

Somewhere between our third and fifth root canal, we came to the conclusion that dentists are sick, twisted people. After all, anyone who truly wants to spend a career punishing people for enjoying candy has got to have some sort of serious God complex. Sure, pulling down a cool six figures for making small talk with drooling patients may "sweeten" the deal, but is it really worth living your life ...

Recent developments in medical science have enabled patients with heart conditions to experience unprecedented methods of surgery and rehabilitation. Tireless and precise remote-controlled robots provide doctors with "complete control" over surgical procedures, and an advanced and minimized artificial heart recently allowed a father to leave the hospital for the first time in two years. Aside ...

Often, when people talk about the future of user interaction with computers, the go-to reference is Steven Spielberg's 'Minority Report.' But those dreams of gesture-based computing find users waving their hands in the air with no tactile feedback at all, and anyone who has typed on both an iPhone and a BlackBerry can tell you a little physical feedback is always welcome. An experimental system ...