health

MacGourmet Deluxe can help you collect, edit, use, and share your favorite recipes and recipe-related notes in an easy, intuitive, iTunes-style interface, which is much improved over previous versions. This Deluxe version includes all three optional plug-ins for MacGourmet: the Mealplan (to help schedule meals and sync up with iCal), Cookbook (for creating and sharing PDF cookbooks), and built-in nutritional data from the USDA database (which makes it easy to calculate nutritional info for entire recipes). The main recipe interface is highly customizable and includes a large, easy-to-read "Chef View" for laptop-assisted cooking, which you can control with … Read more

The news out of Japan has not been good this week. Officials there raised the severity rating of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to the highest level, while the plant continues to dump radiation into the air and water and radiation is found in milk and drinking water in U.S. cities and elsewhere. What does this mean for you and me?

To help make sense of the health and environmental consequences of this crisis, CNET spoke to two experts in the nuclear field. My colleague Martin LaMonica spoke with David Brenner from Columbia University's … Read more

By far, the biggest danger from the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant is to the workers who are trying to control a still-volatile situation. But with the crisis likely to play out for months, people are beginning to wonder what the release of radioactive material actually means.

Very low levels of radioactive material have been found in the water supply in Tokyo, for example, and those same particles are being carried by the wind elsewhere in the world.

Workers at the plant are being exposed to radiation coming directly from the core and spent-fuel cooling pools. For … Read more

We're still not at the place where we can have real-time X-ray video like in "Total Recall," but that doesn't mean X-ray technology hasn't come a long way in the last 116 years.

To underline that point, researchers in the town of Maastricht in Holland have fired up an X-ray machine from 1895 and compared it with a modern machine.

As you can see in the photos to the right, things have gotten sharper. The original device was built by a local educator and doctor just weeks after the first "how to" on X-ray machines was published. It was found in a warehouse and then dusted off by researchers from Maastricht University Medical Center who wanted to show it off.

The old machine was originally produced and built in the Dutch town, and the team didn't just turn it on, they replicated as closely as possible the conditions that would have been available and used by doctors of that time.

But it's not just the better-looking images that make modern X-ray machines better, according to the BBC, but also the fact that they use 1,500 times less radiation, making them safer and cheaper. The machine wasn't just fired up for fun, but for science, by doctors who chronicle their findings in the journal Radiology.

Still, that doesn't mean that we can look down at the venerable old Dutch machine. If you hadn't been told that the image on the left came from a Victorian-era machine, would you have been able to tell? Probably not.… Read more

Amid a full-blown humanitarian crisis from a massive earthquake and tsunami, Japan is racing against time to avert a nuclear catastrophe.

Plant workers at Fukushima Daiichi are struggling to cool the reactors and spent fuel held in pools also on site. Because of explosions caused by the buildup of hydrogen, it is believed that two of the containment structures that hold the reactors have been breached, greatly increasing risk of a release of a large amount or radioactive material.

Although it's still an unstable situation, it's clear the damage at the Fukushima Daiichi plant is worse than the … Read more

Some runner out there was a little overeager. A member of question-and-answer site Quora used the service to pose a burning question about a potentially reckless activity: "How do you train for a marathon with a stress fracture in your ankle or foot?" Seriously? Ouch.

Luckily, there happened to be a sports therapist who was reading. "There (are) plenty of marathons left in the world for you to do when the stress fracture has healed," the therapist warned. "The amount of training required for a marathon means that this will severely stress the bone if … Read more

A new study has found that prolonged use of a cell phone increases brain activity but failed to determine whether such use can lead to health problems.

The study, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, recruited 47 people in good health to document the effects of cell phone use on the brain. Conducted in 2009 by researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, the study was created to see whether the electromagnetic fields emitted by cell phones affect the brain's glucose metabolism, considered a marker for brain activity.

Cell phones were placed next … Read more

With millions of smart meters projected to be installed, opponents have raised concerns over the health impact from the radios inside these two-way meters.

Industry group the Electric Power Research Institute today released the results of tests that show the radio frequency emissions of one smart meter fall well below the federal safety threshold. It measured the radio frequency energy coming from commonly used Itron smart meters, part of a few tests it's doing in response to public health concerns.

In some places, such as Northern California, there is fierce opposition to smart meters because of concerns around privacy … Read more

Microsoft is trying to tighten up security on medical information that is sent by e-mail, while at the same time making it easier to share.

At a U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services event earlier today in Washington, D.C., the company unveiled an updated component to its HealthVault online personal health platform that can send encrypted copies of a patient's medical records via a secured e-mail address.

Microsoft says the new feature should make it easier for health care records and other information updates to be sent to its system, while at the same time meeting … Read more