Let's face it: It doesn't matter how high quality the video is. Chatting over Skype or FaceTime doesn't do a lot of good if the call is between the hearing and the deaf and only the latter know sign language.

Now, following a successful release in California in April, the SmartVP videophone by Purple Communications is available free of charge to the deaf and hard-of-hearing nationwide, and it manages to solve the signing conundrum.… Read more

Kids dealing with cancer at the A.C. Camargo Cancer Center in Sao Paulo, Brazil, are getting a slightly different kind of cancer-fighting treatment. The medicine is the same, but the delivery method carries a superheroic message. The IV fluid is now covered with superhero logos created by advertising agency JWT Brazil.

Warner Brothers (owner of DC Comics) is also a client of JWT and gave its blessing and a helping hand to the project that features Green Lantern, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. The kids are given custom comic books and animations that show the popular superheroes undergoing similar treatments. The superheroes recover thanks to the "superformula" and continue in their crime-fighting ways.… Read more

The emerging field of soft robotics, which involves mimicking the squishiness and stickiness of such creatures as octopuses, starfish, and squid, may be taking its next cue from a different source: plants.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley describe in the journal Nano Letters a new hydrogel that, inspired by phototropism (the phenomenon of plants moving toward light), can actually expand and shrink in a very controlled fashion via light.

"Shape-changing gels such as ours could have applications for drug delivery and tissue engineering," principal investigator Seung-Wuk Lee, associated professor of bioengineering, said in a school … Read more

Beautiful, active people with overflowing pocketbooks make La Jolla, Calif., a San Diego beach town, the perfect place for an upscale fitness craze to take hold.

At least that's the gamble Josh Weinstein and his three business partners are making with Fitwall, a branded fitness studio where members strap on heart rate monitors, find their assigned Fitwall, and monitor their workout exertion with an attached iPad.

The Fitwall studio in La Jolla, which opened to the public this week, is the first of 100 technology-driven fitness studios that founders Weinstein, Doug Brendle, Ethan Penner, and Anthony Westreich plan to … Read more

Most commonly used as a test subject for 3D computer graphics, the Stanford Bunny has probably never turned up in a more intriguing place. This model of the bunny is tiny -- just a few micrometers across, the size of an average bacterium.

It was created by a team of physicists and chemists from Yokohama National University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the company C-MET to demonstrate a new type of resin that can be used to create electrodes. Currently, there are materials that can be used to create complex 3D sculptures, but there's a limitation that prevents these materials from being used in creating electronics. … Read more

Scientists have been investigating the structure of the HIV capsid for years; the protein shell protects the virus' genetic material, helps debilitate the infected person's immune system, and is the target for the development of new antiretroviral drugs. Research teams have turned to a wide range of futuristic-sounding techniques to crack the code, from cryo-electron microscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to cryo-EM tomography and X-ray crystallography.

Now, thanks to a little help from the supercomputer Blue Waters, the mystery finally has been unraveled, according to a research team reporting this week in the journal Nature.… Read more

Science stinks, literally. At least it does when you build a model human colon to follow the life cycle of E. coli and other bacteria.

After noting that scientists tend to study bacteria in isolated environments with carefully crafted growing conditions, engineer Ian Marcus, who recently earned his PhD from UC Riverside, decided to take matters into his own hands.

He built a system that models a human colon, a septic tank, and groundwater; fed the colon three times a day for weeks; let the bacteria grow alongside other microorganisms such as protozoa and fungi; and took copious notes.… Read more

According to the Center for Disease Control's most recent statistics, there are about 10 fatal drownings per day. Children age 1 through 4 have the highest drowning rates. Graham Snyder, an emergency-room physician who has dealt with his share of drowning accidents, is the co-inventor of a system that could help reduce those sad numbers.

The SEAL system consists of a necklace-type device and a monitoring hub. A swimmer wears the neck band and goes underwater. The lifeguard or parent also wears a band. After a certain amount of time without surfacing, visual and audio alarms signal on the necklace, the hub, and the lifeguard's band.… Read more

In a seemingly random but nevertheless important discovery, scientists watching surfers with cystic fibrosis in Australia several years ago found that inhaling sea water mist reduced lung problems associated with the inherited disease.

So Cambridge Consultants in the U.K. paired with pharma firm Parion to develop and design a type of aerosol delivery systemt, called trans-nasal pulmonary aerosol delivery (tPAD), that brings the benefits of salt water treatment to the comfort of patients' homes, working overnight while they sleep.… Read more