health

Norovirus is a particularly nasty virus that causes severe gastrointestinal upset. It's famous for turning cruises into nightmares. It's a tough little number that spreads easily and is hard to kill. To study it, you can't just ask a bunch of sick people to pop down to the lab and vomit on demand. That's where a robot nicknamed Vomiting Larry comes in.

Larry is a one-robot upchucking machine in residence at the Health & Safety Laboratory in Buxton, U.K. He's an anatomically correct model and his favorite hobby is barfing for science. He helps scientists determine how far the norovirus can spread. … Read more

Pneumonia, which claims the lives of more than 1.2 million children under the age of 5 every year, is the leading cause of death in children worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. And in certain regions, such as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, pneumonia alone accounts for 85 percent of pediatric deaths.

So it comes as little surprise that Microsoft, through its Imagine Cup Grants program, has awarded its second-place prize of $75,000 to a team out of Australia that is developing a tool to diagnose the infection quickly and affordably. (The first-place prize went to a … Read more

San Francisco startup Basis Science confirmed pricing and availability for its Basis health tracker today. The $199 watch-style gadget hits the market in early December, continuing the evolution of wearable fitness technology for everyday consumers. … Read more

As a child, I used to concentrate really hard on things like pencils and pebbles, trying to get them to budge with the sheer power of my mind. It never worked, but technology is getting us a little closer to the mind control dream. The Muse brainwave-sensing headband from Interaxon is a step in the right direction.

The Muse uses two sensors on the forehead and two behind the ears. You wear it positioned kind of like a pair of glasses. It measures your brainwaves and sends the information to a smartphone or tablet. Viewing that data in real time can show you if your mind is wandering, if you're relaxed, or if you're in a state of intense concentration.… Read more

Battery Health is, as its name implies, designed to tell you about your MacBook's battery, including current capacity and current charge level. Since battery health is an important factor for many of us on the move, knowing how healthy our battery is and how long we can depend on it can help prevent losing power when you need it most. Knowing when it is going to need replacing is also a handy piece of knowledge.

Battery Health is a small utility that installs quickly and easily. When launched the first time, Battery Health asks if you want to run … Read more

Your smartphone may be sleek and shiny on the outside, but on the inside, it could be harboring some environmental troublemakers.

But there's some good news: today's smartphones are likely to contain less of that bad stuff.

iFixit, in partnership with HealthyStuff.org, has released the results of a study that conducted a chemical analysis of handsets to see just how packed with toxic ickiness your favorite gadget might be.

The components found in modern-day devices, from desktop PCs and displays to mobile phones and other gadgets, contain a number of chemicals and elements -- needed for electronics … Read more

The story goes that one of the world's greatest geniuses had a slightly different shaped brain than mere mortals. Now anyone can verify the tale for themselves with a new iPad app.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine Chicago launched an interactive app today that has about 350 scanned and digitized slides of Albert Einstein's brain, according to the Associated Press. The goal of the app is to give scientists, students, and anyone else who is curious the opportunity to see into the inner workings of the genius's brain.

"I can't wait to find … Read more

Today, patients with chronic lung conditions such as cystic fibrosis or asthma can't easily monitor how their airways are doing. Instead, they have to go to the doctor's office and blow into a special device called a spirometer as hard and fast as they can.

So for the past two-plus years, grad students at the University of Washington in Seattle have been working to develop an app that can measure lung function just as accurately but without the need for additional hardware. (Existing apps either require hardware or are for entertainment purposes only.)

In other words, they've been trying to turn a smartphone into a spirometer.… Read more

After reviewing data from 1,839 14- to 17-year-old high-school students in Los Angeles, researchers are confirming what may otherwise seem obvious: sexting and sex go hand in hand.

But which of these activities comes first -- sex or sexting -- remains unclear.

"What we really wanted to know is, is there a link between sexting and taking risks with your body? And the answer is a pretty resounding 'yes,'" lead author Eric Rice, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, told Reuters Health.

Rice and colleagues, who just published their findings in the journal Pediatrics, … Read more