Health

Viruses are often known as the invisible enemies that make you weak, but virus expert Julian Tay and Pennsylvania State University engineering professor Gary Settles have discovered a way to see how gas travels when a person coughs in order to find out more about how viruses can spread through the air.

The method the duo uses, Schlieren photography, is not new. It photographs the flow of fluid and is commonly utilized to check the aerodynamics of vehicles in air tunnels. Additional equipment used includes precision optics, a curved mirror, and a razor blade to control how much light passes … Read more

Intel plans to unveil a series of health care products aimed at the aging and chronically ill on November 11.

Few details have been released, but it's likely the new products will tie in with the Intel Health Guide PHS 6000.

Intel was recently granted approval for this touch-screen laptop with a 40GB hard drive and corresponding Web application from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. While it's run trials in the UK with the device, Intel's still awaiting approval for the UK market.

The laptop and its software enables medical data input, analysis, and transfer … Read more

Everybody knows tomatoes are good for you. After all, they are vegetables...or fruits, depending on whom you ask. Either way--fruit or vegetable--those juicy, red spheres are packed with nutrients. Although many varieties exist, from heirloom to the new cancer-fighting purple tomato, it is an ingredient in the good ol' fashioned red tomato that is the focus here.

Lycopene is deep red in color and found in various fruits and vegetables. The tomato (which is quite red) has a high concentration of the antioxidant. Thought to be helpful in countering the effects of aging, lycopene may not be an essential … Read more

Health care product giant Johnson & Johnson announced that it has completed its acquisition of HealthMedia, a company that specializes in online health counseling and Web interventions.

HealthMedia is a unique property on the Web. It combines its technology and behavioral science to emulate a health coach in a browser. The site's suite of services provides automated coaching for topics on wellness, disease management, behavioral health, and medication adherence that the company claims will help reduce health bills. Because of that, Johnson & Johnson believes the addition of HealthMedia to its properties will improve the company's standing in … Read more

For those who don't speak Zulu, Project Masiluleke may be hard to pronounce. But the concept behind it is easy enough to understand--harness the 90 percent cell phone penetration rate in South Africa to deliver crucial information about two crippling public health crises there: AIDS and tuberculosis.

Meaning "to give wise counsel" and "lend a helping hand," Project Masiluleke (Project M for short) is bringing together a coalition of partners--including Frog Design, Nokia Siemens, and National Geographic--to create an interdisciplinary system that relies on mobile technology to encourage testing and treatment of the diseases, as well as deliver low-cost diagnostic tools such as saliva and blood tests.

In its first phase, the program is sending out about a million text messages per day urging mobile phone users to contact HIV and TB call centers. Trained operators then provide callers with accurate healthcare information, counseling, and referrals to local testing clinics. The program will eventually include anti-retroviral therapy support, at-home HIV testing, and "virtual call centers," where teams of highly trained HIV-positive counselors will field calls remotely.

Project M was officially announced at the Pop!Tech 2008 ideas summit, which took place in Camden, Maine, last week. The project arose from the Pop!Tech Accelerator program, a social-innovation incubator designed to foster breakthrough, interdisciplinary solutions to major global challenges.

It's well-known that Africa is suffering a debilitating AIDS crisis. South Africa has more HIV-positive citizens than any country in the world, according to Project M materials, and in some provinces, more than 40 percent of the population is infected. Yet statistics show that only 2 percent of South Africans have ever been tested for HIV. Of those who test positive, just 10 percent are receiving anti-retroviral therapy--leaving 90 percent untreated, infectious, and likely to die. … Read more

Is being an astronaut really all that much fun?

You get otherworldly for a while, but, as some children on vacation will tell you, floating can get old very quickly.

While a few astronauts become heroes, some seem to come back to earth and never come back to earth. Their behavior becomes eccentric. Their utterances become bizarre. Some even claim they have seen aliens.

A question worth asking is whether many of these astronauts were already a bit weird before they floated off into space. And I'm not even including the ones who wear diapers whenever they slip into … Read more

HealthCare.com, an online directory of health care providers that competes in the so-called health 2.0 space with companies such as OrganizedWisdom, announced on Thursday that it has acquired BrokersWeb, a targeted, performance-based online-advertising firm that caters to health insurance brokers, for an undisclosed sum. With the acquisition, it gains control of BrokersWeb's consumer health insurance search engine, Health Insurance Finders.

"The acquisition of BrokersWeb strengthens our presence and fits within HealthCare.com's mission to help consumers make better health care decisions," said Matias de Tezanos, founder and chief executive of HealthCare.com. "From … Read more

If you spend more than an hour a day in deep intimacy with your iPod, your Zune, or some other MP3 machine, a group of important scientists would like you to turn it down and listen to them.

The EU's Scientific Committee on emerging health risks, which is normally concerned with noise in factories and the British Parliament, performed a study of MP3 usage.

The committee members' findings left them with a strange ringing feeling. They concluded that an hour's iPod usage a day for five years might make as many as 1 in 10 listeners deaf.

The problem, the committee believes, … Read more

A prototype high-tech cuff that detects and treats bleeding from combat injuries got a step closer to the battlefield Monday when Siemens Healthcare announced an exclusive contract with the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency to develop the device.

The Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation cuff, or DBAC, is designed to limit blood loss from penetrating wounds to limbs--as in the case of a gunshot injury--thus reducing the risk of limb loss or death.

Once the cuff is applied, ultrasound technology within the device automatically would identify the location and severity of the bleeding. This in turn would trigger therapeutic ultrasound elements … Read more