Medicine

Jeff, Justin, and Wilson start the show off right today with a SNL Christopher Walken reference. Always a great way to start the day. Getting into actual stories, we chat about ways to actually sleep. Tip No. 1: Sleep when you are tired. iTunes launches an indie music store. Gore Verbinski decides to make a video game based on "Clue." And yes, people stalk their exes online.

Charitable causes are getting hit hard these days, but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, formed by the eponymous Microsoft founder and his wife, announced Thursday the donation of nearly $14 million. About half, or $6.9 million, is going to two U.S. organizations promoting broadband connectivity, and another $7 million has been awarded to fight a parasitic illness that threatens millions of people in developing countries.

The $6.9 million for broadband has been donated to advocacy group Connected Nation and to the American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy -- the bulk of it to … Read more

Philips Research is out with a new intelligent camera pill that can be electronically preprogrammed to deliver targeted doses of medicine to patients with digestive disorders such as Crohn's disease, colitis, and colon cancer.

The device comes in the form of an 11 mm x 26 mm capsule that patients swallow with water, just like any other pill. It's designed to pass through the digestive tract of its own accord, meaning you just let nature take its course with this one.

The iPill determines its location via a pH sensor that measures the acidity of the environment, which … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Three of medicine and technology's minds gathered together Thursday at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Summit to discuss the state of the U.S. health care system, and where it's going in the next few years. The outlook: good--just give us a swab of your cheek and $400 for the test.

Carol McCall, the vice president of research and development for Humana Inc., believes there's going to be an "explosion" of at-home testing services. Services like 23andMe (which uses a swab of your cheek) are some of the first on that front, leapfrogging … Read more

Did you lose a lot of money in the markets over the last two weeks? Do you fear you will lose even more before the bell tolls today?

Please don't worry. Some scientists will soon be able to help you.

Yes, very soon, you will realize that these awful things never happened. You will realize you lost no money. You will realize there was no need for a bailout. You will realize that tomorrow truly is a new day and that yesterday was almost as new as tomorrow.

Whatever people tell you about the future--whether it be investing in … Read more

Improved e-mail filtering and government crackdowns might've deterred some of the once-ubiquitous spammers peddling prescription-free Viagra on the Web, but a new study from Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse has found that many of those sites are still alive and kicking.

The CASA study, resulting from its fifth annual "You've Got Drugs!" investigation, did find that there has been a decline in the total count of Web sites hawking controlled drugs: 365 of them, compared to 581 in 2007's study.

But it's still alarming, CASA said, because few of … Read more

Michael Breus joins us, author of Beauty Sleep and thesleepdoctor.com. We basically sit and bask in his sleep wisdom. Want to know how long is long enough, or how much is too much? Listen to Michael, he knows what's up. One of our most informative shows ever.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Just about every day brings new advances in using computers to customize medical treatments. How are chips and bodies interfacing to change disease treatment, repair damaged brain tissue, and even manufacture micro-specialized drugs to be released directly into the bloodstream?

Read the full story on MSNBC: "The future of biomedicine: virtual humans"

Computers have a better record of accurately diagnosing Alzheimer's disease than human physicians do. They read MRI brain scans and compare them to a database of known cases.