Health tech

I think most people who have tried yoga would agree: it's a great way to improve flexibility and blood flow, increase stamina and strength, and even reduce back and muscle pain.

OK, but how can you find nearby classes, especially if you're traveling or you've just moved to a new town?

Yep: there's an app for that. Om Finder for iOS locates nearby classes, studios, and instructors wherever you happen to be in the world. It needs a few tweaks, but it's definitely a handy tool for the om-minded.… Read more

No diversion can divert me from the fact that treadmills are boring. Even if the weather is bad, I'm not much of a TV viewer -- on or off the treadmill. And I often find the most energizing music to also be the most annoying. Reading on a treadmill can be downright nauseating.

But thanks to an experimental system out of Purdue University, I soon may be able to catch up on my backlog of New Yorker digital issues while clocking time on the dreaded tread.… Read more

It's hard to imagine life without a limb -- not just the physical difficulties, but how it might affect your relationship with your body, and your sense of how you're perceived by the world around you. One prosthetist is taking into account not just restoring limb function, but also the wearer's personality and style.

The Alternative Limb Project is the work of Sophie de Oliveira Barata, who, taking her honors degree from the London Arts University studying special-effects prosthetics, went to work as a sculptor for a prosthetics company. In her eight years there, she created realistic limbs and digits for amputees who wanted their new limbs to blend into their bodies.

de Oliveira Barata has continued this work with the Alternative Limb Project, and her realistic limbs, molded from casts of the customer's own body, are incredibly detailed. But some people prefer to stand out in a crowd. … Read more

Studying the brain can be a tricky business.

The interesting stuff, such as neurons and how they communicate, is obscured by things like fatty tissue. Usually, scientists just cut it up into paper-thin slices to study, like with Einstein's brain, but a team of scientists at Stanford University, led by Karl Deisseroth and Kwanghun Chung, have found what the director of the National Institute of Mental Health Thomas Insel is calling "one of the most important advances for doing neuroanatomy in decades."

The new technique lets researchers leave the brain intact, which puts an end to the damage that slicing can cause. It involves infusing the brain with acrylamide, which binds the proteins; once heated, it polymerizes, preserving the important molecules. Then, the brain is rinsed with sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) detergent, which strips the fatty lipids, leaving intact the proteins that the researchers wish to study. … Read more

At the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, Yukiyasu Kamitani and his colleagues have spent a long time trying to assemble the data they need to image a sleeper's dreams on a screen -- and it looks like they might be nearly there.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which examines the flow of blood in the brain to monitor activity, the team has managed to create an algorithm that can accurately display in real time what images are appearing in a dream. This is the first time, it is believed, that objective data has been collected from … Read more

With lung cancer being the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the U.S., effective early screening is key to saving lives. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic say they've developed new software that can help classify lung nodules noninvasively, saving lives and health care costs.

A pilot study of the program called Computer-aided Nodule Assessment and Risk Yield, or Canary, appears in the April issue of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology.

Canary leans on data from high-resolution CT images of a common type of cancerous nodule in the lung called pulmonary adenocarcinomas. It matches every pixel of the lung image to one of nine unique radiological exemplars. In the pilot study, it was able to classify the lesions as aggressive or indolent with high sensitivity, as compared to microscopic analyses of the lesions after being surgically removed and analyzed by lung pathologists.… Read more

If you're missing a hand, getting a replacement isn't exactly cheap. The BeBionic -- which is, admittedly, a higher-end model -- can cost up to $35,000. We imagine that's a little out of the price range of many amputees.

It's unsurprising, then, that some have taken it upon themselves to find a more accessible solution. Robohand, for example, has been creating 3D-printed robotic hands for children, with a free, open-source 3D-printing pattern available on Thingiverse for people who wish to make their own.

Christopher Chappell of the U.K. wants to do something similar. He'… Read more

At first glance, it's a black dress festooned with colorful embroidery. But Nikki Day had much more than style in mind when threading the intricate pattern into the garment's left side.

The British fashion design and knitwear student researched the morphology of various classes of cortical neurons and then embroidered images to reflect the theory of schizophrenia as a disease of aberrant brain circuit connectivity.

"The dress is tight and slightly restricts movement to reflect the effect these brain cell malfunctions can have in limiting people with the disease in everyday life," she says. "The intricate needlework draws you in and before you know it you are discussing how the cortical neural circuits are formed." … Read more

Researchers who shined a laser light in a certain region of the brain -- stimulating the area associated with decision-making and impulse control -- were able to zap what they call "cocaine seeking" behaviors in addicts.

And while their work was on rats, their hope is that a similar technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS, currently used to improve symptoms of depression) will work on humans as well.… Read more