Medical tools

Baby, it's the way you make me kinda get me sit straightly, never wanna stop.

The Back Straight Boys aren't singing that tune yet, but they probably should be. The teenagers did, after all, name themselves after the boy band Backstreet Boys. But instead of targeting screaming teens, they're targeting screaming adults--screaming in pain, that is--with a device that aims to prevent poor workstation posture by monitoring wearers' stance and training them to correct it when needed.

Sean Colford, Ethan Epstein, Brandon Loye, and Michael Walsh, all of San Diego and just out of their freshman year of high school, came up with the idea for Posture Pad back in middle school after experiencing firsthand the discomfort computer use can cause.

"We noticed that at school, all the computer workstations were the same size, but Ethan and I had a 15-inch difference in height," Loye said. "I had to hunch my back to see the monitor, and Ethan had to sit on his legs. This caused us discomfort, and we thought we could do something about it."

So the longtime pals decided to delve deep into improper posture at computer workstations and the consequent musculoskeletal problems it can cause among kids and adults in classrooms and offices.

Many hours of research spawned the "Posture Pad," which strategically embeds sensors and microcomputers in an ergonomically designed seat pad to gauge a computer user's positioning and connects to the user's computer to deliver visual and/or audio feedback via special software. … Read more

Being able to regenerate injured heart cells would give physicians the tools to repair and replace damaged tissue and ultimately save lives. So while researchers have spent more than a decade trying to reprogram cell types in general, changing them into heart cells has been a sort of holy grail.

Now, a team at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has done just that--and is the first to directly convert a non-heart cell type into a heart cell via RNA transfer. In fact, the researchers reprogrammed both an astrocyte (a star-shaped brain cell) and a fibroblast (a skin cell) into heart cells.

"What's new about this approach for heart-cell generation is that we directly converted one cell type to another using RNA without an intermediate step," says James Eberwine, a pharmacology professor at Penn, in a news release.

Because a cell's signature is characterized by messenger RNAs (mRNAs), which act as a sort of blueprint for making a protein, the researchers introduced an excess amount of heart cell mRNAs into the host cells and let the new, abundant population essentially take over the smaller, indigenous one. This new population then directed DNA in the host nucleus to actually change the cell's RNA populations to the new heart cell ("tCardiomyocyte").

Ultimately, the heart-cell mRNAs are translated into heart-cell proteins, which influence gene expression in the host so that heart-cell genes are turned on and heart-cell-enriched proteins are made. The chain of events may be lengthy, but the process is direct.

The team's approach, called Transcriptome Induced Phenotype Remodeling, has been fine-tuned in Eberwine's lab in recent years.

While it may be a way off, the team says that reprogramming a patient's cells to be heart cells would enable personalized screening for efficacy of drug treatments and new drugs. It reports its findings online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.… Read more

You wouldn't know it by looking at it, but the naked mole-rat has a few things to teach the animal world. It has fascinated researchers since it was discovered a few years ago that the rodents can live for 30 years, compared to the mouse's average life span of four.

So after launching an online database that details the lives and histories of more than 4,000 animal species, a consortium of researchers from around the world set out to sequence the genome of the naked mole-rate--which is native to the deserts of East Africa.

With the help … Read more

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working on an inexpensive way to use smartphones to quickly detect early-stage cataracts, the clouding of the eye lens that is the leading cause of blindness worldwide.

Developed by Media Lab Camera Culture group director Ramesh Raskar and colleagues, the Catra system is made of off-the-shelf components. Users peer through an eyepiece that slides onto a smartphone or other smart device like an iPod Touch, and they view lines displayed on the screen.

When the lines appear cloudy, the user presses a button. In that way, the device scans the lens of the eye to create a map of the cloudy areas, which are produced by proteins clumping together.

Identifying the position, size, shape, and density of the clouds, Catra can produce a diagnosis of cataracts in minutes. Check out the promo video below.

The idea is that Catra could be used in the developing world, where few have access to the expensive slit lamps and clinicians used to diagnose the disorder. That could lead to earlier detection of cataracts and better treatment results following surgery. … Read more

If you're freaked out either by humanoid robots or the thought of dental work, proceed with caution. If both make your skin crawl, you might want to reach for the nitrous oxide.

Showa Hanako, a robotic dental patient out of Japan we told you about last year, has been reborn as Showa Hanako 2. Now the android can not only open and close her mouth, move her tongue, shake her head, blink, cough, sneeze, choke, roll her eyes, and tell her dentist, "Ouch! It hurts!" She can look ultra-realistic doing it.

Jointly developed by Showa, Waseda, and Kogakuin universities and produced by Japanese robot maker Tmsuk, Showa Hanako 2 was created to be a training robot for dental students. But where her elder sister looked like a stiff plastic doll tethered to a dental chair, Showa Hanako 2 looks like a stiff real woman tethered to a dental chair. That's largely because where she used to be made of PVC plastic, she now features silicone skin, tongue, and mouth lining made by Orient Industry, a creator of sex dolls. Needless to say, Orient has a high stake in making realistic-looking and -feeling body parts. … Read more

A study of almost 6,000 people trying to quit smoking cigarettes finds that those who receive regular motivational text messages are twice as likely to quit than those who receive neutral text messages thanking them for participating in the study.

The txt2stop trial, led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, measured cotinine (a chemical in tobacco) levels in the participants six months after participants reported to try quitting.

The randomly selected txt2stop group received five text messages a day for five weeks and then three a week for the following 26 weeks, with encouragements such as: "Cravings last less than 5 minutes on average. To help distract yourself, try sipping a drink slowly until the craving is over."

The txt2stop group was also able to text words such as "crave" and "lapse" to receive a motivating message during episodes of weakness and craving.

The control group, meanwhile, received only one message every two weeks thanking participants for being part of the trial.

Only 4.9 percent of the control group abstained from smoking throughout the six months, as determined through cotinine testing, while more than twice as many members (10.7 percent) of the txt2stop group succeeded.

"We are delighted with the results and hope that text motivation will now become a standard part of the quitting process," says Glyn Mcintosh of QUIT, which helped develop the text messages and find volunteers for the study.

The researchers, whose findings appear in The Lancet this week, say that txt2stop worked well across all age and social groups in the study.… Read more

If you have to get your insides examined, there are few alternatives to the unpleasant experience of having a tube shoved into your throat or backside.

But a team of researchers in Japan recently successfully tested a remote-controlled, self-propelled capsule camera that can examine the human stomach and colon.

Developed by researchers at Ryukoku University, Osaka Medical College, and a private-sector firm, the fish-shaped Mermaid is a 1.7-inch-long, electromagnet-powered capsule with a fin-like tail.

That's longer than a conventional endoscopy capsule, which isn't maneuverable and takes a brute-force approach to capturing images, snapping as many as possible as it descends. … Read more

A new saliva test developed by geneticists at the University of California, Los Angeles, reveals a person's age within five years, a finding that could have many applications in medicine, at crime scenes, and more.

"With just a saliva sample, we can accurately predict a person's age without knowing anything else about them," says principal investigator Dr. Eric Vilain, a professor of human genetics, pediatrics and urology, in a UCLA news release.

The team's research, published online this week in the Public Library of Science's PLoS One journal, focuses on methylation, a process by … Read more

The tricorder, that handheld geological, biological, and meteorological device of general awesomeness from the Star Trek universe, has spawned several real-life iterations boasting such uses as the detection of ulcers and deadly gases.

So in May, the X Prize Foundation announced that, alongside Qualcomm, it would award a $10 million Tricorder X Prize to the person who develops a mobile device that can diagnose a broad range of common health ailments as well as--or better than--a panel of board-certified physicians.

A team at Oregon State University in Corvallis is now one step closer to what remains a pretty tall order.… Read more