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bronchitis

See how healthy your lungs are -- just blow into your phone

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

Showers may be far dirtier than we think

As if we didn't already have enough germs and toxins to deal with in our home environments (the lead in our paint; flame retardants in our furniture; indoor air quality and even the resulting air purifiers; to name a few), we now get to fret over another perpetrator: the showerhead.

Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have just published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finding that about 30 percent of the showerheads in nine cities (including New York, Chicago, and Denver) carry "significant" levels of Mycobacterium avium, a pathogen … Read more