September 12, 2011
PLAYING a computer game once meant sitting on the couch and pushing buttons on a controller, but those buttons have been disappearing of late, replaced by human gestures that guide the action. (New York Times)
September 12, 2011
Watson, the “Jeopardy!”-playing computer system, is getting a job. WellPoint Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. are set to announce a deal on Monday for the health insurer to use the Watson technology, the first time the high-profile project will … Read More
September 12, 2011
A lawsuit filed in North Carolina’s Durham County Superior Court accuses Duke University, Duke University Heath System and five doctors of exposing patients to unnecessary chemotherapy during fraudulent clinical trials. (ABC News)
September 12, 2011
Peer review is the process that decides whether your work gets published in an academic journal. It doesn’t work very well any more, mainly as a result of the enormous number of papers that are being published (an estimated 1.3 … Read More
September 12, 2011
Today on bmj.com researchers argue that, before approval, manufactures should have to reveal how their medicine compares to treatments that already exist, in order to make sure that the most effective and safest treatments reach patients and that limited healthcare … Read More
September 12, 2011
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) partner Dinakar Singh discovered in 2001 that his 19-month-old daughter, Arya, had a crippling genetic disease called spinal muscular atrophy. (Bloomberg)
September 12, 2011
I’ve written a news story for New Scientist about a recent study which shows that patients in the minimally conscious state may be capable of dreaming, and that studying the brain wave patterns associated with sleep could be helpful in … Read More
September 12, 2011
Voters in Mississippi will be given a chance to decide whether life begins at conception, a controversial abortion-related ballot initiative that the state’s highest court has refused to block. (CNN)
September 9, 2011
A decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the anthrax scare that same year, the United States still is not adequately prepared to respond to public health threats, experts say. (American Medical News)
September 9, 2011
Servier, the pharmaceutical company at the heart of a massive medical scandal in France, suffered several fresh blows to its credibility this week. Yesterday, a newspaper revealed that the company has come under fire from Europe’s medicine watchdog for the … Read More
September 9, 2011
A Canadian radio station has been condemned as ‘unethical and insulting’ over a competition in which listeners can ‘win a baby’. (Daily Mail)
September 9, 2011
“Go home and die.†Until recently, that advice constituted the extent of end-of-life care that patients with incurable diseases could expect in Rwanda. As in much of the developing world, palliative care was virtually nonexistent in the tiny Africa nation, … Read More
September 9, 2011
The human body is a nanoscale engineer par excellence. Our cells push and pull billions of molecules around every second in order to grow, communicate with each other, attack invaders or heal after injury. (Guardian)
September 9, 2011
There’s a lot of research right now being devoted to the creation of robots that are the size of insects. Those robots would be used for surveillance and monitoring – to both good and bad uses, no doubt. (Forbes)
September 8, 2011
Britain’s House of Commons has rejected a proposal to bar abortion providers from counseling women about their decisions on whether to terminate their pregnancies. (Washington Post)
September 8, 2011
Future doctors aren’t learning much about the unique health needs of gays and lesbians, a survey of medical school deans suggests. (ABC News)
September 8, 2011
Until she tore her hamstring a year and a half ago, Tina Basle ran marathons. Since then, she has been on a desperate search for a cure. (New York Times)
September 8, 2011
Doctors are paid higher fees in the United States than in several other countries, and this is a major factor in the nation’s higher overall cost of health care, says a new study by two Columbia University professors, one of … Read More
September 8, 2011
The virus begins in a bat, before spreading to domesticated pigs in an industrial pork farm built on recently cleared forestland. After a few invisible mutations, the virus jumps to a chef in the Chinese city of Macau, who was … Read More
September 8, 2011
Primary-care physicians are pressing the agency that oversees Medicare to change a payment system they say places a higher value on work done by specialists. (Wall Street Journal)
September 7, 2011
Recent advances have given organ donors easier surgeries and faster recovery times, but the advances have not tackled one primary issue in organ donation: the limited supply of organs. (MSNBC)
September 7, 2011
Yale researchers report that signals from stem cells in the fatty layer of the skin may trigger the growth of new hair. The study in mice may lead to better understanding and treatments to reverse baldness in humans. (TIME)
September 7, 2011
The police have passed a total of 44 files to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) since 2009 in which firm evidence was found which could have led to a prosecution for helping someone end their lives. The crime remains punishable … Read More
September 7, 2011
Researchers have created the smallest electric motor ever devised. The motor, made from a single molecule just a billionth of a metre across, is reported in Nature Nanotechnology. (BBC News)
September 7, 2011
An Australian company developing a stem cell treatment to prevent heart failure has been given the go-ahead for a mid-stage clinical trial in Europe, moving potential “off-the-shelf” stem cell treatments a step closer. (MSNBC)
