Narcissistic Cheer

A new technique for detecting cancer by imaging the consumption of sugar with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been unveiled by UCL scientists. The breakthrough could provide a safer and simpler alternative to standard radioactive techniques and enable radiologists to image tumours in greater detail.

The new technique, called 'glucose chemical exchange saturation transfer' (glucoCEST), is based on the fact that tumours consume much more glucose (a type of sugar) than normal, healthy tissues in order to sustain their growth.

The researchers found that sensitising an MRI scanner to glucose uptake caused tumours to appear as bright images on MRI scans of mice.

Scanadu Scout™ is designed to be a medical grade Tricorder using your smartphone and Bluetooth LE to emulate an Emergency Room in your pocket.

It can measure your: 

Whether you’re a Quantified Selfer, life-logger, Maker, medical student, techie, MD, parent with kids, parent with parents, teacher, educator, baby boomer, data scientist, pilot, mountaineer, athlete or mathlete...

Simply place the Scanadu Scout™ on your forehead for 10 seconds and in a snap, your stats are displayed on your smartphone.

Scanadu Scout™ gives you access to valuable data which your body provides every day. Don't let your precious information get lost; use Scanadu Scout™ to analyze, track, and trend your vitals with unprecedented simplicity.

  Scanadu Scout™ is built on the 32-bit RTOS Micrium platform, NASA’s choice for SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) on the Rover Curiosity (uC/OS-II Kernel Drives Extraterrestrial Scientific Investigations).

The Scanadu app will come in Android and iOS versions. It will support Bluetooth 4.0, more specifically Bluetooth 4.0 Smart Low Energy (LE).

If you’d like to see the very first webpage Tim Berners-Lee and the WWW team ever put online, point your browser to http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.

Going from a standstill to 60 mph takes a tick over five seconds, and high-end torque slings the bike through on-ramps with aplomb. The Zero has the power to inspire that smirk of speed euphoria I crave from a bike — something that hasn’t been lost with the removal of a traditional internal combustion engine.

The motor’s capabilities are akin to a 600cc sport bike, with 54 horsepower and 68 pound-feet of torque motivating the 400-pound Zero DS. In Sport mode, speed maxes out at 95 mph. Eco mode reduces torque to 70 percent of capacity and limits the top speed to 70 mph, but both numbers are adjustable. For range, you’ve got two options: 95 miles of city driving on the base model ($14,000) with an 8.5 kWh battery, or 126 miles on model with the 11.4 kWh battery, an option which adds $2,000 to the price. Riding at an average of 55 mph on the freeway knocks those numbers down to 57 and 76 miles of travel, respectively.

The first Firefox OS-powered mobile devices, manufactured by the Spanish company Geeksphone, went on sale today. Unfortunately for anyone hoping to get their hands on some hardware explicitly designed for Firefox OS, the phones have apparently already sold out.

I am widely credited as the inventor of the <blink> tag.For those of you who are relatively new to the Web, the <blink> tag is an HTML command that causes text to blink, and many, many people find its behavior to be extremely annoying. I won't deny the invention, but there is a bit more to the story than is widely known.

The smart pills are tiny robots that travel through your digestive system and monitor how everything works, from your vitals to blood flow to temperature in real time. They wirelessly transmit results to a cell phone app, body patch or website.

Proteus Digital Health is one startup that’s working on an ingestible computer and it has raised $62.5 million from venture capitalists. Its pills use the body (stomach acid to be precise) for power instead of batteries.

Bilton explains how it works:

As a Proteus pill hits the bottom of the stomach, it sends information to a mobile phone app through a patch worn on the body. The tiny computer can track medication-taking behaviours — “did Grandma take her pills today, and what time?” — and monitor how a patient’s body is responding to medicine. It also detects the person’s movements and rest patterns.

Another pill, HQ Inc’s CorTemp Ingestible Core Body Temperature Sensor, uses a battery and displays temperature throughout the body.

The name of China’s newest supercomputer, Tianhe-2, translates to MilkyWay-2. It’s a fitting moniker, maybe even a modest one. There are an estimated 300 billion stars in our galaxy. Tianhe-2 can run 100,000 times as many calculations per second as there are stars in the sky. Tianhe-2 is now the fastest computer on Earth, doubling the speed of its American rival, Titan—and it arrived two years ahead of schedule.

The Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), officially opened October 5th, will be the fastest, most sensitive radio telescope in the world when it is fully operational next year. But ASKAP is just the opening act. If all goes to plan, by 2024, ASKAP will be expanded in Australia and linked to other sites in South Africa to create the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)—50 times more sensitive and 10,000 times faster than any telescope in existence.

Lending Club, the peer-to-peer loan firm, recently announced Google and Foundation Capital bought $125 million of the firm’s shares on secondary markets (that is, from previous investors—not newly issued stock) for three times the stock’s valuation a little less than a year ago. Lending Club says their system has funded $1.7 billion in loans since inception and, according to TechCrunch, the firm hopes to go public by 2014.

Kellogg was a Seventh-Day Adventist and a passionate adherent of the “healthy living” tenets of the church, which embraced a holistic approach to health in the days when there were no antibiotics and few effective drugs of any kind. He carried his beliefs with him into his professional life as a doctor and surgeon.

7th March 1897: Dr. John Kellogg, believing that a strict diet (along with vigorous exercise, fresh air and plenty of rest) benefits the patients at his sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, serves up the world’s first cornflakes.

The cornflakes he served at his Battle Creek Sanitarium (the word “sanitarium” having been coined by Kellogg) were sugarless, that is to say nearly tasteless, and meant not to fill you up but to round out a healthy diet.

His brother, Will, was the one who recognized and exploited the commercial value of cornflakes. He added sugar to the flakes and sold the stuff as breakfast food, deeply offending the sensibilities of John, and causing a fallout between the brothers that became a legal battle when John sued to stop Will from marketing the cereal.

Needless to say, John lost. And Will marketed as few had ever done. His signature became the company logo, and he devoted millions to advertising. In 1911, he put up the world’s largest electric sign in Times Square in New York City: 80 feet by 160 feet, with the letter K in Kellogg standing more than 60 feet high.

John Kellogg, meanwhile, was a prolific author of medical books and used the royalties to subsidize his sanitarium, which became a working laboratory for putting his strict theories on healthy living into practice. The sanitarium, which he billed as a “place where people learn to stay well,” became famous — for the services, not the cornflakes — and attracted a mainly wealthy clientele, who tended to check in for several weeks at a time.

Kellogg was no slouch as a surgeon, either, introducing new techniques (primarily to abdominal surgery) and performing more than 22,000 operations in a career spanning nearly seven decades.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is planning to deliver a review this year of whether triclosan is safe. The ruling, which will determine whether triclosan continues to be used in household cleaners, could have implications for a $1 billion industry that includes hundreds of antibacterial products from toothpaste to toys.

The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans climbed a startling 28 percent in a decade, a period that included the recession and the mortgage crisis.

The trend was most pronounced among white men and women in that age group. Their suicide rate jumped 40 percent between 1999 and 2010.

One theory suggests the recession caused more emotional trauma in whites, who tend not to have the same kind of church support and extended families that blacks and Hispanics do.