disease

Pandemic, the first game in this duo, was released for Web browsers back in 2007. The object of the game was to infect a person with a disease you created, then manage the outbreak and evolve the disease to create the most worldwide damage. I agree that the game's subject is morbid, but the huge popularity of Pandemic showed that the actual content doesn't make it any less addictive.

At the beginning of last month, Pandemic 2.5 was released for iOS and quickly shot up the App Store's most-popular lists probably based on the Flash version's popularity. But at the end of May, a very similar game was released that might even be better than the original.

In testing these games, I infected most of the world with my various diseases, but never had one that destroyed all of humankind. Those who have played Pandemic in the past might guess that Madagascar was my downfall (it's a joke among Web gamers that Madagascar is always the one to close its shipyards at the first whiff of danger), but it was Iceland that put a stop to the deadly Parkerism.… Read more

Pandemic for iOS is a faithful recreation of the popular Web-based game where the object is to play as a villain and infect our entire planet with an evolving disease. The game is obviously quite morbid, but it's also extremely addictive as you start with one infected person in a random location and try to spread a disease to every corner of the globe. You can choose from three skill levels at the beginning of the game, with the easiest setting for quick sessions allowing for more experimentation, and the hardest setting making it a real challenge to even … Read more

Many of us have relied on rapid diagnostic tests at one time or another, whether it's testing for pregnancy, blood glucose levels, or strep throat.

But while dropping fluid samples on a small strip for near-instantaneous results is affordable and convenient, reading results using the human eye means there is the potential for, well, human error.

So researchers at UCLA have taken the human out of the equation as much as possible and developed a digital "universal" reader for all rapid diagnostic tests, or RDTs, that requires no translation of results.

In the journal Lab on a … Read more

Today, pathologists and researchers must cut super-thin slices of tissue samples to view them on a microscope -- a labor-intensive process that renders 3D images created from hundreds of 2D sections prohibitively expensive.

Not to mention tedious to construct. Imagine if a single scene in Halo was presented as a series of 2D images one must perfectly align before getting the lay of, say, a single battleground.

Now, computer scientists and medical researchers at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom say they've devised a novel workaround in the form of a digital scanning system that produces 3D views of tissue samples … Read more

Chances are that if you are reading this, you have a private flush toilet a few steps from your bed. Your commode is more reliable than your mobile connection, and likely will outlast all of your home appliances.

Yet huge tracts of the developing world have yet to see so much as a latrine, a situation that facilitates the spread of debilitating or even deadly diarrheal diseases. Advocates for universal access to and use of basic personal sanitation hope their efforts will get a big boost in August, when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation present several hygienic innovations developed … Read more

Engineers at Cornell are building a handheld pathogen detector that will help health care workers around the world test for pathogens such as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and HIV and get results in as little as 30 minutes, instead of waiting days.

Dan Luo, professor of biological and environmental engineering, has been using synthetic DNA to amplify tiny samples of pathogen DNA, RNA, or proteins. Because of $25 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenge to 12 teams developing point-of-care diagnostics, Luo will be combining forces with Edwin Kan, a Cornell professor of electrical and computer engineering, who has built a computer chip that can respond quickly to those amplified samples.

The engineers describe their novel device as something akin to a molecular-level Lego builder.… Read more

At CES, scientific-equipment giant Life Technologies unveiled a DNA sequencer designed to decode an entire human genome in a day for $1,000 by the end of 2012.

The Ion Proton Sequencer, priced at $149,000, isn't your typical hot commodity on the show floor. But the benchtop sequencer costs far less than its bulkier, slower predecessors (typically in the $500,000 to $750,000 range), and the $1,000 price tag--once costs fall to that level--could put personal gene sequencing directly into the hands of the masses.

"This is such an amazing moment in history," said … Read more

It's been a good year for video gamers--and not just the epic legions of Call of Duty fans enjoying Modern Warfare 3.

A few months after Foldit players helped decode the structure of a protein key to the way HIV multiplies, another group of gamers taking on DNA sequencing in the game Phylo have contributed more than 350,000 solutions, the game's designers at McGill University report.

When University of Washington researchers unveiled Foldit in 2008, it wasn't clear whether the protein-folding game would be a one hit wonder. But one-year-old Phylo, already averaging 1,000 eureka … Read more

Tracking where humans migrate and cluster in any given country from season to season is, in some places, a tall order. Which makes tracking the risk of infectious disease outbreaks that thrive in dense populations tricky as well.

Satellite images of nighttime lights could be the answer, according to researchers at Princeton, who report on their findings today in the journal Science.

Using nighttime images taken of Niger's three largest cities between 2000 and 2004 by a U.S. Department of Defense satellite, and checking those images against public health records compiled by Niger's Ministry of Health, they … Read more