health

Everyone wants to lose weight, but for many folks, the rewards of looking better, feeling better, and living longer aren't sufficient motivation.

Ah, but what if there's money involved?

That's the idea behind DietBet, a "social dieting game" with a twist: You bet some money with friends and/or strangers, then spend 28 days trying to lose 4 percent of your body weight. Winner takes the pot -- which can end up being pretty sizable. If there are multiple winners, they split the cash.

In other words, here's your chance to lose weight and … Read more

What if you could "street view" the human body, navigating its interactive components all the way down to a metabolic level? An international group of scientists is working on that right now with a map of the human metabolism, which they call Recon 2.

Metabolism plays a key role in many diseases, and while scientists have already managed to reconstruct several models of it, each "represents only a subset of our knowledge" with "only partially overlapping content," the team writes in the journal Nature Biology.

"It's like having the coordinates of all the cars in town, but no street map," Bernhard Palsson, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and one of the authors of the paper, said in a statement. "Without this tool, we don't know why people are moving the way they are."… Read more

Testing for strokes can be inaccurate and expensive. But a new device that looks like a pair of swimming goggles may offer a better, cheaper alternative, and save tens of thousands of lives every year.

The goggles, equipped with an infrared camera attached to a cord that goes to a laptop computer, measure eye movements, Dr. David Newman-Toker, an associate professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explained on "CBS This Morning."

"The eye movements (when) patients present with strokes in the back part of the brain -- and that's about one out of every four strokes -- the patients present with dizziness and vertigo and we can tell from their eye movements whether they've had a stroke or whether they have a benign inner-ear condition, quickly and easily," said Newman-Toker, who is leading the study of the new technique.

The goggles will work best as strokes occur, Newman-Toker said, and will likely find use in emergency rooms. … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Lucasfilm forces Flyers goalie to change the "Star Wars" graphic on his mask.

- NIN's "Head Like a Hole" mashed with "Call Me Maybe" is terrible and perfect.

- Teddy Faley made a mashup album using Mobb Deep lyrics over 8-bit Mario samples.

- Never lose at pool again (by cheating).

- Silicon Valley is full of stoners.… Read more

Oxford University Ph.D. student Jessica Richman, who today finished raising some $350,000 from more than 2,500 people wanting to take part in the uBiome project, isn't shying away from reality: "Yes, we are going to be sampling people's poo," she told the Guardian this week.

And for the squeamish, she offered an asterisk: "You'll only have to wipe it on the toilet paper."

The uBiome project is a "citizen science" effort to sequence the genomes of the trillions of bacteria that colonize our bodies and likely play pivotal … Read more

A fair number of people are turning to the Internet to help them with medical problems.

Among 3,000 adults surveyed by Pew Internet, 35 percent say they've gone online at one time or another to diagnose a medical condition. Some were researching their own medical problems, while others were looking into problems suffered by people they know.

Dubbed "online diagnosers" by Pew, 46 percent of them said the information they found online made them think they needed the help of a doctor. Another 38 percent said they felt they could remedy the problem at home, and … Read more

Mirror, mirror on the wall, will drinking affect my looks at all?

The very week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the results of a survey on drinking patterns among U.S. females (notably that 1 in 5 high school girls and 1 in 8 women report binge drinking), the Scottish government launched its Drop a Glass Size campaign, complete with app, in an attempt to get people to drink a little less every day.

The free Drinking Mirror app, for iPhone and Android devices, has users take or upload existing photos of themselves and watch their faces age over the course of 10 years based on their current rates of alcohol consumption.

The developers fully admit that they are playing the vanity card -- and targeting women in particular.… Read more