Biotech

An electrical engineer at Stanford has led the effort to develop an endoscope that is not only as thin as a human hair but also boasts a resolution four times better than existing ultrathin models. The "micro-endoscope" could lead to far less invasive bio-imaging, making it easier and safer to peer inside living organs and tissue to, say, study the brain and detect cancer.

The researchers, led by Joseph Kahn at the Stanford School of Engineering, report in the journal Optics Express and the Optical Society of America's Spotlight in Optics that the prototype can resolve objects … 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

I'll be honest. Vague phrases like "inner balance," "emotional resilience," and "coherence zone," all of which HeartMath uses to describe its new heart rate monitor and corresponding app, aggravate me a bit. After test-driving the product this week, however, I can overlook the language.

Think of the system as a mobile meditation guide. Available as of yesterday on iTunes, HeartMath's free Inner Balance app works exclusively with its Inner Balance earlobe sensor for iOS ($99), which is available at the company's online store or through many major retailers. It uses emWave technology to show the user's heart rhythm pattern (HRV) and trains the user to change that pattern to a healthier, "coherent" state.

The system is easy to set up and, more importantly, use regularly. After installing the app, simply clip the sensor to your earlobe, plug it into your iPhone or iPad using a standard 30-pin connector (you'll need a Lightning-to-30-pin adapter for iPhone 5), and tap the screen to start.… Read more

Cardio med tech company Biotronik today announced Food and Drug Administration approval of the world's first implantable cardiac defibrillator that uses just one lead to sense atrial arrhythmias.

Say what?

For those unfamiliar with the mechanics of the heart, let's back up. Atrial fibrillation (AF), the most common heat arrhythmia, occurs when the electrical signals in the atria (the heart's two upper chambers) fire fast and frenetically, causing the atria to essentially quiver instead of pulse regularly, which can result in blood pooling or clotting and thus greatly increase the risk of stroke and congestive heart failure.… 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

For most of us, light-sensitive cells that line our retinas convert light rays into electrical impulses that travel through the optic nerve to the brain to be assembled into images. But for an estimated 1 in 4,000 people in the U.S. with a genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa, or RP, those cells are damaged, which most commonly impairs vision at night. What's more, treatment to prevent eventual (if unlikely) total blindness remains elusive.

Enter the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System, which the FDA approved today to treat a very specific population: adults 25 and older with severe to profound RP who have bare or no light perception in both eyes but inner layer retinal function and a history of the ability to see forms.

Though the bionic eye doesn't restore vision to these patients, it could allow them to detect light and dark, which in turn could help them identify the movement or location of objects.… Read more

New research out of UC Davis suggests that when couples who are romantically involved interact, their heart and respiratory rates sync up.

But that doesn't mean you should bring a pair of heart rate monitors to scout out potential partners on your first date. When study participants were paired with someone outside their relationship, neither their heart rates nor their breathing closely matched.

To conduct their research, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology and Emotion, the psychologists in one study placed couples a few feet apart in a quiet, calm room and instructed them not to talk or touch. In another, the couples were asked to mimic each other without speaking. In both instances, heart and respiratory rates were closely matched.… Read more

It may not make your list of must-have camping gear, but a new sheet that detects mercury levels in water may prove useful to those who live or work downstream from industrial and mining sites (such as gold mines and coal-fired powered plants) and want to drink the local water.

When dipped in water for five minutes, the sheet, manufactured by chemists at the University of Burgos in Spain, signals the presence of mercury by turning red -- a process that can be seen with the naked eye.

Take a picture of that sheet with a digital camera, and you can learn the specific concentration of the mercury, a metal that is liquid at room temperature and has been found to cause long-term neurological issues after accumulating in the brain.… Read more