health

In my weekly attempt to learn long technical words, I was browsing New Scientist when I came across a concept that made me cough to a splutter.

E-cigarettes.

Powered by batteries, they look vaguely like a cigarette, the end furthest from your lips glows red, they emit smoke, and they give you something of a nicotine hit with every drag.

However, because they don't burn, they are not classified as, well, cigarettes. And because they don't make a health claim, they're not classified as, you know, medicine. Which means that you can sit at a bar and … Read more

It's Friday the 13th today, and just one day left before Valentine's Day, so we beg 404 resident hottie biscotti Rana Showbunny of Medialets into the studio to help Jeff decide what to get his girlfriend for the holiday. Her answer is definitely the opposite from what we thought! Meanwhile, I think all hope is lost for Wilson and me...I can't speak for him, but I know that by this time tomorrow I'll be curled up in the fetal position with a Snuggie watching A Walk to Remember and polishing off a Dumpster's worth … Read more

I spent some time talking with an Accenture veteran this morning, and came away with an intriguing idea: enable open-source projects to provide corporate benefits like health insurance to their developers so that they can ditch their day jobs to focus on their open-source passion.

If you've ever started a small business, you know that getting "enterprise-grade" benefits like health insurance is very difficult. At Alfresco, for example, we ultimately joined a PEO (Professional Employer Organization) called Trinet [PDF], which aggregates many smaller companies to negotiate insurance plans with companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield that would … Read more

commentary The U.S. Senate on Tuesday approved an $838 billion "stimulus" bill by a 61-37 vote, capping more than a week of political sparring between critics of the measure and President Obama, who claimed during a press conference that an "economic emergency" made it necessary.

What didn't come up during the president's first press conference was how one section of the convoluted legislation--it's approximately 800 pages total--is intended to radically reshape the nation's medical system by having the government establish computerized medical records that would follow each American from birth to … Read more

Looks like that iPhone or iPod Touch you bring to the gym can do more for your fitness than just make your workout more pleasurable.

iTMP Technology, an iPhone hardware and software developer, announced Friday its launch of SmHeart Link, a new device developed to bring health and fitness tracking capabilities to iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Basically, SmHeart Link is a wireless bridge that collects data from distributed health and fitness sensors such as those found in workout machines and sends it to the iPhone via Wi-Fi. Users then can make use of the data via an iPhone application … Read more

We were really thinking about calling this episode something to do with prehistoric snake. Because Natali is very into the prehistoric snakes. Although she can't kill them. Instead we discuss Bill Gates releasing mosquitoes at TED, the Congress sort of delaying the DTV transition, and Google trying to steal your health information.

Bill Gates Unleashes Mosquitoes On Rich TED Conference Crowd http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/2/bill-gates-unleashes-mosquitoes-on-rich-ted-crowd http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7871210.stm

DTV delay passes, 264-158 http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/02/dtv-delay-passes-264-158.ars… Read more

It's going to get easier for Google to keep tabs on your health.

The ubiquitous tech conglomerate has signed on to a new software product created by IBM with help from the Continua Health Alliance, an organization that promotes interoperability of medical devices. It'll take data from personal health monitoring devices, like blood sugar meters for diabetics, and share that directly with the patient in question's Google Health file (and the patient's physician, if he or she uses Google Health as well).

Other personal health record (PHR) services will also be able to use the IBM … Read more

Google has brought seven new languages to its Google Translate service. According to the company, Albanian, Estonian, Galician, Hungarian, Maltese, Thai, and Turkish have been added. The company also announced that its English dictionary has been improved to "include synonyms, antonyms, pronunciations, detailed definitions, and examples from Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary." All its new features are available now.

User Centric, a company that researches user experiences, announced Monday that it has concluded its usability study of Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. According to its findings, which took opinions from 30 participants who were asked to … Read more

The OpenID Foundation announced Wednesday that it has added PayPal as a corporate member of the board. Andrew Nash, PayPal's senior director of information risk management, joins the board, which is populated by representatives from Google, IBM, and Microsoft, among others. According to Nash, PayPal elected to become part of the OpenID board because "open standards-based user-centric identity is clearly becoming an increasingly important part of the evolving web infrastructure" and his company believes it can add to OpenID's desire to bring more security to the Web.

HealthCentral, a site that provides a collection of condition-specific … Read more