sterile

I like to think I'm no germaphobe, but when I was recently handed an iPad whose screen was littered with smudgy fingerprints, a little voice inside my head stopped talking and started choking. I couldn't help but imagine what pathogens were thriving on that surface.

Enter the AirStrap Med, an iPad case designed by and for health care workers but well-suited to the germ-wary as well.

The $89.99 case, released this month by Griffin, is made of a two-piece polycarbonate and silicone frame that snaps around the iPad (also compatible with iPad 2) in such a way … Read more

Microsoft's Kinect has in recent years spawned hundreds of side hack projects. This week, a group of researchers and surgeons out of London is piloting a project developed alongside Microsoft Research to enable touchless viewing and manipulation of images while performing vascular surgery.

During complex aneurysm procedures, a computer program takes a 3D image of a patient's anatomy and produces several 2D images taken from different angles. The Kinect tech then enables surgeons to operate those images using gesture and voice alone.

The benefits are two-fold: surgeons can more easily maintain a sterile environment when they don't … Read more

Welcome to mating 2.0: the sexual act itself might not change, but when the parts don't work, we'll simply build new ones.

So say scientists in Japan who, using stem-cell techniques, are the first to engineer sperm in infertile male mice that successfully fertilized eggs and produced offspring.

The team, led by Mitinori Saitou at Kyoto University, report in the journal Cell that it used stem cells to create primordial germ cells, the precursor to sperm cells, and injected those germ cells into the testicles of infertile mice. The cells eventually produced normal-looking sperm, which went on … Read more

Female mosquitoes just don't get to have any fun. They mate only once, lay eggs, and eventually die.

In an effort to combat malaria, researchers at Imperial College London hope to take advantage of the female mosquito's plight--and reduce the mosquito population--by engineering spermless males. They say the key is that the females don't seem able to tell the difference; they still mate with the sterile males and proceed to lay eggs that never hatch.

This is an improvement over previous attempts to engineer sterile males, the team said, because that process often exposed the males to … Read more

Medical instrument sterilization is a hot, dirty, expensive business involving chemicals, ozone-depleting aerosols and hazardous waste, but a new plasma technology promises to change the way we kill germs.

Atmospheric Glow Technologies of Knoxville, Tenn., is building a portable medical device called the Steriglow Sterilization System that it says will produce no waste or heat and costs much less to operate than existing technologies.

The process takes plasma, the same stuff found in flat-screen TVs, and creates "short-lived reactive chemical species from air" that neutralizes all biocontaminants. Viruses, bacteria, fungi--it kills them all. It's so effective that … Read more