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Category: health – Page 437

Soon, Your Smartwatch Will Know When You’re Getting Sick (Before You Do)

Pretty soon, your smart watch may know you’re sick before you do, according to US scientists. The researchers made an app which tracked health data — such as heart rate and skin temperature — collected by 60 people’s smart watches for up to two years, and found that people’s stats changed when they were getting sick.

The authors say smart watches could also help detect the risk of type 2 diabetes and low oxygen on planes, and that they even helped detect Lyme disease in one of the scientists behind the study.

Smart watches and similar portable devices are commonly used for measuring steps and physiological parameters, but have not generally been used to detect illness.

Older, fitter adults experience greater brain activity while learning

Exercise is one of the best ways to slow down aging and its free too!

(Boston) — Older adults who experience good cardiac fitness may be also keeping their brains in good shape as well.

In what is believed to be the first study of its kind, older adults who scored high on cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) tests performed better on memory tasks than those who had low CRF. Further, the more fit older adults were, the more active their brain was during learning. These findings appear in the journal Cortex. Difficulty remembering new information represents one of the most common complaints in aging and decreased memory performance is one of the hallmark impairments in Alzheimer’s disease.

Healthy young (18−31 years) and older adults (55−74 years) with a wide range of fitness levels walked and jogged on a treadmill while researchers assessed their cardiorespiratory fitness by measuring the ratio of inhaled and exhaled oxygen and carbon dioxide. These participants also underwent MRI scans which collected images of their brain while they learned and remembered names that were associated with pictures of unfamiliar faces.

Woman In The US Dies After Infection From Bacteria Resistant To 26 Antibiotic Drugs

Last year, doctors in the United States were unable to treat a patient infected with a bacterial strain that was resistant to 26 different antibiotics. After subjecting the bacteria to multiple tests, the doctors found it to be “resistant to all available antimicrobial drugs”, and the 70-year-old patient unfortunately died from the infection.

Detailed in a newly released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, the case highlights the significant threat that the emergence of highly resistant bacteria is becoming to global public health. The woman in the report was initially admitted to a hospital in Reno, Nevada, after she had returned from an extended trip to India with an infected swelling in her right hip.

After doctors conducted tests, they found she was infected with a form of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae known as Klebsiella pneumoniae. Normally living in the gut without causing any issues, K. pneumoniae is opportunistic in its infection. It seems that in the case of the woman in this latest report, the infection entered the bone after a femur fracture in India, and then subsequently spread to her hip.

Hong Kong’s Air is Now Filled with Smog Blown From China

Bigger question is what happens when it begins to impact it’s other neighbors including Japan and Tiawan?

Bigger question is what happens when it begins to impact it’s other neighbors including Japan and Taiwan?

Hongkongers were forced to breathe China’s airpocalypse smog over the weekend when monsoon winds from the northeast pushed the poisonous air from the mainland down to the city.

According to South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department reported that 11 of 16 stations in different districts recorded Air Quality Health Index readings by Sunday afternoon.

The districts of Tung Chung and Tuen Mun posted a score of 10, the highest mark in the “very high” health risk category.

Calorie Restriction as a Means to Improve Surgical Outcomes

More data for caloric restriction and health benefits.

The long-term response to calorie restriction has long been of interest to the aging research community, and particularly in the past few decades as the tools of biotechnology allowed for a more detailed analysis of the metabolic changes that accompany a reduced calorie intake. A restricted diet extends healthy life spans in near all species tested to date, though to a much greater extent in short-lived species than in long-lived species such as our own. Considerable effort is presently devoted to the development of drugs that can replicate some fraction of calorie restriction — more effort than is merited in my opinion, given that the optimal result for extension of human life span achieved via calorie restriction mimetics will be both hard to achieve safely and very limited in comparison to the gains possible through rejuvenation therapies after the SENS model. Repairing damage within the existing system should be expected to outdo attempts to change the system in order to slow the accumulation of damage, in both efficiency and size of result.

Not everyone is interested in the long term, however. The short term health benefits of calorie restriction appear quickly and are surprisingly similar in mice and humans, given that calorie restriction in mice results in significantly extended life and calorie restriction in humans does not. The beneficial adjustments to metabolism and organ function are for the most part larger and more reliable than similar gains presently achievable through forms of medicine. That is more a case of medical science having a long way to go yet than calorie restriction being wondrous, however. Still, the short term benefits are coming to the attention to wider audience within the research and medical community.

Government testing online grocery shopping for food stamp participants

Interesting approach.

Families who rely on food stamps may not be left out of the future of grocery shopping after all.

The pilot, which will run for two years, will launch on Shop.safeway.com in August.

The other retailers include Amazon, testing the program in New York, New Jersey and Maryland; Safeway, testing it in Maryland, Oregon and Washington; delivery service FreshDirect, testing in New York; and other regional and local grocers testing the program in New York and other East Coast states. As with the core program, SNAP participants will be able to use their benefits only to purchase eligible items online, not to pay for service or delivery charges. “Allowing consumers to use their SNAP benefits in the same way you would also use a credit or debit card to purchase groceries will lead to lower prices and greater options for consumers in every corner of this city and state”, said Diaz “I want to thank Congressman Maloney and our NY delegation, our partners in business and the health and hunger advocates who understood the need for this pilot program and joined our efforts to bring this important new program to NY”. “With the SNAP Pilot, we look forward to bringing the online purchasing option to SNAP clients and positively impacting all the communities that we serve”.

Light can be Used to Control the Logic Networks of a Cell

Another example where we will see a convergence of tech and bio especially as we emerge QC forward and synbio technology such as gene/ cell circuitry. We are finding so many synergies between Quantum and bio including the brain/ neuro networking, cell technology, human framework and pathways, etc. My guess when we mature these fields along with the minerals fiend we will began to wonder why we didn’t figure this out sooner.

New technique illuminates role of previously inaccessible proteins involved in health and disease.

Hour-Long Nap May Boost Brain Function in Older Adults

My grandparents taught me the importance of a power nap; and it does help.

We’re not sure what the boss would have to say about it if you suddenly downed tools and made a decision to have a little sleep, but new research has found that taking an hour’s nap after lunch can have a number of health benefits, including preventing brain ageing.

The study conducted among the older Chinese men by a team of worldwide researchers concentrated mainly on post-lunchtime napping and its impact on the health of elderly people.

Do you hesitate to take a sleep after having your lunch, now you should not.

IBM predicts superhero vision, nano-sized health devices in next five years

I like this article as it highlights some of the major discoveries made in 2016 that will launch many areas forward in 2017.

IBM is taking steps to make the world a better place.

The company has unveiled its annual ‘Five in Five’ list today, which lays out some of the most important and groundbreaking scientific innovations that, in the next five years, could have the potential to drastically alter the way people work, live and interact.

This year’s overarching theme is “making the invisible visible,” with IBM highlighting artificial intelligence (AI), hyperimaging, macroscopes, chip technology, and smart sensors as technologies that could have a big impact on life as we know it.