Business is booming.
Gyms aren’t a recent phenomenon. If we thought gyms were tethered to the trend of self-conscious fashionistas and the scourge of obesity, well, you’d be wrong. Gymnasiums, or ‘gymnasia’, go back thousands of years to Ancient Greece where you’d find dedicated exercise auditoriums typically consisting of spacious training grounds for athletic contests.
Changes in a dog’s behavior could clue us into problems in their owners’ lives.
Lassie’s barking may have saved many humans from a barn or forest fire, but Newcastle University researchers in England say that even more subtle changes in a dog’s behavior could clue us into problems in their owners’ lives–especially if those owners are older, isolated, and might eschew Fitbits and other wearable tracking devices themselves.
Continue reading… “A dog collar that tracks when something is wrong with their humans”
Do you have Silicon Valley Syndrome?
Do you sit at a computer all day? Are you achy, your back hurts, you have trouble sleeping, and your head is pounding? You could have Silicon Valley syndrome.
Continue reading… “60% of Americans suffer from Silicon Valley Syndrome: Infographic”
IBM scientists are collaborating with Johns Hopkins University and University of California, San Francisco to combat illness and infectious diseases in real-time with smarter data tools for public health. The focus is to help contain global outbreaks of dengue fever and malaria by applying the latest analytic models, computing technology and mathematical skills on an open-source framework.
Continue reading… “IBM scientists use data to predict infectious disease outbreaks”
For some patients and for some microbes, we are already in the post-antibiotic era.
The Centers for Disease Control, in a highly unusual new report, warned that America is threatened by a wave of new antibiotic-proof germs that could threaten public health, and that overuse of antibiotics in health care and industrial agriculture bears much of the blame.
Continue reading… “CDC warns “we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era””
Google is planning to launch a new company with the absurdly ambitious objective of extending our lives. “Calico” is the name of the company and will be run by Arthur Levinson, chairman and ex-CEO of biotech company Genentech.
Continue reading… “Google hopes to cure death with its new health startup Calico”
Communication is the key when it comes to cancer care.
A new report has been released recently by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) on the state of cancer care in the United States. The IOM is a non-profit, non-governmental advisory group. To get on one of their advisory boards you have to be a national, if not international, expert in whatever field is being studied. According to the cancer advisory board, the state of cancer care in the United States is abysmal.
Futurist Thomas Frey: Our teenage years have always been a time of great awkwardness, super hormones, and bad decision-making. But lately these years have moved even further down the path of supreme weirdness.
UCLA smartphone virus scanner
Scientists have finally developed a technology that makes it possible to avoid a trip to the doctor. The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science scientists have created a lightweight, virus-detecting device that attaches to a common smartphone and is able to scan the human body for human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) particles. The troublesome virus is the root of various illnesses, including birth defects like deafness and brain damage. HCMV can also expedite the death of adults who have HIV, a weak immune system and those who have undergone organ transplants, making early detection of the virus useful.
More than 1.78 million middle and high school students nationwide had tried e-cigarettes in 2012.
Electronic cigarettes use among middle and high school students has been rising rapidly, a trend that public health officials worry could undermine decades of efforts to reduce youth smoking and put a growing number of teenagers on a path toward conventional cigarettes.
Continue reading… “E-cigarette use doubles among middle and high school students”
Clergy members are at a higher risk of depression.
Using phone surveys and written questionnaires, researchers from the Clergy Health Initiative at Duke Divinity School decided to look into the mental health of members of the clergy. They interviewed over 1,700 United Methodist pastors, and found that depression is about 1.6 times higher in that group compared to the general population (8.7% versus 5.5%).
Continue reading… “There is more depression among clergy than the general population: Study”
Tube transportation is the future of transportation.
You shouldn’t give up on flying cars or hoverboards just yet. As technology continues to march on, everything will go into development sooner or later—as demonstrated by the existence of these things, which we’ll almost certainly see within our lifetimes.
Continue reading… “Top 10 cutting-edge technologies in development”