This intricate 3D model was done by Visual Science and it’s based on X-ray analysis and data that was published in the last twenty years. Some of the protein structures were predicted using computer modeling techniques.

This new model is 10 times more complex than the last one they did of HIV, which is kind of astounding. Where can I print mine?

[via designyoutrust]

This is a stomach crab gnawing away at your cancer. Inside of you. The future is (almost) here people. It will be at least three years until it is commercially in use.

[via medgadget]

The coolest of the projects that received grant money is one proposed by a team of scientists at Boston University that want to figure out if you can grow brown fat cells and then inject them into the human body as a way to boost metabolism and burn fat, leading to weight loss. The human body has both brown adipose tissue and white adipose tissue. The white fat cells make people obese, yet the brown fat cells help burn calories.

In fact, a recent study showed that a pockets of brown fat cells can burn as much as 250 calories in a three-hour time span. Those brown fat cells can even steal energy from white fat cells, further stunting obesity. The researchers hope to develop a method of growing those brown fat cells and injecting them into the body with the goal of helping overweight soldiers lose weight. You can bet that if the team is successful, this will also be highly profitable in the private sector with obese people looking for a way to lose weight.

[via Wired: Danger Room]

I doubt we’ll ever reach that stage, but the point is, time is valuable. Time is money. And time is something we all probably don’t have enough of.

So for the guys, there’s the e-Urinal. This thing will speed you up by checking your urinary health as you pee. The touchscreen fires up as you go, and you can just browse through the different menu and options by tapping (preferably after washing your hands.) So maybe it might also be a good idea to stick a mini sink in there somewhere.

The e-Urinal concept would measure the PH, SG, URO, BLO, WBC, PRO, GLI, BIL, & KET in your pee. That’s a whole lot of stuff, but basically, those are measures of your sugar levels, PH, and red/white blood cell count, among others. It could also store your history so you could check up on your trends over time (assuming you can remember which urinal you used.)

The e-Urinal was designed by Royce Zhang. It seems pretty cool, though it would be much cooler if he also came up with a female version. Hmmm.

[via Yanko Design]

The team is working on a contact lens which non-invasively monitors blood sugar levels without constantly stabbing yourself with a needle. The scientists have already figured out a way to build a glucose sensor into a contact lens, as well as lenses with built in radios and antennas, which can transmit information wirelessly. In the short term, the plan is to combine these technologies and transmit data to a wireless device.

While none of the current lens components have a built-in display, the team envisions a day where the lens itself would provide its wearer with heads-up information, without need for any additional components. Sure, it sounds a bit like science fiction, but with a real-world medical problem driving research, it’s possible the development of such wondrous things will receive investment and make it to market sooner than we think.

Now take everything a notch further with your very own personal mood detector and tweeter with the Q-Sensor Bracelet.

So what makes the Q-Sensor by Affectiva any different from all those other self-proclaimed mood-detecting products? Well, for one, it makes use of sensors that measure your galvanic skin response, an indicator of your physiological or psychological arousal (and also what supposed “lie detectors” measure.). It also keeps tabs on the electrical conductance of your skin, which changes with varying moisture levels on your skin (sweaty, much?)

Aside from that, the Q-Sensor also measures your temperature and overall movement, and inputs all this information into pre-installed software to determine your mood. And if you want it to, it will Tweet your mood.

Sounds pretty cool, right? The only downside is the $2,000 pricetag that comes with it. Of course, Affectiva doesn’t intend this as a consumer gadget – it’s actually targeted at medical and research environments, where the cost shouldn’t be such a factor.

[via GigaOm via Geeky Gadgets]

Having HOSPI-Rimo around means that they will be able to talk to the doctor even when he is in a different area of the hospital as if he were in the room talking to you face to face. That goes for family as well. The HOSPI-Rimo also has their medication needs covered since it will deliver medication. It won’t be long before this bot is put into service across Japan. I think doctors will get sick of this one really quick since it allows patients to bother them at their leisure about any little thing.

[via Ubergizmo]

One of the hassles of being an in-patient is that you’re often hooked up on to monitoring machines and are literally confined in your hospital room. However, a team from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain want to change that with their Nuubo smart shirt.

Obviously, this shirt is no ordinary piece of clothing. You can think of it like a portable monitoring machine that you can wear to keep track of your vital signs, and can alert doctors and nurses if anything is amiss. It’s also embedded with a GPS unit that will let hospital staff locate you if you wander too far away from your ward. Moreover, the shirt can even be programmed to run an EKG chest remotely with the push of a button.

The shirt is currently being put on a trial run in a hospital environment, and I hope it’s something we’ll be able to see in use in hospitals very soon.

[via Engadget via Dvice]

Brennan was motivated by the number of post-diagnosis deaths of patients afflicted with tuberculous pericarditis, a condition affecting about 2% of TB patients that could lead to cardiac arrest. He wanted to develop a cheap and easy way for patients to record their heartbeats on their own. The prototype you see above was made using a headset and an egg-cup.

A rubber O-ring and a piece of clear plastic are attached to the listening end of the egg cup to “ensure a good seal” to a patient’s chest. The custom software developed by Brennan, Clifford and Springer lets users record the phonocardiogram – the sound from the heart – then send the file to a specialist. It also has a built-in signal processor so it can identify poor recordings and ask the user to repeat the procedure, as well as a custom algorithm to “reliably identify heart rate and heart sounds.”

Brennan and company conducted a clinical trial from January to April of this year and compared the results that their device – connected to a Nokia 3110 Classic and then to an iPhone 3G – obtained with those from an actual electronic stethoscope. Amazingly enough the readings from the lowly Nokia bested the ones from the dedicated stethoscope, although the former also had a lot of low quality recordings. Brennan isn’t stopping here – he and Springer are working on an Android app version of their software. He also wants to see if their invention can be used to analyze other heart-related diseases.

[University of Oxford via Medgadget via Ubergizmo]

So what several Japanese scientists from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute did instead was develop a chemical reagent that could turn biological tissues transparent. The photo above is not of a human embryo (because not only is it unethical, it’s also illegal, but the thought still crossed my mind all the same), but of a mouse embryo.

The reagent is called Scale (with an italicized “l”, as you can see) and was developed by Atsushi Miyawaki and his team at RIKEN. Scale can turn any tissue transparent, without causing any major alternations or changes in the overall shape or proportion of the sample. While Scale is definitely the most advanced of its kind, it still has a long way to go. The reagent can be used on living tissue; however, it quickly turns the tissue from living to non-living because of its nature.

Miyawaki explains that Scale was primarily intended for conducting research on the brain of mice, but that he and his team hope to improve the reagent more to extend its application to heart, muscle, and kidney tissues–not only of rodents, but also to human and primate tissues in the future.

[via PopSci via Dvice]

In all, Yale is spending about $600,000 to provide 520 top-of-the-line iPad 2 3G 64GB tablets to students. The iPads come with the curriculum for first and second year students pre-loaded. The iPad for third and fourth year students come with materials for their chosen specialty. Apparently, the stack of printed materials that goes along with medical school at Yale is enormous after two years and the copied pages don’t do colors that are needed in medical images.

The iPad on the other hand will allow the students to view the material with high-resolution images as well. They can also take advantage of apps that encourage interactive learning. Tablets like the iPad are becoming much more common in the hospital and medical setting so it only makes sense for Yale to move in this direction.

[Yale Daily News via MacWorld]

The glowing blue stick you see in the tweezers is a new sensor that the team has been working on that glows to show the mouse’s blood sugar. The sensor uses glucose-responsive fluorescent hydrogels inside and is 1mm in diameter. It is designed to be easily injected under the skin and can be removed with tweezers like a splinter.

The sensor has shown to be accurate and durable enough to stay inside the body for up to 140 days in mice. The team is working on calibrating and testing the sensor further to improve the accuracy and duration of the sensor. Eventually the hope is that the sensor can be used in humans to allow blood sugar monitoring without having to prick the finger to draw blood for conventional testing.

[via MedGadget]

This little factoid has already been brought up more than once, but it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw these adult cradles.

Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, because yes, that is a cradle, and yes, that’s an adult lying down inside it. Looks comfortable, doesn’t it?

The story as to how the design came about isn’t all whimsical and rhymes, however. It was actually one of the results from a study done about children who have rhythmic movement disorder (RMD). This chair here provides a comfortable environment that can calm anyone’s senses and give them some downtime and a much-needed break from work and life, in general.

As an added bonus, environmentalists will be happy to know that all of the materials that went into making this adult cradle was sourced in a way that’s friendly to Mother Earth, including the glue that was used to bind the layers of plywood.

The team of designers behind this cradle are Richard Clarkson, Grace Emmanual, Kalivia Russel, Eamon Moore, Brodie Cambell, Jeremy Brooker and Joya Boerrigter, collectively known as Synergy341.

[via Yanko Design]

Technology today makes living and doing the little things for the disabled much easier. We have talked about Willow Garage and its cool PR2 robot in the past. Willow Garage has been working with the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech and a paralyzed man named Henry Evans on new interfaces that allow the severely disabled to live an easier and more normal life. Evans had a stroke at 40-years-old and now only has use of one finger and his head.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

He is able to do little things for himself using an experimental interface like shave and scratch his own back that he couldn’t not do alone before. I think this sort of research holds a lot of promise for the disabled; it’s too bad the PR2 costs so much though since 99.9% of the people that could use it can’t afford one.

If you don’t agree with me on that one, then you might want to take a look at the Hanako 2 Dental Robot.

Can the pretty girl say “ahh”, please?

The Hanako 2 Dental Robot, as its name suggests and implies, is meant to be used as a practice dummy for dentistry students. Pull her teeth out, give her a cleaning, examine her molars–it’s all entirely up to you.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The Hanako 2 is a far cry from its predecessor in terms of what it can do. This version of the dental robot can sneeze, blink, roll its eyes, open and close its mouth, cough, and even gag if you stick your fingers too far back into its throat.

And thanks to the robot’s development team collaborating with some sex toy makers, Hanako 2′s skin now feels more realistic and human.

[via DigInfo TV via Dvice]

The app not only points to the sections of the body that you might want to work on, but also gives you the fees for the surgery as well. The fee schedule even gives the cost of the anesthesiologist as well. The app offers procedures for men and women to check out. The clinic the doctor that invented the app works in is in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but the app helps prospective patients find surgeons around the country. The app launched on iOS devices and a version is being developed now for Android devices as well.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

According to Kaplan, “Consumers want information to make better buying decisions, especially about cosmetic surgery, where prices for the same procedures can vary by as much as 35%. As the dramatic growth in the development of apps for the iPhone shows, people want the convenience of having information they can use to make important decisions on their phones. It seemed logical that being able to research cosmetic surgeons and procedures that way would be of real value to consumers and surgeons.”

Am I the only one that finds this weird?

Patrick, a 24-year old Austrian, had lost the use of his hand. Now, thanks to his bionic hand, he can move his fingers once more. The prosthetics are called bionic since use the signals from the patients’ brain and nerves to enact movement. Through the miracle of modern science, Patrick can tie his own shoelaces and open a bottle. Another patient, called “Milo” lost his hand in a motorcycle accident and will soon be fitted with a bionic hand after a voluntary amputation of his right hand.

This stuff seems like it’s out of science fiction, but it’s real. It’s amazing what they can do with these bionic limbs. It won’t take long before people will have all sorts of bionic implants, from feet to eyes. Be sure to check out the videos over at the BBC.

[via Make:]

A group of researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine has developed new tech that is described as being similar to an ink jet printer that is able to print skin directly onto a wound (Opens PDF doc). The printer sprays a combination of skin cells, collagen, and blood coagulants onto the wound that form skin once mixed at the print head. Naturally, the wound still has to heal, but the hope is that the printer tech could one day replace the need for skin grafts.

Once perfected, the process could be used to treat soldiers with injuries on the battlefield.

[via Technology Review via DVICE]

Some of you may not see anything wrong with the idea behind this automated stabber. Well then let’s look at how it works: the Bloodbot is able to select a suitable vein – one that is close to the surface of the skin – from which to draw blood from by pressing a probe onto a patient’s arm. Using mathemagics, the robot is able to detect the unlucky blood vessel and then inserts the needle under what the EMPIRE Imperial College London calls – I shit you not – “force control”.

Really though it’s just a fancy way of saying that the Bloodbot can sense the force that a patient’s skin is exerting on the needle. As the graph above shows – and as common sense dictates – our skin resists the needle somewhat at first, but since the Bloodbot is hellbent on stabbing you it will keep on piercing the skin. As soon as the robot’s needle pierces our skin, the force that our relatively tough skin exerts on the needle is gone, replaced by the weaker force from our blood. The robot (hopefully) detects this drop in force and stops inserting the needle so as not to run you straight through. The temptation is still there though. Now consider this: at any given moment there are millions of people who are eating and/or drinking. That’s a massive enough scale right? Do you think we need Foodbots and Drinkbots? They’ll surely save us a lot of time and energy.

[via gearfuse]

As you can see, Jones’ tooth serves as as a support for the lens that was created out of a patch of his skin. What’s even more amazing (for me at least) is that the procedure, developed by surgeon Christopher Liu, has actually been performed about 50 times! So Jones isn’t the only guy with the Sauron-like eye. Check out Daily Mail‘s report for more details.

[via gizmo watch]