The WELT communicates with your phone to tell you how many steps you've taken, how long you've been sitting, eating habits and your waistline size. It then sends the data to a specially-designed app for analysis, to tell you things like -- if you keep eating like you did today, you're going to gain 2 pounds this month. Samsung expects the WELT to go on sale this year.If the product becomes a commercial success, it's easy to imagine how much historical data the company is going to collect across a broad range of demographic categories. Even if this particular product flops in the market, similar ones, e.g. made by FitBit or Apple, will emerge over time. The key difference between Samsung and others is that Samsung is now getting into pharmaceuticals. Here's a quote from a 2014 Bloomberg article:
South Korea’s biggest company is investing at least $2 billion in biopharmaceuticals, including the growing segment of biosimilars, which are cheaper versions of brand-name biotechnology drugs that have lost patent protection.
“We are in an infancy still,” Christopher Hansung Ko, chief executive officer at the Samsung Bioepis unit, said in an interview. “We are a Samsung company. Our mandate is to become No. 1 in everything we enter into, so our long-term goal is to become a leading pharmaceutical company in the world.”
(MTR 02/25/2013)A brain-pacemaker helped put out-of-sync brain circuits back on track in patients with extreme forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), reported researchers in yesterday’s Nature Neuroscience. The work could help improve treatment of severe OCD and even lead to other, less invasive new forms of treatment.
The next step, says Figee [, will be to see if he and his colleagues can use the brain activity measures to determine if a patient’s deep-brain stimulator is working properly. An implant has several electrodes, and it can take a lot of trial and error to learn which should be active and at which pulse settings for each patient. “We still don’t really know what we do; sometimes people respond, sometimes they don’t, sometimes it takes weeks or a year trying all kinds of settings,” he says. Using the brain scanning tools in the clinic may be years away, but it is possible, says Figee. “This may help us focus on the brain synchronization that we should aim for,” he says.
In 2011, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study that shed new light on America’s weight gain. The subjects — 120,877 women and men — were all professionals in the health field, and were likely to be more conscious about nutrition, so the findings might well understate the overall trend. [The researchers] found that every four years, the participants exercised less, watched TV more and gained an average of 3.35 pounds. The researchers parsed the data by the caloric content of the foods being eaten, and found the top contributors to weight gain included red meat and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages and potatoes, including mashed and French fries. But the largest weight-inducing food was the potato chip. The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself — all of this combines to make it the perfect addictive food.Food scientists and advertisers found a way to hack into our biology, exploiting the body's reliance on taste to provide quality nutrition. Nowadays, even pets started suffering from extra weight because their owners can't control the pets' diet.
In a single year, there are 200-300 million cases of malaria and 50-100 million cases of dengue fever worldwide. So: Why haven't we found a way to effectively kill mosquitoes yet? Hadyn Parry presents a fascinating solution: genetically engineering male mosquitoes to make them sterile, and releasing the insects into the wild, to cut down on disease-carrying species.
(MIT Tech Review. Feb 1, 2013) Currently, researchers have limited tools to study the molecular structure of proteins. X-ray diffraction can give them an atomic-level view of some proteins, but many copies of the protein must be crystallized into a rigid lattice, a process that does not work for all proteins and results in an averaging of protein shape. Conventional MRI, which can be used by doctors to peek inside the body, doesn’t let researchers see anything smaller than a few micrometers in size because the detectors aren’t sensitive enough to pick up magnetic field signals from very small structures.
Two reports published online in Science on Thursday open up the possibility that researchers may be able to determine the structure of individual proteins in living cells. ...the researchers show how specially modified diamond flakes can be used as nanoscale magnetic field detectors.
These tiny sensors can elucidate the structure of single organic molecules. With nanoscale MRI, researchers may one day be able to directly image proteins and other molecules at the atomic scale.
Laparoscopic surgery uses minimally invasive incisions -- which means less pain and shorter recovery times for patients. But Steven Schwaitzberg has run into two problems teaching these techniques to surgeons around the world -- language and distance. He shares how a new technology, which combines video conferencing and a real-time universal translator, could help.
Researcher Marie-Soleil Beaudoin has discovered not only that a healthy person's blood sugar levels spike after eating a high-fat meal, but that the spike doubles after having both a fatty meal and caffeinated coffee – jumping to levels similar to those of people at risk for diabetes.Since many Starbucks sell fatty sweets and lunches, adding coffee to the mix creates a recipe for sure-fire Diabetes 2: sugar (salt) + fat + caffeine. Similarly, when McDonald's sells coffee in addition to its traditional junk food they reproduce Starbucks' commercial success and the Diabetes 2 recipe.
Parkinson’s disease affects 6.3 million people worldwide, causing weakness and tremors, but there's no objective way to detect it early on. Yet. Applied mathematician and TED Fellow Max Little is testing a simple, cheap tool that in trials is able to detect Parkinson's with 99 percent accuracy -- in a 30-second phone call.
Sugar also has a clear potential for abuse. Like tobacco and alcohol, it acts on the brain to encourage subsequent intake. There are now numerous studies examining the dependence-producing properties of sugar in humans6. Specifically, sugar dampens the suppression of the hormone ghrelin, which signals hunger to the brain. It also interferes with the normal transport and signalling of the hormone leptin, which helps to produce the feeling of satiety. And it reduces dopamine signalling in the brain’s reward centre, thereby decreasing the pleasure derived from food and compelling the individual to consume more.
To treat obesity, it should possible to move the bacteria the other way around, from obesity-resistant individuals to obesity-prone ones.In 2006, biologists found that the types of bacteria in the guts of obese rats differed from those in non-obese rats. To find out more, Mihai Covasa and his colleagues at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) in Paris swapped gut bacteria between obesity-prone and obesity-resistant rats.The obesity-resistant rodents proceeded to eat more and pile on the pounds. They also developed gut hormone levels typical of obesity-prone rodents.
10 February 2012. NS -- When a nerve is severed through injury, surgeons must suture the two stumps together as quickly as possible. Yet even under controlled lab conditions, Bittner's tests in rats suggest that these conventional sutures restore little more than 30 per cent of previous mobility, even three months after surgery.
Put bluntly, the body botches nerve repair. It forms seals over the two severed stumps of a broken nerve within an hour, says Bittner, but it doesn't reconnect them first. Even if surgeons then suture the two ends, the seals will prevent nerve signals from passing easily across the join.Bittner realised that we need a system that blocks the body's repair process. The way to do that, he discovered, is to immediately flush the injury site with a calcium-free salty solution that also contains methylene blue, a chemical that blocks oxidation reactions. Calcium and oxidation drive the formation of tiny spheres called vesicles, which in turn seal the nerve stumps.
Feb 6, 2012. NS -- By using an MRI scan of their patient's ailing jawbone to get the shape right, they fed it to a laser sintering 3D printer which fused tiny titanium particles layer by layer until the shape of her jawbone was recreated. It was then coated in a biocompatible ceramic layer. No detail was spared: it even had dimples and cavities that promoted muscle attachment, and sleeves that allowed mandibular nerves to pass through - plus support structures for dental implants the patient might need in future.I wonder how long will it take to figure out how to print neurons or their equivalent, so that motor and sensory functions can be restored in, e.g. paraplegics.
Starbucks is planning to add the alcoholic drinks and food such as savory snacks, cheese plates and hot flatbreads to menus in four to six outlets in each market.Nutrition-wise, beer is largely carbs. A 12oz glass of a decent beer is worth about 150 calories, which should give you the extra energy to ride a horse for almost an hour. And if you add a cheese plate to your Starbucks order, you'll have to ride this horse for the rest of the evening.
