Technology

Though 23andMe finally got FDA approval for a test, that is much different than the unvalidated claims about 250 conditions that they used to make. They got a cease and desist letter from the FDA because of their high profile. In general, smaller companies are even more aggressive in their marketing claims -they overemphasize their purported benefits and downplay their limitations, including genetic tests whose value for guiding cancer treatment has not been shown to be clinically useful.  "We wanted to see if consumers are getting a balanced picture of benefits and limitations of these…

How much overdetection is acceptable in cancer screening? A UK survey discussed in The BMJ this week affirms what we always knew, that responses are all over the map, depending on how the questions are framed. The article is part of a series on over-detection (over-diagnosis) looking at the risks and harms to patients of expanding definitions of disease and increasing use of new diagnostic technologies. Over-detection describes cancerous lesions that are picked up and treated but would never have caused symptoms or become fatal in a person's lifetime. This is typically seen if the cancers are…

Deep in the heart of synthetic biology are the proteins that make it tick and that is why protein engineering is crucial to the new discipline: Scientists grow, harvest, and reprogram proteins to become new drug therapeutics, environmentally friendly fuels, and vaccines. But producing proteins quickly and in large quantities has been and remains a major challenge in the field, so Northwestern University synthetic biologist Michael Jewett and colleagues have pioneered a new protein production method that is faster and cheaper than ever before, making synthetic biology research more accessible…

After an interventional radiology intranasal treatment, migraine patients report using less pain-relief medicine for headaches, according to a paper at the Society of Interventional Radiology's Annual Scientific Meeting. Clinicians used a treatment called image-guided, intranasal sphenopalatine ganglion (SPG) blocks to give patients enough ongoing relief that they required less medication to relieve migraine pain. The team did a retrospective analysis of 112 patients suffering migraine or cluster headaches. Patients reported the severity of their headaches on a visual analogue scale (…

Ariel between Wisdom and Gaiety. Wikimedia My advice to the BBC: ignore the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport committee report on your future at your peril. Over the past 30 years the BBC has largely been the author of its own misfortune. While the journalists and program makers have continued to create and inform, executive leadership has been busy digging the corporation’s future grave. It’s easy to dismiss the media committee’s various incarnations as a small bunch of parliamentarians washed up from ministerial sackings and twilight political career grazing. But I believe the…

Centrality and nodes are an important concept in the theory of social networks. Centrality of an individual - a "node" in network theory - measures its relative importance within a network, and a recent paper in Scientific Reports studies the problem of dynamics and evolution of node's centrality. Nitesh Chawla, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Notre Dame, and doctoral students Yang Yang and Yuxiao Dong point out that social networks are dynamic and evolve over time when new individuals (nodes) join a network, or new links form between nodes or old links diminish…

Hundreds of hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and hundreds of millions of hours are viewed daily, including many that cover areas of science. Despite this, if you want to use YouTube for science communication, reaching an audience is not always guaranteed. We’ve analyzed nearly 400 science communication videos to understand what the successful YouTube science communicators do – those with numerous subscribers – that less successful communicators do not. So, here are seven things we found that can help you to communicate science on YouTube. 1. Choose your audience This seems…

The demise of radio has been predicted for 70 years, but it is still going strong - it is just more consolidated than it was in the past. Even college radio which, thanks to taxpayers, isn't under the same financial pressure as the corporate kind, has declined in popularity, because young people have been listening to the radio much less. Yet since 2008, social networks have been changing that. Like much of college radio, it wasn't planned but they made it a feature as it happened.  An analysis of 23 university stations in Spain found that college radio embraced social networking - and…

The Internet of Things is Web 2.0 of 2004 or Big Data of 2013 - a great buzzword that marketing groups are trying to exploit by rebranding what already exists. But the promise, the idea that everything in the human environment, from kitchen appliances to industrial equipment, could be equipped with sensors and processors that can exchange data, helping with maintenance and the coordination of tasks, is real. Yet there is a huge barrier, in a world that would like to reduce greenhouse gases without actually embracing energy that produces no greenhouse gases, like nuclear science - the energy…

Six months form here, there won't be a single whatsapp user in the world. Why? Because Telegram exists. References:  http://www.whatsapp.com/, https://telegram.org/ PS: Of course I might be wrong. Whatsapp could be dead in five months :) PS2: I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine last time, on the subject "Why do women have longer hair than men"? The answer is coming soon. PS3: Very interesting windsurfing day today 22 february 2015 in Porto Cesareo, Lecce, Italy, with waves up to 5 meters. high. See weather report here.PS4: Honestly speaking, Hank, in the Twitter…