Technology

The world market for diagnostics was about $54.6 billion in 2013 and is expected to grow 4% annually, to $65 billion, by 2018. That figure in Kalorama's biennial survey of the IVD industry, The Worldwide Market for In Vitro Diagnostic Tests, 9th Edition, includes all laboratory and hospital-based products, and OTC product sales. New technology is leading the charge, according to Kalorama. Diagnostic laboratory technology has changed dramatically due to the publication of the human genome project and advances in functional genomics, bioinformatics, miniaturization and…

It’s banal to mention that technology is a two-edged sword. That it solves practical problems and creates new ones. That it makes our lives more comfortable and more complex, and stresses and at the same time sustains our social relationships. Today we’ll go beyond these commonplaces to explore two lesser-known aspects of tech’s dark side: Inequality and unhappiness. Will the dark side prevail? Maybe, but we’ll see glimmers of hope for the team of truth and goodness. The growing gap Technology enabled globalization. Globalization meant investment capital could freely roam the world, looking…

There has always been a bit of good-natured humor when it comes to who gets credit for what in a long line of citations. Occasionally, it can be strange, like when one person who contributed to the I.P.C.C. claims to be a Nobel laureate, but most often there is a pecking order to science papers. This does not keep science humorosts like Jorge Cham at PhDComics.com from cutting to the heart of the matter, as they did on figuring out citations way back in 2005: But a paper by Northeastern's Center for Complex Network Research takes a more serious approach to it and has created a new algorithm…

If you want to do something more practical with your phone than playing Angry Birds and reading email you won't reply to until you get to a computer, researchers at U.C. Davis have created Easy Leaf Area, which allow users to accurately measure leaf area from digital images in seconds.  Leaf measurements are often critical in plant physiological and ecological studies, but traditional methods have been time consuming and sometimes destructive to plant samples.   "It has always been a challenge to measure leaf surface area without damaging the plants or spending long hours in…

A picture is worth a thousand words, the saying goes, meaning that a picture can tell a big story quickly, but what if it could also represent a hundred thousand other images?  New software seeks to tame the vast amount of visual data in the world by generating a single photo that can represent massive clusters of images. This tool can give users the photographic gist of a kid on Santa's lap, housecats, or brides and grooms at their weddings. It works by generating an image that literally averages the key features of the other photos.  Users can also give extra weight to specific…

Not popular on Twitter? You may think it's because you're too honest. Unless you are a celebrity, popularity instead seems to come from conforming to social norms and expectations, so science journalists will complain about Republicans a lot, entertainment journalists will pretend to care about the Kardashians and New York Times journalists will pretend they like having spontaneous social media participation in their job descriptions. Given the perceived importance of social media, it's no surprise Aalto University found that users admitted faking parts of their online image in order to…

Given the choice between a great doctor and a nice doctor, most people would choose great, but for those who prefer nice, a new tool evaluates and helps medical residents improve their communication and other soft skills to become better doctors.  The study is the first to look at the medical residents' collaboration, communication and other soft skills, or what are known as CanMEDS competencies, in orthopedic surgical training. "While we do a great job at evaluating the medical skills of residents, we don't have a good tool to objectively test their soft skills such as…

Formerly conjoined twins Carl and Clarence Aguirre celebrated the 10th anniversary of their separation today with the medical team that successfully separated and cared for them at The Children's Hospital at Montefiore (CHAM) - the first documented set of twins to undergo a successfully staged separation of craniopagus twins in the world. One in two and a half million live births are craniopagus - twins joined at the head - and when Carl and Clarence arrived at Montefiore from the Philippines in September 2003, they were already dying from complications of their condition. Doctors believe…

People routinely edit photos, to take out red eyes or knock five percent of the width off of their bodies - but soon editors will have an extra dimension to work with. People will be able to turn or flip objects any way they want, even exposing surfaces not visible in the original photograph. A chair in a photograph of a living room, for instance, can be turned around or even upside down in the photo, displaying sides of the chair that would have been hidden from the camera, yet appearing to be realistic. This three-dimensional manipulation of objects in a single, two-dimensional photograph…

New discoveries about how butterflies feed could help engineers develop tiny probes that siphon liquid out of single cells for a wide range of medical tests and treatments. The research has brought together Clemson's materials scientists and biologists who have been focusing on the proboscis, the mouthpart that many insects used for feeding. For materials scientists, the goal is to develop what they call "fiber-based fluidic devices," among them probes that could eventually allow doctors to pluck a single defective gene out of a cell and replace it with a good one, said Konstantin Kornev, a…