Technology
Though lots of people used the expensive government health insurance portal healthcare.gov to get information on the Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare, far fewer could successfully use it to sign up.
As the stories of its flaws mounted, larger percentages instead talked to call centers or a navigator without using the website at all. That's a win for the government, which needed to show some success after expending a great deal of political capital and taxpayer money, but not without cost. How much cost is unclear, the government has not yet disclosed how many people signed…
Reading glasses have served us for centuries. Why fix a good thing? Because science and technology can.
Presbyopia, blurriness in near vision experienced by many people over the age of 40, could one day be relegated to olden days if a thin ring inserted into the eye gains popularity.
Presbyopia affects more than 1 billion people worldwide. As people age, the cornea becomes less flexible and bends in such a way that it becomes difficult to see up close. While the most common remedy is wearing reading glasses, a host of new corneal inlay products are in development to treat the condition…
Image credit: Ph0neutria via shutterstock
By: Benjamin Plackett, Inside Science
(Inside Science) — Until last year, website designers had a choice of just 22 Internet domains to use as suffixes at the end of URLs, excluding country-specific ones. The familiar “dot-com” and “dot-org” hail from the Reagan era, and the trickle of new domains since has usually been met with much discussion and occasionally debate or even discontent.
But now, public health officials have brought up a potential concern: the use of the new "dot-health" suffix by groups that aren’t medical experts.
Similar…
DNA analysis has become increasingly cost-effective since the human genome was first fully sequenced in the year 2001.
Sequencing a complete genome, however, still costs around $1,000 each so sequencing the genetic code of 100s of individuals would be expensive. For non-human studies, researchers very quickly hit the limit of financial feasibility.
The solution to this problem is pool sequencing (Pool-Seq).
In the two publications,
Schlötterer et al. sequenced entire groups of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) at once instead of carrying out many individual sequencing reactions.…
A paper in the International Journal of Web-Based Communities suggests that the familiar interfaces of online social networking sites might be adapted to allow us to interact more efficiently with our networked devices such as cars, domestic appliances and gadgets.
The concept would also extend to the idea of those devices connecting with each other as necessary to improve efficiency of heating and lighting, make our home entertainment systems smarter and much more.
It doesn't sound intuitive; none of us are friends with our car or our house on Facebook but the paper argues there are…
We are only beginning to see what augmented reality can do. Credit: Flickr/Karlis Dambra, CC BY
By Nick Kelly, University of Southern Queensland
It seems we are headed towards a world where augmented reality (AR) systems will be as common as smartphones are today – it’s already about to revolutionize medicine, entertainment, the lives of disabled people and of course advertising and shopping.
The big three tech companies have all invested heavily in research and development in the AR domain. Google will be releasing Google Glass later in the year, Microsoft has been working on its own AR…
By Marsha Lewis, Inside Science
(Inside Science TV) – You've seen toys and prosthetics made on a 3-D printer but now, scientists are using 3-D printers to build implants that help babies breathe.
Natalie Peterson, a parent of a child who was having trouble breathing shortly after birth said of her son Garrett, “When he was born, he was so sensitive to everything…when the nurses would move his head, he would just turn blue instantly.”
Almost every day 18 month old Garrett Peterson stopped breathing due to a collapsed trachea.
“He was not able to breathe and he would actually go into…
For most of humanity's existence, our kind have worried about getting enough to eat. So we may see it as a good sign that now some of our species are worried about not getting organic milk in their lattes and frappes. "Where oh where shall I ever find a frappe made with organic milk?" one supposes they say. "If only Starbucks made their lattes and frappes with organic milk; it would be so healthy!"
Or as one over-achieving Organitrepreneur put it:
"Consumers are increasingly looking for organic milk. I stopped drinking Starbucks lattes once I found out the health implications of consuming non…
A little known secret in data mining is that simply feeding raw data into a data analysis algorithm is unlikely to produce meaningful results.
From recognizing speech to identifying unusual stars, new discoveries often begin with comparison of data streams to find connections and spot outliers. But most data comparison algorithms today have one major weakness – somewhere, they rely on a human expert to specify what aspects of the data are relevant for comparison, and what aspects aren't. But experts aren't keeping pace with the growing amounts and complexities of big data.
Cornell computing…
The director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, is worried about the lack of reproducibility and 'secret sauce' in a large number of studies funded by their $30 billion government agency.
Fraud happens everywhere, as does cherry-picking of results, but the more scientific the field, the less it happens. It's hard to get 2,000 people to be fraudulent about an experimental physics result while a lone psychologist writing about surveys of college students is difficult to catch.
Carnegie-Mellon and Stanford scholars say they have a solution for Dr. Collins, at least…