1) New smartphone app can test your eyesight.
- A modified smartphone with a new app can act as a ‘pocket optician’ to effectively test eyesight and even scan the eye for cataracts, researchers have found.
- Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine believe the smartphone app can transform eye care for millions of people in remote parts of the world.
- A trial on 233 people in Kenya showed that the Portable Eye Examination Kit (Peek) produced the same results as eye charts.
2) Paswan launches BIS App to register complaints against quality of Hallmarked jewelry.
- Union Food and Consumer Affairs Minister Ram Vilas Paswan launched a BIS App to register complaints against sub-standard quality of ISI marked products and Hallmark jewellery.
4) Rat brain cells power a computer.
- A rat trained to control a robot is an interesting ‘Pavlovian’ experiment by itself. But, independently-cultured rat brain cells aiding a robot navigate through an obstacle seems straight out of science fiction.
- Having cultured brain cells on a glass plate and kept in sterilized conditions, a group of researchers at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) demonstrated that this tissue culture can read signals from an infra-red enabled robot, process the problem of obstacles, and give an appropriate, accurate solution.
5) NASA finds Pluto’s moons `tumbling in absolute chaos`.
- There’s a chaotic dance going on at the far end of our solar system, involving Pluto and five of its closest friends, a new study finds.
- What makes it so odd is that there’s a double set of dances going on. First, Pluto and Charon are locked together in their own waltz “as if they are a dumbbell” with a rod connecting them.
6) Texas man is first to get skull-scalp transplant.
- US doctors hailed a complex operation as a world first after performing a skull and scalp transplant on a cancer patient who also received a new kidney and pancreas during the procedure.
- James Boysen, a 55-year-old software developer, underwent 15 hours of surgery performed with the help of more than 50 medical professionals, the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
- Historic surgery made Boysen the "first patient to receive the simultaneous craniofacial tissue transplant together with solid organ transplants.
About:
- The operation, performed at Houston Methodist Hospital, was conceptualized almost four years ago, but wasn`t carried out until May 22, some 20 hours after doctors were told appropriate organs had become available.
7) A blood test can tell every virus you`ve ever had.
- Researchers have developed a new test that can detect every known human virus that currently or previously infected a person from a single drop of blood.
- The method, called VirScan, developed by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers can test for current and past infections with any known human virus, including HIV and hepatitis C.
- The comprehensive analysis can be performed for about USD 25 per blood sample.
8) Amazon, Google in a DNA race.
- Amazon, in a race against Google to store data on human DNA, is seeking bragging rights in helping scientists make new medical discoveries and market share in a business that may be worth $1 billion a year by 2018.
- Academic institutions and healthcare companies are picking sides between their cloud computing offerings — Google Genomics or Amazon Web Services — spurring the two to go one up on each other as they win high-profile genomics business, according to interviews with researchers, industry consultants and analysts.
Personalized medicine:
- That growth is being propelled by, among other forces, the push for personalized medicine, which aims to base treatments on a patient’s DNA profile. Making that a reality will require enormous quantities of data to reveal how particular genetic profiles respond to different treatments.
9) New drug may prevent death from flu virus.
- Scientists in Canada have developed a new drug that offers an unconventional approach to beat the flu virus.
- The researchers who found the drug was effective in two different strains of mice and three different strains of flu believe the drug could be effective in animals other than mice, including humans.
- Instead of targeting the virus that causes flu, the new drug can prevent the blood vessels from leaking fluid into the lung`s air sacs.
- The new drug, Vasculotide, developed by researchers at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto acts on the endothelial cells that line the blood vessels.