A report on the future of health was presented to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) by PSFK, a trends research and innovation company. It features a wide range to topics including distant learning, diagnostics, gaming for health, offline web, DIY checkup, and many others:
(Hat Tip: iMedicalApps)
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
The Dutch Corpus Museum takes you into the human body and shows how our organs work. A fascinating idea and a great visualization. An excerpt from Amusing Planet:
The Corpus Museum takes you on a fantastic journey through a giant model of the human body during which you can see, feel and hear how the human body works and what roles healthy food, healthy life and plenty of exercise plays. The tour through the museum starts with an escalator ride into an open sore on your giant victim’s leg and ends among the pulsing neurons in his brain. Between those two points, you will watch cheese being digested in the intestines and explore the ventricles of the heart. Kids can bounce up and down on the rubber tongue (with burping noises in the background) while you take in various scents wafting through the giant nose. Perhaps the most unusual display is the hologram of sperm fertilizing an egg, viewed via 3D glasses.
Click here for more pictures.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, published a very interesting paper focusing on the genetic background of social drinking. Specific gene variants might increase the risk for extensive alcohol use or abuse when spending time with heavy-drinking peers. An excerpt from Medical News Today:
Drinking alcohol increases levels of dopamine –- a brain chemical that causes pleasure and makes us feel good. The dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) has been shown to be involved in motivation of seeking out rewards. Research has suggested that carrying a specific form (or variant) of this gene –- one that includes seven or more repeats of a certain section of the gene –- may be associated with craving caused by alcohol-related cues. Psychological scientist Helle Larsen from Radboud University in The Netherlands and her colleagues wanted to investigate if this 7-repeat gene variant plays a role in how an individual responds to alcohol-related cues.
The results showed an effect between how much the confederate drank and the gene variant on volunteers’ alcohol consumption: When the confederate was seen consuming three or four drinks, carriers of the 7-repeat form of the gene drank more than twice as many glasses of alcohol than did noncarriers of the gene variant. However, when the confederate consumed only one drink, there was no difference in alcohol consumption between carriers and noncarriers. These findings suggest that individuals carrying this form of the DRD4 gene may be more sensitive than noncarriers to other people’s drinking behavior.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
The Speech Production and Articulation Knowledge Group at the University of Southern California (USC) works on very interesting projects. If you’ve ever wondered what an MRI of vocal performance might look like, this is it. From USC:
This video illustrates real-time MRI of vocal performance. It includes examples from a soprano and an emcee/beatboxer. This video was featured at the Sounds and Visions Session of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) Scientific Sessions, May 2006, Seattle.
the diva and the emcee from Krishna Nayak on Vimeo.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
There’s a new profession in the Internet era, the so-called “Internet Content Reviewer.” These people check all of the submissions and uploads on huge social networking sites, review tens of thousands of pictures, and make sure only legal content is being uploaded to these communities.
It seems a new mental health, “social” disease is starting to spread: Internet Moderitis. An excerpt from a New York Times piece on the topic:
Ricky Bess spends eight hours a day in front of a computer near Orlando, Fla., viewing some of the worst depravities harbored on the Internet. He has seen photographs of graphic gang killings, animal abuse and twisted forms of pornography. One recent sighting was a photo of two teenage boys gleefully pointing guns at another boy, who is crying.
YouTube, a division of Google, is an exception. If a user indicates a video is inappropriate, software scans the image looking for warning signs of clips that are breaking the site’s rules or the law. Flagged videos are then sent for manual review by YouTube-employed content moderators who, because of the nature of the work, are given only yearlong contracts and access to counseling services, according to Victoria Grand, a YouTube spokeswoman.
Photo credit: Stephen Mally for The New York Times
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
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