Health Tech

'Nomophobia' up as more folks fear being mobileless

We humans seem to have the capacity to fear just about anything these days. From chromophobia (fear of colors) to genuphobia (fear of knees or kneeling), optophobia (fear of opening one's eyes) to selenophobia (fear of the moon), we've been able to identify just about any phobia imaginable.

So it should come as no surprise that nomophobia, the fear of being out of mobile phone contact, exists at all, let alone may afflict as many as two in three adults, according to a new survey out of the U.K.

Commissioned by SecurEnvoy, creator of tokenless two-factor authentication, more

Electronic cigarette blows up in man's mouth

From the age of dot, we're all told not to put gadgets in our mouths.

But along came electric toothbrushes--and then electronic cigarettes. Some will wonder how safe they might be after a 57-year-old Florida man was taken to hospital Monday night when his electronic smoke exploded while he was smoking it.

He ended up in an Alabama hospital, facing burns, the loss of part of his tongue and his front teeth.

Joseph Parker, division chief for the North Bay Fire Department, offered a graphic analogy to the Associated Press: "It was trying to hold a bottle rocket in your mouth when it went off. The battery flew out of the tube and set the closet on fire."

Originally posted at Technically Incorrect

Hot nanotubes blast chemo-resistant cancer cells into oblivion

When it comes to cancer cells, a particularly confounding breed called cancer stem cells have proven difficult to kill. Because they divide so slowly, chemo drugs do them little harm, and they appear resistant to heat therapies that are generally good at killing most cells. Some cancer drugs even appear to promote the growth of cancer stem cells.

Now, three years after they found that the heat from 30-second laser blasts can kill kidney cancer stem cells, researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center say the same treatment works to kill breast cancer stem cells as well.

Torti's team more

New app gauges ideal time for coffee break

If you're wondering whether you're too many cups or too many hours into the day for yet another jolt of caffeine, a free app developed by researchers at Pennsylvania State University aims to help.

In building the Caffeine Zone app, professors representing several disciplines relied on peer-reviewed studies to devise a simple formula: those with between 200 and 400 milligrams of caffeine in their bloodstream are in the optimal mental alertness zone, while anyone above 100 milligrams has entered the good-luck-sleeping-anytime-soon zone.

Windows 8 will be more accessible to those with disabilities

Microsoft is enhancing some of the accessibility features in Windows 8 to make the new OS easier for people with disabilities.

Certain "assistive technologies" have long been a part of Windows. The built-in Narrator can read text aloud to people who are blind. The Magnifier can zoom in to display content for people who have trouble seeing. Speech recognition allows people who are unable to type to navigate via voice.

But as described in the latest Building Windows 8 blog by Jennifer Norberg, a senior program manager on Microsoft's Human Interaction Platform team, Windows 8 is taking those features a few steps further.more

Originally posted at Microsoft

Jonathan Schwartz unveils startup, talks about final days at Sun

Let's start with this: Jonathan Schwartz knew that the sale of Sun Microsystems was inevitable.

Schwartz, you may recall, was Sun's last chief executive--the guy who, in 2006, inherited control of a trailblazing company that had seen better days. He was full of personality until his departure, which he announced in a haiku tweet, but he acknowledges that there wasn't much he could have done to reverse the slide that eventually led to Oracle's 2009 deal to buy the company for $7.4 billion.

Could Schwartz have slowed Sun's decline? Sure. But stopped it? Not

Originally posted at Bootstrap

Internet addiction could be dubbed official affliction in DSM-V

The so-called "bible" of the mental health profession is getting an update, and version 5.0 of the American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM) could add "Internet addiction" to its lengthy list of disorders.

The different iterations of the DSM have for decades been the go-to reference many psychiatrists use to diagnose patients. The manual has been no stranger to controversy over the years, including recent charges by some that it seems written to serve the interests of drug companies as much as those of patients.

But now the APA working group in charge of revising the DSM section on substance-related disorders has proposed adding a new non-substance based affliction--"Internet addiction."

In other words, Internet addiction could soon be classified along other listed DSM disorders like "cocaine dependence" or "Opioid abuse."

Originally posted at Crave

Online role-playing can zap marital happiness, survey finds

Online role-playing games, typically of the massively multiplayer variety, have a reputation for wreaking havoc on real-world relationships.

Now, researchers can back up that notion with survey results and can pinpoint the problems that result from such gaming. The survey, from researchers at Brigham Young University, is set to appear tomorrow in the Journal of Leisure Research.

The findings confirm what many gamers know all too intimately--perhaps having heard the message delivered loudly in words with four letters. Three-quarters of spouses of online gamers wish their partners would put more time and effort into their marriages than they put into more

Nifty stem-cell engineering sheds light on Parkinson's disease

Researchers at the University at Buffalo may have taken a significant step toward unraveling the way Parkinson's disease assails the human nervous system--thanks in part to a nifty bit of stem-cell engineering.

Scientists led by physiologist Jian Feng took skin cells from healthy control subjects and people with a particular type of Parkinson's disease and transformed them into a type of primordial cell--technically, an "induced pluripotent stem cell." Such iPS cells, as they're known, can be coaxed into developing as almost any type of cell in the body.

Here, they turned into brain cells. And the more