Health & Medicine

In many parts of the world, mosquitoes are more than just a campsite nuisance -- they carry that cause an estimated 725,000 deaths per year. On Singapore, the effect isn't so terrible -- some mosquitoes carry dengue fever, but it affects less than a dozen people per year. But because it's a city and an island, Singapore is the perfect testing ground to see how easy it might be to get rid of the disease-carrying bugs, all sans gene editing. That's what Alphabet-owned healthcare company Verily hopes to do. The company, along with Singapore's environmental agency, plans to release male mosquitoes that carry Wolbachia, a naturally-occurring bacteria that reduces the bugs' ability to transmit disease and prevents their eggs from hatching.

It's been the month of wearable silicon – and off the back of the news of the Amazfit Verge, Huami announced that its developed the "world's first AI-powered wearable chipset" – the Huangshan No. 1. For the uninitiated, Huami is a Chinese hardware company, pretty much backed by Xiaomi. It's been turning out some pretty impressive devices, including the Amazfit Bip and Amazfit Stratos, both of which have mustered decent Wareable reviews. Well, Gizmochina says that the Huangshan No.1 features four core intelligence engines: namely, a cardiac biometric engine, ECG, ECG Pro and Heart Rhythm Abnormality engine. That's clearly a pretty big claim to Apple, aping (in true Huami style) pretty much all the lead features of the Apple Watch Series 4 unveiled last week.

The science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein once wrote, "Each generation thinks it invented sex." He was presumably referring to the pride each generation takes in defining its own sexual practices and ethics. But his comment hit the mark in another sense: Every generation has to reinvent sex because the previous generation did a lousy job of teaching it. In the United States, the conversations we have with our children about sex are often awkward, limited, and brimming with euphemism. At school, if kids are lucky enough to live in a state that allows it, they'll get something like 10 total hours of sex education.1

The total of 71 insurtech funding transactions in the second quarter of 2018 is an all-time high, according to a Willis Towers Watson report. However, the total amount of money invested actually declined from the previous quarter. Investors poured in US$579 million into insurtech companies in the second quarter, or 20% less than the first quarter, Willis Towers Watson's Quarterly InsurTech Briefing revealed. Furthermore, the second quarter set the new record for the volume of incumbent participation in insurtech investments. The briefing, a collaboration with CB Insights, focuses on insurtech for the life and health insurance industry and how the complexity of change occurring within the value chain is much greater than in other insurance subsectors.

For well over a decade, VNA solutions have been available to provide a shared multi-department, multi-facility repository and integration point for healthcare enterprises. Organizations employing these systems, often in conjunction with an enterprise-wide electronic medical record (EMR) system, typically benefit from a reduction in complexity, compared with managing disparate archives for each site and department. These organizations can invest their IT dollars in ensuring that the system is fast and provides maximum uptime, using on-premises or cloud deployments. And it can act as a central, managed broker for interoperability with other enterprises. The ability to standardize on the format, metadata structure, quality of data (completeness and consistency of data across records, driven by organizational policy), and interfaces for storage, discovery and access of records is much more feasible with a single centrally managed system.

For well over a decade, VNA solutions have been available to provide a shared multi-department, multi-facility repository and integration point for healthcare enterprises. Organizations employing these systems, often in conjunction with an enterprise-wide electronic medical record (EMR) system, typically benefit from a reduction in complexity, compared with managing disparate archives for each site and department. These organizations can invest their IT dollars in ensuring that the system is fast and provides maximum uptime, using on-premises or cloud deployments. And it can act as a central, managed broker for interoperability with other enterprises. The ability to standardize on the format, metadata structure, quality of data (completeness and consistency of data across records, driven by organizational policy), and interfaces for storage, discovery and access of records is much more feasible with a single centrally managed system.

A 24-year-old Dallas man who died after falling off a Lime electric scooter was killed by blunt force injuries to his head, county officials said Thursday, likely making him the first person to die while riding the electric mobility devices that have swept across the nation this year. The death of Jacoby Stoneking has been ruled an accident, the Dallas County Medical Examiner's Office told The Washington Post before releasing the information publicly. Police said Stoneking was riding a Lime scooter home from a restaurant where he works when the accident occurred. He was found unconscious and badly injured in the early morning hours of Sept. 1, several hundred yards from a scooter that was broken in half. He was not wearing a helmet, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk freely about the investigation.

A 24-year-old Dallas man who died after falling off a Lime electric scooter was killed by blunt force injuries to his head, county officials said Thursday, likely making him the first person to die while riding the electric mobility devices that have swept across the nation this year. The death of Jacoby Stoneking has been ruled an accident, the Dallas County Medical Examiner's Office told The Washington Post before releasing the information publicly. Police said Stoneking was riding a Lime scooter home from a restaurant where he works when the accident occurred. He was found unconscious and badly injured in the early morning hours of Sept. 1, several hundred yards from a scooter that was broken in half. He was not wearing a helmet, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk freely about the investigation.

Scientists at the Allen Institute have used machine learning to train computers to see parts of the cell the human eye cannot easily distinguish. Using 3-D images of fluorescently labeled cells, the research team taught computers to find structures inside living cells without fluorescent labels, using only black and white images generated by an inexpensive technique known as brightfield microscopy. A study describing the new technique is published today in the journal Nature Methods. Fluorescence microscopy, which uses glowing molecular labels to pinpoint specific parts of cells, is very precise but only allows scientists to see a few structures in the cell at a time. Human cells have upwards of 20,000 different proteins that, if viewed together, could reveal important information about both healthy and diseased cells.

There is a developing drug epidemic in the United States. Jalal et al. analyzed nearly 600,000 unintentional drug overdoses over a 38-year period. Although the overall mortality rate closely followed an exponential growth curve, the pattern itself is a composite of several underlying subepidemics of different drugs. Geographic hotspots have developed over time, as well as drug-specific demographic differences. The epidemic of substance use disorders and drug overdose deaths is a growing public health crisis in the United States. Every day, 174 people die from drug overdoses. Currently, opioids (including prescription opioids, heroin, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and its chemical analogs) are the leading cause of overdose deaths. The overdose mortality data can reveal the complex and evolving dynamics of drug use in the United States.