Tech

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have taken the first step to building a computer capable of operating in the heat of a jet engine or the sunny side of the planet Mercury.

Te-Hao Lee, Swarup Bhunia and Mehran Mehregany, have made electromechanical switches – building blocks of circuits - that can take twice the heat that renders electronic transistors useless. Their work was published in Science last month.

MAYWOOD, Ill. -- A Loyola University Hospital study has demonstrated how the hospital has improved patient safety and cut costs by reducing the number of blood transfusions.

In 2009, the average amount of blood products transfused per patient at Loyola was 10 percent lower than it was in 2008, saving $453,355. The average amount of blood products transfused dropped from 2.03 units per patient in 2008 to 1.82 units per patient in 2009.

Results were reported at the recent annual meeting of the College of American Pathologists.

New York, NY, October 6, 2010 – In recognition of the 20th anniversary of the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the October issue of Disability and Health Journal has brought together a series of articles to examine whether the ADA has in fact improved the health of people with disabilities. Areas of progress are identified, most notably acknowledging physical barriers and need for better staff training and communication about and with people with disabilities.

Hospitals vary in how they detect and treat drug-resistant staph infections, but most follow national guideline recommendations, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Researchers sent a 61-item questionnaire to pharmacy directors at 263 acute-care hospitals in the U.S. to learn of their policies and practices regarding methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. All of the hospitals are members of Broadlane, a health care cost management company based in Dallas.

New York, NY, October 7, 2010—The United States continues to lag behind other nations when it comes to gains in life expectancy, and commonly cited causes for our poor performance—obesity, smoking, traffic fatalities, and homicide—are not to blame, according to a Commonwealth Fund-supported study published today as a Health Affairs Web First. The study, by Peter Muennig and Sherry Glied at Columbia University, looked at health spending; behavioral risk factors like obesity and smoking; and 15-year survival rates for men and women ages 45 and 65 in the U.S.

NASA loosens GRIP on Atlantic hurricane season

NASA wrapped up one of its largest hurricane research efforts ever last week after nearly two months of flights that broke new ground in the study of tropical cyclones and delivered data that scientists will now be able to analyze for years to come.

Trauma center care not only saves lives, it is a cost-effective way of treating major trauma, according to a new report from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Injury Research and Policy. Although treatment at a trauma center is more expensive, the benefits of this approach in terms of lives saved and quality of life-years gained outweigh the costs. The study finds that the added cost of treatment at a trauma center versus nontrauma center is only $36,319 for every life-year gained or $790,931 per life saved.

Breakthrough e-Display means electronics with high speed, high readability and low power usage

Today's Oct. 4 issue of the high-impact journal, Applied Physics Letters, contains a new electrofluidics design from the University of Cincinnati and start-up company Gamma Dynamics that promises to dramatically reshape the image capabilities of electronic devices.

VTT printed the paper with antibodies that react to the sample. The test result can be read in the form of a line, for example, which either does or does not appear depending on the sample – just like in the pregnancy tests already familiar to consumers. It is also possible to print instructional images or text, for example, either on or alongside the test.

Insecure Web browsers and the growing number of complex applets and browser plug-in applications are allowing malicious software to spread faster than ever on the Internet. Some websites are installing malicious code, such as spyware, on computers without the user's knowledge or consent.

These so-called "drive-by downloads" signal a shift away from using spam and malicious e-mail attachments to infect computers. Approximately 560,000 websites -- and 5.5 million Web pages on those sites -- were infected with malware during the fourth quarter of 2009.

UW-built device reveals invisible world teeming with microscopic algae

It just got easier to pinpoint biological hot spots in the world's oceans where some inhabitants are smaller than, well, a pinpoint.

With the Major League Baseball Division Series set to begin, associate math professor Bruce Bukiet at NJIT is performing his analysis of the probability of each team advancing to the League Championship Series. "Going into these series, the Philadelphia Phillies have a 64 percent chance of defeating the Cincinnati Reds in their best of five game series," he said.

NASA AIRS Satellite instrument sees Tropical Depression 14W form

The northwestern Pacific Ocean is just as active as the Atlantic Ocean this hurricane season. The fourteenth tropical depression formed near Hainan Island, China this morning and its birth was captured by a NASA infrared satellite instrument. The NASA image showed the depression's strong thunderstorms near its center and east of its center.

From 1998 to 2007, the use of CT or MRI scans in emergency departments for injury-related conditions increased about 3-fold without a similar increase in the prevalence of the diagnosis of certain life-threatening trauma-related conditions, according to a study in the October 6 issue of JAMA.