Group items tagged

Medical researchers around the world will from Friday have access to information on half a million Britons, with the release of the globe's largest collection of human health data.

With the Oscars just 3 days away, movies have been on our mind lately here at CDC's Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response.  Especially disaster movies.  They come in all kinds of flavors: deadly viruses, tornadoes, earthquakes, and, yes, even snakes on a plane.   Their special effects can be realistic enough to make us feel like we are right there in the heart of the storm.  But frequently, the heroes and heroines of these movies respond to disasters in ways that bear no resemblance to what people in the real world should do.  We can nevertheless use disaster films to consider how the characters could have been more prepared or how they should have reacted if the situation they faced was real.  Check out some of our favorite disaster movies and the lessons we can learn from them.

Since his diagnosis with Alzheimer's in 2007, beloved fantasy author Terry Pratchett has kept up his rigorous writing and touring schedule, despite his growing health difficulties. These days, he writes entirely with the help of voice-activated software and his assistant Rob Wilkins. Now he's done an extensive interview with New Statesman's Laurie Penny, where he reveals what his life is like now, and what's coming next for Discworld.

It seems that more and more policy makers, advocacy groups, advertisers and media pundits are making claims based on science: this kind of potion is good for your health, that chemical is bad for the environment, this new technology can reduce crime. How is the public supposed to know what to believe?

"Passwords control your life. From accessing work email and stock prices on the go to checking a grocery store shopping list, passwords have become the primary source of identifying who you are. They are arguably more important than your driver's license. But with that ubiquity comes risk - this tiny, yet powerful device contains enough information to expose your financial or health records and other personal details. From an enterprise perspective, the risks are just as great, if not greater."

New legal limits in traffic for drugs other than alcohol : table showing the impairment based legislative limits and limits for graded sanctions for drugs other than alcohol, from Feb. 1, 2012. Credit: Copyright: Norwegian Institute of Public Health

The brain appears to be wired in a rectangular 3D grid structure, suggests a new brain imaging study funded by the National Institutes of Health. "Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain's connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables - folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric," explained Van Wedeen, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Harvard Medical School.

UNU Media Centre head Brendan Barrett shares insights derived from a UNU Institute for Water, Environment and Health conference that focused on K* (K-Star) - a spectrum of ideas that covers research communication, science push, knowledge translation, adaptation, transfer and exchange, knowledge brokering and mobilization, and policy pull. * * * To sum up the underlying need for the recent K* Conference 2012, I borrow the words of a co-participant who explained that "as we are seeing with the climate debate and other 'wicked problems', it is not sufficient to assume that scientific consensus about the facts will be influential in policy or the wider community".

US experts have developed what they say are the most biologically-accurate robotic legs yet. Writing in the Journal of Neural Engineering, they said the work could help understanding of how babies learn to walk - and spinal-injury treatment. They created a version of the message system that generates the rhythmic muscle signals that control walking. A UK expert said the work was exciting because the robot mimics control and not just movement.

We often worry about people who lie awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. Scientists have been saying for 20 years that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural, and historians increasingly are backing them up.