UK Pharmacy to Sell Pill with Ingestible Microchip
A few years ago, a report by the New England Healthcare Institute claimed that patients not taking their medications as prescribed incur a staggering US $290 billion in increased medical costs - or about 13 percent of total US health expenditures. Technology reaching drug store shelves later this year in the UK and which is under review in the US could help cut the costs significantly. First, a little background. About a year before the Institute’s report came out in 2009, there was an article in MIT’s Technology Review magazine about a Silicon Valley start-up company calledProteus Biomedical that was developing a microchip about the size of a grain of sand called an “ingestible event marker” (IEM). It was to be embedded within a pill and swallowed along with a patient’s medicine. The IEM, reported the TR article, consists of:
“… a thin-film battery that is activated on ingestion, as it is exposed to water. The battery, Proteus says, is nontoxic because it is made from materials similar to those in a vitamin pill. Once swallowed, the IEM sends through the body’s tissues a high-frequency electrical current that’s modulated in such a way that it provides a unique marker of the pill. It’s not an RFID technology: it uses the conductive tissues of the body to conduct the signal, rather than a radio, and the signal is confined within the body.”
The high-frequency current is picked up by a disposable monitoring patch worn by the patient or a monitor placed under their skin. The monitoring system is able to discern biophysical parameters such as a patient’s heart rate, respiration, body posture as well as sleeping patterns. The information can then be transmitted to a patient’s cell phone or the computer of the patient’s physician. Based on what the physician is seeing, he or she might decided to change dosages or change medications altogether.
Girls in STEM
It’s not a secret that women (and pretty much any minority group) have uphill battle after uphill battle facing them when it comes to succeeding in math, science and engineering fields. Some of these are explicit (like the tilted playing field of the tenure system, which could take 100 years to level out), and some are more obscured (like the quiet social pressures that push them away from science). But what is clear is that it does not have to be the case.
I was really struck by this infographic’s ability to capture how quickly and precipitously women drop out of many fields of science once social pressures begin to take over.
I hope that projects like ScienceCheerleader, IAmScience, DoubleXScience and This Is What A Scientist Looks Like (<- bonus points if you can find me on that one) can continue to make this image a relic of the past and not a picture of the future.
(ᔥ EngineeringDegree.net, click here for enlargification)
Antarctic icefishes have translucent bodies and blood
The blood of an icefish isn’t red. Instead, its blood runs white.
Kristin O’Brien is a biologist at University of Alaska Fairbanks, who studies an unusual family of fishes called icefishes. They’re found only in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. They are unique because they are the only vertebrates in the world that lack the oxygen-binding protein hemoglobin, which is the protein that transports oxygen throughout the body and gives blood its red color. In other words, the blood of an icefish isn’t red. Instead, its blood runs a cloudy white. “I think these animals are among the most fascinating creatures on Earth,” Dr. O’Brien said
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
aw shit get it wednesday
HA! I almost forgot to reblog this today
Every Wednesday from now on.
Its wednesday , get it girl
Lol y she rip tht tho
Black Hippy did a remix, U.O.E.N.O
— Kid Cudi (via amysphoenix)
