Turning Washing into Books
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“If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines”.
Hans Rosling talks about the magic of the washing machine — a device that turns drudgery into books.
This is a popular topic around our house: our washing machine and our dishwasher free up hours each day and many more hours each week, allowing us to do …
‘Production line’ heart surgery
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Division of labor, specialization, and mass production. The result: complex heart surgeries for $1,800 and the head doctor wants to bring the price down to just $800. Now that’s healthcare reform.
Where Drugs Come From: The Numbers
We can now answer the question: “Where do new drugs come from?”. A new paper in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery takes on all 252 drugs approved by the FDA from then through 2007, and traces each of them back to their origins. What’s more, each drug is evaluated by how much unmet medical need it was addressed to and how scientifically innovative it was.
Will Doctors Use Bacteria To Kill Your Next Cancer?
James Byrne wrote about new developments in cancer treatment for Scientific American. Researchers are looking at ways to use bacteria to kill cancerous tumours, without making you sick the way chemotherapy and radiation do.
Plastics from engineered yeast?
We’re going to run out of oil someday — whether it’s now or 75 years from now. Plastics are pretty important and we’ll need a way to produce them once we run out of oil. Given all of that, how cool is this?
Engineered yeast could produce low-cost plastics from renewable resources:
The researchers engineered …
Diversity in Ratings
Scene Stealer – The Web Is Pouncing on Hollywood’s Ratings – NYTimes.com
The standard Hollywood ratings — G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17 — must now compete with all manner of Internet-based ratings alternatives, some of which are gaining new traction through social networking tools.
SceneSmoking.org, which monitors tobacco use in …
Government Bulbs: Slightly More Efficient, Vastly More Expensive
Incandescent Bulbs Return to the Cutting Edge – NYTimes.com
…the incandescent bulb is turning into a case study of the way government mandates can spur innovation.
… The first bulbs to emerge from this push, Philips Lighting’s Halogena Energy Savers, are expensive compared with older incandescents. They sell for $5 apiece …
Jordan Shlain MD, on Healthcare
Mr. HIStalk recently did a great interview with Dr. Jordan Shlain, founder of Current Health. It was a fantastic read. Here’s a sample:
I want to give you a softball question here, because I’ve seen your answer elsewhere, but I think it bears repeating. What’s wrong with the average patient-physician-insurance company relationship that’s common …
An AIDS Cure?
A genetic mutation may hold an AIDS cure.
The startling case of an AIDS patient who underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia is stirring new hope that gene-therapy strategies on the far edges of AIDS research might someday cure the disease.
The patient, a 42-year-old American living in Berlin, …
The Magic of FieldTurf
A free market economy is always generating new ideas, finding new ways to use people and materials, finding new ways to cut waste and improve lives. For today’s example, look no further than the grass on next Sunday’s football games. In most cases, that’s not grass that’s FieldTurf. It’s not just a clever product. It’s …