Smartphones Alone Not the Smart Choice for Teen Weight Control
Teens use smartphones successfully to do almost anything: learn new skills, communicate with friends, do research and catch Pokémon. But a new study finds smartphones aren't as useful for helping teens maintain weight loss. In a 24-week behavioral study that combined traditional weight control intervention with smartphone-assisted helps, researchers found that teens lost weight initially, but couldn't maintain it when smartphones were the only tool helping them stay on track.
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Pediatricians Update Digital Media Recommendations for Kids
It's not so bad to hand your child an iPad once in a while depending on how it's used.
Playing a game together or Skyping with Grandma? That's OK.
Helping your little one calm down or trying to keep peace in the house? Not so much.
Engineers, Mathematicians and Doctors Unite to Develop New Breast Cancer-Detection Option
An international team comprising engineers, mathematicians and doctors has applied a technique used for detecting damage in underwater marine structures to identify cancerous cells in breast cancer histopathology images. Their multidisciplinary breakthrough, which has the potential to automate the screening of images and improve the detection rate, has been published in leading journal, PLOS ONE.
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A Portable Smartphone Laboratory Detects Cancer
Washington State University researchers have developed a low-cost, portable laboratory on a smartphone that can analyze several samples at once to catch a cancer biomarker, producing lab quality results. The research team, led by Lei Li, assistant professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, recently published the work in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.
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A Step Forward in Building Functional Human Tissues
Toward the ultimate goal of engineering human tissues and organs that can mimic native function for use in drug screening, disease modeling, and regenerative medicine, a Wyss Institute team led by Core Faculty member Jennifer Lewis, Sc.D., has made another foundational advance using three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting. This work builds upon their demonstrated ability to bioprint tissue constructs composed of multiple types of living cells patterned alongside a vascular network in an extracellular matrix.
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Mapping the 'Dark Matter' of Human DNA
Researchers from ERIBA, Radboud UMC, XJTU, Saarland University, CWI and UMC Utrecht have made a big step towards a better understanding of the human genome. By identifying large DNA variants in 250 Dutch families, the researchers have clarified part of the "dark matter", the great unknown, of the human genome. These new data enable researchers from all over the world to study the DNA variants and use the results to better understand genetic diseases.
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Imaging Stroke Risk in 4D
Affecting 33.5 million patients worldwide, atrial fibrillation is the most common form of cardiac arrhythmia. As if having an irregular heart beat wasn't troubling enough, patients with atrial fibrillation are also much more likely to have a stroke. "Atrial fibrillation is thought to be responsible for 20 to 30 percent of all strokes in the United States," said Northwestern University's Michael Markl, the Lester B. and Frances T. Knight Professor of Cardiac Imaging. "While atrial fibrillation is easy to detect and diagnose, it's not easy to predict who will suffer a stroke because of it."
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