Challis Hodge’s UXblog

1. New, faster CT machines that can take clear pictures of a beating heart without a catheter, sedation or hospitalization, combined with MRI to show blood vessels, blood flow, scar tissue and the workings of the heart muscle and valves plus plaque buildup.

2. International efforts to regulate food marketing, pricing and production to prevent obesity.

3. 24-hour blood-pressure recording to diagnose hypertension and increased use of home blood-pressure readings to provide doctors with more accurate, regular monitoring of patients.

4. An over-the-counter “morning after” birth-control pill.

5. A new oral anticoagulant called Exanta that promises to make blood-clot prevention far less complicated than warfarin.

6. Results of an NIH-funded independent assessment of cholesterol-lowering statin use showing a higher rate of cognitive side effects than previously reported.

7. New targeted cancer therapies, including two new drugs for colon cancer that attack cancer on various fronts, without the toxic and debilitating side effects triggered by traditional chemotherapy.

8. Better cancer prediction, including new molecular-imaging machines to find out far sooner whether a particular cancer treatment is working, a simple blood test called CellSearch capable of detecting minuscule amounts of tumor cells circulating in the blood, and “molecular profiling” — using genes and proteins associated with cancer to better predict just how aggressive the tumors will be.

9. Insurance-paid weight loss based on trying the diet and lifestyle program created by Dean Ornish.

10. FDA regulatory changes to precisely define use of the term “low-carb” in food packaging.

From the Wall Street Journal Online January 26, 2004 (requires paid subscription).

By plugging the TiltCONTROL dongle on a supported handheld users can control any application or game by tilting their device from left to right or up and down. The company said you can use it to play games, scroll the pages of documents or web pages, draw, and flip the pages of an electronic book with the flick of a wrist. ECER also has software for the TiltCONTROL that allow users to measure and log the performance of a car or performance during exercise. It plans to release more custom applications in the future.

Joining Mountain View and New York, Google has opened an office in Bangalore, India. “The office will operate in an identical manner to our other engineering groups, with the same scope of work, hiring standards and unique Google culture.”

You could soon be able to store much more on an MP3 player, digital camera or mobile phone. Toshiba has developed a tiny hard drive which measures less than an inch across but can hold between two and four gigabytes of data. The drive was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The hard drive has emerged as one of the key components in the push to bring computing technologies to the home.

A lie detector small enough to fit in the eyeglasses of law enforcement officers can tell whether a passenger is a terrorist by analyzing his answer to questions in real time.

The technology, developed by Nemesysco for military, insurance claim and law enforcement use, is being repackaged and retargeted for personal and corporate applications by V Entertainment.

A signal-processing engine, said to use more than 8,000 algorithms each time it analyzes an incoming voice waveform, detects levels of various emotional states simultaneously from the pitch and speed of the voice and measures 18 parameters of speech in real time.

President Bush’s plan to expand the exploration of space parallels U.S. efforts to control the heavens for military, economic and strategic gain.

The moon is also a source of potentially unlimited energy in the form of the helium 3 isotope — a near perfect fuel source: potent, nonpolluting and causing virtually no radioactive byproduct in a fusion reactor, with a cash value of perhaps $4 billion a ton in terms of its energy equivalent in oil.

There are about 1 million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the earth for thousands of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 30 tons could meet all U.S. electric power needs for a year.

The move is an effort by Kodak to cut lines with declining appeal in favor of fast-growing digital products. I just don’t get how Kodak is still in business. They’ve been so far behind the curve it’s silly. New York Times (requires free registration).