President Biden has selected Robert Califf as his pick for the next head of the Food and Drug Administration, the White House announced today. Califf is currently a senior advisor for Verily Life Sciences and Google Health, two divisions of parent company Alphabet. He was brought on in 2019 to lead health strategy and policy for the groups. Califf, a cardiologist, previously served as the FDA commissioner during the last year of the Obama administration. He also founded the Duke Clinical Research Institute, which runs clinical trials. “As the FDA considers many consequential decisions around vaccine approvals and more, it…
Author: Mike Harrison
Reports of teens developing tic-like behaviors after watching TikTok videos highlight something most of us don’t consider about mental health: symptoms can be social. Since March 2020, specialists in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom have seen a dramatic spike in young patients seeking treatment for tics, according to The Wall Street Journal. Doctors say most of the young people watched content from TikTok creators who say they have Tourette syndrome, one type of tic disorder. Top TikTokers film themselves involuntarily cursing, slapping themselves, making clapping sounds, and more. Cumulatively, #tourettes videos have been viewed more than…
Southern Ohio Medical Center, a not-for-profit hospital in Portsmouth, Ohio, canceled appointments for today and is diverting ambulances after it was hit by a cyberattack on Thursday. It’s part of a series of escalating attacks on healthcare organizations in the past two years — a trend that could have serious consequences for patient care. But while information technology experts are well aware that the risk of cyberattacks that compromise patient data and shut down computer systems is on the rise, patients don’t seem to be, according to a new report by cybersecurity company Armis. In fact, over 60 percent of…
(Photo : JUNG YEON-JE/AFP via Getty Images) SEOUL, REPUBLIC OF KOREA: A South Korean pedestrian walks by a logo of Samsung group in Seoul, 09 October 2005, as domestic woes are mounting for Samsung, South Korea’s biggest and most profitable business group. Criticism intensified last week when a court convicted two Samsung executives for illegally handling the father-to-son transfer of ownership at Samsung Everland, the group’s holding company. A popular tech leaker said that Samsung Exynos 2200 AMD GPU poses smoother performance compared to the Snapdragon 888. Samsung has not yet disclosed any details about this rumored graphic card, but…
After almost two years, the Withings ScanWatch is now available to purchase in the US after its announcement back at the beginning of 2020. The ScanWatch was waiting for clearance from the Food and Drug Administration, which it had received in October for its EKG and blood oxygen measurement features. Unlike its competitors Apple Watch and Fitbit, both of whom can track blood oxygen and have EKG technology, Withings is claiming that the hybrid watch can detect sleep apnea, a sleep disorder charactered by disrupted breathing patterns. The ScanWatch is still a part of an ongoing clinical study for this…
Here’s the thing about prostate-specific antigen: you do not expect to find it in blood test results for most women, because most women don’t have prostates. So when Theranos’ former lab director, Kingshuk Das, found that Theranos’ devices kept reporting that women had detectable PSA levels, he assumed that meant there was something wrong with the devices. Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes had an “alternative explanation,” he said. It was that these women had a rare kind of breast cancer. That explanation “seemed implausible,” he testified today in US v. Elizabeth Holmes. Das was one of a parade of experts we’ve…
Public skin image datasets that are used to train algorithms to detect skin problems don’t include enough information about skin tone, according to a new analysis. And within the datasets where skin tone information is available, only a very small number of images are of darker skin — so algorithms built using these datasets might not be as accurate for people who aren’t white. The study, published today in The Lancet Digital Health, examined 21 freely accessible datasets of images of skin conditions. Combined, they contained over 100,000 images. Just over 1,400 of those images had information attached about the…
Apple has announced that Johnson & Johnson’s current CEO, Alex Gorsky, will join its board of directors. Gorsky’s move to Apple’s leadership team (he’ll step down from his role at J&J in January) comes at a time when the company is focusing even more on health and how it can make data more accessible to users and their doctors. In the press release announcing Gorsky’s role at Apple, Tim Cook calls him “a visionary in healthcare” who has a “passion for technology.” Apple hasn’t kept its ambitions in health a secret — the Apple Watch is largely seen as a…
(Photo : Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay ) Personal Finance refers to how you manage your finances and encompasses all areas of financial decision-making. Learning practical financial skills online or through books is essential for living a healthy lifestyle that provides security and eliminates the burden of money worries. Improving your knowledge of various aspects of finance via any personal finance blogs, personal finance news and a lot more on budgeting, debt management, loan saving, and, in some circumstances, investing, will help you flourish in your daily life and provide best clarity to each major or minor financial choice.…
Tesla Sentry Mode actually offers a feature that allows you to turn your voice into the sound of Darth Vader. You can use this capability to get the attention of those around your car easier. The Twitter user Dezmond Oliver posted a video to allow Tesla consumers to know how Sentry Mode actually sounds like. (Photo : Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)Tesla electric-powered sedan stands at a Tesla charging staiton at a highway reststop along the A7 highway on June 11, 2015 near Rieden, Germany. Tesla has introduced a limited network of charging stations along the German highway grid in…