From Lifehacker: Standing Desks on the Cheap: The IKEA Guide

The standing desk revolution has been rapidly spreading over the past few years, and it’s no surprise why. Switching to a standing desk can improve circulation, alleviate back pain, reduce stress, and strengthen muscles. But the switch can be expensive. Thankfully, the folks at Priceonomics braved the IKEA crowds to create a guide of the store’s most affordable workstations. More »
 

from Lifehacker

From Discover Magazine: Light-activated, Nano-sized Protein Factories Show Promise For Drug Delivery | 80beats

particle

Some of the most exciting medical research these days involves light. Light therapy for cancer, in which a tumor-seeking dye becomes toxic as soon as a light is switched on, manages to avoid slaughtering nearby healthy cells. Optogenetics—using light to turn on or off the expression of neurons—has advanced researchers’ understanding of neurological diseases.

Now, a recent paper is a reminder that light might someday be used for exquisitely tailored drug delivery: in this paper, tiny packages bearing all the molecular machinery to build a protein are idle when injected into mice, but spring into action when exposed to UV light.

The nanoparticles, which you can see a schematic of above, are little envelopes of cellular membrane, wrapped around a basic set of protein-building machinery and the gene for whatever you’d like manufactured—the researchers used a glowing fluorescent protein for their test. The gene can’t be accessed by the machinery because it is sealed into a loop by a piece of molecular adhesive, but shine a UV light on it, and the adhesive unsticks. Then the machinery transcribes the gene, and the protein is expressed. The researchers found that when they injected the particles into mice and …

 

from Discover Magazine

From Lifehacker: The Science Behind Why Power Naps Help You Stay Productive and Creative

If you’ve tried taking naps in the afternoon and found yourself feeling groggy after waking—if you manage to force yourself back out of bed—you may just be going about them all wrong. Even if you don’t work in a job where napping is acceptable, there’s a very clear reason why the best naps are the ones that are usually around the half-hour mark. Here’s why. More »
 

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From Lifehacker: Feel Rested After a Red Eye Flight by Adjusting Your Food and Water Intake Schedule

Red eye flights aren’t fun, but sometimes they’re inevitable. The worst part is getting to your destination early in the morning without sufficient rest. You have to go about your day tired, and that’s tough. A thread on Quora, however, suggests you can avoid this problem with a few adjustments to your eating (and drinking) schedule. More »


 

from Lifehacker

From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Approved: The First Swallowable Electronic Devices

Smart Pills Proteus Biomedical
Digital pills that monitor you from withinNo matter how fast pharmaceutical companies can churn out drugs to prevent or cure illnesses, health insurance doesn’t cover the cost of hiring a person to follow you around and remind you to take your meds. So the FDA has approved a pill that can do it on its own by monitoring your insides and relaying the information back to a healthcare provider.

The pills, made by Proteus Digital Health, have sand-particle-sized silicon chips with small amounts of magnesium and copper on them. After they’re swallowed, they generate voltage as they make contact with digestive juices. That signals a patch on the person’s skin, which then relays a message to a mobile phone given to a healthcare provider. It’s only been approved for use with placebos right now, but the company is hoping to get it approved for use with other drugs (which would be where it would get the most use).

Even if there’s a slight whiff of dystopia about a pill that tracks your actions, it does help with a major problem. Patients aren’t the best at taking their pills, especially those suffering from chronic illnesses, so it’s one step of many toward a future where they don’t have to.

[Nature]

 

from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now