Is social media good for you, or bad? Well, it's complicated. A study of 12 million Facebook users suggests that using Facebook is associated with living longer - when it serves to maintain and enhance your real-world social ties. Oh and you can relax and stop watching how many "likes" you get: That doesn't seem to correlate at all.
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HIV Test Performed on USB Stick
Scientists have developed a type of HIV test on a USB stick. The device, created by scientists at Imperial College London and DNA Electronics, uses a drop of blood to detect HIV, and then creates an electrical signal that can be read by a computer, laptop or handheld device.
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Crack the Human Brain
The time is ripe, the communication technology is available, for teams from different labs and different countries to join efforts and apply new forms of grassroots collaborative research in brain science. This is the right way to gradually upscale the study of the brain so as to usher it into the era of Big Science, claim neuroscientists in Portugal, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. And they are already putting ideas into action.
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Telemedicine, in Addition to Clinical Care, May Help Manage Diabetes
Telemedicine, including text messaging and Web portals, may help patients with diabetes and their doctors manage blood sugar levels, according to a study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). The prevalence of diabetes has more than doubled worldwide in the last 30 years, to 382 million in 2013, and is projected to increase to 592 million in 2035.
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SleepCoacher: A Personalized Automated Self-Experimentation System for Sleep Recommendations
There are plenty of cellphone apps on the market designed to help people monitor their sleep patterns. The apps generally record data on when people go to bed and when they wake, and many use the device's microphone and accelerometer to take note of noises in the night and to monitor how much people toss and turn.
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Paper vs. Electronic: How a Dermatology Prescription is Written Affects Adherence
A UNC School of Medicine dermatologist recently conducted a study to determine if the way a prescription was written - either traditionally or electronically - played a role in whether a patient filled and picked up the medication. In the study, published in JAMA Dermatology, Adewole S. Adamson, MD, assistant professor of dermatology, found that the way a prescription was written could influence whether a patient filled the prescription.
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Facebook Updates could Help Understand - and Potentially Treat - Mental Health Disorders
Our Facebook status updates, 'likes' and even photos could help researchers better understand mental health disorders with the right ethical safeguards, argue researchers from the University of Cambridge, who suggest that social networks may even be used in future to provide support and interventions, particularly among young people.
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