Scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) have managed to control the behavior of individual bacteria by connecting them to a computer. The interdisciplinary team including experimental biologist Remy Chait and mathematician Jakob Ruess (now at the Institut Pasteur and Inria Saclay in France) as first authors of the study, as well as Professors Calin Guet and Gasper Tkacik used the setup to build a genetic circuit that is partly living and partly digital.

The researchers from Imperial have designed a video game called Balloon Buddies, which is a tool that enables those recovering from conditions such as a stroke to engage and play together with healthy volunteers such as therapists and family members as a form of rehabilitation. Balloon Buddies is designed to level the playing field by allowing healthy participants to support the less abled player.

When it comes to strengthening your mental or emotional health, would you trust an app? A trio of Brigham Young University health science researchers has published new research that says the answer is yes. The group was looking to identify what it is about health apps that influences users' behavior. Over three studies, they surveyed roughly 600 people who had used diet, physical activity or mental health apps in the past six months.

Researchers at Dartmouth, Stanford University, and IBM Research, conducted a critical review of existing literature to determine whether social media big data can be used to understand communication and behavioral patterns related to prescription drug abuse. Their study found that with proper research methods and attention to privacy and ethical issues, social media big data can reveal important information concerning drug abuse, such as user-reported side effects, drug cravings, emotional states, and risky behaviors.

Virtual reality has emerged into popular culture with an ever-widening array of applications including clinical use in a pediatric healthcare center. Children undergo necessary yet painful and distressing medical procedures every day, but very few non-pharmaceutical interventions have been found to successfully manage the pain and anxiety associated with these procedures.

Expectant and new parents often turn to the internet for parenting prep, but it turns out that dads often don't seem to find the information they say they need about pregnancy, parenthood and routes to their own mental health and well-being. Now, a new study from a Canadian team led by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) with funding from global men's health charity the Movember Foundation highlights just what soon-to-be and new fathers want to see in a dad-focused website and how best to meet those needs.

For some diseases, a simple blood test is all that's needed to estimate severity or confirm a diagnosis. Not so for multiple sclerosis. No single lab test can tell doctors what type of MS a patient has, nor whether it's responding to treatment. But by better tracking patients' symptoms and potential triggers with help from a new iPhone app,