Health Care

What's in this week's headlines? Three medical stories, one on world population and food, and another on China and capping carbon emissions.

• MS Breakthrough Holds Promise for Treating Autoimmune Diseases and Responses;
• Non-invasive Treatment May Be a Cure for Blindness;

Recent developments suggest that wearable computing may finally be gaining traction. Intel evangelist Manny Vara believes that comfortable and convenient wearable computers may be just two to five years away.

originally posted to the Trends & Foresight blog

What technology and science stories caught my eye this week? Several in biomedicine. And two involving 3D printing, one for making liver, the other for mass customized manufacturing. A forecast of changes to climate zones as our atmosphere continues to heat. And a new commercial rocket joining the competition for low-Earth orbit missions. So here they are:

As we get older our ability to replace damaged cells weakens. For blood cells the trigger seems to be age-induced changes that occur in hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) that makes us less capable of fighting of diseases like leukemia.

In Part 2 of 10 Technologies from Space We Use Here on Earth, we complete the list first reported on March 19 in Information Week in an article

My weekly picks unlike last week are not a single theme but range over many science and technology fields. I hope you find these stories as interesting as I do.

• The Universe is 100 Millions Older Than We Thought;
• Physicists Calculate Doomsday Argument;
• New 3D Display No Longer Requires Glasses;

The FDA in the United States has approved the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System, the first bionic eye, an artificial retina for sufferers of Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), a disease that affects 1 in 4,000 in North America.