That’s One Smart Phone!

If you thought your smart phone was clever, allowing you to check your emails on the move, or take videos of things that just seemed terribly funny at the time, but no-one else really gets it afterwards, well you ain’t seen nothing yet.  Developers at Lifelens have created an app that is 94% accurate in detecting malaria.  The application works by photographing a blood sample, then enlarging the image 350 times, allowing the user to see the blood at a molecular level.  It takes a cell count and allows the user to isolate the disease within the red blood cells.  Whilst this won’t be a useful one to play with when riding the bus to work, the development could result in saving hundreds, if not thousands of lives.  Current tests for malaria are only around 40% accurate.

Find out more here.

 

No More Monkey Business.

It came to our attention at the beginning of the week that a squirrel monkey from San Francisco Zoo had been kidnapped.  Banana Sam, as he is known by his friends was taken from the zoo, and subsequently returned by a member of the public.  The man returning Sam claimed to have heard him in a park and coaxed him into his backpack, an assertion that zoo officials have dismissed as “unlikely”.  The police investigation is ongoing.  Sam was unavailable to speak to the Newsnibbles team, presumably still recovering from his ordeal.

Learn more here.

 

No More Kisses for You!

According to a BBC report “The Kiss of Life” has been putting many people off the thought of conducting CPR, for fear of contracting a disease.  Whilst this does not seem to put people of after a few shots in a pub, The British Heart Foundation’s official stand is now that if you are worried about the mouth to mouth, just focus on compressions instead.  One qualified first aider told Newsnibbles,

“This is nothing new.  The mouth to mouth has always come secondary to chest compressions.  The fact is if you aren’t trained in first aid attempting it can be futile anyway as you could send air into the stomach instead of the lungs.”

Other concerns about conducting CPR are that people could crack a rib.  This is to be expected as the amount of pressure exerted in order to keep the heart beating sometimes can result in broken bones.

Read the full report here.

Learn more about first aid here.

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