Low-Cost Mobile Device Uses the Cloud to Speed Up Diagnostic Testing for HIV
January 28th 2013Samuel K. Sia, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has taken his innovative lab-on-a-chip and developed a way to not only check a patient's HIV status anywhere in the world with just a finger prick, but also synchronize the results automatically and instantaneously with central health-care records10 times faster, the researchers say, than the benchtop ELISA, a broadly used diagnostic technique. The device was field-tested in Rwanda by a collaborative team from the Sia lab and ICAP at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health.
Penicillin, Not the Pill, May Have Launched the Sexual Revolution
January 28th 2013The rise in risky, non-traditional sexual relations that marked the swinging 60s actually began as much as a decade earlier, during the conformist 50s, suggests an analysis recently published by the Archives of Sexual Behavior.