What was Deborah Tagle, aged 55, doing during that time? Apparently she was attempting to find treatment options using WebMD. And the whole thing was caught on in-house surveillance video. From KHOU in Houston:

The video shows Pete Jesse Rodriguez, 24, who is also a resident of the home, pointed a pistol directly at the teen, police said. Rodriguez is accused of tracking the teen’s movement with the pistol and eventually pulling the trigger. The victim was shot once in the upper left thigh with a high-caliber bullet, police said. The teen lay on the floor for several minutes before getting up. Police said the teen and his mother initially looked up gunshots on WebMD.com. Then, seven hours later, the teen’s mother drove him to Mainland Center hospital, police said.

The shooter is charged with injury to a child with intent to commit serious bodily harm and is being held on bond.

The kid is reportedly recovering and in stable condition.

Police did not say whether or not the mom’s WebMD searching produced any viable treatment options. A quick search of WebMD leaves much to be desired in terms of gunshot treatment advice – although after spending a few minutes on the site I’m 100% convinced I have a brain tumor.

[KHOU via UPROXX]

According to a Fox 10 report, after suffering a leaking nose for 18 months, Joe Nagy was told by a doctor that the fluid coming from his nose was actually brain fluid. It turned out that Nagy had a hole in the membrane protecting his brain.

Doctors told Fox 10 that such a condition can be easy to miss, since many people simply assume they have a constantly running nose. Many patients find out about the problem when the fluid becomes infected. Nagy himself developed a serious case of meningitis just before undergoing brain surgery to repair his leaking membrane.

The surgery used cartilage from Nagy’s nose to repair the membrane. It was successful and Nagy stated he was surprised by how quickly the issue was repaired.

“I was waiting for the dribble, you know?” said Nagy. “I was so used to it every day, I got a hanky, a cloth ready, a tissue. Nothing. And all of a sudden, it’s never come back.”

Oxford University revealed this week that its researchers have built a custom 3D printer that prints out a new material that’s composed of thousands of connected water droplets inside lipid films. This new material can perform some of the functions of the cells within our bodies, and may one day be used to either deliver medicine to targeted areas, or repair damaged tissue.

“We aren’t trying to make materials that faithfully resemble tissues but rather structures that can carry out the functions of tissues,” said Professor Hagan Bayley of Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry, who led the research. “We’ve shown that it is possible to create networks of tens of thousands connected droplets. The droplets can be printed with protein pores to form pathways through the network that mimic nerves and are able to transmit electrical signals from one side of a network to the other.”

The custom 3D printer, built by Gabriel Villar, is unlike anything we’ve ever see in the field. The printer is able to create networks of up to 35,000 droplets with each droplet only being 50 microns in diameter. These droplets, when combined into networks, can fold into unique shapes after being printed.

The folding of these droplets is similar to another form of 3D printing called 4D printing. The highly experimental technology allows objects, after being printed on a 3D printer, to self assemble into new shapes.

[h/t: 3ders]

This story takes that formula and adds “totally unnerving” to the mix.

A Swiss nurse has run afoul of investigators after posting photos on Facebook showing her posing next to dead people – presumably people formerly under her care.

In captions posted alongside the photos, the nurse refers to herself as the “soul thief”:

“Guess she is asleep or is she dead? Hint: I’m the soul thief,” read one caption.

“Yeah, your time is over. Send them to hell, where some of them belong. The rest goes into the hole for compost fertilizer, hehehe,” read another. Both are Google Translated from German, but you get the picture.

According to reports, the nurse’s Facebook page was also full of “Satanic” imagery – “devilish images” and such.

Officials in the town of St. Gallen, Switzerland said that they are looking into possible criminal charges. The Swiss nurses federation said that they were “shocked and saddened” by the nurse’s actions.

Facebookers have been known to post photos of their deceased relatives at funerals and such (RIP GRANNY LOVE YOU #YOLO). But posting photos of dead people in your nursing care, well, that’s a whole other animal. Yikes.

[20min via France 24 via Jezebel]

It’s called the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. Apple Chairman Art Levinson with chair the new foundation.

“Our society needs more heroes who are scientists, researchers and engineers. We need to celebrate and reward the people who cure diseases, expand our understanding of humanity and work to improve people’s lives. That’s why Priscilla and I are honored to partner with Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Art Levinson and Yuri Milner to create the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. At $3 million per prize, it’s the largest prize for this work in the world. I’m hopeful this serves as a blueprint for prizes and philanthropy in other fields as well,” said Zuckerberg in a Facebook post.

“Curing a disease should be worth more than a touchdown,” added Sergey Brin.

The inaugural winners have been announced as well, and here’s the full list:

Cornelia I. Bargmann

Torsten N. Wiesel Professor and Head of the Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at the Rockefeller University. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
For the genetics of neural circuits and behavior, and synaptic guidepost molecules

David Botstein

Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the Anthony B. Evnin Professor of Genomics at Princeton University.
For linkage mapping of Mendelian disease in humans using DNA polymorphisms.

Lewis C. Cantley

Margaret and Herman Sokol Professor and Director of the Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medical College and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
For the discovery of PI 3-Kinase and its role in cancer metabolism.

Hans Clevers

Professor of Molecular Genetics at Hubrecht Institute.
For describing the role of Wnt signaling in tissue stem cells and cancer.

Titia de Lange

Leon Hess Professor, Head of the Laboratory of Cell Biology and Genetics, and Director of the Anderson Center for Cancer Research at the Rockefeller University.
For research on telomeres, illuminating how they protect chromosome ends and their role in genome instability in cancer.

Napoleone Ferrara

Distinguished Professor of Pathology and Senior Deputy Director for Basic Sciences at Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego.
For discoveries in the mechanisms of angiogenesis that led to therapies for cancer and eye diseases.

Eric S. Lander

President and Founding Director of the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Professor of Biology at MIT. Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.
For the discovery of general principles for identifying human disease genes, and enabling their application to medicine through the creation and analysis of genetic, physical and sequence maps of the human genome.

Charles L. Sawyers

Chair, Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
For cancer genes and targeted therapy.

Bert Vogelstein

Director of the Ludwig Center and Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
For cancer genomics and tumor suppressor genes.

Robert A. Weinberg

Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at MIT and Director of the MIT/Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology. Member, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
For characterization of human cancer genes.

Shinya Yamanaka

Director of Center for iPS Cell Research and Application, Kyoto University. Senior Investigator, Gladstone Institutes, San Francisco.
For induced pluripotent stem cells.

Although the inaugural winners total 11, there will only be 5 winners per year moving forward. Each winner receives a $3 million (U.S.) prize. Winners will be selected with the help of previous year’s winners. It will also be a transparent process, allowing for online nominations. There are no age restrictions when it comes to who can be nominated and ultimately win the prize.

Women’s Memorial Hermann Hospital at Memorial City Medical Center in Houston Texas will be the first hospital to live-tweet a surgical birth.

“This is a medically indicated c-section. 39-year-old mom had an urgent c-section before & chose not to VBAC. Our goal is to educate,” says Memorial Hermann. “Patient privacy is of utmost importance. Patient & family have consented & we’ll only disclose age & condition.”

You’ll be able to follow multiple stages of the process: admission testing, anesthesia and delivery of the baby. It won’t be for the faint of heart, as Memorial Hermann promises live, close-up photography and video alongside the play-by-play-tweets.

Tomorrow: The first baby born on Twitter. Follow live photo & video clips of a C-section Wed. @ 7am CST. #MHbaby bit.ly/c-section

— Memorial Hermann(@houstonhospital) February 19, 2013

@lulizzylu You’ll see real pics/videos of surgery. We’ll explain that C-section is associated with risks & should only be done if necessary.

— Memorial Hermann(@houstonhospital) February 19, 2013

This is the same hospital that live-tweeted a brain surgery last May.

You can follow all of the action on the @houstonhospital account and the special #MHbaby as well. Everything kicks off Wednesday morning at 7am CST.

We all know by now that research has linked sedentary lifestyles to not living very long. Seriously, the more you sit on your ass, the likelier you are to develop a host of illnesses and eventually die. Naturally, that’s bad news for millions of people whose jobs involve sitting in front of a computer all day.

Now, according to new research, it looks like your internet-browsing, tv-watching overindulgence may also be hurting your chances of reproducing.

The study, recently published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, involved 189 men, various level of inactivity, and sperm samples. What the researchers found was that sedentary lifestyles were associated with lower sperm counts.

“The objective of this study was to evaluate the relationships between semen quality and both physical activity and TV watching among young, healthy men. We hypothesised that increased physical activity was associated with higher sperm count, concentration and motility, and a lower proportion of morphologically abnormal sperm. Furthermore, we hypothesised that increased TV watching time was associated with decreased semen quality parameters,” said the study’s authors.

And they were right. Young me who spent over 20 hours a week watching television had a 44% lower sperm count that those men who watched the least amount of TV (4 hours). Although the researchers say that lower sperm count doesn’t necessarily affect reproductive chances – the fact is that sitting on the couch is reducing your swimmers.

There is some hope, if you’re willing to turn off Netflix and stay off reddit for a little bit. The study also concluded that exercise helped overall sperm count. In fact, men who logged at least 15 hours of moderate exercise a week had 73% higher sperm counts as compared to men who didn’t log any physical activity.

Light physical activity, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have an impact on sperm count.

[Medical News Today via Geekosystem]

Thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation, researchers at Parabon NanoLabs and Janssen Research & Development are now creating and testing cancer drugs made with a 3D printer. The technology is called the Parabon Essemblix Drug Development Platform, and it can potentially bring rapid prototyping to drug creation. If successful, it could drastically reduce the time it takes to bring new drugs to market.

Steven Armentrout, co-developer of the technology, explains the new method of drug creation:

“We can now ‘print,’ molecule by molecule, exactly the compound that we want. What differentiates our nanotechnology from others is our ability to rapidly, and precisely, specify the placement of every atom in a compound that we design.”

Senior research scientist, Hong Zhong, describes the new technology as “a deliberate and methodical engineering process.” He also says that “it’s quite different from most other drug development approaches in use today.”

So what makes the 3D printing of drugs so advantageous? Much like regular 3D printing, the researchers can rapid prototype new drugs in a matter of weeks. The current process of bringing a new drug to market can take years. The new process won’t cut down on the time it takes to test these new drugs, which could still take years, but it makes the actual process of creating drugs much faster than before.

For now, the team at Parabon is creating a new prostate cancer drug with their technology. In its current form, the new drug “combines a toxin with a chemical that makes cancer cells susceptible to that toxin.” It also contains components that prevent the drug from targeting healthy tissue, and markers that allow the researchers to track the drug as it moves to tumors. The design work and synthesis of the drug will amazingly only take a few weeks.

[h/t: ExtremeTech]

Researchers at Sapporo Medical University in Japan (yes, that Sapporo) have determined that a chemical found in beer may help protect against a common virus that could give you one of those crappy winter colds.

It’s called human respiratory syncytial virus and is one of the major causes of lower respiratory infection in babies and younger kids. Most kids will have been infected at some point before they turn four years old. But it’s not only small children that are affected by RSV, as adults can develop cold-like symptoms from the virus. If you live in a temperate (non-tropical climate), you’re most likely to contract the virus during the winter.

The scientists says that humulone, aka the thing in hops that makes your beer deliciously bitter, can help stave off RSV.

In summarion, your babies need to get blitzed.

Ok, not really. But who am I to tell you have to raise your kid? The researchers know most parents don’t want to start their babies on the sauce that early, and they tell the AFP:

“We are now studying the feasibility of applying humulone to food or non-alcoholic products. The challenge really is that the bitter taste is going to be difficult for children.

In reality, it’s you that could benefit from drinking more beer. The only problem is that they say you’ll need to drink about 30 beers in order to benefit from the humulone (no word on whether or not hoppier beers would cut that number).

Wait, did I say “problem?” I meant challenge accepted. No more colds for this guy.

It would be interesting to see what kind of effect this has on users clicking through to other sites like WebMD.

“This data comes from the U.S. FDA, the National Library of Medicine, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, among others,” says Google Search Senior Product Manager Aaron Brown. “It’s part of the Knowledge Graph — our project to map out billions of real-world things, from famous artists to roller coasters to planets (and now medications). We hope you find this useful, but remember that these results do not act as medical advice.”

When you’re talking about something like medicine, the nature of the info users are pointed to is of higher importance than something like that of celebrities. Now, you’re talking about information that can directly influence decisions related to people’s heath and well-being.

Google did not specify the roll-out timeframe. We’re not seeing the results yet, but presumably, users in the U.S. will start seeing them soon.

Do you think Google’s Knowledge Graph and these particular sources have what it takes to provide the best results for queries about medications?