Now that the opening act is over, lets welcome the Paralympians to the field. Michael Phelps should try swimming with his hand behind his back. Or how about wheelchair rugby pictured on the right? We are, of course, excited to be able to see all kinds of assistive devices in direct competition and worked over by players that don’t hold back.
NBC’s Universal Sports will be broadcasting the games through its online video network.

U.S. Paralympics, a division of the U.S. Olympic Committee, is pleased to announce that Universal Sports, a multiplatform destination for amateur sports programming, will provide the first-ever multiplatform broadcast coverage of the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games, presented by GE in the United States. Daily video highlights will also be webcast on the official site of the U.S. Paralympic Team, usparalympics.org.
Viewers will have the opportunity to watch the Paralympic Games, Sept. 6-17, with daily live and delayed highlight shows on UniversalSports.com and usparalympics.org. The official U.S. Paralympic Team site will also host daily video blogs from U.S. athletes and delegation members. Beginning in 2009, the U.S. Olympic Network will re-air portions of the 2008 Paralympic Games.

Press release: First Ever Multiplatform Broadcast of Paralympic Games Coming to U.S. via Universal Sports
Universal Sports…
More at the International Paralympic Committee..
Image: Wheelchair rugby

Forbes has a great “in pictures” article on some new startups with some interesting technologies in the pipeline. The highlights include:
Hx Technolgies is working on establishing a system for rapid delivery of imaging data between hospitals. Begging hospitals to send over 20 lb. film envelopes could soon be a thing of the past! More info from the company’s website:

Xebra is an open source platform for web-based distribution and clinical review of medical imaging results. The software provides healthcare organizations and software developers with all the necessary components to securely transmit and review medical images over a network such as the Internet.
Unlike closed and proprietary imaging software locked to a single vendor, Xebra is intended to work alongside any picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and to provide advanced imaging capabilities to a wide range of healthcare IT applications including use in:
* health information exchanges (HIEs)
* regional health information organizations (RHIOs)
* electronic medical records (EMRs)
* personal health records (PHRs)
* clinical trials
* medical education
Written in Java, the software is designed to run on any operating system with an ultra-thin client that can be launched over the Web without any installation required by the end user.

Aethon is working on a robot to fetch supplies instead of sending a clueless med student after them.
From the TUG website:

The TUG is an affordable, automated courier system for the delivery and tracking of hospital goods and supplies. This autonomous mobile robot requires no extra infrastructure investment, is simple to install and can be applied across a variety of applications. Many hospitals have deployed multiple TUGs which have saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars.

View video showing off the TUG…
patientkeeper looks to be a nifty tool that allows you to write notes, order prescriptions, labs, and studies on your patient using most mobile devices that have web-access. An alternative to the thousands of sticker covered index cards you have your pocket.
From the company:

PatientKeeper can help you save time by eliminating the need to hunt for free workstations, search for information, or track down patients and other clinicians. With PatientKeeper, you have ready access to lab and test results, medication histories, allergies, vital signs, I/O’s and all the rest of the information on your patients. As a result, you can focus on what matters most: your patient’s care.
We help ensure that you have the most up-to-date patient information at your fingertips so you can respond to critical care issues more quickly. We provide you with drug-drug and drug-allergy checking to help reduce interaction and allergy risks. And we facilitate information sharing with other caregivers to help avoid the errors and near misses that can develop from poor communication.

More from Forbes …

In a world’s first, researchers at Harvard have turned one form of fully formed adult cells of a mouse into another.

The Melton [Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) co-director Doug Melton] team reports in today’s online edition of the journal Nature that, using a technique it is calling "direct reprogramming," the team is able to turn mouse exocrine cells, which make up about 95 percent of the pancreas, into precious and rare insulin-producing beta cells. These beta cells, which comrpise [sic] about one percent of the pancreas, are the cells that die off in Type I diabetes.
In addition to its value for the field of regenerative medicine, the work also is a major step forward toward eventually developing a treatment for Type II – and eventually Type I – diabetes, a treatment that might someday eliminate the need for patients to constantly monitor their blood sugar and take insulin-adjusting medications, or even insulin. It is important to note, however, that there are numerous scientific hurdles that lay ahead before a treatment could be tested in humans.
Unlike the process involved in creating induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), which have caused enormous excitement ever since their introduction two years ago by Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka, this direct reprogramming technique does not require turning adult cells into stem cells and then figuring out how to induce them to differentiate into a desired cell type. Melton emphasized, however, that direct reprogramming does not in any way eliminate the need for, or value of, work with iPS cells or human embryonic stem cells. "We need to attack problems from multiple angles," said Melton, stressing that his lab is using several approaches and will continue to work with iPS and hES cells.
Melton likened the the multi-step process a stem cell goes through during differentiation into a specific adult cell type to passing through a series of doors. "There are locks on all the doors," he said, "and the locks are transcription factors. We asked which ones are present in the beta cell, and that gave us 1,100 transcription factors to choose from. Eventually we learned that of the 1,100, only about 200 are actually expressed in cells that are involved in forming the pancreas.
"Next," Melton continued, "we decided that of the 200, we only cared about the ones that are expressed in the key part of the pancreas where the beta cells are – and that got us down to about 28. Then we did some lineage studies," he explained, "and we got it down to nine. Joe said, ‘my best guess is it’s these nine.’ And he were right. It was a messy experiment, mixing all nine and injecting them into the pancreas. Then we found out that it got better and better as we removed one gene at a time from the nine, and eventually we found that it actually works best with three transcription factors – that six of them aren’t that important. And that’s the fun of science!" Melton said, a grin spreading across his face.
But back to serendipity for a moment:
Suppose the experiment hadn’t worked with those nine transcription factors; what then? "If it hadn’t worked with those nine, we’d probably have dropped the experiment and gone onto something else; there would have been just too many possible combinations of transcription factors to wade through," Melton said.

Press release: Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers turn one form of adult mouse cell directly into another.
Image: In this immunofluorescent image of an adult mouse pancreas, exocrine cells into which three transcription factors have been inserted are displayed in green. The red areas in the image are insulin. The blue streaks are blood vessels, which are remodeled by and lie close to the new, insulin-producing beta cells. Image courtesy Joe Zhou, Melton Lab

Writing in the latest PLoS Biology, researchers from the University of Wisconsin, Madison are wondering whether sleep is really a biological necessity, or maybe it’s just a function created by evolution to kill time and avoid stress.
From the article in PLoS Biology:

Everybody knows that sleep is important, yet the function of sleep seems like the mythological phoenix: “Che vi sia ciascun lo dice, dove sia nessun lo sa” (“that there is one they all say, where it may be no one knows,” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte [1790], Così fan tutte). But what if the search for an essential function of sleep is misguided? What if sleep is not required but rather a kind of extreme indolence that animals indulge in when they have no more pressing needs, such as eating or reproducing? In many circumstances sleeping may be a less dangerous choice than roaming around, wasting energy and exposing oneself to predators. Also, if sleep is just one out of a repertoire of available behaviors that is useful without being essential, it is easier to explain why sleep duration varies so much across species. This “null hypothesis” would explain why nobody has yet identified a core function of sleep. But how strong is the evidence supporting it? And are there counterexamples?
So far the null hypothesis has survived better than alternatives positing some core function for sleep [8–10]. In what follows we shall test the null hypothesis by considering three of its key corollaries. If the null hypothesis were right, we would expect to find: (1) animals that do not sleep at all; (2) animals that do not need recovery sleep when they stay awake longer; and, finally, (3) that lack of sleep occurs without serious consequences.

Article in PLoS Biology: Is Sleep Essential?
Check out this illustration from the article that lists animal species in which the presence of sleep and/or Its homeostatic regulation have been called into question…