[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.] [More]

The steady rise of digital cameras has prompted the rapid growth of a new industry: instant photographic developing. A shutterbug brings her camera’s memory stick to a store, inserts it into a kiosk, selects the photographs she wants, and moments later prints drop into a chute. The machines seem to be everywhere. “In five years the number of digital kiosks has skyrocketed to 85,000 worldwide,” says Charles S. Christ, Jr., thermal systems director at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, N.Y.The printers use a “dry” processing technique known as thermal dye transfer (as opposed to the traditional “wet” process of bathing exposed film in liquid chemicals). As the photographic paper scrolls past a print head, tiny resistors aligned in a row each heat up to specific temperatures, transferring minute amounts of yellow, magenta or cyan dye from a ribbon onto the paper. Together the dots form color pixels. [More]

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The brains of flies are wired to avoid the swatter, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

Move-in day is a rite of passage, for parents as well as for their nearly grown children. Limber up

The widely-held perception that the influenza vaccination reduces overall mortality risk in the elderly does not withstand careful scrutiny, according to researchers in Alberta. The vaccine does confer protection against specific strains of influenza, but its overall benefit appears to have been exaggerated by a number of observational studies that found a very large reduction in all-cause mortality among elderly patients who had been vaccinated.

There is a strong link between obesity and asthma and as the prevalence of both conditions has been increasing steadily, epidemiologists have speculated that there is an underlying condition that connects the two. But one long-suspected link, the systemic inflammation associated with obesity, has been ruled out by a recent New Zealand study that found no evidence of its involvement.

Children who are physically or sexually abused are more than twice as likely to have asthma as their peers, according to a recent study of urban children in Puerto Rico. In fact, physical and sexual abuse was second only to maternal asthma in all the risk factors tested, including paternal asthma and indicators of socioeconomic status.

High-speed cameras reveal that flies perform an elegant little ballet with their legs. In less than a 10th of a second, flies perceive the direction of the threat and use their legs to angle their bodies for the quickest escape route.

"An investigation into the effects of gum chewing on mood and cortisol levels during psychological stress," to be presented at the 2008 10th international congress of Behavioral Medicine, found chewing gum helped relieve anxiety, improve alertness and reduce stress among individuals in a laboratory setting.

Engineers at Georgia Tech have used skin cells to create artificial bones that mimic the ability of natural bone to blend into other tissues such as tendons or ligaments. The artificial bones provide for better integration with the body and handle weight more successfully.