Month: September 2018

Enlarge (credit: WeartheCost.org)

In a desperate attempt to raise awareness of outrageously high, stunningly variable hospital bills, the state of Maryland has created a passive-aggressive line of T-shirts.

The black T-shirts blast the average prices for procedures in bold, white lettering, such as “Hip Replacement $30,799” and “Vaginal Delivery $11,590.”

The campaign, WeartheCost.org, is designed to start conversations, according to the Maryland Health Care Commission, which is behind the shirts. “We won't control the high costs of health care until we're all talking about it,” the commission’s campaign site notes.

Enlarge (credit: Romell et al. 2018)

A variation on traditional CT scanning recently gave archaeologists a much closer look at a 2,400-year-old mummified hand from ancient Egypt. Medical imaging already uses the technology for higher-resolution views of patients' soft tissues, but this is the first time it has been tested on mummified human remains.

For soft tissue imaging, contrast is key

“There has long been a struggle to retrieve information from ancient soft tissues, and neither conventional X-ray imaging and CT, nor new methods like MRI and terahertz imaging, have been able to give images with enough contrast or resolution for detailed analysis of these tissues,” physicist Jenny Romell of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden told Ars Technica.

CT scanning relies on X-rays but uses a computer to combine images from different angles into cross-sectional views of the body. Differences in the amounts of radiation absorbed by different materials produce the contrast visible in the resulting image. The method works especially well for hard, dense materials like bone, but most types of soft tissue don’t produce enough contrast for really high-resolution imagery. Instead, paleopathologists who want to study ancient tissues have to take small samples from mummified remains and examine them under a microscope.

Let's get one thing out of the way right up front: Oculus Quest is not the wireless, PC-free version of the Rift you may have been dreaming of. The Snapdragon 835 SoC powering Quest is much closer to a mid-range mobile phone than the Nvidia GTX 960 graphics card (and surrounding Windows PC) required to run a tethered Rift. The field of view and maximum refresh rate on the Quest both seem more comparable to the portable Oculus Go, which is a bit of downgrade from the Rift as well (though we have yet to confirm precise numbers for any of these devices).

Let's get another thing out of the way: None of that seems to matter that much when you're walking around an apparently solid virtual reality space without the need for any outside hardware or any external cameras or sensors.

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

Another brick-and-mortar Amazon store opens its doors today: Amazon 4-star, at a new location in New York City's Soho district. The retail giant's new store only sells products that have been rated four stars or above on Amazon.com, plus Amazon's own products.

The company writes in a blog post that Amazon 4-star is a "direction reflection of our customers," and in a way that's true. The average rating for all items in Amazon 4-star is 4.4, and most items have hundreds or thousands of online star-ratings and reviews. Amazon stocked the store with consumer electronics, kitchen and home items, toys, books, games, and more, but it doesn't contain every single product that has a 4-star rating or higher.

Discovery appears to be one of the main purposes of the new store. Not only does the store highlight the most-loved items on Amazon.com, but the company also organizes them into specific categories like Most-Wished-For, Trending Around NYC, Amazon Exclusives, and others.