If you partake in Wii fitness regularly, you probably know that there is only one thing keeping you from having a full-fledged, muscle-building, vein-popping work-out experience: limited range of push-up motion. Thankfully, this push-up bar attachment lets you dig deep . More

Costing just a cent to produce and requiring just a single drop of blood, this paper chip, designed by Harvard chemist George Whitesides, can diagnose HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and more. What substance makes this tiny marvel possible? Comic-book ink. The water-resistant ink pushes the blood into the different paper channels, each of which contain chemicals that react with the blood and change color to indicate the presence and severity of the various diseases.

Costing just a cent to produce and requiring just a single drop of blood to function, this paper chip, designed by chemist George Whitesides, can diagnose HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and more. What substance makes this tiny marvel possible? Comic-book ink. The water-resistant ink pushes the blood into the different paper channels, each of which contain chemicals that react with the blood and change color to indicate the presence and severity of the various diseases. In developing countries where technology for diagnosing diseases needs to be cheap and easy for individuals to use themselves, it’s hard to imagine a test simpler than Whitesides’ “zero cost diagnostics”.

This is upsetting. A South Korean couple was arrested for starving their baby to death, reportedly only feeding her once a day after marathon sessions at an internet cafe. What was keeping them so busy? Their virtual baby. Yeah

In today’s Remainders: headaches. Microsoft’s browser ballot is a headache for the little guys; CereProc talks about the painstaking process of rebuilding Ebert’s voice; WiMax taxis in Taiwan get me a little steamed; a magical migraine-diminishing wand, and more. Talk To Me Since we first read about the Scottish company CereProc and their effort to give Roger Ebert his voice back , we’ve been eager to get the scoop on the tech behind the scenes. Ebert’s computerized voice was debuted on Oprah earlier this week , and while it was far from a perfect recreation, no one could deny that at some points the voice was distinctly his own. Now, CNET has an in-depth talk with CereProc which sheds some light on the process behind their incredible product. It has some interesting bits, like how they usually require 15 hours of recordings to recreate a voice, though they rebuilt Ebert’s from only four hours of clips

A man hassled a neighbor over his Wi-Fi allergies , and we dismissed him as a member of the tin-foil hat brigade. Now we’re reading PopSci’s look at the Electro-hypersensitivity—the real deal gadget allergy—and we’re feeling sorta like assholes. The article opens with an anecdote of Per Segerbäck, a serious electro-hypersensitive who lives in a cottage north of Stockholm. He can be rendered unconscious by a single cell phone call.

A new study found a direct link between the time teenagers spent staring at screens and their inability to have meaningful relationships with their parents and peers. This study obviously was conducted before that Russian kid blessed us with Chatroulette. You’ve likely been at one end of this debate—either you were a teenage TV zombie being told by your parents to go play outside, or you were that parent trying to keep your kid from spending another mindless hour on the Internet. In this battle, it turns out, the wisdom of age prevails. The study, published in this month’s Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, found that every hour of TV watched increased the teen’s likelihood of detachment from friends and family 4% and each hour of Internet increased it 5%

Did you know that your run of the mill keyboard is basically a gigantic apartment complex for bacteria? Gross, no? Thankfully there’s Cleankeys, a keyboard that bulldozes that shit and replaces it with a sleek, sterile touch-sensitive slab. Wiping a standard keyboard with a disinfecting cloth kills about 5% of bacteria. Cleankeys claims the same test kills 99% of bacteria on their keyboard, simply because they have nowhere to hide

Artificial schnozzes have been sniffing foreign objects for years now , but rarely are they engineered to sniff out specific things. A team of researchers from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign have done just that, though, with a new snout that acts as a coffee analyzer. Reportedly, the device can “distinguish between ten well-known commercial brands of coffee and can also make a distinction between coffee beans that have been roasted at different temperatures or lengths of time.” The significance here is that this distinction is incredibly difficult to make, and it could one day help coffee growers determine whether batches are as good as prior batches on the cheap. More importantly, however, it could help the modern java hunter determine whether or not they’re walking in a corporate Starbucks or one of those “branded” kiosks with two-fifths the menu. Brilliant, right

Neurologists have built an ultrasound device which uses focused sound waves to destroy stroke-causing blood clots in brains. The procedure is non-invasive—requiring no drugs or surgery—and is already being tested on patients. The machine and procedure allows doctors to “surround the head with an array of transducers that can focus ultrasound beams on a single spot in the brain without damaging the skull.” This means that diseased tissue could be destroyed without any collateral damage or risky surgery. [ Technology Review via Pop Sci ]