Subscription Center
Nov 12, 2008
You’ve been tagged.
Hospitals are increasingly using electronic-monitoring equipment to track patients, employees and medical devices to prevent them from going the way of the Junior Mint Seinfeld’s Kramer infamously dropped into an open surgical patient.
The e-tracking software has been used for more than a decade by hospitals to prevent baby kidnappings, the Wall Street Journal reports today. But now hospitals are tagging patients with radio-frequency identification (RFID) devices to, among other things, cut down on emergency room waiting time by keeping track of how long each person has been in the ER. They're tagging employees to get a handle on departments that need staff or can spare them. And equipment is tagged so it can be easily located – and to prevent surgeons from inadvertently leaving it inside patients.
Sep 11, 2008
As the U.S. marks the seventh anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a group of UK researchers have completed a study designed to lead to improved skyscraper safety. The report, to be presented at next year's International Conference in Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics (PED) at Germany's University of Wuppertal, is based on interviews with 271 WTC survivors who provided first-hand accounts of what it was like for victims as they tried to leave the burning buildings.
Researchers from the Universities of Greenwich, Ulster and Liverpool concluded that more than half of the survivors delayed evacuating because they wanted to gather information about what was happening; those intent on getting more info about the attacks before exiting took between 1.5 and 2.6 times longer to begin evacuating than others; and congestion in stairways was the main cause of delay in getting out, even though the towers were less than one-third occupied that day.
See what we're tweeting about
johnrplatt Oman invests in solar energy -- to extract oil http://t.co/DbGkvKJQ0T
dbiello The citi bikes are here... http://t.co/9jbxTUDwFK
KateClancy Which is why I've been all but absent from twitter and blogs. Grr.
Deadline: Jul 30 2013
Reward: $100,000 USD
The Seeker desires a method for producing pseudoephedrine products in such a way that it will be extremely difficult for clandestine che
Deadline: Jun 29 2013
Reward: $7,000 USD
The Seeker for this Challenge desires proposals for chemical methods that could rapidly degrade a dilute aqueous solution
Powered By: 
YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific American with no obligation to continue the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed for the one-year subscription.
