bones

LAS VEGAS--Music can serve as a great motivator in a long workout at the gym, but it's a universally bad idea to use headphones during outdoor exercises, especially if you live in a big city with traffic and obstructions coming at you from all angles.

For cyclists and runners who still want to jam to a soundtrack, Panasonic introduces the RP-BTGS10 wireless headphones at CES with a unique take on sound transmission, using your cheekbones to deliver audio straight to your head. (Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

Calling this device an "earphone" is a misnomer, since they actually … Read more

Dogs are pack animals. When their pack leaders go off to work, leave on vacation, or go run some errands, life can feel awfully lonely for the pooches left behind.

Chinese product designer Yunfan Tan has an idea he hopes will ease the sadness for pouty pups. His WithMe Bone design plays to a dog's excellent senses of smell and hearing.

The idea is you stuff a worn piece of clothing like a sock into the bone. Small perforations let the smell out. A tiny voice recorder inside tapes you saying soothing messages to Fido, such as "Good boy!" or "Please don't pee on the rug." The audio is motion activated when the bone is shaken.… Read more

AfterShokz is one of a handful of companies making bone-conduction headphones, launching its brand earlier this year. Unlike conventional headphones and earbuds that use the eardrums to transmit sound, AfterShokz headphones rest in front of your ear and utilize bone-conduction technology to transmit sound through your cheekbones to your inner ear, bypassing your eardrum completely. The technology, originally developed for military personnel, has been around for a while, but AfterShokz and others have turned it into a niche consumer product.

Although the headphones work just fine, audiophiles probably won't be impressed with the sound quality. After all, these are … Read more

There's nothing like hitting the ski lodge for a warm beverage after a few hours on the slopes, but trying to round up the troops can be a pain when you have to dig through your winter layers to find your cell phone and then shout instructions over all the swooshing and ambient noise around you.

If you're sick of dealing with this first-world problem, let us introduce you to the Buhel SpeakGoggle G33. These high-tech goggles connect to your cell phone or smartphone via Bluetooth and feature a bone conduction mic integrated into the frame that translates speech using the vibrations from your nose. The advantage of bone conduction technology is that it blocks outside noise, so you can have a clearer conversation with your friend. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--The show floor at CES 2012 looks like a spaceship full of headphones crash-landed onto it, blasting earbuds and DJ headsets into every booth. AfterShokz finds a way to cut through the clutter by bypassing the ears completely.

AfterShokz sit over the back of your head and hook over your ears. The pads touch at the back of your cheekbones and use bone conduction technology to deliver the sound.

I already tested out Yurbuds, rubbery earbuds designed for athletes. The AfterShokz are also designed for athletes, particularly runners.… Read more

Here's some bone-chilling news: The chance of breaking a bone increases significantly after age 50, especially for women. We know bones lose mass as they age. However, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says what makes them become brittle is more complicated than that.

Robert Ritchie, a materials scientist at the lab, is trying to figure out why bones break so easily in older adults. While a lot of work has been done looking at the loss of quantity of bone, Ritchie and his team are focusing on another issue: quality. Specifically, how bones deteriorate. SmartPlanet interviewed Ritchie … Read more

It may be benign, but researchers have turned the virus M13 into a sophisticated engineering tool that could lead to the manufacturing of materials with biomedical properties that can be fine-tuned, such as bone, skin, and corneas.

"We took our inspiration from nature," said Seung-Wuk Lee, an associate professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley who describes the team's self-templating material assembly process in the journal Nature. "Nature has a unique ability to create functional materials from very basic building blocks. We found a way to mimic [this]."

Lee points to the protein collagen as the … Read more

Researchers at the Imperial College London and the University of Oxford are reporting in the journal PLoS Biology that they can see the inner workings of white blood cells at the highest resolution ever documented.

To do this, the team immobilized a white blood cell using a pair of optical laser tweezers and watched with a super-res microscope as the so-called Natural Killer cell's actin filaments parted, creating a tiny portal through which enzyme-filled granules passed to kill targeted diseased tissue.

If you think the resulting image (at right) doesn't look super-res, consider the zoom. The place where … Read more

As anyone who has broken a bone knows, keeping up with physical therapy post-injury can be painful and annoying, and without a clear way to gauge progress, the regimen is as tempting to avoid as a bland diet.

Recent Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design graduate Pedro Nakazato Andrade hopes to keep people motivated--and thus improve recovery time--via a prototype cast that employs electromyographic sensors, which measure the electrical activity produced by a muscle when it moves.

Called "Bones," his cast prototype can keep a running tally of how much the injured area is being exercised.

The idea behind the design is rooted in the idea behind weight loss programs such as Weight Watchers: people who can track their progress using real, hard data are more likely to stay motivated and keep doing what they have been told to do.… Read more