Not So Hard To Swallow

Monitoring gastric distress is hard to do and often involves sliding camera-equipped scopes or catheters through the nose to internal places of interest. A new ingestible device may soon hit the market: a camera about the size of a quarter.

In tests on pigs, researchers said it delivered location measurements comparable to an X-ray, but without the obvious gagging. There are already “smart pills” on the market that measure things such as pH, pressure, transit time and temperature along the gastrointestinal tract. The new device works by detecting a magnetic field generated by a coil outside the body and could, in principle, allow patients to watch something moving through their bodies in three dimensions.

Body of Knowledge

Human fingers can feel objects as small as 13 nanometers. Mark Rutland, a professor of surface chemistry, says that means that “if your finger was the size of the Earth, you could feel the difference between houses (and) cars.

Get Me That, Stat!

A new report in Nature Human Behavior estimates that school-aged children around the world lost, on average, 35% of an academic year’s learning — and still haven’t made up for that loss — due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stories for the Waiting Room

Most women do not smoke during pregnancy. That’s a good thing. Even better, the CDC says the small number who do has shrunk by more than a third. Smoking is a major risk factor for poor pregnancy outcomes and health problems for newborns later in life.

Among pregnant women who continued to smoke, the CDC said they tended to be under the age of 30 and live in these 10 states: Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Doc Talk

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