Performing chest compressions in CPR is a fairly simple process easily explained to most laymen, but execution is key. You don’t want to be breaking ribs, but you certainly don’t want to under-pump the patient with even graver results. Physio-Control just launched its new TrueCPR coaching device, a system that accurately measures the rate and depth of chest compressions and provides both real-time feedback and follow-up analysis of the supplied treatment.

Suspected brain injuries can be difficult to diagnose, and expensive CT scanners are the best way to look for edemas and hematomas. But CT scanners are large, expensive, ionizing, and require specialists to operate.

Hippocampus, the part of the brain with a major role in forming long-term memories

A memory device may be implanted in a small number of human volunteers within two years and the device might become available to anyone within five to ten years. A maverick neuroscientist, Theodore Berger, believes he has deciphered the code by which the brain forms long-term memories.

Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, envisions a day in the not too distant future when a patient with severe memory loss can get help from an electronic implant.

For many who suffer from chronic migraines, nothing can reliably prevent or dull the debilitating headaches that may strike as often as every other day.

A biopharmaceutical company in Bothell, Washington, may have a solution. It hopes that a monthly injection of an antibody that blocks a well-known migraine-triggering protein will prevent these headaches.

The company, called Alder Biopharmaceuticals, is testing the efficacy of the drug in a clinical study of 160 patients, each of whom has between four and 14 migraines per month; Alder expects the results of the study to be in this fall.