Year: 2014

Dennis Aabo Sorensen is the first amputee to feel in real-time with a prosthetic hand.        

Fatal Overdoses Reported in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Michigan

WASHINGTON (AP) — To feel what you touch — that's the holy grail for artificial limbs. In a step toward that goal, European researchers created a robotic hand that let an amputee feel differences between a bottle, a baseball and a mandarin orange.

Sen. Tim Scott claims that the Affordable Care Act’s taxes of $800 billion hit small businesses and families. But that’s misleading on several levels.

By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) – Dennis Aabo Sorensen lost his left hand when a firework rocket he was holding exploded during New Year’s Eve celebrations 10 years ago, and he never expected to feel anything with the stump again. But for a while last year he regained his sense of touch after being attached to a “feeling” bionic hand that allowed him to grasp and identify objects even when blindfolded. There is still work to be done in miniaturizing components and tidying away trailing cables that mean the robotic hand has so far only been used in the lab, but Sorensen said the European research team behind the project had got the basics right. Alastair Ritchie, a bioengineering expert at the University of Nottingham, who was not involved in the research, said the device was a logical next step but more clinical trials were now needed to confirm the system’s viability.

Some key events and adult smoking rates in the fight over tobacco during the last 50 years:

What would you do if your mother’s health insurance stopped covering her care?        

Fentanyl-laced heroin suspected in multiple deaths in three states.        

Humana Inc said on Wednesday that it received 202,000 applications for Obamacare health insurance plans, many of them from young people, but still gave a wide forecast for 2014 profit as it waits to see the demographics of future customers. President Barack Obama’s national healthcare reform law, often called Obamacare, set up state-based insurance exchanges to let individuals buy policies with income-based subsidies. Humana, which previously cut its outlook for sign-ups by at least half because of the technology failures, said it saw that more customers than usual were extending their old health plans. Still, Chief Executive Officer Bruce Broussard said that its first look at enrollees so far shows that they are “scaling a bit more to the younger side.” Young people, typically defined as adults under age 35, have fewer medical problems and are less expensive to insure, making them an important element to ensure the long-term viability of the exchanges.

By Jon Herskovitz AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – Texas is set to execute a woman convicted of leading a plot to kidnap, torture and then beat to death a mentally disabled man to collect insurance money. The state, which executes more people than any other in the United States, plans to execute Suzanne Basso, 59, at 6:00 p.m. U.S. Central Time (2400 GMT) on Wednesday by lethal injection at its death chamber in Huntsville. If the execution goes ahead, Basso would be the 14th woman put to death in the country since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 and the 510th person executed in Texas. Lawyers for Basso have filed an application with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking a stay, arguing that she is not mentally competent and should not be executed.