In a five-minute test, a doctor uses pegs to isolate a patient's individual fingers. "You wouldn't think it works as well as it does, but once you are pegged in, you can't move anything but the finger we want you to," Miller said. A loop is fitted around the finger, and when the patient moves it, the amount of force generated is measured. "PRIME gets the peak force," Xu said. "Then the doctor can create a patient-specific file with all your information, time-stamped, and record every single measurement.".

Apparently, most of the tests for carpal tunnel are subjective—so improving accuracy and providing detailed patient-specific information will be helpful for sufferers in the future. It's a good thing too, because in this line of work I will need all the help I can get. [Medgadget via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Researchers at Rice University demonstrated a graphite data storage medium that was only 10 atoms thick. They said it could provide many times the capacity of current flash memory and withstand temperatures (up to 200 C) that would make SSD memory disintegrate.

On the minus side, the researchers have only gotten an access time of 100 nanoseconds, about 10 times slower than SRAM. But they're confident that as they experiment more with the material, they'll be able to get that number down. [ComputerWorld]