hospitals

As much as we love the actual future here at Popular Science, we love the past's vision of the future almost as much. So we basically freaked out when our good friends over at Pink Tentacle discovered this spread from a 1969 issue of the Japanese magazine Shonen Sunday.

These pictures show a predicted 1989 where computers have changed how we live. The above photo depicts a classroom full of children learning on computers, watching a video of a teacher, and receiving beatings from enforcement robots.

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Hand-washing: it seems easy enough, but for whatever reason, we constantly shirk this simplest of duties. These days we have swine flu to remind us, but what about when that becomes old news? Microbes don't disappear just because they're not in the news every day.

A few University of Florida professors have invented a solution -- HyGreen, a sensor system that can sniff your hands to detect telltale soap fumes -- or the lack thereof.

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At 3 p.m. last June 22, Pam Barco’s heart stopped. The 46-year-old ER clerk at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia was near the end of her shift when she felt dizzy, put her head down on her desk, and suddenly stopped breathing. A nearby co-worker saw Barco slump over and shouted, “Staff emergency!” Minutes later, a dozen doctors and nurses surrounded Barco’s body. They shocked her with a defibrillator. No response. They shocked her twice more. Nothing. Then: Beep. Beep. Beep.

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