Despite the blizzard, we delivered more than the US Postal Service this week!

We launched a new site feature, From Bathroom to Healthroom: How magical technology will revolutionize human health.

 Here’s what caught our attention this week.

Image source and credits: Senior Designer Brian Gartside on Behance.

Water is Life has partnered with researchers at Carnegie-Mellon and University of Virginia on the Drinkable Book Project to help provide education about and access to clean water. The pages of the Drinkable Book are treated to become water filters and also include information to educate people about the dangers of contaminated water.

Kalong-drawing Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons 

We haven't forgotten about the Ebola crisis, especially after reading Bats, Trees and Bureaucrats: Ebola and How Everything, Positively Everything, Connects. Disturbing but well researched.

We heard a heartwarming and fascinating story on NPR earlier this week when host David Greene interviewed author Judith Newman, about how a talking phone made life easier for her 13-year-old son, Gus, who has autism.

While you wait for Trick-or-Treaters to ring the bell, here are some sites to explore.

Designer Eric Benoit attended Future Insights’ Ultimate Developer Event in Boston and shared a couple of finds.

All over the news: Ebola Virus Disease

Our RSS feeds are popping up with distressing and confusing stories that are getting uncomfortably close to home. So Juhan Sonin and intern Xinyu Liu put together Understanding Ebloa: A Visual Guide. One clinician enlightened us with the following response:

“This is a remarkable summary. The one thing I can think of that might be missing is an understanding of why Ebola is so contagious. It has, in part at least, to do with what is the viral load of the disease. For example, when someone is at the height of the illness, one-fifth of a teaspoon of that person's blood can carry 10 billion viral Ebola particles. An untreated HIV patient, by comparison, has just 50,000 to 100,000 particles in the same amount of blood. Someone with untreated hepatitis C has between 5 million and 20 million.”

We've distributed the link locally and it has also been picked up by Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare in Ebola: A Crash Course in Reliability. Our research and design work continues as we do what we can to support the worldwide efforts to save lives and stop the spread of this disease.

For your Friday surfing pleasure: