It’s a tech subject that allows us to rant on one of our favorite pet peeves:  that something as vital as health care is still in the dark ages. You can rent a movie 24 hours a day, get email notifications from any company, and get lower prices on better products every time you visit an electronics store. But when it comes to medicine, prices continually rise and problems abound. There are at least three reasons:

• The over-used insurance system (If car insurance were like health insurance, we’d use it for tune-ups.) This makes people less price-sensitive, because after all, “insurance is paying for it.”*
• Frivolous lawsuits.
• Lack of competition among doctors. Physicians’ assistants and nurses, for example, can’t open their own practice.

*In the U.S. in the 1940s, there were wage and price controls. Employers who wanted to raise wages were stuck. So they started offering insurance benefits instead of wage increases. A few years later, the I.R.S. started taxing them for this and there were howls of protests. So a law was passed that gave employers a tax break for offering benefits. Gradually Americans started using insurance for everything and became less price-sensitive.

Spinal cord repair may one day make it possible for those suffering paralysis to walk again. Leading scientists are hailing the discovery in this issue of Chemical World.  Nature Materials published a scientific paper on the topic here.

The site, dubbed “FOF,” could also stand for “friends of friends.” It’s a place for women to hang out, get tips, share ideas, discover new restaurants, fashions, consumer electronics and travel ideas.

There are lots of subject tabs at the top of the screen. Examples:

• “Facts of Life,” with tips for skin, body, mind and budget.
• “Fab Faves,” where we learned about the tables “outside of Bubby’s” in the Tribeca area of New York City.
• “Exclusives” for bargain hunters.

Our only complaint with the site is its search engine. We typed “Chicago restaurant” and nothing came up, though there are many Chicago restaurants reviewed here. We typed “George Clooney,” and got zero results, despite a page on the site offering to bring the author of  the book “Marrying George Clooney” to your home or book group if you give a good reason for wanting to meet her. (The site offers a different author visit each month.)

In any event, this is a fun site where you can marvel over the many things women over 50 are doing these days.

Can stem cells cure cancer and other diseases?

StemCell.ChildrensHospital.org is a new website going live today that aims to answer those questions. It has videos,  patient stories, and an area for patients and families to look up specific diseases–like diabetes, Parkinson’s, cancer, etc.

The site notes that doctors are “incredibly good at shrinking cancer tumors, and incredibly bad at curing them.”  More on that topic here.

Athletes may find the new “Body Temperature Alert Patch,” handy. It’s a single-use patch that changes from black to yellow if the person is in danger of over-heating.

You’ll see the Alert Patch, from ionX, in 550 retail outlets, such as Sports Authority, starting in mid-to-late June. More info at ionxalert.com.

“FitnessBuilder PRO 3.1″ lets trainers create workouts on the iPhone or iPad and share them with other iPhones and iPads, or email them as PDFs.  The app can also take the place of a personal trainer, through hundreds of videos, images, and workout routines. These include all the hard-core free-weight exercises, as well as things like yoga,  Pilates and calisthenics. There are also areas for recording personal statistics and accomplishments.

FitnessBuilder is $10 for iPhone or iPad.  For more exercises, (up to 5,600), there’s also a monthly subscription. More info at PumpOne.com.

Dworkin is also a clarinetist who played at Carnegie Hall under Leopold Stokowski. Stokowski is so famous he is mentioned in the Chuck Barry rock song, “Roll Over Beethoven.” (“Roll over Beethoven, and tell Stokowski the news.”)

Videos at Conductorcise.com give you the basic idea. For $1300 you can get  the DVDs, batons, and instructions you need to become a certified “Conductorcise” instructor.

We think it’s probably good enough just to teach people to wave their arms to music. We have frequently read that  conductors have much lower rates of heart disease, because of  their furious arm waving.

The mice were bombarded for two hours every day in structures that resembled apartment and condominium buildings. The radiation simulated the level that humans get by holding cell phones to their heads.

This backs up a previous study by the University of Sunderland in England which claimed that Alzheimer’s could be reversed if patients wore helmets that bathed their brains in infrared light, which is at a lower electromagnetic frequency than cell phones emit. There’s more info on this at the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, j-alz.com. Click on “press releases.”

– eHealthMedicare.com helps U.S. consumers figure out Medicare, including the famous “Part D Doughnut Hole,” and offers phone support six days a week.

– Ifixit.com helps people repair their iPods and other Apple devices with do-it-yourself manuals, forums, etc.

The speakers can connect to iPods, MP3 players, CD players, TVs and audio books. We tried it with the Amazon Kindle, which can be used to listen to books as well as read them. It worked fine but made us wonder if any tiny speakers would work just as well.

The speakers sell for $17 at Amazon.com, and work with any pillow. For $100, you can buy a Natural Sounds Therapy System that comes with a sound machine for ocean surf, thunderstorms, rain, woodlands and eight other sleep-inducing sounds, along with the speakers and a pillow. More info at sound-oasis.com.

Whenever anyone goes into a topic like this, the question of sleep-learning comes up.  Most people have wondered is they could learn another language or stud for exams while hearing lectures in their sleep. Many studies have been done on this and the record is not good. When questioned later about the content of the information delivered in their sleep, hardly anyone could remember anything about the subject.