Following the interest from cardiologists in my iphone application iStethoscope, a few months ago I began a collaboration with cardiologist researcher Glenn Nordehn based at the Medical School of the University of Minnesota Duluth. This led to the professional version, iStethoscope Pro which according to Glenn works better than many commercially available digital stethoscopes. We recently began a medical trial with the app, allowing users to email their heart audio to Glenn's lab where they intend to analyse the data and create a machine learning system capable of automatic diagnosis from heart audio. In the meantime, we have nearly finished another collaboration: I've created an iphone version of Glenn's proven auscultation training course. It teaches the user how to listen and understand the spectrogram (as produced in iStethoscope Pro and recognise specific abnormalities associated with heart problems) We're calling the app iAuscultate and it should be available from iTunes in the next few weeks. It's amazing how excited the medical profession is getting about the potential of iphone apps like these!

Not too long ago I was interviewed by up-and-coming broadcaster (and medical doctor) Elizabeth Hauke. My iStethoscope program will apparently be mentioned in her radio documentary on "The Sound of Disease" - I'll add a link when she's finished it. I was also interviewed about my book The Undercover Scientist (and a little bit about my background) for her radio show "Short Science" which is broadcast weekly on Imperial College Radio. I think my section appears in podcast number 11, which you can download from iTunes or listen from their website by clicking here. It also includes a nice review of the book. You can visit the radio webpage here: http://shortscience.co.uk/

The latest translations of my book The Undercover Scentist have just been sent to me: the Traditional Chinese version and the Spanish version. Both are very nicely laid out inside and have suitably amusing covers. I especially like the Spanish cover; for some reason the Chinese one has a rather old fashioned looking British guy in a bowler hat being hit by a bird poop the size of a snowball.