How are you feeling right now? Can you pinpoint the specific emotions? Maybe a little excited that it’s almost the weekend, but also sad because it’s raining outside and you won’t be able to bike home like you’d hoped. Or maybe you can’t get that level of differentiation and all you can say is “unpleasant” ...
How many things in this world take pride in being bad at their job? It’s certainly not something humans like to brag about, but zoom in to the microscopic level and you’ll find that a tiny little piece of us is constantly cheer-leading its own bad behavior. It’s an enzyme called an error-prone or repair ...
This afternoon, reading through Professor Kim Lewis’ soon to be published article in Cell Press (available ahead of print here), I may have fancied myself something of a private investigator with the high stakes job of providing a comprehensive picture of his new findings for you, my dedicated reader. It was a pretty action-heavy couple ...
I love starting the week off with a bang. The topic of this morning’s symposium, hosted by the Institute on Urban Health Research, just totally gets my engines going. Four experts in personal health technology came from all over the country to talk shop. As IUHR Interim Director Alisa Lincoln said, there were people from ...
The Puerto Rican population is the largest Latino group in the northeastern United States, but data about health disparities is largely focused on Mexican Americans, according to Katherine Tucker, whose Puerto Rican Health Study is the longest, most comprehensive study of its kind for the Puerto Rican population. “This is important, because all Hispanics are ...
Last month, Atul Gawande had a popular article in the New Yorker questioning whether the hospital industry could learn a thing or two from the likes of the Cheesecake Factory. In the article, he points to qualities like management oversight and standardization common to large-scale restaurant chain operations as areas for hospitals to work on. ...
Perhaps by now you’ve heard of Heather Clark’s work developing nanosensors to monitor biological states for both clinical and research applications. Maybe you read the story in Wired magazine about her nanosensor tattoo that, combined with a simple iPhone app, helps diabetic patients determine their real-time blood sugar level. Clark’s nanosensors have shown promise in ...
Talk about making complex topics accessible to the general public — this video from PhD candidate Margery Hines does such a good job explaining ground penetrating radar (GPR) for landmine detection, it won the Judges’ Choice Award at the 2012 NSF IGERT Online Video & Poster competition. Cover photo via Flickr.
How many things can you do with a microscope? Before this morning I would have probably said “one: magnify stuff.” Now I can confidently say “two: magnify and drill holes in stuff.” Meni Wanunu, assistant professor of physics and chemistry/chemical biology, will be using the university’s new transmission electron microscope (TEM) to make nanopores nucleic ...
Sepsis is a whole-body inflammatory response to an overwhelming infection by bacteria or other microogransim. At first glance, it may not seem like a big enough issue to dedicate a whole day toward. But consider the following and then decide: Every 3-4 seconds, someone dies of sepsis. 70% of all infant deaths worldwide are due ...
Imagine you’re a wine producer and you’re changing your prices. Your customers have an infinite range of preferences — some of them require very high quality wines while others are happy with the two buck chuck. You obviously can’t make a separate bottle for every customer, each with a different cost suited for their individual ...
Who ever said you can’t have cake at 8 in the morning never heard of the chromosome-centric human proteome project. Yesterday morning a group of researchers from all around the globe gathered at Hynes Convention Center in Boston to kick-off of the project, which aims to unearth all the proteins encoded by our DNA, one ...