NASA and Honeywell claim they can reduce sonic booms over land, potentially bringing supersonic flight to the masses – CNBC

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NASA and American multinational conglomerate Honeywell say they now know how to reduce sonic booms when flying a supersonic aircraft over land following the completion of a two-year study.

A ban on supersonic travel over U.S. soil has been in place since the Richard Nixon administration in the early 1970s, amid fears of disrupted sleep and broken windows. Sonic booms are loud sounds similar to that of an explosion that can be generated by supersonic flights.

But Bob Smith, president of Honeywell's Mechanical Systems, said Tuesday that while the problem of sonic booms over populated areas has been a problem since the early days of Concorde, it could be about to change.

"A sonic boom is effectively just a big pressure change. So if you can effectively smooth that pressure change out it becomes a weaker wave so it becomes a rumble instead of a bang," said Smith.

Smith said NASA has been working on aerodynamic techniques to achieve smoother pressure changes to minimize sonic booms. He explained that Honeywell's input is to take the NASA data and allow a pilot to visualize on screen what impact a sonic boom is having on the ground below the plane.

"So a pilot gets an understanding if they are getting into a region where the impingement of a sonic boom on a populated area was getting more critical or less critical," Smith added. "It gives them a visualization of what of that sonic boom footprint effectively is."

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NASA and Honeywell claim they can reduce sonic booms over land, potentially bringing supersonic flight to the masses - CNBC

A NASA Engineer Has A Creative New Way To Find Missing Rockets – Newsy

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BySarah Schlieder June 20, 2017

Sometimes, the only thing harder than launching a rocket to space is figuring out where it landed back on Earth.

Unlike the giant rocket boosters that launch spacecraft and astronauts,sounding rocketsusually don't spend more than 20 minutes or so in space. They deploy short-lived sensors to take readings of Earth and the atmosphere. But NASA can have a hard time locating them when they come back.

"Obviously we have telemetry systems and GPS systems that can track it and get us in the neighborhood," said Scott Hesh, an electrical engineer at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. "But eventually they go over the horizon, and there's a level of uncertainty."

The tracking systems can only narrow the search grid down so far; then, helicopters try to locate the rockets. NASA even offers finder fees for anyone who stumbles onto one. Locating just one sounding rocket can fetch up to $5,000.

But one NASA engineer thinks he's found a better way. Scott Hesh is testing a method to track rockets that uses seismic and sound data. He calls his concept TRIGS or Triangulation of Rocket Impacts using Ground Sensors.

Related StoryThis Small, 3-D Printed Rocket Could Make It Easier To Get To Space

The idea cameduring a launch in Norwaywhen part of a rocket went missing. A nearby university offered to look through data from its infrasound sensors, which measure very low-frequency sound waves traveling through the atmosphere. It worked: They were able to triangulate the rocket's flight path.

With that success, Hesh wanted to test the idea at alaunch range in Alaska. He teamed up with researchers from the University of California, San Diego including Frank Vernon, a geophysicist who directs the U.S. Array Network Facility. His team had already established an array of sensors in Alaska near the range.

"I was a little bit skeptical because of the stations' spacing and being as far apart as we are," Vernon said. "I wondered if there would be big enough signals to observe."

Sure enough, the sensors "heard" the impacts of the rocket landings, and the data narrowed the search grids by half.

Hesh and his team have had some success, but he doesn't expect the concept to become standard practice for several years. So if you come across a sounding rocket, you still have time to cash in on that $5,000 reward.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misinterpreted a source as saying he found the missing rocket part when he meant he located only the rocket trajectory. This story has been updated.

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A NASA Engineer Has A Creative New Way To Find Missing Rockets - Newsy

Revisiting the ice giants: NASA considers missions to Uranus and Neptune – The Planetary Society (blog)

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Jason Davis June21,2017

If you look up Uranus and Neptune in an encyclopedia, there's a good chance the pictures you see will be about 30 years old.

In the late 1970s, the twin Voyager spacecraft launched on a grand tour of the solar system, taking advantage of a rare planetary alignment that only happens every 175 years. Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in January 1986, and Neptune in August 1989. The probe was traveling too fast, and lacked the fuel, to slow down and enter orbit.

We haven't been back since.

Every 10 years, NASA releases a report called the decadal survey outlining top priorities for planetary exploration. The current iteration, covering 2013 through 2022, identifies three top missions: Mars sample return, the Europa Clipper, and a return to Uranus or Neptune (Uranus was favored due to more convenient planetary alignments, which affects travel times).

With the next decadal survey just five years away, scientists are revisiting the plan to send a spacecraft to our outermost planets, known as the ice giants. A new NASA report, officially a "pre-decadal" mission study, describes the reasons to go and the spacecraft that could take us there.

NASA / JPL

Like most planets, our understanding of Uranus and Neptune has greatly evolved since the early days of planetary science.

Before photographic imagery became a common tool for studying the universe, astronomers spent long, cold nights hunched over telescope eyepieces, hand-drawing what their eyes saw.

Heidi Hammel, a Planetary Society board member and the executive vice president of AURA, a consortium of universities that operates astronomical observatories, told me some early Uranus drawings portrayed the planet with distinct atmospheric features. The advent of photography changed that, revealing the planet as a featureless, pale-green orb. This led to a theory that planets farther from the Sun exhibited less atmospheric activity.

Intuitively, this made sense: Jupiter has vibrant bands and swirls, Saturn is stormy but muted, and Uranus was featureless (Neptune was too far away to discern much of anything).

"When Voyager flew by Uranus, it was like, 'Well, okay, we were right,'" Hammel said. "There were no clouds to look at there. It was very bland, with maybe 10 discrete cloud features."

Neptune was expected to be equally dull. But when Voyager arrived three years later, that wasn't the case.

"Neptune was a huge shock," she said. "There was this huge dark spot, like a quarter of the size of the planetreally monstrous. And then all of these bright features, and eventually a second dark feature, and all sorts of clouds. I mean, this planet was just absolutely covered with storm systems."

Why, then, was Uranus so bland? The question went unaddressed for years, until Hammel saw an academic poster at a conference with long-exposure images of Uranus captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The images, taken in support of a search for new moons, inadvertently revealed a set of features not seen by Voyager 2.

"I said, what is that?" Hammel recalled. The poster author replied, "Well, that's Uranus."

Uranus, famously, orbits the Sun tipped on its side. When Voyager flew past, the planet's pole was facing the Sun. Since then, Uranus' 84-year orbit around the sun has progressed enough to illuminate more of the equator. This has apparently had a drastic effect on the planet's atmosphere, activating a host of swirls and storms.

Follow-up observations with adaptive optics-equipped ground telescopes continued to reveal new features. As for the early Uranus photographs, Hammel said atmospheric distortion likely smeared out discernible features, meaning those original astronomical drawings may have been correct all along.

"Only now do we have the technology to reproduce what the human eye was able to see back in the eighteen hundreds," she said.

Heidi Hammel, Imke de Pater, W. M. Keck Observatory

The most pressing question to be solved by a mission to either of the ice giants is figuring out what lies beneath the planets' outer layers of clouds. This is similar to the question NASA's Juno spacecraft is trying to answer at Jupiter.

Figuring out these planets' basic compositions and interior structures would fill an important gap in our knowledge of how solar systems form. Among the exoplanets we've discovered, worlds weighing the same as Uranus and Neptune appear more common than gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Yet ice giants seem to require a very specific set of conditions to form during the birth of a solar system.

"Based on the current models, it looks like there's only a really narrow time window when you can get these sort of planets to form," said Amy Simon, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "You need to have a big enough core, but on the other hand, you need to have the solar nebula dissipating so that you can get these gas and ices in there at the same time."

Simon co-chaired the science team for the new ice giants report. She told me the reasons to go back, as well as the top science priorities, have not drastically changed since the last decadal survey.

"There weren't a ton of changes," she said. "The focus was on a more detailed study of all the mission trades, to look at the technology you might need, and what type of mission you'd like to fly."

All of the mission concepts envision detachable probes that would be sent hurtling into the ice giants' atmospheres. The main spacecraft would remain in orbit at least two or three years, and be nuclear-powered, owing to the small amount of sunlight reaching that far into space.

The basic set of proposed science instruments include a camera, magnetometers and a doppler imager. The doppler imager, Simon said, was a particularly innovative example of how the planets' interior structures could be revealed.

"The idea behind it is that you're essentially looking for seismic waves on the planet," she said. "You're looking to see the planet oscillate. And the idea behind that is similar to studies they've done on the Sun, where you can see the Sun oscillating and you can determine its interior structure."

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Justin Cowart

The Voyager 2 mission also captured one-sided glimpses of Uranus' and Neptune's major moons.

One of the most interesting moons turned out to be Triton. Triton is believed to be a Kuiper Belt object captured by Neptune's gravitational pull. In the process, Triton either smacked into the rest of Neptune's moons or flung them out of the system entirely.

Voyager images revealed a relatively young surface that looked like the skin of a cantaloupe, with nitrogen-spewing geysers in the southern hemisphere.

"And again," said Simon, "We've only seen part of Triton. Who knows what's on the other side?"

"With Triton, you can do comparative planetology to Pluto," Hammel said. "They're a matched set of Kuiper Belt objects, like fraternal twins who were separated at birth and took on completely different life stories."

Uranus, on the other hand, has five large moons: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. Unlike Triton, they are likely native to the planet's system, making them our only chance to study large worlds leftover from an ice giant's formation.

The new report does not single out a preference for visiting either Uranus or Neptune. Both are "equally compelling as a scientific target," it said.

"Each planet has something important to teach us that the other cannot," said Hammel. "I think the deciding factor will probably have to do with what launch vehicles are available, and what trajectories are most favorable to get us to those planets in a reasonable amount of time. Scientifically, your bounty is going to be fabulous for either planet."

Hubble / Ted Stryk, Roane State CC

What, exactly, constitutes a reasonable amount of time for getting to Uranus or Neptune?

Simon said the report assumes a spacecraft life of about 15 years, even though missions like Voyager, as well as the Cassini spacecraft at Saturn, have exceeded that.

"There are reliability limitations on the hardware," she said. "Even though we've seen propulsion tanks last longer than that, that's just not how they're rated. We didn't want to be pushing the reliability too hard."

The travel time to Uranus, using an Atlas V with five solid rocket boosters, is 12 years for an orbiter. It takes 13 years to get to Neptune using a Delta IV Heavy launcherand that's with an extra solar-electric propulsion stage to add additional thrust. All missions require Jupiter gravity assists, as well as likely flybys of Venus and Earth.

NASA's heavy lift Space Launch System, SLS, could potentially shave four years off the transit time. But there's a catch: a spacecraft can't go too fast, because it still has to slow down to enter orbit upon arrival. The report notes aerocapture techniquesbasically, skimming the planet's atmosphere to shave speedcould allow for higher cruising velocities.

A vehicle like SLS could, however, launch two missions at once. But that's assuming NASA spends what could end up being $2 billion per mission.

Good launch windows are available for Uranus between 2030 and 2034, while Neptune trajectories are favorable around 2029. That means we might not get to see the ice giants again until the late 30s or early 40s.

That's still okay with both Hammel and Simon.

"I kind of hope this excites younger scientists, because this will be their mission," said Simon, who recalls seeing Voyager 2 images on TV as a child. "We might get it off the ground for them, but they are going to be the scientists doing the activities. So I really hope it does generate a lot of interest in early career folks, and in the public."

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Revisiting the ice giants: NASA considers missions to Uranus and Neptune - The Planetary Society (blog)

NASA says ‘we are not alone’ as it reveals 10 new Earth-like planets which could sustain life – CNBC

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U.S. space agency NASA announced the discovery of more than 200 new planets on Monday, 10 of which are believed to be about the right size and temperature to support life.

Of the 219 new suspected planets to have been discovered by NASA's Kepler telescope, 10 were found to exist in the so-called 'Goldilocks zone' of their solar system. This refers to the distance between the planet and their star, which is neither too hot nor too cold to support complex life.

The presence of liquid water on these "rocky" Earth-like planets is seen as a key ingredient required for the existence of life.

"Are we alone? Maybe Kepler today has told us indirectly, although we need confirmation, that we are probably not alone," Mario Perez, Kepler program scientist, said at a news conference.

NASA launched the Kepler telescope in 2009 in a bid to discover whether other Earth-like planets are common or rare.

The latest identification of suspected exoplanets planets outside our own solar system brings the tally discovered by the Kepler telescope to 4,034. The number of worlds thought to be approximately the same size and temperature as Earth is around 50.

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NASA says 'we are not alone' as it reveals 10 new Earth-like planets which could sustain life - CNBC

Nanotechnology in the food industry: ‘plenty of room’ to innovate – New Food

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Nanotechnology has been referred to as one of the most interesting topics in food science and technology. The use of food grade structures at nanoscale levels have been showing interesting features and has been proposed as a new way to not only improve safety and quality of foods, but also for the development of new and innovative food products with unique properties. It is predicted that the nanotechnology market focused on food industry will increase from 7 billion US dollars in 2015 to 20.4 billion US dollar in 20201. In this article, Miguel Cerqueira and Lorenzo Pastrana from the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) discuss this exciting field of innovation.

First of all, it is important to mention that the presence of nanostructures in food products are not new. One example are the casein micelles in milk, they have always existed in milk and are responsible for the high stability of lipids in milk at the nanoscale2. The nanoscale dimension of materials shows great advantages when compared with micro- and macroscale. The impact of the nanoscale (i.e. 100,000,000 lower than the meter; for example, a sheet of paper presents a thickness of approximately 100,000 nanometers)in materials and systems are related with their large surface area-to-volume ratio leading to enhanced surface area, distinct optical behaviour, chemical and kinetic stability, and low density versus high mechanical properties.

These advantages over micro- and macroscale lead to a high interest for use in the food industry which can bring several advantages such as improved solubility, bioavailability and sensorial behaviour can be used to prevent undesirable chemical reactions and protect functional compounds against chemical degradation, and avoid compatibility problems between ingredients and the food matrix. In the last few years the benefits of applying nanotechnology have been driving the development of new and high performance materials for the food sector and thus the applications at laboratorial but also on an industrial scale have exponentially increased. In the last two decades the number of publications and patents increased 40% and 90%, respectively3. These numbers show the potential and interest of researchers and companies of using nanotechnology in the food sector and the high potential of using nanotechnology-based products in several food processes and applications. Moreover, the number of companies focusing their research and development with nanotechnology-based productsare more than 1,000 a number that should grow in the next years1.

Nanotechnology offers a great number of opportunities to the agricultural and food industry, for instance the agricultural and primary production sector could benefit from the use of pesticides with improved action (e.g. use of nanoemulsions in their dispersion); animal feeds with enhanced efficacy and higher nutrition value (e.g. nanoencapsulation for proteins and amino acids protection during the ruminants digestion process); diagnostic of animal disease, or for the detection of pathogenics in water (e.g. smart sensor). In the food industry, mainly during the processing, formulation, packaging and shipping, nanotechnology offers many other potential benefits for consumers and manufacturers. Figure 1 shows some examples of how nanotechnology can be integrated into the food supply chain. In food processing the use of membranes with nanoporous and a high surface area can be selective in filtration processes during separation of compounds. The immobilisation of enzymes in nanosized systems can also enhance their efficiency, stability and reuse, and thus reduce the cost of the process. Other possible ways of using nanotechnology in food processing are: the use of nanoscale structures to obtain new textural properties in foods, using nanofibrillar and aggregated proteins, and by the crystallisation of molecules having the ability to entrap oils in their nanosized crystalline structures. This can help in the reduction of material needed, change the optical properties, and the control of rheological behaviour by influencing of temperature, pH and enzymes.

In food packaging the advantages of nanotechnology are clear and, alongside with processing packaging, it is one of the areas where nanotechnology is more mature. In this field nanotechnology has been used to improve the materials properties (improved barrier and mechanical properties, light materials), but also in the development of active and intelligent packaging systems. The use of nanoscaled particles with antimicrobials properties (e.g. zinc oxide and silver nanoparticles) have been used to extend shelf-life of foods reducing microbiological growth during storage4. This can be very helpful in foods with reduced shelf-life (e.g. fresh meat, poultry and fish) where the increase in shelf life can bring several advantages for the industry (i.e. shipping for export purposes).

Another great possibility for nanotechnology is in intelligent packaging. Intelligent food packaging can monitor and give indication of the quality of the packaged food and thus guarantee their safety, not only during storage and shipping for industry and retailers but also to the consumers. Some of the examples are the sensors-enabled RFID (radiofrequency identification) tags and indicators that have been using nanotechnology to inform about the quality or freshness of the packed food products. This same nanotechnology has been used in food safety. In fact, the entire food supply chain benefits from improvements in the detection and control of chemical and microbiological hazards, thus promoting food safety while eventually leading to an improved market value of the foods. Nowadays, several sensors based on chemical and biological detections have been developed to detect and measure the presence of volatiles (e.g. oxygen) and bacteria (e.g. Listeria monocytogenes). These sensors are based on nanotechnology-based devices able to measure low amounts of several compounds that can help control the quality and safety of food products at a fast pace5. One of the trends in the food industry is the possibility to establish personalised nutrition schemes with on-demand health requirements and allow consumers to safely choose food products based on their best interests. This is possible with the fortification and enrichment of food products where nanotechnology can have avery important role. The use of nanoencapsulation can be used to protect and deliver functional compounds, improving stability, bioavailability, and known systems. It is possible to nanoencapsulate several compounds, such as vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and poly-unsaturated fatty acids, and achieve better stability (decrease coalescence and effect of environmental conditions such as light and temperature), improve organoleptic properties (low infl uence of fl avour and colour) and increase bioavailability (high absorption in the human gut with controlled release) when compared with the existing systems6. Figure 2 shows nanoparticles produced by a nanospray drier and electrospray using proteins from milk whey that can be used for the encapsulation of several bioactive compounds.

The increasing number of publications and patents shows a substantial increase of possible applications of nanotechnology in food industry. While for some applications such as packaging and food processing it can be considered a reality, some other applications still require some progress. Some years ago, the study of food structure at nanoscale looked to be a utopia, but today thanks to the great advances in equipment, analysis software and new preparation techniques (e.g. cryo-transmission electronic microscopy and small angle X-ray scattering spectroscopy), researchers are able to evaluate the food structure and develop new nanoscale systems. The aspects that most intrigue the food industry are the regulatory aspects and the consumer behaviour facing the use of new technologies. The regulatory aspects of using nanotechnology in food industry are well defi ned, although some doubts still exist among the stakeholders regarding the defi nition of nanomaterials (i.e. soft and soluble nanomaterials that solubilise during consumption should be considered separate from insoluble inorganic materials) is clear that according to the application their use should be carefully considered. Regarding consumers behaviour, work is still needed to manage and change the way that consumers see the use of nanotechnology in their daily consumed foods. Scientific awareness should be promoted amongst stakeholders to reduce the risk perception associated with nanotechnology in foods, and in this aspect the role of governmental organisations, academia and industry is very important. They should work together to show the consumers the advantages and safety of using nanotechnology in food products in order to increase the acceptance of nanotechnology-based products.

1. Helmut Kaiser Consultancy. Study: Nanotechnology in Food and Food Processing Industry. 2008-2010-2015. http://www. hkc22.com/nanofood.html (accessed 21 April, 2017).

2. Martin G.J., Williams R.P., Dunstan D.E. Comparison of Casein Micelles in Raw and Reconstituted Skim Milk. J Dairy Sci. 90(10) (2007) 4543-4551.

3. Cerqueira, M.A., Pinheiro, A.C., Ramos, O.L., Silva, H., Bourbon, A.I. and Vicente, A.A. Advances in Food Nanotechnology, In Micro and Nano Technologies, Rosa Busquets (Ed), Elsevier, Boston, 2017, pp. 11-38, Emerging Nanotechnologies in Food Science, ISBN 9780323429801

4. Mihindukulasuriya, S.D.F. and Lim, L.T. Nanotechnology Development in Food Packaging: A review. Trends in Food Science & Technology 40 (2014) 149-167.

5. Vanderroost, M. Ragaert, P., Devlieghere, F. and De Meulenaer, B. Intelligent Food Packaging: The next Generation. Trends in Food Science & Technology. 39 (2014) 47-62.

6. Cerqueira, M.A., Pinheiro, A.C., Silva, H.D., Ramos, P.E., Azevedo, M.A., Flores-Lpez, M.L., Rivera, M.C., Bourbon, A.I., Ramos, O.L., Vicente, A.A. Design of Bio-nanosystems for Oral Delivery of Functional Compounds. Food Engineering Reviews. 6 (2014) 119.

MIGUEL CERQUEIRA is Research Fellow at the Food Processing group at International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL). Since 2010 he is focused on the development of nanostructures for food applications. He authored more than 70 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, books and patents. In 2014 he won the Young Scientist Award organised by the International Union of Food Science and Technology.

LORENZO PASTRANA is the Head of the Life Sciences Department at INL. Formerly, he was Professor of Food Science at the University of Vigo and Director of Knowledge Transfer at the same University. He has lead several international and national projects and a research contracts with industry. He has a wide expertise in food nano and biotechnology and has authored more than one hundred peer-reviewed publications, patents and book-chapters.

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Nanotechnology in the food industry: 'plenty of room' to innovate - New Food

Yale University, Cambridge scientists discover process they hope will lead to cure for MS – West Hartford News

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NEW HAVEN >> Scientists from Yale University and the University of Cambridge in England have teamed up to develop a potential cure for multiple sclerosis.

Its the first treatment that addresses the disease by disarming the immune cells that have turned against the bodys nerve cells, rather than simply suppressing them. An autoimmune disease, MS begins when parts of the bodys immune system, rather than fighting off disease, begin to attack healthy cells.

Su Metcalfe, senior research associate in the University of Cambridge Clinical School, discovered the molecular process that stops the attack on the protective myelin sheath around nerves in the brain and central nervous system. Its that destruction of myelin that causes MS.

Tarek Fahmy, associate professor of biomedical engineering and of immunobiology in the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science, created the delivery system that brings Metcalfes treatment to the site of the disease.

Multiple sclerosis is a devastating disease that can attack people as young as 30, slowly reducing their brain volume, Metcalfe said. Theyre looking forward to 40 years of slowly getting worse, she said. Its a horrible disease and it costs the global economy $100 billion a year.

According to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, there are more than 2.3 million cases worldwide, but the society doesnt provide an estimate of U.S. cases because doctors are not required to report new cases. There are a wide variety of symptoms, including fatigue, numbness and tingling muscles, slurred speech, walking difficulties and muscle spasms.

Among the cells in the immune system are T lymphocytes, or T cells. One of their functions is to produce molecules called cytokines, which specialize in alerting immune system cells to infection, cancer or any foreign intrusion in the body, Fahmy said. The immune cells then rush to the site to fight the disease, he said.

However, T cells can go awry and turn from fighting disease to attacking the bodys own cells. In these disease states the T cells make an error whose root cause is still an enigma to scientists and clinicians, Fahmy said. If this happens, then these malfunctioned T cells will produce cytokines that bring in more T cells to the site and the illness cascade of events begins.

He said the same process also is involved in other autoimmune diseases, such as type 1 diabetes and lupus.

Metcalfe said that in 2005 she discovered that another cytokine, called leukemia inhibitory factor, or LIF, regulates the immune response to stop autoimmune attack. The molecule controls a switch that turns the T cells from destroyers to protectors. The way LIF acts on T cells was a critical discovery, she said.

That was a world first, and we discovered that theres a binary switch in the cell so the cell can either become tolerant or aggressive and that switch is operated by LIF, Metcalfe said.

LIF comes in and cuts off the signal that calls in more T cells, Fahmy said.

The challenge to getting LIF to the diseased site was that it is a short-lived molecule. It breaks down within 20 minutes, Metcalfe said. So a way had to be found to deliver it to the T cells. Thats where Fahmys engineering expertise came in.

Fahmy confronted two issues in addition to LIFs delicate nature. One is to avoid having LIF turn off the immune properties of cells throughout the body, the way chemotherapy attacks both healthy and cancerous cells. It has to be targeted to those areas and it has to be a long-lasting signal as well, Fahmy said.

A third factor is we need a high concentration of LIF in that area, he said. The question then becomes, how do you get a high amount of nullifying molecules to the area thats affected and to have those LIF molecules sustained over a long period of time.

Fahmys solution was to create a nanoparticle, one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair follicle (100 to 200 nanometers), which carries the LIF molecules to the T cell like a truck carrying cargo. He used the same material used in soluble stitches and coated it with a protein that only binds to those immune cells that are attacking the rogue T cells. Then, the nanoparticle was loaded with LIF molecules and freeze-dried.

When theyre exposed to water again, they start degrading and as they degrade they release the LIF, Fahmy said. So its like a new drug, except its using older materials, combining them together. Im very hopeful that this is going to work like how natural processes in the body work.

Fahmy said the nanoparticle delivery method is important because, given alone by itself, this drug LIF is a very toxic drug if administered to people without a delivery apparatus. Using the nanoparticle, the amount of LIF that needs to be delivered is 10,000-fold lower than if it were given directly.

Metcalfe and Fahmy have formed a company called LIFNano, which will bring their treatment to clinical trials by 2020. Im committed, Metcalfe said. Ive given my whole career, switched it over to treat patients.

Ive just received 1 million pounds from the U.K. government to do pre-clinical, pre-regulatory work. Part of that million pounds is going to Yale. So Yale remains very closely involved alongside and were continuing this synergistic value in taking this nano-medicine approach to treat patients, she said.

Metcalfe and Fahmy hope their therapy, treating the cells with a naturally occurring molecule, will eventually replace the standard treatment of giving immune-suppressant drugs, which carry their own risks.

This really is a whole new field of study that we call immune-engineering, and it promises to change how therapy will happen for cancer and autoimmune diseases, Fahmy said.

Theres nothing specific controlling the root cause of disease, which is what were doing, and in addition were repairing the myelin and protecting the nerves and theres nothing out there today that protects the nerves, Metcalfe said.

She said she has been at Cambridge her whole career and working to understand what controls lymphocytes and I found LIF. Its been a long journey.

Call Ed Stannard at 203-680-9382.

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Yale University, Cambridge scientists discover process they hope will lead to cure for MS - West Hartford News

Pioneering a new dimension in virtual reality: The nanoscale – University of California

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Like many other tech entrepreneurs, UC San Diego Class of 2017engineering grad Dennis Chiang got his start in a basement. But he and fellow classmates behind the UC San Diegostartup Nanome havent exactly been working amid dusty garden tools and old sports equipment as they seek to establish their business.Their Basement UC San Diegos high-tech incubator includes access to cutting-edge equipment and mentoring from world-renowned engineers and business leaders.

It was just what Chiang and his fellow inventors needed, not just to create a new company, but to revolutionize an industry.

Nanome lets scientists, researchers and drug manufacturers use virtual reality to visualize and explore nanoscale materials as if they were large enough to touch and to hold.

Many people think of virtual reality as the next wave of video gaming. Nanomes founders are leapfrogging forward to its potential for tangible real-world uses allowing researchers to manipulate objects thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Its hard to wrap your head around an object youll never see, said Chiang. This enables us to actually scale up these objects so we can see their dimensions.

Nanome was co-founded by 2015 graduate Steven McCloskey, part of the first class to earn a degree in nanoengineering. Together with fellow 2016management science graduate Keita Funakawa, he seized upon the idea to use virtual reality to help people grasp difficult engineering and math concepts.

The company, which has completed its first round of seed funding, is focused on building applications for drug manufacturers that will enable them to see in fine detail the surfaces of the molecules they are constructing.

Up to now, scientists have had to rely on still images taken with high-powered microscopes, along with their own imaginations, to see things at the molecular level. Nanome incorporates detailed molecular information from scientific databases to build three-dimensional models of nanoscale materials so researchers canvisualize the molecules and simulate how they will interact with target cells.

The information can help manufacturers work more quickly and with greater precision.

Chiang, a native of Fremont, California, was drawn to UC San Diego by its sunny, beachside location and the world-class Jacobs School of Engineering.

Going through undergrad really opened up the world to me, Chiang said. I really had no idea of all the different engineering sciences that are out there. Its not just circuits and semiconductors.

The die-hard video gamer never realized his pastime could have professional applications, however, until he learned about Nanome at a student entrepreneurship showcase.

A member of the schools virtual reality club, he immediately saw the potential of the companys products to help engineers better do their jobs.

Just going through my own coursework, it was extremely hard to grasp the 3-D concept of things I couldnt actually see, said Chiang. This allows you to perceive everything as if you were actually holding it in real life.

He applied to be a summer intern, which turned into a part-time and then a full-time position.

He now helps to design and implement the foundational programming, alternating between the computer screen and virtual reality goggles to test the experience for glitches and adjust the programming to fix any bugs.

Through the Basement, Chiang and his colleagues have had access to advisers who can help with the legal and logistical particulars of launching a startup leaving the engineers more time to focus on building their products.

In developing their product, they get guidance from faculty who are leaders in the field many with offices just across the courtyard.

The team at Nanome are all UC San Diegostudents or graduates. They share a love of video games and the experience of countless hours spent in the dungeon, the computer lab where computer science and engineering majors go to complete projects and assignments.

We have a real identity of being a UC San Diego company, said Chiang. We were already very close and that plays over into the work environment.

The company has completed its first round of seed funding and signed on a large pharmaceutical company as a customer. Going forward, Chiang and his colleagues at Nanome see applications not only for medicine, but for robotics, energy sources and computer technology.

Virtual reality is barely two years old, Chiang said. The possibilities are endless. One day, when VR is everywhere, Ill be that grandpa whos able to say, I was part of that right from the beginning.

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Bristol’s female engineers on a mission to inspire women with a Blu-ray screening of Hidden Figures – University of Bristol

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Press release issued: 21 June 2017

Female engineers from the University of Bristol's Faculty of Engineering are on a mission to inspire women to pursue science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects this Friday [23 June] when 90 local secondary school girls, aged 11- to 15-years old, celebrate International Women in Engineering Day.

The day will start with a Blu-ray screening of the Oscar-nominated film, Hidden Figures which is launching on Blu-ray and DVD July 3rd, followed by interactive talks and demonstrations from some of the University's leading female academics who will discuss how women engineers are shaping the future of space exploration.

Hidden Figuresis the incredible untold story of Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Mone), brilliant African-American women mathematicians and engineers working at NASA. They were as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the USA's launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation's confidence, turned around the Space Race, and galvanised the world.A visionary trio who crossed all gender and race lines, to inspire future generations to dream big.

Following the screening the students will meet some of the Universitys world-leading academics and hear about their work. They will also have talks from current female engineering students. It is hoped the day will inspire them to pursue their passion for STEM subjects.

Talks taking place during the day include:

Dr Lucy Berthoud,Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Chair of Space Universities Network (SUN), said: "International National Women in Engineering Day has been created to celebrate the achievements of women. The day will give students an overview of what it might be like to work or study in science, technology, engineering and maths.

"Women are currently under-represented in these areas and we need to inspire girls to study STEM subjects and get them excited about what they can achieve in the future."

About International Women in Engineering Day International Women in Engineering Day takes place on 23 June annually. This day focuses attention on the amazing careers in engineering and technical roles for girls, and allows us to celebrate the achievements of our outstanding women engineers. The hashtag is #INWED17

About Hidden Figures Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment celebrates the incredible untold true story of three brilliant African-American women working at NASA, with the home entertainment release of Hidden Figures arriving on Digital Download 19 June 2017, and 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD on 3 July 2017. Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae) served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. This stunning achievement restored the nation's confidence, turned around the Space Race between Russia and the U.S.A., and galvanised the world. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big. Directed by Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent), and written by Allison Schroeder (Pineapple Express), Hidden Figures was nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress for Octavia Spencer at the 89th Academy Awards.

About Bristol Composites Institute (ACCIS) Bristol Composites Institute (ACCIS) is one of seven newly created Specialist Research Institutes (SRIs) designed to reflect Bristol's strength and depth in key specialisms. We lead the way in composites education and research, combining cutting edge fundamental science with strong industrial links for technology transfer.

Advanced composite materials are critical to reducing weight, energy consumption and CO2generation for transport applications. They also enable novel and multi-functional structural designs. They are formed by combining two or more materials to create an advanced material with significantly improved properties. Composites also enable novel and multi-functional structural designs.

As a global leader in composites research and application, the University of Bristol has the strength to make composites in the UK an exemplar of how research and industrial engagement should be done.

About Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) is the most comprehensive academic centre for multi-disciplinary robotics research in the UK. It is a collaborative partnership between the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol), and home to a vibrant community of over 200 academics, researchers and industry practitioners. Together, they are world leaders in current thinking on service robotics, intelligent autonomous systems and bio-engineering. An internationally recognised Centre of Excellence in Robotics, BRLs state-of-the-art facilities cover an area of over 4,600 sq. metres (50,000 sq. feet).

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Bristol's female engineers on a mission to inspire women with a Blu-ray screening of Hidden Figures - University of Bristol

Plotting a Moore’s Law for Flexible Electronics – IEEE Spectrum

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Photo: IMEC Near Field Communicator: There are 1,700 transistors on the flexible chip in this NFC transmitter.

At a meeting in midtown Manhattan, Kris Myny picks up what looks like an ordinary paper business card and, with little fanfare, holds it to his smartphone. The details of the card appear almost immediately on the screen inside a custom app.

Its a simple demonstration, but Myny thinks it heralds an exciting future for flexible circuitry. In January, he began a five-year project at the nanoelectronics research institute Imec in Leuven, Belgium, to demonstrate that thin-film electronics has significant potential outside the realm of display electronics. In fact, he hopes that the project, funded with a 1.5 million grant from the European Research Council (ERC), could demonstrate that there is a path for the mass production of denser and denser flexible circuitsin other words, a Moores Law for bendable ICs.

Five years ago, Myny and his colleagues reported that they had used organic thin-film transistors to build an 8-bit microprocessor on flexible plastic. In the years since, the group has turned its focus to IGZOa metal-oxide semiconductor that is a mixture of indium, gallium, zinc, and oxygen. Thin-film transistors based on this substance can move charge significantly faster than their organic counterparts do; at the same time the transistors can still be built at or around room temperaturean important requirement when attempting to fabricate electronics directly onto plastic and other materials that can be easily deformed or damaged by heat.

To build that business card, Myny and his colleagues engineered a flexible chip containing more than 1,700thin-film IGZO transistors. What sets the chip apart from other efforts is its ability to comply with the ISO14443-A Near Field Communication (NFC) standard. For flexible circuitry, this is a demanding set of requirements, Myny says, as it requires logic gates that are fast enough to work with the 13.56-megahertz standard carrier frequency.

Adding to the challenge is that while IGZO is an effective n-type semiconductor, allowing electrons to flow easily, it is not a particularly good p-type material; there is no comparable material that excels at permitting the flow of holesthe absence of electrons that are treated as positive charges. Todays logic uses both p- and n-type devices; the complementary pairing helps control power consumption by preventing the flow of current when transistors are not in the act of switching. With just n-type devices to work with, Myny and his colleagues have to devise a different kind of circuitry.

With the ERC project, Imec aims to tackle a suite of interrelated problems in an effort to boost transistor density from 5,000 or so devices per square centimeter to 100,000. That figure isnt far from the density of thin-film transistors in conventional rigid-display backplanes today, Myny says. However, its another matter to try to achieve that density with digital logic circuitswhich require more complicated designsand to make sure those devices are reliable and consistent when theyre built on a delicate and irregular substrate.

The group also wants to prove this density is achievable outside the lab, by adapting manufacturing techniques that are already in use in display fabs. Myny says that if he and his team hit their goals, a square centimeter of fast, flexible circuitry could be built at a cost of 1 U.S. cent (assuming high-volume manufacturing). At the same time, while the density of the circuits increases, the group will also have to boost the transistor frequency and drive down power consumption to prevent overheating. The overall goal, Myny says, is to demonstrate that you can indeed make flexible circuitsthat it is not science fiction but that it is going to market.

When it comes to the fabrication of complex digital circuits on flexible substrates, Imec is in my opinion the biggest player, says Niko Mnzenrieder, a lecturer at the University of Sussex, in England, who specializes in flexible electronics. He notes that metal-oxide flexible circuitry is already starting to make commercial inroads, and he expects the first big applications to be in RFID and NFC technology. Its not a mature technology, he says, but its nearly ready for everyday use.

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Plotting a Moore's Law for Flexible Electronics - IEEE Spectrum

Bones make hormones that communicate with the brain and other organs – Science News Magazine

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Long typecast as the strong silent type, bones are speaking up.

In addition to providing structural support, the skeleton is a versatile conversationalist. Bones make hormones that chat with other organs and tissues, including the brain, kidneys and pancreas, experiments in mice have shown.

The bone, which was considered a dead organ, has really become a gland almost, says Beate Lanske, a bone and mineral researcher at Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Theres so much going on between bone and brain and all the other organs, it has become one of the most prominent tissues being studied at the moment.

At least four bone hormones moonlight as couriers, recent studies show, and there could be more. Scientists have only just begun to decipher what this messaging means for health. But cataloging and investigating the hormones should offer a more nuanced understanding of how the body regulates sugar, energy and fat, among other things.

Of the hormones on the list of bones messengers osteocalcin, sclerostin, fibroblast growth factor 23 and lipocalin2 the last is the latest to attract attention. Lipocalin 2, which bones unleash to stem bacterial infections, also works in the brain to control appetite, physiologist Stavroula Kousteni of Columbia University Medical Center and colleagues reported in the March 16 Nature.

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After mice eat, their bone-forming cells absorb nutrients and release a hormone called lipocalin 2 (LCN2) into the blood. LCN2 travels to the brain, where it gloms on to appetite-regulating nerve cells, which tell the brain to stop eating, a recent study suggests.

Researchers previously thought that fat cells were mostly responsible for making lipocalin 2, or LCN2. But in mice, bones produce up to 10 times as much of the hormone as fat cells do, Kousteni and colleagues showed. And after a meal, mices bones pumped out enough LCN2 to boost blood levels three times as high as premeal levels. Its a new role for bone as an endocrine organ, Kousteni says.

Clifford Rosen, a bone endocrinologist at the Center for Molecular Medicine in Scarborough, Maine, is excited by this new bone-brain connection. It makes sense physiologically that there are bidirectional interactions between bone and other tissues, Rosen says. You have to have things to regulate the fuel sources that are necessary for bone formation.

Bones constantly reinvent themselves through energy-intensive remodeling. Cells known as osteoblasts make new bone; other cells, osteoclasts, destroy old bone. With such turnover, the skeleton must have some fine-tuning mechanism that allows the whole body to be in sync with whats happening at the skeletal level, Rosen says. Osteoblasts and osteoclasts send hormones to do their bidding.

Scientists began homing in on bones molecular messengers a decade ago (SN: 8/11/07, p. 83). Geneticist Gerard Karsenty of Columbia University Medical Center found that osteocalcin made by osteoblasts helps regulate blood sugar. Osteocalcin circulates through the blood, collecting calcium and other minerals that bones need. When the hormone reaches the pancreas, it signals insulin-making cells to ramp up production, mouse experiments showed. Osteocalcin also signals fat cells to release a hormone that increases the bodys sensitivity to insulin, the bodys blood sugar moderator, Karsenty and colleagues reported in Cell in 2007. If it works the same way in people, Karsenty says, osteocalcin could be developed as a potential diabetes or obesity treatment.

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Bones produce hormones that go to work in other organs. Some of those functions are known, but researchers are finding new ways these hormones may work.

Blood sugar and insulin metabolism

Memory and mood

Testosterone production

Pancreas and fat tissue

Brain

Testicles

Their data is fairly convincing, says Sundeep Khosla, a bone biologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. But the data in humans has been less than conclusive. In observational studies of people, its hard to say that osteocalcin directly influences blood sugar metabolism when there are so many factors involved.

More recent mouse data indicate that osteocalcin may play a role in energy metabolism. After an injection of the hormone, old mice could run as far as younger mice. Old mice that didnt receive an osteocalcin boost ran about half as far, Karsenty and colleagues reported last year in Cell Metabolism. As the hormone increases endurance, it helps muscles absorb more nutrients. In return, muscles talk back to bones, telling them to churn out more osteocalcin.

There are hints that this feedback loop works in humans, too. Womens blood levels of osteocalcin increased during exercise, the team reported.

Mounting evidence from the Karsenty lab suggests that osteocalcin also could have more far-flung effects. It stimulates cells in testicles to pump out testosterone crucial for reproduction and bone density and may also improve mood and memory, studies in mice have shown. Bones might even use the hormone to talk to a fetuss brain before birth. Osteocalcin from the bones of pregnant mice can penetrate the placenta and help shape fetal brain development, Karsenty and colleagues reported in 2013 in Cell. What benefit bones get from influencing developing brains remains unclear.

Another emerging bone messenger is sclerostin. Its day job is to keep bone growth in check by telling bone-forming osteoblasts to slow down or stop. But bones may dispatch the hormone to manage an important fuel source fat. In mice, the hormone helps convert white (or bad) fat into more useful energy-burning beige fat, molecular biologist Keertik Fulzele of Boston University and colleagues reported in the February Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.

Osteocalcin, sclerostin and LCN2 offer tantalizing clues about bones communication skills. Another hormone, fibroblast growth factor 23, or FGF-23, may have more immediate medical applications.

Bones use FGF-23 to tell the kidneys to shunt extra phosphate that cant be absorbed. In people with kidney failure, cancer or some genetic diseases, including an inherited form of rickets called X-linked hypophosphatemia, FGF-23 levels soar, causing phosphate levels to plummet. Bones starved of this mineral become weak and prone to deformities.

In the case of X-linked hypophosphatemia, or XLH, a missing or broken gene in bones causes the hormone deluge. Apprehending the molecular accomplice may be easier than fixing the gene.

In March, researchers, in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company Ultragenyx, completed the first part of a Phase III clinical trial in adults with XLH the final test of a drug before federal approval. The scientists tested an antibody that latches on to extra FGF-23 before it can reach the kidneys. Structurally similar to the kidney proteins where FGF-23 docks, the antibody is like a decoy in the blood, says Lanske, who is not involved in the trial. Once connected, the duo is broken down by the body.

Traditionally, treating XLH patients has been like trying to fill a bathtub without a plug. The kidney is peeing out the phosphorus, and were pouring it in the mouth as fast as we can so bones mineralize, says Suzanne Jan De Beur, a lead investigator of the clinical trial and director of endocrinology at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. Success is variable, and debilitating side effects often arise from long-term treatment, she says. The antibody therapy should help restore the bodys ability to absorb phosphate.

Unpublished initial results indicate that the antibody works. Of 68 people taking the drug in the trial, over 90 percent had blood phosphate levels reach and stay in the normal range after 24 weeks of treatment, Ultragenyx announced in April. People taking the antibody also reported less pain and stiffness than those not on the drug.

Osteocalcin, sclerostin and LCN2 might also be involved in treating diseases someday, if results in animals apply to people.

In the study recently published in Nature, Koustenis team found that boosting LCN2 levels in mice missing the LCN2 gene tamed their voracious feeding habits. Even in mice with working LCN2 genes, infusions of the hormone reduced food intake, improved blood sugar levels and increased insulin sensitivity.

Researchers traced the hormones path from the skeleton to the hypothalamus a brain structure that maintains blood sugar levels and body temperature and regulates other processes. Injecting LCN2 into mices brains suppressed appetite and decreased weight gain. Once the hormone crosses the blood-brain barrier and reaches the hypothalamus, it attaches to the surface of nerve cells that regulate appetite, the team proposed.

Mice with defective LCN2 docking stations on their brain cells, however, overate and gained weight just like mice that couldnt make the hormone in the first place. Injections of LCN2 didnt curb eating or weight gain.

(Two mouse studies by another research group published in 2010, however, found that LCN2 had no effect on appetite. Kousteni and colleagues say that inconsistency could have resulted from a difference in the types of mice that the two groups used. Additional experiments by Koustenis lab still found a link between LCN2 and appetite.)

In a small group of people with type 2 diabetes, those who weighed more had less LCN2 in their blood, the researchers found. And a few people whose brains had defective LCN2 docking stations had higher blood levels of the hormone.

If the hormone suppresses appetite in people, it could be a great obesity drug, Rosen says. Its still too early, though, to make any definitive proclamations about LCN2 and the other hormones side hustles, let alone medical implications. Theres just all sorts of things that we are uncovering that weve ignored, Rosen says. But one thing is clear, he says: The era of bone as a silent bystander is over.

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Bones make hormones that communicate with the brain and other organs - Science News Magazine

Finnish Researchers find Similar Mutation Patterns to Cancer in … – Labiotech.eu (blog)

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A new study has identified for the first time how a common process in cancer might be involved in the development of autoimmunediseases.

Researchers at the University of Helsinki and the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland have found that the accumulation of mutations in mature immune cells could drive rheumatoid arthritis in a similar way to how somatic mutations drive cancer. This phenomenon has been extensively studied in tumors, but this study is the first to investigate it in other diseases.

The results,published today in Nature Communications, revealed 30 mutations in CD8+ cytotoxic T cells of 5out of 25 patients with rheumatoid arthritis, versus a single mutation in one out of 20 healthy patients.The mutations were found in genes linked with the regulation of immunity and cell proliferation, and the clones of those cells with mutations appeared in much larger quantities that T cell clones without the mutations.

Interestingly, all the mutations were found incytotoxic CD8+ T cells, and none in helper CD4+ T cells. Given both cell types have a common origin, it was determined that the mutations appeared in mature cells and were not related to genetic defects in the stem cells that produce new immune cells every day.

Counterintuitively, none of the mutations identified were found in other 82 rheumatoid arthritis patients, indicating that rather than beingdriven by any specific genes, the process would depend on the accumulation of nonspecific mutations.

The prevalence of these types of mutations in hematopoietic cells increases with age,a process that has been extensively linked to an increased risk of cancer, and particularly blood cancer. These results indicate that the same process could also be behind a higher risk of suffering from an autoimmune disease.

For now, there is no certainty on how these mutations affect the regulation of chronic inflammations, says Professor Satu Mustjoki, one of theprojects leaders. They may be, for lack of a better word, genomic scars formed as a result of the activation of the immune defense system. In any case, this research project revealed a new connection on the molecular level between autoimmune diseases and cancer, which brings us one step closer to understanding these diseases.

After this first step, further studies with larger patients cohorts are definitely needed to confirm the results and gain a deeper insight into the mechanisms by which these mutations result in autoimmune disease. As Mustjoki stated, his group is planning to continue investigating the phenomenon in several inflammatory conditions.

Images via nobeastsofierce / Shutterstock;P Savola et al. Nature Communications 8, 15869 (2017)

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Finnish Researchers find Similar Mutation Patterns to Cancer in ... - Labiotech.eu (blog)

Researchers target gene to treat inflammatory bowel disease – Medical Xpress

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June 21, 2017 by Becky Freemal Treatments targeting a gene known as NLRX1 could help provide relief to the estimated 1.6 million Americans currently suffering from inflammatory bowel disease. Credit: Virginia Tech

Researchers at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech have discovered a new therapeutic target for inflammatory bowel diseaseand it's right inside our immune cells.

The research at the Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory (NIMML), at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech, targeted the gene known as NLRX1 as one that has potential therapeutic effects to aid in the treatment of gastrointestinal inflammation.

This investigation into how immunology and metabolism interface may hold critical answers for next generation nutritional immunology. The findings from the team's most recent research were published in the Journal of Immunology.

It's this sort of discovery that has the potential to customize healthcare for the individual, from personalized nutrition to precision medicine. The team uncovered new mechanistic insights into the role of NLRX1, targeting cellular metabolism and offering new therapeutic possibilities beyond traditional targets in autoimmune disease treatment.

"For decades, immunologists have applied reductionist approaches to studying the smallest details of the immune response without considering crucial system-wide interactions with nutrition and metabolism," said Josep Bassaganya-Riera, director of NIMML, a professor of immunology, and CEO of BioTherapeutics. "Our laboratory has built predictive computational and mathematical models and artificial intelligence pipelines capable of analyzing complex, massively interacting systems, including interactions between immunity and metabolism. This study not only elucidates novel mechanisms of immunoregulation in IBD, but it also validates transcriptomic and computational modeling studies that predicted the importance of NLRX1 in regulating gastrointestinal inflammation and its potential as a therapeutic target for infectious and immune-mediated diseases."

Due to an incomplete understanding of how NLRX1 works to decrease inflammation, scientific attempts to target this molecule as a treatment for the disease had previously stalled. The lab team's findings provide a deeper understanding of this gene's role in mucosal immunity and metabolism. This levels the playing field for both nutritional interventions that target NLRX1 and the development of NLRX1-based drugs.

"This seminal work, while impactful independently, sets the stage for the next lines of applied investigation on the role of NLRX1 in IBD," said Andrew Leber, scientific director of BioTherapeutics. "It highlights the need to understand not only the immediately relevant pathways for novel immunoregulatory genes, but their global effect on all of the cohesive metabolic and immunological processes within a cell, a goal that we will continue to pursue."

This work builds upon NIMML's successful track record in leading innovative transdisciplinary research at the interface of nutrition, immunity, and metabolism that dates back to its founding in 2002. The NIMML team has been involved in establishing spinoff companies that translate new scientific discoveries into the development of marketable products that address unmet consumer or clinical needs.

Explore further: Solving the immunity puzzle takes collaboration among different fields

More information: Andrew Leber et al. NLRX1 Regulates Effector and Metabolic Functions of CD4T Cells, The Journal of Immunology (2017). DOI: 10.4049/jimmunol.1601547

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Researchers at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech have discovered a new therapeutic target for inflammatory bowel diseaseand it's right inside our immune cells.

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VR for Good: Future Aleppo Is An Emotional Tour Of Loss And Hope – UploadVR

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There are a lot of places on this planet that I dream of visiting. I want to stand on the tiny islands that sit between Russia and Alaska, explore the parks of Canada, and experience the culture of South Korea. Im lucky enough to have travelled the globe already, but I still have so many cities and landscapes I want to see.

Mohammed Kteish just wants to see his home again.

Kteish is a Syrian refugee, hailing from the city of Aleppo. This was once a great city, a sprawling hub for over 2 million people going about their day with places for children to play and spots for communities to enjoy. The on-going crisis in the county, however, has reduced parts of it to little more than a ghost town, its streets filled with rubble and robbed of the laughter and joy that once occupied them. Kteish, 15, was one of the many that fled his war torn surroundings. Now he wants to go back.

But its not safe, and all Kteish is left with is his memories. Aleppo still exists in his mind, and hes brought it back to life in the real world too with a papercraft model of its various landmarks and hot spots. Ancient brick has been replaced with scrawled coloring, lush trees are reborn with scrunched up paper, and toy cars line the streets. It captures a vibrancy and bustle that many of us wouldnt associate with the region, preserving a way of life that existed long before gunfire and bombs took over.

And its been further immortalised within VR.

Kteishs creation itself has been virtually recreated inside the Oculus Rift with the help of Alex Pearson and London-based production studio, Marshmallow Laser Feast. The result is Future Aleppo, a piece commissioned by Sheffield Doc/Fest and on display for the first time at this years festival. Kteishs model sits in front of you in real life, and then you pull a Rift over your head to find it sitting there in the virtual world, with Kteish ready to give you an audio tour of the area.

As an experience, Future Aleppo reminded me of Clouds Over Sidra, the groundbreaking 360 degree video that gave us a tour of a Syrian refugee camp. Here, however, Kteish recalls memories of his childhood, growing up in an apartment block, playing in nearby parks, visiting huge monuments and sites like the stadium. Theres an obvious child-like quality to it; youre seeing Kteishs memories, directly through his eyes. Its a perspective on Syria that simply isnt possible without VR.

At one point he tells us that its his dream to revisit these sights one day. Its a tragedy I couldnt hope to fully process; imagine wanting more than anything for your home to just be your home again. Imagine having that taken from you.

As I removed the Rift, I took the time to study the model in greater detail. I had a better sense of this place already, my mind was better able to form an image of people walking its streets. I revisited the spots Kteish had talked about and took the time to picture the scenes he described. I got to see a side of Aleppo I just hadnt thought about before. If that was the aim of the project then it certainly succeeded.

Future Aleppo only lasts a few minutes but its sights will long stay in my mind. On the one hand its a tragic look at what scores of innocent people have been robbed of, and the injustice of the humanitarian crisis that they now face. On the other, its the best kind of rose-tinted window into the joy and love of a community that will hopefully one day thrive once more. Its also a great example of combining the real and virtual worlds. In a climate that increasingly struggles to understand and sympathize, this is an experience that I would be eager to get on as many heads as possible.

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VR for Good: Future Aleppo Is An Emotional Tour Of Loss And Hope - UploadVR

Combat Veteran Fights PTSD Through Hip-Hop : Shots – Health … – NPR

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After a deployment to Afghanistan in 2009, Doc Todd suffered from PTSD. With his new album Combat Medicine, he hopes to show other veterans that they're not alone. ZoomWorks Photography/Courtesy of Doc Todd hide caption

After a deployment to Afghanistan in 2009, Doc Todd suffered from PTSD. With his new album Combat Medicine, he hopes to show other veterans that they're not alone.

There is no one sure way to reach combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or substance abuse. But a new hip-hop album called Combat Medicine, released Wednesday, might help. It was written and performed by George "Mik" Todd, who goes by the name Doc Todd. He's a former Fleet Marine Force corpsman essentially a combat medic who served alongside the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan.

Todd's style is tough and direct in a way that only one veteran can be to another. In the song "Not Alone," he urges veterans to take action in their own recovery.

Take those bottles out, dog

and pour 'em in the sink.

Take the needles out of your arm

And the gun away from your forehead.

It's time, man.

You've been through enough pain.

Stand up.

It's time to stand back up.

Todd says the song is about empowerment, "about taking charge of your life, taking charge of your transition" from the combat zone to civilian life.

In his own transition, Doc Todd went through many of the issues other veterans face: shame, isolation, self-abuse. For Todd, it began in 2009 after he was in a large and dangerous battle in Afghanistan. Many of his friends were seriously wounded. His roommate was killed. Todd was medically evacuated to Germany after he fell seriously ill with pneumonia.

"That tore me up so bad, because I felt like I was alienated from the guys I served with," Todd recalls. "I felt like there was an asterisk next to my deployment. I felt like it would've been better if I got shot because that would've been more heroic."

George "Mik" Todd seen here in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in July 2009. He served with Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines. Courtesy of Doc Todd hide caption

George "Mik" Todd seen here in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in July 2009. He served with Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines.

Todd says it took him several years before he got help for his PTSD. He was depressed and started drinking heavily. Eventually, he realized what he needed to be doing was helping other veterans. With savings from his job as a money manager and help from his wife, he was able to quit his job. He'd been making music since he was a teenager. Now, he wanted to use his music to help veterans heal. And he had plenty of material for his lyrics.

The struggle is real

Found a feast

And lost a soul

Eventually my drinking

It got out of control

There in darkness, I roamed

Struggling to find home

See Suddenly death didn't

Feel so Alone

In the video for "Not Alone," a young veteran gets out of bed and immediately reaches for the bottle. That scenario is all too real, says former Marine Zach Ludwig who served with Todd in Afghanistan and is now working through his own PTSD.

"He knows what to say and how to say it," Ludwig says, pointing to Todd's combat experience. "What the man says is just blunt force truth."

Todd says facing the truth, no matter how difficult, can do more to help veterans than "coddling" them. His mission with Combat Medicine is to show vets they're not alone and to urge them to get help.

"We have to be responsible for empowering our own lives. And it doesn't really help when the overwhelming narrative is victimization and brokenness," he says.

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Northwestern Medicine to close nursing center and adult day care in Lake Forest – Chicago Tribune

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The family members of some elderly patients receiving services at Westmoreland Nursing Center in Lake Forest are frustrated and angry at Northwestern Medicine's decision to shutter the facility later this year.

The relatives of some residents and day care clients say they don't have time to make alternate care arrangements for their loved ones.

"It's a bit unnerving," said Joyce Jackson of Lake Forest, who said she and her sister learned about the impending closure in a May 19 letter; their 92-year-old mother, who has dementia, was a longtime day care client and has been a Westmoreland resident for about 18 months. "I don't know why the residents up there couldn't have gotten until the end of the year."

Westmoreland will close in December, with full-time residents required to move out by Aug. 31, according to Christopher King, director of media relations at Northwestern Medicine, which owns Westmoreland.

He said rehabilitation patients, along with outpatient adult services, have until December to relocate.

The decision to close Westmoreland, which has been in operation since 1975, is related to the construction of a new Lake Forest Hospital, King said.

Outpatient clinics for the new $399 million hospital are scheduled to open this fall, with inpatient services opening in early 2018, King said.

King said he didn't know much notice would have been perfect.

"It was a difficult decision," he said. "We've spent the last few months really taking an extensive look at the facility and planning how to advance."

Westmoreland is connected to the existing hospital by a tunnel, King said. Food for Westmoreland is prepared and laundry done at the existing hospital, and Westmoreland shares technology with the facility, he said.

"Our plan is once the new hospital is open and fully functional, the old hospital will be coming down," King said, adding that the cost and "regulatory resources" needed to make Westmoreland an independent facility would not be "feasible."

King said he didn't know the cost of making Westmoreland an independent facility.

Westmoreland now has fewer than 30 full-time residents, King said, although he didn't know the full capacity.

Westmoreland, at 660 N. Westmoreland Road, has fewer than 10 people in rehabilitation, King said. He didn't know how many people were in outpatient adult services, he said.

The final fate of the Westmoreland building and land has yet to be determined, King said.

Jackson said she is unhappy with Northwestern Medicine's decision to close Westmoreland due to its quality and proximity to her home.

"For us, it's like two miles away," she said. "There are activities. We know everyone there; it's like a big family. People who have loved ones there all say it's the best place to go."

Jackson is also concerned how her mother will react to a move.

"She's older and frailer," she said. "Now, at a late stage in dementia, they don't like change. Now she's faced with this change."

Kathy Metke of Mundelein said her 93-year-old father, who has dementia, attends adult day care at Westmoreland four days a week.

"It's good for a person with dementia to do the same routine every day," Metke said. "That's what Westmoreland did. It was a clean facility. The food they provided was good. They had church service two times a week. The quality of life for a 93-year-old man with moderate dementia was very good."

So far, only a Deerfield facility may have a day care spot for her father, Metke said, and that is problematic for her.

"I'd have to go from Mundelein to Deerfield (to drop off her father) to my job at Waukegan and then at the end of the day, have to do that in reverse," Metke said. "I'm not going to spend my life in the car."

All of which leaves Metke unhappy.

"I'm kind of upset," Metke said. "I have to work. I have a mortgage. I'm not going to put my father in a nursing home when he's not ready to go into a nursing home. We had something that was working."

mlawton@pioneerlocal.com

Twitter @reporterdude

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On the Case – Cornell Chronicle

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A gruff Boston cop with a heart of gold. A cynical lawyer whose taste for vodka martinis gets him into trouble. A spy who knows all about the nukes in Kazakhstan. They could be characters drawn straight from the pages of a best-selling thriller but the real detective in their stories is Dr. Stuart Mushlin, MD 73, president of the Weill Cornell Medicine Alumni Association. In his new book, "Playing the Ponies and Other Medical Mysteries Solved," the internist reflects on their cases and many others from his more than 40 years of practice. The cop, he writes, suffered from back pain so bad it made the stoic man scream. The lawyer showed up first with a liver condition, then with a rash that Dr. Mushlin traced back to the mans service in Vietnam. The spy had prostate cancer and that was just the beginning of his problems.

Dr. Muslin's book, "Playing the Ponies and Other Medical Mysteries Solved"

Throughout the books 20 essays, Dr. Mushlin, a master clinician in internal medicine and primary care at Brigham and Womens Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, presents his patients not just as cases but as people. Along with details of their conditions ranging from rogue chromosomes to leprosy he offers details of their lives that helped (or hindered) his efforts at diagnosis and treatment. The clear protagonist of "Playing the Ponies"though, is Dr. Mushlin himself. This book came from the heart, and its my voice on the page, he says. I was giving up full-time practice and taking the first steps toward retirement, and I wanted to share the joy and privilege of being a doctor and having patients put their trust in you.

In one chapter, he treats a patient with tuberculosis and reflects on how his own fathers struggle with the disease influenced his decision to become a doctor. When a woman shows up with a condition that harks back to his first-year physiology class, Dr. Mushlin remembers his time as a student at Weill Cornell Medicine in the early 70s. Another essay describes the moonlighting gig he took at a small hospital in a blue-collar town when his young family couldnt make ends meet. It was a chance to pick up both extra income and some hands-on lessons that went beyond his training in internal medicine offering what he calls a more immediate and gratifying experience of helping those in his care, compared with advocating lifestyle changes whose benefits would accrue over the longer term. It made me feel like a real doctor, he writes of sewing up the scalp of a man whod been conked over the head with a wine bottle, one who wasnt just trying to persuade people post heart attack to stop smoking and eat less meat.Dr. Mushlin, who studied English as an undergraduate and once considered a PhD in literary studies, weaves his autobiography through the cases in "Playing the Ponies," which came out in March from Rutgers University Press. I always knew that part of this book would be memoir, he says. In your professional life as a physician, you dont share a lot of personal information with your patients, but your experiences are formative, just as theirs are. I wanted to show how our lives those of my patients, and my own are shaped by our choices as well as by our circumstances.

DEDICATED DOC: Dr. Mushlin at work at Brigham and Women's Hospital where his nickname is "House"

Dr. Mushlin went on to enter private practice as an internist with coverage responsibilities at a community hospital, and in the books title essay he describes a memorable case he saw there. The patient, whom Dr. Mushlin calls S.M., had a rare blood condition that was causing neurological and kidney damage and required a then-experimental total body plasma exchange. Thanks to the young doctors quick thinking, the patient lived but ultimately stiffed Dr. Mushlin on the bill. His wife told me that they had cashed the insurance check, and both had gone to the track and played the ponies, Dr. Mushlin writes. They figured that S.M.s life was pretty lousy now and I had enough money. And they never returned.

In "Playing the Ponies," Dr. Mushlin takes readers through the question-and-answer, trial-and-error method that hes used throughout his career. While his nickname among the staff at Brigham and Womens Hospital is House for the fictional characters diagnostic acumen, not his misanthropic tendencies Dr. Mushlin is the first to admit that real clinicians dont pull answers out of the air like doctors on TV. Theres inspiration, of course, but diagnosis is mostly perspiration and desperation, he says. Essays with wry titles like Thinking Can Sometimes Make a Difference recount the exams, tests and late-night musings that have led Dr. Mushlin to the right answers or sometimes the wrong ones. Ive been puzzled many times, and there are days when your fastball just isnt as fast, says Dr. Mushlin. I wanted to communicate that doctors arent perfect. We need to learn from our mistakes and from our patients.

Dr. Mushlin hopes that the message gets through to the lay readers If you like the cases in the Sunday New York Times, this book is for you, he says and the aspiring physicians whom he envisions as his books ideal audience. Ive always taught my clinical medicine students to listen to their patients stories,Dr. Mushlin says. Patients will keep you humble. They tell you their innermost secrets and hopes, and you never stop learning. Thats what has made being a doctor such a wonderful career.

C. A. Carlson

This story first appeared in Weill Cornell Medicine,Vol. 16. No. 2

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KYF(M) celebration spoils Arts and Medicine event – The Hindu

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The Hindu
KYF(M) celebration spoils Arts and Medicine event
The Hindu
The 175th edition of the Kochi Biennale Foundation's Arts and Medicine programme at Ernakulam General Hospital turned sour with the youth wing of the Kerala Congress (M), Kerala Youth Front (M), usurping the platform and turning it into a political ...

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KYF(M) celebration spoils Arts and Medicine event - The Hindu

Medical School approved for ULM by Board of Regents – Bastrop Daily Enterprise

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Scott Henderson

The Louisiana Board of Regents today voted to approve a medical school to be located at the University of Louisiana-Monroe.

Discussions have been underway between ULM and the New York Institute of Technology about the creation of the Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine School on ULM's campus. On Wednesday, a large group of supporters, including school officials, Dr. Nick Bruno, President of ULM, and others gathered at the Board of Regents meeting in Baton Rouge for the vote. The board voted unanimously to approve the school.

Dr. Charles McDonald, a member of the Board of Regents, said that the school is anticipated to have a large economic impact on the area. He also said that this endeavor would help bring primary care doctors to the Delta. With one-third of primary care doctors in the area in their sixties, the influx of new physicians is welcome in the area.

ULM signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in April to establish the private, non-profit school at ULM. NYIT has already opened an osteopathic medical school at Arkansas State University at Jonesboro that began accepting students in Fall of 2016. NYIT also operates a medical school in Old Westbury, New York.

The medical school would still need the approval of accrediting agencies.

Graduates of the school would be Doctor's of Osteopathic Medicine or DO. Both DO's and MD's are licensed to practice medicine. According to the American Osteopathic Association, "Osteopathic medicine is a complete system of medical carewith a philosophy that combines the needs of the patient with the current practice of medicine, surgery and obstetrics; that emphasizes the interrelationship between structure and function; and that has an appreciation of the body's ability to heal itself. DOs are fully licensed to prescribe medicine and practice in all specialty areas including surgery. They are trained to consider the health of the whole person and use their hands to help diagnose and treat their patients."

The medical school is targeting a fall of 2019 opening and anticipates an initial enrollment of 115 students.

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The unwritten curriculum of med school – Scope (blog)

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They say to avoid going to the hospital during July, which is when the newly branded doctors start working after receiving their medical degrees a mere handful of weeks earlier. Whether that urban legend is true or not, its still a frightening notion to think that that my classmates and I will be branded with an MDat the end of our last names in another year. And from that point on, patients and nurses will begin to respect our medical opinions whether correct or not and our signatures would suffice for medical orders.

Sure, weve run traumas, intubated patients, delivered babies, treated heart attacks, and cured infections of each and every type. Weve admitted sick patients and then successfully discharged them in better conditions. And yet, despite twelve months of working in the hospital and taking countless call days, it still feels as if weve learned so little and are still as unprepared as ever.

Perhaps its an inherent limit of our early training: Theres only so much medical training and knowledge you can absorb while in the comfort and safety of the medical school cocoon. And theres only so much growth to be gained through memorization and testing.

But to gauge our growth as healers based on how much we learn in the traditional sense would be a red herring. The purpose of medical school was never to only impart textbook knowledge that can be gained anywhere these days with an internet connection, and those bits of facts and figures would never last long in our saturated brains.

The real purpose of medical school, I now realize, is to teach us how to learn medicine. And by that measurement, we have grown immensely in ways that cant be measured on paper.

We learned to attach ourselves to the residents and the attendings who were willing to teach, and we followed the tails of their white coats as closely as possible. And we learned that nurses, especially the ones who have been working there for decades, are sometimes the most knowledgeable and kindest teachers.

We realized the need to grow a thicker skin each time the surgeon berated us in the operating room while still maintaining a slice of humanity to offer to the homeless patient who has been admitted for alcohol abuse.

We picked up a habit of eating breakfast in the car to gain that extra fifteen minutes of precious sleep and to shovel down lunch and gulp coffee as quickly as we can, even risking burning our tongue, so wedont miss the next surgery.

We somehow acquired the ability to keep standing even when we briefly fall asleep after the third hour of holding traction for a broken femur.

We learned our way around the hospital so well that we know which stairwells are always empty so we can always find refuge for a precious moment of solitude to escape the chaos of a busy call day.

Third year wasnt easy. There were the good days when wed walk out of the hospital beaming with pride, proud of our budding diagnosing abilities. But they were inevitably followed by bad days when wed scold ourselves for making an inexcusable mistake, leaving us in doubt whether we could ever be trusted as physicians.

But ultimately, for all of medical schools valleys and peaks, we eventually learned to embrace these experiences because thats how we grew as healers. And these are the lessons that wont be found in any textbook or classroom.

Stanford MedicineUnplugged is a forum for students to chronicle their experiences in medical school. The student-penned entries appear on Scope once a week during the academic year; the entire blog series can be found in the Stanford Medicine Unpluggedcategory.

Steven Zhang just finished his third year of medical school at Stanford. When hes not cramming for his next exam, you can find him on a run around campus or exploring a new hiking trail.

Photo by Pixabay

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Medical school adds radiology component to year-1 anatomy instruction – Health Imaging

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First-year medical students at a historically black university in the nations capital are getting a deep introduction to the basics of radiology.

The school is the Howard University College of Medicine. The program incorporates multiple learning modules in medical imaging while overcoming the limitations of resources including funding, faculty and curricular time, according to an article published online June 19 in Anatomical Sciences Education, the journal of the American Association of Anatomists.

Describing the fruits of their successful interdepartmental collaboration, anatomist James Wilson, PhD, radiologist Andre Duerinckx, MD, and co-authors emphasize their programs reliance on self-study and peer-to-peer interactions.

The teams aims in launching the program included building students proficiency using free DICOM image-viewer software and teaching them to identify normal anatomy in medical images.

An effective collaborative relationship between a radiologist and anatomist was necessary to develop and implement the program of anatomicradiographic instruction, the authors point out.

The curriculum steps students upward along five tiers, according to the journal article. Students are first exposed to anatomy through standard dissections, then study annotated radiographs from atlases. Next they take a radiology quiz open to group discussions, conduct small-group studies of clinical cases with diagnostic images and, finally, get tested on their image-interpretation skills.

In the programs pilot period, students worked from medical images preloaded on their personal computers to take all their quizzes and tests, mimicking the approach by which radiologists analyze medical images, the authors report.

Graduating physicians in all subspecialties have an increased need for competency in radiology, particularly since the use of diagnostic imaging continues to grow, Wilson et al. note.

In addition to stimulating student support of a new teaching initiative, they write, the strengths of Howards program are that it can be introduced into an existing preclinical curriculum in almost any medical school with minimal disruption, it requires few additional resources to implement and run, and its design is consistent with the principles of modern education theory.

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Medical school adds radiology component to year-1 anatomy instruction - Health Imaging