Let’s take a look at the biggest news in science over the past Thanksgiving break! The headlines include the effects of climate change on the immune system, the James Webb Space Telescope’s latest screening and a new phylogenetic branch.
Before heading off for Thanksgiving, take a moment to learn about the amazing science being done around the world. This week’s news features NASA’s Artemis 1 mission to the moon, the COP27 climate conference, groundbreaking usage of gene-editing technology to combat cancer and octopuses throwing shells in the Pacific Ocean.
From black holes to quantum chips, this week was full of exciting revelations in the science and technology community. As we hit the midpoint of November, take a look at the STEM news shaking the world!
With most of the attendees still in their work clothes and sporting a “Hopkins Medicine” badge reel, a spectator may have assumed they were gathering for a presentation on the latest medical research. The table of wine and cheese, however, suggested otherwise.
“One Year On: The Pervasive Health Challenges in Afghanistan” is a four-part webinar series that invites panelists to talk about the ongoing health crises in Afghanistan after the regime change in 2021. Its second part, which took place on Nov. 8, focused on reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (RMNCH) in Afghanistan.
A newly engineered cytokine/antibody fusion with promising clinical application was created and tested by a team at Hopkins. Their results were recently published in Cell Reports.
PeriCor, co-founded by Hopkins Mechanical Engineering PhD student Justin Opfermann, won the Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institutes of Health for PeriPath, a novel device that obviates the need for open cardiac procedures in children. This grant will provide around $1.8 million to help the development of the device in order to make it commercially available.
In their recent study published in PLOS ONE, Dr. John Aucott and Cherie Marvel found that unexpected white matter activity in the brain, a symptom normally considered pathological, was found to be correlated with better outcomes in patients with post-treatment Lyme disease (PTLD).
Dr. Peter Abadir and Dr. Lolita Nidadavolu from the School of Medicine, along with other researchers, recently identified circulating cell-free genomic DNA (ccf-gDNA) as one of the factors that can predict the effects of aging in elderly populations.
The Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) preserves and publicizes over 1.5 million documents related to the stakeholders of the opioid epidemic. The archive — a joint effort by Hopkins and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) — serves as a consolidation of knowledge containing millions of pages of documents released during litigation between 2011-2022 against manufacturers, wholesalers and pharmacies involved in opioid distribution.
Pranav Samineni, a recent graduate currently working in a stroke lab at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, knew coming into Hopkins that he wanted to be a doctor. After growing up in a multigenerational household and witnessing the impact of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia on his family members and their caregivers, Samineni gained the impression that physical health was one of the biggest things to be thankful for in life.
Sean Carroll is a name familiar to those engaged with the world of science communication. As a physicist, Carroll’s work over the last three decades covered cosmology, relativity and quantum field theory.
A team of researchers at the School of Medicine led by Sarven Sabunciyan, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, discovered that changes in mRNA communication through extracellular vesicles are connected to postpartum depression. The team’s findings were published in Molecular Psychiatry, which further details their impact on the field.
As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, respiratory symptoms such as fatigue, dyspnea, chest pain and cough are some of the most common post-COVID symptoms among both hospitalized and non-hospitalized patients. As such, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been working to improve its identification of symptoms and diagnoses experienced by patients with persistent respiratory conditions post-COVID.
Starting in mid-June of this year, the increased intensity of monsoon rains have led to flooding conditions over certain parts of Pakistan. A monsoon can refer to the rainy season created by a change in wind patterns or a dry season. However, in Asian regions, monsoons mainly refer to the rainy season. But how is climate change connected to these floods?
Prescription to Prediction: The Ancient Sciences in Cross-Cultural Perspective conference brought Egyptologists, Classicists, ancient Near Eastern scholars and science historians from around the world to Scott-Bates Commons on Oct. 6–7 to discuss intercultural exchange of medical and scientific knowledge in the ancient world.
Internationally-acclaimed author and mathematician Manil Suri spoke about math, fiction, sexuality and creation in front of a packed Glass Pavilion audience on Sept. 29 in celebration of his latest book, The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math.
The Stoop Storytelling Series and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health collaborated to bring the “Hidden in Plain Sight” event to the Enoch Pratt Central Library on Sept. 22. The event featured a live recording of an episode of the Stoop Storytelling Series podcast, published on Oct. 3, where a panel of speakers told their stories about the impact of public health on their lives.
Here’s an interview question for you: how would you save humanity if an asteroid was hurtling through space towards our planet? Hopkins students and professors gathered Monday, Sept. 26 on Keyser Quad to view a live broadcast of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s (APL) Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), their answer to the question.
Smrithi Upadhyayula, a senior at the University of Texas at Dallas, was already resigned to the fact that her email inbox would stay packed for the rest of her medical school application cycle. Every day, there seemed to be updates from one school or another about transcripts that needed to be updated or rec letters that needed to be resubmitted.
