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Science & Technology

JohnCon unites gaming, fiction enthusiasts

By TONY WU | April 16, 2015

This past weekend marked the 19th annual JohnCon, a 48-hour convention held every year on the Homewood Campus that caters to gamers and board game enthusiasts. This year’s convention was packed with Pokémon tournaments, diverse panelists and gaming of all sorts. “[The convention] serves as a place for Hopkins students and people in the community to hang out... sharing their interest for games and fiction,” junior Emily Forster, vice president of JohnCon, said. The convention was hosted by the University’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, Anime Club and Pen & Paper Gaming Club. JohnCon is marketed as a fun and convenient way for Hopkins students to relax and learn about the world of fiction. In addition to gaming, it offers a place for vendors to sell their figurines and game cards. The convention is free, but donations are encouraged to support future JohnCons. The first event of the convention, laser tag, took place outside the Glass Pavilion. Because the turnout was small, three-man teams participated in each round. Though some competitors seemed shy at first, they loosened up after running around in the sun and barrel-rolling in the grass, trying to stay alive for as long as possible. Besides the laser tag games, which occurred on each day of the convention, there were various panels that took place in either the Sherwood Room of Levering Hall or the Arellano Theater. Topics ranged from fan fiction tips to comedy shows by +2 Comedy. +2 Comedy is a group of stand-up comedians well-versed in the world of fiction. Mentions of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings abounded, and even though some of the audience may not have been familiar with references to other franchises such as Dungeons and Dragons, the relaxed and inclusive atmosphere encouraged everyone to participate in the act. Some jokes were painfully awkward, with chuckles from the audience breaking the silence, while others, mostly about movies, were more well-received. A major portion of the show targeted the Hobbit films, with the comedians and celebrity guest Dan Barnett, also known as Epic Dan, taking turns cracking jokes at the long, disappointing series. As the show approached its end, +2 Comedy sprung a surprise, offering a chance for an audience member to receive a DVD and syphilis (or rather, a plush doll of the bacteria). To get a chance at the prize, participating audience members had to risk something of their own. The comedians accepted offers as diverse as lint from a wallet to a $20 bill, but they ended up selecting the person who offered up a plaid jacket. After a brutal ten-minute quiz, during which he had to guess movie titles from their Netflix descriptions, the plaid-jacket owner took home a recording of +2 Comedy shows and the plush doll. Compared to Sherwood and the Arellano Theater, the atmosphere of the Glass Pavilion was charged with intense card and video game competition. Throughout the weekend, the room hosted tournaments for Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, Super Smash Bros, and more. While some participants were very competitive, others joined in just to have fun with their friends. The tabletop game, Warhammer 40k, was one of the more fierce events and spanned two days. The game relies on dice rolls to determine movement, attacks and saves. Prizes were handed to the winners of the tournaments, driving players to play their hardest and backstab their friends. The last portion of the convention featured a raffle and appearances by guests such as Danny Birt, composer, college instructor and award-winning author of Between a Roc and a Hard Place. Birt read some of his works to the audience and performed music pieces inspired by science fiction. During multimedia hour, Birt also played videogames with the audience, allowing fans to interact with the accomplished writer. For those who wanted more time with guests, JohnCon offered a raffle in which an attendee won the chance to eat dinner with comedians from +2 Comedy as well as other invitees. Junior Jerry Fang commented on JohnCon’s slow start. “[I was] disappointed since there weren’t a lot of people there on the first day of the convention,” Fang said. Forster, vice president of JohnCon, praised the event’s inclusivity. “Students from Hopkins, the community around Hopkins and even people from MICA can hang out and share their interests in gaming and fiction,” she said.

Study finds unpasteurized milk is dangerous

By JESS CARNEY | April 14, 2015

Raw milk, the natural and unprocessed form of milk, has grown in popularity many think it tastes better and is healthier than regular milk. However, new research from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future suggests that raw milk might actually be harmful. The study was conducted in response to a bill presented to the Maryland House of Delegates during the 2014 session of the General Assembly, which aimed to loosen regulations regarding the sale of raw milk in Maryland. Currently, all sales of raw milk are prohibited in Maryland, and the bill called for allowing on-farm sale. According to the Maryland House of Delegates website, a formal decision on the bill has not yet been passed. Keeve Nachman, director of the Food Production Program and a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH), led the study along with his team from the Center for a Livable Future, including Benjamin Davis and Cissy Li. Nachman previously worked for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers after receiving his Ph.D. at JHSPH. His current work revolves around human health risks associated with the drugs used in food animals. The team’s method included reviewing over 1,000 journal articles published on the subject and analyzing some of them to determine the health risks and benefits of raw milk. They concluded that drinking raw milk carries an increased risk of foodborne illness as compared to drinking pasteurized milk, but that the reason why has not yet been identified. The researchers stated that any benefits that could come from drinking raw milk do not outweigh the definite health risks. Raw milk not gone through the pasteurization process in which milk is heated in order to kill bacteria that could have contaminated it during milking or transportation. Proponents of raw milk believe that it tastes better and is significantly healthier because it contains natural proteins and bacteria, which reduce allergies and lactose intolerance. However, opponents fear it could risk public health and safety. Some who experience lactose intolerance claim that the raw milk lessens the symptoms of the condition, but a study done at Stanford University concluded that raw milk does not decrease symptoms. Raw milk contains just as much lactose as properly pasteurized milk. According to the FDA, the bacteria that can be found in unpasteurized milk include salmonella, campylobacter, listeria, and Escherichia coli. Infections of this type can lead to vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, fever, headache and in some serious cases, even death. Young children, pregnant women and the elderly are particularly at risk. The Farm-to-Consumer Defense Fund states, though, that consumers should have the right to access the foods they want. Nachman’s research did find that raw milk increased the risk of illness to nearly 100 times greater than pasteurized milk. This correlates with other studies from the FDA that found that over half of milk-related illness was caused by raw milk, even though only around 3.5 percent of the population drinks it. Nachman’s research did not however find any solid evidence supporting the claims that raw milk is healthier. Most people understand the risks of drinking unpasteurized milk, and that the consequences can even be deadly. However, the benefits are less understood. Nachman believes that they would have to be investigated further. Forty-two states currently allow the sale of raw milk to varying degrees, but Maryland is among states including Montana, Nevada, Iowa, Louisiana, West Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey and Hawaii where it is completely banned. Nachman concludes that from a public health perspective, it is safer right now to discourage the sale of raw milk. He also suggests in the study that people should be more aware of the potential risks of consuming raw milk, especially the risks to vulnerable members of the population such as pregnant women, children and the elderly. For many the question is not as much about the actual health benefits and risks of raw milk, but about the freedom to decide for one’s self. Does the government have the right to restrict an individual’s right to choose their milk source, or does it have the obligation to protect that individual from danger? These are not easy questions to answer, and more research is certainly needed, but the decision will left to the Maryland House of Delegates.

The Brain Wave: Scientists unravel the brain’s synaptic anatomy

By DUY PHAN | April 14, 2015

Communication between different neurons provides the functional basis for how the nervous system works. For example, neurons in the retina relay visual information to higher-order neurons in the cortex to derive our conscious perception of the external world. As a result, understanding which neurons talk to each other is fundamentally necessary for gaining insight into the biological basis of brain function. One way to understand how neurons connect with each other is through tracing their connectivity patterns. Each neuron sends its axon, a wire-like protrusion, to a nearby or far-away neuron. Electrical ripples known as action potentials travel through the axon to reach the axon terminal, triggering release of chemicals called neurotransmitters. These neurotransmitters will bind to receptors on the adjacent neuron’s dendrites. The functional contact between each neuron is a synapse. As a result, tracing where these axons go can provide a clue to which populations of neurons communicate with each other, and ultimately, a better understanding of the brain’s anatomical wiring diagram. For a long time, tracing was done via injecting a dye that moves throughout neuronal processes. These reagents could either travel backward (retrograde) or forward (anterograde). By following where the dye ends up, it is possible to figure out which region the injected neuron is projecting to, or which neuronal population is sending information to the injected neuron. However, these classical dye tracers suffer from a major drawback. They do not prove the existence of synapses, since localization of the dye at an area does not necessarily imply the presence of synaptic connections. As a result, scientists needed a type of tracer that could not only traverse through axons but also jump across synapses. To that end, rabies viruses have been utilized as tracers due to their ability to infect a large number of neurons via synapse jumping. In addition to providing proof that synapses exist between neurons of interest, another benefit to the rabies virus is that it can be used to map longer pathways that involve more than two distinct populations of neurons. However, the results can be extremely difficult to interpret, since it is difficult to control the number of synapses that the virus crosses. As a result, tracing experiments that utilize rabies viruses must have clearly delineated timelines so that the chronological order by which synapses were crossed can be determined. Recent developments in genetics combined with viral technologies have made vast improvements to rabies virus tracing. By swapping out the comments necessary for infection and transsynaptic spread, the modified version of rabies virus can now only jump one synapse. The new technique is also much more precise because the virus can now infect only neurons that express the necessary molecular components, whereas before, the virus could infect any cell in its vicinity. Termed transsynaptic viral tracing, this technology was first used to trace the brain’s olfactory pathways. The importance of tracing methodologies cannot be overemphasized. The brain is a biological entity composed of interconnected neuronal populations. As a result, the first step toward understanding the circuit mechanism of brain function is to obtain a map of the wiring diagram. This could later lead to developments of brain diseases in which neuronal circuits are perturbed.

Astronaut embarks on longest space mission

By BARBARA HOLT | April 9, 2015

In August of 1996, U.S. Navy Captain Scott J. Kelly reported to the Johnson Space Center for astronaut training. Nineteen years of service to NASA, three spaceflights and 180 days in the International Space Station (ISS) later, Kelly, 51, begins his most ambitious endeavor yet — a mission to spend an entire year in space. This past Friday, Kelly launched aboard a Soyuz rocket, accompanied by cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka. Kelly is scheduled to return in March 2016 by which time he will have spent more than 500 days in Earth’s orbit. Unlike his cosmonaut colleagues, however, Kelly will provide NASA with a unique opportunity to monitor the effects of a harsh space environment on the human body by bringing his biological twin U.S. Navy Captain Mark E. Kelly into the equation. Mark retired from service in the U.S. Navy and NASA in 2011. Thus, in a near-perfect case study of the “nature vs. nurture” argument, Scott will orbit the Earth, enduring the effects of extended time in space, while Mark remains on solid ground below. This mission holds more significance than satiating mere scientific curiosity. Data collected through observation of the Kelly twins will contribute to the future of space travel as NASA and other space agencies attempt increasingly longer space voyages. In a few decades, this mission may even serve as the bedrock to NASA’s potential missions to Mars. “All of those things really affect the bodies of astronauts,” Julie A. Robinson, NASA’s chief scientist for the space station, said during a news conference in January. “They push them to something not at all unlike aging on Earth, where their balance is disrupted, their hearts are weaker, their immune system isn’t functioning as well, their muscles are weaker and their bones are being lost.” Scott Kelly’s scientific contribution won’t be without its personal drawbacks. While Kelly looks forward to the space station, he also dislikes the confinement. Kelly said that he’ll miss his friends and family, being able to get away from work and going outside. Ultimately, Scott Kelly’s mission is a potent reminder of both what magic lies ahead of us and behind us as we take to the stars.

Minimally invasive surgery lowers healthcare costs

By MANISH PARANJPE | April 9, 2015

As healthcare costs continue to rise, the U.S. continues to search for ways to provide affordable coverage to all citizens. The Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid are modern players in the long fight against increasing healthcare costs. However, a new quantitative study may soon change the way we think of hospital costs. The healthcare industry in the U.S., made up of physicians, hospitals and insurance providers, represents a $3.8 trillion dollar industry, according to Forbes. Yet, a McKinsey Study showed that the United States, while spending more on healthcare per capita than any other developed country, does not enjoy higher health outcome measures such as percent obesity and life expectancy. Many theories exist regarding this paradox: the higher cost of medical procedures, an overly bureaucratic administration, increased length of inpatient stay and even a lack of preventative medicine. However, whatever the reason may be, it is clear that a systematic cost reduction is critically needed. Minimally invasive surgery has flourished in the current age of technology-based medicine. Through innovations in biomedical engineering, physicians can perform what were once open surgeries with minimally invasive tools such as laparoscopic devices and robotically controlled instruments. The Mayo Clinic reports that because patients often have just a very small incision, there is lesser chance of painful and life-threatening postoperative infections. Recovery times also increase because less healthy tissue is damaged during the procedure. Surgical procedures represent a substantial single contributor to aggregate healthcare expenses. A new study led a professor of surgery at the Hopkins School of Medicine, Marty Makary, and published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Surgery, took a quantitative approach to surgical costs by studying the cost savings and number of postoperative complications avoided by performing minimally invasive surgery versus open surgery. Makary said in the report that minimally invasive surgery is an often-overlooked opportunity to make surgery safer and less costly. For their study, the researchers used the 2010 National Inpatient Sample for patients undergoing an appendectomy (the removal of the appendix), a partial colectomy (removal of part of the colon) or a lung lobectomy (removal of part of the lung). In order to limit the effect of confounding variables, Makary removed instances of emergency surgery and high-risk patients. From this dataset, Markary and his team were able to observe open and minimally invasive surgeries (MIS) with and without postoperative complications. In order to study the cost of postoperative complications associated with open surgery, the researchers considered seven postoperative complications listed in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Patient Safety Indicators. The team first built a two-stage regression model for excess cost in cases with and without postoperative complications. From their model, Markary was able to create two simulations in which patients with open surgery instead underwent minimally invasive surgery and from there compute the cost savings, number of complications avoided and number of hospital days avoided. In the first simulation, hospitals that were performing a low number of MIS (i.e., up to the 83rd percentile of hospitals) performed as many MIS as the 83rd percentile. In the second scenario, all hospitals increased their number MIS by 50 percent from the baseline. The investigators found that there was a marked decrease in surgical costs, postoperative complications and hospital stays in both simulations. If hospitals increased their rate of MIS to that of the 83rd percentile, patients could have 169,819 fewer days in the hospital and 4,306 fewer postoperative complications. In total, this would mean a $377 million reduction in annual cost. As Makary concludes, the team’s results indicate that MIS is underutilized and should be a choice given to patients more often. While not applicable in all cases, lower cost, less harmful minimally invasive surgeries may be an effective solution to reducing the fiscal burden of healthcare while also improving patient satisfaction.

Psoriasis medication reduces patches better

By ALFRED CHIN | April 2, 2015

Characterized by painful red patches on the skin covered with thick silvery scales, psoriasis is a chronic autoimmune skin condition that afflicts roughly 125 million people worldwide. Newly released data from a clinical study shows that Cosentyx, a psoriasis treatment manufactured by Novartis, is 21 percent more effective than the widely administered treatment Stelara.

The Brain Wave: Immune cells lower neuron growth in seizures

By DUY PHAN | April 2, 2015

Seizures are almost like firestorms in the brain, causing neurons to fire uncontrollably and resulting in aberrant motor behavior and the loss of consciousness. Despite their seriousness, we still have no good way to treat them. However, a recent study by Taito Matsuda and colleagues from Japan has uncovered a novel pathway between hippocampal neurogenesis and the immune system, potentially providing a new treatment avenue for epilepsy.

Stars make sounds too high for us to hear

By BARBARA HOLT | April 2, 2015

Just as the elusive dog whistle is beyond our mere human auditory capabilities, there is an entire reality out there full of waves beyond our visual spectrum, patterns beyond our recognition and dimensions beyond our reach.

After Ebola, Africa faces possible measles outbreak

By JESS CARNEY | April 2, 2015

It may seem as though danger from the Ebola epidemic is gone, but new research from the Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) suggests otherwise. The study, led by Justin Lessler and released in the March 13 issue of Science, found that disruptions to the West African health care, caused by the Ebola crisis, have led to a significant decrease in vaccinations and a consequent increase in susceptibility to a variety of other diseases.

Stricter gun control laws decrease violence

By JOAN YEA | April 2, 2015

In recent decades, studies have investigated the efficacy of certain gun policies in reducing violent crime and preventing high-risk individuals, such as those issued with domestic violence restraining orders or stricken with serious mental illnesses, from gaining access to firearms.

Americans no closer to getting generic insulin

By SUNNY CAI | April 2, 2015

There are 21 million people living with diabetes in the U.S., six million of whom take insulin. Although insulin has been used as the life-saving drug of choice to control diabetes for nearly 100 years, generic insulin has yet to be seen on the market.

Angelina Jolie undergoes surgery to avoid cancer

By SAMHITA ILANGO | March 26, 2015

The recent announcement of Angelina Jolie Pitt’s removal of her ovaries and fallopian tubes after showing early signs of ovarian cancer has women across the nation thinking about genetic testing for cancer. Some doctors describe ovarian cancer as one of the most deadly due to its late-stage discovery, which limits treatment options.

Peanut allergies have a genetic component

By SARAH SUKARDI | March 26, 2015

On every medical form, there is that one box to check off: “allergies.” It’s a question that most people are lucky enough to gloss over, but allergies are a very real problem in the United States and the world, especially among children. It is estimated that between two percent and 10 percent of children in the world are afflicted with food allergies.

A sense of purpose can help you live a longer life

By SUNNY CAI | March 26, 2015

The Japanese believe that everyone has a “reason for being,” or “ikigai.” In Japanese culture, searching for one’s ikigai is regarded as very important, as the discovery of one’s ikigai is believed to bring meaning, direction and satisfaction to life. In fact, National Geographic writer Dan Buettner theorizes that one of the main reasons Okinawans are among the longest-lived people on the planet is because they have a high sense of ikigai.

Europeans gather to watch a solar eclipse

By SARI AMIEL | March 26, 2015

On Friday, a solar eclipse darkened the skies of the North Atlantic for four hours, prompting dramatic photographs for some and disappointment for others in the many countries where cloudy skies unexpectedly blocked the view.

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