Clearly we all need a little more Facebook in our lives.
Expectations don’t come much higher than they do when it comes to curing cancer. Philanthropist John G. Rangos Sr. fuels that audacious hope with the bold claim that Hopkins will surely be the first to cure cancer. On the strength of his conviction, Mr Rangos thus created the Rangos Award for Creativity in Cancer Discovery, which was presented to finalists Jason Howard, Ashwin Ram, Hogan Tang, Sylvie Stacy and Xiaochuan Yang on April 3.
Hopkins researchers have recently made a discovery that have implications in the treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
We train dogs to do tricks for a treat and we train our children to behave well and get good grades in school. With the help of recent developments in biomedical research, we can also train white blood cells to specifically look for and kill only cancer cells.
For the lazy students at Hopkins: For those plagued by constant laziness during school, you are in for a scientific treat. Thanks to recent findings, you may be able to blame your regular indolences on your DNA! A study on mice has shown that laziness can actually be a genetic predisposition. Researchers bred a group of active and lazy mice and monitored the activity of subsequent generations by measuring their running distances. There was a clear difference in running activity between the 10th generation mice that belonged in the active group and those in the lazy group. Through a technique called RNA deep sequencing, the scientists were able to find 36 prospective genes that may be involved in laziness. But even so, try not to let laziness hinder your studies!
When the Egyptians first stumbled upon cancer more than 3000 years ago, they simply wrote: “there is no treatment.”
Would you rather save a savage shark or an adorable panda? If you have watched Jaws or Piranha 3D, then you would probably pick the latter. Too often, the media over-sensationalizes animal appearances and behaviors for the sake of entertainment. While the cutesy birds and bunnies get to co-star with Disney princesses, the vicious and hideous critters are stuck playing the villain. These stereotypes stem from our tendency to reject what we perceive as dangerous, foreign or unsightly. In reality, these so-called monstrous creatures are important members of our ecosystems.
Hopkins undergraduate biomedical engineering design teams never cease to amaze with their innovative and practical medical inventions. Past teams have devised devices such as CervoCheck, a labor monitoring device for pregnant women. This time, a BME design team has wowed the Hopkins community once again by inventing a novel device called the “Cooling Cure,” which could potentially save the lives of millions of newborn babies with Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy (HIE).
For the past few months, particle physicists have been very cautious about calling the newly discovered particle, found at the Large Hadron Collider, a “Higgs-like” particle. The Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is the largest particle collider on earth, made to smash protons together at velocities near the speed of light in order to learn more about the fundamental particles that describe the universe. The reason that this new particle has been called a “Higgs-like” particle is, simply, that we aren’t entirely sure that it is actually “the Higgs boson” predicted by the Standard Model.
Gun-related tragedies have left names that previously referred only to locations on a map with unshakable, secondary meanings. Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora and, most recently, Newtown lost their cartographic anonymity when shootings catapulted them into the headlines. As Americans struggle to come to terms with the mass-shootings of the past decade, the two most prominent questions in the national consciousness — “how?” closely followed by “why?” — have complicated the social and political fallout surrounding gun-control policies in unforeseen ways.
Doctor of Medicine: the career respected throughout the world and contended for by thousands of students in the U.S. every year, just got easier to endure. After a tough four years of undergraduate studies and an even more grueling medical school education, students are finally exposed to the real medical world under the guidance of other physicians during their residency. In 2011, the residency hour requirements shifted from intensive 30-hour shift limits to more agreeable 16-hour shifts.
Mothers constantly remind their children that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, assuring that eating fruits and vegetables is important for having a healthy lifestyle. However, recent discoveries have shown that crops such as fruits may serve as much more than just a daily source of vitamins. On top of providing nutritious supplements, fruits have been recently found to be an excellent source for fuel.
While the existence of a two headed creature can only seem possible in a Disney or sci-fi movie, such animals do actually exist in our world. In fact, we even have a scientific name for two-headedness: dicephalia, or axial bifurcation.
In October 2012, Facebook hit a new milestone yet again, announcing that it had reached one billion users. Even after overlooking the thousands of fake or duplicate accounts, this announcement meant that nearly one out of every seven people on Earth has made Facebook a part of their daily life.
Something can’t come from nothing, but perhaps nothing is really something to begin with.
Before you pack away the pounds in time for bikini weather, you might want to take a moment to thank your fat, for it may someday save your life. A new study found that stem cells derived from fat can be just as effective as stem cells derived from bone marrow in targeting and destroying cancer cells. And it’s not just any cancer, but the most common and aggressive human brain tumor — glioblastoma.
The blue jay, Hopkins’s school mascot, is named after and commonly known for the impressive blue color of its feathers. However, what may be more impressive than having two beautiful wings is having four of them.
Organ transplants are some of the most complex medical procedures imaginable, especially those that involve a chain of numerous donors. Kidney paired donation, or KPD, is one form of chain strategy and a recent Hopkins study shows that greater use of this exchange mechanism would help more patients receive transplants.
As the field of genetics has burgeoned in the past decade with new gene analyzing technologies, it seems as though we are discovering new genes every day that are responsible for diseases like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia. With the massive amount of genetic data studied each day, it has become difficult for various gene labs to collaborate and organize new genetic information in a coherent manner.
With every purchase of a Toyota Prius or discovery of a new alloy or element that could be used for efficient engine design, our world has been gradually compensating for the vast pollution we have built up over generations. The United States, which is the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide behind China, lists the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as one of the greater challenges that we face, as our economy has relied on fossil fuels as a central form of energy production since the Industrial Revolution.
