Bioengineer Kit Parker wants to build replacement hearts for children born with heart defects. Although that goal remains a long way off, Parker recently took a step in that direction by assembling a 1:250 scale model of the human left … Continue reading
Journal Club
Highlighting recently published papers selected by Academy members
Author Archives: Amber Dance
Journal Club: Bioengineers build a tiny heart ventricle to better understand heart disease and treatment
Categories: Cell Biology | Journal Club | Medical Sciences
Tagged arrhythmia, heart attack, heart defect, isoproterenol, stem cells, tissue engineering, ventricle
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Journal Club: Giving the brain something to do highlights the circuitry of smarts
Scientists conducting neuroimaging studies hope that their MRI scans will offer up patterns that predict traits related to intelligence, personality, disease, or even offer insights into a patient’s clinical symptoms or their chances of responding to a drug. But according … Continue reading
Categories: Applied Physical Sciences | Journal Club | Neuroscience
Tagged Human Connectome Project, intelligence, MRI, neuroimaging, Raven's matrices, rest-state
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Journal Club: Fruit flies’ internal circadian clocks continually check the temperature
As a fruit fly sails from sunshine into a patch of shade, its temperature drops by 10 degrees F or so. Immediately, certain neurons in its brain spring into action, telling the fly’s circadian clock about the temperature change. By … Continue reading
Categories: Biochemistry | Genetics | Journal Club | Neuroscience
Tagged chronobiology, circadian rhythms, drosophila, fruit fly, neurons, sleep-wake cycle, temperature
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Journal Club: New technique lights up the connectome, tracking signals across neuronal populations
Neuroscientists still possess an incomplete understanding of how different neurons interface and communicate throughout the brain’s wiring diagram, called the connectome. In a recent eLife article, Caltech molecular neurobiologist Carlos Lois and colleagues introduce a new tool to screen for such … Continue reading
Categories: Applied Biological Sciences | Biochemistry | Journal Club | Neuroscience
Tagged axon, connectome, dendrite, electron microscopy, neuon, TRACT, wiring diagram
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Journal Club: Cooler temperatures might make some mosquitoes better dengue spreaders
Migrating mosquitoes that carry diseases from the tropics to cooler climes might be better at spreading disease in their new, cooler home, according to a recent study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Researchers from Yale University in … Continue reading
Categories: Animal Behavior | Biochemistry | Climate science | Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences | Infectious disease | Medical Sciences
Tagged Aedes aegypti, climate change, dengue, mosquito, RNAi
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Journal Club: Antarctic cyanobacteria show no changes due to warming—yet
Captain Robert Scott’s Antarctic Discovery expedition took place over 100 years ago—and yet its participants recently racked up another contribution to science. Thanks to the samples of bacterial mats they collected from polar ponds—samples that were pressed, dried, and stored … Continue reading
Journal Club: Geometry of Greenland’s glaciers helps predict future ice melt
The changing climate is just one factor contributing to the melting and thinning of the slow-moving rivers of ice that terminate in spots such as Greenland’s fjords. Each glacier’s geometry—including its thickness and how steeply it flows—also makes a difference. … Continue reading
Categories: Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences | Environmental Sciences | Journal Club
Tagged climate change, Greenland, ice sheet, iceberg
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Journal Club: Layer-cake chemistry offers up a cheap way to perform chemical tests
Sana Jahanshahi-Anbuhi started her study with a trip to the supermarket to buy Listerine breath strips, the sort that melt on your tongue in seconds. But the chemical engineering postdoc at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada wasn’t worried about bad … Continue reading
Categories: Biochemistry | Chemistry | Environmental Sciences | Journal Club | Microbiology | Pharmacology
Tagged chemical test, drugs, E. coli, genome sequencing, lab on a chip
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Journal Club: How much you think you understand depends on what you believe others understand
Knowing that experts understand something is enough to make lay persons think they, too, have better grasped a concept, according to a September 26 paper in the journal Psychological Science. Cognitive scientist Steven Sloman, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode … Continue reading
Categories: Journal Club | Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Tagged community of knowledge
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Journal Club: Childhood adversities correlated with shortened telomeres, poorer health later in life
Stressful experiences during youth seem to leave a mark on a person’s genome decades later, in the form of withered chromosomal caps. As reported in PNAS, childhood stress correlates with increased odds to have shortened telomeres, the chromosome tips that … Continue reading
Categories: Cell Biology | Journal Club | Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Tagged childhood, stress, telomeres
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Journal Club: Low-calorie diets might improve effectiveness of cancer treatments
The old saying goes, “feed a cold, starve a fever”—now scientists might add, “starve a tumor.” In mice, a low-protein, low-calorie diet sensitizes breast cancer and melanoma cells to attack by the immune system, while prodding the immune system itself … Continue reading
Categories: Cell Biology | Immunology | Journal Club
Tagged cancer, diet, doxorubicin
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