Here's a project from a team at MIT Media Lab's Tangible Media Group called Recompose. It's an actuated 3D display that responds to gestures with haptic feedback. At its very basic Recompose is part keyboard and part display surface. It sounds a little confusing, but watching the video makes it pretty clear. 

Below is a schematic with various gestural responses.

As a researcher, I would love to use a display like this when presenting data of some kind. It would also be cool to hook it up to my iPod and watch the surface create a wave that matches the beat of the music. 

You instinctively move your hand towards the toilet paper roll, ready to finish your business. Your heart sinks as you grasp a bare cardboard roll mocking you with remnants of toilet paper.  You would yell out for another roll, but you're at your boss's house warming party with twenty of your "closest" colleagues. Conundrum.

This might be a common situation during the likes of a toilet paper shortage, an unthinkable reality in today's day and age. Believe it or not, a toilet paper shortage did occur in the USA in 1973! It all started because of a little joke on the Johnny Carson Tonight Show. After hearing about the government falling behind in getting bids for toilet paper from congressional representative Harold Froehlich, the writers decided to twist it to the extreme. On December 19, 1973, Carson's monologue read: "You know what's disappearing from the supermarket shelves? Toilet paper. There's an acute shortage of toilet paper in the United States."  

Surprisingly, the monologue set off a frenzy of toilet paper purchases the next morning with families stocking up on toilet paper to supply their foreseeable futures. On the afternoon of December 20, 1973 almost every store in the USA was completely out of toilet paper. America had artificially created the largest toilet paper shortage in its history.

Later in the week, Johnny Carson retracted his statement and apologized to America. But because shelves were already empty of toilet paper, whenever there were rolls available, customers would purchase all of it. The shortage continued for another three weeks until shelves were stocked again.  

This little history gem gives us an excellent example of consumer behavior in the face of a percieved or propogated belief and how dangerous un-vetted information can be. 

Reference:

The Johnny Carson Effect

I was in Chicago this past weekend and decided to take a nice long walking tour of the city. Coming from Dallas, I didn't think 90 degrees was anything to worry about given the 102+ oven that is Dallas. However, in Dallas I never walk anywhere. Ten minutes into the walk, I was sweating bullets: my clothes were drenched and my eyes were burning from the sweat seeping into my eye lids. I did whatever I could to find shade and ended up taking the longest route possible just to be out of the sun.

Apparently, this is a pretty common occurrence for city dwellers. A common problem with a potential solution: Google Shade Walk, a google earth/maps feature that shows you the most shaded way to walk to your destination.

The version of Google Earth released for Android 3.0+ devices features a 3D UI, meaning it clearly knows the heights of all the buildings on the map or it wouldn't be able to accurately represent them on a 3D map.

If it knows the height and geographical coordinates of all given buildings in an area, and with the appropriate layers selected can even show trees... and if you search for walking or biking directions in Google Maps it can give pretty good time estimates on how fast you're likely to be moving, and knows the position of the sun at any given time...Then it should be easy to add an option to create a route based on availability of shade along said route.

This would benefit pedestrians greatly when traversing unfamiliar territory by foot. The best part is, it shouldn't actually require a device to be compatible with the 3D map view to use this feature. It doesn't have to DISPLAY the height of the buildings and/or trees. All it has to do is access that information from Google's database to incorporate the data into its route calculation. This should make it compatible with ANY smartphone/tablet with ANY version of Google Maps or Google Earth.

One of the greatest medical innovations in our society is something we rarely think about on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis. This innovation has single-handedly changed the course of medicine, completely eradicating certain diseases from our lexicon. This miraculous invention is, of course, the vaccine. As children, we receive vaccines on a very specific schedule to protect us against a host of viral and bacterial diseases. Nearly all of these vaccines only need to be administered once or on a series/booster schedule; however, the only vaccine given on a yearly basis is the influenza vaccine to protect against new strains of the flu virus. So what's so special about the influenza virus?

In a broad sense, the flu virus can escape our immune system by mutating its genetic sequence, essentially cloaking it from our body's detection. The degree of mutation in viruses is dependent on the type of genetic material in the virus. If the virus contains double-stranded DNA, which has an efficient error-checking system, it will be fairly stable from strain to strain, allowing our immune systems to recognize the virus year after year. However, if the virus contains RNA, a single-stranded structure, the frequency of mutations increases exponentially. Unlike DNA replication, RNA replication doesn't have an efficient "spell-check" , making it extremely susceptible to those replication errors that lead to mutation. This explains why a vaccine against varicella (chicken pox), a DNA virus, keeps the immune system prepped for years, whereas a vaccine against influenza, a RNA virus, is not sufficient to  protect the immune system from one year to the next.

The influenza virus can use two methods to escape immune detection, both driven by RNA mutations.

One method is known as antigenic drift. The flu virus has specific receptors that allow it to bind to host cells and enter healthy tissue. Our immune system creates antibodies that bind to these receptors, allowing our "defense" cells to recognize and get rid of the virus. However, subtle mutations in the influenza virus can change the identity of this receptor, making it invisible to previously made antibodies and allowing the flu to continue attacking host cells. Through these various mutations, a new strain of influenza can be created that is different from the original.

Here's an image explaining antigenic drift:

Image courtesy of Janeway Immunobiology

The other method of viral escape is antigenic shift. A single host cell can be infected by two slightly different strains of an influenza virus at the same time. Antigenic shift occurs when the RNA from these different viruses combine to form a new RNA strand that encodes for a completely different receptor. The immune system has no way of recognizing and attacking this new receptor, thus making host cells susceptible to viral attack. Where antigenic drift creates subtle changes in the flu virus, antigenic shift contributes to larger changes in the antigenicity of the virus. As a result, antigenic shift is responsible for the large scale changes associated with widespread virus epidemics when no vaccine exists

Below is an image explaining the process of antigenic shift:

Image courtesy of Janeway Immunobiology

In short, RNA mutations provide the influenza virus with a way to evolve at breakneck speed, allowing it to evade attack from our immune systems. This "micro-evolution" of influenza is the major player in the continual arms race between our immune system and the viral assault of the flu.

It's these unpredictable mutations that make the creation of a suitable vaccine so difficult to find. Despite these challenges, experts have done a remarkably good job at protecting the population from new strains of influenza year after year.

In the midst of the tragedy in Japan, experts are concerned with the possibility of multiple nuclear meltdowns which could exacerbate the situation tremendously. In particular the Fukushima Daini plant has been a major concern due to the inability of its cooling system to keep fuel rods exposed. To prevent radiation sickness in the event of a meltdown, Japanese officials are preemptively distributing potassium-iodine pills to those in the immediate area. As a medical student interested in radiobiology, I was immediately curious why iodine was the pill of choice and not some other salt.

Turns out there is an interesting physiological rationale behind this:

In the event of a nuclear meltdown, the most dangerous radioactive material to be expelled from a reactor is Iodine-131. I-131 is released as a gas, making it easy to enter our bodies and preferentially be taken up by the thyroid. In addition I-131 has a very short half-life (~1 week), meaning it can cause some serious damage very quickly (i.e. thyroid cancer).

Once in our body, I-131 is shuttled to our thyroid due to a special receptor present on follicular cells of the thyroid gland (follicular cells = work horse cell of the thyroid). These special receptors are known as Sodium/Iodine(Na/I) symporters or NIS.

Essentially, it's tough for iodine to get into thyroid cells due to issues with its concentration gradient, charge (its present as I- in the body, aka iodide) and lack of dedicated I- transporters. Luckily, our body can couple I- transport to the transport of sodium, making it energetically efficient to transport I- into follicular cells. This form of transport is called 'symport' and is the driving force for the majority of ion transport in the body. NIS mediated iodine transport facilitates this symport and is a major site of regulation with regards to iodine uptake.

NIS can take up most if not all forms of iodine, including I-131. Physiologically, this presents a serious problem: if I-131 is the most readily available form of iodine in the body (as it would be after a meltdown), our thyroid would unknowingly take it up and cause glandular suicide!

Schematic illustration of a thyroid follicular cell showing the key aspects of thyroid iodine transport and thyroid hormone synthesis (courtesy of International Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism)

That's where iodine pills come in. Iodine pills create a way for iodide (I-) to saturate the NIS co-transporter, effictevely making it impossible for other forms of iodide to enter the thyroid.  So, if one were to take KI pills before a meltdown, there would be no way for I-131 to enter the thyroid in the event of a meltdown. Accordingly, I-131 would be filtered by the kidney and excreted into the urine, effictively saving the thyroid from damage.

While examining thymus slices sectioned from an elderly patient (personal info was scrubbed) in histology today, I found an early valentine's day present:

The objective lens was set to 40x with a 10x eye piece magnification. Captured using my iphone, I was pretty happy with the resulting image after a few tries.  

Happy (early) Valentine's Day!

This guy visualizes the microwaves from a microwave oven using a grid of neon bulbs and explains their distribution pattern. Brilliant!

Here's his explanation for the experiment:

Microwaves are invisible, so you can't see them inside microwave oven, but their presence can be detected with neon lamps. The changing electromagnetic field from the microwaves will make charged particles move, and so the electrons in the metal legs will move creating current. This current makes the lamps glow.

It sucks to get cut. It sucks even more (especially in the hospital) to continually remove a bandage and check for infections. Not only is this process annoying, but it can also increase the chance for infection. Crappy problem, awesome solution: a team of scientists at the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Modular Solid State Technologies in Munich have created a special dye that changes color at different pH's. Healthy skin has an acidic pH of 5 whereas infected skin has a pH in the alkaline range (pH>7). 

"If the pH value is between 6.5 and 8.5 an infection is frequently present and the indicator color strip turns purple," says Dr. Sabine Trupp, one of the lead scientists on the project. This provides an intelligent bandage material that can continuously check for infections without disrupting wound healing. 

What a smart bandage. 

Here's an excellent piece by Miwa Matreyek using music, projections, animations and her own shadow. After a while, I started to get confused between what was real and what was a projection. Seemingly simple animations become very interesting when trying to decipher what Miwa is doing and what the audience is seeing. Very cool. Here's a list of the artists playing in the background: Anna Oxygen, Mirah, Caroline Lufkin and Mileece.

Med school life leaves me with little time to do things other than studying. In fact, I've found myself lazing on meals whenever possible. So, I had this idea for a non-cookbook ideally suited for med students or anyone else on a time crunch: Made in Your Mouth.

The premise is simple; it's a book of recipes to make right in your mouth.

No frying, no cooking, no washing ... just eating.

For example:

The de novo Fluffer-Nutter

1 marshmallow 

11 peanuts

1/2 slice of bread

--> chew briskly

The Chunky

9 chocolate chips

6 raisins

1-2 walnits

--> chew like a champ

You're only limited by your imagination ... and gag reflex.