If you’re passionate about baseball and are familiar with the history of the sport, you may be familiar with the player Babe Ruth and his record of 714 home runs set in 1934. This record stood strong until Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run in 1974 — a historic day for baseball and an inquisitive day for mathematicians.
I stared blankly at my phone as I read an incoming message, “Sorry, I forgot the dirt.” I was devastated. I really needed that bag of dirt. I had asked my friend to pack me a bag of soil when he was away in New Jersey for the weekend. Inside that bag would have been an assortment of bacteria, too numerous to count, fighting with each other for space and resources.
What do a non-stick pan, a raincoat and a medical stent have in common? They all have water-repelling properties that resist water uptake or degradation by hydrolysis. Hydrophobicity, the capacity to not interact with water, is important as we are consistently in contact with water in the external environment and inside our cells.
Harvard Medical school recently conducted an extensive trial of the bionic pancreas, a device that uses cutting-edge technology to automatically deliver insulin to the human body.
Adderall, the drug used to treat the most commonly diagnosed mental disorder in American children, is currently in short supply. Pharmaceutical companies are reporting that they are unable to supply Adderall, which is used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Lower temperatures and changing leaves signal the coming of fall, a season of apple picking, pumpkin spice lattes and Halloween movies. The colder months also bring with them an unwelcome guest: influenza season. This year’s flu season is expected to be worse than past winters according to forecasts based on patterns in Australia and New Zealand. Experts look toward countries in the southern hemisphere to predict the upcoming season because winter runs from April to October. According to government surveillance reports, Australia had its worst flu season in five years this year, with an early onset and a peak that was three times higher than average. Public health experts are worried that, along with a COVID-19 peak predicted in early December, two circulating respiratory viruses will be problematic for an already weakened hospital system and are emphasizing that people take the flu season seriously.
It doesn’t take much digging nowadays to find a startling new headline — “Overlapping pandemics: Monkeypox intensifies as COVID-19 continues to thrive,” one might read. While such public health emergencies and other tense political debates occupy much of the news cycle, it also seems that there is increased reporting on extreme weather events. Puerto Rico’s entire power grid was wiped out by Hurricane Fiona last week after several years of infrastructure improvements that followed Hurricane Maria in 2016. Just yesterday, Hurricane Ian became one of the most powerful storms to strike the US as it neared the Category 5 threshold. And for weeks now, nearly a third of Pakistan’s population has been underwater due to extreme flooding that closed out the summer. Tufts students are inundated with very real and diverse stories of how the climate crisis affects the daily lives of global populations, but how can we consolidate solutions that target the various issues at hand?
Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital have developed an antibody capable of neutralizing all known SARS-CoV-2 variants in pre-clinical assessments, according to an August pre-print. The study published within Science Immunology, presents a potential solution to future variants of concern, as this is the first effective antibody that neutralizes all major variants through the recent Omicron BA.5 variant.
While humans worry about the impending threats of COVID-19 and monkeypox, seals in the northeastern United States might have a different virus to worry about: bird flu. The marine mammals have come down this summer with a new strain of H5N1, which is believed to have spilled over to them from birds.
Would Gordon Ramsay approve of lab-grown meat? With the Kaplan Lab’s work in replicating the flavors and textures of traditional meat from a small biopsy of animal cells, maybe one day he will. The most recent series of developments in the lab have contributed a method to mass produce cell-cultured fat — fat grown in a lab from just a few animal cells.
Faint bubbles twist their way to the top of an inconspicuous green container about the size of a hand. Among the miscellaneous bottles and boxes on the countertop, you wouldn’t give the box — called an SDS-PAGE — a second glance, and you certainly wouldn’t guess what it was up to. In reality, this device is not a more boring version of a lava lamp, but a part of a larger effort at Tufts and beyond to redefine the food industry.
Last updated: 5/3/2022 at 11:22 a.m. (EST)
A nurse was found guilty of gross neglect and negligent homicide last month in a high-profile medical error case that some health care professionals argue could set a bleak precedent for mistakes in medicine.
Largest microbe ever discovered could explain the link between prokaryotes and eukaryotes
COVID-19 vaccine boosters will be strongly recommended — but not yet required — for students across Tufts’ campuses, university officials told the Daily last week. Testing frequency and pandemic protocols are also currently expected to remain unchanged going into the Spring semester.
Throughout her career, Ayse Asatekin, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at Tufts University, has sought to use filters to prevent illness and protect the environment. One mineral that performs this function is fluoride, which results in dental and skeletal fluorosis. Fluorosis is a degradation of bones or teeth that happens when fluoride is consumed in excess quantities at a young age. Now, Asatekin has finally found a solution to filtering fluoride out of water.
The omicron variant, the newest COVID-19 strain, may be more contagious but cause milder symptoms than other coronavirus variants, a new study suggests. Venky Soundararajan, a bioengineer who co-wrote the study, explained to the Washington Post that as viruses evolve to become more widespread, symptoms generally become less severe. Still, researchers caution that more information is needed about the novel variant.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact communities around the United States and the world, certain trends have emerged surrounding infection rates and their link with prevention measures including surveillance testing, masking and vaccine mandates. Experts agree that, especially on college campuses, these measures are essential in curbing the spread of COVID-19.
A new COVID-19 variant labeled omicron has recently emerged in several countries, including South Africa, Botswana and Hong Kong, and contains dozens of mutations from the original alpha variant,leading many scientists to discuss its implications for COVID-19’s future. Although the moment when omicron first started to infect people is not exactly known, infectious disease researcher Kristian Andersen hypothesizes that the variant could have emerged in September or October, indicating that it was initially slow to spread. However, this does not mean that it is less contagious than previous variants; in fact, researchers predict that the mutations associated with omicron may likely increase the virus’s resistance to the vaccine and its rate of infection, according to evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom. Because of this,researchers are suggesting that people receive a booster shot to strengthen their protection against omicron.
Among the 3D printers throughout the room, Vincent Fitzpatrick, a postdoctoral biomedical researcher at Tufts University, holds up a gray unassuming piece of plastic, crisscrossed with a cage-like structure. Hidden beneath a series of support structures that have yet to be removed, he explains, lies a perfect replica of a patient’s bone — assembled from data isolated from a CT scan so that it would have a Cinderella-like fit if surgically implanted.
