The economy, presidential election, and Middle Eastern affairs usually take the forefront in today’s media. However, looming behind the news of rising and falling gas prices is a most alarming domestic issue, namely the obesity epidemic. There has been an occasional eye-opener, such as the documentary “Super Size Me,” to force Americans to realize the enormity of this issue. Still, some Americans neglect to acknowledge the pounds accumulating directly onto their bodies. The number of obese citizens in the United States has increased at a frightening rate during the past several years because Americans obsess on fattening foods. A typical nutritional philosophy is the backbone of the problem: fast food is cheap, filling, and great tasting, so why not eat it? . . . As an eating disorder, obesity heightens vulnerability to life-threatening conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and respiratory problems..... Read more...
Nanostructures are constructed from carbon nanotubes as well as small nanoparticles on the scale of 0.000 000 001 meters. In recent years, DNA has come to be used in nanotechnology as a structural base material. DNA is prized in this regard for its unique property of Watson-Crick complementary base pairing. This natural process can be exploited to allow for the self-assembly of segments of DNA. Base pairing itself is an extremely primitive example of self-assembly. Because DNA naturally uses this process to form many different shapes, it is a very pliable material that is easily shaped simply by altering nucleotide sequences. Thus, self-assembly of DNA is cheaper, easier, and more desirable than physical manipulation..... Read more...
I hit numerous impasses and sometimes spent hours at my local university's library thinking and looking for theorems and tools. For example, when I started to parameterize my space curve, I ran into the problem that one of Wang et al.'s theorem that was crucial in parameterization failed for my intersection space curve projection. I was stuck, but I knew I could adapt it some way. I read ahead. I tried multiple ways of attacking this problem. Many times I failed. I didn't give up. I just went back to my notes, and looked for new ideas that I had written down. Weeks later, while I was reading the parameterization section in Wang et al.'s paper, I suddenly realized that if I lowered the degree of the space curve projection, I could successfully adapt the failed theorem . . . Eventually I was able to nd the parameterization for a special case of the intersection curve. Read more...
Last year, a friend of mine from camp was harassed over the Internet. Her “friends” tormented her online by sending a steady stream of emails and instant messages that threatened or insulted her. This occurred for months, and it became so extreme that she was too distressed even to go to school . . . Soon after I heard her story, I read about Megan Meier, a thirteen-year-old girl who committed suicide after receiving hurtful messages online. It was a similar situation, with more devastating results. Such stories piqued my interest in bullying . . . Researchers identify three types of bullying as traditional bullying: verbal, indirect, and physical bullying. The Brown University Child and Adolescent Behavior Letter (2005) defines traditional bullying as aggressive or intended harm by one person or a group, generally carried out repeatedly and over time, involving a power imbalance. In the past, there had to be physical interaction for victimization to occur, but with modern technology, bullies can extend their power of aggression onto the Internet. This new form of bullying has been called cyber-bullying..... Read more...
Astronomy has always captivated me, and after being introduced to the constellation Orion at a young age, I marveled at its steadfast loyalty as it returned each winter. The night sky seemed awesome and mystifying . . . I began researching and following the patterns of the moon and the night sky, as well as lunar and solar eclipses. I was thrilled when our family got a telescope . . . A neutron star is one of the densest objects in the universe, containing on average about 1.5 solar masses and having a radius of approximately 12 kilometers (Lattimer et al., 2004). For this reason, the neutron star may exhibit unique particle phenomena including superfluidity, superconductivity, and hyperon and quark-dominated matter, and provides many opportunities to study and test the theories of particle, nuclear, and dense matter astrophysics (Manchester et al., 2004). Despite the many significant advances in the field, there is still much that remains unknown regarding neutron stars, including their radii and shapes as they rotate (Shapiro et al., 2004). It is imperative that these properties be established before astronomers can use neutron stars to test more complex aspects of physics (Webb et al., 2007)..... Read more...
Computational science is playing a growing role in basic medical research in many ways. A key aspect of medical research and subsequent drug development is understanding exactly how biological systems operate on a macro and micro level. Through modeling of biological molecules, cells, tissues, and organs, and the networks of interactions, scientists can explore the mechanism through which these systems operate. Agent-based models are comprised of multiple, interacting agents situated within a model or simulation environment. A relationship between agents is specified, linking agents to other agents and / or other entities within a system. In an agent-based model, each component of a system of interest is represented as a discrete “agent”, with its own specific behavior (methods) and attributes (variables) . . . In my project, I attempted to apply this type of modeling on a much smaller biological scale. I considered not organs or cells or even organelles, but the actual proteins and lipids inside the cell, which has not been studied in the past years. The possibility of such rapid, cheap and exactly repeatable computer simulation of cellular signaling mechanisms represents a breakthrough in the study of cell biology. Here, I present the first agent-based model based on a cellular signaling pathway and show how it can be used to qualitatively study the effects of pathway perturbations, which may result in cancer..... Read more...
Certain arthropods such as the water strider and the fisher spider have acquired the unique ability to walk on the surface of the water by exploiting the phenomenon of surface tension that occurs at the airwater interface. Water striders and other water-walking arthropods distribute their weight between supporting legs, creating dimples in the water’s surface without penetrating it. These dimples push against the weight of the water strider because the water is trying to return to its original state. Numerous studies have attempted to mimic the water strider's water walking abilities by creating robotic water striders with a similar morphological design. Despite our understanding of surface tension mechanisms, water striders are still far more adept at navigating along the free surface than their robotic counterparts, and it is clear that a deeper understanding is needed to produce robots on par with actual water striders. Such a robot would be exceptionally useful in monitoring marsh environments not suited for either floating or walking robots and would be much more easily converted into an amphibious robot because it already has the entire leg structure in place. Also, water strider robots could skate effortlessly over the surface of the water because they do not have to push water out of the way like a floating robot making it very fast and efficient..... Read more...
In fact, for a time, I really was stuck. For the entire summer between sophomore and junior years, my research project rusted in a corner, because I had not yet discovered the true meaning of “computational” in “computational biology.” To me, “computational” was still the four major operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division; I was “computing” numbers, much like a cheap, gas-station calculator. Little did I know, however, that there is an entire field of artificial intelligence focusing on classifiers, statistical learning methods, and intelligent systems . . . An understanding of drug-drug interactions (DDIs) impacts fields ranging from medicine to drug development to public health. In 2004, the average American took a combination of 12 prescription drugs per day [1]. This daily behavior seems trivial, but lack of proper DDI knowledge puts millions of individuals at risk, as a set of 12 drugs could cause more than 1000 lethal interactions. Also in 2004, more than 1% of all deaths were directly caused by DDIs, because these patients were oblivious to the life-threatening reactions that their drug repertoire would cause in the human body [2]. By developing a comprehensive database of DDIs, we can hopefully reduce the number of deaths associated with DDIs . . . There are existing programs that help pharmacists dispense better combinations of drugs, but these are sparse and often inaccurate. One of the goals of this investigation is to improve these programs in accuracy so that pharmacies can be more effective in preventing fatal DDIs..... Read more...
On my highly anticipated field trip to the ice skating rink in the eighth grade, I broke my leg within five minutes. I waited in a daze on the ice, thinking I had just sprained an ankle, until I felt the bones in my leg jiggling. The ambulance immediately came, I was shipped off, and put to sleep. When Iwoke up, Dr. Martin, a renowned orthopedic surgeon, announced to me that I had a “broken tibia and fibula, both in multiple places, and am bleeding internally. We cannot delay this operation. You’re scheduled to undergo surgery immediately" . . . My face was masked and my IV flushed with intravenal anesthesia. I had no recollection of what followed until I awoke with an excruciating pain in my knee. I breathed slowly and deliberately, but why was I awake? My knee was being torn open, and I couldn't open my eyes or wince! Then I recalled waking up from my surgery sobbing, surrounded by nurses cooing and repeating, “Everything will be all right.” I had acquired a 16" titanium rod and 4 screws in my leg through a 2" slit in my knee, and I was conscious for a part of it!. . . In Chaos Theory, Fractal Dimensions, and the Human Cerebrum, I discuss the evidence and development of a model to describe the dynamical processes responsible for consciousness and cognition. Emphasis is placed on chaotic neural activity and its mathematics in fractal dimensions to explain the phenomenon of subjective consciousness using objective physical mechanisms..... Read more...
University of Chicago
Professor David Mazziotti
Editor