Influx of Ca2+ into isolated secretory vesicles from adrenal medulla Influence of external K+ and Na+

Secretory vesic1es from adrenal medulla contain catecholamines, nuc1eotides and proteins, all of which are released into the extracellular fluid during exocytosis. Adrenal medullary secretory vesic1es also contain high concentrations of Ca'+ [1]. The mechanism of the aecumulation of Ca 2+ into the vesicles is largely unknown and the experimental data eoncerning the uptake of Ca'+ into isolated secretory vesicles are contradictory. It has been reported that secretory vesicle membranes are impermeable to Ca'+ [2], that secretory vesicles take up Ca 2+ independently of ATP [3] and that they possess an ATP-stimulated uptake system [4,5]. In earlier work relatively impure and unstable seeretory vesicle fractions were used for the determination of Ca 2+ -uptake. We have developed a method to isolate highly purified and stable secretory vesicles from bovine medulla [6]. With these vesic1es we repeated earlier Ca'+ -uptake experiments and found that: (i) The vesic1es take up <sCa2+ in K+-containingmedia; (ü) 4SCa2+ uptake is abolished in the presence ofNa+; (üi) nie Ca 2+ content of isolated secretory vesic1es is increased when incubated with Ca 2+ in media containing K+, but not in media containing Na +

When Are Medical Apps Medical? Off-Label Use and the Food and Drug Administration

People have a love/hate relationship with rapidly changing healthcare technology. While consumer demand for medical apps continues to grow as rapidly as does supply (there are over 100,000 health, wellness and medical applications, or ‘apps’ on the market), healthcare professionals and safety experts worry about the impact of these apps on the health consumer. In response to the rapidly growing mobile healthcare sector, the Food and Drug Administration has put forth guidelines to regulate ‘mobile medical apps’ (MMAs), those health-related apps that are (self) designated as medical devices. In this article, I argue that this decision, to only regulate apps that bill themselves as medical devices, will create a market for ‘off-label’ app use. Further, I will talk about the oft used analogy between off-label apps and off-label pharmaceuticals, showing that off-labeling apps will provide patients none of the benefits that come with a physician prescribing a drug off-label, while exposing the mobile healthcare consumer to significant risks that go significantly beyond those that we know of (and must accept) from prescription drugs. Recognizing that the Food and Drug Administration is not going to be able to significantly change its policies on oversight, I will suggest specific actions to at least mitigate some of the risks associated with off-label app use

Medical Apps: Public and Academic Perspectives

Medical apps have featured in popular websites and mainstream news media in recent months. However, there has been almost no mention of these tools in journals focusing on relevant ethical or social issues, including conflict of interest, the role of politics in science, and technological oversight.This essay examines the role that these philosophical issues might play in answering both public and academic questions about these pieces of emergent technology

The Effect of Clinical Education on Law Student Reasoning: An Empirical Study

During the past thirty years, clinical legal education has become an important component of most law school curricula. In clinics, students, typically in their second or third year of law school, represent clients in actual cases in a legal aid office at the law school, pursuant to a court approved student practice order. \u27 Under the supervision of faculty members, students interview and counsel clients, investigate facts, research legal rules, negotiate with opposing parties, draft documents, and try and argue cases in court. Proponents of clinical education have urged the development and expansion of clinical programs to train students in the skills necessary to apply legal doctrine in practice. While few have argued that the traditional law school curriculum be replaced with an entirely clinical curriculum, many have suggested the introduction of courses using clinical methods during the first year and increased clinical offerings in the last two years. Just recently, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published a major study of legal education lauding clinical education as one of the law school\u27s primary means of teaching students how to connect the abstract thinking formed by legal categories and procedures with fuller human contexts. And in the recent report, Best Practices for Legal Education, which professes to present a vision and road map for legal education, the authors argue that contextualized learning, such as clinical training, is the most effective and efficient way for students to develop professional competence. While the proponents of clinical education identify a number of virtues for this pedagogy, much of the literature on the subject focuses on one major benefit: teaching modes of planning and analysis for problem solving in unstructured situations. Advocates of clinical education argue that traditional legal education has focused too narrowly on legal rules and doctrinal analysis. In his seminal article on the purposes of clinical legal education, Anthony Amsterdam complained that traditional legal education taught students only three kinds of analytic thinking: case reading and interpretation; doctrinal analysis and application; and logical conceptualization and criticism, while ignoring other modes of analysis that are essential for the practice of law. These neglected modes of analysis include: (1) ends-means thinking; (2) hypothesis formulation and testing in information acquisition; and (3) decision making in situations where options involve differing and often uncertain degrees of risk and promises of different sorts

A new code for Fourier-Legendre analysis of large datasets: first results and a comparison with ring-diagram analysis

Fourier-Legendre decomposition (FLD) of solar Doppler imaging data is a promising method to estimate the sub-surface solar meridional flow. FLD is sensible to low-degree oscillation modes and thus has the potential to probe the deep meridional flow. We present a newly developed code to be used for large scale FLD analysis of helioseismic data as provided by the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG), the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) instrument, and the upcoming Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) instrument. First results obtained with the new code are qualitatively comparable to those obtained from ring-diagram analyis of the same time series.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 4th HELAS International Conference "Seismological Challenges for Stellar Structure", 1-5 February 2010, Arrecife, Lanzarote (Canary Islands