Internship at Kit.com - Health Diagnostics through Mail

Currently the most common way to run a diagnostic test is to go to a doctor\u27s office for a blood draw, but this has drawbacks - offices can be crowded, lead to exposure to illness, and take a large amount of time out of your day. At the Biotech startup company, Kit.com, we hope to provide the ability for clients to use our diagnostics kits in the comfort of their own home. Due to the use of the mail to deliver our kit anyone can use it and there are no needles involved to help assuage anxiety. We use a fringerprick test that uses lancets that provides a quick method that doesn\u27t require the user to see a needle. The amount of blood needed for our tests is approximately 700uL while conventional draws can take multiple milliliters. Some examples of some tests we provide are HbA1c, Triglyceride and multiple enzyme level panels. My role is to test the components of the kit for quality and to test the user experience with volunteers

Feet on the potential energy surface, head in the π clouds

The landscape of a potential energy surface is marked by chemically interesting features. Hills and valleys correspond to transition states and reactive intermediates; the deepest valley gives the most stable configuration. Mapping these features for individual molecules and for the interactions between molecules is one of the goals of computational chemistry. The dispersion energy is a weak attractive force in intermolecular interactions. Dispersion energy results from a purely quantum mechanical effect, in which instantaneous multipoles on one molecule induce multipoles on another. Among neutral atoms or molecules that lack permanent multipole moments, the dispersion interaction is the principal attractive force. Dispersion also plays a significant role in the interaction between molecules with diffuse π clouds. This interaction is often difficult to capture with standard computational chemistry methods, so a comparison of the results obtained with various methods is itself important. This work presents explorations of the potential energy surface of clusters of atoms and of the interactions between molecules. First, structures of small aluminum clusters are examined and classified as ground states, transition states, or higher-order saddle points. Subsequently, the focus shifts to dispersion-dominated π-π interactions when the potential energy surfaces of benzene, substituted benzene, and pyridine dimers are explored. Because DNA nucleotide bases can be thought of as substituted heterocycles, a natural extension of the substituted benzene and pyridine investigations is to model paired nucleotide bases. Finally, the success of the dispersion studies inspires the development of an extension to the computational method used, which will enable the dispersion energy to be modeled - and the potential energy surface explored - in additional chemical systems

The Meaning and Malleableness of Liberty from 1897-1945

This paper covers how the substance and meaning of liberty changed during the ending years of the Gilded Age (1870-1900) through the beginning ages of the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968). Economic liberty took shape in the cases Allegeyer v. Louisiana (1897) and Lochner v. New York (1905). Civil liberties would take several more years to come into the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. The case Gitlow v. New York (1925) began the establishment of incorporation of the Bill of Rights to the states, otherwise known as our fundamental liberties (note: The Supreme Court used selective incorporation, however). In the case U.S. v. Carolene Products (1938), the court stated that it would impose higher scrutiny to laws that violated the Bill of Rights. This paper attempts to rationalize that legal realism and sociological jurisprudence, both established by Roscoe Pound, changed the way we view liberty in the modern day. In a span of just under 50 years, the court retreated from substantive Due Process of economic liberty to substantive Due Process of civil liberty and human rights. Rulings such as Korematsu v. U.S. (1945), which established strict scrutiny, were the stepping stones of the growing Civil Rights Movement that would take the nation by storm from the mid-1950s until the end of the 1960s. Lastly, this paper argues that, while it may not be publicly known to all, Supreme Court decisions shape the way our laws are created, and thus, how our democratic society functions as a whole. We must not take our liberty for granted

PhD

dissertationTransport and permeability properties of the blood-cerebrospinal fluid and blood-brain barriers were determined by kinetic analysis of radioisotope uptake from the plasma into the central nervous system of adult and infant rats. For adult rats (5 wk of age), 36CI and 22Na uptake into the lateral ventricle (LVCP) and fourth ventricle (4VCP) choroid plexuses were resolved into two components, a fast component (t,½ 0.02-0.05 h) which represents isotope distribution within the extracellular and residual erythrocyte compartments and a slow component (t ½ 0.85-1.93 h) representing isotope movement into the epithelial cell compartment. Calculated LVCP and 4VCPcell [CI], 67 mmol/kg cell HO, were 3.9x greater than that predicted for passive distribution by the membrane potential. It is postulated that CI is actively transported into the choroid ependymal cell across the basolateral membrane; the energy for active CI transport may be the Na electrochemical potential gradient which is twice that of the CI electrochemical potential difference. 36CI and 22Na uptake into the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) were resolved into two components, a fast component (t ½ 0.18 h, fractional volume 0.24) and a slow component (t ½ 1.2 h, fractional volume 0.76). Evidence suggests that the fast component represents isotope movement across the blood-CSF barrier, i.e., the choroid plexuses. The slow component may reflect isotope exchange primarily from brain extracellular fluid into the CSF. Cerebral cortex and cerebellum uptake of 36CI and 22 Na were resolved into two components. The fast component (t ½ 0.02-0.05 h, fractional volume 0.04-0.08) Is comprised of the vascular compartment and a small perivascular space. The slow component (t ½ 1.1-1.7 h, fractional volume 0.92-0.96) represents isotope movement across the blood-brain barrier into the brain extracellular and cellular compartments. The extracellular fluid volume of the cerebral cortex and cerebellum was estimated as ~13% from the initial slope of the brain space versus CSF space curve. Like the choroid plexuses, the glial cell compartment of the brain would appear to actively accumulate CI from 2-6x that predicted for passive distribution. The relative permeability of the blood-CSF and blood-brain barriers to 36CI, 22Na, and 3H-mannitol was determined by calculating permeability surface-area products (PA). Analysis of the PA values for all three isotopes indicates that the effective permeability of the choroidal epithelium (blood-CSF barrier) is significantly greater than that of the cerebral cortex or cerebellum capillary endothelium (blood-brain barrier). Analysis of radioisotope uptake by the 1- and 2-wk rat central nervous system revealed significant maturational differences from that of the 5-wk rat. The calculated LVCPand 4VCP cell [CI] and [Na] were markedly greater in the 1-wk than in the 5-wk rat. Likewise, a significant CSF fast component was not observed for radioisotope uptake at 1 wk of age. It is postulated that while the immature choroid plexus can actively accumulate CI across the basolateral membrane of the cell, the mechanisms which regulate CI exit from the choroidal cell into the CSF have not fully developed. Thus, at 1 wk, epithelial cell [CI] and [Na] were substantially greater than at 2 or 5 wk because ion transport into the choroidal cell across the basolateral membrane was not coupled with ion movement from the cell into the CSF. The onset of choroid plexus fluid secretion {~2 wk), as indicated by the volume of the CSF fast component, corresponds in time to the decrease in choroid plexus cell [CI] and [Na] (1-2 wk). Lastly, the cerebral cortex and cerebellum PA for all three radioisotopes decreased significantly between 1 and 5 wk of age (barrier tightening) while the CSF (fast component) PA to 36CI and 22Na increased with age (transepithelial choroid plexus NaCI transport)

The Unusual Variability of the Large Magellanic Cloud Planetary Nebula RPJ 053059-683542

We present images and light curves of the bipolar Planetary Nebula RPJ 053059-683542 that was discovered in the Reid-Parker AAO/UKST H-alpha survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The emission from this object appears entirely nebular, with the central star apparently obscured by a central band of absorption that bisects the nebula. The light curves, which were derived from images from the SuperMACHO project at CTIO, showed significant, spatially resolved variability over the period 2002 January through 2005 December. Remarkably, the emission from the two bright lobes of the nebula vary either independently, or similarly but with a phase lag of at least one year. The optical spectra show a low level of nebular excitation, and only modest N enrichment. Infrared photometry from the 2MASS and SAGE surveys indicates the presence of a significant quantity of dust. The available data imply that the central star has a close binary companion, and that the system has undergone some kind of outburst event that caused the nebular emission to first brighten and then fade. Further monitoring, high-resolution imaging, and detailed IR polarimetry and spectroscopy would uncover the nature of this nebula and the unseen ionizing source.Comment: Accepted for ApJ Letters; 6 page

Swinburne's explanation of the universe

Richard Swinburne, Is There a God? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. vii+144.Swinburne's Is There A God? presents a brief, updated version of his book, The Existence of God, in which Swinburne argued that criteria used in scientific reasoning could be used to argue that God probably exists. This new book is designed for a wider audience than professional philosophers. Nonetheless, there much that is new and of interest to philosophers in Is There a God? For example, there is a discussion of Stephen Hawking's cosmology, some new ideas in the philosophy of mind, and a new way of formulating the argument that theism is a simpler explanation of the universe than is materialism.</jats:p