Osmotic pressure induced tensile forces in tendon collagen

Water is an important component of collagen in tendons, but its role for the function of this load-carrying protein structure is poorly understood. Here we use a combination of multi-scale experimentation and computation to show that water is an integral part of the collagen molecule, which changes conformation upon water removal. The consequence is a shortening of the molecule that translates into tensile stresses in the range of several to almost 100 MPa, largely surpassing those of about 0.3 MPa generated by contractile muscles. Although a complete drying of collagen would be relevant for technical applications, such as the fabrication of leather or parchment, stresses comparable to muscle contraction already occur at small osmotic pressures common in biological environments. We suggest, therefore, that water-generated tensile stresses may play a role in living collagen-based materials such as tendon or bone.United States. Office of Naval Research. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and EngineersNational Institutes of Health (U.S.) (U01-EB016422

Digital services landscape in primary care setting in city of Zagreb; an EIP-AHA reference site case study

European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP on AHA) brings together partners to create innovative solutions to the challenges of aging. Reference Sites (RS) of the Partnership act as hubs of innovation and assist the scale-up of identified solutions. “Blueprint on Digital Transformation of Health and Care for the Ageing Society” (The Blueprint) is guiding the shift towards ICT enabled patient-centered care. To further inform its development, a tool has been created and piloted across RS, to explore the digital services landscape and find services that address the needs of the personas developed for this tool, that represent the needs of the populations. The aim of this case study was to explore the digital services ecosystem in primary care in Zagreb from the services availability and accessibility perspective, using the personas needs tool. The total of 23 digital services was identified out of which 21 matched at least one persona need. Each service-need match was scored against usefulness and accessibility criteria and the resulting matrix was evaluated using original methods. The results point to several underperforming services and provide insight into possible improvement strategies. Several “workhorse” services were identified that are heavily dependent on the health workforce. The services adopted through EIP on AHA twinning schemes performed well against set criteria. The persona based tool, along with the original service assessment methodology based on the tool’s framework provides a new perspective to the digital services landscape, useful for planning the areas for improvement and detecting underperforming services on a system level

Implementing Agile Continuous Education (ACE) at MIT and beyond: The MIT Refugee Action Hub (ReACT) case

The rapid pace of change in technology, business models, and work practices is causing ever-increasing strain on the global workforce. Companies in every industry need to train professionals with updated skill-sets in a rapid and continuous manner. However, traditional educational models — university classes and in-person degrees— are increasingly incompatible with the needs of professionals, the market, and society as a whole. New models of education require more flexible, granular and affordable alternatives. MIT is currently developing a new educational framework called Agile Continuous Education (ACE). ACE describes workforce level education offered in a flexible, cost-effective and time-efficient manner by combining individual, group, and real-life mentored learning through multiple traditional and emerging learning modalities. This paper introduces the ACE framework along with its different learning approaches and modalities (e.g. asynchronous and synchronous online courses, virtual synchronous bootcamps, and real-life mentored apprenticeships and internships) and presents the MIT Refugee Action Hub (ReACT) as an illustrative example. MIT ReACT is an institute-wide effort to develop global education programs for underserved communities, including refugees, displaced persons, migrants and economically disadvantaged populations, with the goal of promoting the learner’s social integration and formal inclusion into the job market. MIT ReACT’s core programs are the Certificate in Computer and Data Science (CDS) and the MicroMasters in Data, Economics and Development Policy, which consist of a combination of online courses, bootcamps, and global apprenticeships. Currently, MIT ReACT has regional presence in the Middle East and North Africa, East Africa, South America, Asia, Europe and North America

Accelerated Growth Plate Mineralization and Foreshortened Proximal Limb Bones in Fetuin-A Knockout Mice

PMCID: PMC3473050This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited