Leading the Way?: Maine's Initial Experience in Expanding Coverage Through Dirigo Health Reforms

Examines interim indicators -- enrollment of the previously uninsured, responses from small firms and the working poor, and the impact on costs -- of Maine's progress in providing affordable health insurance through the Dirigo Health program

Direct Freeform Fabrication of Spatially Heterogeneous Living Cell-Impregnated Implants

The objectives of this work are the development of the processes, materials, and tooling to directly “3-D print” living, pre-seeded, patient-specific implants of spatially heterogeneous compositions. The research presented herein attempts to overcome some of the challenges to scaffolding, such as the difficulty of producing spatially heterogeneous implants that require varied seeding densities and/or cell-type distributions. In the proposed approach, living implants are fabricated by the layer-wise deposition of pre-cell-seeded alginate hydrogel. Although alginate hydrogels have been previously used to mold living implants, the properties of the alginate formulations used for molding were not suitable for 3-D printing. In addition to changing the formulation to make the alginate hydrogels “printable,” we developed a robotic hydrogel deposition system and supporting CAD software to deposit the gel in arbitrary geometries. We demonstrated this technology’s capabilities by printing alginate gel implants of multiple materials with various spatial heterogeneities, including, implants with completely embedded material clusters. The process was determined to be both viable (94±5% n=15) and sterile (less than one bacterium per 0.9 µL after 8 days of incubation). Additionally, we demonstrated the printing of a meniscus cartilage-shaped gel generated directly from a CT Scan. The proposed approach may hold advantages over other tissue printing efforts [5,9]. This technology has the potential to overcome challenges to scaffolding and could enable the efficient fabrication of spatially heterogeneous, patient-specific, living implants.Mechanical Engineerin

Geometries and energetics of methanol–ethanol clusters: a VUV laser/time-of-flight mass spectrometry and density functional theory study

Hydrogen-bonded clusters, formed above liquid methanol (Me) and ethanol (Et) mixtures of various compositions, were entrained in a supersonic jet and probed using 118 nm vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) laser single-photon ionization/time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The spectra are dominated by protonated cluster ions, formed by ionizing hydrogen-bonded MemEtn neutrals, m = 0–4, n = 0–3, and m + n = 2–5. The structures and energetics of the neutral and ionic species were investigated using both the all-atom optimized potential for liquid state, OPLS-AA, and the density functional (DFT) calculations. The energetic factors affecting the observed cluster distributions were examined. Calculations indicate that the large change in binding energy going from trimer to tetramer can be attributed more to pair-wise interactions than to cooperativity effects

A⁴⁰/K⁴⁰ Ages of Micas and Feldspars from the Glenarm Series near Baltimore, Maryland

The inner zone of the central Appalachian Mountains is a belt of metamorphic and plutonic rocks which crop out in the Blue Ridge province and underlie most of the Piedmont province. In southeastern Pennsylvania and adjacent parts of Maryland, the oldest rock is the Baltimore gneiss, which forms domical uplifts surrounded and overlain by the Glenarm series. This series consists of a basal quartzite (Setters) overlain by a marble (Cockeysville) and a thick series of mica schists (Wissahickon and Peters Creek) of sedimentary origin but including in some places altered volcanics (1). The Glenarm group is locally cut by pegmatite, granite, and other plutonic rocks