Life - now in exciting 3D!

"AIDS Virus - Third Edition" by Ellen Sandor

Medill Reports: Chicago

Republished by: The Chicago Journal

Chicago artist Ellen Sandor has been bending the dimensions of visual art since the 1980s, creating scientific visualizations of everything from fractal math to viruses.

Driven originally by what she describes as “a healthy appetite for kitsch,” Sandor was fascinated by turn-of-the-century novelties such as lenticular postcards and stereoscopic films. She set out to develop ways to include similar alternative effects in her work.

Learning to regulate emotions may offer comfort to those with developmental challenges

Rubbing "Weeping Yogi" statues such as this one is thought
to bring comfort to the distressed. (Jessica Krinke/MEDILL)

Medill Reports: Chicago

Republished in: Get Healthy Magazine (Northwest Indiana Times)


"We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” -Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

I often recall a duck cruising along a placid lake when trying to describe living with ADHD. It appears calm, daydreaming on the surface while kicking frantically underneath.

New options give The Pill a rebirth at 50

Evaluating life with hormonal birth control 50 years later.
(Jessica Krinke/MEDILL)

Medill Reports: Chicago

WATCH: Dr. Debby explains more about The Pill

The Pill celebrates its 50th birthday this year yet understanding regarding the ins and outs of hormonal birth control still remain in adolescence.

While just as effective as it’s always been, it’s not your mother’s pill anymore.

If you can't beat 'em, stop 'em where they stand

Human breast cancer cells treated left to right with dasatinib. The same samples are dyed to highlight different proteins. Photo courtesy of Dr. Corey.

Medill Reports Chicago

Republished in : Science in Society, Evanston Trib Local

Researchers at Northwestern University are pioneering ways to shoot out the tires from breast cancer’s getaway car in a high-speed chase of drug assassins and carcinogenic criminals.

Dr. Seth Corey, M.D.

That’s because breast cancer itself doesn’t kill until it metastasizes, or travels, to other sensitive organs, invades and then grows. But a new clue to stopping this destructive spree surprisingly came from children.

Dr. Seth Corey is a pediatric oncologist at Children’s Memorial Hospital and professor of cellular and molecular biology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He and his researchers saw similarities between the travels of breast cancer and another notorious roamer – leukemia. They found that dasatinib, a drug already used to eliminate leukemia in the bone marrow, may also prevent mobility in breast cancer, keeping it from jumping the mammary ship to invade vital organs and kill.

But even though dasatinib is FDA-approved for the treatment of leukemia, the likelihood of your doctor prescribing it for breast cancer just yet is slim. The Northwestern research team hopes to take advantage of dasatinib’s clinical breast cancer trials to determine what responds best. By mapping the biological signatures of varying cancer types this way, fingerprints of these malignant flight-risks to assist in diagnosis and further targeted treatment may not be far off.

Grains of change: Northwestern researchers craft the future of plastics

J. Mirian Diop, a graduate student with Northwestern University’s
Torkelson’s Research Group, adjusts the construction of a screw for the
lab’s “extruder,” a gadget that combines polymers molecularly.
Diop left an industrial chemical engineering career to pursue
environmentally beneficial research. (Jessica Krinke/MEDILL)

In a small laboratory on the ground floor of an unassuming office building in Evanston, J. Mirian Diop, a petite young woman with a soft African accent and a beaming smile, spends her days reworking experiments until the right combination of polymer grains produces the desired results.

Northwestern University’s Torkelson Research Group has big plans for those tiny grains. Diop and her colleagues think that someday the work done here will change the way the world produces and recycles much of its everyday plastic products.

After each tweak of the mixture, Diop sets up again for another three-hour test beneath the lab’s florescent lights and concrete walls lined with machinery parts and trays of various granulated plastics.

Right now, the conventional way industry creates plastics is to melt down the specific polymers (science for plastic) needed and blend them with dyes until the mixture is the desired color and consistency.