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Practical advice about raising children
Photo by Fotolia
It's that time of year again when parents are rejoicing and children are lamenting about the upcoming school year. Suddenly, we are carefully checking school supply lists, scheduling haircuts, and trying desperately to get back into a routine. As you plan and prepare, take a few minutes to consider the ways you can help keep your kids healthy and thriving as they head back to class this fall. To help you on this journey, here are ten tips to implement this school year.
The rigors of school, extracurriculars and homework mean kids can easily become sleep-deprived. This can result in poor school performance, attention disorders, mood disruptions, and immune systems that are more susceptible to illness. Experts recommend children get at least 9 hours of sleep every night.
When many of us were growing up, we started our mornings with a bowl of cereal. Unfortunately, these traditional morning staples are loaded with sugar, added fiber, and synthetic vitamins or minerals. Look outside of the cereal box for alternative meal ideas, including whole grains and proteins, to fuel a child's body and satisfy their hunger until lunch. For starters, consider adding eggs or oatmeal back into your family's daily morning routine.
Whether it is balancing grades and activities, homework, or scoring the winning touchdown on Friday night, kids feel a lot of pressure from parents, teachers, coaches and peers. This is especially true as they enter high school and start looking toward college. Let them know that it is okay to make mistakes and teach them methods to overcome setbacks and disappointments.
We always teach our children to share, but this is one surefire way to pass germs and illness around a classroom. Tell kids, "if you put it in your mouth, don't share". Advise older kids to avoid sharing deodorants or razors after gym or practice.
Whether it's biking, jump roping, playing Just Dance, or catching Pokemon, look for activities that are fun and encourage you to get in shape while participating. If the activities are appealing to our kids, exercising will seem less like a chore and more like a treat. Consider how celebrities like Kelly Osbourne, Catherine Zeta Jones, Jason Mraz, Beyonce, and even First Lady Michelle Obama are enjoying the hula hoop fitness movement and having fun at the same time!
Instead of wrapping sandwiches and meal items in questionable one-time use only plastics, consider utilizing safe reusable alternatives. While we realistically can't avoid plastics, look for recycling codes 1, 2, 4, and 5 on the bottom of products before purchasing. These are the safest to use. Also, avoid microwaving food in plastic containers if at all possible to avoid chemicals leeching into our foods.
What advice do you have for keeping your kids healthy this school year?
Summer vacations to sunny and sandy destinations are loads of fun, but the vast majority of summer memories happen right at home in our own backyards. Many parents focus on one week of summer vacation at the beach — but why not invest in where the other dozen or so weeks of summer will be spent?
Your backyard is full of potential, especially to kids. Here is a look at how to build the ultimate family friendly backyard wonderland.
Your backyard should be full of fun, but without unnecessary anxiety or worry. Unfortunately, over 200,000 children ages 14 and under are taken to emergency rooms each year because of injuries on playgrounds and about 80% of those injuries result from falls.
Any upgrades or new equipment you add should meet basic safety and common sense standards. You can prevent injuries by following installation instructions and common child-proofing practices. Be sure to survey potential problem areas yourself, too.
You can include the kids in bringing some of these ideas to fruition, but for others, you may want to call in a professional. Here is a range of ideas — from budget-friendly to extravagant — that can help make your backyard the ultimate summer destination.
To make your own low-budget, super simple move screen, all you need is a white sheet, some nails and two trees. Or, you can opt to build an outdoor movie screen that will make the highest viewing quality for the projected film (turns out they make a fabric for that).
After you create your screen, you can move on to the fun part: the furnishings. Arrange comfy outdoor chairs, beanbags and picnic blankets near the screen. If it's a cool night, encourage friends to bring sleeping bags--perfect for snuggling as a family. Pop some popcorn and enjoy!
Do you have an avid reader in the family? A hammock is a great way to ensure they enjoy some fresh air while reading. Be sure to properly hang the hammock. If you prefer to leave your hammock up — instead of taking it down every time it rains — be sure to look for a mildew-resistant material.
Many families own swing sets or jungle gyms. If you want to level up on your backyard activity center, try a backyard zip line. You'll likely want to enlist the help of your talented handyman of a father-in-law or your friend who is a contractor by day. The supplies are surprisingly simple, and there are even zip-line kits ready to go for purchase if you're not much of a DIYer. Keep in mind, safety is paramount when allowing children to hang from rope, so helmets and harnesses are a must.
Kids have been using chalk to decorate sidewalks and driveways for ages. There will always be a special place in our hearts for hopscotch boards and four square outlines etched in sidewalk chalk.
Elevate your love of chalk art and use chalkboard paint on fences or wall installations to create an outdoor artist's canvas. You can hang a bucket of chalk for easy access and clean up, or simply use a plastic container with a lid, so the chalk won't get wet if it rains.
The backyard playhouse is ubiquitous. Most kids have seen a mini house in a backyard, but what about a teepee? Create a backyard teepee using painter's canvas as the fabric, which is sturdy but won't cost a fortune. There is no hammering or power tools involved, so the kids can help and then decorate it as they wish. You could also use this opportunity to teach them about Native American history.
If you put a bit of sweat equity into your backyard, your family will enjoy a fun and creative summer. Consider trying one — or all! — of these projects to create a wonderland in your backyard to enjoy for the seasons to come.
I remember a couple of years ago, being at the new home of my ex-husband and his young girlfriend, for my sons' birthday celebration. My kids had asked their father to host this party and that I come along and celebrate with them. Of course I said yes, in spite of the heavy emotions I knew this would bring up for me. As the party progressed, I recall looking desperately for a spot to lift up into a handstand. I couldn't explain this urge to be upside down, but it was there, and when I found a wall (because I admit I am a yogi who needs a wall), and got myself inverted, I felt instant relief, and had a moment to literally look at the whole situation from a different perspective.
Kids of all ages feel stress, anxiety, sadness and other emotions as much as adults, and often don't have the tools to cope. When in the midst of a troubling situation, or feeling overwhelmed conversation isn't always the answer. Kids respond viscerally to a multitude of experiences, and often, getting them to do something physical gives them a more immediate way to safely handle what is troubling. Helping kids learn to invert gives them another way to not only change their physiology but also their outlook.
To invert really means to have the head below the heart. Inversions don't need to be intimidating. Often, the idea of headstands or handstands can bring on a bit of fear and anxiety, so unless these are desired inversions, there are others available to do the job. Downward dog is always a favorite, and readily available for everyone. Other options are wheel, shoulder stand, legs up the wall, happy baby and simply folding over one's own legs from a standing position There are safe ways to teach head and handstands with the support of a wall and a teacher. One of my favorite headstands uses blocks to do a no-head headstand, taking the weight and pressure off of the neck and head. Whatever the preference, inverting feels great and is extremely beneficial.
Turning things upside down actually has great benefit to the body. Inversions help strengthen the core, arms, and shoulders, and serve as good practice for balance. There is increased blood flow and oxygen to the brain, providing more clarity and an increased ability to focus, and improved circulation. This also helps to invigorate and energize the body. As we know sometimes kids get stuck in a pattern of negative thought, or feel drained, and heavy with emotions due to fatigue. Inversions such as headstand, handstand or forearm stand can give kids a mental boost that helps increase their energy and ability to tackle issues at hand. They can be a fun, quick, "pick me up!"
More soothing inversions, such as legs against the wall or happy baby can have a calming effect on the nervous system. When kids are stressed or upset, their sympathetic nervous system has usually taken over and they are stuck in a reactionary fight or flight mode. Calming inversions can activate the parasympathetic nervous system, and increase ability to make clearer decisions, slow down breathing, find homeostasis in the body's functioning, becoming and feeling more in control of a situation.
Photo by Susan Verde
In addition to physiologically affecting the brain and the nervous system, inversions can both literally and emotionally "turn that frown upside down." Having safe and effective choices and options for handling stress is important for children, as they encounter many varied situations into adulthood. Sometimes what kids need is a different way to see things and that is what inverting does. Being upside down builds confidence, boosting a child's view of his own ability to handle his emotions. When we can look at an event from another point of view, we cultivate empathy and compassion, as well as providing ourselves with more options to cope.
Looking at a situation from another angle also brings an element of playfulness and fun into the moment. Sometimes this shift is all that's needed to change one's mood and bring on a real smile from ear to ear.
Susan Verde is a yoga and mindfulness teacher, and author of the picture books The Museum, I Am Yoga, You and Me and the forthcoming The Water Princess.She lives in East Hampton, New York with her three children.
It's now a distant memory, but before the days of video games, tablets and other electronic devices, there was actually a time when kids loved to play outside. In fact, there was a time when parents thought their kids played outside too much, and they had to find ways to coax them back indoors.
Times, of course, have changed. For a variety of reasons, kids just don't go outside as much as they used to. It doesn't have to be that way, though. Here are 10 ways you can get your kids to go outside and help them learn to love it.
This is the simplest option, of course, but take your kids for a walk. Make it a part of your evening routine – rain or shine. This will have the double effect of helping your child get used to going outside regularly, along with exercise for you both. You could also bump it up a notch and take your kids on a hike.
For many children, sleeping outside is an adventure. You may eventually want to take them on a real camping trip, but before that you can get a little practice but setting up a tent and camping in the backyard. This will include more than just sleeping, of course. There will be plenty of time to have a meal and play some games, all while spending time outdoors.
Looking at clouds and discussing what they remind you of may be one of the oldest games in the book. But it can be an easy way to spend some time with your child outside and spark up a conversation and get their little wheels turning. Who knows? Maybe they will blossom into a full-fledged cloud appreciator.
The world of ultra-competitive youth sports can be a daunting proposition for many parents, but you don't have to have a child on the top traveling team for them to learn and enjoy all sports. The point is just to get them outside--childhood play is key for developing a wide variety of skills. Try a wide range of sports. Play catch with a football or baseball. Toss a Frisbee. Kick around a soccer ball. Shoot some hoops. Allowing your kids to try their hand at all manners of sports will help them appreciate the pros even more.
Gardening with your children will not only get them outside on a regular basis, but it will also help them learn the basics of botany and plant life. Not only that, but the whole family will benefit from the fruits, vegetables and herbs you grow together. There's just something about homegrown food that makes it taste that much better.
Teaching your kids to swim early in life will help them in the long run, but being around water doesn't always have to be about swimming. Depending on your child's age, there are countless other water activities available, too! Water skiing, snorkeling, body surfing or fishing are all water activities you and your kinds may choose to partake in. You can also enjoy the water without actually getting in it--take in the beauty and serenity of a local lake, pond, river or stream.
Putting together a good old fashioned clubhouse has multiple benefits. Not only will it get your kids in the habit of going outside regularly, but it will also give you plenty of bonding time while you build it together. Kids always enjoy feeling like they have access to their own private sanctuary, and having one in the backyard is a good way to do so while keeping your peace of mind intact.
Like many things on this list, starting a nature collection with your children has benefits above and beyond getting them out of the house and into fresh air. For one, it can teach them--and you--about everything from leaves to plants to bugs to birds. Starting a nature collection can also teach them values such as appreciating and respecting nature.
It may take a while to teach your child to ride a bike, but once they do there are hours of fun ahead. Riding with your kids will teach them all sorts of things, including the geography of your city your town, how to properly obey traffic laws and how to properly maintain and care for a bicycle. Bike riding, of course, is also an excellent form of exercise.
It's sad that in the last 30 years the time devoted to play in a preschooler's day has dropped from 40 to 25 percent of the day. Play is critical to a child's development and, the truth is, it doesn't really matter what they're doing to play. The key is just getting them outside and playing in the first place.
Summertime is almost here, and with the beautiful weather comes beach time! Between the sunscreen, gathering the snacks and towels, other "equipment," and loading everyone into the car for your drive, beach trips can feel a bit overwhelming. But once you've "landed" it is actually a wonderful opportunity to fit in some yoga and mindfulness. From the sand to the water, the beach is an opportunity to connect, relax and play. Try these active and calming exercises to infuse your child's beach day with a bit of yoga fun.
The beach is the perfect place to get your kids practicing mindfulness, and that particular attention paid to what is happening in the moment. Take some time to really observe the water, what is its color? Are there waves? Are they big or small? How do they form and move? Can you sync your breath to their ebb and flow? Once in the water what does it feel like against your skin? While immersed, ask, "How do you feel inside your body as each wave approaches? Nervous? Excited?" Engaging all of the senses can turn a dip into a mindful experience and a practice of awareness and appreciation for the beauty and wonder of nature. Taking a beach walk and collecting shells is also a great option. Feel the sand between the toes. Listen to the crunch with each footstep. Look closely at the details of each shell. Who lived in there? Can you hear the ocean?
Taking your child through a series of sun salutations can not only support everyone's appreciation for the gift of the sun, but it's a wonderful way to warm up the body after getting chilled in the water, and great exercise to boot! Start standing with feet hip distance apart. Inhale and reach up to the sky as if taking the sun in your hands. Exhale and fold over the feet, inhale with hands on shins and look up. Exhale and fold. Step each foot back into a plank and drop to the belly. With bent elbows and hands on either side of the body aligned with the chest, palms pressing into the ground, push the sand away as you arch the back and look up at the sky in cobra pose. Coming back to all fours lift your hips in the air, keeping hands on the ground and arms straight. Gaze at your belly and wag your tail in downward dog pose. Jump your feet to your hands and squat in frog, then straighten the legs and fold over them as you did from the start. Raise your arms towards the sky as you slowly roll up and then bring palms pressed together to your heart. Repeat this sequence as many times as feels good. Build up a sweat and say "Thank you Sun!" Kids will be ready for round two of wave diving in no time!
The softness of the sand is perfect for trying more difficult poses and removing the fear of falling which can often hold kids (and grown-ups) back from inverting. Kids can kick up their heels and practice handstands or crow pose. Give kids the challenge and they will rise to the occasion. Children naturally love to turn upside down and look at the world from a different perspective and the beach is a naturally supportive setting for this exploration.
Photo by Susan Verde
Lying on a towel, soaking up the rays (with lots of sunscreen on of course) is one of the best parts of a beach day. Encourage your kids to take some down time, stretching out on their backs, closing their eyes, and letting their whole body and the thoughts of a busy day just go. Some deep breathing in and out through the nose will allow their muscles to loosen and their minds to clear. Having the sand beneath them is great for a tense and relax exercise or a body scan. While in this restful position have your child tighten different parts of the body and then on an exhale, relax them or bring their attention to each body part imagining they are sinking into the soft sand.
Beach yoga and mindfulness can give kids a chance to reset their bodies and minds, and can help to manage the transitions and busy schedules that the season can bring, which makes for a happier summertime experience for the whole family!
Planes, trains, automobiles or backyards: What will be your pick for family fun this summer? The minute schools let out, the kids are officially on vacation. That means that mom and dad have to be on elevated alert to make sure the home front is also a safe zone for fun.
Those precautions can extend to the family vacation as well. It doesn't take a lot of effort to protect your loved ones, just a little planning. Do it right and they won't even notice you've become a super safety monitor. Here's what to keep in mind:
The moment your kids step outside to play, they should be lathered with sunscreen. The minimal SPF factor is around 15. Thankfully, sunscreen companies have gotten with the program in terms of "ease of use." Now, you can find safe sunscreen options that come in sprays as well as lotions. Most sunscreen should be reapplied every two hours. This is especially true if your kids are around water or sand, where the sun's reflections intensify. Keeping babies and toddlers covered with hats and long sleeves is also a good precaution.
If given the chance, the average kid would hit the backyard in the morning and not come back inside until it's time for dinner. As with sunscreen, you also want them to stay hydrated. That means taking drink breaks at least every twenty minutes when out in the heat. Make it easy by setting up a cooler of water. Keep in mind that the minute your kid feels thirsty, they are already dehydrated.
Depending on where you live, you might need to do a tick check when playtime is over – particularly if you've been in a wooded area. Ticks can be tricky and hard to spot, but you definitely want to catch them before they latch onto you or your child. If you find a tick, make sure you follow proper tick removal and disposal techniques.
Photo by Fotolia
If you have a pool in your backyard, it could become the most popular spot on the block. Rule number one: Never leave young kids alone by the pool. Ever. It doesn't matter how skilled they are at swimming or diving, they need supervision. You are the lifeguard now. Even your teens should know that you're keeping an eye out on them to prevent horseplay that can lead to injuries.
When enjoying your typical pool session, make sure you've got a phone outside, along with flotation rings and a shepherd's hook. For extra vigilance, take a CPR course. With a couple of hours' training, you'll be good to go.
When visiting a new pool at a hotel, theme park or community center, make sure you give it the once over before the kids dive in. Specifically, make sure all the drains are covered, especially in the deep end. It doesn't hurt to check the inspection reports as well, since as many as 80% of public pools had at least one violation in a recent study.
If a road trip is on the agenda, make sure your car is ready for the adventure. It might be time to review your child safety seat setups to make sure they conform to recommended standards (1 in 4 car seats are not used or installed properly). Of course, you should also travel with an emergency road kit, to help if the car breaks down in bad weather.
Once you get behind the wheel put down the cell phone. Between the road ahead and what's going on in the backseat, you don't need any other distractions.
Summer is all about grilling. As you work up your new marinade recipe, review the hot zone areas with your kids. There is nothing wrong with getting them to help out with the cooking, but make sure they're aware of the potentially dangerous situations.
Ask any top chef and they'll recommend that before grilling, you bring meat and poultry to room temperature. This means setting it out on the counter for a bit, keeping it covered in a bowl or on a cutting board. After handing any type of raw meat or poultry, wash up and avoid using the same bowls or trays to transfer cooked meat, to avoid cross-contamination.
Of course, nothing can prevent your fair share of scrapes, cuts and bug bites. Fortunately that's nothing that can't be taken care of with a well-stocked first aid kit. Between that and common sense precautions, your family can look forward to a super safe and fun summer.
Growing your own food can be a big step in learning to eat well early in life. Instilling healthy eating habits in kids can be tricky, but if you can teach them to love gardening, your chances of getting your picky eater to eat their veggies will increase. With a few tips, you can get your child to enjoy themselves in the garden. Check out the list below for some ideas on giving your little one a green thumb.
Letting your kids pick what to plant can help keep them interested. They get to choose something and watch how it changes as they take care of it. The cause and effect part of gardening can be very rewarding for children. Get garden tools that are suited to their small hands and let them participate in the whole process of creating and maintaining a garden.
Dedicating a small section of the garden to your child can make gardening feel like a special activity for them. Having their own area to work in helps them feel important and included. Giving them their own garden space also grants a little room for creativity, because they can set up their garden just how they like it.
Plain flower pots look better with a coat of paint, and your child will enjoy making something colorful. Allow your child as much creative freedom as possible to decorate the garden as they wish. Let them paint pots or draw signs to identify plants. Anything they can do to personalize the garden will keep them content.
Kids love to get their hands dirty. Letting them go wild in the garden may be the secret to keeping your little helper entertained. Let them dig their own holes and plant their own seeds. Getting their hands in the dirt is something almost no kid can resist. Let your child water the garden sometimes, as well. Who doesn't love playing with the garden hose?
Be aware though; May and June can be rainy months, and if your yard is in a low-lying area, small puddles can quickly turn into a muddy pond. If you find yourself in this situation it may be helpful to remove water with a pump or at least redistribute it to other areas of your yard. Your white carpet will thank you later.
Kids are all about their senses. No matter what it is, they want to touch it, smell it or put it in their mouths. The garden can be the perfect place to explore your senses. Plant things that appeal to all the ways your kids interact with the world. Colorful flowers give them something to look at. Wooly plants such as lamb's ear are interesting to feel. Marigold and mint are highly scented plants. Lettuce and radishes will sprout quickly and show your kid that their hard work is paying off.
OK, this probably isn't the best way to get or keep your kids in the garden, but a reward system can make them more interested in their new role of farmer. You can create a garden chore chart and reward them for completing all their tasks. The reward should be something small but exciting. Getting to pick a rental movie, having 10 extra minutes of playtime or a small treat are some good possible rewards. Personalize the chart and reward system to your child and they might eventually start volunteering to garden.
Don't make gardening too stressful for your little helper. When offering advice on an activity, be specific but not overly strict. Rows don't need to be planted perfectly straight. Let your kids have a little wiggle room and allow them to garden in a carefree way. Never cry over spilled seed and always remember that clothes – and children – are washable.
Getting your child to help in the garden can start a lifelong love of healthy food. The physical activity is just one reason to get outside, and the time you spend together is irreplaceable. Even if your garden isn't the most successful, you're getting plenty of practice and your child is learning valuable skills they can carry with them their whole life.
Megan Wild is a gardener who is the process of cultivating her first succulent garden. She loves visiting local floral nurseries and picking out plants that she struggles to fit into her yard. Find her tweeting home and garden inspiration @Megan_Wild.
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PASADENA, Calif.—The cameras in our cell phones have
dramatically changed the way we share the special moments in our
lives, making photographs instantly available to friends and
family. Now, the imaging sensor chips that form the heart of these
built-in cameras are helping engineers at the California Institute
of Technology (Caltech) transform the way cell cultures are imaged
by serving as the platform for a "smart" petri dish.
Dubbed ePetri, the device is described in a paper that appears
online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences (PNAS).
Since the late 1800s, biologists have used petri dishes
primarily to grow cells. In the medical field, they are used to
identify bacterial infections, such as tuberculosis. Conventional
use of a petri dish requires that the cells being cultured be
placed in an incubator to grow. As the sample grows, it is
removed—often numerous times—from the incubator to be
studied under a microscope.
Not so with the ePetri, whose platform does away with the need
for bulky microscopes and significantly reduces human labor time,
while improving the way in which the culture growth can be
"Our ePetri dish is a compact, small, lens-free microscopy
imaging platform. We can directly track the cell culture or
bacteria culture within the incubator," explains Guoan Zheng,
lead author of the study and a graduate student in electrical
engineering at Caltech. "The data from the ePetri dish
automatically transfers to a computer outside the incubator by
a cable connection. Therefore, this technology can significantly
streamline and improve cell culture experiments by cutting down on
human labor and contamination risks."
The team built the platform prototype using a Google smart
phone, a commercially available cell-phone image sensor,
and Lego building blocks. The culture is placed on the image-sensor
chip, while the phone's LED screen is used as a scanning light
source. The device is placed in an incubator with a wire running
from the chip to a laptop outside the incubator. As the image
sensor takes pictures of the culture, that information is sent out
to the laptop, enabling the researchers to acquire and save images
of the cells as they are growing in real time. The technology is
particularly adept at imaging confluent cells—those that grow
very close to one another and typically cover the entire petri
"Until now, imaging of confluent cell cultures has been a highly
labor-intensive process in which the traditional microscope has to
serve as an expensive and suboptimal workhorse," says Changhuei
Yang, senior author of the study and professor of electrical
engineering and bioengineering at Caltech. "What this technology
allows us to do is create a system in which you can do wide
field-of-view microscopy imaging of confluent cell samples. It
capitalizes on the use of readily available image-sensor
technology, which is found in all cell-phone cameras."
In addition to simplifying medical diagnostic tests, the ePetri
platform may be useful in various other areas, such as drug
screening and the detection of toxic compounds. It has also
proved to be practical for use in basic research.
Caltech biologist Michael Elowitz, a coauthor on the study, has
put the ePetri system to the test, using it to observe embryonic
stem cells. Stem cells in different parts of a petri dish often
behave differently, changing into various types of other, more
specialized cells. Using a conventional microscope with its lens's
limitations, a researcher effectively wears blinders and is only
able to focus on one region of the petri dish at a time, says
Elowitz. But by using the ePetri platform, Elowitz was able to
follow the stem-cell changes over the entire surface of the
"It radically reconceives the whole idea of what a light
microscope is," says Elowitz, a professor of biology and
bioengineering at Caltech and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute
investigator. "Instead of a large, heavy instrument full of
delicate lenses, Yang and his team have invented a compact
lightweight microscope with no lens at all, yet one that can still
produce high-resolution images of living cells. Not only that, it
can do so dynamically, following events over time in live cells,
and across a wide range of spatial scales from the subcellular to
the macroscopic."
Elowitz says the technology can capture things that would
otherwise be difficult or impossible—even with
state-of-the-art light microscopes that are both much more
complicated and much more expensive.
"With ePetri, you can survey the entire field at once, but still
maintain the ability to 'zoom in' to any cells of interest," he
says. "In this regard, perhaps it's a bit like an episode of CSI
where they zoom in on what would otherwise be unresolvable details
in a photograph."
Yang and his team believe the ePetri system is likely to open up
a whole range of new approaches to many other biological systems as
well. Since it is a platform technology, it can be applied to other
devices. For example, ePetri could provide microscopy-imaging
capabilities for other portable diagnostic lab-on-a-chip tools. The
team is also working to build a self-contained system that would
include its own small incubator. This advance would make the system
more useful as a desktop diagnostic tool that could be housed in a
doctor's office, reducing the need to send bacteria samples out to
a lab for testing.
Seung Ah Lee, a graduate student in electrical engineering, and
Yaron Antebi, a postdoctoral scholar in biology—both from
Caltech—were also coauthors on the study, which is titled
"The ePetri dish, an on-chip cell imaging platform based on
subpixel perspective sweeping microscopy (SPSM)." Funding support
was provided by the Coulter Foundation.
Written by Katie Neith
PASADENA, Calif.—Responding to faces is a critical tool
for social interactions between humans. Without the ability to read
faces and their expressions, it would be hard to tell friends from
strangers upon first glance, let alone a sad person from a happy
one. Now, neuroscientists from the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech), with the help of collaborators at Huntington
Memorial Hospital in Pasadena and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in
Los Angeles, have discovered a novel response to human faces by
looking at recordings from brain cells in neurosurgical
The finding, described in the journal Current Biology,
provides the first description of neurons that respond strongly
when the patient sees an entire face, but respond much less to a
face in which only a very small region has been erased.
"The finding really surprised us," says Ueli Rutishauser, first
author on the paper, a former postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, and
now a visitor in the Division of Biology. "Here you have neurons
that respond well to seeing pictures of whole faces, but when you
show them only parts of faces, they actually respond less and less
the more of the face you show. That just seems
The neurons are located in a brain region called the amygdala,
which has long been known to be important for the processing of
emotions. However, the study results strengthen a growing belief
among researchers that the amygdala has also a more general role in
the processing of, and learning about, social stimuli such as
Other researchers have described the amygdala's neuronal
response to faces before, but this dramatic selectivity—which
requires the face to be whole in order to elicit a
response—is a new insight.
"Our interpretation of this initially puzzling effect is that
the brain cares about representing the entire face, and needs to be
highly sensitive to anything wrong with the face, like a part
missing," explains Ralph Adolphs, senior author on the study and
Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of
biology at Caltech. "This is probably an important mechanism to
ensure that we do not mistake one person for another and to help us
keep track of many individuals."
The team recorded brain-cell responses in human participants who
were awaiting surgery for drug-resistant epileptic seizures. As
part of the preparation for surgery, the patients had electrodes
implanted in their medial temporal lobes, the area of the brain
where the amygdala is located. By using special clinical electrodes
that have very small wires inserted, the researchers were able to
observe the firings of individual neurons as participants looked at
images of whole faces and partially revealed faces. The
voluntary participants provided the researchers with a unique and
very rare opportunity to measure responses from single neurons
through the implanted depth electrodes, says Rutishauser.
"This is really a dream collaboration for basic research
scientists," he says. "At Caltech, we are very fortunate to have
several nearby hospitals at which the neurosurgeons are interested
in such collaborative medical research."
The team plans to continue their studies by looking at how the
same neurons respond to emotional stimuli. This future work,
combined with the present study results, could be highly valuable
for understanding a variety of psychiatric diseases in which this
region of the brain is thought to function abnormally, such as mood
disorders and autism.
Other Caltech authors on the paper are Oana Tudusciuc, a
postdoctoral scholar in neuroscience and psychology, and Dirk
Neumann, visiting associate in biology. Medical collaborators on
the study include Adam Mamelak, a neurosurgeon at Cedars-Sinai; and
Huntington Memorial Hospital's Christopher Heller, neurosurgeon;
Ian Ross, neurosurgeon; Linda Philpott, neuropsychologist; and
William Sutherling, medical director of the Epilepsy and Brain
Mapping Program. The work in the paper "Neuronal responses
selective for whole faces in the human amygdala," was supported by
the National Science Foundation, the Pfeiffer Family Foundation,
and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
PASADENA, Calif.—Four members of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) faculty have been named among the researchers being given National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's Awards. The awards are administered through the NIH's Common Fund, which provides support for research deemed to be both innovative and risky.
"The NIH Director's Award programs reinvigorate the biomedical work force by providing unique opportunities to provide research that is neither incremental nor conventional," said James M. Anderson, director of the Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives, which guides the Common Fund's High-Risk Research program. "The awards are intended to catalyze giant leaps forward for any area of biomedical research, allowing investigators to go in entirely new directions."
There are three types of NIH Director's Awards: the Pioneer Award, the New Innovator Award, and the Transformative Research Projects Award. This year, Caltech scientists were given two of 13 Pioneer Awards; two other Caltech researchers were among the 49 scientists given New Innovator Awards.
NIH Pioneer Awards
William Clemons Jr., assistant professor of biochemistry, and Thanos Siapas, professor of computation and neural systems, were each presented with an NIH Pioneer Award to promote what the Institutes call "pioneering and possibly transforming approaches" to key challenges in biomedical and behavioral research.
Clemons' project will focus on membrane proteins. "Membrane proteins are an abundant and important class of molecules that play critical roles in medicine," he says. "But progress in understanding these molecules has been hindered by an inability to obtain them in significant quantities. Our goal is to examine the biological principles that cause these limitations, and discover new methods to overcome them. This award will allow us to explore these ideas in ways that aren't possible through traditional funding methods."
Clemons received his BS from Virginia Tech in 1995, and his PhD from the University of Utah in 2000, spending time at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, he arrived at Caltech in 2005.
Siapas will use his Pioneer Award to develop neural probes for large-scale recordings of brain activity. "Brain functions such as perception, learning, and memory arise from the coordinated activation of billions of neurons distributed throughout the brain," Siapas says. "While we know a lot about the properties of individual neurons, much less is known about how assemblies of neurons interact to perform computations. Our goal is to develop large-scale, multielectrode arrays that will enable the monitoring of many neurons simultaneously across different brain areas. We hope that such arrays will expose new fundamental insights into brain activity, and will find application in the study of animal models of brain disorders."
Siapas received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990, 1992, and 1996, respectively. He came to Caltech in 2002, and was named a full professor in 2010.
NIH New Innovator Awards
Long Cai, assistant professor of chemistry, and Lea Goentoro, assistant professor of biology, were each given the New Innovator Award, which the NIH says is meant to both stimulate highly innovative research and support promising new investigators.
Cai and his colleagues are working to use single-molecule microscopy to help them better understand the genetic programs in individual cells. "Our idea is to label the molecules individually," says Cai. "Then we can identify where these molecules are in the cell and how many of them are there, by single-molecule counting. "
"The goal is to monitor individual cells to find out how they work," he adds. "This may provide valuable information about rogue cells that are involved in cancer and other diseases."
Cai received his BA and PhD from Harvard in 2001 and 2006, respectively, and joined the Caltech faculty in 2010.
Goentoro will be exploring the ways in which cellular signaling molecules respond to their environment. "Have you ever noticed how we can easily whisper to each other in a quiet room, but we have to shout if we're standing on a busy road?" she asks. "In perceiving the world, our sensory systems automatically change their detection sensitivity according to the ambient condition, a phenomenon known as Weber's Law. We have found evidence to suggest that each cell in our body uses this same principle in perceiving signaling molecules in its surroundings. We will use the Innovator Award to explore this relative perception in cells, the underlying mechanism, and how it goes wrong in diseases."
"I am very grateful for the award," Goentoro adds. "It will give us precious freedom to explore ideas we are very curious about."
Goentoro's BS was awarded by the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2001, and she got her PhD from Princeton University in 2006. She has been at Caltech since July of this year.
As we take in the world around us, learn, and form memories, the
synapses between neurons in our brains are constantly being
modified. Some get stronger, while others are allowed to shrink or
get weaker. The network of enzyme-regulated chemical reactions that
control these modifications is complex, to say the least. Now Mary
Kennedy, the Allen and Lenabelle Davis Professor of Biology at
Caltech, has come up with a way to tease apart the elusive details
of that network.
Beyond the basic scientific importance of understanding the ins
and outs of our brains, the work could have significant
implications for the mental health field. "It's becoming
increasingly clear that slight mutations in some of these pathways
make people more vulnerable to many disorders, including
schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism," Kennedy says.
Over the past 30 years, researchers have pieced together an
understanding of the regulatory pathways and enzymes involved in
controlling and modifying synaptic activity, and they've created
"cartoons"—maps showing how the various components of the
pathways interact. Looking at the cartoons, with their tangles of
crisscrossing arrows connecting proteins and enzymes, the
complexity of the network becomes apparent.
Researchers have worked out many of the players involved and how
they can interact to modify synapse strength. But they still know
little about the dynamics of the network and how the processes are
activated over time and under different circumstances. "We know how
little strings of enzymatic processes can get activated," Kennedy
says. "But we don't have very good ways of asking what happens
when, say, 20 of these processes are interacting and you tweak one
or two."
Now Kennedy believes she's found a way to ask such questions.
The key is to stop the action in a series of samples and to see
what changes from one second to the next.
Kennedy is putting together an experimental method that will
enable her to capture such "snapshots in time." She recently
acquired a plunge-freeze device that she plans to modify so that it
can freeze brain tissue samples in liquid propane/ethane as quickly
as one second after electrical stimulation. Previously, Kennedy
says, "we had no way of putting recording-electrodes into a
brain slice, stimulating, and then freezing it solid or stopping it
within a second."
There really was no reason to do so until the science and
technology had progressed to a level that would enable a full
analysis of the frozen samples. Kennedy says now is the time to
move forward with these studies. Once she has the frozen tissue
samples in hand, she'll process them with a new proteomic
technique. Then, with the help of the Proteome Exploration
Laboratory in the Beckman Institute, she'll be able to inject the
sample into a mass spectrometer for analysis.
Many of the enzyme-driven reactions that take place in the
synapses involve adding a highly energetic phosphate group to an
amino acid, a process called phosphorylation, which alters the
function of a protein. Since scientists have already determined the
sequences of amino acids surrounding many of the critical sites of
regulation in these pathways, Kennedy believes she will be able to
use a mass spectrometer to measure the concentration of as many as
20 to 40 known phosphorylated sites in a single small tissue
"That will let us map out the changes that happen in this large
network immediately after a synchronized synaptic input," Kennedy
says. "That means we'll be able to measure much more globally how
these complex pathways interact with each other—which ones
are more important at early stages, and which ones come in
later—all of which has been very difficult to
She hopes that she'll be able to use her new method to identify
synaptic pathways that may be relevant to mental illnesses and
Alzheimer's disease. "In order to screen in a more effective way
for drugs or anything that could bring a particular set of
processes into range, such global measurements are really
critical," she says.
Kennedy's new Leica plunge-freeze apparatus was a gift from the
Allen and Lenabelle Davis Foundation. The work is also supported by
a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.
PASADENA, Calif.—Some people feel compelled to pet every furry animal they see on the street, while others jump at the mere sight of a shark or snake on the television screen. No matter what your response is to animals, it may be thanks to a specific part of your brain that is hardwired to rapidly detect creatures of the nonhuman kind. In fact, researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and UCLA report that neurons throughout the amygdala—a center in the brain known for processing emotional reactions—respond preferentially to images of animals.
Their findings were described in a study published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
The collaborative research team was responsible for recruiting 41 epilepsy patients at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center; these patients were already being monitored for brain activity related to seizures. Using electrodes already in place, the team recorded single-neuron responses in the amygdala as study participants viewed images of people, animals, landmarks, or objects. The amygdalae are two almond-shaped clusters of neurons—cells that are core components of the nervous system—located deep in the medial temporal lobe of the brain.
"Our study shows that neurons in the human amygdala respond preferentially to pictures of animals, meaning that we saw the most amount of activity in cells when the patients looked at cats or snakes versus buildings or people," says Florian Mormann, lead author on the paper and a former postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Biology at Caltech. "This preference extends to cute as well as ugly or dangerous animals and appears to be independent of the emotional contents of the pictures. Remarkably, we find this response behavior only in the right and not in the left amygdala."
Mormann says this striking hemispheric asymmetry helps strengthen previous findings supporting the idea that, early on in vertebrate evolution, the right hemisphere became specialized in dealing with unexpected and biologically relevant stimuli, or with changes in the environment. "In terms of brain evolution, the amygdala is a very old structure, and throughout our biological history, animals—which could represent either predators or prey—were a highly relevant class of stimuli," he says.
"This is a pretty novel finding, since most amygdala research in the past was usually about faces of people and emotions related to fear rather than pictures of animals," adds Ralph Adolphs, a coauthor on the paper and Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of biology at Caltech. "Nobody would have guessed that cells in the amygdala respond more to animals than they do to human faces, and in particular that they respond to all kinds of animals, not just dangerous ones. I think this will stimulate more research and has the potential to help us better understand phobias of animals."
The study is also a clear illustration of how scientists doing basic research can benefit from working with collaborators in a clinical setting and vice versa.
"This is a good example of how special situations in neurosurgery—in this case, patients who are treated in order to cure their epilepsy—can provide a unique window into the workings of the human mind," says Itzhak Fried, a UCLA neurosurgeon and a coauthor of the study.
"A category-specific response to animals in the right human amygdala" was featured online on August 28 as an advance online publication of Nature Neuroscience. The Caltech team was led by Christof Koch, Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology, and included Julien Dubois, Simon Kornblith, Milica Milosavljevic, Moran Cerf, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, and Alexander Kraskov. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga and Matias Ison from the University of Leicester also contributed to the study.
The research was supported by the European Commission, the National Research Foundation of Korea, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Foundation, the Gimbel Discovery Fund, and the Dana Foundation.
PASADENA, Calif.—Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have obtained the first high-resolution, three-dimensional images of a cell with a nucleus undergoing cell division. The observations, made using a powerful imaging technique in combination with a new method for slicing cell samples, indicate that one of the characteristic steps of mitosis is significantly different in some cells.
During mitosis, two sets of chromosomes get paired up at the center of the cell's nucleus. Then hollow rods of proteins called microtubules, which make up a cellular structure called the spindle apparatus, grab on to the chromosomes and essentially pull each set away from the center in opposite directions, so that both daughter cells end up with a full copy of the genetic material. Typically, in the cells of plants, fungi, and many animals, one or more microtubules attach to each chromosome before the spindle will separate the sets of chromosomes from each another.
But when the Caltech researchers observed this step using their new technique, what they saw was not business as usual for a dividing cell. "We've found the first clear example of a cell where there are fewer microtubules used than chromosomes," says Grant Jensen, professor of biology at Caltech and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. The group's findings appear online in Current Biology and will be published in the September 27 issue of the journal.
Jensen's group is one of just a few in the world that uses electron cryotomography (ECT) to image biological samples. Unlike traditional electron microscopy—for which samples must be dehydrated, embedded in plastic, sectioned, and stained—ECT involves plunge-freezing samples so quickly that they become trapped in a near-native state within a layer of transparent, glasslike ice. A microscope can then capture high-resolution images of the sample as it is rotated, usually one degree at a time.
One limitation of ECT is that samples cannot be thicker than 500 nanometers—otherwise the electron beam cannot penetrate the sample sufficiently. Therefore, ECT studies have focused on small bacteria and viruses. But Jensen's group wanted to extend the technique to observe eukaryotic cells, which are typically much bigger. So they located the smallest known eukaryote, Ostreococcus tauri, and imaged it with ECT.
The next step was to observe the important process of cell division in a eukaryote. But even tiny O. tauri exceeds the 500-nanometer limit when it is undergoing mitosis, since cells are essentially twice as big as usual when they're dividing. So the researchers needed a way to cut the frozen sample into slices, a process called cryosectioning.
"In the past when people have tried this, the sections have come off sort of like snowflakes—the material has gotten crushed," Jensen says. But Caltech electron microscopy scientist Mark Ladinsky has developed a highly successful new technique for cryosectioning samples. He slices them at about -150°C, using a special machine and a diamond knife. Then he carefully removes the slices from the knife using a micromanipulator. The technique has enabled the researchers to look at slices through dividing cells in a near-native, hydrated state.
With the new imaging and sectioning techniques working together, a former postdoctoral scholar in Jensen's lab, Lu Gan, was able to make detailed observations of mitosis in O. tauri, a cell with 20 chromosomes. Contrary to expectations, Gan observed nowhere near 40 microtubules attached to the two sets of chromosomes during mitosis; instead, he found only about 10 small, incomplete microtubules. This suggests that the chromosomes may link together to form some kind of a bundle that can then be segregated all at once by a smaller number of microtubules.
Previous studies, dating back to the 1970s, claimed to have found unicellular eukaryotic cells with fewer microtubules than chromosomes. However, those cells were chemically fixed and stained—a process that can easily damage the cells—casting doubt on the claims. But with their new imaging and sectioning techniques, the Caltech researchers feel confident that they have indeed imaged such a cell.
Their success bodes well for future studies. "Our work with O. tauri shows that we might be able to get high-resolution, three-dimensional images of other eukaryotic cells, which are much larger than bacteria," Jensen says. "We've even moved on to try to image some human cells using the same process."
The group's report, "Organization of the Smallest Eukaryotic Spindle," was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health and a fellowship from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. The ECT imaging was made possible by a gift from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
PASADENA, Calif.—Bacteria can generally be divided into two classes: those with just one membrane and those with two. Now researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have used a powerful imaging technique to find what they believe may be the missing link between the two classes, as well as a plausible explanation for how the outer membrane may have arisen.
The "missing link" is a bacterium called Acetonema longum—a member of a little-known family of bacteria that have two membranes and respond to extreme or challenging situations by forming protective spores, a process known as sporulation. Outside of this small family, only bacteria with a single membrane have been found to sporulate.
"When we started looking at Acetonema, we had no idea how unique and interesting it would turn out to be," says Grant Jensen, professor of biology at Caltech and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. "But when we imaged the sporulation process in this bacterium at high resolution, we saw that a piece of the inner membrane actually becomes the new cell's outer membrane."
The finding shows that because sporulation results in a second membrane covering a cell, the common ancestor of bacteria with a single or double membrane could have been a spore-forming bacterium similar to A. longum.
Jensen's group at Caltech is one of just a few in the world that uses electron cryotomography (ECT) to image biological samples. Unlike traditional electron microscopy—for which samples must be dehydrated, embedded in plastic, sectioned, and stained—ECT involves plunge-freezing samples so quickly that they become trapped in a near-native state within a layer of transparent, glasslike ice. A microscope can then capture high-resolution images of the sample as it is rotated, usually one degree at a time. Finally, those images can be stitched together to create three-dimensional representations of a specimen such as a single bacterial cell or a virus.
Postdoctoral scholar Elitza Tocheva, a member of Jensen's lab, was exploring possible projects when Jared Leadbetter, professor of environmental microbiology at Caltech, suggested the group collaborate to study a sporulating bacterium isolated from a termite gut. Leadbetter knew that the model for sporulating bacteria, Bacillus subtilis, was too thick for ECT, and this other bacterium, A. longum, happened to be relatively skinny.
Tocheva quickly realized that a unique subject had fallen into her hands—not only was A. longum thin enough to image using ECT, but it also turned out to be one of the rare spore-forming bacteria with two membranes. The images she captured revealed the sporulation process in exquisite detail, and within the images, she noticed something interesting: in order to end up with an outer membrane after sporulation, an inner membrane had to be inverted and converted into an outer membrane. That's no small feat, given that inner and outer membranes are very different both structurally and functionally.
In the case of a double-membraned bacterium, such as A. longum, the sporulation process begins with the inner membrane pinching together asymmetrically, creating a mother cell and a smaller daughter cell, all within the outer membrane. Next, the mother cell engulfs the daughter, giving the daughter an extra layer of membrane derived from the original inner membrane. The product is a spore surrounded by two membranes within the mother cell. At this point, the mother cell dies away, leaving the spore protected by those two membranes and a protein coat.
When conditions improve and the spore germinates, part of its protective protein coat cracks open, allowing the new cell to outgrow, or exit, the protein coat. Unlike a single-membraned bacterium, which would at this point shed its outer membrane, the double-membraned bacterium retains it. Jensen's group found that the new outer membrane has all of the structure and function of a typical outer membrane, even though it originated as part of the mother cell's inner membrane.
"When the bacterium outgrows, one of its two membranes has to be converted from an inner to an outer membrane," Tocheva says. "This is very intriguing, and we don't know how it happens."
To prove that the membrane becomes converted to an outer membrane once it outgrows, the researchers had to show that Acetonema longum's outer membrane was like those seen in other double-membraned bacteria. They achieved this in a few different ways. First they showed that the outer membrane had one of the hallmarks of a true outer membrane—the presence of an immunologically important macromolecule called lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Then they calculated the density of the membranes and found that the outer membrane was slightly denser than the inner membrane, as would be expected of a true outer membrane. Finally, they searched the genomes of about one thousand bacteria and found that A. longum had a full complement of the genes that commonly correlate with having a double membrane and having the ability to sporulate.
With all of this evidence in hand, the researchers were able to say that they were indeed seeing an outer membrane that was once part of an inner membrane. "We were rewarded with this kind of rich data of a sporulating bacterium," Tocheva says. "Acetonema was just the ideal subject."
The group's paper, "Peptidoglycan Remodeling and Conversion of an Inner Membrane into an Outer Membrane During Sporulation," appears online and will be published in the September 2 issue of the journal Cell. In addition to Jensen, Leadbetter, and Tocheva, Caltech postdoctoral scholar Eric Matson and graduate student Dylan Morris participated in the study, along with Farshid Moussavi of Stanford University. The ECT imaging was made possible by a gift from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The analysis of LPS was performed at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center and was supported by a Department of Energy grant. The work was also supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship, by the National Science Foundation, and by the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation.
PASADENA, Calif.— Much like cities organize contingency plans and supplies for emergencies, chronic infectious diseases like HIV form reservoirs that ensure their survival in adverse conditions. But these reservoirs—small populations of viruses or bacteria of a specific type that persist despite attack by the immune system or drug treatment—are not always well understood. Now, however, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) believe they have begun to decode how a reservoir of infection can persist in HIV-positive populations.
The research team—led by David Baltimore, Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology and recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—proposes that a type of HIV infection that uses infected cells to get close to uninfected cells and then discharge a large load of virus on them, may be the reason small populations of HIV-infected cells persist even when antiretroviral drug treatment has been successful in suppressing most other infections within an individual.
Their findings were reported in the advance online publication of the journal Nature on August 17.
For chronic infections such as HIV, the end game for scientists is to remove "chronic" from the disease's name—by finding a cure. Many believe that better understanding of viral reservoirs may be the key to eradicating them, and thus the disease. So the research team started at the beginning of the process, looking for clues into how an HIV reservoir might be formed in the first place.
There are two known ways that HIV can infect cells, and thus the human body: cell-free transmission, in which the virus infects immune system cells called T cells it encounters while floating free in plasma; and cell-to-cell transmission, in which the virus moves between T cells by using an infected "donor" cell as its vehicle. Once an uninfected target cell is found, the donor cell can then directionally discharge its viral load upon the target. To replicate both types of transmission, the team infected target cells using both cell-free HIV and previously infected donor cells. They used donor cells that lack a natural marker, HLA-A2, usually used in matching human organ donors to recipients. The target cells did have the marker, and this helped the scientists keep track of which cells were the donors and which were the targets. The target cells were infected either in the absence or in the presence of antiretroviral drugs.
What the researchers found was that while the antiretroviral drugs caused a steep drop in the number of newly infected cells infected via cell-free transmission, the decrease in the number of newly infected cells for the cell-to-cell infected T cells was much more moderate, even when they had large doses of the drugs thrown at them.
"We saw that with cell-to-cell infection, you wind up with a lot more virus infecting a single cell," explains Alex Sigal, a postdoctoral scholar in Baltimore's laboratory and lead author of the study. "When this happens, the chance of at least a single virus getting past the drugs is much larger."
This may explain why, while antiretroviral drugs work very well, they do not eradicate the infection completely. The drugs are probabilistic by nature, meaning that they don't kill 100 percent of the virus. So, as the number of transmitted viruses gets larger, the chance of at least one virus slipping by the drugs and infecting another cell becomes greater. "And you only need one virus to infect a cell and keep the cycle going, forming a reservoir of infection," says Sigal.
Another possibility for why HIV cannot be eradicated is that it goes into latency. A latent reservoir would consist of cells that contain the HIV virus in their DNA, but are not currently making any virus and therefore are not affected by drugs. Sigal says it's possible that both types of reservoirs are present and interact with each other.
"It's important to determine whether or not cell-to-cell replication is causing a reservoir, particularly in terms of finding a cure," he says. "You can't treat it the same way as you would a latent reservoir." Theoretically, virus in a latent reservoir could be eradicated by flushing out the virus from the cells by activating it, and treating the patient with a lot of drugs at the same time so that the released virus can't enter new cells. This would not work if the virus could get into new cells anyway, despite the drugs.
"For us, the next step is to look at the process on a more physiological level by looking at how HIV infects in organs such as lymph nodes where cell-to-cell transmission actually happens," says Sigal. The team will do so by collaborating with the UCLA Center for AIDS Research, which provided the cells for virus infection from anonymous healthy volunteers in this study. The two groups will work together to increase the level of complexity in additional studies that will aim for a deeper understanding of the reservoir. "We're really looking for a cure, but to get to a cure, you have to fully understand the disease first," he says.
The Nature paper is titled "Cell-to-cell spread of HIV permits ongoing replication despite antiretroviral therapy." Jocelyn T. Kim, an infectious disease doctor and a graduate student in the Caltech-UCLA STAR Program; Alejandro B. Balazs, a postdoctoral scholar in Baltimore's laboratory; and Erez Dekel, Avi Mayo, and Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel also contributed to the study.
The research was supported by the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Lea Goentoro remembers the precise moment that biology made an
impression on her. It was 2002 and she was a PhD candidate in
chemical engineering at Princeton. During a presentation at the
Institute for Advanced Study, developmental biologist and Nobel
laureate Eric Wieschaus—who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize with
the late Edward Lewis, Caltech alumnus and former Morgan Professor
of Biology—showed a movie of a live fly embryo under a
microscope that was undergoing gastrulation, a phase early in
development where a single layer of cells is reorganized into a
three-layer structure. "The embryonic cells undergo massive
rearrangement and things fold in—and it was all on this big
screen," says Goentoro. "It was amazing. For me, that was when I
thought, 'Wow. I really want to study this.'"
Now, nine years after that fateful day in New Jersey, Goentoro
is Caltech's newest faculty member in the Division of Biology. She
joined the division in late July as an assistant professor.
"Caltech is a wonderful place to be—the right place," says
Goentoro. "When I saw that the division was looking for someone
with a quantitative background and a research program that would
combine quantitative approaches with biology, I thought it could be
a perfect fit."
Although her educational background is in chemical
engineering—like her PhD, she also earned her BS in the field
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001—Goentoro has
been applying her math and engineering skills to biology problems
for the past 10 years. Previous to arriving at Caltech, she was a
postdoctoral fellow at the Systems Biology Department at Harvard
Medical School.
Her current research focuses on Weber's Law applied at a
cellular level. The law, first discovered by an experimental
psychologist in the early 1800s, is the idea that we sense our
world in a relative way. Imagine that you spend the day outside in
the bright sunlight. When you come indoors, it takes a few moments
for your eyes to adjust to a different background. The idea of the
law is that you will always be able to adjust to these types of
"From my previous work with Marc Kirschner at Harvard, we found
that there is a strong suggestion that this concept also applies to
individual cells in our body," says Goentoro. "The way our brain
processes sensory information seems to apply to the way individual
cells process signals."
She hopes to find out whether or not this idea is true. Do
individual cells communicate this way, and if so, how is it
implemented at the molecular level? Goentoro uses mathematical
modeling as one strategy to address these questions. "Not only does
it give us new tools, it gives us new ways of thinking about
problems in biology," she says. In addition, Goentoro and others in
her lab do experiments in human cell cultures and study embryo
development in African frogs to try to understand how individual
cells are communicating with each other.
"The signaling pathway that we are studying is highly conserved
across all animal cells, so that's why we can jump between one
system and another," she explains. "Each system allows us to do
different experiments. By combining all of them, we can get more
When she's not attending to frogs in her lab, or studying cells
under a microscope, Goentoro says she'll be exploring her new
hometown. An aspiring hiker, she looks forward to tackling local
trails. "I've been promised that there is a really good hiking
scene here," she says. In addition, she enjoys scouring used
bookstores for hidden treasures. Like research, you never know what
you might discover.
PASADENA, Calif.—If one is good, two can sometimes be better. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have certainly found this to be the case when it comes to a small HIV-fighting protein.
The protein, called cyanovirin-N (CV-N), is produced by a type of blue-green algae and has gained attention for its ability to ward off several diseases caused by viruses, including HIV and influenza. Now Caltech researchers have found that a relatively simple engineering technique can boost the protein's battling prowess.
"By linking two cyanovirins, we were able to make significantly more potent HIV-fighting molecules," says Jennifer Keeffe, a staff scientist at Caltech and first author of a new paper describing the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "One of our linked molecules was 18 times more effective at preventing infection than the naturally occurring, single protein."
The team's linked pairs, or dimers, were able to neutralize all 33 subtypes of HIV that they were tested against. The researchers also found the most successful dimer to be similar or more potent than seven well-studied anti-HIV antibodies that are known to be broadly neutralizing.
CV-N binds well to certain carbohydrates, such as the kind found in high quantities connected to the proteins on the envelope that surrounds the HIV virus. Once attached, CV-N prevents a virus from infecting cells, although the mechanism by which it accomplishes this is not well understood.
What is known is that each CV-N protein has two binding sites where it can bind to a carbohydrate and that both sites are needed to neutralize HIV.
Once the Caltech researchers had linked two CV-Ns together, they wanted to know if the enhanced ability of their engineered dimers to ward off HIV was related to the availability of additional binding sites. So they engineered another version of the dimers—this time with one or more of the binding sites knocked out—and tested their ability to neutralize HIV.
It turns out that the dimers' infection-fighting potency increased with each additional binding site—three sites are better than two, and four are better than three. The advantages seemed to stop at four sites, however; the researchers did not see additional improvements when they linked three or four CV-N molecules together to create molecules with six to eight binding sites.
Although CV-N has a naturally occurring dimeric form, it isn't stable at physiological temperatures, and thus mainly exists in single-copy form. To create dimers that would be stable under such conditions, the researchers covalently bound together two CV-N molecules in a head-to-tail fashion, using flexible polypeptide linkers of varying lengths.
Interestingly, by stabilizing the dimers and locking them into a particular configuration, it seems that the group created proteins with distances between binding sites that are very similar to those between the carbohydrate binding sites in a broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibody.
"It is possible that we have created a dimer that has its carbohydrate binding sites optimally positioned to block infection," says Stephen Mayo, Bren Professor of Biology and Chemistry, chair of the Division of Biology, and corresponding author of the new paper.
Because it is active against multiple disease-causing viruses, including multiple strains of HIV, CV-N holds unique promise for development as a drug therapy. Other research groups have already started investigating its potential application in prophylactic gels and suppositories.
"Our hope is that those who are working to make prophylactic treatments using cyanovirin will see our results and will use CVN2L0 instead of naturally occurring cyanovirin," Keeffe says. "It has higher potency and may be more protective."
The paper, entitled "Designed oligomers of cyanovirin-N show enhanced HIV neutralization," was published in the online edition of PNAS. In addition to Keeffe and Mayo, other authors on the paper include research technician Priyanthi N.P. Gnanapragasam, former biology graduate student Sarah K. Gillespie, biology graduate student John Yong, and Pamela J. Bjorkman, the Max Delbruck Professor of Biology at Caltech and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
The work was funded by the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship program, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Protein Design Processes program, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative.


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The Port of Bellingham is strongly committed to environmental stewardship in the waters and surrounding shorelines of
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. Low-impact development (LID) technology is an alternative comprehensive approach to stormwater management that works with nature to manage stormwater as close to its source as possible using strategies such as environmentally sensitive rain gardens and pervious pavements. The Port evaluates stormwater best management practice (BMP) options and implements LID measures when appropriate.
To evaluate the potential for using LID approaches on contaminated areas of Bellingham's central waterfront, the port hosted a planning session with designers, engineers, regulators, developers, and other key stakeholders to discuss current and emerging information on sustainable LID stormwater management strategies. An overview of the charrette findings has been published in a resource guide titled
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By Simon Ellis, director estate management solutions and services EMEA at Avnet
Today's CIO is under attack.
In today's economy, businesses are required to make less money go further and the customer spend is definitely getting tighter. The mantra 'to do more with less' applies to CIOs, IT managers and also to channel partners who are managing their customer estates.
When new investment is called for, a clear understanding of the entire IT landscape and return on investment (ROI) is a top priority. In addition, there's the question of compliance and regulation, adding increasing pressure to organisations, and CIO and IT managers in particular.
In a mixed hardware and software estate, the challenge of understanding how to 'sweat the assets' is much greater. Various commercial agreements and deployment measures, different replacement lifecycles and a variety of deployment and commercial opportunities add to the complexity.
Estate Management services offer new incremental opportunities and revenue streams to the channel by building closer and deeper relationships with their existing customer base while also offering new services to the market to gain new clients.
These services allow IT and business managers to manage each individual aspect of their IT estate; this includes contracts, renewals, compliance and deployment. Therefore, organisations have immediate, easy access to critical data, allowing IT managers to leverage potential opportunities for savings, consolidation and optimisation. What's more, end of life products, which are no longer supported by the vendor, can be easily identified and actioned to avoid any potential risk to the business.
Complete lifecycle estate management supports channel partners and customers from start to finish, as they learn to take advantage of the IT estate and what it has to offer. Such solutions allow IT managers to handle today's pain points and challenges, whether from a commercial or a deployment focal point.
What does this have to do with the channel?
Customer spend is getting tighter, and the mantra 'to do more with less' applies to CIOs, IT managers and also to channel partners who manage their customer estates today.
Overall, effective estate management solutions puts information directly into the hands of the IT managers to allow them to make smarter, more informed decisions to meet tight budgets.
There are copious benefits to employing estate management solutions. From specific project needs through to complete management of an IT estate, Estate Management solutions available today can cover a range of areas which can be used in isolation or together to form a comprehensive overview of a company's IT infrastructure.
These benefits include:
Contracts and renewals
· Contracts and renewals are assets to an organisation. They define the 'rights to use and consume' products and services from vendors and resellers. By enabling proactive management of contracts and renewals applicable to an estate it is possible to improve commercial management and therefore identify new opportunities.
Discovery and estate baseline
· An organisation must identify what hardware and software is deployed in its estate in order to define its 'as-is' position and to obtain detailed knowledge which can optimise the estate for the future. Managing an estate correctly requires a solid baseline from which the user can understand, govern and assess changes, new deployments and opportunities as they arise.
Common language and visualisation
· A common language within an IT estate enables you to ask questions such as: 'show me all databases,' 'show me all servers,' 'show me all virtualization' in your estate. Visualising where assets are located, and the way in which they relate to each other, will allow a much deeper insight into the IT estate.
· Managing an estate also means planning for the future, looking at how existing estates can be transformed, scaled up, removed from and augmented. The implementation of an effective estate management solution can help the user to model changes in the estate and to look at the commercial impact.
Opportunity identification
· The analysis of contract and discovered estate uncovers areas of opportunity and pin-points issues. This can help to highlight product and service cross sell and upsell where applicable.
Estate Management solutions provide the channel with new opportunities for incremental revenue from their existing customers by providing tools to gain deeper insight into existing customer estates, helping to identify new service opportunities, thus enabling the channel to offer improved services and value to their customer base.


text: Family life insurance coverage is something that a lot of people don't like to think about. Can you blame them? It's probably not something you like to ponder yourself. But as unpleasant a thought as it is, there are some positive things that can come about from calmly facing the practical need for family life insurance coverage. One of those things is the decision to take action to ensure the long term health and well-being of yourself and your family. Avoiding risk caused by bad habits and lifestyle choices should be your chief concern.


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PHOTOS: Kelly Rowland's Summer Must-Haves
"I do have a desire to speak with him. But I have to be ready when I make that decision and I don't want to hurry myself," she tells EURweb. "I've been without him for more than 20 years."
It's absolutely positive she wants to get to know her father again, but understandably a lot of questions need to be asked as well.
PHOTOS: Kelly Rowland's Makeup Evolution
We wish Kelly all of the luck and help on her quest to rebuild her family tree.


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text:
I understand that if an interrupt occurs , (Reference ->
[url]http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~beej/guide/ipc/signals.html[/url] ) the
corresponding handler is called.
But , if a second interrupt occurs before the first interrupt handler
is able to reset the interrupt
handler in its corresponding handler, the default handler will be
So, how to handle this scenario and avoid the invocation of default
handler ?
Thx in advans,
Karthik Balaguru


text:
Sorry that this week has been a little off on the posting frequency side. It'll pick back up soon. In the meanwhile, here are some shiny items from around the web:
- Neat article from John Baez on the use of category theory in control theory. I like how he describes category theory as a way of formally studying anything that can be diagrammatically expressed.
- Mathematicians have found that the Rubik's cube has a Hamiltonian circuit – a sequence of quarter-turn moves that will generate all the 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 positions that a Rubik's cube can attain, and then on the next move restore it to its original state.
- This BBC report is on computer programming being taught in primary schools in Estonia. More please, and over here in the states.
- Apple has pulled its most popular Bitcoin wallet app from the App Store. Difficult to say whether Bitcoin is getting traction or not these days – everyone seems interested in it, but at the same time nobody wants to touch it.
- Eric Mazur is perhaps best known for his work on peer instruction and his video "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer" in which he lays out how and why he came to invent peer instruction. He has a more recent video "Assessment: The Silent Killer of Learning" that's also worth watching and discussing. I'll have more next week on this one.
- Did you know that the US Army was using the flipped classroom with impressive results in the 1970s? I didn't, and this article gives some fascinating details.


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Greek court refuses student bail
A north London student accused of killing a teenager in a nightclub has been refused bail by a Greek court.
Andrew Symeou is charged with the manslaughter of Jonathan Hiles, 18, of Cardiff, who died on the isle of Zante in 2007, allegedly after being punched.
Mr Symeou, 20, of Enfield, returned to Greece last week for trial after losing a High Court fight against extradition.
Bail was refused as Mr Symeou has no permanent address in Greece, campaign group Fair Trials International said.
'Unfounded prosecution'
Jago Russell, the charity's chief executive, said: "Despite the major flaws in the case against him, Andrew now faces the prospect of months in a Greek jail before his trial even starts.
"We will continue to work with his Greek lawyer to fight for bail and to persuade the Greek authorities to end this unfounded prosecution."
A spokesman for the campaign group said Mr Symeou would prepare his appeal against the decision over the next five days.
Jonathon Hiles
Jonathan Hiles represented the Great Britain roller-hockey team
Mr Hiles, who was in Britain's roller-hockey team, died in July 2007 two days after falling off a dance podium in a nightclub.
It is alleged that he lost consciousness when he was punched hard in the face.
Mr Symeou, a Bournemouth University student, maintains that he arrived in the club three hours after Mr Hiles was injured.
Campaigners said two of Mr Symeou's friends were "beaten, punched, slapped and threatened" by Greek police officers until they gave statements implicating him.
There was a long challenge in the UK against Mr Symeou's extradition, although he was eventually returned to Greece last week after the House of Lords refused to hear an appeal.
Click to view image: '728e9a79694e-_44700621_jonhiles226.jpg'
Impressive, the Greeks don't fuck around.
Nanny state take note.
Posted Jul-28-2009 By
(1) | Report
that kid looks like a serious murderer
Posted Jul-28-2009 By
(0) | Report
This pretty boy is going to like the Greek jail.
Q: How do you separate the men from the boys in Greece?
A: With a crowbar.
Posted Jul-28-2009 By
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