Category Archives: Video

Video

Government video lets you choose your own clinical research (mis)adventure

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UntitledIt seems hardly a day goes by without a new report of research misconduct. To help prevent such behavior from occurring, the US Department of Health and Human Services has released an  interactive training video called ‘The Research Clinic’ that gives viewers the opportunity to assume the role of one of four decision-makers who are frequently involved in clinical research: a principal investigator, a clinical research coordinator, a research assistant and the chair of an institutional review board.

The interactive video puts each character in a variety of real-world scenarios that require the viewer to choose from among a series of options, each of which is accompanied by a different outcome and educational messages about the potential consequences of each choice. For example, one part follows a research assistant and her struggles to follow protocol for obtaining informed consent from participants involved in a study she’s working on, and describes the potential consequences of her different courses of actions.

But the video isn’t all seriousness, all the time. It manages to mix in a few humorous moments, and at times almost feels like a bizarre episode of The Office that was shot in a clinical setting.

So have a look, and let us know what you think—will this interactive video help to curb research misconduct?

Image via the US Department of Health and Human Services

‘Google Earth’ of the brain slated for planetarium show

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If you’re anything like me, you love a good planetarium show. I don’t mean the trippy laser light shows set to Pink Floyd tunes (although these certainly have their place), but rather the kind of immersive experience that gives you a glimpse into the untold depths of the universe and a few wondrous moments of what it feels like to soar through outer space. Now, a team of neuroscientists, astronomers, software engineers and film specialists are working on a new planetarium show to give us a fly-through experience in a different kind of vast and awe-inspiring space: the human brain.

The project is called the Neurodome. It’s the brainchild of Jonathan Fisher, a neuroscientist at New York Medical College who also has a background in astrophysics. Although the planetarium version of the Neurodome is not yet complete, you can get a taste of what to expect tomorrow evening at Columbia University in New York, where Fisher and Columbia astronomer Matt Turk will guide viewers through pictures of outer space and images of human brains, explaining how light travels across the universe from distant stars and into the eye, triggering electrical impulses in the brain’s neural pathways. “Just like you can walk through Google Earth, we’ll walk through the brain,” says Fisher.

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Head injury documentary points to global concussion crisis

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headgames_global_ landscapeAlthough it wasn’t a contender for last night’s Academy Awards, there’s a powerful new film out this week that you may want to see. It’s the sports documentary, Head Games: The Global Concussion Crisis, and it provides a human face to the seemingly endless stream of high-profile reports linking repetitive head trauma to degenerative brain disease.

Early in the film, we meet Christopher Nowinski, who confesses that he once “loved the violence” of football. “It’s the closest thing to being a warrior without actually having to go to war,” says Nowinski, a former Harvard football defensive lineman turned pro-wrestler. But not long after that, we see him lying on a cold concrete floor, clutching his head after what would turn out to be a career-ending concussion he sustained during a wrestling match in 2003.

As Nowinski continued to experience headaches, memory problems and sleepwalking for the next year, he decided to see Boston University School of Medicine concussion expert Robert Cantu, who asked Nowinski how often he saw stars or felt woozy after being hit in the wrestling ring or on the football field. “All the time,” Nowinski recalls sheepishly, dumbfounded that he had likely been experiencing regular concussions but had never before given much thought to the potential long-term consequences of such injuries.

That experience led Nowinski on a crusade to better understand his condition, and in 2006 he published the book, “Head Games: Football’s Concussion Crisis,” which inspired the documentary from director Steve James (who also gave us the 1994 Oscar-nominated documentary, Hoop Dreams). But whereas Nowinski’s book largely focused on the brain hazards associated with professional and amateur football, the new film makes painfully clear that all athletes who engage in contact sports—be it hockey, rugby, soccer or any of a variety of games—are potentially at risk.

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Bioengineered kidney makes urine after transplantation

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Here’s research that could take the piss out of disease—and it’s no joke. For the first time, scientists reporting in Nature Medicine have created lab-grown kidneys in rats that produce urine after transplantation.

If the work can be replicated in humans, patients suffering from end-stage kidney disease could one day have “an organ that’s grown on demand—a tailored organ that can be transplanted and replaces the failing organ,” says study author Harald Ott, a bioengineer at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Psychiatrist Sasha Bardey discusses Hollywood’s Side Effects

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Life has its ups and downs and everyone gets sad once in a while, but the toll of mental illness can be grave. The numbers reveal that one in ten people in the US takes antidepressants and the nationwide rate of antidepressant use has quadrupled in the last 30 years. In most cases, these drugs help stabilize mood without any serious drawbacks. But adverse reactions can happen, as on display in the new thriller Side Effects, out this Friday in theaters across North America, written by Scott Burns and directed by Steven Soderbergh, the same people behind the 2011 viral pandemic movie Contagion (which Nature Medicine reviewed at the time).

Both films are structured around a specific modern-day fear. But the threat in Side Effects mutates faster than any virus could.

Rooney Mara and Channing Tatum star in Side Effects as Emily and Martin Taylor{credit}Peter Andrews, Open Road Films 2012{/credit}

In the movie, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) and her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) are a young and successful couple living a lavish lifestyle until Martin is sent to prison for insider trading (see trailer below). Devastated, Emily waits for him for four years while living in a tiny apartment in upper Manhattan, struggling with depression. When she is finally reunited with Martin, Emily becomes completely unhinged. After it’s thought that she’s a threat to herself, Emily is assigned to a psychiatrist named Jonathan Banks (Jude Law).

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An ingestible pill-sized device offers a 3D view of the esophagus

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Almost everyone gets occasional heartburn, that painful sensation in the chest or throat caused by the reflux of stomach acid back into the esophagus. When it happens too frequently, however, such as in patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease, it can result in a condition known as Barrett’s esophagus. An estimated 3 million Americans suffer from this disorder, where the tissue that lines the esophagus accumulates abnormal changes over time, increasing the risk for esophageal cancer.

Barrett’s esophagus often goes undiagnosed because it causes minor or nonexistent symptoms, and because of the procedure required to identify it. Currently, doctors must sedate a patient, insert a long, flexible camera known as an endoscope down the esophagus to look for abnormal tissue, and then cut off a small piece for analysis in a laboratory. The procedure is invasive, expensive and uncomfortable.

Now, researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston have invented a tethered, pill-sized endoscope that that allows doctors to construct an image of a person’s esophagus in microscopic detail within a few minutes—and all without anesthesia, intense training or causing pain. Their work was published today in Nature Medicine.

“A lot of people have reflux but don’t feel the pain of heartburn,” says MGH pathologist Gary Tearney, who led the study. These patients are at high risk for developing cancer, because they usually have no reason to get their esophagus inspected. “[Our device] really opens up screening to many more people,” Tearney says.

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‘FlyWalker’ tracks insect feet, could advance Parkinson’s research

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They may have wings, but fruit flies spend plenty of time on their feet. And these insects, also known as Drosophila, are a standard animal model for studying neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s and even Alzhiemer’s.

Often, scientists will create fruit flies that contain the same genetic mutations as seen in these disorders to see how the DNA changes affect the insects. Yet, for all the complex genetic tools they employ, the way of measuring the resulting motor defects remain crude: A researcher will knock the flies in a vial down to the bottom with a quick tap, and then wait to see how long it takes for the insects to climb to the top. (For an example, go to 2:28 into this video on LRRK2 animal models of Parkinson’s.)

Now, reporting in eLife, a team at Columbia University in New York has developed a more accurate and sophisticated way to quantify such movement. They first videotape a fly walking, and then, using computer software that can spot the individual footpads of the insect and mark when these each hit the surface. With this data, they can calculate the insects’ walking speed, distance covered and overall gait.

In the paper, the authors looked at sensory-deprived flies and showed that inactivation of sensory neurons in the insects’ legs led to defects in step precision but did not affect coordination between the legs. They call the program FlyWalker.

Similar technology already exists for tracking the movements of lab rodents. But as Ronald Calabrese of Emory University in Atlanta notes in an accompany commentary, “the Columbia team is the first to scale it down to fly-like dimensions.”

With so many metrics being teased apart by the new algorithm, Columbia’s César Mendes, a postdoc in Richard Mann’s lab who led the research, expects scientists who use the technique to discover new things about their diseases of interest, such as how an ailment worsens over time. “This method is good if you want to see a progressive phenotype and to see subtle changes as time goes by and the disease phenotype gets more aggravated,” he says.

“I really foresee that you will see flies that start to have some [movement] defects that have not been seen before, and hopefully we’ll be able to correlate some phenotypes to particular groups of neurons or to particular circuits,” Mendes told Nature Medicine. “I’m very curious to see what we’re going to have in the future.”

VIDEO: Newly discovered form of cell division may help ward off cancer

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Cell biologists have long thought that cytokinesis, the final step of cell division in which the cytoplasm and its contents are split, is necessary for the proper assortment of chromosomes. Disrupt this process, the prevailing wisdom held, and aneuploidy will result, with cancerous implications. But a team led by Mark Burkard at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has discovered a new type of cell division, dubbed ‘klerokinesis’, that protects cells from failed cytokinesis.

Using live-cell imaging, the researchers watched retinal pigment epithelial cells for five days after they had chemically inhibited cytokinesis. Reporting today at the American Society for Cell Biology’s annual meeting in San Francisco, they showed that many cells managed to split into two during the first growth phase of the next cell cycle—not during mitosis—allowing each to recover a normal chromosome set. Burkard says that therapeutic strategies that boost this type of nonmitotic cell fission could prevent cancer in people at high risk of developing tumors marked by abnormal chromosomal counts.

https://youtu.be/lKU-F3Pqyj8

Video courtesy of Mark Burkhard

MIT video models airports most likely to spread diseases

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In a study released last week from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), based in Cambridge, engineers show through computer modeling how major international US airports might contribute to the spread of contagious disease during the early days of an epidemic. The culprits that could contribute the most damage turn out to be airports in New York, Los Angeles and Honolulu, Hawaii. “Our work is the first to look at the spatial spreading of contagion processes at early times, and to propose a predictor for which ‘nodes’—in this case, airports—will lead to more aggressive spatial spreading,” said MIT computer engineer Ruben Juanes in a statement. The new model, unlike previous ones, considers the routines that passengers usually follow when traveling, an airport’s geographic location, how flights connect—or don’t—between airports, and, finally, how a long wait at an airport could influence how diseases spread.

Check out the video below.