TEDMED

The Long Tail 2012 Agenda : Sage Commons Congress “Building Better Models of Disease Together” -Moving beyond the current medical information system and its rewards Part I: Redefining Tools Needed to Do Our Work Starting Point: Stephen Friend, Sage Bionetworks “Why Can’t We Build Better Models of Disease?” Session 1: ”Synapse” as a pilot for building an “information commons” for disease models together. Session 2: Enablement by Governance and Patient Consents Leaders: Lara Mangravite, Sage Bionetworks & John Wilbanks, Kauffman FoundationView/Download Video Mangravite Slides Wilbanks Slides Commentators include: Kelly Edwards, Peter Kapitein, Jane Kaye, Sharon Terry Patients have traditionally been sidelined in medical research and need to be enabled to become activated partners. Working Session with Breakout Groups Report Outs Part II: Redefining How We Share / How We Work Together Working Session with Breakout Groups Report Outs Session 8: Congress Unplugged! Part III: Redefining Our Roles / “Who does what” Breakout Reports

Stand Again It’s hard to describe to people all of the magic that happens at Anastasis on a daily basis. It really does feel like something special, a magical quality of falling down the rabbit hole into another world where school is fun and challenging and wonderful. The learning that happens here is very organic, it lacks a formulaic approach. So when people ask us how they can do what we do, it isn’t a simple answer. Anastasis learners are in a continual state of growth, discovery, and creativity. The nice thing about having ALL students in the same big guided inquiry during a block, is the incredible overlaps in learning that occur between classes. For each inquiry block I give teachers an inquiry guide with the driving inquiry question, the key concept, and the individual lines of inquiry that could be explored. This is the point that the magic I mentioned above starts to happen. The students in Team Weissman began this block with a field trip to a local observatory. The Jr. Anastasis Jr.

International Cancer Genome Consortium What Schools Can Learn From Google, IDEO, and Pixar A community about to build or rehab a school often creates checklists of best practices, looks for furniture that matches its mascot, and orders shiny new lockers to line its corridors. These are all fine steps, but the process of planning and designing a new school requires both looking outward (to the future, to the community, to innovative corporate powerhouses) as well as inward (to the playfulness and creativity that are at the core of learning). In many ways, what makes the Googles of the world exceptional begins in the childhood classroom -- an embrace of creativity, play, and collaboration. It was just one year ago that 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the number-one leadership competency in our complex global marketplace. Learning from IDEO: A transparent space where projects take the spotlight The design and innovation firm IDEO tacitly understands how office environments help or hinder the creative process. [Photos by Steve Hall] [Photo by James Steinkamp]

Ghanaian women take to the skies to fight waterborne disease - Report: Ghana The women have begun delivering health-related materials to isolated communities around Lake Volta. They drop specially designed aerodynamic packages containing information on how to prevent schistosomiasis, which is classified by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a neglected tropical disease. “The disease is particularly prevalent around the lake due to poor sanitation,” Lester Chihitsulo, a WHO expert, told RFI. Humans become infected with schistosomiasis through contact with snails that live in stagnant water. Children are particularly at risk because of their play habits. Although the WHO strategy for combating the disease is increased access to the drug praziquantel, Chihitsulo says, “We also encourage organisations to collaborate with the ministry of health in a given country to assist in delivering hygiene education.” Medicine on the Move, a local NGO, does just that.

Waiter Rant Surviving HIV Untreated, HIV is normally a death sentence. But not quite always. A small number of people infected with HIV can survive for decades without symptoms. They’re called “elite controllers”, and — although the fact that they’re healthy makes them hard to identify with certainty — they’re thought to comprise less than 1% of the infected population. Elite controllers, as the name suggests, control the replication of HIV much better than a normal infected person. What makes them special? Let me unpack that a little for non-immunologists. The core of the system is a pair of protein complexes called MHC class I and class II. Both class I and class II MHC genes are highly polymorphic: there are lots of different alleles in the population, each of which can bind a different characteristic subset of the peptides that might be produced by a pathogen. Which brings us back to the findings of this paper. I’ve shown some of the important amino acids on a sketch of the MHC class I bear trap. Like this:

The Physics Book: An Illustrated Chronology of How We Understand the Universe by Maria Popova Making knowledge digestible in the age of information overload, or what a cat has to do with quasicrystals. Einstein famously observed that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it’s comprehensible. In The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics, acclaimed science author Clifford Pickover offers a sweeping, lavishly illustrated chronology of comprehension by way of physics, from the Big Bang (13.7 billion BC) to Quantum Resurrection (> 100 trillion), through such watershed moments as Newton’s formulation of the laws of motion and gravity (1687), the invention of fiber optics (1841), Einstein’s general theory of relativity (1915), the first speculation about parallel universes (1956), the discovery of buckyballs (1985), Stephen Hawking’s Star Trek cameo (1993), and the building of the Large Hadron Collider (2009). Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. Share on Tumblr

Gene therapy: can it cure Parkinson’s? Ok, let’s start off with the basics: Parkinson’s disease is a neurological disorder where nerve cells that make dopamine are destroyed. Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter and without it, nerve cells are unable to properly send messages to other parts of the body. Eventually, the destruction of dopamine-producing cells leads to a loss of muscle function that gets worse over time. In gene therapy, a gene variant is used to alter the function of a cell or an organ. Now, a new large-scale study suggests that a type of gene therapy (called NLX-P101) may be able to improve Parkinson’s symptoms. “In Parkinson’s disease, not only do patients lose many dopamine-producing brain cells, but they also develop substantial reductions in the activity and amount of GABA in their brains. So, what they’ve done is inject a fully-functioning GAD gene into the brains of Parkinson’s patients. References LeWitt, P.A. et al. (2011). Like this: Like Loading...