by: Katherine Stenger The withholding of a pacemaker shock after cardiac arrest. The delivery of an extremely high dose of insulin. The prevention of access to medical files in an emergency room. All three of these potentially fatal situations can be created with simple hacks to extremely vulnerable medical devices. For a growing number of […]
Consumer Inertia in the Healthcare Industry
by: Ming Pei People often have great difficulty choosing the best healthcare plan and treatment because of the limited healthcare price transparency and the energy cost to find a better healthcare plan. Professor Ben Handel at UC Berkeley used the data from the large employer-sponsored insurance system and conducted research to find that consumer inertia […]
A Closer Look into the HIV Life Cycle: Hijacking the Host Cell
by: Sherry Wu Around every 9.5 minutes, one person in the United States alone is newly infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (Center of Disease Control and Prevention). This rapid rate at which HIV propagates is extremely alarming, hinting at the significant role that this virus plays on a larger scale. In fact globally, an […]
Who am I?: The Neural Mechanisms Underlying Gender Dysphoria
by: Niharika Desaraju In recent years, the world’s perception of transgender people has significantly transformed, with celebrities such as Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox gaining popularity as the faces of this minority. Although society has begun to understand and accept the transgender community, scientists have yet to understand any underlying similarities and differences between the […]
Nicotine, Carcinogen, and Toxin Exposure in Long-Term E-Cigarette and Nicotine Replacement Therapy Users: A Cross-sectional Study
by: Kelvin Ngo “Ay bro can I hit your Juul please bro? Can I hit your Juul dude? Come on dude!” The last few years have seen a rapid spike in the popularity of e-cigarettes, with the Juul device being the most prominent on the market. Self-proclaimed “Juul fiends”, seen campuswide vaping away at their […]
Modeling Influenza Spread on College Campuses
by: Ankita Chatterjee “Gesundheit!” What’s in a sneeze? If you’re in a cramped college campus during flu season, the answer could be thousands of tiny droplets full of active viral particles. Potentially deadly diseases like influenza can spread quickly across a college campus, where large numbers of people packed into small environments can increase the […]
Human DX: Man, Machine and Medicine
by: Leo Zhang WebMD is a health information services website that contains health care publications, physician blogs, and a symptoms checklist that tries to diagnose medical conditions based on the symptoms the user describes. There is a running joke on the internet about how using this symptom checker for something like a mild headache will […]
Allergies: a Thing of the Past?
by: Mark Houdi Early exposure is almost always a good thing, but no one really considered said approach with allergies until now. A recent study has shown a significant reduction in peanut and egg allergies specifically by the use of early exposure. Using a special derivative of peanut butter as a substitute at an early […]
Economics of Antibacterial Drug Research
by: Sage Geher The discovery of penicillin prior to WWII is one of the most important milestones in modern medicine, and its wide-scale use during the war made it arguably one of the best defensive weapons employed in the war. Antibiotics are just as important a defensive weapon today as they were in the 1940s, […]
Bioengineered Hemoglobin-like Protein Paves Way for Potential Clinical Cure to CO Poisoning
by: Patrick Lin Many of us probably have experienced this scenario before: while pan-frying some leafy vegetables, a few seconds of inattention lead to sharp alarm beeps following billowing clouds of grey smoke erupting from the now-burnt food. You proceed to take the smoke detector off from the wall to turn it off. What you […]