Abdul-Kareem Ahmed

Scope Correspondent
akahmed@MIT.EDU
Abdul-Kareem Ahmed grew up in a suburb in Rhode Island. Seeking adventure, he attended college in the city, at the University of Pittsburgh. There he majored in Neuroscience and History & Philosophy of Science, discovering a curiosity, the human brain. During college, Abdul spent some years studying the neural basis of motion sickness, as well as the neurophilosophy of color perception. He would soon find he wanted to share his interest in science. Abdul started writing for his college newspaper, The Pitt News, sharing opinions on research, health care and medicine. He also started The Pitt Pulse, a student publication that offers advice on pre-health and science career development. Abdul’s ultimate goal is a career in medicine. For him, science writing serves as a voice of perspective in the science and medical community. One day he hopes to practice medicine and share his fascination through the craft of writing.

The Messy Cosmos

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Scope Correspondent

No matter how many times you vacuum your carpet, do your bed, and fold your laundry, you end up with a messy room again by the end of the week. You might even feel that some invisible force drives your living space toward more disorder and chaos. That’s right, you’re not to blame.

The same sort of unrelenting drive to disorder occurs even at the molecular level. Physicists like to call it entropy, but really, it’s the messy room concept. From the Greek, εντροπος, entropy means “inner tendency.” All matter in the world, large as galaxies and small as atoms, has an innate preference for a state of chaos. Just like your laundry, if we took a hundred gas particles, and neatly lined them up in a row, we can be sure they will break formation. Each particle will go its own way, in a stochastic or random manner. Similarly, by Saturday, you’ll find one sock behind the headboard, and the other, curiously enough, between your mattresses. Or perhaps I am a little messier than you are. Full Article »

The Race to Give X-ray Vision to Medicine

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Scope Correspondent
If you asked a radiologist which American first applied the use of X rays in medicine, his answer would depend on his loyalty, whether it is to Dartmouth, Yale, or perhaps even MIT. However, the radiologist would have to concede that X rays themselves were discovered in Germany.

Late Friday, November 8, 1895, the physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had his moment of inspiration in a University of Würzburg laboratory. He was tinkering, as geniuses do, with a Crookes tube, a glass tube enclosing a low pressure gas. After covering the tube, he placed a barium platinocyanide plate on the one side he had left open. He then applied an electric current through the tube. Röntgen noticed that the plate fluoresced, a clue that something was emanating from within the tube. He eventually called them X rays in his famous December 28 publication. For this work, Röntgen was awarded in 1901 the very first Nobel Prize in Physics.

Röntgen had in a way invented a telescope, but he didn’t realize the galaxies that resided ahead. Using X rays in clinical diagnosis, bequeathing a new sight to medicine, was for someone else to achieve. Full Article »

You Are What You Drink

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Scope Correspondent

If written down letter by letter, your genetic code would fill books as tall as the Washington Monument. And each gene narrates an attribute you might acquire in life, such as the color of your eyes.

However, you can also edit your genetic biography through your own behavior. What you drink, for example, may help determine your fate.

In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a team from Harvard and affiliated hospitals discovered that your level of consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks can predict if you have a genetic risk of obesity.

In the most comprehensive effort to date to determine this relationship, the researchers surveyed three groups, one all male and two female. They first analyzed everyone’s DNA to evaluate each individual’s genetic risk of obesity. This assessment was then compared to each participant’s frequency of drink consumption.

In this way they found that individuals consuming one or more sugary drinks a day were twice as likely to have both a high obesity risk and body mass index as those consuming less than one a month. Fundamentally, you are what you drink. Full Article »

The Race To Get Under Your Skin

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Scope Correspondent

There is more than one way to push drugs through your skin. Your new choices are to use a laser, an electric current, or ultrasound waves.

Conventional needles pose problems for patients and clinical professionals. Injuries due to needles are a common occupational hazard, with 385,000 injuries occurring annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scientists recognize the need for a safer method of dermal drug delivery and have worked on alternative designs for many years. This year, three methods have made significant progress, hot on each other’s heels. Are these technologies at odds with one another?

The most recent development is the laser injector, which holds a liquid and a desired drug separated by a membrane. The laser generates air bubbles in the liquid, which push the membrane, forcing the drug through the skin, explains Jack Yoh, a professor at Seoul National University in South Korea. Full Article »