Smart Hydrogels Designed for use in Microfabricated Sensor Arrays

2013 ◽  
Vol 1570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Bates ◽  
Seung Hei Cho ◽  
Prashant Tathireddy ◽  
Loren W. Rieth ◽  
Jules J. Magda

ABSTRACTHydrogels are considered smart materials because they respond to environmental stimuli. Sensors that monitor the body’s pH levels would be helpful for doctors to determine the severity of a patient’s condition, especially if they exhibit signs of shock. The motivation of this project is to create a biomedical device that can be worn sublingually or implanted into the body to help doctors with diagnosing a patient’s condition. The magnitude of the swelling/deswelling behavior can be measured by placing a sample of the hydrogel in a piezoresistive sensor. The degree of swelling/deswelling is directly proportional to the change in pH of the aqueous solution it is placed in. In this study, a variety of compositions of pH responsive hydrogels were designed and tested to determine the response time and magnitude for use in both macro and micro sensor arrays. This pressure sensor has been designed for use with thinner gels than have been used in the past. The results for swelling time and magnitude were compared to determine the effect of the thickness of the hydrogel samples on the swelling/deswelling kinetics of the material in order to find the appropriate composition, thickness and device that will yield the desired response rate and sensitivity.

2019 ◽  
Vol 59 (5) ◽  
pp. 1275-1280 ◽  
Author(s):  
H Frederik Nijhout ◽  
Kenneth Z McKenna

Abstract Until recently, the study of allometry has been mostly descriptive, and consisted of a diversity of methods for fitting regressions to bivariate or multivariate morphometric data. During the past decade, researchers have been developing methods to extract biological information from allometric data that could be used to deduce the underlying mechanisms that gave rise to the allometry. In addition, an increasing effort has gone into understanding the kinetics of growth and the regulatory mechanisms that control growth of the body and its component parts. The study of allometry and scaling has now become an exceptionally diverse field, with different investigators applying state of the art methods and concepts in evolution, developmental biology, cell biology, and genetics. Diversity has caused divergence, and we felt that although there is general agreement about the new goals for the study of allometry (understanding underlying mechanisms and how those evolve to produce different morphologies), progress is hindered by lack of coordination among the different approaches. We felt the time was right to bring these diverse practitioners together in a symposium to discuss their most recent work in the hope of forging new functional, conceptual, and collaborative connections among established and novice practitioners.


Reports ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Limbert ◽  
Amiri

In this paper, we present a review of the intra-aortic balloon pump, as well as the usage of it in the medical field today. An intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP) is a biomedical device that can assist the heart during unstable angina or after a heart attack. This pump is typically used in patients who suffer from ischemia of the heart tissue, due to an unbalanced level of myocardial oxygen supply or demand. Through counterpulsation, which is a technique to synchronize the external pumping of blood with the heart’s cycle, the device can balance the supply and demand of blood that is necessary for the heart to pump properly. The IABP is comprised of the following four components: a polyurethane balloon, a polyethylene or fiber-optic catheter, a transducer, and the intra-aortic balloon pump console. In the past, researchers have used other materials that have low biocompatibility and can cause complications within the body. This analysis will explain the complications and state changes that occurred due to them. Limitations of past designs and advantages of current designs will be acknowledged, for they can be used by researchers to enhance designs for the future. Consequently, the analysis of this device may lead to improved designs and treatment in the future for patients with cardiac conditions.


Derrida Today ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Morris

Over the past thirty years, academic debate over pornography in the discourses of feminism and cultural studies has foundered on questions of the performative and of the word's definition. In the polylogue of Droit de regards, pornography is defined as la mise en vente that is taking place in the act of exegesis in progress. (Wills's idiomatic English translation includes an ‘it’ that is absent in the French original). The definition in Droit de regards alludes to the word's etymology (writing by or about prostitutes) but leaves the referent of the ‘sale’ suspended. Pornography as la mise en vente boldly restates the necessary iterability of the sign and anticipates two of Derrida's late arguments: that there is no ‘the’ body and that performatives may be powerless. Deriving a definition of pornography from a truncated etymology exemplifies the prosthesis of origin and challenges other critical discourses to explain how pornography can be understood as anything more than ‘putting (it) up for sale’.


Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.


Author(s):  
Raphael A. Cadenhead

Although the reception of the Eastern father Gregory of Nyssa has varied over the centuries, the past few decades have witnessed a profound awakening of interest in his thought, particularly in relation to the contentious issues of gender, sex, and sexuality. The Body and Desire sets out to retrieve the full range of Gregory’s thinking on the challenges of the ascetic life through a diachronic analysis of his oeuvre. Exploring his understanding of the importance of bodily and spiritual maturation in the practices of contemplation and virtue, Raphael Cadenhead recovers the vital relevance of this vision of transformation for contemporary ethical discourse.


2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-93
Author(s):  
Laurel Smith Stvan

Examination of the term stress in naturally occurring vernacular prose provides evidence of three separate senses being conflated. A corpus analysis of 818 instances of stress from non-academic texts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of American Discourses on Health (CADOH) shows a negative prosody for stress, which is portrayed variously as a source outside the body, a physical symptom within the body and an emotional state. The data show that contemporary speakers intermingle the three senses, making more difficult a discussion between doctors and patients of ways to ‘reduce stress’, when stress might be interpreted as a stressor, a symptom, or state of anxiety. This conflation of senses reinforces the impression that stress is pervasive and increasing. In addition, a semantic shift is also refining a new sense for stress, as post-traumatic stress develops as a specific subtype of emotional stress whose use has increased in circulation in the past 20 years.


Biomolecules ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 1038
Author(s):  
Jianyuan Zeng ◽  
Wen G. Jiang ◽  
Andrew J. Sanders

Epithelial Protein Lost In Neoplasm (EPLIN), also known as LIMA1 (LIM Domain And Actin Binding 1), was first discovered as a protein differentially expressed in normal and cancerous cell lines. It is now known to be key to the progression and metastasis of certain solid tumours. Despite a slow pace in understanding the biological role in cells and body systems, as well as its clinical implications in the early years since its discovery, recent years have witnessed a rapid progress in understanding the mechanisms of this protein in cells, diseases and indeed the body. EPLIN has drawn more attention over the past few years with its roles expanding from cell migration and cytoskeletal dynamics, to cell cycle, gene regulation, angiogenesis/lymphangiogenesis and lipid metabolism. This concise review summarises and discusses the recent progress in understanding EPLIN in biological processes and its implications in cancer.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102199664
Author(s):  
Chris Shilling

During the past two decades, there has been a significant growth of sociological studies into the ‘body pedagogics’ of cultural transmission, reproduction and change. Rejecting the tendency to over-valorise cognitive information, these investigations have explored the importance of corporeal capacities, habits and techniques in the processes associated with belonging to specific ‘ways of life’. Focused on practical issues associated with ‘knowing how’ to operate within specific cultures, however, body pedagogic analyses have been less effective at accounting for the incarnation of cultural values. Addressing this limitation, with reference to the radically diverse norms involved historically and contemporarily in ‘vélo worlds’, I develop Dewey’s pragmatist transactionalism by arguing that the social, material and intellectual processes involved in learning physical techniques inevitably entail a concurrent entanglement with, and development of, values.


Author(s):  
Joseph M. Iaquinto ◽  
Richard Tsai ◽  
Michael J. Fassbind ◽  
David R. Haynor ◽  
Bruce J. Sangeorzan ◽  
...  

The ability to accurately measure three dimensional (3D) bone kinematics is key to understanding the motion of the joints of the body, and how such motion is altered by injury, disease, and treatment. Precise measurement of such kinematics is technically challenging. Biplane fluoroscopy is ideally suited to measure bone motion. Such systems have been developed in the past for both radiographic stereo-photogrammetric analysis (RSA) [1] and the more challenging model-based analysis [2]. Research groups have studied the knee [3,4], shoulder [5] and ankle [6] motion with similar techniques. The work presented here is an initial evaluation of the performance of our system, i.e., a validation that this in-house system can detect magnitudes of motion on-par with other existing systems.


1939 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. W. Fenwick

Numerous attempts have been made in the past to induce the eggs of Ascaris suum to hatch outside the body of the host. Extra-corporeal hatching has been observed under a variety of conditions by different workers. Kondo (1920, 1922), Asada (1921) and others record hatching in water, charcoal and sand cultures. Wharton (1915) states that hatching will occur in alkaline digestive juices, while Martin (1913) records a similar phenomenon in pancreatic fluid. Many different explanations have been offered to explain this hatching. Wharton suggested that the interaction of algae and sand might have some effect. Ohba (1923), who found that hatching would occur in 0·2% hydrochloric acid and 0·2% sodium carbonate believed that extra-corporeal hatching was limited to very old cultures of eggs. Many workers are of the opinion that some stimulus normally present in the digestive tract is necessary for hatching.


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