Register Here

Register Here

Republicans attempt to use the power of the purse to defund an Obama achievement. Democrats insist on a clean spending bill. A gridlocked Congress races toward a government shutdown. Sound familiar?

A year ago, the government shut down over a dispute over Obamacare funding. Now, a government shutdown looms, due to a dispute over funding for Obama’s immigration order.

The dysfunction never ends.

The latest saga began in last November, when President Obama signed an executive order that deferred deportation for up to five million undocumented immigrants. Republicans were united in their opposition to the executive action, but divided on how to stop it.

In December, some Republicans wanted to use the threat of a government shutdown to defund Obama’s immigration order. Instead, the GOP decided to confront Obama in the new Congress, when the party would have a majority in the Senate.

So Congress funded all agencies for a year, save the Department of Homeland Security.

One problem with the plan: the GOP only has 54 votes in the Senate, short of the 60 needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster. The Senate GOP was unable to overcome three Democratic filibusters last week.

Speaker Boehner blames Democrats for not caving to Republicans’ demands. Democrats stand firm behind Obama. Some Republicans insist that a government shutdown is too risky, and this is not a fight worth having. Other conservatives insist on defunding Obama’s executive order, even if it means shutting down DHS.

And this is where we stand now. Gridlocked, with no end in sight.

Next week, the GOP-led Congress will return from a weeklong recess with only five legislative days to find a solution to keep the DHS open. It is unclear what Republicans plan to do to avoid a government shutdown.

We at Democrazy will keep you posted on how this standoff ends.

“Hmm… I’ve never seen symptoms like this before. Let me just post a pic to my app and I’ll have a diagnosis for you in 24 hours.”

Well… after all that schooling, even the medical professionals can still be stumped from time to time.

That’s why one app developer created a platform where doctors can get the skinny on those oddball tricky cases. Figure 1 has been dubbed the “Instagram for Doctors.” And it’s had considerable success.

Here’s how it works: 

If a patient walks in with an unfamiliar condition, the doctor can post a picture of the condition to Figure 1. The doctor must ask permission first and the picture has to be vague enough that privacy is protected. Then, doctors from around the world with the app can comment to diagnosis the mystery illness. 

If you’re not a doctor you can download the app, but you won’t be able to comment (which is probably a good thing).

Some doctors have admitted – it’s their new work-related guilty pleasure. Let’s just hope things stay professional. We don’t want our doctors doing it for the Vine.

Tanguy Ringoir ’18 financial economics, recently won the Grandmaster Norm Invitational held at the Chinggis Chess Club, Burlingame, Calif.

The Grandmaster (GM) title is the highest title a chess player can earn, is difficult to achieve and can take quite some time to accomplish.

To win the title, a player must achieve a certain score (number of wins) in a tournament with a certain number of highly rated titled players (Grandmasters) present and at least three of them must be from a foreign country.

“It is not so easy to locate tournaments–or host ones–that meet this criteria in the U.S.,” says Joel DeWyer, business manager of UMBC’s chess team. “A player has to do this at three separate tournaments that meet this criteria.”

DeWyer says that, “In Tanguy’s case, he [Ringoir] knew that he needed at least one win and a draw in his final two games at the tournament in order to earn his final norm. One loss and it would have all escaped him.”

For Ringoir, earning the GM title will also open the door to several elite tournaments around the world.

Hilltop Senior Research Analyst Michael T. Abrams, MPH, and Policy Analyst Carl H. Mueller, MS, are co-authors of a new study published in the Journal of Pediatrics titled “Transcranial Doppler screening of Medicaid-insured children with sickle cell disease.”

The work was conducted in collaboration with researchers at Johns Hopkins and University of South Carolina medical schools, under the direction of Dr. David Bundy. The study found that letters to parents and doctors of children with sickle cell disease (SCD) did not succeed in increasing their use of a simple screening technique (transcranial Doppler imaging: TDI) for stroke risk, even as children with SCD are known to be at markedly heightened risk for stroke.

The research, conducted largely at The Hilltop Institute, used Medicaid administrative data to identify a calendar year 2010-11 cohort of youth aged 2-16 years with SCD, and measured 6 month post-letter TDI use in a group of 117 subje cts whose parents and doctors were sent letters, and a comparison group of 433 subjects who were not targeted by that mailing. Pre-intervention, annualized screening in the full SCD cohort identified (n=829) was just over 23 percent. Six month follow-up on those who did not receive screening in the pre-intervention period was 7.2 percent in the group receiving the mailing, and 8.6 percent in the comparison group. This group difference was non-significant after adjusting for numerous covariates. Accordingly, this work reveals that a single mailing to parents and providers is not sufficient to increase TDI use in youth with SCD. One important correlate which did emerge from this work is that specialist visits (e.g., to a hematologist), did significantly increase the use of TCD irrespective of the mailing. This incidental finding suggests that referral to a sickle cell specialist is more impactful than referral for a specific procedure to address this serious illness, at least in terms of receiving important preventative screening. For more information contact Hilltop team lead Michael Abrams (mabrams@hilltop.umbc.edu).
The full reference for this work is: Bundy DG, Abrams MT, Strouse JJ, Mueller CH, Miller MR, Casella JF (2015): “Transcranial Doppler screening of Medicaid-insured children with sickle cell disease”, Journal of Pediatrics, 166(1):188-90. doi: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2014.09.018. The pubmed citation and abstract can be accessed here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25444529

In the quest to make a better battery Evgenia Barannikova, a graduate student at UMBC in the department of chemistry and biochemistry, has isolated a peptide, a small sequence of amino acids, which binds to lithium manganese nickel oxide (LMNO), a material that can be used to make high performance batteries.

“Biology provides several tools for us to solve important problems,” said Evgenia Barannikova, a graduate student at UMBC. Barannikova works in the lab of Mark Allen and studies how biological molecules in general can improve the properties of inorganic materials in batteries. “By mimicking biological processes we can find the better solution,” she told phys.org

Read more at:

Phys.org 
Newelectronics
Scientific American