Higher Education

Bacteria are swimming in our guts. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Probiotics, for example, help us digest food, make vitamins, and destroy rogue, possibly cancer-causing mutated cells before they spin out of control. But bad actors can also sneak in and wreak havoc. That’s especially true with Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), a bacterium that has infected about half the world’s population.

The clearest connection between H. pylori and bad health outcomes is with gastric cancer. H. pylori is typically passed from person to person as they share food and drinks, and it goes “right to the stomach and attaches itself to stomach cells,” said Wael El-Rifai, M.D., Ph.D., associate director of Basic Science and co-leader of the Tumor Biology Program at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. After binding to those cells, it injects CagA, an oncogenic bacterial protein, into them and reprograms cells.

When Allison Thomas ’78 introduces herself, she does so like this: “My name is Allison and I descend from enslavers dating back to Colonial Virginia.” This usually shocks people, but she doesn’t care. Thomas wants to normalize revealing these stories, both through small interactions and big projects, including one she started working on in 2015 when she found proof of her family’s true history in an ancestor’s diary.

She and writer Maria Sharp Montgomery, along with Our Black Ancestry, a nonprofit, launched the Gwynn’s Island Project, which has unraveled the history of a Virginia island located on the western shore of the lower Chesapeake Bay. They’re connected because Montgomery is a descendent of those whom Thomas’ family enslaved. Together, the duo has been telling this story and proving the existence of the island’s once thriving Black community.

“We’re not responsible for that history, but I am responsible for sharing it,” Thomas says.

AI-powered edge computing is already pervasive in our lives. Devices like drones, smart wearables, and industrial IoT sensors are equipped with AI-enabled chips so that computing can occur at the “edge” of the internet, where the data originates. This allows real-time processing and guarantees data privacy.

However, AI functionalities on these tiny edge devices are limited by the energy provided by a battery. Therefore, improving energy efficiency is crucial. In today’s AI chips, data processing and data storage happen at separate places – a compute unit and a memory unit. The frequent data movement between these units consumes most of the energy during AI processing, so reducing the data movement is the key to addressing the energy issue.

Penn Medicine has been on a multiyear journey to both raise the rates of screening for colorectal cancer and increase uptake of follow up care, with the goal of driving down colorectal cancer death rates and addressing inequities. Right now, colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the U.S., with higher rates in the Black community than any other racial/ethnic group. Black Americans are 20% more likely to get colorectal cancer, and 40% more likely to die of it compared to most other groups, according to the American Cancer Society.

The Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) market—including everything from yoga and meditation to acupuncture and naturopathy—is projected to be worth $210.12 billion by 2026, according to Grand View Research.

HIPAA compliance is a challenge for every healthcare organization. The industry took note in April when Amazon announced new HIPAA-compliant features for its Alexa digital assistant. These features represent a step forward in the potential for smart speaker technology to meet growing demands from patients for easy access to health information.

When David G. Marrero, PhD, talks about diabetes, he is not shy about using strong language. “Diabetes may be the most serious public health crisis of our time,” said Marrero, director of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center for Border Health Disparities in Tucson. “If you think our healthcare system is stressed now and that the costs are exacerbated, put another 40 to 50 million people with diabetes into the mix, and we’ll be in very deep trouble.”

Antibiotic resistant bacteria are not just a $2.2 billion healthcare industry problem: They’re a modern-day health crisis that has continued to build a dangerous momentum.

If your warehouse isn’t on the wearable bandwagon, expect to jump on soon: MHI expects 70% of facilities to adopt wearables in the next five years.

Wearables don’t necessarily mean the latest GPS watch you’ll wear while marathon training. It could be as simple as a barcode scanner that eliminates the need for manual data entry, or as complex as smart glasses that identify what exactly a person should pick through augmented reality.

An egg seller recently had a chicken/egg problem, though not which came first. The company wanted to figure out how to optimize its chickens’ egg laying capacity.

“The problem is the coop is covered with chicken feces,” said Alfonso Velosa, research vice president for IoT at Gartner, discussing a recent client’s conundrum. “For them, the central thing is how do we increase productivity while the floor is clean enough.”

When both Amazon and DHL announced they were making moves to open warehouses in Latin America, it brought a spotlight onto a growing region – on the overall economy but especially on e-commerce and how it’s changing the demand for warehousing and supply chain services.

“The e-commerce boom in Latin America is changing the way that companies are servicing their customers,” Diego Rodriguez, director of the logistics practice at Americas Market Intelligence, told Supply Chain Dive.

The threat of blackmail never really goes away. It’s just now the bad guys want their anonymous payments in bitcoin (BTC).

In a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attack hackers bombard a website with so much traffic from multiple sources the site can’t function. To make the problem go away, hackers are demanding ransom in cryptocurrencies, which make the payments easier for them to get.

You may know that hackers want to take over your devices and use them to get rich mining cryptocurrencies. What you may not know is the problem is getting worse very quickly.

That’s a key finding from McAfee Labs’ first-quarter threats report. The research unit of the computer security software company McAfee found what it calls a “stunning” 629 percent increase in coin miner malware during the first quarter compared with the fourth quarter of last year. This kind of malware infects a victim’s device and turns it into a cryptocurrency miner, allowing the attacker to pocket the profits.

Big data is the buzzword we can’t avoid, but for good reason: it’s changing the way a lot of businesses operate, and will continue to do so, especially within the supply chain world.

Sixty-four percent of supply chain executives consider big data analytics a disruptive and important technology, according to SCM World, even though it’s still a relatively new application of the technology.

It’s a wrap for bulky, wasteful packaging. Shippers today have to satisfy consumers who not only demand that fewer materials be used in packaging, but also prefer those materials to have a low environmental impact.

In addition to eliminating packaging waste to satisfy consumers, shippers also need to consider cost. Cutting back on packaging can reduce both material spend and shipping costs. Making packages smaller and lighter helps companies streamline the supply chain for additional time and money savings.

On a jobsite in Kingsville, Texas, in August 2013, a worker was mixing gypsum concrete in preparation for gypcrete installation on an apartment building. It’s not a particularly taxing job, but he was doing it in direct sunlight. “He wasn’t training or doing anything that involved a lot of lifting or climbing,” says Holly Webster, director of administration at Texas-based KWA Construction, which served as the general contractor on the job. (KWA would not release further information on either the worker or subcontractor.) The man, in his 20s, had just transferred from New Mexico, and he wasn’t used to the heat and humidity of a Texas summer. While he’d had some water that day, he also drank some caffeine-packed energy drinks.

The mobile health (mMealth) marketplace has lived up to its hype, but where it goes next depends on our changing healthcare needs.

The number of mHealth apps published on iOS and Android has more than doubled in two and-a-half years, reaching more than 100,000 apps in 2014, according to research2guidance’s fourth annual study on mHealth app publishing.

Market revenue reached $2.4 billion dollars in 2013 and is projected to grow to $26 billion by 2017.

The beat goes on. In recent weeks, both JP Morgan Chase and Home Depot have been identified as the latest victims of large-scale cyberattacks.

JP Morgan Chase was among a handful of U.S. banks hit by hackers in a series of attacks in August. A few days later, Krebs on Security released details about a spring attack on Home Depot. The scope of the attack has not yet been determined, but it could be bigger than last year’s Target breach. Oh, and investigators found another Healthcare.gov hack in July, too.

Zachry Engineering Corp. burst out of the recession with a full head of steam. On the heels of a tough couple of years, the design arm of Zachry Holdings is back among the region’s powerhouse firms. After its regional revenue dropped from $124.5 million in 2009 to $41.4 million in 2011, the company more than doubled the total in 2012, reaching $90.4 million. That secured it eighth place on the current list of top design firms in Texas and Louisiana.

Parents with cancer face special challenges. New points of connection can help you be there for your kids.