A randomized trial of a wearable UV dosimeter for skin cancer prevention.

Background: Non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC) is the most prevalent cancer in the United States. Despite guidelines on ultraviolet (UV) avoidance, it remains difficult for people to assess their exposure, as UV is invisible and the onset of UV-induced symptoms is delayed.

Methods: In a prospective randomized trial, 97 elderly patients with a history of actinic keratoses (AK) were followed over 6 months.

The Ultraviolet Index Is Well Estimated by the Terrestrial Irradiance at 310 nm.

Ultraviolet (UV) exposure significantly contributes to non-melanoma skin cancer. In the context of health, UV exposure is the product of time and the UV Index (UVI), a weighted sum of the irradiance over all wavelengths from = 250 to 400 nm. In our analysis of the United States Environmental Protection Agency's UV-Net database of over 400,000 spectral irradiance measurements taken over several years, we found that the UVI is well estimated by 77 .

An Ecological Study Indicates the Importance of Ultraviolet A Protection in Sunscreens.

The use of sunscreens is recommended to limit the impact of sun exposure on the skin. The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between sunscreen sales and melanoma in 4 different countries with diverse sunscreen regulations. Data from publicly avail-able databases were examined for Sweden, England, Australia, and the USA from 1999 to 2018.

Allele-specific DNA methylation is increased in cancers and its dense mapping in normal plus neoplastic cells increases the yield of disease-associated regulatory SNPs.

Background: Mapping of allele-specific DNA methylation (ASM) can be a post-GWAS strategy for localizing regulatory sequence polymorphisms (rSNPs). The advantages of this approach, and the mechanisms underlying ASM in normal and neoplastic cells, remain to be clarified.

Results: We perform whole genome methyl-seq on diverse normal cells and tissues and three cancer types.

CloudASM: an ultra-efficient cloud-based pipeline for mapping allele-specific DNA methylation.

Summary: Methods for quantifying the imbalance in CpG methylation between alleles genome-wide have been described but their algorithmic time complexity is quadratic and their practical use requires painstaking attention to infrastructure choice, implementation and execution. To solve this problem, we developed CloudASM, a scalable, ultra-efficient, turn-key, portable pipeline on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that uses a novel pipeline manager and GCP's serverless enterprise data warehouse.

Availability And Implementation: CloudASM is freely available in the GitHub repository https://github.

Clinical and surgical applications of smart glasses.

Background: With the increased efforts to adopt health information technology in the healthcare field, many innovative devices have emerged to improve patient care, increase efficiency, and decrease healthcare costs. A recent addition is smart glasses: web-connected glasses that can present data onto the lenses and record images or videos through a front-facing camera.

Objective: In this article, we review the most salient uses of smart glasses in healthcare, while also denoting their limitations including practical capabilities and patient confidentiality.

Molecular wear of microtubules propelled by surface-adhered kinesins.

Wear is the progressive loss of material from a body caused by contact and relative movement and is a major concern in both engineering and biology. Advances in nanotechnology have allowed the origins of wear processes to be studied at the atomic and molecular scale, but also demand that wear in nanoscale systems can be predicted and controlled. Biomolecular systems can undergo a range of active movements at the nanoscale, which are enabled by the transduction of chemical energy into mechanical work by polymerization processes and motor proteins.

Observing the mushroom-to-brush transition for kinesin proteins.

The height of polymers grafted to a surface is predicted to be constant at low densities ("mushroom" regime) and increase with the third root of the polymer surface density at high densities ("brush" regime). This mushroom-to-brush transition is explored with kinesin-1 proteins adhered to a surface at controlled densities. The kinesin height is measured by attaching fluorescently labeled microtubules to the kinesins and determining their elevation using fluorescence interference contrast microscopy.

Fatigue failure and molecular machine design.

Sophisticated molecular machines have evolved in nature, and the first synthetic molecular machines have been demonstrated. With our increasing understanding of individual operating cycles, the question of how operation can be sustained over many cycles comes to the forefront. In the design of macroscale machines, performance and lifetime are opposing goals.