CHASE (Children's Housing Assessment for a Safe Environment): a protocol for the inspection and modification of injury risks in children's homes.

Background: Decades of research and practice experience have led to an extensive body of evidence about effective home safety modifications. However, the benefits of safety modifications have not reached all segments of society. Poor quality housing in low-income neighborhoods, along with limited access to safety products and injury prevention information, can be significant barriers to child safety.

In vitro electrochemical assessment of electrodes for neurostimulation in roach biobots.

Biobotics investigates the use of live insects as biological robots whose locomotion can be controlled by neurostimulation through implanted electrodes. Inactivity in the biobots (biological robots) can sometimes be noticed following extended neurostimulation, partly owing to incompatibility of implanted electrodes with the biobotic application or gradual degradation of the tissue-electrode interface. Implanted electrodes need to sufficiently exhibit consistent, reliable, and stable performance during stimulation experiments, have low tissue-electrode impedance, facilitate good charge injection capacity, and be compact in size or shape.

Low-Power Wearable Systems for Continuous Monitoring of Environment and Health for Chronic Respiratory Disease.

We present our efforts toward enabling a wearable sensor system that allows for the correlation of individual environmental exposures with physiologic and subsequent adverse health responses. This system will permit a better understanding of the impact of increased ozone levels and other pollutants on chronic asthma conditions. We discuss the inefficiency of existing commercial off-the-shelf components to achieve continuous monitoring and our system-level and nano-enabled efforts toward improving the wearability and power consumption.

Early metamorphic insertion technology for insect flight behavior monitoring.

Early Metamorphosis Insertion Technology (EMIT) is a novel methodology for integrating microfabricated neuromuscular recording and actuation platforms on insects during their metamorphic development. Here, the implants are fused within the structure and function of the neuromuscular system as a result of metamorphic tissue remaking. The implants emerge with the insect where the development of tissue around the electronics during pupal development results in a bioelectrically and biomechanically enhanced tissue interface.

Electromagnetic levitation platform for wireless study of insect flight neurophysiology.

An electromagnetic levitation platform for use in a light emitting diode (LED) arena based virtual reality environment was developed for wireless recording of neural and neuromuscular signals from the flight related muscle groups in Manduca sexta. The platform incorporates the use of Early Metamorphosis Insertion Technology to implant recording electrodes into the flight muscles of late stage pupal moths. Analysis of the insects' response to changes in the LED arena rotation direction indicate that this setup could be used to perform a variety of flight behavior studies during yaw maneuvers.

Cocktails of human anti-cancer antibodies show a synergistic effect in nude mouse tumor xenografts.

A panel of four natural human monoclonal IgG antibodies derived from B lymphocytes isolated from regional draining lymph nodes of cancer patients has been developed and characterized. The four human antibodies are termed, RM1, RM2, RM3, and RM4. The immunoreactivity of this panel of four human antibodies is restricted to tumor cells.

Requirements for human antibody cocktails for oncology.

Cancer patients receiving antibodies as monotherapy have benefited from these treatments. However, significant improvements can be made that should make the therapy more effective. Applying lessons learned from the natural oligoclonal antibody response that cancer patients mount to their own tumours suggests that cocktails of monoclonal antibodies could be formulated, which may be more effective in treating cancers.

Novel ganglioside antigen identified by B cells in human medullary breast carcinomas: the proof of principle concerning the tumor-infiltrating B lymphocytes.

The potential tumor-recognizing capacity of B cells infiltrating human breast carcinoma is an important aspect of breast cancer biology. As an experimental system, we used human medullary breast carcinoma because of its heavy B lymphocytic infiltration paralleled to a relatively better prognosis. Ig-rearranged V region V(H)-J(H), Vkappa-Jkappa, and Vlambda-Jlambda genes, amplified by RT-PCR of the infiltrating B cells, were cloned, sequenced, and subjected to a comparative DNA analysis.