I was able to utilize a 3T MRI machine with the permission of CUNY’s Advanced Science Research Center to show the time comparisons of eggs which were injected with contrast media. The same response occurs in humans and in eggs, since there are proteins that react to contrast media. The protein break down by MRI contrast seems focal but small iodine contrast in CT is diffused. Dotarem and Gadavist work as negative contrast agent when pooled in larger quantities in small, confined regions due to T2* signal loss and not as positive contrast agent with T1 enhancement. Gadolinium is sustained and is needed in 3T for cancer, vascular, and infection imaging. Hydrogen communicates with Gadolinium and when used in small amount it acts as T1 enhanced image. The results from the egg protein can offer insights about how human tissue, particularly vulnerable embryos could lose proteins if radiologic contrast is given at high dose. An example is the triple dose that we injected in the eggs compared to humans.
Throughout history we have continued to see strange parallels in the development of various technologies. With the use of modern technology, I hope to bridge some of the gaps in knowledge we have between the ages. While much of what motivated our ancestors to make their discoveries may have been lost, we may still yet be able to proverbially “travel back in time” by rediscovering how our ancestors dealt with problems. While I doubt there is a missing link in mathematics, I think it is important to look at how our ancestors learned to create better learning models for students today.
Have you ever wondered why people find biology and it related science subjects extremely intriguing? We all know about cells and it importance in the human genome, but have you ever heard of the word – Tetrahymena Thermophila? The life cycle of Tetrahymena provides the opportunity to study biological factors important for different cellular processes. Areas T. Thermophila has impacted includes RNA enzymes, Cytoskeleton, Chromosome Replication and Copy Number Control, Toxicology, Evolution, Programmed Genome Rearrangement, etc. The purpose of this project is to identify which human calpain TTHERM_00259450, the gene of interest selected for the Tetrahymena Thermophila database, is highly related to. Relevant data sets were collected through multiple alignment tools, and phylogenetic tools. Completion of the research shows that TTHERM_00259450 is closely similar to human calpain-7 compared to human calpain-1, etc. Now, the questions are, why is TTHERM_00259450 similar to human calpain-7? What are the keynoted similarities between these two that can take this biological research into another phase? Which will interestingly take this research into further analysis in the future.
Organic chemicals with metal ions inside can affect proteins and other structures in our body that are also organic materials with metal ions for function. Carbs, meat and various plant products in our food often bring in useful metals that can hop and exchange places with the metals inside our biostructures. But sometimes they bring in toxic metals like mercury or cadmium or even gadolinium from MRI tests. Cadmium in mines can replace magnesium or zinc or iron in the body as cadmium toxicity happens among some miners. Our work involves such “transmetallation” between toxic metals injected during MRI procedure that may fail to go out through kidneys or some of the CT iodine dye that is different from the safe iodized salt and may extract out valuable metals away from our body. Both of these toxic metal “in” and valuable metal “out” are being tested in this project using mineral-rich fruits (for example banana or apple or sweet potato) upon injecting radiologic dye at our college x-ray lab and at MRI units at Langone NYU and a Harvard facility, McLean. The MR and X-ray experiments show images, we believe, for the first time in medicine and biology literature that such metal transfer can be tested in the natural fruit and vegetable states without destroying the natural physiology of those metal/carb or metal/protein relations.
My name is BingFang Chen and I do the research project of the Emerging Scholar program. I try to use my projects to help people who get the physical problem, make
their life not effect by accident. They can use the mind to control wheelchair move if their hand can’t work temporally. In the current phase of the project, background research is done to learn to use the Electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements of brain waves to control the robot. A modified Mindflex game controller is connected to Arduino and brain activity data is passed on to Processing code running on a PC in
order to track and record brain wave patterns. The electrical activity of the brain will be used to control the electrical toy. We try to automatically connect between master Bluetooth and slave Bluetooth without Arduino.
This research project is about “The role of calpains in Tetrahymena thermophila”. Tetrahymena thermophila is a unicellular ciliated Protozoa found in freshwater lakes and ponds. Calpains are proteins that belong to the family of intracellular calcium-dependent, no-lysosomal cysteine proteases. For this research, Ciliates.org was used to identify the calpain gene of interest. A gene of choice was selected, which was TTHERM_00885870(protein). The amino acid sequence from TTHERM_00885870 was used to run a BLASTp search changing the organism to Homo sapiens. By changing the organism to Homo sapiens, this will give the human homologs that may be more similar to TTHERM_00885870. BLAST was used to search for human homologs that may be similar to TTHERM_00885870. Multiple Sequence Alignment such as, MUSCLE, T-Coffee, and MAFFT were also used to search for alignment and close matches. They provide the alignment sequences and construct cladograms. MEGA and Phylogeny.fr were used to draw phylogenetic trees, which was used to identify the closely related human calpain to TTHERM_00885870(protein). Preliminary results indicate that TTHERM_00885870 might be more closely related to human calpain 16 and 7. More analysis will be done to confirm this similarity and potential functions of this calpain in T. thermophila.
The project is to construct and compare models using Lasso regression and Decision Tree respectively to demonstrate the relation between the PM2.5 and its causing factors. We analyze the PM2.5 readings and meteorological records of Beijing in China from 2010 to 2015 and the data is collected from the UCI website. In our study of the PM2.5 data, by comparing the training and testing errors for both models, the Decision Tree model is more reliable than Lasso Regression.
The Department of Energy Solar Decathlon is a collegiate initiative that encourages student competitors to design and construct high efficiency and creative renewable-energy buildings. The aim is to create a two-story residential project that would act as a model for building assemblies and environmentally sustainable architecture design. Colchester Eco house reflects the scale of the surrounding family homes, adding interest with aberrant roofs and cantilevers. A derelict, high-consuming 1930s bungalow is being replaced with two homes in a zero-energy building. It will incorporate active and passive energy strategies to create a low impact building. The team’s long-term strategy of this project will be to construct this sustainable design on a site. The team is using modeling tools including building a WUFI Plus Energy model that consistently updated as needed so that it meets performance and energy targets.
Hello! I am Anny Baez Silfa, an upper sophomore in the CET Department. Technology has been my passion, how machines work and are made of, and how technology is involved with medicine. In previous semesters I have been updating an ongoing project “Roboqueen”. This project consists of a full-body interactive robotic mannequin made of cardboard and an aluminum frame. Due to Covid, and due to my interest in helping people with disabilities, I modified my own oximeter and made a BioOxi Monitoring Device. This project displays oxygen in the blood and heart rate which is helpful to prevent heart failure.
My research is about learning how internet search engines like google and yahoo rank pages. We use search engines every day, and it is an interesting question to know how these search engines work. It turns out the rank is obtained using tools from Linear Algebra and Probability. We use a WebGraph to explain how we can rank a network of six links. For a larger network this is not feasible. We then explain a more complex method based on the Markov chain. We used SageMath to help us with the computations.
