AAAS Conference

      This past weekend I went to the AAAS Conference in Boston. It very interesting and a lot of fun. At the conference there were talks ranging from medicine to physics to art. An important thing I noticed, however, is that many of the talks were interdisciplinary. My favorite exhibit at the exhibition is a good example of this.  The exhibit was done by both postdoc and graduate students from Canada, who wanted to model the human brain and with its firing synapses.  At the exhibit they had both a robot and a computer model. In order to make the model they had a group of biologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, and engineers all working together. They said that some of the hardest things are to make a model that has a similar synaptic firing rate (computing rate) as the actual human brain and to create a physical model that both looks and acts like the computer model.
   
    The talk I liked most was about strokes and how we can help patients recover better. My favorite part was on regenerative strategies. The two methods of regeneration that they covered were Endogenous Stem Cell Stimulation and Exogenous Stem Cell Transplantation. The speaker was doing research on mice and rats for both of these methods and found them both to be effective.

Below is a link to the paper written by one of the speakers on Endogenous Stem Cell Stimulation.

http://www.ecf.utoronto.ca/~molly/publications/hydrogel%20delivery%20of%20erythropoietin...after%20stroke%20injury.pdf

Some other things I enjoyed while at the conference were...

Sticking a wooden stick through a balloon without popping it! A balloon is made out of polymers. When polymers are stretched, they become very ridged and easy to break, which is why a balloon normally pops. However, at the ends of the balloon the polymers are not stretched very tightly at all, allowing them to be flexible, therefore preventing them from breaking.

 Below is an example of two enantimors: