In the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, I find that Aristotle endorses two distinct forms of political activity. The first form, which I term statesman activity, is intrinsically valuable. Aristotle thinks that we should value this kind of political activity because it is constitutive of human well-being. The second form, which...
The apolipoprotein E (APOE) E4 isoform is the strongest genetic risk factor for sporadic Alzheimer’s disease (AD). While APOE is predominantly expressed by astrocytes in the central nervous system, neuronal expression of APOE is of increasing interest in age-related cognitive impairment, neurological injury, and neurodegeneration. Here we show that endogenous...
Natural Language Processing methods have become increasingly important for a variety of high- and low-level tasks including speech recognition, question answering, and automatic language translation. The state of the art performance of these methods is continuously advancing, but reliance on labeled training data sets often creates an artificial upper bound...
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a high-resolution, non-contact, three-dimensional imaging technique, which has revolutionized the diagnosis and treatment of retinal diseases. Visible-light OCT (vis-OCT) extends OCT by enabling retinal oximetry – the measurement of oxygen saturation of hemoglobin from within individual retinal blood vessels. Three advances in the vis-OCT technique...
The blueprint of life is contained within the sequence of an organism’s genome. While virtually all cells of an individual multicellular eukaryotic organism contain a near identical code of nucleic acid sequences, an organism must give rise to and maintain a varied set of cells and phenotypes. As such, sequence...
Non-covalent and ion-specific interactions in the context of charged polymers are ubiquitous in nature and in synthetic applications. For example, mussels utilize metal-coordinate bonds to form tough underwater adhesion to a wide range of substrates. The sandcastle worm uses coacervation of oppositely charged polymers to build robust structures for self-defense....
Optical interferometers and resonators are commonly used for precision measurement. These devices can accurately measure the phase shifts of light induced by small changes in the optical path in the device. To meet the need for ultra-sensitive measurement, researchers have developed various approaches to build better and more sensitive devices....
More than half of proteins in humans are modified with carbohydrates in a process called glycosylation, yet this process remains poorly understood even though approximately 1% of the expressed human genome encodes biosynthetic machinery for glycosylation. Unlike genomics and proteomics where high throughput tools are now routinely used to generate...
Conventional polymer network materials, e.g., rubber tires, cannot be efficiently recycled for high-value applications because of their permanent network structures. Therefore, at the end of use, none or only a small fraction of the economic value can be recovered from these materials. Scrapped tires demonstrate well this issue along with...
In the United States there is little material culture that foster youth share in common while in state custody. Removed from alleged circumstances of abuse or neglect, these young people frequently relocate between residential care settings like group homes, institutional treatment centers, or single family foster homes. Due to perpetual...