Tomorrow, May 10, marks the end of a comment period established by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to gather public input regarding the best way to define what "natural" means in regard to food. This is the third time the federal government has tried to establish such a standard – the first, in 1974, was undertaken by the Federal Trade Commission; the second, in 1991, by the FDA.
A recent competition at the University of Florida featured a race of 16 drones guided by human thoughts. The technology, called Brain Computer Interface (BCI), has been used in the past to help some paralyzed people manipulate prosthetics with their minds. In 2013, University of Minnesota biomedical engineering professor Bin He, PhD, first presented a drone controlled by BCI, in which electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets are fine-tuned to determine the electrical activity linked with specific thoughts in the brain.
The 2015-16 Microbiome Research & Microbiota Therapeutics lecture series wrapped up today with a talk by Prof. Diane Hoffmann, JD, MS, of the Law & Health Care Program at the University of Maryland. Prof. Hoffmann discussed her work leading an NIH-funded working group charged with identifying regulatory gaps and recommending solutions to ensure the safety and efficacy of probiotic products.
An administrative judge has determined that the costs of climate change, which Minnesota is required to account for when deciding how to generate electricity, have previously been assessed much too cheaply. In her ruling, Judge LauraSue Schlatter mostly agreed with the US government's calculation of the social cost of carbon emissions, ruling that the federal figures are more realistic than those Minnesota had been using.
An article in this week's New York Times Magazine outlines the challenges of protecting the U.S. agricultural system from devastating diseases. Last year's avian flu outbreak was particularly destructive, with more than 21 states reporting cases of the H5 virus and more than 50 million birds killed.
University of Minnesota faculty members have been making headlines for their work addressing connections between race and health care disparities. An article in STAT profiles Prof. Brooke Cunningham, MD, PhD (Medical School), a physician and sociologist who recently taught first-year medical students about the dangers of misunderstanding the concept of race. In her lecture, Prof.
The University of Minnesota has hired a new leader for its Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Sophia Vinogradov, a schizophrenia researcher who has recently served as vice chair of the psychiatry department at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, will start in August.
Prof. Stacy A. Kahn, MD, (University of Chicago School of Medicine, Comer Children's Hospital) recently delivered a lecture on Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT): Ethical Challenges and Regulatory Hurdles. Dr. Kahn, a pediatrician, discussed the real-world challenges faced by clinicians whose patients see FMT as a magic bullet for the treatment of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD), despite a lack of evidence that it works for those conditions.
New research by Judy Jou, PhD candidate in the School of Public Health and Pamela Jo Johnson, MPH, PhD, of Consortium member the Center for Spirituality and Healing, shows that 40% of patients using complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) don't disclose it to their doctors. The article, p
Each year, the Consortium funds research projects related to the intersections of science and society. In November, 2015, we issued a call for proposals to graduate and professional students at the University of Minnesota, to provide a stipend for research and writing in the Summer 2016 or academic year 2016-17. We were delighted to receive proposals from 27 students in 23 programs around the University. Six awards were made for a total of $41,407.