Cool Stem News:

How Google’s New Career Certificates Could Disrupt the College Degree  | Inc.com (02:01)

• On Thursday, March 11th, Google announced their plan that could change the future of work and schooling. 

• A certificate program that provides skills and qualifications in fields that are highly technical and high paying.
  • Big Thing of Note: No college degree required!

• Game changer for anyone who believes the current educational system is broken (that would be me!).

• “College degrees are out of reach for many Americans, and you shouldn’t need a college diploma to have economic security,” writes Kent Walker, senior vice president of global affairs at Google. “We need new, accessible job-training solutions–from enhanced vocational programs to online education–to help America recover and rebuild.”

• The plan includes:
  • 3 new Google Career Certificates on Coursera (quoted by Google):
    • Project Management ($93,000) 
    • Data Analytics ($66,000)
    • User Experience (UX) design ($75,000) 
  • A new Associate Android Developer Certification course
  • Over 100,000 need-based scholarships
  • Partnerships with more than 130 employers working with Google to hire graduates of its certificate program.
    • Google Career Certificates Hiring Consortium, a group working together with Google that now includes companies like Bayer, Deloitte, Verizon, SAP, Accenture, Intel, and Bank of America.
  • A new Google Search feature that makes it easier for people to find jobs for their education level, including no degree and no experience

• On average you can finish this course in six months or less, putting the cost at about $240 for U.S. students. ($49/month, Based their IT cert course on Coursera)
  • Some may need only three months, cutting that cost in half.

• Google through analysis of its first IT certification course on Coursera saw the need of providing more of these courses that provide in-demand, and real-world skills to people. 

• They want the programs to provide a clear path to a high-paying job and a stable career, or even be a way to start a business. 

Scientists Find a Natural Protein That Stops Allergies And Autoimmune Conditions | Science Alert (14:46)

• Unfortunately a lot of Americans deal with abusive immune systems. 

• Allergies are becoming more and more common, with roughly 50 million people dealing with them each and every year. 
  • Most common and most overlooked. 
  • Allergy: when your immune system reacts to a foreign substance, called an allergen. 

• Using transgenic mice and cultures of cells taken from human tonsils, researchers have now found evidence of how our bodies might defend against the mistakes that result in conditions such as asthma, food allergies, and lupus.

• The researchers found a protein that is produced by immune cells that acts as a “boss-level” antihistamine.

• A protein called Neuritin:
  • “There are over 80 autoimmune diseases, in many of them we find antibodies that bind to our own tissues and attack us instead of targeting pathogens – viruses and bacteria,” explained immunologist Paula Gonzalez-Figueroa from the Australian National University (ANU).
  • She continues to explain how neuritin actually works, “We found neuritin suppresses formation of rogue plasma cells which are the cells that produce harmful antibodies.”
  • For a while researchers did not know how the immune system’s regulatory T cells suppress self-targeting antibodies and immunoglobulin E (IgE)
    • IgE: What your body makes when it overreacts to non harmful substances. (Levels measured to check for allergies)
  • It took Gonzalez-Figueroa and her team five years to figure it out, with the help of genetically engineered mice and lab-grown human cells.

• Study:
  • Genetically modified mice to lack the T follicular regulatory (Tfr), which produces neuritin
  • These mice had an increased chance of dying when dealing with some form of allergen.
  • Also these mice, early in life, produced faulty plasma cells. Which remember they produce harmful antibodies.
  • The researchers treated these Tfr-deficient mice by injecting neuritin into their veins
  • According to the paper they “appeared healthy” afterwards.
  • I’ll let ANU Professor Carola Vinuesa explain the significance of this:

“This could be more than a new drug – it could be a completely new approach to treat allergies and autoimmune diseases … If this approach was successful, we would not need to deplete important immune cells nor dampen the entire immune system; instead, we would only need to use the proteins our own body uses to ensure immune tolerance.”

Elon Musk Says Cybertruck Will Power Off-Grid Tiny Houses and Campers | Interesting Engineering (22:20)

• In a response to a question on Twitter, Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla’s Cybertruck will be able to power off-grid tiny houses and campers.

• This is not something new when it comes to the world of EVs. Most recent example being Texans utilizing their EVs to power their houses during that large blackout.

• And back in 2019, an “off-the-grid veteran” based on his own calculations estimated that a cybertruck could power his tiny-house for about 240 days.
  • That was with some caveats:  “didn’t do laundry, run the shop vac or any power tools.”
  • Estimate that the battery size of the mid-range Tesla pickup would be around 120 kWh. 
    • Based on the size of the vehicle, the Tesla community roughly agrees with this rough estimate. (e.g. 100 kWh)

• Cybertrucks may then become the vehicle of choice for people who want to get away and go into nature with their camper trailers. Due to energy storage and towing capability.

• Towing Capacity:
  • Single-RWD motor: 7,500 lbs
  • Dual Motor AWD: 10,000 lbs
  • Tri Motor AWD: 14,000 lbs

• The Tesla Cybertruck is set to start production later this year, but with a number of automotive production delays, this date may likely be pushed back to 2022. 

Painless skin swabs used to detect Parkinson’s with high accuracy | New Atlas (30:40)

• How do we currently test for Parkinson’s?
  • It is a complicated process that relies on symptoms, careful examinations, family history and case-by-case assessments by physicians.
  • Muhammad Ali is the most notable figure I knew who had it. 

• Scientists at the University of Manchester (UM) focusing on analyzing skin for the disease have made a significant discovery:
  • Swabs that gather chemical information from the skin can be used to distinguish Parkinson’s patients from healthy controls with high accuracy.

• How would this approach work?

• • Collect samples from the oily layer on our skin called the sebum.
  • This substance is full of “molecules of interest” and it is thought that people with Parkinson’s produce higher amounts of it.

• The Study:
  • 500 participants (both with and without Parkinson’s) 
  • Collect sebum samples from upper back
  • Utilized mass spectrometry to analyze the chemical components of sample.
  • 10 chemicals (e.g. biomarkers) revealed that were heightened or lowered in participants with Parkinson’s
  • Utilizing that knowledge, the scientists were able to distinguish those with the disease from those without with an accuracy of 85 percent.

• University of Manchester’s Professor Perdita Barran provides her thoughts on the study: “We believe that our results are an extremely encouraging step towards tests that could be used to help diagnose and monitor Parkinson’s … Not only is the test quick, simple and painless but it should also be extremely cost-effective because it uses existing technology that is already widely available. We are now looking to take our findings forwards to refine the test to improve accuracy even further,”

• The hope is that Parkinson’s can be diagnosed and then managed during its earlier stages, before the majority of the brain cells that produce dopamine have died off and a patient’s symptoms become severe.

Digital twins could lead to more proactive, personalized medicine, researchers say | MedicalXPress (38:31)

• What if you had a twin who doctors could work with to predict your future health care needs or how a particular virus might affect you? 
  • No I’m not talking about an actual twin or about clones, but what about a digital twin?

• That’s the solution an Indiana University researcher is suggesting in order to predict individuals’ future health care needs.
  • The idea is to create improved mathematical models of human health and disease using digital twins.

• They claim that this could lead to better health care outcomes and faster responses to novel diseases.

• James Glazier, one of the authors of the paper explains the idea behind it: “Digital twins combine a computer model that predicts how the state of a system will evolve with real-time measurements of individuals … Medicine, at the moment, is largely reactive: You go to the doctor when you’re sick, or after there’s a major problem. Ideally, what we’d like to be able to do is predict when there’s going to be a problem and make small interventions to prevent the problem from ever becoming serious.”

• He continues to explain that medicine currently lacks the ability to have some form of controlled experimentation, because obviously experimenting on people is bad!

• Digital twins would allow this type of experimentation in the virtual world to simulate possible outcomes from a type of treatment method. 
  • Controlled and repeatable experiments 
  • Discovering how outcomes differ for various interventions
  • Enabling rapid selection of optimal interventions.

• I appreciate the general concept, but there is a concern I have that just stems from all this movement to the digital platform and that is personal privacy concerns. 

• Suggestion: Grab a sample & generalize based on statistics about the population.

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