Fall 2020

Your Baby and dTGA

Shawn Avidan, Gabi Davis, Kaija Harrison, Maisy Meyer

So, your baby has d-TGA and needs to have surgery. Not to worry! Your surgical team is ready to help. Your babyís heart is in the right hands! 

The vast majority of babies born with d-TGA who receive surgery make full recoveries and live healthy lives just like all of us! 

d-TGA stands for dextro-Transposition of the Great Arteries. The two great arteries are the pulmonary artery which goes to the lungs, and the aorta, which goes to the body. To put it simply, your baby has these two major vessels of their heart switched. This may sound scary but try not to worry. Your surgeon has a simple procedure that will put everything back into the right place. 

Here is what a typical heart looks like. Normally, the heart functions as a connection between the two loops of the circulatory system: one loop of the figure 8 goes to the lungs and the other loop goes to the rest of the body. The two loops work together to deliver oxygen to your babyís body. Red blood represents the blood carrying oxygen to the body, and blue blood represents the blood that has already dropped off its oxygen. The difference between a typical heart and your babyís heart is that the two loops are no longer connected to each other. The lung loop is isolated from the body loop, and itís impossible for the oxygenated blood to reach the rest of the body. This is because the two main vessels that go into your babyís heart, the aorta (to the body) and the pulmonary artery (to the lungs) are switched. 

In addition to this switch, your baby may also have another small abnormality in their heart. Many babies with dTGA have whatís called an atrial septal defect. This is when there is a tiny hole between the atria, or the top two compartments in the heart. Even though this may sound intimidating, an atrial septal defect actually is beneficial to your baby when they have dTGA. It allows oxygenated blood to mix with deoxygenated blood that is going to the body and results in a partially oxygenated mixture. Even if your baby is not born with this tunnel open, doctors may opt to medically reopen it to allow this mixed blood to supply oxygen to your babyís body while the surgical team prepares them for surgery. 

The surgery that will fix your babyís heart is called an Arterial Switch Procedure. This procedure will ideally be performed when your baby is 8 to 14 days old. You can expect the procedure to last around 5 hours. Your baby will be placed under general anesthesia. Then, the surgeon will perform two repairs: first, they will seal the atrial septal defect. Once the ASD has been repaired, then the vessels themselves need to be swapped! The surgeon will detach the two major vessels and reattach them in the correct position: the aorta attached to the left ventricle and the pulmonary artery attached to the right ventricle. 

After surgery, your baby will be in the critical care unit to be cared for and monitored for safety. Rest assured; you can be with your child for much of this time. Your baby may need to be monitored for up to 2 weeks. After the surgical repair of dTGA, your baby can grow to become an active child.

Your baby will need to continue to visit their cardiologist just to check in and make sure everything is okay! With this life saving surgery, people with d-TGA can live full and happy lives. And just remember, your babyís heart is in the absolute best hands!

Kleiber's Law

Dhruv Bhatia, Joe Emmetti, Thomas Patti

Max Kleiber: (taps his glass) Good evening, everyone, and welcome to my science and spaghetti social. I'm delighted to see all of your warm faces, human and otherwise. I also extend my welcome to the scientists joining us remotely. For those of you I haven't yet had the pleasure of meeting, my name is Dr. Max Kleiber. I have arranged this gathering so that my esteemed guests can intermingle across discipline, country, and species lines, but also so that I may ask you all for a favor. You see, my studies have taken me to every corner of the globe, and at last I've decided to sit down and make some sense out of what I've seen. And for years, now, one pattern has occupied my thoughts.

I intentionally chose to host this event in a place with an industrial elevator, but imagine for a moment that you took the stairs to this high-rise dining room. Perhaps you would still be short of breath from the ascent. Now imagine you made the same climb with our friend Greta Goat strapped to your back. You would still be on the second stair!

Greta Goat: baaa!

MK: My apologies. My point is that extra weight makes life extra difficult. So, when I observed large animals all over the world, I asked the same question: How do they do it? Surely, they must need more energy to carry around all that weight. How much more energy does a giant elephant need than, say, our guest Mary Mouse?

Before we eat, let's do a little experiment. In return for my delicious homemade spaghetti and meatballs, each of my non-human guests agreed to be weighed, and I've arranged them from smallest to largest. We want to figure out how much energy—in the form of pasta—each one will need based on their weight. My initial prediction was that each animal would eat an amount of spaghetti that is directly proportional to their masses.

For Mary Mouse, we serve one scoop. 

Mary Mouse: (gesture showing she's pleased)

MK: She seems pleased. Katy Cat, who's twice as large, receives twice as many scoops. 

Katy Cat: (gesture showing she's pleased)

MK: Wonderful. Next, we serve three scoops for Malachi Monkey.

Malachi Monkey: (gesture showing three is too much) 

MK: You don't want that much? That's odd. Maybe he's just a shy eater. To continue our linear method, we offer four scoops to Darius Dog.

Darius Dog: (gesture showing four is too much) 

MK: Hmmm. Darius wants even more taken off his plate. Last but not least is Greta Goat. She's five times heavier than Mary Mouse, so let's give her five times the spaghetti.

Greta Goat: (gesture showing five is too much)  

MK: Very interesting. Now, let's adjust the larger animals' servings to better reflect their appetites. 

(Server removes food from monkey, dog, and goat's plate, and each one gestures in approval)

MK: Thank you, honored creatures, for humoring me in my demonstration. Now, I turn my attention to my fellow scientists. 

Our guests have rejected our hypothesis that energy consumption increases linearly with body mass. As you can see, the food piles do not rise evenly as the animals' weights increase. Instead, the curve bends slightly downwards when we reach our bigger-boned guests. I wanted to quantify this non-linear relationship between the mass of an animal and its metabolic rate—basically, how much energy it needs to survive. So, I plotted my experimental data points on a graph and brainstormed equations that match what I saw in nature. I quickly stumbled upon an equation that fits just right: the metabolic rate equals some constant number, c, times the mass to the three-fourths power. I present to you, Kleiber's Law.

What my law suggests is that larger animals use energy more efficiently than smaller animals. That's why they need less food pound-for-pound. But so far, I haven't found any good explanation as to why this relationship matches the three-fourths power curve.

Here is where your brilliant minds enter the picture. I want everyone to propose a theory to explain my findings. In the name of friendly competition, the presenter of the best theory will win all of the leftover spaghetti. For your reference, a good theory does two things: it accurately predicts what we observe, and it makes reasonable assumptions to do it. To start, let's welcome your high school biology teacher to the stage. She will be presenting her theory on the topic.

Teacher: Recall page 235 of your tenth-grade textbooks, which describes the square-cube law. Imagine that each animal we study is a cube. As we increase the volume of the cubic creature, its surface area lags behind. Since body heat escapes animals through their skin, less relative surface area allows larger animals to hold more tightly onto the heat that they generate, and conserve that valuable energy. This might explain why Kleiber's curve falls below linear at higher masses. 

Katy Cat: (meows, hisses)

Translator: Katy is right. This theory comes up short. Based on its assumptions, the relationship between metabolic rate and body mass should follow a two-thirds power curve, not Kleiber's three-fourths. Close, but no cigar. 

MK: That's a compelling point. Next?

WBE: I am physicist Geoffrey West and my partners here are ecologists James Brown and Brian Enquist. The square-cube theory is okay, but ours fits the data perfectly. Here it goes. Metabolic rate is all about oxygen, which helps convert food into energy in your cells. But to get there, oxygen has to travel through a system of branching blood vessels. Let's assume that these vessels organize into a self-similar structure. That means that if you zoom in on the next, smaller branch, it looks identical to the larger one it came from. From this assumption, we can calculate blood flow through differently sized animals and eventually derive Kleiber's three-fourths power curve. Now, the square-cube law might explain why larger animals are more efficient with their energy overall, but it overestimates this difference by ignoring the fact that larger animals need a little extra energy to push blood through their longer and more complex blood vessel networks.

Darius Dog: (barks angrily)

Translator: As Darius was saying, your model might perfectly match Dr. Kleiber's data, but the assumptions aren't so rock solid. They're so difficult to verify! Even if we cut up different animals to measure their veins by hand, there’s so much room for error. Plus, single-celled organisms, which have no blood vessels, also follow the three-fourths power curve. How do you explain that?

MK: Okay, I think we've heard enough. None of these are perfect. The first theory had good assumptions but didn't match the data, and the second matched the data but had shakier assumptions. How am I supposed to choose the best? Therefore, I call upon you,  the scientists tuning in from home, to decide which theories hold weight. How trustworthy are their assumptions? How well do they match my observations? And if you aren't satisfied with the theories you've seen? Propose your own! We're sure our dinner guests will be happy to help out—as long as you provide the spaghetti.

Why You Should Get Your Flu Shot

Harrison Katz, Derek Russell, Adeline Schwartz

Rachel: Hi everyone, this is Rachel 

Milo: and Milo

Rachel: and welcome back to DumpsterFire, the podcast where we talk about anything and everything 2020. Today we are going to talk about...

*ding*

Milo: oh shoot sorry that’s my mom. She sent me an article about COVID and the flu. She wants me to get my flu shot this year. 

Rachel: But you’re going to, right? 

Milo: I haven’t gotten it since I started college so probably not. 

Rachel: Wait, why? 

Milo: It’s too much of a hassle. Besides, I’m healthy. The last time I got sick was in 2009 when all that swine flu stuff was going on… and I got the shot that year too!  The flu shot just isn’t effective.  

Rachel: Milo! That’s just a myth, and getting the vaccine is even more important this year with COVID. 

Milo: So Rachel, tell me, why can people still get the flu after getting the shot?

Rachel: Well, strains of Influenza are constantly mutating and changing, so scientists can’t use the same vaccine every year. Instead, they must predict which strains will be most prevalent and then make a vaccine against those strains, usually at least six months before flu season begins. Like in 2009, strains can mutate and emerge after the vaccine has already been made. However, even if the vaccine isn’t a perfect match, it can still help reduce the severity and length of your symptoms. 

Milo: Okay, so some protection is still better than none. But why are we so concerned about getting a new shot each year? Are these mutations really that bad? 

Rachel: Well, they can be. In some instances, a strain that usually infects one species can mutate enough to infect a new species.This dramatic mutation occurs when a host cell is infected with two different strains at the same time. The gene segments get mixed up and packaged together, creating a new strain with unique infection capabilities. Strains that have never infected humans before are extra dangerous and can spread through a population rapidly. Without vaccine protection, a new influenza strain is deadly enough to cause a global pandemic. 

Milo: So in case something new and deadly has emerged, we should get the flu shot each year. Next I want to talk a bit about your immune system’s role in all of this. It’s my understanding that when you are infected with a strain for the first time, your immune system’s primary response is too slow to get rid of the virus before it makes you sick and contagious. This is why new strains spread so easily- no one can fight them off quick enough. 

Rachel: Exactly. The vaccine basically gives you a head start. It presents your immune system with that year’s strains so that you can make your primary response ahead of time. If you then actually get infected by those strains, your immune system skips right to its secondary response, producing the necessary antibodies faster and more effectively.With a good vaccine match, this protection prevents you from feeling sick and passing the flu to others. 

Milo: But how do we know that the shot won’t just give us the flu? I’ve heard that sometimes people feel sick after getting it. 

Rachel: Great question. The shot contains a killed version of the virus. It can’t actually infect your cells, but it does allow your immune system to mimic what it would do if it was fighting that strain for real. This means that some of the symptoms you feel from the real flu may be induced from the vaccine as well. This just means your immune system is developing good protection. Some people have allergic reactions to the shot, but that’s rare. 

Milo: So the vaccine is safe?

Rachel: Vaccines are some of the most extensively monitored pharmaceuticals in the United States. The approval process is so rigorous it can take a decade for a vaccine to become available to the public. Vaccines contain many components, like compounds called adjuvants, which help create a heightened immune response. While each annual flu vaccine has different strains of the killed virus, the other components are highly tested and kept consistent, ensuring the vaccine’s safety despite strain changes. 

Milo: But let’s put this into the context of 2020. I know for me and for many of our listeners, COVID-19 has already been so overwhelming. I’m not sure I can even think about the flu.

Rachel: Well, this brings us back to that article your mom sent you. The flu kills anywhere from 12,000 to 61,000 people in the US each year. Having patients infected with both influenza and COVID-19 will be even more catastrophic and will require a greater supply of already scarce medical resources.

Milo: Ok, yeah, that makes sense. 

Rachel: It’s also important to remember that getting your flu shot doesn’t just protect you. It greatly protects the people around you, especially those who can’t get the vaccine due to medical issues or reduced access to healthcare. These are often the most vulnerable people in our communities. As college students, we share the responsibility of protecting our community. 

Milo: Alright, you’ve convinced me. It’s safe, it’s easy, and it’s important for myself and for others around me. I’ll set up an appointment with the clinic tomorrow. 

Rachel: Success! For all our viewers listening, be like Milo and make sure you get your flu shot this year.  That’s #2020 news. 

Milo: and that’s all we’ve got for these week’s episode of DumpsterFire. Next week we’ll be talking about…

*ding*

Milo: Sorry, that’s my mom.

Rachel: Milo!!

Solar Savings

Ayden Ackerman, Adelaide Dahl, Ben Gerow

The Earth has a carbon problem. The pace of human life has increased, and so has our carbon footprint.

Although humans have been on the planet for thousands of years, starting roughly 260 years ago, industrialization caused global carbon levels to increase dramatically in a short period of time. The earth has not experienced this level of extreme rapid change ever in its 4.5 billion year long history! Burning fossil fuels releases harmful gases, such as carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere and in recent years, fossil fuel burning has accelerated at an exponential rate. This has caused negative effects on global climate and public health.

Every home that is powered by fossil fuels contributes every day to destructive environmental changes. We are seeing these negative effects play out in real time as wildfires race across nations, islands and coasts are ravaged by the sea, and air pollution brings health risks to your front door. Although fossil fuels seem like the cheap option, the real price is far more devastating. Other nations have invested in alternative energy sources like hydroelectric or wind, and found creative solutions to reducing energy use and making fossil fuel more efficient.

Meanwhile the US subsidizes fossil fuels for short term goals, falling behind and neglecting one of the strongest sources of power in our solar system...The sun… shining more than 3 trillion watts of free energy down onto the earth every day. Energy we can use to power homes, businesses, and lifestyles.

The energy from just one day of sunlight is enough to power almost 94,000 homes for a full year!

During the day, the photons emitted by the sun travel through the atmosphere and, whether it is cloudy or clear, can be absorbed into a solar panel. The panels themselves are made up of a series of photovoltaic cells which convert these photons into electrical energy. These cells are made out of silicon and glass, and since silicon is a semiconducting material, it allows the solar panel to generate an electric current. The panel, combined with a transformer, processes this current into electricity to use in your home.

Seems pretty simple right? So why isn't everyone using solar energy? The initial cost of installation for a solar panel may seem a little intimidating, but that's not the whole story! Federal incentives are in place to allow homeowners, like you, to get up to 30% in tax credit from the cost of installation of your panels. In addition to that, there are plenty of ways you can earn money on your solar array locally. 34

states across the country provide people with specific benefits that make the road to sustainable energy cheaper and easier. With your solar panels powering your home, your monthly power bill can be completely eliminated! And once you are using the solar power throughout your house, sometimes you have a little extra. You can sell this extra power back to the grid for credit. The exact amount of monetary kickback depends on your local power company, but, these benefits stack up savings from month to month, and over time you can save thousands of dollars. The average timeline for this payoff (in the US) is between 9 and 12 years but can be as short as 5. These payoffs typically depend on government-funded incentives, as well as specific power company perks, so if those are not enough

for you, vote for state and federal representatives who will give you more money for your solar!

This may seem like a lot of big changes, but change never seems easy, and normal gets redefined all the time. With each household taking these small steps to redefine what power means in their home, sustainable energy will be the new normal. We can still have the short term benefits like cheap, easily

accessible energy, while investing in our future and bringing the planet closer to a sustainable, carbon free energy source.