The world is awash in data visualizations, from charts accompanying news stories on the economy to graphs tracking the weekly temperature to scatterplots showing relationships between baseball statistics.
3D printing has come a long way since its invention in 1983 by Chuck Hull, who pioneered stereolithography, a technique that solidifies liquid resin into solid objects using ultraviolet lasers. Over the decades, 3D printers have evolved from experimental curiosities into tools capable of producing everything from custom prosthetics to complex food designs, architectural models, and even functioning human organs.
Most people recognize Alzheimer’s from its devastating symptoms such as memory loss, while new drugs target pathological aspects of disease manifestations, such as plaques of amyloid proteins. Now a sweeping new study in the Sept. 4 edition of Cell by MIT researchers shows the importance of understanding the disease as a battle over how well brain cells control the expression of their genes.. The study paints a high-resolution picture of a desperate struggle to maintain healthy gene expression and gene regulation where the consequences of failure or success are nothing less than the loss or preservation of cell function and cognition.
