Using quantitative rather than qualitative terms to describe the risks of various treatment options improves communication between surgeons and patients.

Despite regional variations in COVID-19-related restrictions last year during the lockdown phase of the pandemic, similar trends emerged in activity at Level I trauma centers in four different cities from the Southeast to the Northwest.

“For more than 30 years, we have collaborated with our Model System colleagues...,” said Trevor Dyson-Hudson, MD, director of the Center for Spinal Cord injury Research at Kessler Foundation and co-director of the NNJSCIS. “This most recent grant enables us to continue to contribute to the important work of the SCI Model Systems." Steven Kirshblum, MD, is co-director of the NNJSCIS, director of Spinal Cord Injury Services at Kessler Institute, and chief medical officer for Kessler Institute and Kessler Foundation: "We will compare the successes of a person-centered early intervention called vocational resource facilitation with that of conventional vocational rehabilitation, looking at individuals’ return to competitive employment following inpatient rehabilitation at Kessler Institute.”

Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have found new ways of controlling how heat flows through thin materials by stacking atomically thin layers of atoms into <i>van der Waals heterostructures</i>. By comparing different stacks of different materials, or even the same material after heat treatment, they found that weak coupling and mismatch between layers helped significantly reduce heat transport. Their finding promises sensitive control of heat flow at the nanoscale in thermoelectric devices.

Chuan Wang’s lab at the McKelvey School of Engineering has developed a way to print stretchy LEDs on unconventional surfaces using an inkjet printer.

A newly developed coating that allows for certain liquids to move across surfaces without fluid loss could usher in new advances in a range of fields, including medical testing. The innovation has important implications for microfluidics, a field where small quantities of liquids are transported within tiny channels, often less than a millimetre wide. This technique has many applications, one of them being to miniaturize the standard analytical tests that are currently preformed in chemical laboratories. By reducing the quantity of sample and reagents required, and automating protocols for working with them, microfluidics can power lab-on-a-chip devices that offer fast, inexpensive medical tests. Proponents hope this could lead to diagnosing multiple conditions in minutes using only a drop or two of blood.