UCSD Global TIES Haiti Earthquake Relief Campaign

Below is an excerpt of an open letter from Mandy Bratton, Ph.D. Director, Global TIES at the Jacobs School.

I know that many of you have been moved, as I have, by the stories and images emerging from Haiti in the wake of last week’s devastating earthquake. We all want to do something to help. Rest assured that Global TIES intends to help Haiti rebuild itself, once it is safe and appropriate for us to be on the
ground.

In the meantime, the best way to help is through financial contributions. Immediate medical aid is urgently needed to stem the death toll from this disaster. To this end, Global TIES has teamed up with Partners in Health, a non-governmental organization co-founded by Dr. Paul Farmer that has been providing healthcare in Haiti for the past 25 years. (To learn more about Dr. Farmer and his groundbreaking work, read “Mountains Beyond Mountains” by Tracy Kidder.)

Global TIES has created a fund-raising page on the Partners in Health web site: http://act.pih.org/page/outreach/view/haitiearthquake/ucsdglobalties.

Please join me in giving what you can via this web site. Partners in Health has agreed to track contributions made from UC San Diego via this site, so if you are part of the UC San Diego community, please include your UCSD email address on your donation form. All proceeds will go to Partners in Health.

http://act.pih.org/page/outreach/view/haitiearthquake/ucsdglobalties

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NanoEngineers Use DNA to Place Nano Scale Materials

NanoEngineering professor Jennifer Cha recently published new work on using biomolecules, such as DNA and proteins, to engineer the orientation and placement of nano scale materials into the desired device architectures that are reproducible in high yields and at low costs.

The paper titled “Large Area Spatially Ordered Arrays of Gold Nanoparticles Directed by Lithographically Confined DNA Origami,” appeared in Nature Nanotechology.

“Self-assembled structures are often too small and affordable lithographic patterns are too large,” said Albert Hung, lead author of the Nature Nanotechnology paper and a post doc working in Cha’s Biomolecular Materials and Nanoscale Assembly Lab. “But rationally designed synthetic DNA nanostructures allow us to access length scales between 5 and 100 nanometers and bridge the two systems."

This story recently appeared as the top news story on Semiconductor Online.

Healthy Desk Life...it takes some effort

Screen time, computer time, desk time, study time, writing time, Facebooking time...so much of our lives now take place in front of the computer. And it can take its tool.

A friend here on campus recently sent me a link to various ergonomic resources provided by UCSD. Check them out...you'll be glad you did.

http://blink.ucsd.edu/safety/occupational/ergonomics/fund/stretches.html

By the way...way back in 2009, I linked to a Calit2 project called "Active Desk" to make "treadmill workstations" safe and affordable. (Tiffany Fox's full Calit2 story is here.)