Engineering physics senior Kate Scalet, and graduates Elliot Lorenz, Austin Wolf and Brock Headen were finalists in a NASA competition for design concepts that allow the expansion of human space exploration, including short-term stays and scientific operations on planetary bodies. The team’s project: a mobile cube that “blooms” into a flower-like shape when deployed and is intended to provide communication capabilities, power generation, energy storage and multipurpose storage on the moon.

Researchers found that the stress neurotransmitter norepinephrine, or noradrenaline, in the brain facilitates fear processing by stimulating neurons in the amygdala to generate a pattern of electrical discharges. This pattern changes the frequency of brain wave oscillation to an aroused state that promotes the formation of fear memories. Jeffrey Tasker, professor of cell and molecular biology and holder of the Catherine and Hunter Pierson Chair in Neuroscience, and Xin Fu, PhD student, led this research.

A study led by Dr. Nassir Marrouche, director of the Tulane Heart and Vascular Institute, shows that the simple approach — compared to advanced image-guided technology to aggressively target diseased areas of the heart — has better patient outcomes when it comes to ablation, a procedure that destroys cardiac tissue to correct irregular heart rhythms, also known as atrial fibrillation.

A research team led by Dr. Samir El-Dahr, Jane B. Aron Professor and chair of pediatrics at the School of Medicine, examined why human kidneys, which are composed of nearly a million filter units, stop creating new filter cells after birth. The researchers used a mouse model to understand what occurs when a fetal stem cell differentiates into a mature kidney cell. Researchers found that near the time of birth, the DNA blueprint that controls the fate of kidney stem cells changes dramatically.