Janet Jay Online

News Flash: Heartening

Janet — Sun, 12 May 2013 16:55:38 +0000

How do you mend a broken heart? If you’re lovesick, time or distance might do the trick. If your heart is actually damaged, however, bioengineered protein scaffolds are a much better choice.

Candid Coach: Heather Zidek

Janet — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 20:08:15 +0000

Tumbles & Cheers’ Heather Zidek Reveals how her small gym has achieved big results.

Avon, Ohio’s Tumbles & Cheers is on a roll: after being named the USASAF’s “Best Small Gym in America,” in 2010, the gym recently moved to a brand-new 143,000 sq. ft. facility– replete with inground rod floor, tumble trak, trampoline and 1,300 sq. ft. worth of pits. What’s been their secret to success? According to Heather Zidek, the gym’s founder and coach of the Ohio Extreme All-Stars, it’s all about keeping your gym drama-free and setting high expectations.

Read the interview here!

Published in the Winter 2013 issue of Cheer Professional Magazine.

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Spotlight: Green Bay Elite

Janet — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 20:16:41 +0000

When people think of competitive cheerleading, Wisconsin usually isn’t the first place that comes to mind. Cherokee Greendeer was just 19 years old when she set out to start a cheer gym there in 1999, but she knew she was taking a risk. “I had to be direct; I had to sell the sport, to make everyone see that this is definitely legitimate,” says Greendeer. “Parents thought, ‘Rah rah rah, that’s all our daughter will do,’ but once they saw what it was really about, they said, ‘Wow, this is what our daughter can do?!’” Continue reading →

Published in CheerProfessional Magazine, January 2013.

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Meditative State

Janet — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 17:42:05 +0000

Loneliness is more than feeling alone; it can prompt severe physical consequences, especially in the elderly. Feelings of disconnection can cause inflammation, which increases the risk of dementia, heart disease, stroke, and other diseases. A new study of seniors, published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity, found that the ancient practice of “mindfulness meditation” reduces feelings of loneliness and the markers of inflammation. Study leader J. David Creswell, assistant professor of psychology, explains, “Our meditation training can actually turn down this inflammatory response that places lonely older adults at risk.”

Carnegie Mellon Today, January 2013

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Terrance Hayes: Poetic

Janet — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 17:38:57 +0000

This September, five high school poets will be chosen from among the winners of the Scholastic Art & Writing Award, which is the United States’ highest honor for student poetry. The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, chaired by First Lady Michelle Obama, was tasked with selecting the judges who will choose the winners; one judge will be Terrance Hayes, Carnegie Mellon’s English professor and National Book Award winner for poetry.
—Janet Jay (DC’07)

Published in Carnegie Mellon Today.

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Imaginative Hobby

Janet — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 17:36:23 +0000

Four Carnegie Mellon students are hunkered down in a Seattle hotel room. The rest of the hotel guests turned out the lights long ago, but these guys are wide awake. Earlier in the day, they completed round one of the U.S. Microsoft Imagine Cup, a worldwide student technology competition.

To win, teams must use technology to build projects that can ultimately transform the world. For the Carnegie Mellon entrants, their hopes lie in the Xbox/Windows category: They’ve created a conservation-themed real-time strategy game, named Redux.

The game serves them well in round one: They get high scores in every category but one—the presentation (which they hadn’t rehearsed). With the final round just a sunrise away, they can’t let the presentation be their downfall again, which is why they’re still up, practicing what to say.

The team’s story began a few years earlier in Hamerschlag House, where they met and became buddies. Before long, the dorm-room walls and common areas were covered with whiteboards and scribbles. The idea of Redux came after they attended a Game Creation Society meeting and learned about the Imagine Cup competition.

Although the team members—Chris Reid (DC’12), Wilson Pei (E’13), Yueran Yuan (CS’13), and Steven Blessing (CS’12)—consider game design more a hobby than a career path, they were interested in tackling a “more serious and demanding kind of topic,” says Reid.

Redux is a game of resource management and sustainability and draws inspiration from the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. “The idea of the game is that you’re making products to sell, but every time you make a product, you make some accidental byproduct,” explains Reid. To win the game, players must research new uses for resources, reduce their resource use, recycle their products, and reclaim as much waste to reuse as possible.

It took the team one frantic weekend to bang out the prototype for Redux, and another to polish it and submit it to Microsoft under the team name “Dr. Fishbowl,” which comes from a background character in an earlier game. They had competition: 113,000 people registered for the Microsoft Imagine Cup, and only 22 teams made it to the finals.

In the final round—after they rehearsed “a billion times,” says Reid—their presentation must have matched the quality of their game, because Redux won first place in the “Game Design: Windows/Xbox” category. Microsoft donated $10,000 to the university and awarded $6,000 to the members of Dr. Fishbowl.
—Janet Jay (DC’07)

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Hand-Me-Down

Janet — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 16:06:00 +0000

“Can we actually do this?” chemist Danith Ly asks aloud, and for good reason. What the Carnegie Mellon researcher and his lab members are attempting has never been done. They want to use synthetic techniques to resurrect and modify a disease-fighting peptide that hasn’t existed in humans for 9 million years.

Peptides are short chains of amino acids joined together by peptide bonds. Ly became specifically intrigued by a peptide dubbed RTD-1, which had been discovered in some primates and was a part of humans’ DNA until 9 million years ago.

“It has the therapeutic potential to help create a new class of pharmaceuticals aimed at combating hard-to-treat diseases such as HIV,” he says.

Unfortunately, it’s flimsy and degrades easily, which minimizes its practicality.

But Ly and his team believed they could strengthen RTD-1, making it far more cost-effective and efficient to produce. After three years of testing, they found out that, yes, they could actually do it.

Their results were recently reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. More research needs to take place, but Ly believes this tweak of a peptide from our past could have significant ramifications on the way disease is treated in the future.
—Janet Jay (DC’07)

Related Links:
The Ly Group

“Hand-Me-Down” in Carnegie Mellon Today, October 2012

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