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UC San Francisco study suggests healthy diet, sleep and exercise can mitigate negative impacts of stress.

Modern office workers are expected to multitask regularly, often juggling multiple projects and priorities over the course of a day. Studies have shown that the typical employee in an office environment is interrupted up to six times per hour, but how does that impact the finished product? New research published in Human Factors evaluates how ongoing interruptions can negatively affect the quality of work.

As we’ve talked about many times in this column, technology has transformed the life sciences in more radical ways than in most industries. Many of us went from bench work to office work. Along the way, our work became more streamlined and sometimes more complex, no doubt because of all kinds of
electronic communication happening via computers, smartphones, and other personal devices.

Amrita Cheema, PhD, associate professor and codirector of the Proteomics and Metabolomics Shared Resource at Georgetown University Medical Center, talks to contributing editor Tanuja Koppal, PhD, about the growing use of mass spectrometry as a tool for detecting biomarkers for early prediction and diagnosis of disease, leading to personalized therapy. She highlights that improvements in software
and hardware have led to better resolution and specificity, which in turn have increased the use of this technology for biomarker discovery and will potentially help pave its path into the clinic as a diagnostic tool.















