A few months into her virology doctoral program at Harvard University, Fernanda de Araújo Ferreira knew something wasn’t right. “Grad school was a reality check. Once you choose to pursue a PhD, your life is kind of mapped out for you,” she explains. “But when I started grad school, I immediately saw the annoying parts of academia: writing five grants and getting one, and labs being shut down for lack of funding....
A team of researchers at Indiana University has published significant research findings via pre-print in ChemRxiv demonstrating for the first time that coronaviruses are killed upon exposure to an electroceutical fabric. “Electroceutical” refers to a matrix of embedded microcell batteries that creates an electric field and wirelessly generates a low level of electricity in the presence of moisture. It is well known that viruses can be electrically charged. Coronaviruses rely on electrostatic interactions to be able to attach to their host and assemble themselves into an infective form....
A new physics-based study finds that in the U.S., elections went through a transition in 1970, from a condition in which election results captured reasonably well the greater electorate’s political preferences, to a period of increasing instability, in which very small changes in voter preferences led to significant swings toward more extreme political outcomes in both directions. The analysis also shows this instability can be associated with an unexpected situation in which outcomes swing in the opposite direction of how people’s true preferences are shifting....
That’s according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Brazil’s Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul, published today in the journal Scientific Reports. The research team also estimated the carbon credit value of emissions from tropical forest communities who consume wild meat instead of domesticated livestock. André Nunes from the Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul and Carlos Peres, Professor of Conservation Science at UEA, working with Brazilian and Danish colleagues, looked at people living in both Afrotropical and Neotropical countries, including Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania, Brazil, Peru and Bolivia....
“Hospital-acquired infections sicken approximately 2 million Americans annually, and kill nearly 100,000, numbers roughly equivalent to the number of deaths if a wide-bodied jet crashed every day,” said co-author Michael G. Schmidt, Ph.D., Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston. They are the eighth leading cause of death in the US. Hospital beds are among the most contaminated surfaces in patient care settings. “Despite the best efforts by environmental services workers, they are neither cleaned often enough, nor well enough,” said Dr....
New findings from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggest the eye’s cornea can resist infection from the novel coronavirus. Although the herpes simplex virus can infect the cornea and spread to other parts of the body in patients with compromised immune systems, and Zika virus has been found in tears and corneal tissue, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, does not appear to replicate in the human cornea....
The researchers, in their study published in the journal Nature Communications, analyzed datasets of human lung cancer and conducted experiments on preclinical models of lung cancer to demonstrate that the transcription factor XBP1s improves tumor survival by surpressing the anti-cancer abilities of neighboring immune cells. Through their investigation, they uncovered that XBP1s achieves this by promoting the production of the potent immunosuppressive molecule, prostaglandin E2. “We found that XBP1s is part of an important pathway in cancer cells that regulates the local immune environment in lung tumors, and can be disabled to increase anticancer immunity,” said study co-senior author Dr....
The new research shows that the theory holds for strongly self-gravitating objects such as neutron stars. Using a radio telescope, scientists can very accurately observe the signal produced by pulsars, a type of neutron star and test the validity of Einstein’s theory of gravity for these extreme objects. In particular, the team analyzed the signals from a pulsar named ‘PSR J0337+1715’ recorded by the large radio telescope of Nançay, located in the heart of Sologne (France)....
Study also found mortality was driven by age, severity of disease and the presence and extent of organ failure, rather than mainly due to underlying conditions. New research reveals that the COVID-19 intensive care (ICU) mortality rate in Sweden was lower during the first wave of the pandemic than in many studies from other countries. And while analysis of individual underlying conditions found they were linked to mortality, an analysis looking at all these variables together found COVID-19 mortality in intensive care was not associated with underlying conditions, except for chronic lung disease....
A single dose induced antibodies in nonhuman primates. The vaccine’s design has advantages of safety, cost, scalability, and storage. A replicating RNA vaccine, formulated with a lipid-based nanoparticle emulsion that goes by the acronym LION, produces antibodies against the COVID-19 coronavirus in mice and primates with a single immunization. These antibodies potently neutralize the virus. The effects occurred within two weeks after administration through injection into a muscle. The level of antibodies generated was comparable to those in people who are recovering from COVID-19....
A new study from the University of Michigan, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and University of California, Berkeley has ruled out dark matter being responsible for mysterious electromagnetic signals previously observed from nearby galaxies. Prior to this work there were high hopes that these signals would give physicists hard evidence to help identify dark matter. Dark matter can’t be observed directly because it does not absorb, reflect or emit light, but researchers know it exists because of the effect it has on other matter....
The NIH is located in Bethesda, Maryland, and ClinVar integrates dozens of existing databases. It also provides a central place for clinical testing laboratories to deposit their data, since most of this is usually kept locally within the labs themselves. This aggregation of information will accelerate the work of clinicians. Such information could help clinical labs improve quality, and prompt research on new variants. ClinVar was built with computational analyses in mind, using standard nomenclature to describe diseases....
This year is the 20th anniversary of sequencing the human genome. In honor of this event, a research team led by Prof. FU Qiaomei from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reviewed the most recent progress in the field of ancient DNA (aDNA), i.e., DNA obtained from the remains of past organisms. This review, entitled “Insights into human history from the first decade of ancient human genomics,” was published in Science on September 24, 2021....
According to a recent study of doctors, the more hours per week someone works in a demanding job, the greater their chance of developing depression is. Working 90 or more hours a week was associated with changes in depression symptom scores three times larger than the change in depression symptoms among those working 40 to 45 hours a week. Furthermore, compared to those working fewer hours, a greater proportion of those working many hours had scored high enough to be diagnosed with moderate to severe depression, which is serious enough to need therapy....
According to a study from the University of Arizona Health Sciences, people over the age of 45 with Type 2 diabetes who were treated with anti-hyperglycemic medications had a higher risk of developing multiple sclerosis, particularly among women. However, the study also found that in people under the age of 45, anti-hyperglycemic exposure actually reduced the risk of multiple sclerosis. “Our findings reinforce the need for a precision medicine approach to preventing MS in these vulnerable populations,” said lead researcher Kathleen Rodgers, Ph....
A groundbreaking study led by researchers at Florida Atlantic University and an international team of scientists conclusively confirms the time year of the catastrophic Chicxulub asteroid, responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs and 75 percent of life on Earth 66 million years ago. Springtime, the season of new beginnings, ended the 165-million-year reign of dinosaurs and changed the course of evolution on Earth. Results of the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, greatly enhances the ability to trace the first stages of damage to life on Earth....
Don’t throw that cloth mask away yet—it still works. New study also confirms that layering a cotton mask on top of a surgical mask—properly fit on one’s face—provides more protection than cloth alone. The reusable cloth masks people have been using for COVID-19 protection for the past year or more may look a little worse for the wear. But new research from the University of Colorado Boulder finds that washing and drying them doesn’t reduce their ability to filter out viral particles....
Hurricane Ida struck southeast Louisiana as a powerful Category 4 storm on Sunday, August 29, 2021- the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in 2005. Ida brought destructive storm surge, high winds, and heavy rainfall to the region, and left over 1 million homes and businesses without power, including the entire city of New Orleans. The NASA / JAXA GPM Core Observatory satellite flew over the eye of Ida shortly before landfall at 10:13 a....
Touted by makers as a “healthy” alternative to traditional nicotine cigarettes, new research indicates the chemicals found in e-cigarettes disrupt the gut barrier and trigger inflammation in the body, potentially leading to a variety of health concerns. In the study, published on January 5, 2021, in the journal iScience, Soumita Das, PhD, associate professor of pathology, and Pradipta Ghosh, MD, professor of cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues, found that chronic use of nicotine-free e-cigarettes led to a “leaky gut,” in which microbes and other molecules seep out of the intestines, resulting in chronic inflammation....
What determines global patterns of biodiversity has been a puzzle for scientists since the days of von Humboldt, Darwin, and Wallace. Yet, despite two centuries of research, this question remains unanswered. The global pattern of mountain biodiversity, and the extraordinarily high richness in tropical mountains, in particular, is documented in two companion Science review papers this week. The papers focus on the fact that the high level of biodiversity found in mountains is far beyond what would be expected from prevailing hypotheses....
