Fitted filtration efficiency of double masking during COVID-19 pandemic

CHAPEL HILL, NC - A study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine shows that wearing two face coverings can nearly double the effectiveness of filtering out SARS-CoV-2-sized particles, preventing them from reaching the wearer's nose and mouth and causing COVID-19. The reason for the enhanced filtration isn't so much adding layers of cloth, but eliminating any gaps or poor-fitting areas of a mask. "The medical procedure masks are designed to have very good filtration potential based on their material, but the way they fit our faces isn't perfect," said Emily ...

Thermoelectrics directly convert heat into electricity and power a wide array of items -- from NASA's Perseverance rover currently exploring Mars to travel coolers that chill beverages. A Clemson University physicist has joined forces with collaborators from China and Denmark to create a new and potentially paradigm-shifting high-performance thermoelectric compound. A material's atomic structure, which is how atoms arrange themselves in space and time, determines its properties. Typically, solids are crystalline or amorphous. In crystals, atoms are in an orderly and symmetrical pattern. Amorphous materials have randomly distributed atoms. Clemson researcher Jian He and the international team created a new hybrid compound in which the crystalline and ...

Russian scientists have proposed a theory of phase transformation in polymer gels. It explains the mechanisms of the dramatic reduction in volume of zwitterionic hydrogels when they are cooled. The results are published in the journal Chemical Communications (ChemComm). Polymer gels have unusual properties, including the ability to absorb water in volumes hundreds of times greater than their own. For example, some hydrogels are capable of holding up to two kilograms of water per gram of dry gel. By changing the temperature or adding solvents, various desired properties can be achieved. This is why polymer gels are used in industry and biomedicine, including for the targeted delivery of medication, creation of artificial skin, children's toys, etc. If you take ...

Two new studies published in Blood suggest that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine may have reduced efficacy in individuals with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and multiple myeloma, two types of blood cancer. According to researchers, these studies could help inform the ideal time for vaccination of these populations. Study suggests two-dose COVID-19 vaccine is less effective for people with CLL as compared to healthy controls The first study reports that people with CLL had markedly lower immune response rates to the two-dose mRNA COVID-19 vaccine than healthy individuals ...

Underground pipelines that transport oil and gas are very important engineering communications worldwide. Some of these underground communications are built and operated in earthquake-prone areas. Seismic safety or seismic stability of underground pipelines began to be intensively studied since the 1950s. Since then, a number of methodologies were proposed for calculating stress received by an underground pipeline during an earthquake. The purpose of these methodologies was to make an accurate prediction on the structural stress received by a pipeline during an earthquake, and thus it would allow to decide ...

A virtual human can be as good as a flesh-and-blood one when it comes to helping people practice new leadership skills. That's the conclusion from new research published in the journal Frontiers in Virtual Reality that evaluated the effectiveness of computer-generated characters in a training scenario compared to real human role-players in a conventional setting. Practice-based training techniques, including role-playing, are sometimes used to help improve training outcomes. However, these methods can be expensive to implement, and often require specialized knowledge and even professional actors to create realistic training environments. In addition, some ...

The preliminary trial results of a novel radiopharmaceutical for PET imaging of inflammation developed at the University of Turku, Finland, have been published. The compound, which targets the vascular adhesion protein 1 (VAP-1) that regulates inflammatory cell traffic, is the first radiopharmaceutical that has been developed completely in Finland and has advanced to clinical trials. In the study that started with healthy volunteers, the radiopharmaceutical was found to be well tolerated and safe. The radiopharmaceutical is 68Ga-labelled Siglec-9 peptide. "The dose of the radiopharmaceutical ...

"It is machination, it is deception," said the Director General of the Berlin Royal Museums in his defence when criticized for buying a fake. Wilhelm Bode did not budge an inch: the sculpture he acquired in 1909 was an as yet unknown production of the great Renaissance master, Leonardo da Vinci. After one hundred years and numerous controversies, a group of scientists led by a CNRS researcher* has just proven him wrong once and for all. The Flora wax bust, conserved at the Bode Museum in Berlin, recently underwent radiocarbon (14C) dating, which provided both a precise date and an incontrovertible result: it was made in the nineteenth century, nearly 300 years after da Vinci's death. As the sculpture was made primarily from spermaceti, ...

The life of almost all animals in the ocean depends on the availability of oxygen, which is dissolved as a gas in seawater. However, the ocean has been continuously losing oxygen for several decades. In the last 50 years, the loss of oxygen accumulates globally to about 2% of the total inventory (regionally sometimes significantly more). The main reason for this is global warming, which leads to a decrease in the solubility of gases and thus also of oxygen, as well as to a slowdown in the ocean circulation and vertical mixing. A new study published today in the scientific journal Nature Communications ...

In a new publication from Opto-Electronic Advances; DOI https://doi.org/10.29026/oea.2021.200031, Researchers led by Professor Baohua Jia at Swinburne University of Technology, Victoria, Australia, Professor Cheng-Wei Qiu at National University of Singapore, Singapore and Professor Tian Lan at Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China considered the generation of super-resolved optical needle and multifocal array using graphene oxide metalenses. Ultrathin and lightweight, metalenses are becoming increasingly significant for their use in photonic chips, biosensors and micro imaging systems such as smart phone cameras. Compared to conventional lenses, metalenses can improve the image quality of current cameras, ...