The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented disruption to health care delivery, with resources shifted toward telehealth services and mass viral testing. While early studies in the pandemic highlighted differences in health care utilization among patients with commercial insurance, data from publicly insured or uninsured "safety-net" patient populations continue to emerge. A recent study from researchers at the University of Minnesota and Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute (HHRI) is among the first to examine how different socio-demographic groups used telehealth, outpatient (i.e., clinic), emergency department and inpatient (i.e., hospital) care to test for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. ...

In particle physics, a Majorana Fermion is charge neutral and its antiparticle is just itself. In condensed matter physics, a Majorana zero mode (MZM) is a quasi-particle excitation, which appears in the surfaces or edges of topological superconductors. Unlike the ordinary particles or quasi-particles that obey boson or fermion statistics, MZM obeys non-abelian statistics, a key property that makes MZM the building block for realizing topological quantum computation. Currently major experimental efforts focus on heterostructures made of superconductors and spin-orbit coupled systems (such as semiconducting nano-wires and topological insulators), where evidences of MZMs have been found. Unambiguous detection and manipulation of MZMs in these heterostructures, ...

North Carolina State University researchers have created insecticide-free, mosquito-resistant clothing using textile materials they confirmed to be bite-proof in experiments with live mosquitoes. They developed the materials using a computational model of their own design, which describes the biting behavior of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carries viruses that cause human diseases like Zika, Dengue fever and yellow fever. Ultimately, the researchers reported in the journal Insects that they were able to prevent 100 percent of bites when a volunteer wore their clothing - a base layer undergarment and a combat shirt initially designed for the military - in a cage with 200 live, disease-free mosquitoes. Vector Textiles, an NC State startup company, ...

Contractile injection systems (CISs) are widely distributed in bacteria and archaea that can form a nanomachine resembling the contractile tails of bacteriophage (T4, P2, etc.) to translocate proteins and nucleic acids . The P. asymbiotica was shown to be involved in the human infection with severe skin lesions. The PVC loci within P. asymbiotica genome produce molecular needle complexes and encode several putative effector genes. It would be a candidate P. asymbiotica weapon that participates in the attack of mammalian cells, but substantial evidences will be needed to verify this hypothesis. In this study, researchers have characterized the PAU_RS16575 as a potent PVC effector, which is widely present in bacteria. ...

To extract the polarization information of incident light, polarization-sensitive photodetectors (PSPDs) exhibit significant practical application in both military and civil areas, like bio-imaging, remote sensing, night vision, and helmet-mounted sight for fighter plane. Optical filters combined with polarizers are usually needed for traditional photodetectors to realize polarized light detection. But it will increase the size and complexity of devices. To obtain a small-size PSPD, one-dimensional (1D) nanomaterials with geometrical anisotropy, such as nanowires, nanoribbons, and nanotubes, have been used as the sensitive materials for PSPDs, which can directly identify the polarization information of incident light without any optical filters and polarizers. However, it is not ...

Google searches related to infertility and coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines increased by 34,900% after a pair of physicians submitted a petition questioning the safety and efficacy data of the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine. Referencing the petition, anti-vaccine activists circulated claims that misconstrued the information regarding the possibility that the vaccine could impact fertility in women. The inaccurately represented information spread rapidly on social media channels, potentially influencing public perception and decision-making among pregnant patients or those ...

The human brain has extreme ability in thinking and computation, but it only requires a very low energy power of about 20W, which is much lower than that of electronic computers. The neuronal connections in the brain network have a globally sparse but locally compact modular topological characteristics, which greatly reduces the total resource consumption for establishing the connections. The spikes of each neuron in the brain are sparse and irregular, and the clustered firing of the neuronal populations has a certain degree of synchronization, forming neural avalanches with scale-free characteristics, and the network can sensitively respond to external stimuli. However, it is still not clear how the ...

While attending a conference at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City several years ago, Sharon Borja was struck by the story of a young man who, as a child, joined his parents repatriating to their native country of Mexico. Like millions of Mexican immigrants, the family had called the United States home for years, and having been born in the U.S., he was an American citizen. Walking one day in his newfound urban Mexican neighborhood, a couple carrying a wooden stick approached him on the street and encouraged him to ...

A new study from researchers at the University of Liverpool shows that decreasing local government funding over recent years probably contributed to declines in life expectancy in some areas of England, which was stalling even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Local government funding and life expectancy in England, a longitudinal ecological study published in The Lancet Public Health, linked annual local government funding data from the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government with life expectancy and mortality data from Public Health England between 2013 and 2017. Corresponding author Dr Alexandros ...

A USC analysis of deaths among individuals in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody found that ICE violated its own internal medical care standards in 78% of cases, potentially contributing to deaths in relatively young and healthy men. The study appears in END ...

New research from the University of Georgia finds that older Mexican Americans who live in low English-speaking neighborhoods are at greater risk for poor health and even an early death. Language barriers can be a significant deterrent to health. People who don't speak English well are less likely to seek health care or receive health information. This can lead to delay of care and missed health screenings for chronic disease and cancers. Language isolation is also linked to poor mental health. These issues only compound as non-English speakers age, said study co-author Kerstin Emerson, a clinical ...

A single dose of the Sputnik V vaccine may elicit significant antibody responses against SARS-CoV-2, finds a study published July 13 in the journal Cell Reports Medicine. "Due to limited vaccine supply and uneven vaccine distribution in many regions of the world, health authorities urgently need data on the immune response to vaccines to optimize vaccination strategies," says senior author Andrea Gamarnik (@GamarnikLab) of the Fundación Instituto Leloir-CONICET in Buenos Aires, Argentina. "The peer-reviewed data we present provide information for guiding public health decisions in light of the current global health emergency." Past research has shown that two doses of Sputnik V results in 92% efficacy against ...

Feeling extra sweaty from a summer heat wave? Don't worry--not all your perspiration has to go to waste. In a paper publishing July 13 in the journal Joule, researchers have developed a new device that harvests energy from the sweat on--of all places--your fingertips. To date, the device is the most efficient on-body energy harvester ever invented, producing 300 millijoules (mJ) of energy per square centimeter without any mechanical energy input during a 10-hour sleep and an additional 30 mJ of energy with a single press of a finger. The authors say the device represents a significant ...

WASHINGTON, July 13, 2021 -- The rhythm in a working heart is regulated by electrical impulses. Disturbances of this bioelectrical process can result in cardiac arrhythmias, or irregularities in heartbeat -- a common ailment that can lead to illness and death. In Biophysics Reviews, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Harvard Medical School provide a state-of-the-art update on how electrical impulses in the heart travel from cell to cell. A functioning heart contracts to pump blood to the body and the lungs. Within the heart, a pacemaker acts as an electrical clock, sending out a signal that tells the heart when to contract. The whole muscle moves together, because ...

No longer science fiction, farm robots are already here--and they have created two possible extremes for the future of agriculture and its impacts on the environment, argues agricultural economist Thomas Daum in a Science & Society article published July 13 in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution. One is a utopia, where fleets of small, intelligent robots farm in harmony with nature to produce diverse, organic crops. The other is a dystopia in which large, tractor-like robots subdue the landscape through heavy machinery and artificial chemicals. He describes the utopian scenario as a mosaic ...

PITTSBURGH, July 13, 2021 - Substantially more people in the U.S. with opioid use disorder are receiving evidence-based treatment for the disease, but there are still considerable gaps in care along racial lines, according to the largest analysis to date of opioid use disorder among Medicaid recipients. The results, published today in JAMA, provide insights that policymakers and medical providers can act on to improve access to quality care for opioid use disorder, one of the leading causes of death in the U.S. The analysis was possible because of a unique network that partnered academic institutes with state Medicaid programs to overcome barriers to data sharing between states. "Medicaid plays an incredibly important role in our ...

A new wearable device turns the touch of a finger into a source of power for small electronics and sensors. Engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a thin, flexible strip that can be worn on a fingertip and generate small amounts of electricity when a person's finger sweats or presses on it. What's special about this sweat-fueled device is that it generates power even while the wearer is asleep or sitting still. This is potentially a big deal for the field of wearables because researchers have now figured out how to harness the energy that can be extracted from human sweat even when a person is not moving. This type of device is ...

What The Study Did: Researchers used a large data resource of U.S. COVID-19 cases and control patients who tested negative from multiple health systems across the country to evaluate COVID-19 severity and risk factors over time and assess the use of machine learning to predict clinical severity. Authors: Tellen D. Bennett, M.D., of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora, and Christopher G. Chute, M.D., of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, are corresponding authors. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.16901) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the ...

Osaka, Japan - BRCA1, a protein that is well-known for its role in hereditary breast cancer, is an important part of the cellular system that repairs double-strand DNA breaks. Now, researchers from Japan have discovered a new way in which cells protect these broken DNA ends to make sure that they are repaired correctly. In a study published in Cell Reports, researchers from Osaka University have revealed that protein phosphatase 1 (PP1) binds to double-strand breaks early on to promote repair by a process known as nonhomologous end joining instead of by homologous ...

For their own benefit and to grow beyond control, tumours manipulate cell signals to make it appear as if the cells have the nutrients they need. That is the case in follicular lymphoma, a type of tumour that affects the B lymphocytes of the immune system. One in six follicular lymphoma patients has mutations in RagC, a gene involved in the mTOR nutrient signalling pathway. The team led by Alejo Efeyan, head of the Metabolism and Cell Signalling Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), has discovered that genetic inhibition of the RagC protein blocks the activation of B lymphocytes and delays the onset of follicular lymphomas without side effects. The study, which was carried out in animal models, was published this ...

Patients with Achilles tendinopathy, a disease of the Achilles tendon that can potentially cause significant pain, receive no benefit from being treated with platelet rich plasma (PRP) injection, a clinical trial led by the University of Warwick has found. PRP is a treatment often used for a number of orthopaedic conditions and popularised by its use by elite sportspeople. However, this new study published today (13 July) in the Journal of the American Medical Association and funded by Versus Arthritis has shown that it is ineffective for the treatment of Achilles tendinopathy ...

New research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London, in collaboration with Glasgow University, has found that teenagers who have self-harmed five or more times in their life have a significantly higher threshold for pain compared to adolescents that have not. The study, which has been published in JAMA Network Open, is the largest study of its kind looking at the relationship between self-harm and bodily sensation, found that the threshold for sensitivity, both painful and not, increases significantly the more a participant ...

(Boston)--Proper lung function relies on the precise balance of specialized epithelial cells (cells that line the surfaces of the body) that coordinate functions to maintain homeostasis. One important lung cell type is the goblet cell, which secretes mucus that helps protect the lining of the bronchus (major air passages of the lung) and trap microorganisms. Goblet cells are often increased in lung diseases, but signals that lead to their dysregulation are not well understood. Researchers have now discovered a new set of signals that control the production of goblet cells in the lung. "By altering the proteins that control these signals we are able to either increase or decrease the production of goblet cells which offers potential new avenues for therapeutically targeting ...

The journey of the egg and the embryo through the fallopian tube or oviduct toward the uterus is not well understood, mainly because it is inaccessible for direct imaging. Looking to shed new light on the dynamics of the eggs prior to fertilization and embryo transport preceding implantation, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Stevens Institute of Technology developed a novel imaging approach that has allowed them to see eggs and embryos as they move along the fallopian tube in a live animal. Published in the journal Cell Reports, the researchers' observations revealed that eggs and embryos go through an unexpected journey that is more dynamic and complex than previously ...

In addition to chemical factors, mechanical influences play an important role in the natural growth of human organs such as kidneys, lungs and mammary glands - but also in the development of tumors. Now a research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has investigated the process in detail using organoids, three-dimensional model systems of such organs which are produced in the laboratory. Organoids are three-dimensional systems modeling various human organs. Grown in the laboratory, they exhibit properties similar to those of actual body tissue. Organoids offer science new opportunities to simulate and investigate the processes of organ growth. These processes could not be observed in the ...