Alexandria, Va., USA -- COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in March 2020 and given an incomplete understanding of the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 at that time, the American Dental Association recommended that dental offices refrain from providing non-emergency services. As a result, 198,000 dentists in the United States closed their doors to patients. The study "Sources of SARS-CoV-2 and Other Microorganisms in Dental Aerosols," published in the Journal of Dental Research (JDR), sought to inform infection-control science by identifying the source of bacteria and viruses in aerosol generating dental procedures. Researchers at The Ohio State University College of Dentistry, Division of Periodontology, Columbus, USA, tracked the origins of microbiota in aerosols generated during treatment ...

Are you empathic, generous and altruistic? In short, do you possess that specific personality trait defined as agreeableness in the language of psychologists? New research from SISSA recently published in the journal NeuroImage sheds light on brain mechanisms underlying this trait. The study showed that detached and individualistic subjects seem to process information associated with social and non-social contexts in similar ways, as demonstrated by similar activation patterns in the prefrontal cortex, whereas in more agreeable subjects the activation patterns ...

Peri-implantitis, a condition where tissue and bone around dental implants becomes infected, besets roughly one-quarter of dental implant patients, and currently there's no reliable way to assess how patients will respond to treatment of this condition. To that end, a team led by the University of Michigan School of Dentistry developed a machine learning algorithm, a form of artificial intelligence, to assess an individual patient's risk of regenerative outcomes after surgical treatments of peri-implantitis. The algorithm is called FARDEEP, which stands for Fast and Robust Deconvolution of Expression ...

When Museums closed their doors in March 2020 for the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK a majority moved their activities online to keep their audiences interested. Researchers from WMG, University of Warwick have worked with OUMNH, to analyse the success of the exhibitions, and say the way Museums operate will change forever.Caption: Compton Verney's homepage for the Cranach exhibition which opened in March 2020 Credit: Compton Verney The cultural impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been analysed by researchers from WMG, University of Warwick in collaboration with OUMNH (Oxford University Museum of Natural History) who in the paper, 'Digital Responses ...

An international research team led by the University of Cologne has succeeded for the first time in connecting several atomically precise nanoribbons made of graphene, a modification of carbon, to form complex structures. The scientists have synthesized and spectroscopically characterized nanoribbon heterojunctions. They then were able to integrate the heterojunctions into an electronic component. In this way, they have created a novel sensor that is highly sensitive to atoms and molecules. The results of their research have been published under the title 'Tunneling current modulation in atomically precise graphene nanoribbon heterojunctions' in Nature Communications. The work was carried out in close cooperation between the Institute for ...

BOSTON - (May 12, 2021) - Scientists are rapidly gathering evidence that variants of gut microbiomes, the collections of bacteria and other microbes in our digestive systems, may play harmful roles in diabetes and other diseases. Now Joslin Diabetes Center scientists have found dramatic differences between gut microbiomes from ancient North American peoples and modern microbiomes, offering new evidence on how these microbes may evolve with different diets. The scientists analyzed microbial DNA found in indigenous human paleofeces (desiccated excrement) from unusually dry caves in Utah and northern Mexico with extremely ...

Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are highly localized surface waves on the interface between metal and dielectric in the optical frequency band. SSPs do not naturally exist in the microwave and terahertz frequencies, so "spoof" surface plasmon polaritons (SSPPs) are necessary for operations in those lower frequency bands. Like optical SPPs, microwave SSPPs exhibit highly localized electromagnetic fields, subwavelength resolution, and extraordinary field confinement. Therefore, SSPP transmission lines (TLs) have been proposed as novel types of microwaveguides that offer new solutions for miniaturization, ...

BOSTON - During the development and progression of Alzheimer's disease, a protein called tau accumulates and spreads in the brain. Understanding the mechanisms behind tau spread--and its consequences--may point to new prevention and treatment strategies for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. New insights now come from research that was led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and involves an anesthetic known to affect cognitive function. The findings are published in Communications Biology. The scientists note that inflammation plays an important role in Alzheimer's disease, and microglia--immune cells that reside in the brain--are thought to be involved in this process by producing an ...

Since the discovery of Alzheimer's disease over a century ago, two hallmarks of the devastating illness have taken center stage. The first, known as amyloid plaques, are dense accumulations of misfolded amyloid protein, occurring in the spaces between nerve cells. Most efforts to halt the advance of Alzheimer's disease have targeted amyloid protein plaques. To date, all have met dispiriting failure. The second classic trait has, until recently, received less scrutiny. It consists of string-like formations within the bodies of neurons, produced by another crucial protein-- tau. These are known as neurofibrillary tangles. In a new study, researchers with the ASU-Banner Neurodegenerative Disease Center at the Biodesign ...

PHILADELPHIA--A low-cost, rapid diagnostic test for COVID-19 developed by Penn Medicine provides COVID-19 results within four minutes with 90 percent accuracy. A paper published this week in Matter details the fast and inexpensive diagnostic test, called RAPID 1.0 (Real-time Accurate Portable Impedimetric Detection prototype 1.0). Compared to existing methods for COVID-19 detection, RAPID is inexpensive and highly scalable, allowing the production of millions of units per week. Despite the urgency of the pandemic, most available methods for COVID-19 testing use RT-PCR--reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction--to detect ...

Central to any technological progress is the enrichment of human life. The internet and wireless connectivity have done that by allowing not only virtually anyone anywhere to connect real time, but by making possible connections between humans and a range of intelligent devices both indoors and outdoors, putting smart cities on the horizon. One key aspect of realizing smart cities is "smart vehicles", the latest development in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), which involve the integration of communication, mapping, positioning, network, and sensor technologies to ensure cooperative, efficient, intelligent, safe, and economical transportation. For decades, research on bringing to the streets smart vehicles that operate ...

The field of magnonics offers a new type of low-power information processing, in which magnons, the quanta of spin waves, carry and process data instead of electrons. The end goal of this field is to create magnonic circuits, which would be smaller and more energy-efficient than current electronic ones. Until recently, the development of a functional magnonic device could take years of trial-and-error. Researchers from the University of Vienna and the TU Kaiserslautern have developed a new computational method to design new devices in a considerably shorter time. Moreover, the efficiency added through this novel inverse design method helps overcome a traditional problem with such devices: they were just suitable for one function only. Now, thanks to the proposed ...

The inhibition of pathological protein-protein interactions is a promising approach for treating a large number of diseases, including many forms of cancer. A team of researchers has now developed a bicyclic peptide that binds to beta-catenin--a protein associated with certain types of tumor. The secret of their success is the cyclic nature and the hairpin shape of the peptide, which mimics a natural protein structure, they report in the journal Angewandte Chemie. Because of the extensive protein regions involved in protein-protein interactions, therapeutic approaches involving small molecules are often unsuccessful. Protein mimetics are alternatives that imitate the spatial structure of binding segments of natural protein binding partners. ...

In a new study from Lund University and the University of Gothenburg, patients were interviewed about their experiences ten years after undergoing obesity surgery. The results show that the effect on eating and weight regulation persisted, whereas other problems, such as feelings of guilt about still not being healthy enough, remained. "This is one of few follow-ups from a patients perspective so long after surgery", says My Engström, researcher in nursing at the University of Gothenburg. 18 patients were interviewed in the study. All of them experienced that their eating habits and appetite were still affected after the operation: their bodies still objected, preventing ...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is incredible in that it can survive for decades within its human host. It does this by varying its diet to successfully steal nutrients from the human host including immune cells; it is known to acquire and absorb multiple carbon sources from the body during infection. In a paper published in the journal Molecular Systems Biology, Surrey scientists detail how they measure the flow of metabolites or "fluxes" through metabolic pathways when Mycobacterium tuberculosis is consuming some of its favourite nutrients. Measuring these 'fluxes' could help scientists advance new tuberculosis drugs as well as understand why the bacterium survives so long in humans and why current antibiotics are often ineffective. By growing Mycobacterium ...

The multiplexing capability of fluorescence microscopy is severely limited by the broad fluorescence spectral width. Spectral imaging offers potential solutions, yet typical approaches to disperse the local emission spectra notably impede the attainable throughput and place substantial constraints on temporal resolution. Tunable bandpass filters provide a possibility to scan through the emission wavelength in the wide field. However, applying narrow bandpasses to the fluorescence emission results in inefficient use of the scarce signal. In a new paper published in Light: Science & Application, a team of scientists, led by Professor Ke Xu ...

The DNA sequences produced are also called oligonucleotides. These are widely used for disease identification, for the manufacture of oligonucleotide-based drugs, and for several other medical and biotechnological applications.  The high demand for oligonucleotides therefore requires an efficient automated method for their chemical production.This process relies on phosphoramidites, which are chemical compounds that have the disadvantage of being unstable unless stored at the ideal -20 degrees Celsius. Instruments used for DNA synthesis are not able to cool down the phosphoramidites, and consequently it is unavoidable that some of them degrade after being added ...

"We're meant to be crossing over ... but the bridge is broken": 2020 university graduates' experiences of the pandemic in Ireland A new study from Trinity College Dublin investigating the impact of the COVID pandemic on young adults finds that they are vastly more affected than older people, and the reverberations of the disruption to some will last decades. Researchers say this group have paid a high price in the form of foregone opportunities for education, social networks, and labour market integration. The research, involving university graduates in Ireland, is published in YOUNG: ...

A researcher at University of Limerick has developed a low-cost, environmentally friendly sensor that can detect damage in pipelines and could save water as a result. The damage detection sensor uses highly sensitive, eco-friendly crystals that generate an electrical signal in response to a leak. It is the first validation of these biological crystals for real world applications, according to Dr Sarah Guerin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Physics and the Bernal Institute in UL, who has been developing amino acid crystal devices since 2017. An Irish research collaboration between the Bernal Institute at UL and the Dynamical Systems and Risk Laboratory in University College Dublin has validated ...

In mathematics, simple equations can generate a complex evolution in time and intriguing patterns in space. One famous example of this is the Mandelbrot set, named after the French-American mathematician of Polish origin, Benoit B. Mandelbrot (1924-2010), the most studied fractal. This set is based on a single quadratic equation with only one parameter and one variable. The fascinating fractal patterns of the Mandelbrot set have attracted attention far beyond mathematics. An article by Ralph Andrzejak, entitled "Chimeras confined by fractal boundaries in the complex plane", forms part of a special edition of the journal Chaos in memory of Russian professor Vadim S. Anishchenko, (1943-2020), published on 3 May 2021. Andrzejak is head of the Nonlinear Time Series Analysis Group ...

Intelligent materials, the latest revolution in the field of materials science, can adapt their properties depending on changes in their surroundings. They can be used in everything from self-healing mobile phone screens, to shape-shifting aeroplane wings, and targeted drug delivery. Delivering drugs to a specific target inside the body using intelligent materials is particularly important for diseases like cancer, as the smart material only releases the drug payload when it detects the presence of a cancer cell, leaving the healthy cells unharmed. Now, researchers from the Centre ...

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and the Latvian Institute of Organic Synthesis have designed a drug-like compound which effectively blocks a critical step in the malaria parasite life cycle and are working to develop this compound into a potential first of its kind malaria treatment. While drugs and mosquito control have reduced levels of malaria over recent decades, the parasite still kills over 400,000 people every year, infecting many more. Worryingly, it has now developed resistance to many existing antimalarial drugs, meaning new treatments that work in different ways are urgently needed. In their research, published in PNAS, the scientists developed a set of compounds designed to stop the parasite being able to burst out of red ...

Multiple sclerosis, or MS for short, manifests itself slightly differently in each person - which is why some call it "the disease of a thousand faces." Arguably the worst manifestation of MS is its chronic progressive form. Unlike the more common relapsing-remitting variant (RRMS), in which sufferers are often symptom-free for months or even years, patients with the primary progressive form of the disease (PPMS) see their condition steadily deteriorate with no remissions. Poorly insulated neurons die off Today's therapeutic approaches are based on the assumption that the immune system is making a mistake and waging an inappropriate attack on the layer of myelin that surrounds and insulates the nerve cells' long, ...

AdaptiFont has recently been presented at CHI, the leading Conference on Human Factors in Computing. Language is without doubt the most pervasive medium for exchanging knowledge between humans. However, spoken language or abstract text need to be made visible in order to be read, be it in print or on screen. How does the way a text looks affect its readability, that is, how it is being read, processed, and understood? A team at TU Darmstadt's Centre for Cognitive Science investigated this question at the intersection of perceptual science, cognitive ...

A giant mosasaur from the end of the Cretaceous period in Morocco that could have reached up to eight metres long is the third new species to be described from the region in less than a year, bringing the total number of species up to at least 13. The high diversity of the fauna shows how mosasaurs, giant marine lizards related to snakes and Komodo dragons, thrived in the final million years of the Cretaceous period before they, and most of all species on Earth, were wiped out by the impact of a giant asteroid 66 million years ago. The new species, named Pluridens serpentis, had long, slender jaws with over a hundred sharp, ...