WHAT: The experimental antiviral drug MK-4482 significantly decreased levels of virus and disease damage in the lungs of hamsters treated for SARS-CoV-2 infection, according to a new study from National Institutes of Health scientists. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19. MK-4482, delivered orally, is now in human clinical trials. Remdesivir, an antiviral drug already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use against COVID-19, must be provided intravenously, making its use primarily limited to clinical settings. In their study, published in the journal ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has sped up the process of detecting flooded buildings immediately after a large-scale flood, allowing emergency personnel to direct their efforts efficiently. Now, a research group from Tohoku University has created a machine learning (ML) model that uses news media photos to identify flooded buildings accurately within 24 hours of the disaster. Their research was published in the journal Remote Sensing on April 5, 2021. "Our model demonstrates how the rapid reporting of news media can speed up and increase the accuracy of damage mapping activities, accelerating ...

Collaborative research of the University of Jyvaskyla and Natural Research Institute Finland presents new evidence of the effects of enriched rearing on well-being of aquaculture fishes. The research demonstrates that stone enrichments that have been previously conditioned in lake water significantly improve survival of fish compared to clean stones. Also a higher number of stones has a similar positive effect. The results have practical implications for prevention of aquaculture diseases. The study was published in Antibiotics in March 2021. The volume of aquaculture is continuously increasing. Parasitic diseases represent a significant threat to farmed fishes and ecological solutions to minimize use of medication are being sought. Enriched rearing, where rearing tanks ...

A survey of star formation activity in the Orion Nebula Cluster found similar mass distributions for newborn stars and dense gas cores, which may evolve into stars. Counterintuitively, this means that the amount of gas a core accretes as it develops, and not the initial mass of the core, is the key factor in deciding the final mass of the produced star. The Universe is populated with stars of various masses. Dense cores in clouds of interstellar gas collapse under their own gravity to form stars, but what determines the final mass of the star remains an ...

Academic medical centers continuously strive to enhance patient care. One of the major mechanisms to improve patient health outcomes is through translational research - bringing research breakthroughs from the lab to patients via clinical trials. Making clinical trials more efficient, and ultimately more successful, would significantly advance patient care. However, fragmentation of the relevant data necessary to implement improvements to translational science is a significant barrier. While some bioinformatic tools have attempted to address this problem, they often lacked the ability to assess the efficiency of translational science. ...

Gas accidents such as toxic gas leakage in factories, carbon monoxide leakage of boilers, or toxic gas suffocation during manhole cleaning continue to claim lives and cause injuries. Developing a sensor that can quickly detect toxic gases or biochemicals is still an important issue in public health, environmental monitoring, and military sectors. Recently, a research team at POSTECH has developed an inexpensive, ultra-compact wearable hologram sensor that immediately notifies the user of volatile gas detection. A joint research team led by Professor Junsuk Rho of departments of mechanical and chemical engineering and Dr. Inki Kim of Department of Mechanical ...

A person who owns a car or who has a college education may be less vulnerable to COVID-19, according to an analysis of cases in Tehran, Iran, one of the early epicenters of the pandemic. While such variables do not inherently lower a person's risk, they do indicate an infrastructure of protection that persists despite how densely populated a person's district might be. The international collaboration published their results on April 3 in Sustainable Cities and Society. "In the past few decades, there have been various efforts aimed at increasing urban density to enhance efficiency and contribute to climate change mitigation -- but the COVID-19 pandemic has brought questions about ...

The nervous system is the internet of the human body and can in the same way transfer signals over long distances very quickly. Some of the most important elements in this signaling are the axons. They are projections of the nerve cells which send signals to other nerve cells or muscles. For instance, axons that jut out from nerve cells in the spinal cord can be over one meter long. Researchers from the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen have now in a new study examined how signal molecules are transported in ...

Scientists have called for the use of climate projections in conservation planning, to ensure that areas most at risk from biodiversity loss and climate impacts are protected. Protected areas are often created in areas of low population density and remote locations, rather than because of their biodiversity conservation potential. Conservation planning in tropical forests especially tends to be less rigorous and climate rarely taken into account, they said. But climate projections and science-based information are critical to actively seek out and safeguard areas where species are most at risk and ecosystems are fast declining, said authors of the ...

New research has shed light on how autism-spectrum disorder (ASD) manifests in the brains of girls, prompting the scientists to warn that conclusions drawn from studies conducted primarily in boys should not be assumed to hold true for girls. The researchers discovered that there is a significant difference in the genes and "genetic burden" that underpin the condition in girls and boys. They also identified specific ways the brains of girls with ASD respond differently to social cues such as facial expressions and gestures than do those of girls without ASD. "This new study provides us with a roadmap for understanding how to better match current and future evidenced-based interventions to underlying ...

A candidate vaccine that could provide protection against the COVID-19 virus and other coronaviruses has shown promising results in early animal testing. The candidate coronavirus vaccines, created by Virginia Tech's University Distinguished Professor X.J. Meng and UVA Health's Professor Steven L. Zeichner, prevented pigs from being becoming ill with a pig coronavirus, porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV). The researchers have recently published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "The candidate vaccine was developed using an innovative vaccine platform targeting a highly conserved genomic region of coronaviruses," said Meng, a University ...

Angiogenesis is a process of new vessel formation that is activated both in physiological (tissue repair, reproduction, etc.) and pathological (myocardial infarction, diabetic retinopathy, cancer, etc.) conditions. The process is carried out by endothelial cells and includes their proliferation, migration and arrangement in tubes. Angiogenesis regulation is precise and is mainly mediated by pro-angiogenic factors, such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which in turn promote different signalling pathways leading to an increase of intracellular Ca2+ concentrations. The researchers from the Cardiovascular Pathophysiology group at the Institute ...

A team of researchers, affiliated with UNIST has proposed a satellite-aided drought monitoring method that can adequately represent the complex drought conditions into a single integrated drought index. The newly-proposed drought index has attracted considerable attention as a new method for monitoring and forecasting drought hazards due to its accuracy with no space-time constraints. Drought is one of the most complex natural disasters. Therefore, unlike most other natural disasters, it is usually difficult to define the drought onset or drought declaration. For this reason, various drought indices (i.e., drought severity, the area affected, duration, and timing) are used to monitor drought and its risk management. The existing drought indices are tended to be specific to particular ...

Researchers at UniSA have developed a cost-effective technique that could deliver safe drinking water to millions of vulnerable people using cheap, sustainable materials and sunlight. Less than 3 per cent of the world's water is fresh, and due to the pressures of climate change, pollution, and shifting population patterns, in many areas this already scarce resource is becoming scarcer. Currently, 1.42 billion people - including 450 million children - live in areas of high, or extremely high, water vulnerability, and that figure is expected to grow in coming decades. Researchers at UniSA's Future Industries Institute have developed a promising new process that could eliminate water stress for millions of people, including those living in many of the planet's most vulnerable ...

Reston, VA--New research shows that a novel positron emission tomography (PET) tracer that targets inflammation is safe and can clearly identify early stages of rheumatoid arthritis. The promising PET tracer, 68Ga-DOTA-Siglec-9, rapidly clears from blood circulation, has a low radiation dose, and can be easily produced. This first-in-human study was published in the April issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. Inflammation is a significant part of several chronic diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis and its related issues. While PET imaging with 18F-FDG is a valuable tool for the diagnosis and monitoring of the effects of treatments, it is not specific enough to assess inflammation. "It's important to detect inflammation early so that patients ...

New UCLA research suggests that elderly patients of female physicians are more likely than those of male physicians in the same outpatient practice to be vaccinated against the flu. This trend holds for all racial and ethnic groups studied and could provide insight into improving vaccination rates for influenza, COVID-19 and other illnesses, according to the research letter, which is published in the peer-reviewed JAMA Internal Medicine. Prior studies have shown that female physicians tend to spend more time with their patients, said study author Dr. Dan Ly, an assistant professor in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David ...

A single footprint left by a cat-sized dinosaur around 100 million years ago has been discovered in China by an international team of palaeontologists. University of Queensland researcher Dr Anthony Romilio was part of the team that investigated the track, originally found by Associate Professor Lida Xing from the China University of Geosciences (Beijing). "This footprint was made by a herbivorous, armoured dinosaur known broadly as a stegosaur - the family of dinosaurs that includes the famed stegosaurus," Dr Romilio said. "Like the stegosaurus, this little dinosaur probably had spikes on its tail and ...

While Black, Hispanic, Latino, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander people are more likely to die of COVID-19 than white people nationwide, a recent study from Oregon State University found the risk was even greater for racial and ethnic minority groups living in rural areas compared with urban areas. To address the disparities, researchers say the health care response to COVID-19, including the vaccine rollout, needs to allocate additional resources to rural areas that have been hardest hit, especially those where minority populations are concentrated. Earlier studies throughout the U.S. have shown that ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- April 16, 2021 -- University of Oregon physicists have developed a new method to manipulate sound -- stop it, reverse it, store it and even use it later -- in synthetic composite structures known as metamaterials. The discovery was made using theoretical and computational analysis of the mechanical vibrations of thin elastic plates, which serve as the building blocks for the proposed design. The physicists, Pragalv Karki and Jayson Paulose, also developed a simpler minimal model consisting of springs and masses demonstrating the same signal manipulation ability. "There have been a lot of mechanisms that can guide or block the transmission of sound waves through a metamaterial, but our design is the first to dynamically stop and reverse a sound pulse," said Karki, ...

NEW YORK, NY (April 16, 2021)--SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, likely does not directly infect the brain but can still inflict significant neurological damage, according to a new study from neuropathologists, neurologists, and neuroradiologists at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. "There's been considerable debate about whether this virus infects the brain, but we were unable to find any signs of virus inside brain cells of more than 40 COVID-19 patients," says James E. Goldman, MD, PhD, professor of pathology & cell biology (in psychiatry), who led the ...

Understanding the components that control cell division is fundamental to understanding how life works and how alterations in this delicate process can cause diseases such as cancer. It was precisely the discoveries of "key regulators of the cell cycle" and their implications for processes such as cancer, that won the British scientists R. Timothy Hunt and Paul M. Nurse and the American scientist Leland H. Hartwell the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. A study led by Óscar Fernández-Capetillo, Head of the Genomic Instability Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) and published this week in The EMBO Journal uncovers a new cell cycle control element, the USP7 protein. It acts as a brake to prevent cells ...

Researchers from the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators have recently made great progress in the study of the stellar beta-decay rate of 59Fe, which constitutes an important step towards understanding 60Fe nucleosynthesis in massive stars. The results were published in Physical Review Letters on April 12. Radioactive nuclide 60Fe plays an essential role in nuclear astrophysical studies. It is synthesized in massive stars by successive neutron captures on a stable nucleus of 58Fe and, during the late stages of stellar evolution, ejected into space via a core-collapse supernova. The characteristic gamma lines associated with the decay of 60Fe have been detected by space gamma-ray detectors. By comparing the 60Fe ...

The first photosynthetic oxygen-producing organisms on Earth were cyanobacteria. Their evolution dramatically changed the Earth allowing oxygen to accumulate into the atmosphere for the first time and further allowing the evolution of oxygen-utilizing organisms including eukaryotes. Eukaryotes include animals, but also algae, a broad group of photosynthetic oxygen-producing organisms that now dominate photosynthesis in the modern oceans. When, however, did algae begin to occupy marine ecosystems and compete with cyanobacteria as important phototrophic organisms? In a new study Zhang et al use the molecular remains of ancient algae (so-called biomarkers) to show that algae occupied an important ...

It is always exciting to find new isotopes with extreme neutron/proton numbers in nuclear physics research. In the region of heavy nuclei, α-decay is one of the pervasive decay modes and plays an essential role in searching for new isotopes. However, even after about a century of studying α-decay, scientists still cannot perfectly describe how the α-particle is formed at the surface of the nucleus before its emission. In the α-decay process, the α-particle can be regarded not only as two protons plus two neutrons, but also as two proton-neutron pairs. Although previous studies have proved the importance of the pairing forces between the identical nucleons, it remains unclear whether ...

Older adults are more willing to make an effort to help others than younger adults, according to new research from the University of Birmingham. The study, led by researchers in the University's School of Psychology, is the first to show how effortful 'prosocial' behaviour - intended to benefit others - changes as people get older. In particular, it focused on people's willingness to exert physical effort, rather than to give money or time, since attitudes to both these are known to change with age. The research results are published in Psychological Science. In the study, the research team tested a group of 95 adults aged between 18 and 36, and a group of 92 adults aged 55-85. Each participant made 150 choices about whether or not to grip a handheld ...