The efficiency of solar cells can be increased by exploiting a phenomenon known as singlet fission. However, unexplained energy losses during the reaction have until now been a major problem. A research group led by scientists at Linköping University, Sweden, has discovered what happens during singlet fission and where the lost energy goes. The results have been published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science. Solar energy is one of the most important fossil-free and eco-friendly sustainable sources of electricity. The silicon-based solar cells currently in use can at most use approximately 33% of the energy in sunlight and convert it to electricity. This ...

(LOS ANGELES) - Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most prevalent chronic liver disease worldwide. It is found in 30% of people in developed countries and occurs in approximately 25% of people in the United States. Risk factors for the disease include obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol and poor eating habits, although this does not exclude individuals without these risk factors. There is normally a small amount of fat found in the liver; however, if the amount of fat makes up 5% or more of the liver, this is considered to be NAFLD and it must be managed ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - New contact lens technology to help diagnose and monitor medical conditions may soon be ready for clinical trials. A team of researchers from Purdue University worked with biomedical, mechanical and chemical engineers, along with clinicians, to develop the novel technology. The team enabled commercial soft contact lenses to be a bioinstrumentation tool for unobtrusive monitoring of clinically important information associated with underlying ocular health conditions. The team's work is published in Nature Communications. The Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization helped secure a patent for the technology and it is available ...

Armando Collazo Garcia III got more than he expected from a graduate course he took last spring. He developed a new understanding of the physics of transonic shocks produced across a laminar flow airfoil with boundary-layer suction and added a published paper to his resume. "When I got the assignment to do a research project, I realized I already had a good data set from my master's thesis that I could use in a new way," Collazo Garcia said. "I was able to apply linear algebra techniques to manipulate the flow field data and decompose the information into modes. The modes provided a snapshot of various aspects of the flow and were ranked by their energy contribution, ...

Scientists have used modern genetic techniques to prove age-old assumptions about what sizes of fish to leave in the sea to preserve the future of local fisheries. "We've known for decades that bigger fish produce exponentially more eggs," said the lead author of the new study, Charles Lavin, who is a research fellow from James Cook University (JCU) and Nord University in Norway. "However, we also found while these big fish contributed significantly to keeping the population going--they are also rare." Co-author Dr Hugo Harrison from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies ...

New international research published in Anaesthesia (a journal of the Association of Anaesthetists) concludes that surgery should be delayed for seven weeks after a patient tests positive for SARS-CoV-2, since the data show that surgery that takes place between 0 and 6 weeks after diagnosis is associated with increased mortality. The study is by the COVIDSurg Collaborative: a global collaboration of over 15,000 surgeons working together to collect a range of data on the COVID-19 pandemic. This study's lead authors are Dr Dmitri Nepogodiev (Public Health) and Dr Aneel Bhangu (Surgeon) of the University of Birmingham, UK. While it is known that infection with SARS-CoV-2 during surgery increases mortality and international guidelines recommend ...

Over the summer and fall, paper after paper revealed that mothers are one of the demographics hardest hit by the pandemic. From layoffs and leaving careers to do caretaking, to submission rate decreases and additional service projects, the data were clear, but the follow up less so. Many of the problems are not new and will remain after the pandemic. But a new paper, published this week in PLOS Biology, outlines methods to help solve them. "In the spirit of the well-worn adage 'never let a good crisis go to waste,' we propose using these unprecedented times as a springboard for necessary, substantive and lasting change," write the 13 co-authors, led by researchers from Boston University and hailing from seven institutions, ...

Language difficulties and cultural barriers keep an "alarming" number of Chinese Americans from asking for cancer screenings that may protect their health, according to a new University of Central Florida study. Su-I Hou, professor and interim chair of UCF's Health Management & Informatics Department, said her results show that physicians and members of the Chinese community need to improve their communication about the importance of cancer screenings. Her study was recently published in the Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention. Hou surveyed 372 ...

PHILADELPHIA (March 9, 20201) - The PhD degree prepares nurse scientists to advance knowledge through research that improves health, translates into policy, and enhances education. However, as the role of the nurse has changed, and health care has grown more complex, there is a need to re-envision how PhD programs can attract, retain, and create the nurse-scientists of the future and improve patient care. To begin the dialog about the future of PhD education in research-intensive schools, the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) invited 41 educational, governmental, professional, and philanthropic institutions to ...

MIAMI--In the Florida Straits at night, and under a new moon is the preference for spawning mahi-mahi, according to a new study by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. These new details on the daily life of the highly sought-after migratory fish can help better manage their populations and provide scientists with new information to understand the impacts to the animal from changing environmental conditions. To uncover these important details about the behaviors of mahi-mahi, or dolphinfish, the research team tagged captive spawning ...

WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- A long-lasting, successful relationship between scientists at the MBL Ecosystems Center and the citizen-led Buzzards Bay Coalition has garnered a long-term record of water quality in the busy bay that lies west of Woods Hole. That record has already returned tremendous value and last week, it was published in Scientific Data, a Nature journal. "We hope getting this data out will encourage scientists to use it to test new hypotheses and develop new insights into Bay health," said Rachel Jakuba, science director of the Buzzards Bay Coalition and lead author of the journal article. Since 1992, a large and dedicated team of citizen volunteers, dubbed Baywatchers, has been ...

News Release -- LOGAN, UT -- Mar. 9, 2021 -- Researchers at Utah State University are using silkworm silk to grow skeletal muscle cells, improving on traditional methods of cell culture and hopefully leading to better treatments for muscle atrophy. When scientists are trying to understand disease and test treatments, they generally grow model cells on a flat plastic surface (think petri dish). But growing cells on a two-dimensional surface has its limitations, primarily because muscle tissue is three-dimensional. Thus, USU researchers developed a three-dimensional cell culture surface by growing cells on silk fibers that are wrapped around an acrylic ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A new SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate, developed by giving a key protein's gene a ride into the body while encased in a measles vaccine, has been shown to produce a strong immune response and prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection and lung disease in multiple animal studies. Scientists attribute the vaccine candidate's effectiveness to strategic production of the antigen to stimulate immunity: using a specific snippet of the coronavirus spike protein gene, and inserting it into a sweet spot in the measles vaccine genome to boost activation, or expression, of the gene that makes the protein. Even with ...

Delaying second doses of COVID-19 vaccines should reduce case numbers in the near term. But the longer-term case burden and the potential for evolution of viral "escape" from immunity will depend on the robustness of immune responses generated by natural infections and one or two vaccine doses, according to a Princeton University and McGill University study published March 9 in the journal Science. "Several countries including the United Kingdom and Canada have stated that they will delay second doses of COVID-19 vaccines in response to supply shortages, but also in an attempt to rapidly increase the number of people immunized," said lead author Chadi Saad-Roy, a Ph.D. candidate in Princeton's Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative ...

Members of the COVID-19 Primary Care Database Consortium explain how the use of big data containing millions of primary care medical records provides an opportunity for rapid research to help inform patient care and policy decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Established in April 2020, the Consortium brings together experts in big data, epidemiology, intensive care, primary care and statistics, as well as journal editors, patient and public representatives, and front-line clinical staff from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Southampton, Bristol and Nottingham The consensus statement that the consortium has developed and described in the article aims to facilitate transparency and rigor in methodological approaches, as well as consistency in defining and reporting ...

Members of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and its health system developed and implemented a new model of collaborative care called The Penn Integrated Care (PIC) program. PIC includes a resource center to support intake, triage and referral management and collaborative care services in primary care practices. PIC was created to increase access to and engagement with mental health professionals to improve mental and physical health outcomes. Primary care physicians were able to refer patients with any mental health symptom or condition to PIC. In 12 months, 6,124 unique patients were referred from eight primary care clinics to either the PIC Resource Center or were connected with a mental health professional. ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Variants of the coronavirus are appearing in different parts of the world, many of them spreading with alarming speed. One contagious variant is the South African, or SA, variant, identified by an international team of researchers, including biomedical scientists from the University of California, Riverside. "The new COVID-19 variants are the next new frontier," said Adam Godzik, a professor of biomedical sciences in the UC Riverside School of Medicine and a member of the research team that made the discovery. "Of these, the ...

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have implicated a type of immune cell in the development of chronic lung disease that sometimes is triggered following a respiratory viral infection. The evidence suggests that activation of this immune cell -- a type of guardian cell called a dendritic cell -- serves as an early switch that, when activated, sets in motion a chain of events that drives progressive lung diseases, including asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The new study, published in The Journal of Immunology, opens the door to potential preventive ...

New study finds the skyrocketing cost of drugs in U.S. used to treat hookworm and other soil-transmitted parasites increases patient costs, suggests decreased quality of care A new study finds that the increasingly high prices in the United States of the drugs used to treat three soil-transmitted helminth infections--hookworm, roundworm (ascariasis), and whipworm (trichuriasis)--is not only the major driver for the increase in costs to patients with either Medicaid or private insurance, but it also may have a damaging impact on the quality-of-care patients receive as clinicians shift their prescribing patterns to more affordable yet less-effective medicines covered ...

https://doi.org/10.15212/bioi-2021-0002 Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Jingdun Xie, Zhenhua Qi, Xiaolin Luo, Fang Yan, Wei Xing, Weian Zeng, Dongtai Chen and Qiang Li; from Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China discuss integration analysis of m6A regulators and m6A-related genes in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). N6-Methyladenosine (m6A) RNA methylation of eukaryotic mRNA is involved in the progression of various tumors. This study comprehensively analyzed m6A regulators and m6A-related genes through an integrated bioinformatic analysis, ...

Last fall, nearly half of older adults were on the fence about COVID-19 vaccination - or at least taking a wait-and-see attitude, according to a University of Michigan poll taken at the time. But a new follow-up poll shows that 71% of people in their 50s, 60s and 70s are now ready to get vaccinated against COVID-19 when a dose becomes available to them, or had already gotten vaccinated by the time they were polled in late January. That's up from 58% in October. Three groups of older adults with especially high risk of severe COVID-19 -- Blacks, Hispanics and people in fair or poor health - had even bigger jumps in vaccine receptiveness between October and late January. The poll shows a 20-point jump in just ...

BOSTON - Almost immediately after the first mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines were authorized for emergency use and were administered to individuals outside of clinical trials, reports of anaphylaxis--a life-threatening whole-body allergic reaction--raised widespread concerns among experts and the public. Now, real world data on vaccinations among employees at Mass General Brigham provide reassurances of the rarity of such serious reactions, and the ability to recover from them. The findings are published in the END ...

Past studies on whether incarcerated people with mental illness are more likely to be placed in solitary confinement have yielded mixed results. A new study examined the issue in one state's prisons, taking into account factors related to incarcerated men and the facilities where they were imprisoned. It found that having a mental illness was associated with a significant increase in the likelihood of being placed in extended solitary confinement. The study, by researchers at Florida State University (FSU), appears in Justice Quarterly, a publication of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. "Our findings provide new information on how mental illness shapes experiences for incarcerated men, and more broadly, on how the criminal justice ...

A research team at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany has developed a completely new, environmentally-friendly electrochemical procedure for producing sulfonamides rapidly and inexpensively. Sulfonamides are used in many drugs including antibiotics and Viagra as well as in agrochemicals and dyes, which makes them an important class of molecules for the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. While to date it has been necessary to use corrosive chemicals, high temperatures, and expensive metal catalysts to produce sulfonamides, the new method requires ...

The mountain forests of Tanzania are more than 9,300 miles away from Salt Lake City, Utah. But, as in eastern Africa, the wild places of Utah depend on a diversity of birds to spread seeds, eat pests and clean up carrion. Birds keep ecosystems healthy. So if birds in Tanzania are in trouble in a warming climate, as found in a recent study by University of Utah researchers, people in Utah as well as in the African tropics should pay attention. In a new study published in Global Change Biology, doctoral student Monte Neate-Clegg and colleagues tracked the demographics of 21 bird species over 30 years of observations from a mountain forest in Tanzania. For at least six of the species, their population declined over ...