How can we better understand how people move during the pandemic and how they spread COVID-19? New END ...

From microwave ovens to Wi-Fi connections, the radio waves that permeate the environment are not just signals of energy consumed but are also sources of energy themselves. An international team of researchers, led by Huanyu "Larry" Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, has developed a way to harvest energy from radio waves to power wearable devices. The researchers recently published their method inMaterials Today Physics. According to Cheng, current energy sources for wearable health-monitoring devices have their place in powering sensor devices, but each has its setbacks. Solar power, for example, can only harvest energy when exposed to the sun. A self-powered triboelectric device can only ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Researchers have found an unexpected synergy between a T-cell stimulatory protein -- the ICOS ligand -- and interleukin-10, an immunoregulatory cytokine, to prevent inflammatory bowel disease in mice. The study will aid the understanding of, and future research into, this immune disorder, which includes Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. About 1.6 million Americans have inflammatory bowel disease. Interleukin-10, or IL-10, was already known as a major player to prevent gut inflammation by establishing and maintaining immune homeostasis in the gut, where it is vital for the host to have a peaceful coexistence with normal intestinal microbes, while the immune system still stands ...

Efforts to shift from petrochemical plastics to renewable and biodegradable plastics have proven tricky -- the production process can require toxic chemicals and is expensive, and the mechanical strength and water stability is often insufficient. But researchers have made a breakthrough, using wood byproducts, that shows promise for producing more durable and sustainable bioplastics. A study published in Nature Sustainability, co-authored by Yuan Yao, assistant professor of industrial ecology and sustainable systems at Yale School of the Environment (YSE), outlines the process of deconstructing the porous matrix of natural wood into a slurry. The researchers say the resulting material shows ...

Researchers from the Center for Health, Work & Environment (CHWE) at the Colorado School of Public Health have published a paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health studying the effectiveness of applying Total Worker Health (TWH) in an international context. The study, led by a team at CHWE, is the first to examine how a TWH framework operates outside of a western context in Latin America workforces. "Although recent reviews show that TWH intervention studies have had some global reach, the vast majority have been conducted in Western countries," says lead researcher Diana Jaramillo. "While global organizations, as well as governmental entities in Latin America, acknowledge the importance ...

Researchers at GMI - Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) use two complementary approaches to unveil a co-evolutionary mechanism between bacteria and plants and also explain complex immune response patterns observed in the wild. Together the papers change the way scientists have been thinking about the relationship of a bacterial antigenic component with its plant immune receptor. The two papers are published back to back in the journal Cell Host & Microbe. Immune responses have developed in virtually all organisms over evolutionary time scales to protect them from foreign ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 25, 2021--A new class of quantum dots deliver a stable stream of single, spectrally tunable infrared photons under ambient conditions and at room temperature, unlike other single photon emitters. This breakthrough opens a range of practical applications, including quantum communication, quantum metrology, medical imaging and diagnostics, and clandestine labeling. "The demonstration of high single-photon purity in the infrared has immediate utility in areas such as quantum key distribution for secure communication," said Victor Klimov, lead author of a paper published ...

Opioids are the main driver of fatal drug overdoses in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, resulting in 46,802 deaths in 2018, usually because the person stops breathing. Naloxone -- a Food and Drug Administration-approved medication used to reverse overdoses from opioids, such as heroin, morphine and oxycodone -- works by restoring normal respiration to a person whose breathing has slowed or stopped. "Opioid overdoses cause the largest number of accidental and avoidable deaths," said Peter Davidson, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Medicine at University of California San Diego School of Medicine. "The human toll of drug addiction is devastating. Using naloxone to prevent opiate overdoses can and has saved many lives." In ...

A major goal of organic and medicinal chemistry in recent decades has been the rapid synthesis of three-dimensional molecules for the development of new drugs. These drug candidates exhibit a variety of improved properties compared to predominantly flat molecular structures, which are reflected in clinical trials by higher efficacy and success rates. However, they could only be produced at great expense or not at all using previous methods. Chemists led by Prof. Frank Glorius (University of Münster, Germany) and his colleagues Prof. M. Kevin Brown (Indiana University Bloomington) and Prof. Kendall N. Houk (University of California, Los Angeles) have now succeeded in converting several classes of flat ...

Skoltech scientists and their colleagues have proposed a new human height inheritance model that accounts for the interaction between various factors that influence adult human height. The research was published in the European Journal of Human Genetics. Human height is a classical quantitative trait that depends on sex, genetics, and the environment. Scientists from Skoltech, Novosibirsk State University, the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Branch of RAS, and the Institute of Science and Technology in Vienna analyzed the human height distribution ...

Buried beneath 20 kilometers of ice, the subsurface ocean of Enceladus--one of Saturn's moons--appears to be churning with currents akin to those on Earth. The theory, derived from the shape of Enceladus's ice shell, challenges the current thinking that the moon's global ocean is homogenous, apart from some vertical mixing driven by the warmth of the moon's core. Enceladus, a tiny frozen ball about 500 kilometers in diameter (about 1/7th the diameter of Earth's moon), is the sixth largest moon of Saturn. Despite its small size, Enceladus attracted the ...

About two decades after first devising a new kind of vaccine, Oregon Health & Science University researchers are unlocking why it stops and ultimately clears the monkey form of HIV, called SIV, in about half of nonhuman primates - and why it's a promising candidate to stop HIV in people. In scientific papers that were simultaneously published today in the journals Science and Science Immunology, creators of the cytomegalovirus, or CMV, vaccine platform describe the unusual biological mechanisms through which it works. The findings also helped fine-tune VIR-1111, the CMV-based experimental vaccine against HIV that was developed at OHSU and is now being evaluated in a Phase 1 clinical trial. The trial is being conducted by Vir Biotechnology, which ...

SILVER SPRING, Md. - As concern has grown over COVID-19 variants and their implications for how well COVID-19 vaccines will protect against the virus, researchers have proposed a method to examine instances of SARS-COV-2 infections in people who have received a COVID-19 vaccine. Genomic sieve analysis of these so-called "breakthrough" SARS-CoV-2 infections in COVID vaccine trials is a critical tool to identify viral mutations associated with vaccine failure and to predict how vaccination impacts the virus' evolution. Dr. Morgane Rolland, Chief of Viral Genetics ...

Scientists at Sinai Health say they have discovered a new pathway that controls dangerous overreactions in a body's immune system, including deadly forms of hyper-inflammation. In new findings out today in the journal Science, researchers at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI) detail how a protein known as WAVE2, a protein expressed in all immune cells, plays a critical role in maintaining immune system balance. As part of the research, scientists knocked out, or turned off, WAVE2 in a subset of immune cells in mice, which led to severe autoimmunity and inflammation, ...

Despite having remarkable utility in treating movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease, deep brain stimulation (DBS) has confounded researchers, with a general lack of understanding of why it works at some frequencies and does not at others. Now a University of Houston biomedical engineer is presenting evidence in Nature Communications Biology that electrical stimulation of the brain at higher frequencies (>100Hz) induces resonating waveforms which can successfully recalibrate dysfunctional circuits causing movement symptoms. "We investigated the modulations in local ?eld potentials induced by electrical stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) at therapeutic ...

Tel-Aviv, ISRAEL - March 25, 2021 - Wild Biotech, a preclinical stage drug discovery & development company emerging out of stealth mode, today announces the publication of its first major paper, which appears in the journal Science. The study mapped the gut microbiota of animals in the wild on an unprecedented scale, adding millions of potentially novel microbiome-based therapeutics for human diseases to the company's already massive database. Wild will use these findings to first tap its database for targets in inflammatory, immune and gastrointestinal diseases. "For the study, we collected gut microbiota from almost 200 species of animals in the wild, covering diverse classes, feeding behaviors, geographies, and ...

Water scarcity in rural Alaska is not a new problem, but the situation is getting worse with climate change. Lasting solutions must encourage the use of alternative water supplies like rainwater catchment and grey water recycling. They must also address the affordability of water related to household income, say researchers from McGill University. Washing hands with clean water is something most people take for granted, yet for Alaska's rural residents, this is often not the case. When people pay for water by the gallon, serious thought is given to how much is used - even during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many rural Alaskan communities, where jobs are scarce and household income is low, the cost of water is a high burden, according to the study published in Environmental ...

A medical device that has been shown to manage pain among babies born preterm can also help keep their brain oxygen levels steady during medical procedures, finds new analysis by researchers at UBC. The device, called Calmer, is a pillow-sized therapeutic bed covered in soft fabric and inserted into the incubator. It can be programmed to mimic a parent's heartbeat and breathing rate-- providing a soothing presence by moving up and down gently to simulate a breathing motion and heartbeat sound for the baby when their parent cannot be present. "For newborns and particularly for preterm babies, it's critical to keep overall blood oxygen levels steady, especially in the brain. The more stable their brain oxygenation is, the better for their brain development," ...

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have uncovered an innovative way to tap into the over-capacity of 5G networks, turning them into "a wireless power grid" for powering Internet of Things (IoT) devices that today need batteries to operate. The Georgia Tech inventors have developed a flexible Rotman lens-based rectifying antenna (rectenna) system capable, for the first time, of millimeter-wave harvesting in the 28-GHz band. (The Rotman lens is key for beamforming networks and is frequently used in radar surveillance systems to see targets in multiple directions without physically moving the antenna system.) But to harvest enough power to supply low-power devices at long ranges, large aperture antennas are required. The problem with ...

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, Shandong University in China and other institutions may have found an explanation for dawn phenomenon, an abnormal increase of blood sugar only in the morning, observed in many patients with type 2 diabetes. They report in the journal Nature that mice lacking the circadian clock gene called Rev-erb in the brain show characteristics similar to those of dawn phenomenon. The researchers then looked at Rev-erb gene expression in patients with type 2 diabetes comparing a group with dawn phenomenon to a group without it and found that the gene's expression followed a different temporal pattern between these two groups. The findings support the idea that an altered daily rhythm of expression of the Rev-erb gene may underlie dawn phenomenon. Future ...

WASHINGTON (March 25, 2021)--Although demand for COVID-19 vaccines currently seems high, vaccine hesitancy could pose a major threat to public health efforts to end the pandemic, according to an editorial published today in the journal Science. The authors, including David A. Broniatowski, associate director of the George Washington University Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics, point out that public sentiment towards vaccines are volatile in the face of events such as the recent controversy surrounding the AstraZeneca vaccine clinical trial data. For example, some people could develop safety concerns due to the news reporting about the AstraZeneca vaccine and then turn down the chance to ...

Narcissism is driven by insecurity, and not an inflated sense of self, finds a new study by a team of psychology researchers. Its research, which offers a more detailed understanding of this long-examined phenomenon, may also explain what motivates the self-focused nature of social media activity. "For a long time, it was unclear why narcissists engage in unpleasant behaviors, such as self-congratulation, as it actually makes others think less of them," explains Pascal Wallisch, a clinical associate professor in New York University's Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. "This has become quite prevalent in the age of social media--a behavior that's been coined 'flexing'. "Our ...

A study by prof. Bas van Bavel and prof. Marten Scheffer shows that throughout history, most disasters and pandemics have boosted inequality instead of levelling it. Whether such disastrous events function as levellers or not, depends on the distribution of economic wealth and political leverage within a society at the moment of crisis. Their findings on the historical effects of crises on equality in societies are now published open access in Nature HSS Communications. It is often thought that the main levellers of inequality in societies were natural disasters such as epidemics or earthquakes, and social turmoil such as wars and ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Materials that contain special polymer molecules may someday be able to warn us when they are about to fail, researchers said. Engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have improved their previously developed force-sensitive molecules, called mechanophores, to produce reversible, rapid and vibrant color change when a force is applied. The new study led by postdoctoral researcher Hai Qian, materials science and engineering professor and head Nancy Sottos, and Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology director Jeffrey Moore is published in the journal Chem. Moore's team has been working with mechanophores for more than a decade, but past efforts have produced molecules that were slow to react and return to their original state, if at all. ...

Bright semiconductor nanocrystals known as quantum dots give QLED TV screens their vibrant colors. But attempts to increase the intensity of that light generate heat instead, reducing the dots' light-producing efficiency. A new study explains why, and the results have broad implications for developing future quantum and photonics technologies where light replaces electrons in computers and fluids in refrigerators, for example. In a QLED TV screen, dots absorb blue light and turn it into green or red. At the low energies where TV screens operate, this conversion of light from one color to another is virtually 100% efficient. But at the higher excitation energies required for brighter screens and other ...