A new comprehensive course incorporating an interdisciplinary approach to disaster preparedness shows promise for better equipping health professionals in responding to disasters. Medical staff and researchers from Tohoku University and Fukushima Medical University organized the program. The two universities are well equipped in disaster response and preparedness given their regions were at the epicenter of the deadly 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Their findings were published in the Journal of Disaster Research. "From the experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake, we have learned that disaster medical personnel are required to play the role of conductors in site selection dispatching and on-site activities," said Hiroyuki Sasaki at the ...

Changes to food allergy guidelines has led to a 16 per cent decrease in peanut allergy among infants, according to new study. The research, led by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) and to be presented at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology Virtual Annual Meeting this Sunday, also found a significant increase in parents introducing peanut into their babies' diet since the guideline changes. Introducing peanut early in a child's life has been shown to prevent peanut allergy during randomised controlled trials. But MCRI PhD candidate and study lead author Victoria Soriano said this research was the first to test the approach in homes and to analyse what impact the guideline changes have had on peanut allergies. International infant feeding ...

A pain-free, organic and biodegradable drug delivery patch may be on the horizon for home health care patients soon. Researchers from Tohoku University have developed a biobattery-powered device capable of both delivering large molecule pharmaceuticals across the skin barrier and extracting interstitial fluid for diagnostic purposes. They published their approach online on Jan. 28 in Nature Communications. The team, led by corresponding author Matsuhiko Nishizawa, professor in the Department of Finemechanics in the Graduate School of Engineering at Tohoku University, ...

Computer training applied in addition to psychotherapy can potentially help reduce the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These are the results found by researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and their collaborating partners in a randomised controlled clinical trial with 80 patients with PTSD. With the computerised training, the patients learned to appraise recurring and distressing trauma symptoms in a less negative light and instead to interpret them as a normal and understandable part of processing the trauma. The results are described by a team headed by Dr. Marcella Woud and Dr. Simon Blackwell from the Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, together with the group led by Professor Henrik Kessler ...

Research scientists at Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital have investigated the mechanisms by which hypertension leads to arterial damage and atherosclerosis. The results may facilitate the development of new therapies. Hypertension is a prevalent condition affecting approximately one third of all adults. It is also the leading global cause of morbidity and mortality. The condition is often asymptomatic, but over time it may damage arteries causing atherosclerosis and possibly leading to stroke and heart attack. Despite the prevalence of the disease and its potentially severe consequences, how hypertension ...

Soil microorganisms play a critical role in the survival of life-sustaining ecosystems and, consequently, human well-being. Global assessments continue to provide strong evidence that humans are causing unprecedented biodiversity losses. However, existing information is strongly biased towards selected groups of vertebrates and plants, while much less is known about potential shifts in belowground communities. Soil microbial communities are largely an unseen majority, even though, according to first author Dr Carlos Guerra (iDiv, MLU), "they control a wide range of ecosystem functions that have implications for both human well-being ...

Job applications from men are disfavoured when they apply for work in female-dominated occupations. Reaching the interview stage was most difficult for men applying for jobs as cleaners. These are the results of a study by researchers from Linköping University and the University of California, Irvine, recently published in the scientific journal PLOS One. "We see that there are obstructions to men entering certain parts of the labour market. In the application process, we don't see any discrimination against women who want to get into male-dominated occupations. ...

Our deep-rooted survival instinct for disease avoidance could make us less willing to embrace strangers and take foreign travel risks. "We wanted to look beyond the current crisis and consider the future psyche of the post-COVID-19 traveller," says Associate Professor Florian Kock of Marketing and Tourism at Copenhagen Business School. The research is the first of its kind that goes beyond the surface and finds longer-term psychological consequences; discovering that the pandemic has affected tourists' attitudes and behaviours in unforeseen ways, often subconsciously. The research found post-pandemic tourism could curb our ...

A series of experiments at the ALTO particle accelerator facility in Orsay, France, has revealed that the fragments resulting from nuclear fission obtain their intrinsic angular momentum (or spin) after fission, not before, as is widely assumed. This result was made possible by the 'nu-ball' collaboration, an international group of nuclear physicists from 37 institutes and 16 countries - among them scientists from TU Darmstadt's Institute of Nuclear Physics - which studied a wide range of nuclei and their structure. The collaboration is led by the Irène-Joliot-Curie Laboratory in Orsay. Open questions since the 1930s Nuclear fission, in which a heavy nucleus splits in two and releases energy, was already discovered at the end of the 1930s by the chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz ...

Eye conditions that do not cause vision impairment but have economic and social consequences represent a serious and growing challenge for public health services worldwide, according to a new paper published by The Lancet Global Health Commission. According to research by the Vision Loss Expert Group, led by Professor Rupert Bourne of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), issues such as glaucoma, sore eyes, conjunctivitis and diabetic retinopathy affected hundreds of millions of people across the world in 2020 without causing moderate or severe vision impairment, and an ageing population means instances of these conditions are growing. In the UK, conditions that do not cause sight loss or blindness account for around 88% of GP consultations related to eye health. The ...

Different physical structures play an important role in animal camouflage; however, they are rarely studied compared to the camouflage colors and patterns. All known larvae of long-bodied crane flies (Cylindrotominae) are plant-feeders, feeding either on mosses or herbaceous plants. The terrestrial moss-feeding larvae resemble mosses to a remarkable degree (Fig. 1). The larvae not only have cryptic coloration and patterning, but also are cloaked with special armature; cryptic, fleshy lobes surround their body on dorsal, lateral, and ventral sides. These complex traits serve to ...

As COVID-19 sweeps the world, related viruses quietly circulate among wild animals. A new study shows how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and SARS-CoV-1, which caused the 2003 SARS outbreak, are related to each other. The work, published recently in the journal Virus Evolution, helps scientists better understand the evolution of these viruses, how they acquired the ability to infect humans and which other viruses may be poised for human spillover. "How did these viruses come to be what they are today? Why do some of them have the ability to infect humans while others do not?" said Simon Anthony, associate professor ...

WASHINGTON--Hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and abnormal sodium levels in the blood have an increased risk of experiencing respiratory failure or dying, according to a study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. "This study shows for the first time that patients presenting at the hospital with COVID-19 and low sodium are twice as likely to need intubation or other means of advanced breathing support as those with normal sodium," said lead investigator Ploutarchos Tzoulis, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc., Honorary Associate Professor in Endocrinology at University College London (UCL) Medical School in London, U.K. Additionally, the researchers found ...

An improved high-tech fluorescence microscopy technique is allowing researchers to film cells inside the breast as never seen before. This new protocol provides detailed instructions on how to capture hi-res movies of cell movement, division and cooperation, in hard-to-reach regions of breast tissue. The technology - called multiphoton microscopy - uses infrared lasers to illuminate fluorescently labelled breast cells without harming them, so that elusive cell behaviours can be observed within living tissue. With the new method, WEHI researchers have revealed how breast cells rearrange, interact and sense their environment as the breast grows during development and recedes after lactation. Cell imaging within living tissue has been ...

As the frequency and size of wildfires continues to increase worldwide, new research from Carnegie Mellon University scientists shows how the chemical aging of the particles emitted by these fires can lead to more extensive cloud formation and intense storm development in the atmosphere. The research was published online today in the journal Science Advances. "The introduction of large amounts of ice-nucleating particles from these fires can cause substantial impacts on the microphysics of clouds, whether supercooled cloud droplets freeze or remain liquid, and the propensity of the clouds to precipitate," said Ryan Sullivan, associate ...

Caught between climate change and multi-year droughts, California communities are tapping groundwater and siphoning surface water at unsustainable rates. As this year's below-average rainfall accentuates the problem, a public-private partnership in the Monterey/Salinas region has created a novel water recycling program that could serve as a model for parched communities everywhere. As Stanford civil engineers report in the journal Water, this now urbanized region, still known for farming and fishing, has used water from four sources -- urban stormwater runoff, irrigation drainage, food processing water and traditional municipal wastewater ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- When healthcare workers become ill during a disease outbreak, overall case counts and mortality rates may significantly increase, according to a new model created by researchers at Penn State. The findings may help to improve interventions that aim to mitigate the effects of outbreaks such as COVID-19. "Each year dozens of potentially lethal outbreaks affect populations around the world. For example, Ebola ravaged western Africa in 2014; Zika damaged lives in the Americas in 2015; and now we are in the midst of a worldwide pandemic -- COVID-19," said Katriona Shea, professor of biology and Alumni Professor in the Biological Sciences, Penn State. "Healthcare ...

New York, NY (February 25, 2021) -- Early detection could reduce the number of African Americans dying from liver cancer, but current screening guidelines may not find cancer soon enough in this community, according to a study published in Cancer in February. Black patients with liver cancer often have a worse prognosis than those of other racial and ethnic groups. Mount Sinai researchers sought to understand the reasons for this disparity by studying patients with hepatitis C, the leading driver of liver cancer in the United States. Hepatitis C virus infection can result in cirrhosis, ...

Feb. 25, 2021 - A new paper published online in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society provides a roadmap that critical care clinicians' professional societies can use to address burnout. While strongly needed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the roadmap has taken on even greater urgency due to reports of increasing pandemic-related burnout. In "Professional Societies' Role in Addressing Member Burnout and Promoting Well-Being," Seppo T. Rinne, MD, PhD, of The Pulmonary Center, Boston University School of Medicine, and co-authors from a task force created by the Critical Care Societies Collaborative (CCSC) describe a rigorous process they used to document 17 major professional ...

The Clalit Research Institute, in collaboration with researchers from Harvard University, analyzed one of the world's largest integrated health record databases to examine the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19. The study provides the first large-scale peer-reviewed evaluation of the effectiveness of a COVID-19 vaccine in a nationwide mass-vaccination setting. The study was conducted in Israel, which currently leads the world in COVID-19 vaccination rates. The results of this study validate and complement the previously reported findings of the Pfizer/BioNTech ...

Boston, MA - A new approach to pooled COVID-19 testing can be a highly effective tool for curbing the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, even if infections are widespread in a community, according to researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Simple pooled testing schemes could be implemented with minimal changes to current testing infrastructures in clinical and public health laboratories. "Our research adds another tool to the testing and public health toolbox," said Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard Chan School and associate member of the Broad. "For public health agencies and clinical laboratories ...

ROCKVILLE, MD - Coronavirus outbreaks have occurred periodically, but none have been as devastating as the COVID-19 pandemic. Vivek Govind Kumar, a graduate student, and colleagues in the lab of Mahmoud Moradi at the University of Arkansas, have discovered one reason that likely makes SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, so much more infectious than SARS-CoV-1, which caused the 2003 SARS outbreak. Moradi will present the research on Thursday, February 25 at the 65th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society The first step in coronavirus infection is for the virus to enter cells. For this entry, the spike proteins on the outside of ...

ROCKVILLE, MD - The Zika outbreak of 2015 and 2016 is having lasting impacts on children whose mothers became infected with the virus while they were pregnant. Though the numbers of Zika virus infections have dropped, which scientists speculate may be due to herd immunity in some areas, there is still potential for future outbreaks. To prevent such outbreaks, scientists want to understand how the immune system recognizes Zika virus, in hopes of developing vaccines against it. Shannon Esswein, a graduate student, and Pamela Bjorkman, a professor, at the California Institute of Technology, have new insights on how the body's antibodies attach to Zika virus. Esswein will present the work, which was published in PNAS, on Thursday, February ...

ROCKVILLE, MD - If the coronavirus were a cargo ship, it would need to deliver its contents to a dock in order to infect the host island. The first step of infection would be anchoring by the dock, and step two would be tethering to the dock to bring the ship close enough that it could set up a gangplank and unload. Most treatments and vaccines have focused on blocking the ability of the ship to anchor, but the next step is another potential target. New research by Defne Gorgun, a graduate student, and colleagues in the lab of Emad Tajkhorshid at the University of Illinois addresses the molecular details of this second step, which could inform the design of drugs that block it. Gorgun will present her research on Thursday, February 25 at the ...

ROCKVILLE, MD - The virus that causes COVID-19 belongs to the family of coronaviruses, "corona" referring to the spikes on the viral surface. These spikes are not static--to infect cells, they change shapes. Maolin Lu, an associate research scientist at Yale University, directly visualized the changing shapes of those spike proteins and monitored how the shapes change when COVID-19 patient antibodies attach. Her work, which was published in Cell Host & Microbe in December 2020 and will be presented on Thursday, February 25 at the 65th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society informs the development of ...