The world is one step closer to ultimately secure conference calls, thanks to a collaboration between Quantum Communications Hub researchers and their German colleagues, enabling a quantum-secure conversation to take place between four parties simultaneously. The demonstration, led by Hub researchers based at Heriot-Watt University and published in Science Advances, is a timely advance, given the global reliance on remote collaborative working, including conference calls, since the start of the C19 pandemic. There have been reports of significant escalation of cyber-attacks on popular teleconferencing platforms in the last year. This advance in quantum secured communications could lead to conference calls with inherent unhackable security measures, underpinned by the principles of ...

In the Kumano Sea, off the southeast coast of Japan, an evolutionary mystery lay in wait. Researchers collected samples from the muddy sea floor, including hermit crabs, mollusks and discarded shells. Here, in and on these shells, they found scale worms living mostly in pairs with a striking difference compared to the almost 900 already known species of scale worms: one was a quarter the size of its mate. The discovery was published on March 29 as the cover of the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research. "The species is characterized by males being dwarf, with their minute bodies always riding on the dorsal side of females," said paper author Naoto Jimi, postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute of Polar Research, Research ...

(Geneva, 5 June 2021) Mass screening of school age children has led to significantly higher numbers of coeliac disease cases being diagnosed, according to a new study presented today at the 6th World Congress of Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition. Researchers in Italy found double the number of cases of the autoimmune disease - where the body produces antibodies to gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye - in school children compared to a similar study by the same group 25 years ago. A new screening programme of 7,760 children aged from five ...

(Geneva, 5 June 2021) Procedures to prevent the direct transmission of hepatitis B virus (HBV) from mother to child, particularly during and after pregnancy, have significant fragmentation and gaps, a new survey presented at the 6th World Congress of Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition has shown. The results, based on 76 delivery hospitals from ten major European countries*, identified significant variances in maternal HBV screening frequency during pregnancy: 53% in the first trimester, 1% in the second trimester and 46% in the third trimester. Alarmingly, only 38% of those women who tested positive with high HBV-DNA levels were treated ...

MADISON, Wis. -- If you're wearing gold jewelry right now, there's a good chance it came from an illegal mining operation in the tropics and surfaced only after some rainforest was sacrificed, according to a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and alumni who studied regulatory efforts to curb some of these environmentally damaging activities in the Amazon. The researchers, including UW-Madison geography Professor Lisa Naughton, investigated mining-related deforestation in a biodiverse and ecologically sensitive area of the Peruvian Amazon to see whether formalizing and legalizing these mining operations might curb some of their negative effects. Their study, published June 2 in the journal Environmental Research Letters, was co-authored by a group including UW-Madison ...

In a large, international retrospective study, men at high risk for death from prostate cancer had a significant reduction in all-cause mortality if treated with radiation shortly after surgery. Prostate cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer among men, and about 1-in-8 of them will be diagnosed with it during their lifetime. While most men are cured with available treatment, there remains a group at high risk for death. In the United States in 2020, 33,330 men died from the disease, making prostate cancer the second leading cause of cancer death for men in this country. Therefore, among those at highest risk of recurrence, metastasis, and death from prostate cancer, understanding what steps can be taken to lower these risks could save and extend lives. Early ...

Oak Brook, IL - The June edition of SLAS Discovery features the cover article, "A Perspective on Synthetic Biology in Drug Discovery and Development--Current Impact and Future Opportunities" by Florian David, Ph.D. (Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden), Andrew M. Davis, Ph.D. (AstraZeneca, Cambridge, England, UK). Michael Gossing, Ph.D., Martin A. Hayes, Ph.D., and Elvira Romero, Ph.D., and Louis H. Scott, Ph.D. (AstraZeneca, Gothenburg, Sweden), and Mark J. Wigglesworth, Ph.D. (AstraZeneca, London, England, UK). In January 2021, a survey of immunologists, infectious-disease researchers and virologists found that 90% of respondents believe SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic, continuing to circulate in pockets of the global population ...

An international subject pool was studied to confirm the effectiveness of a whole food complete vitamin and meal replacement product, IQed. The article, co-authored by Lisa Geng; Francine Hamel, EdD, SLP-CCC; Doreen Lewis, Ph.D., appeared in the peer-reviewed journal, Alternative Therapies (Altern Ther Health Med 2021 Mar;27(2):11-20(. The findings indicate that the carefully developed nutritional supplement, IQed Smart Nutrition, can help bolster key functions for people with a wide range of prevalent diagnoses including Autism, Apraxia, ...

Oak Brook, IL - The June edition of SLAS Technology is a Special Issue entitled, "Emerging Trends in 3D Cell Culture: High-Throughput Screening, Disease Modeling and Translational Medicine." Free online access to the articles in this collection is courtesy of Corning Life Sciences, the issue's sponsor. Precision medicine is becoming an increasingly popular and powerful way to target and treat human diseases. Patient-derived cellular models ushered in high-throughput screenings (HTS) in laboratory automation. While the upkeep and expansion of cells for HTS is predominantly manual, this special issue explores an automated avenue for HTS in research settings that considers the expansion of cells. This design is flexible for research and development ...

At Boston University, a team of researchers is working to better understand how language and speech is processed in the brain, and how to best rehabilitate people who have lost their ability to communicate due to brain damage caused by a stroke, trauma, or another type of brain injury. This type of language loss is called aphasia, a long-term neurological disorder caused by damage to the part of the brain responsible for language production and processing that impacts over a million people in the US. "It's a huge problem," says Swathi Kiran, director of BU's Aphasia Research Lab, and College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College associate dean for research and ...

The new drug sotorasib reduces tumor size and shows promise in improving survival among patients with lung tumors caused by a specific DNA mutation, according to results of a global phase 2 clinical trial. The drug is designed to shut down the effects of the mutation, which is found in about 13% of patients with lung adenocarcinoma, a common type of non-small-cell lung cancer. The Food and Drug Administration approved sotorasib May 28 as a targeted therapy for patients with non-small-cell lung cancer whose tumors express a specific mutation -- called ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- A new study of monsoon rainfall on the Indian subcontinent over the past million years provides vital clues about how the monsoons will respond to future climate change. The study, published in Science Advances, found that periodic changes in the intensity of monsoon rainfall over the past 900,000 years were associated with fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), continental ice volume and moisture import from the southern hemisphere Indian Ocean. The findings bolster climate model predictions that rising CO2 and higher global temperatures will lead to stronger monsoon seasons. "We show that over the last 900,000 years, higher CO2 levels along with associated changes in ice volume and moisture ...

Accurate soft tissue measurements are critical when making reconstructions of human ancestors, a new study from the University of Adelaide and Arizona State University has found. "Reconstructing extinct members of the Hominidae, or hominids, including their facial soft tissue, has become increasingly popular with many approximations of their faces presented in museum exhibitions, popular science publications and at conference presentations worldwide," said lead author PhD student Ryan M. Campbell from the University of Adelaide. "It is essential that accurate facial soft tissue thickness measurements are used when reconstructing the faces of hominids to reduce the variability exhibited in reconstructions of the same individuals." Hominids have been readily accepted ...

A new study shows that substantial amounts of carbon dioxide were released during the last millennium because of crop cultivation on peatlands in the Northern Hemisphere. Only about half of the carbon released through the conversion of peat to croplands was compensated by continuous carbon absorption in natural northern peatlands. Peatlands are a type of wetland which store more organic carbon than any other type of land ecosystem in the world. Due to waterlogged conditions, dead plant materials do not fully decay and carbon accumulates in peatlands over thousands of years. Therefore, natural peatlands help to cool the climate by capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere ...

ABSTRACT #9003 HOUSTON - Results from the Phase II cohort of the CodeBreaK 100 study showed that treatment with the KRAS G12C inhibitor sotorasib achieved a 37.1% objective response rate and 12.5 months median overall survival in previously treated patients with KRAS G12C-mutated non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The findings were presented today at the 2021 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Trial results indicated the targeted therapy was safe and tolerable in a heavily pre-treated patient population. The reported findings make sotorasib the first KRAS G12C inhibitor to demonstrate overall survival benefit in a registrational ...

A research group of the Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology of the University of Bologna analyzed more than one million SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences. This analysis led to the identification of a new variant that, over the past weeks, has been spreading mostly in Mexico but has also been found in Europe. Their paper published in the Journal of Medical Virology presented the so-called "Mexican variant", whose scientific name is T478K. Like other strains, this presents a mutation in the Spike protein, which allows coronaviruses to attach to and penetrate their targeted cells. "This variant has been increasingly spreading among people in North America, particularly in Mexico. To date, this variant covers more than 50% of the existing viruses in this area. The ...

Tiny algae in Earth's oceans and lakes take in sunlight and carbon dioxide and turn them into sugars that sustain the rest of the aquatic food web, gobbling up about as much carbon as all the world's trees and plants combined. New research shows a crucial piece has been missing from the conventional explanation for what happens between this first "fixing" of CO2 into phytoplankton and its eventual release to the atmosphere or descent to depths where it no longer contributes to global warming. The missing piece? Fungus. "Basically, carbon moves up the food chain in aquatic environments differently than we commonly think it does," said Anne Dekas, an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford University. Dekas is the senior ...

Though it might seem inanimate, the soil under our feet is very much alive. It's filled with countless microorganisms actively breaking down organic matter, like fallen leaves and plants, and performing a host of other functions that maintain the natural balance of carbon and nutrients stored in the ground beneath us. "Soil is mostly microorganisms, both alive and dead," says END ...

Like all metals, silver, copper, and gold are conductors. Electrons flow across them, carrying heat and electricity. While gold is a good conductor under any conditions, some materials have the property of behaving like metal conductors only if temperatures are high enough; at low temperatures, they act like insulators and do not do a good job of carrying electricity. In other words, these unusual materials go from acting like a chunk of gold to acting like a piece of wood as temperatures are lowered. Physicists have developed theories to explain this so-called metal-insulator transition, but the mechanisms behind the transitions are not ...

There's a lot of interest right now in how different microbiomes--like the one made up of all the bacteria in our guts--could be harnessed to boost human health and cure disease. But Daniel Segrè has set his sights on a much more ambitious vision for how the microbiome could be manipulated for good: "To help sustain our planet, not just our own health." Segrè, director of the END ...

A new drug reduced tumor size in patients who have lung cancer patients with a specific, disease-causing change in the gene KRAS, a study found. The results of the CODEBREAK 100 phase 2 clinical trial were presented June 4, 2021, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting and published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine. The efficacy and safety of the drug sotorasib, developed by Amgen Inc., was tested in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harboring a specific change, or mutation, in the DNA code for KRAS. The KRAS mutant protein targeted in the study was p.G12C, in which a glycine building ...

Washington, DC--A team led by Carnegie's Thomas Shiell and Timothy Strobel developed a new method for synthesizing a novel crystalline form of silicon with a hexagonal structure that could potentially be used to create next-generation electronic and energy devices with enhanced properties that exceed those of the "normal" cubic form of silicon used today. Their work is published in Physical Review Letters. Silicon plays an outsized role in human life. It is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust. When mixed with other elements, it is essential for many construction and infrastructure projects. And in pure elemental form, it ...

A study of more than 1,000 demographically representative participants found that about 22 percent of Americans self-identify as anti-vaxxers, and tend to embrace the label as a form of social identity. According to the study by researchers including Texas A&M University School of Public Health assistant professor Timothy Callaghan, 8 percent of this group "always" self-identify this way, with 14 percent "sometimes" identifying as part of the anti-vaccine movement. The results were published in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities. "We found these results both surprising and concerning," Callaghan said. "The fact that 22 percent of Americans at least sometimes identify as anti-vaxxers was much higher than expected and demonstrates ...

Most Americans should get screened for colorectal cancer beginning at age 45 instead of age 50, according to new recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which includes UVA Health's Li Li, MD, PhD, MPH. This recommendation applies to Americans without symptoms who do not have a history of colorectal polyps or a personal or family health history of genetic disorders that increase the risk of colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer is the third-leading cause of cancer death in America, according to the Task Force, and an increasing number of cases are being diagnosed in younger Americans. The Task Force notes that colorectal cancer diagnoses among Americans ages 40 to 49 increased by almost 15% from 2000-02 to 2014-16. Black ...

While previous research early in the pandemic suggested that vitamin D cuts the risk of contracting COVID-19, a new study from McGill University finds there is no genetic evidence that the vitamin works as a protective measure against the coronavirus. "Vitamin D supplementation as a public health measure to improve outcomes is not supported by this study. Most importantly, our results suggest that investment in other therapeutic or preventative avenues should be prioritized for COVID-19 randomized clinical trials," say the authors. To assess the relationship between vitamin D levels and COVID-19 ...