SEATTLE -- February 19, 2021 -- A team of scientific experts from across the U.S. and Puerto Rico are advocating for increased diversity in vaccine trials after publishing a new report that highlights a decade's worth of disparities. The new study, published in JAMA Network Open, found that among U.S.-based vaccine clinical trials, people who are Black/African American, American Indian/Alaska Native, Hispanic/Latino and age 65 and older were the most underrepresented groups. Conversely, adult women were overrepresented. The research team examined 230 U.S.-based vaccine trials of all ...

What The Study Did: Persistent symptoms among adults with COVID-19 up to nine months after illness onset were analyzed in this study. Authors: Helen Y. Chu, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Washington in Seattle, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.0830) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media advisory: The full study is linked to this news release. Embed ...

What The Study Did: This survey study compared patterns of mental health concerns, substance use and suicidal ideation during June and September of the COVID-19 pandemic and examined at-risk demographic groups. Authors: Mark É. Czeisler, A.B., Monash University in Clayton, Victoria, Australia, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.37665) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author ...

What The Study Did: Using data from completed interventional vaccine trials from 2011 to 2020, researchers examined whether racial/ethnic minority groups, females and older adults were underrepresented in U.S.-based vaccine clinical trials. Authors: Steven A. Pergam, M.D., M.P.H., of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, and Julie K. Silver, M.D., of Harvard Medical School in Boston, are the corresponding authors. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.37640) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions ...

Women of minority races and ethnicities and with less education and income have had relatively lower access to 3D mammography, a technology that can improve breast cancer detection and decrease false alarms, according to research published today. "This study was about whether adoption of this technology is equitable. We're showing that it has not been, even though it has been FDA-approved for a decade now," said END ...

Recreational hunting -- especially hunting of charismatic species for their trophies --raises ethical and moral concerns. Yet recreational hunting is frequently suggested as a way to conserve nature and support local people's livelihoods. In a new article published in the journal One Earth, scientists from the University of Helsinki in Finland and Flinders University in Australia have reviewed more than 1,000 studies on recreational hunting -- the first such attempt to summarize the scientific literature examining the biodiversity and social effects of recreational hunting globally. Co-lead author University of Helsinki Associate Professor Enrico ...

Creating "super soldiers" of specific white blood cells to boost an anti-tumour response has been shown in a series of elegant experiments by Princess Margaret researchers. Research led by Ph.D. candidate Helen Loo Yau, Post-doctoral fellow Dr. Emma Bell and Senior Scientist Dr. Daniel D. De Carvalho describes a DNA modifying epigenetic therapy that can transform immune killer T-cells into "super soldiers" by boosting their ability to kill cancer cells. Their findings could potentially enhance immunotherapy, a new paradigm in cancer treatment currently effective for a minority of cancer patients. Some patients respond well to immunotherapy, with their tumours drastically shrinking in size, but others respond only partially or not at all. Clinicians and scientists around ...

At some point, microvehicles that are small enough to navigate our blood vessels will enable physicians to take biopsies, insert stents and deliver drugs with precision to sites that are difficult to reach, all from inside the body. Scientists around the world are currently researching and developing suitable microvehicles. In most cases, they are powered and controlled by acoustic and magnetic fields or using light. However, until now, propelling microvehicles against a fluid flow had proved to be a major challenge. This would be necessary for the micromachines to be able to navigate in blood vessels against the direction of blood flow. Researchers at ETH Zurich have now developed microvehicles ...

The latest observations from Insight-HXMT were published online in Nature Astronomy on Feb. 18. Insight-HXMT has discovered the very first X-ray burst associated with a fast radio burst (FRB) and has identified that it originated from soft-gamma repeater (SGR) J1935+2154, which is a magnetar in our Milky Way. Insight-HXMT is the first to identify the double-spike structure of this X-ray burst as the high energy counterpart of FRB 200428. This discovery, together with results from other telescopes, proves that FRBs can come from magnetar bursts, thus resolving ...

From atomic clocks to secure communication to quantum computers: these developments are based on the increasingly better control of the quantum behaviour of electrons in atomic shells with the help of laser light. Now, for the first time, physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg have succeeded in precisely controlling quantum jumps in atomic nuclei using X-ray light. Compared with electron systems, nuclear quantum jumps are extreme - with energies up to millions of times higher and incredibly short zeptosecond processes. A zeptosecond is one trillionth of a billionth of a second. The rewards include profound insight into the quantum world, ultra-precise nuclear clocks, ...

Before life emerged on Earth, many physicochemical processes on our planet were highly chaotic. A plethora of small compounds, and polymers of varying lengths, made up of subunits (such as the bases found in DNA and RNA), were present in every conceivable combination. Before life-like chemical processes could emerge, the level of chaos in these systems had to be reduced. In a new study, LMU physicists led by Dieter Braun show that basic features of simple polymers, together with certain aspects of the prebiotic environment, can give rise to selection processes that reduce disorder. In previous publications, Braun's research group explored how spatial order could have developed in narrow, water-filled chambers ...

Epileptic activity originating from one or more diseased brain regions in the temporal lobe is difficult to contain. Many patients with so-called temporal lobe epilepsy often do not respond to treatment with anti-epileptic drugs, and the affected brain areas must therefore be surgically removed. Unfortunately, this procedure only gives seizure freedom to about one third of patients, so the development of alternative therapeutic approaches is of great importance. Scientists led by neurobiologist Prof. Dr. Carola Haas, head of the research group at the Department of Neurosurgery at Medical Center - University of ...

The major direct and indirect effects of covid-19 have forced the authorities to implement policies that strike a balance between minimizing the immediate health impact of the pandemic and containing the long-term damage to society arising from protective policies. One parameter that is crucial for calculating how restrictive policies might be warranted is the mortality impact of covid-19, which has led to large-scale international collaborations in order to collect data that records deaths attributable to the pandemic. Despite the limitations, each of these research avenues and associated health measures (infection rate, deaths and excess deaths) is important in order to inform the public and policymakers about the mortality impact of covid-19. "Our results confirm that the mortality ...

When can tuberculosis therapy be stopped without risk of relapse? Doctors are faced with this question time and again, because the lack of detection of the tuberculosis pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis is no guarantee for a permanent cure of the lung infection. Patients who respond to the standard therapy may be out of treatment after six months. But for resistant cases, more than 18 months of treatment duration is currently advised. "This is a very long time for those affected, who often have to take more than four antibiotics every day and suffer from side effects", explains Prof. Dr. Christoph Lange, Clinical Director at the Research Center Borstel and director of the study, conducted at the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) in cooperation with the German Center for ...

A group of researchers has developed a new program showing participation and activity is critical for the rehabilitation of older adults in long-term care. The results of their research were published in the journal PLOS ONE on February 12, 2021. "Our study shows participatory programs that encourage elderly patients to be active need greater emphasis in elderly care centers," said Yoshihiko Baba, lead author of the study. In 2015, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan launched a comprehensive plan to care for the country's aging population. Crucial to this was rehabilitation centered on promoting activities that elderly patients could actively take part in. Baba, a former ...

Although amber looks like a somewhat unusual inorganic mineral, it is actually derived from an organic source - tree resins. Millions of years ago, when this aromatic and sticky substance was slowly oozing from coniferous trees, insects and other biological material could become trapped in it. That is why some samples of amber contain fossilized specimens, preserved in a virtually pristine state, which afford fascinating snapshots of the flora and fauna of long-gone forests. Now, a research team led by LMU zoologists Viktor Baranov and Joachim Haug has made exciting ...

Semi-trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles are responsible for nearly half of road transportation carbon dioxide emissions in Europe, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation. A team of researchers in Italy has proposed a plan to reduce the emissions without compromising priorities such as delivery times. They published their approach in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, a joint publication of the IEEE and the Chinese Association of Automation. "Driving style, traffic and weather conditions have a significant impact on vehicle fuel consumption. Road freight traffic, in particular, contributes ...

A major pathway for carbon sequestration in the ocean is the growth, aggregation and sinking of phytoplankton - unicellular microalgae like diatoms. Just like plants on land, phytoplankton sequester carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide. When algae cells aggregate, they sink and take the sequestered carbon with them to the ocean floor. This so called biological carbon pump accounts for about 70 per cent of the annual global carbon export to the deep ocean. Estimated 25 to 40 per cent of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning emitted by humans may have been transported by this process from the atmosphere to depths below 1000 meter, where carbon can be stored for millennia. ...

Early Mars is considered as an environment where life could possibly have existed. There was a time in the geological history of Mars when it could have been very similar to Earth and harbored life as we know it. In opposite to the current Mars conditions, bodies of liquid water, warmer temperature, and higher atmospheric pressure could have existed in Mars' early history. Potential early forms of life on Mars should have been able to use accessible inventories of the red planet: derive energy from inorganic mineral sources and transform CO2 into biomass. Such living entities are rock-eating microorganisms, called "chemolithotrophs", which ...

The ability to speak is one of the essential characteristics that distinguishes humans from other animals. Many people would probably intuitively equate speech and language. However, cognitive science research on sign languages since the 1960s paints a different picture: Today it is clear, sign languages are fully autonomous languages and have a complex organization on several linguistic levels such as grammar and meaning. Previous studies on the processing of sign language in the human brain had already found some similarities and also differences between sign ...

The last complete reversal of the Earth's magnetic field, the so-called Laschamps event, took place 42,000 years ago. Radiocarbon analyses of the remains of kauri trees from New Zealand now make it possible for the first time to precisely time and analyse this event and its associated effects, as well as to calibrate geological archives such as sediment and ice cores from this period. Simulations based on this show that the strong reduction of the magnetic field had considerable effects in the Earth's atmosphere. This is shown by an international team led by Chris Turney from the Australian University of New South Wales, with the participation of Norbert Nowaczyk from the German Research Centre for ...

Researchers at Tampere University have successfully used artificial intelligence to predict nonlinear dynamics that take place when ultrashort light pulses interact with matter. This novel solution can be used for efficient and fast numerical modelling, for example, in imaging, manufacturing and surgery. The findings were published in the prestigious Nature Machine Intelligence journal. Artificial intelligence can distinguish different types of laser pulse propagation, just as it recognizes subtle differences of expression in facial recognition. The newly found solution can make it simpler to design experiments in fundamental research and will allow algorithms ...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) electrocatalytic reduction driven by renewable electricity can solve the problem of excessive CO2 emissions. Since CO2 is thermodynamically stable, efficient catalysts are needed to reduce the energy consumption in the process. The single-atom catalysts immobilized on nitrogen-doped carbon supports (M-N/C) have been widely used for CO2 electrocatalytic reduction reaction due to their high atom utilization efficiency. Recently, a research team led by Prof. LIU Licheng from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) proposed a two-step amination strategy to regulate the electronic structure of M-N/C catalysts (M=Ni, Fe, Zn) and enhance the intrinsic activity of CO2 electrocatalytic reduction. In ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- Feb. 19, 2021 -- Friction caused by dry Martian dust particles making contact with each other may produce electrical discharge at the surface and in the planet's atmosphere, according University of Oregon researchers. However, such sparks are likely to be small and pose little danger to future robotic or human missions to the red planet, they report in a paper published online and scheduled to appear in the March 15 print issue of the journal Icarus. Viking landers in the 1970s and orbiters since then detected silts, clays, wind-blown bedforms and dust devils on Mars, raising questions about potential electrical activity. Scientists ...

China is just one of many countries in the Northern Hemisphere having what researchers are calling an "extremely cold winter," due in part to both the tropical Pacific and the Arctic, according to an analysis of temperatures from Dec. 1, 2020, to mid-January of 2021. A country-specific case study, the investigation potentially has far-reaching implications for predictions and early warnings to protect against harmful impacts, researchers said. The results were published online, ahead of print, on Feb. 12 in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. "We are trying to explain why the countries in the Northern Hemisphere ...