When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in North America in March 2020, health care facilities stopped providing all but "essential" care, to reduce infection risks and preserve protective gear known as PPE. That included changes at many centers that provide ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) for severe depression and other conditions, a new survey shows. Because ECT involves anesthesia, so that patients are unconscious when carefully controlled pulses of electricity are delivered to key areas of the brain, it is considered an 'aerosol generating' procedure. That means it poses special risks when a respiratory ...

* ICFO researchers report in Nature on having achieved, for the first time, entanglement of two multimode quantum memories located in different labs separated by 10 meters, and heralded by a photon at the telecommunication wavelength. * The scientists implemented a technique that allowed them to reach a record in the entanglement rate in a system that could be integrated into the fibre communication network, paving the way to operation over long distances. * The results are considered a landmark for quantum communications and a major step forward in the development of quantum repeaters for the future quantum internet. During the 90s, engineers made major advances in the telecom arena spreading out the network to distances beyond the ...

TROY, N.Y. -- Oxygen levels in the world's temperate freshwater lakes are declining rapidly -- faster than in the oceans -- a trend driven largely by climate change that threatens freshwater biodiversity and drinking water quality. Research published today in Nature found that oxygen levels in surveyed lakes across the temperate zone have declined 5.5% at the surface and 18.6% in deep waters since 1980. Meanwhile, in a large subset of mostly nutrient-polluted lakes, surface oxygen levels increased as water temperatures crossed a threshold favoring cyanobacteria, which can create toxins when they flourish in the form of harmful algal blooms. "All complex life depends on oxygen. It's the support system for aquatic food webs. And when you start losing oxygen, you have the potential ...

Chinese researchers realized an elementary link of a quantum repeater based on absorptive quantum memories (QMs) and demonstrated the multiplexed quantum repeater for the first time. On June 2nd?the work is published in Nature. The fundamental task of a quantum network is to distribute quantum entanglement between two remote locations. However, the transmission loss of optical fiber has limited the distance of entanglement distribution to approximately 100 km on the ground. Quantum repeaters can overcome this difficulty by dividing long-distance transmission into several short-distance elementary links. The entanglement of two end nodes of each link is created firstly. Then the entanglement distance is gradually expanded through entanglement swapping between each link. Previously, an ...

HOUSTON - (June 2, 2021) - It's official: Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) is the iron man of 2D materials, so resistant to cracking that it defies a century-old theoretical description engineers still use to measure toughness. "What we observed in this material is remarkable," said Rice University's Jun Lou, co-corresponding author of a Nature paper published this week. "Nobody expected to see this in 2D materials. That's why it's so exciting." Lou explains the significance of the discovery by comparing the fracture toughness of h-BN with that of its better-known cousin ...

The study, published in the journal Nature, shows how a drug available on the NHS can boost fitness of healthy stem cells in the gut, making them more resistant to sabotage from mutant stem cells that cause cancer. Researchers in the Netherlands, funded by the UK charity Worldwide Cancer Research, have discovered a way to boost the fitness of healthy cells in the gut to prevent the development of bowel cancer. The findings have led to the initiation of a clinical trial to find out if a commonly used psychiatric drug could be used to prevent bowel cancer in people. The trial will recruit patients with a genetic mutation that means they are virtually 100% certain to develop bowel cancer in their lifetime, unless ...

Metastases can develop in the body even years after apparently successful cancer treatment. They originate from cancer cells that migrated from the original tumor to other organs, and which can lie there inactive for a considerable time. Researchers have now discovered how these "sleeping cells" are kept dormant and how they wake up and form fatal metastases. They have reported their findings in the journal Nature. A tumor can leave behind an ominous legacy in the body: cancer cells can migrate from the tumor to other tissues in the body, where they survive after treatment in a kind of hibernation called dormancy. Currently, cancer medicine relies on monitoring cancer patients ...

Studies on cancer are limited by the threshold at which cellular transformations become clinically detectable. However, the very initial phase on the way to malignancy is histologically invisible, as the process originates from one single cell. In this early phase, a so-called "seeding cell" acquires an initial pro-cancerous mutation, also known as the "first oncogenic hit", while being completely surrounded by normal tissue. To overcome the detection barrier, a team of researchers around IMBA group leader Bon-Kyoung Koo and University of Cambridge group leader Professor Benjamin D. Simons developed a laboratory system to dissect the pre-cancerous steps that remained under the radar ...

A team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge and University of Utrecht examined trends in daily crime counts before and after COVID-19 restrictions were implemented in major metropolitan areas such as Barcelona, Chicago, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv, Brisbane and London. While both stringency of lockdowns and the resulting crime reductions varied considerably from city to city, the researchers found that most types of crime - with the key exception of homicide - fell significantly in the study sites. Across all 27 cities, daily assaults fell ...

Clinical trials published in high-profile medical journals rarely report on income or other key sociodemographic characteristics of study participants, according to a new study that suggests these gaps may create blind spots when it comes to health care, especially for disadvantaged populations. The study, publishing June 2 in JAMA Network Open, analyzed 10 per cent of 2,351 randomized clinical trials published in New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, The BMJ, The Lancet and Annals of Internal Medicine between Jan. 1, 2014 and July 31, 2020. The most commonly reported sociodemographic variables were sex and gender (in 98.7 per cent of trials) and race/ethnicity (in 48.5 per cent). All other sociodemographic ...

Experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute have, for the first time, experimentally measured the release of iron from the fecal pellets of krill and salps under natural conditions and tested its bioavailability using a natural community of microalgae in the Southern Ocean. In comparison to the fecal pellets of krill, Antarctic phytoplankton can more easily take up the micronutrient iron from those produced by salps. Observations made over the past 20 years show that, as a result of climate change, Antarctic krill are increasingly being supplanted by salps in the Southern Ocean. In the future, salps could more effectively stimulate the fixation of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in Antarctic microalgae than krill, as the team of researchers report ...

Peer reviewed Experimental study / Meta-analysis Animals / Human data Protein disguise could be new target for cancer immunotherapy Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have identified a protein that helps tumours evade the immune system and, in certain types of cancers, is linked to a poorer chance of survival. The protein could become a target for future cancer treatments. A crucial part of the immune system's response to cancer is a group of white blood cells, called CD8+ T-cells, which kill tumour cells. Before they launch their anti-tumour response, these cells must be told who to attack by another immune cell, ...

They studied the extent to which cirrus clouds caused by aircraft occurred during the global hard lockdown between March and May 2020, and compared the values with those during the same period in previous years. The study was led by Johannes Quaas, Professor of Theoretical Meteorology at Leipzig University, and has now been published in the renowned journal "Environmental Research Letters". Cirrus clouds, known for their high, wispy strands, contribute to warming the climate. When cirrus clouds occur naturally, large ice crystals form at an altitude of about 36 kilometres, in turn reflecting sunlight back into space - albeit ...

What drives the feasibility of climate scenarios commonly reviewed by organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? And can they actually be achieved in practice? A new systematic framework can help understand what to improve in the next generation of scenarios and explore how to make ambitious emission reductions possible by strengthening enabling conditions. While the IPCC is in the midst of the drafting cycle of the Sixth Assessment Report, whose publication will start in the second half of 2021, there is an ongoing debate ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Influencing millions of people on social media and being paid handsomely is not as easy as it looks, according to new Cornell University research. Algorithm vagaries are just one of several challenges social media content creators face, according to study author Brooke Erin Duffy, associate professor of communication at Cornell. "I think [our research] is a cautionary tale for aspiring creators as well as the broader public," Duffy said. "The people hoping to work as full-time YouTubers, Instagrammers, and TikTokers are led to believe it's easy and democratic. ...

One-quarter of people who take the drug methotrexate for common immune system disorders -- from rheumatoid arthritis to multiple sclerosis -- mount a weaker immune response to a COVID-19 vaccine, a new study shows. Published (online May 25) recently in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, the study addressed disorders that result when the immune system, meant to fight disease and drive healing, is triggered abnormally. This in turn causes inflammation, the pain and swelling that come as immune cells rush into damaged or infected tissue, but often in the wrong amount or context. Called immune-mediated inflammatory disorders, they are typically treated ...

The pollution of the world's oceans with plastic waste is one of the major environmental problems of our time. However, very little is known about how much plastic is distributed globally in the ocean. Models based on ocean currents have so far suggested that the plastic mainly collects in large ocean gyres. Now, researchers at the University of Bern have calculated the distribution of plastic waste on a global scale while taking into account the fact that plastic can get beached. In their study, which has just been published in the "Environmental Research Letters" scientific journal, ...

Zebrafish exposed to the leading cannabinoids found in cannabis in the earliest stages of development suffer a significant drop in neural activity later in life, according to a University of Alberta study that has implications for prenatal development in humans. Richard Kanyo, the lead author on the study and post-doctoral fellow in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, said despite the popular narrative that the health benefits of cannabis are many, it turns out there is a surprisingly large knowledge gap. "Once the legalization happened, people got really excited about it and there's a lot of bias in the media about positive ...

The number of specialty behavioral health establishments, their workforce and their wages have increased steadily between 2011 and 2019, according to a new study by Indiana University and University of Michigan researchers. The largest increases were found in the number of outpatient establishments and the size of their workforce, as well as an increase in the average wage at residential health establishments. Researchers say while these increases are important in closing the gaps in needed treatment, more work needs to be done to increase behavioral health workforce deficits, especially in areas with an elevated drug overdose mortality rate. At ...

By Karina Toledo  |  Agência FAPESP - The novel coronavirus is transmitted mainly via inhalation of saliva droplets or respiratory secretions suspended in air, so that face covering and social distancing are the most effective ways to prevent COVID-19 until enough vaccines are available for all. In Brazil, fabric masks are among the most widely used because they are cheap, reusable and available in several colors or designs. However, this type of face covering's capacity to filter aerosol particles of a size equivalent to the novel coronavirus can vary between 15% and 70%, according to a study conducted in Brazil by the University of São Paulo (USP). The study was supported by FAPESP, and the principal investigator was Paulo Artaxo, a professor in the university's ...

(10 a.m. EDT, June 2, 2021--Denver) - New research published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology (JTO) suggests the method used to calculate how obesity is measured may affect whether it is considered a risk factor for lung cancer. The JTO is an official journal of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer. Although the association between measures of obesity and both cancer incidence and outcome are clear in some solid tumor types such as breast, esophageal, and colon cancer, the relationship between obesity and lung cancer is more nuanced. Now, a group of researchers led by Sai Yendamuri, M,D, from Rosewell Comprehensive ...

Fluorinated compounds are an important group of compounds that are widely used in pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals, functional resins, and organic electronic materials. In particular, perfluorinated compounds with multiple carbon-fluorine bonds are attracting attention because of their high thermal and chemical stability and various excellent properties such as water and oil repellency and chemical resistance. "C-F bonds are extremely strong; hence, their transformation under mild conditions is difficult, and the selective activation of a specific C-F bond from among multiple C-F bonds in perfluorinated compounds has not been achieved," explains Prof. Makoto Yasuda, corresponding author of the study. The research team led by Prof. Makoto Yasuda has discovered ...

What makes cheetah the fastest land mammal? Why aren't other animals, such as horses, as fast? While we haven't yet figured out why, we have some idea about how--cheetahs, as it turns out, make use of a "galloping" gait at their fastest speeds, involving two different types of "flight": one with the forelimbs and hind limbs beneath their body following a forelimb liftoff, called "gathered flight," while another with the forelimbs and hind limbs stretched out after a hind limb liftoff, called "extended flight" (see Figure 1). Of these, the extended flight is what enables cheetahs to accelerate to high ...

Developing vaccines against bacteria is in many cases much more difficult than vaccines against viruses. Like virtually all pathogens, bacteria are able to sidestep a vaccine's effectiveness by modifying their genes. For many pathogens, such genetic adaptations under selective pressure from vaccination will cause their virulence or fitness to decrease. This lets the pathogens escape the effects of vaccination, but at the price of becoming less transmissible or causing less damage. Some pathogens, however, including many bacteria, are extremely good at changing in ways that allow them to escape the effects of vaccination while remaining highly ...

The white-tailed sea eagle is known for reacting sensitively to human disturbances. Forestry and agricultural activities are therefore restricted in the immediate vicinity of the nests. However, these seasonal protection periods are too short in the German federal States of Brandenburg (until August 31) and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (until July 31), as a new scientific analysis by a team of scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) suggests. Using detailed movement data of 24 juvenile white-tailed sea eagles with GPS transmitters, they were able to track when they fledge and when they leave the parental territory: on average, a good 10 and ...