**Note: the release below is a special early release from the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2023, Copenhagen, 15-18 April). Please credit the conference if you use this story** Compared to adults who did not have COVID in the first wave (March to September 2020), adults infected with COVID-19 in that first wave were 40% less likely to become infected during the first six months of Omicron activity (December 2021 to May 2022), concludes a new Canadian study to be presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Copenhagen, Denmark (15-18 April).  The study was led ...

Infrared spectroscopy is a non-invasive tool to identify unknown samples and known chemical substances. It is based on how different molecules interact with infrared light. You may have seen this tool at airports, where they screen for illicit drugs. The technique has many applications: liquid biopsy, environmental gas monitoring, contaminant detection, forensic analyses, exoplanet search, etc. But the traditional infrared spectroscopy methods provide low (temporal) resolution data. They are usually only applied for static samples because spectral data acquisition is a slow process. Detecting fast-changing phenomena ...

Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have successfully threaded atoms of indium metal in between individual fibers in bundles of transition metal chalcogenide nanofibers. By steeping the bundles in indium gas, rows of atoms were able to make their way in between the fibers to create a unique nanostructure via intercalation. Through simulations and resistivity measurements, individual bundles were shown to have metallic properties, paving the way for application as flexible nanowires in nanocircuitry.   Atomic wires of transition metal chalcogenides (TMCs) ...

Mason Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, Ramin M. Hakami has received a total of $35,000 in grants from Intellifoods Labs, LLC to continue examining methods to reduce the time to detect the presence of bacteria in food samples. Numbers and types of foodborne disease occurrences have increased over time and are a major global public health concern. Hakami and his team seek to reduce the time to identify both live and dead bacteria in food samples using fluorescence detection. The team aims to optimize the detection ...

Healthcare providers (HCP) at three Miami hospitals during the height of the Covid crisis, who practiced the Transcendental Meditation technique (TM), showed a rapid and highly significant reduction in stress-related burnout symptoms such as somatization, depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, and emotional exhaustion, as well as significant improvement in mental well-being, compared to a parallel matched lifestyle-as-usual group (LAU), according to a new study published today in PLOS ONE. A total of 65 healthcare providers at the three Miami hospitals (Baptist, ...

The first piece of a series of concrete structures was lowered into the water off the coast of Miami Beach on Wednesday morning, a massive crane on the deck of a floating barge hoisting the unit into the air and sinking it to the seabed.  During the next six hours, crewmembers aboard the barge would repeat that process until the structures, some stacked on top of each other, were settled on the seafloor, 14 feet below the surface.  To casual observers onshore, the daylong operation might have seemed routine. But this maritime activity was hardly run-of-the-mill.  In ...

A scientist from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) will premiere a new piece of music at the SXSW EDU festival that has been created using data beamed back to Earth from interstellar space. On Thursday, 9 March, Dr Domenico Vicinanza will be joined on stage in Austin, Texas, by Dr Alyssa Schwartz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Flute and Musicology at Fairmont State University, to perform music shaped by scientific readings collected by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft. Dr Vicinanza, a Senior Lecturer in ARU’s School of Computing and Information Science, is a leading expert ...

Oil palm trees are the most productive oil crop and global demand is increasing. However, their productivity is due to conventional management practices including high fertilizer usage and herbicide application, resulting in severe environmental damage. A new study by an international, multidisciplinary research team led by the University of Göttingen, shows that shifting to mechanical weeding and reducing fertilizer usage lead to significant increases in both ecosystem multifunctionality and profit. The scientists compared different environmental measures and economic indicators in mechanical weeding, herbicide application, and combinations of these with high and reduced fertilizer ...

A team of researchers has developed a machine learning model that draws from the contents of news articles to effectively predict locations that face risks of food insecurity. The model, which could be used to help prioritize the allocation of emergency food assistance across vulnerable regions, marks an improvement over existing measurements.  “Our approach could drastically improve the prediction of food crisis outbreaks up to 12 months ahead of time using both real-time news streams and a predictive model that is simple to interpret,” says Samuel Fraiberger, a visiting researcher at ...

Cancer cells have an innate randomness in their ability to respond to chemotherapy, which is another tool in their arsenal of resisting treatment, new research led by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research shows. Understanding why some tumour cells become resistant to chemotherapy is a core challenge in cancer research, as chemotherapy is still a frontline treatment for most cancers. The new research shows that tumour cells from neuroblastoma – cancer that develops in the body’s ‘fight or flight’ sympathetic nervous system – can move between states of responding, or not, to chemotherapy. “We showed there is ‘noise’ in the process of cell ...

As a social media user, you can be eager to share content. You can also try to judge whether it is true or not. But for many people it is difficult to prioritize both these things at once. That’s the conclusion of a new experiment led by MIT scholars, which finds that even considering whether or not to share news items on social media reduces people’s ability to tell truths from falsehoods. The study involved asking people to assess whether various news headlines were accurate. But if participants were first asked whether they would share that content, they were 35 percent worse at telling truths from ...

The researchers discovered evidence of horse riding by studying the remains of human skeletons found in burial mounds called kurgans, which were between 4500-5000 years old. The earthen burial mounds belonged to the Yamnaya culture. The Yamnayans had migrated from the Pontic-Caspian steppes to find greener pastures in today´s countries of Romania and Bulgaria up to Hungary and Serbia. Yamnayans were mobile cattle and sheep herders, now believed to be on horseback. “Horseback-riding seems to have evolved not long ...

Researchers at UCL and University of Ghana have successfully predicted whether children have anaemia using only a set of smartphone images. The study, published in PLOS ONE, brought together researchers and clinicians at UCL Engineering, UCLH and Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Ghana to investigate a new non-invasive diagnostic technique using smartphone photographs of the eye and face. The advance could make anaemia screening more widely available for children in Ghana (and other low- and middle-income countries) where ...

A recent study on the genetic makeup of grapevine has revealed fascinating insights into its domestication and evolution. The study, published in the journal Science, suggests that the harsh climate during the Pleistocene era resulted in the fragmentation of wild ecotypes, which paved the way for the domestication of grapevine about 11,000 years ago in the Near East (Israel) and the Caucasus. The research team sequenced the genomes of 3525 grapevine accessions (2503 V. vinifera (domesticated) and 1022 V. sylvestris (wild) accessions of grapevine, to identify the genetic changes that occurred during domestication and evolution of grapevine in Euro-Asia. According to the study, ...

Modifying inflorescences with higher grain capacity is vital for crop grain production. One recurring target is to select inflorescences with more branches or floral structures. Prominent examples include genes affecting floral identity or meristem determinacy, for which natural or induced variants profoundly change floral primordium number. Yet for temperate cereal crops, such as wheat and barley, excessive floral structures can result in a degeneration penalty due to the indeterminate nature of meristems. On the other hand, the manifestation of this reproductive potential can be accentuated by environmental ...

University of Pittsburgh and University of California, Irvine (UCI) researchers have received funding from the National Institute of Aging to advance understanding of real-world patient and family member reactions to biomarker-informed Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders diagnoses. The grant, which is expected to total $3.5 million over up to five years, will enable researchers to better understand the experiences and potential psychological impact of receiving Alzheimer’s biomarker results. These findings will provide important information for supporting patients and their families and inform best practices in the rapidly evolving state-of-the-art diagnostic ...

“In summary, both articles by Yi et al. emphasized the significance of non-canonical functions of EZH2 during PCa [prostate cancer] development [...]”  BUFFALO, NY- March 3, 2023 – A new editorial paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 14 on February 11, 2023, entitled, “Unveiling the non-canonical functions of EZH2 in prostate cancer.” Prostate cancer (PCa) is ranked as the second leading cause of cancer-related death among American men excluding skin cancer. ...

For older adults with clinical depression that has not responded to standard treatments, adding the drug aripiprazole (brand name Abilify) to an antidepressant they’re already taking is more effective than switching from one antidepressant to another, according to a new multicenter study led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Aripiprazole originally was approved by the FDA in 2002 as a treatment for schizophrenia but also has been used in lower doses as an add-on treatment for clinical depression ...

A new white paper by the American Foregut Society recommends expanding the classification of the esophagogastric junction (EGJ) to increase an assessment of the axial hiatal hernia length, hiatal hernia aperture diameter, and presence or absence of the flap value making it more comprehensive. The white paper is published in the December issue of Foregut, the only subscription journal focused exclusively on foregut disease linking medical, endoscopic, and surgical disciplines. Gastrointestinal reflux disease ...

Research Highlights: People who had higher scores for sleep health — based on regularity, satisfaction, alertness, timing, efficiency and duration — during a 12-month weight loss program were more likely to follow the caloric intake and exercise components of the program in comparison to peers who scored lower for sleep health. People with better sleep health attended more of the program’s group sessions. Embargoed until 10:15 a.m. CT/11:15 a.m. ET, Friday, March 3, 2023 DALLAS, March 3, 2023 — ...

From working with Appalachian communities to examining issues of displacement for refugees, two Virginia Tech faculty have made it their life and scholarly mission to recognize the people that society often overlooks. Now a prestigious national foundation is giving them significant resources to tell the hidden historical stories of communities throughout Southwest Virginia, an opportunity to put their passion into action. Emily Satterwhite and Katrina Powell received a $3 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a three-year project to work with communities across the state’s Appalachia region to commemorate neglected histories. Their project, Monuments ...

Washington, AAAS Annual Meeting. Imagine having a third arm –  a robotic one – to assist you with daily living. Silvestro Micera from EPFL, Switzerland, is engineering the human nervous system to make this a possibility. For decades, professor Silvestro Micera of EPFL has dedicated his research to helping people with sensory and motor deficits to re-gain independence and quality of life by developing wearable and implantable technologies. But this is changing, as he begins to explore what it means to augment the human body. The neuroengineer has thus far avoided the subject of ...

More than 500,000 people in the United States undergo rehabilitation following a stroke or brain injury every year. Movement impairments following a stroke are a major cause of adult disability in the United States, and routine treatments are not currently optimized for individual patient needs. University of Oklahoma biomedical engineer Yuan Yang, Ph.D., has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award, known as a CAREER award, from the National Science Foundation to advance the scientific study of brain functional changes after a stroke and pioneer a tailored rehabilitation strategy that fits individual needs. “The way a stroke victim’s brain adapts to the ...

Helping caregivers take better care of themselves can improve the quality of care they provide to individuals with neurological disabilities, according to experts writing in NeuroRehabilitation Amsterdam, March 3, 2023 – Research on caregiving after neurotrauma and neurological disability extends the focus beyond individuals with neurological conditions to caregivers - family, friends, and significant others who also are also greatly impacted. In this thematic issue published in NeuroRehabilitation, noted experts present the latest research ...

Noel Bairey Merz, MD, professor of cardiology and the director of the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center in the Smidt Heart Institute, will receive the 2023 Master of the ACC Award from the American College of Cardiology (ACC) in honor of her pioneering contributions to the cardiovascular profession. She will be recognized during the ACC’s Annual Scientific Session on Monday, March 6, in New Orleans. The Master of the ACC Award recognizes and honors ACC Fellows who have served with distinction, consistently contributing to the goals and programs ...