By late summer 2020, the resurgence of COVID-19 in the United States was largely driven by adults between the ages of 20 and 49, a new study finds. The results indicate that in locations where novel highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 lineages have not yet established, additional interventions among adults of these ages could bring resurgent COVID-19 epidemics under control and avert deaths. Following initial declines in the number of reported SARS-CoV-2 infections and deaths - a result largely attributed to non-pharmaceutical interventions - a resurgence in transmission of COVID-19 occurred in the United States and Europe beginning in August 2020. Understanding the age demographics that drove this is crucial. For example, between August ...

Laser particles are micrometre and nanometre lasers in the form of particles dispersible in aqueous solution, which have attracted considerable interest in the life sciences as a promising new optical probe. Laser particles emit highly bright light with extremely narrow spectral bandwidth. By transferring laser particles into live cells as shown in Figure 1, individual cells in a heterogeneous population can be tracked using each intracellular particle's specific spectral fingerprint as an optically readable barcode. However, laser particles emit directional light (Figure 2) and freely tumble inside living cells, their orientation varying randomly over time. Therefore optical readout of these labels results ...

Loess Plateau possesses a particular loess physiognomy with numerous ravines and slopes, and tableland is a typical landform in it. Together, the ununiform in both topographic undulation and land coverage compose the ununiform, complex underlying surface on Loess Plateau. This provides a special platform for research of turbulence above the complex underlying surface. As the front-edge problem encountered in the atmospheric boundary layer thesis, the turbulence research for complex underlying surface has drawn extensive attention recently. Local similarity has already proven that under certain condition, theories of turbulence based on the uniform underlying surface can also be applied to which for the ununiform underlying surface. ...

A team from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has developed a portable device that produces high-resolution 3D images of human skin within 10 minutes. The team said the portable skin mapping (imaging) device could be used to assess the severity of skin conditions, such as eczema and psoriasis. 3D skin mapping could be useful to clinicians, as most equipment used to assess skin conditions only provide 2D images of the skin surface. As the device also maps out the depth of the ridges and grooves of the skin at up to 2mm, it could also help with monitoring wound healing. The device presses a specially devised film onto the subject's skin to obtain an imprint of up to 5 by 5 centimetres, which is then ...

A satellite-based dataset generated by KAUST researchers has revealed the dynamics of dust storm formation and movements over the last decade in the Arabian Peninsula. Analysis of this long-term dataset reveals the connection between the occurrence of extreme dust events and regional atmospheric conditions, a finding that could help improve weather forecasting and air-quality models. Dust storms occur when strong winds lift tiny particles of sand into the atmosphere. These events often span several miles and can have an enormous impact on daily life, from damaging buildings and disrupting air traffic to triggering respiratory illnesses and other health problems. The Arabian Peninsula is a global hotspot of extreme dust events, with storms occurring ...

Residential gardens are a poor substitute for native bushland and increasing urbanisation is a growing threat when it comes to bees, Curtin University research has found. Published in 'Urban Ecosystems', the research looked at bee visits to flowers, which form pollination networks across different native bushland and home garden habitats. Lead author, Forrest Foundation Scholar Miss Kit Prendergast, from Curtin's School of Molecular and Life Sciences said the findings highlight the need to prevent destruction of remaining bushland and preserve native vegetation, in order to protect sustainable bee communities and their pollination services. "Our study involved spending hundreds of hours at 14 sites on the Swan Coastal Plain at Perth, Western Australia, ...

Researchers have shown how disposable face masks could be recycled to make roads, in a circular economy solution to pandemic-generated waste. Their study shows that using the recycled face mask material to make just one kilometre of a two-lane road would use up about 3 million masks, preventing 93 tonnes of waste from going to landfill. Developed by researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, the new road-making material is a mix of shredded single-use face masks and processed building rubble designed to meet civil engineering safety standards. ...

Researchers from Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) in collaboration with colleagues from Belgium take a step in the development of genome editing technology. Currently it is possible to deliver genetic material of different sizes and structures to organs and tissues. This is the key to eliminating DNA defects and treating more patients. The project is guided by Professor Gleb Sukhorukov and supported by the Russian Science Foundation. Research results were published in Particle & Particle Systems Characterization journal. An international research group developed a polymer ...

Semiconducting 2D alloys could be key to overcoming the technical limitations of modern electronics. Although 2D Si-Ge alloys would have interesting properties for this purpose, they were only predicted theoretically. Now, scientists from Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have realized the first experimental demonstration. They have also shown that the Si to Ge ratio can be adjusted to fine tune the electronic properties of the alloys, paving the way for novel applications. Alloys--materials composed of a combination of different elements or compounds--have played a crucial role in the technological development of humans since the Bronze Age. Today, ...

The Bronze Age (2200 to 800 BC) marked a decisive step in the technological and economic development of ancient societies. People living at the time faced a series of challenges: changes in the climate, the opening up of trade and a degree of population growth. How did they respond to changes in their diet, especially in Western Switzerland? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Spain has for the first time carried out isotopic analyses on human and animal skeletons together with plant remains. The scientists discovered that manure use had become widespread over time to improve crop harvests in response to demographic growth. The researchers also found that there had ...

Optical waveguides suspended in air are capable to beat free-space laser beams in light-analyte interaction even without complex dispersion engineering. This phenomenon has been predicted more than 20 years ago, yet never observed in experiment. In a new paper published in Light Science & Application, a team of scientists, led by Professor Jana Jágerská from Department of Science and Technology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, and co-workers have devised a mid-infrared free standing solid core optical waveguide which pushes the light interaction with the surrounding air beyond what has been reported up until now: 107 % interaction strength compared to that of a free-space beam has been demonstrated. "The guided mode of our thin waveguide ...

New study found that electrons can reach ultra-relativistic energies for very special conditions in the magnetosphere when space is devoid of plasma. Recent measurements from NASA's Van Allen Probes spacecraft showed that electrons can reach ultra-relativistic energies flying at almost the speed of light. Hayley Allison, Yuri Shprits and collaborators from the German Research Centre for Geosciences have revealed under which conditions such strong accelerations occur. They had already demonstrated in 2020 that during solar storm plasma waves play a crucial role for that. However, it was previously unclear why such high electron energies are not achieved ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended many parts of daily life, one of them being our work life. Research carried out by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has studied the factors that help make efficient work teams. The explanation is multidimensional and multilevel. "Inspiring leadership builds employees' resilience and willingness to undertake new challenges," said Pilar Ficapal Cusi, professor at the UOC's Faculty of Economics and Business and one of the authors of the study, which was published in the Journal of Cleaner Production. Viewed from the group and organizational perspective, "the shared vision, the team's belief in its own creative effectiveness, the ability to reflect openly about how their members connect to adapt ...

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have discovered the individual traits of fungi, and how their hyphae - that is, the fungal threads that grow in soil - behave very differently as they navigate through the earth's microscopic labyrinths. The study was performed in a lab environment, and the underground system constructed synthetically from silicone. Using a microscope, researchers were able to follow seven species and compare their behaviour. How do they react when the maze they grow in turns sharply and forces the hyphae to grow in the direction it came from? What happens when a large space opens up in front of them? "Under a microscope, their behaviour becomes much more personal than you can ever imagine. ...

Parasitic worms could hold the key to living longer and free of chronic disease, according to a review article published today in the open-access eLife journal. The review looks at the growing evidence to suggest that losing our 'old friend' helminth parasites, which used to live relatively harmlessly in our bodies, can cause ageing-associated inflammation. It raises the possibility that carefully controlled, restorative helminth treatments could prevent ageing and protect against diseases such as heart disease and dementia. "A decline in exposure to commensal microbes and gut helminths in developed countries ...

A greater exposure to air pollution at the very start of life was associated with a detrimental effect on people's cognitive skills up to 60 years later, the research found. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh tested the general intelligence of more than 500 people aged approximately 70 years using a test they had all completed at the age of 11 years. The participants then repeated the same test at the ages of 76 and 79 years. A record of where each person had lived throughout their life was used to estimate the level of air pollution they had experienced in their early years. The team used statistical models to analyse the relationship between a person's exposure to air pollution ...

To evaluate the chemical composition of food from a physiological point of view, it is important to know the functions of the receptors that interact with food ingredients. These include receptors for bitter compounds, which first evolved during evolution in bony fishes such as the coelacanth. What 400 million years of evolutionary history reveal about the function of both fish and human bitter receptors was recently published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution by a team of researchers led by the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich and the University of Cologne. Evolutionarily, bitter receptors are a relatively recent invention of nature compared ...

A process that releases iron in response to stress may contribute to heart failure, and blocking this process could be a way of protecting the heart, suggests a study in mice published today in eLife. People with heart failure often have an iron deficiency, leading some scientists to suspect that problems with iron processing in the body may play a role in this condition. The study explains one way that iron processing may contribute to heart failure and suggests potential treatment approaches to protect the heart. "Iron is essential for many processes in the body including oxygen transport, but too much iron can lead to a build-up of unstable oxygen molecules that can kill cells," says ...

Trees are by far the tallest organisms on Earth. Height growth is made possible by a specialized vascular system that conducts water from the roots to the leaves with high efficiency, while simultaneously providing stability. The so-called xylem, also known as wood, is a network of hollow cells with extremely strong cell walls that reinforce the cells against the mechanical conflicts arising from growing tall. These walls wrap around the cells in filigree band and spiral patterns. So far, it is only partly known, how these patterns are created. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm/Potsdam and from ...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the major greenhouse gases causing global warming. If carbon dioxide could be converted into energy, it would be killing two birds with one stone in addressing the environmental issues. A joint research team led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has developed a new photocatalyst which can produce methane fuel (CH4) selectively and effectively from carbon dioxide using sunlight. According to their research, the quantity of methane produced was almost doubled in the first 8 hours of the reaction process. The research was led by Dr Ng Yun-hau, Associate Professor in the ...

King Richard III's involvement in one of the most notorious and emotive mysteries in English history may be a step closer to being confirmed following a new study by Professor Tim Thornton of the University of Huddersfield. Richard has long been held responsible of the murder of his nephews King Edward V and his brother, Richard, duke of York - dubbed 'the Princes in the Tower' - in a dispute about succession to the throne. The pair were held in the Tower of London, but disappeared from public view in 1483 with Richard taking the blame following his death two years later. It has become of the most ...

In the United States only about 1.3 percent of all vehicles sold last year were battery powered. And about 90 percent of those sales were by one company -- Tesla. What has Tesla done right and where have other electric vehicle makers gone wrong? Electric vehicles cannot succeed without developing a nationwide network of fast-charging networks in parallel with the cars. Current EV business models are doomed unless manufacturers that have bet their futures on them, like General Motors and VW, invest in or coordinate on a robust supercharger network. These are the observations in an in-depth study of the industry by management professors at the University of California, Davis, and Dartmouth College. The researchers explain that big ...

As the scientific community continues researching the novel coronavirus, experts are developing new drugs and repurposing existing ones in hopes of identifying promising candidates for treating symptoms of COVID-19. Scientists can analyze the molecular dynamics of drug molecules to better understand their interactions with target proteins in human cells and their potential for treating certain diseases. Many studies examine drug molecules in their dry, powder form, but less is known about how such molecules behave in a hydrated environment, which is characteristic of human cells. Using neutron experiments and computer ...

University of Queensland researchers have discovered a new 'seeding' process in brain cells that could be a cause of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. UQ's Queensland Brain Institute dementia researcher Professor Jürgen Götz said the study revealed that tangled neurons, a hallmark sign of dementia, form in part by a cellular process that has gone astray and allows a toxic protein, tau, to leak into healthy brain cells. "These leaks create a damaging seeding process that causes tau tangles and ultimately lead to memory loss and other impairments," Professor Götz said. Professor Götz said until now researchers did not understand how tau seeds were able to escape after ...

Research into a new drug which primes the immune system in the respiratory tract and is in development for COVID-19 shows it is also effective against rhinovirus. Rhinovirus is the most common respiratory virus, the main cause of the common cold and is responsible for exacerbations of chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In a study recently published in the European Respiratory Journal (LINK), the drug, known as INNA-X, is shown to be effective in a pre-clinical infection model and in human airway cells. Treatment with INNA-X prior to infection with rhinovirus significantly reduced viral load and inhibited harmful inflammation. University of Newcastle and Hunter Medical Research Institute (HMRI) researcher Associate Professor ...