A rapid microbiological point-of-care test to diagnose respiratory infections has proved popular with GPs and could reduce antibiotic prescribing in primary care, according to a National Institute for Health Research funded study by researchers at the Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol. There are high rates of antibiotic prescribing in primary care and the UK government has called for the introduction of rapid diagnostics to curb overuse. The RAPID-TEST study, published in the journal Family Practice today [4 March] evaluated ...

Scientists at the Francis Crick Institute and UCL have identified the trigger of a key cellular change in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a type of motor neurone disease. The findings could help develop new treatments for many neurological diseases with the same change, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. When the nervous system is injured, diseased or infected, star-shaped cells, called astrocytes, undergo 'reactive' changes in their behaviour. Whilst some of these reactive astrocytes become protective, others become harmful and damage surrounding motor neurons. Reactive astrocytes are observed in various neurodegenerative diseases including ALS, but there is a lack of understanding about what causes astrocytes to ...

The Wellcome Trust, one of the world's top funders of health research, stands to gain financially from the covid-19 pandemic, raising questions about transparency and accountability, reports The BMJ today. Independent journalist Tim Schwab shows how the charity plays a leading role in a WHO programme to support new covid-19 therapeutics, while holding investments in companies producing these same treatments. It follows news reports that another charity, the Gates Foundation, is also positioned to potentially benefit financially from its leading role in the pandemic response. Financial disclosures from late 2020 show that Wellcome has a £275m stake in Novartis, which manufactures dexamethasone, and a £252m ...

More than three quarters (78%) of hospitals surveyed between June and August 2020 reported that their paediatric cancer care had been affected by the pandemic. Almost half (43%) made fewer new cancer diagnoses than expected, while around one third (34%) noted a rise in the number of patients abandoning treatment. Nearly one in ten (7%) closed their paediatric cancer units completely at some stage during the pandemic. Hospitals in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) were disproportionately affected, with unavailability of chemotherapy, treatment abandonment, and disrupted radiotherapy among issues more frequently reported. The COVID-19 pandemic has had major impacts on childhood cancer care worldwide, ...

Daily infusions of albumin provide no significant health benefit to patients hospitalised with advanced liver disease, over and above 'standard care', finds a large-scale multicentre trial led by UCL researchers. Albumin is a protein made in the liver that prevents fluid leaking from the bloodstream to other body tissues and carries various substances throughout the body, such as hormones or enzymes. In people with liver disease, low albumin levels are associated with an increased risk of death among hospitalised patients who have cirrhosis, and laboratory studies have shown albumin to have an anti-inflammatory effect. Therefore, albumin infusions are considered the best fluid for patients with cirrhosis and are an integral part of clinical care. Explaining the ATTIRE* trial, Principal ...

BOSTON - As the speed and scale of vaccinations against the SARS-CoV-2 virus ramps up globally, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) are calling for greater awareness and communication around a delayed injection-site reaction that can occur in some patients who have received the Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine. In a letter to the editor published online in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the authors note Phase 3 clinical data from the Moderna vaccine trial did show delayed skin hypersensitivity in a small number of the more than 30,000 trial participants. However, the authors say the large, red, sometimes raised, itchy or painful skin reactions were never fully characterized ...

Scientists say outdated assumptions around gender continue to hinder effective and fair policymaking and action for climate mitigation and adaptation. Lead author of a new study, Dr Jacqueline Lau from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University (Coral CoE at JCU) and WorldFish, said gender--alongside other identities like race, class and age--has a powerful influence on people's experience of, and resilience to, climate change. She said the four most common and interlinked assumptions found are: women are innately caring and connected to the environment; women are a homogenous and vulnerable group; gender equality is a women's issue and; gender equality ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - How might people's political ideology affect their perception of race? Previous research by Amy Krosch, assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, has shown that white people who identify themselves as political conservatives tend to have a lower threshold for seeing mixed-race Black and white faces as Black. More often than liberals, Krosch found, white political conservatives show a form of social discrimination termed "hypodescent" - categorizing multiracial individuals as members of the "socially subordinate" racial group. In new research published Feb. 22 in Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society B, Krosch used neuroimaging to show that this effect seems to be driven by white ...

As COVID-19 lockdowns and quarantines are lifted, businesses are now faced with the challenge of how to keep their employees who are returning to work motivated and engaged. A study led by a University of Illinois Chicago researcher shows that both employees and managers have an important part to play in promoting employee engagement during the pandemic. The research, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, suggests employee engagement and performance are the highest when employees are mentally prepared for their return to work and their managers are strongly committed to employees' health and safety at work. "Given the turmoil and distress during lockdowns ...

To investigate humans' impact on freshwater resources, scientists have now conducted the first global accounting of fluctuating water levels in Earth's lakes and reservoirs - including ones previously too small to measure from space. The research, published March 3 in the journal Nature, relied on NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2), launched in September 2018. ICESat-2 sends 10,000 laser light pulses every second down to Earth. When reflected back to the satellite, those pulses deliver high-precision surface height measurements every 28 inches (70 centimeters) along the satellite's orbit. With these trillions of data points, scientists can distinguish more features of Earth's surface, like small lakes and ponds, and track them over ...

Climate change is generally portrayed as an environmental and societal threat with entirely negative consequences. However, some sectors of the global economy may actually end up benefiting. New economic and philosophical research argues that policymakers must consider both the beneficial effects of climate change to "climate winners" as well as its costs in order to appropriately incentivize actions that are best for society and for the environment. The study by researchers from Princeton University, University College Cork, and HEC Montréal appears to be the first to develop a systematic, ethical framework for addressing climate winners -- as well as those harmed -- using financial transfers. Their approach, called "Polluter Pays, Then Receives," requires ...

A recent survey of the approximately 274,000 City University of New York (CUNY) students published in the Journal of Urban Health found that the Covid-19 pandemic has taken a toll on their mental health and financial security. The population-representative survey, conducted by a team of CUNY SPH faculty in collaboration with researchers at Healthy CUNY, found that more than half of CUNY students (54%) reported experiencing depression and/or anxiety in April 2020, at the height of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Further, they found disturbingly high levels of financial instability and noted that food insecurity and housing worries were strong ...

Injecting hydrogels containing stem cell or exosome therapeutics directly into the pericardial cavity could be a less invasive, less costly, and more effective means of treating cardiac injury, according to new research from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Stem cell therapy holds promise as a way to treat cardiac injury, but delivering the therapy directly to the site of the injury and keeping it in place long enough to be effective are ongoing challenges. Even cardiac patches, which can be positioned directly over the site of the injury, have drawbacks in that they require invasive surgical ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A smartphone app called Harbor, currently under development by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, teaches young adults how to talk to a peer if they are concerned about that other person's drinking or drug use. Designed for people ages 18-29, Harbor teaches young adults how they can "act as first responders for their close friends who demonstrate risky substance use behaviors," according to the app's lead developer, social work professor Douglas C. Smith. Smith, the director of the Center for Prevention Research and Development at the U. of I., focuses his ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: GSA's dynamic online journal, Geosphere, posts articles online regularly. Topics for articles posted for Geosphere this month include "a tale of five enclaves"; evidence for mantle and Moho in the Baltimore Mafic Complex (Maryland, USA); and the after effects of the 1964 Mw 9.2 megathrust rupture, Alaska. From Ordovician nascent to early Permian mature arc in the southern Altaids: Insights from the Kalatage inlier in the Eastern Tianshan, NW China Qigui Mao; Jingbin Wang; Wenjiao Xiao; Brian F. Windley; Karel Schulmann ... Abstract: The Kalatage inlier in the Dananhu-Haerlik arc is one of the most important arcs in the Eastern Tianshan, southern Altaids ...

BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, March 3, 2021 - Machine-learning (ML) systems are becoming pervasive not only in technologies affecting our day-to-day lives, but also in those observing them, including face expression recognition systems. Companies that make and use such widely deployed services rely on so-called privacy preservation tools that often use generative adversarial networks (GANs), typically produced by a third party to scrub images of individuals' identity. But how good are they? Researchers at the END ...

Nature Communications Publishes Paper by Lundquist Institute Investigator Dr. Wei Yan and Colleagues on New Promising Compound for Male Contraceptive Pill The Lundquist Institute researchers discovered a natural compound that exhibits almost ideal male contraceptive effects in pre-clinical studies LOS ANGELES (March 3, 2021) -- In a new paper published by Nature Communications, The Lundquist Institute (TLI) Investigator Wei Yan, MD, PhD, and his research colleagues spell out an innovative strategy that has led to the discovery of a natural compound as a safe, effective and reversible male contraceptive agent in pre-clinical animal models. ...

A recent analysis of the latest generation of climate models -- known as a CMIP6 -- provides a cautionary tale on interpreting climate simulations as scientists develop more sensitive and sophisticated projections of how the Earth will respond to increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Miami reported that newer models with a high "climate sensitivity" -- meaning they predict much greater global warming from the same levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide as other models -- do not provide a plausible scenario of Earth's future climate. Those ...

Inspired by the eyes of mantis shrimp, researchers have developed a new kind of optical sensor that is small enough to fit on a smartphone but is capable of hyperspectral and polarimetric imaging. "Lots of artificial intelligence (AI) programs can make use of data-rich hyperspectral and polarimetric images, but the equipment necessary for capturing those images is currently somewhat bulky," says Michael Kudenov, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. "Our work here makes smaller, more user friendly devices possible. And that would allow us to better bring those AI capabilities to bear in fields from astronomy to biomedicine." In the context of this research, ...

Researchers have analyzed tracking data for 5,775 birds across 39 species of albatrosses and large petrels -- threatened seabirds whose ranges span many countries and the high seas -- to estimate how responsibility for their protection should be distributed among nations and international organizations. The authors note that albatrosses and large petrels from all breeding countries spend much of their time on the high seas, indicating that effectively managing these waters is of global interest. These estimates are critical to inform ongoing United Nations discussions to design a global treaty for conserving biodiversity in the high seas, beyond national jurisdictions, the authors write. Many species of albatrosses and ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - First-year college students are reporting symptoms of depression and anxiety significantly more often than they were before the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The study, embargoed for release until March 3, 2021, at 2 p.m. EST, in the journal PLOS ONE, is based on surveys of 419 Carolina students, and reflects the challenge of colleges nationwide to support student well-being. The study is unique among the growing reports of COVID-19's toll on mental health: researchers followed the ...

The source of potentially hazardous solar particles, released from the Sun at high speed during storms in its outer atmosphere, has been located for the first time by researchers at UCL and George Mason University, Virginia, USA. These particles are highly charged and, if they reach Earth's atmosphere, can potentially disrupt satellites and electronic infrastructure, as well as pose a radiation risk to astronauts and people in airplanes. In 1859, during what's known as the Carrington Event, a large solar storm caused telegraphic systems across Europe and America to fail. With the modern world ...

A huge volume of digital data has been harvested, stored and shared in the last few years - from sources such as social media, geolocation systems and aerial images from drones and satellites - giving researchers many new ways to study information and decrypt our world. In Switzerland, the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) has taken an interest in the big data revolution and the possibilities it offers to generate predictive statistics for the benefit of society. Conventional methods such as censuses and surveys remain the benchmark for generating socio-economic indicators at the municipal, cantonal and national levels. But these methods can now be supplemented with secondary, mostly pre-existing data, from sources such as cell-phone ...

More than five years after receiving an experimental immunotherapy drug, half of a group of people at high risk of developing Type 1 diabetes remained disease-free compared with 22% of those who received a placebo, according to a new trial overseen by Yale School of Medicine researchers. And those who developed diabetes did so on average about five years after receiving the new drug, called teplizumab, compared with 27 months for those who received the placebo. The study, which was done in collaboration with researchers from Indiana University, was published March 3 in the journal Science Translational Medicine. "If approved for use, this will be the first drug to delay or prevent Type 1 diabetes," ...

A series of nanoparticle-based vaccines elicits protective antibodies against various strains of the influenza virus in nonhuman primates, according to work from Nicole Darricarrère and colleagues. Although more research is needed, the vaccines mark an important step toward a universal flu vaccine for humans, which has long been a major goal for infectious disease researchers. Current seasonal flu vaccines can prevent disease but often only work for a year, after which a new vaccine must be developed. This occurs because influenza viruses evolve extremely quickly, meaning that a year-old vaccine may not prepare the immune system to recognize a new ...