"The solar energy-to-electricity conversion of perovskite solar cells is unbelievably high, around 25%, which is now approaching the performance of the best silicon solar cells," says Professor László Forró at EPFL's School of Basic Sciences. "But their central element is lead, which is a poison; if the solar panel fails, it can wash out into the soil, get into the food chain, and cause serious diseases." The problem is that in most of the halide perovskites lead can dissolve in water. This water solubility and solubility in other solvents is actually a great advantage, as it makes building perovskite solar panels simpler and inexpensive - another perk along with their ...

Patients who experience long COVID have reported more than 200 symptoms across 10 organ systems*, in the largest international study of 'long-haulers' to date, led by UCL scientists together with a patient-led research collaborative. For the study, published in the Lancet's EClinicalMedicine, patient researchers who connected through the Body Politic online COVID-19 support group created a web-based survey designed to characterise the symptom profile and time course in patients with confirmed or suspected long COVID, along with the impact on daily life, work, and return to health. With responses from 3,762 ...

BOSTON - Resistance to antibiotics is common and often deadly among children with pneumonia in Bangladesh, according to a new study coauthored by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) with colleagues at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (abbreviated as icddr,b). This study, which appears in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases, offers an early warning that a pandemic of potentially deadly antibiotic resistance is under way and could spread around the globe. The study was led by Mohammod Jobayer Chisti, MD, PhD, a senior scientist in icddr,b's Nutrition ...

Teens' ability to empathize -- to understand others' perspectives and emotions, and to care for their wellbeing -- is an important contributor to their relationships, including with friends. Prior research shows that teens who have more secure family relationships report higher levels of empathy for others. But little research examines whether teens with more secure family relationships actually show greater empathy when observed in real-life interactions with peers, or whether their empathic capacities show different patterns of growth over time. A new study tested whether ...

According to the World Health Organization, over 340 million children and adolescents (aged 5 to 10 years old) were classified as overweight or obese in 2016, a statistic that has risen from 14% since 1975. Childhood obesity is associated with a wide range of severe health complications and an increased risk of premature onset of illnesses, including diabetes and heart disease. Without intervention, children and young adolescents classified as obese are likely to remain so throughout adolescence and adulthood. A new study conducted in the United Arab Emirates investigates whether asking early adolescents to evaluate the food choices of peers triggers deliberative thinking that improves their own food selection, even when the peers' ...

NEW YORK, NY (July 15, 2021)--Heart problems in children hospitalized with multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C)--an inflammatory condition triggered by COVID--were mostly gone within a few months, a new study by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and NewYork-Presbyterian has found. The study published in Pediatrics about 45 MIS-C patients is the first in North America to report on longitudinal cardiac and immunologic outcomes in children hospitalized with MIS-C. "We've learned that COVID causes a spectrum of illness in children. Some are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic and a small number of kids who develop MIS-C become critically ill, requiring ...

Equatorial Asia, which includes Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and surrounding areas, experienced devastating biomass burning in 2015 due to the severe drought condition induced by the extreme El Niño and a positive anomaly of the Indian Ocean dipole. This biomass burning emitted a significant amount of carbon, mainly in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2), into the atmosphere. Equatorial Asia has very few ground-based stations that observe CO2 and other related atmospheric constitutents. Meanwhile, a few satellites could observe atmospheric CO2; however, their observations were less available ...

When a CEO steps down or is dismissed, the attention of the board is on how to choose the right executive to succeed that CEO. However, Bocconi University professor Dovev Lavie claims that managing the process of introducing the new CEO and choking the negative sentiment that can arise among stakeholders in a moment of uncertainty could be a more critical task, especially when the new CEO comes from outside the firm. The effect of such a negative sentiment, which is a form of psychological bias, on a firm's performance is stronger than the implications of the new CEO's previous experience ...

VANCOUVER, Wash. - The psychological toll of losing a job due to COVID-19 caused many young hotel and restaurant workers to consider changing careers, according to a Washington State University study. In the study, the laid-off and fully furloughed hospitality employees reported being financially strained, depressed, socially isolated and panic stricken over the pandemic's effects, leading to increased intention to leave the industry all together. The intention to leave was particularly strong among women and younger workers. "It's a warning sign for my industry that the younger generation was really hit hard," said Chun-Chu Chen, an assistant ...

People with learning disabilities with covid-19 are five times more likely to be admitted to hospital and eight times more likely to die compared with the general population of England, finds a study published by The BMJ today. Risks were particularly high for those with severe to profound learning disability, Down's syndrome and cerebral palsy. The researchers say prompt access to covid-19 testing and healthcare is warranted for this group, and prioritisation for covid-19 vaccination and other targeted preventive measures should be considered. Emerging evidence has shown that people with learning ...

Statins are associated with a small increased risk of side effects in patients without a history of heart disease, but these effects are mild compared with the potential benefits of treatment in preventing major cardiovascular events, say researchers in The BMJ today. They say their findings suggest that the benefit-to-harm balance of statins for adults without heart disease is generally favourable. Statins are widely used to prevent heart disease, and severe side effects are rare, but many people are reluctant to take them because of the potential for milder effects such as muscle weakness and stiffness. For people with existing heart disease, the benefits of statins far outweigh the risk of these effects, but when statins are used by people without a history of heart ...

Ultra-processed food linked to higher risk of IBD Further studies needed to identify contributory factors in processed foods that might account for these associations A higher intake of ultra-processed food is associated with higher risk of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), finds a study published by The BMJ today. Ultra-processed foods include packaged baked goods and snacks, fizzy drinks, sugary cereals, ready meals containing food additives, and reconstituted meat and fish products - often containing high levels of added sugar, fat and salt, but lacking in vitamins and fibre. Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is more common in industrialised nations and it is thought that dietary factors might play a role, but ...

Highlights The physician-scientist workforce doing kidney research in the United States is increasingly made up of women and international medical graduates. However, this workforce is older, declining in relative number, and is less overwhelmingly focused on basic rather than clinical science. Washington, DC (July 14, 2021) -- U.S. physician-scientists make enormous contributions to biomedical research. New research published in CJASN demonstrates increasing representation of women and international graduates within the physician-scientist workforce doing kidney research; however, this workforce is declining in relative number, is getting older, and is less overwhelmingly focused ...

Researchers at UC San Francisco have successfully developed a "speech neuroprosthesis" that has enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, translating signals from his brain to the vocal tract directly into words that appear as text on a screen. The achievement, which was developed in collaboration with the first participant of a clinical research trial, builds on more than a decade of effort by UCSF neurosurgeon Edward Chang, MD, to develop a technology that allows people with paralysis to communicate even if they are unable to speak on their own. The study appears July 15 in the New England Journal of Medicine. "To our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of direct decoding of full words from the brain activity of someone who is ...

MINNEAPOLIS - Keeping your brain active in old age has always been a smart idea, but a new study suggests that reading, writing letters and playing card games or puzzles in later life may delay the onset of Alzheimer's dementia by up to five years. The research is published in the July 14, 2021, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "The good news is that it's never too late to start doing the kinds of inexpensive, accessible activities we looked at in our study," said study author Robert S. Wilson, PhD, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "Our findings suggest it may be beneficial to start doing these ...

Glenview, Illinois - The American College of Chest Physicians® (CHEST) recently released a new clinical guideline, Screening for Lung Cancer: CHEST Guideline and Expert Panel Report. The guideline contains 16 evidence-based recommendations and an update of the evidence base for the benefits, harms, and implementation of low-dose chest computed tomography (CT) screening. Lung cancer is by far the leading cause of cancer death among both men and women, making up almost 25% of all cancer deaths. Evidence suggests that low-dose CT screening for lung cancer can reduce cancer-related deaths in the group that is screened. The new guidelines ...

Professors in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences explored whether or not the scientific community will ever be able to settle on a 'total number' of species of living vertebrates, which could help with species preservation. By knowing what's out there, researchers argue that they can prioritize places and groups on which to concentrate conservation efforts. Research professor Bruce Wilkinson and professor Linda Ivany, both from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, recently co-authored a paper in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society where they determined that forecasting the total number of species may never be possible. When asking the question, 'how many species?,' it is important to note that only a fraction of ...

PITTSBURGH, July 14, 2021 - More doesn't necessarily mean better--including in cancer treatment. University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists report today in Science Translational Medicine that combining targeted radiopharmaceutical therapy with immunotherapy significantly boosts eradication of metastatic cancer in mice, even when the radiation is given in doses too low to destroy the cancer outright. "We're excited--with such low doses of radiation, we didn't expect the response to be so positive," said lead author Ravi Patel, M.D., assistant professor at Pitt and radiation oncologist at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. "In clinical trials, we tend to go with the maximum tolerable dose, ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Facebook posts by members of the U.S. Congress reveal the depth of the partisan divide over the COVID-19 pandemic, new research shows. A study of all 12,031 Facebook posts concerning the pandemic by members of Congress between March and October 2020 showed that Democrats generally took a more negative or neutral tone on the issue, while Republicans were more likely to have a positive tone in their posts. Public crises, like the pandemic, highlight how central social media is to messaging and how important it is to understand how rhetoric impacts engagement and sharing of messages said Laura Moses, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in political science at The Ohio State University. "When ...

New research, led by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, illustrates the disparity between the narrow origins and far-reaching impacts of greenhouse emissions responsible for disrupting the global climate system. Published in Science Advances today, the study was built upon the most comprehensive accounting of global emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. It reveals that the regions generating the most emissions are different from those expected to suffer the most severe warming. The result of this comparison shows the fundamental disparities - quite literally putting them on the map - associated with where, and who, will experience the greatest impacts of climate change. "One of the dirty tricks of climate change is that local pollution has far-reaching consequences," ...

An analysis of the tone used in pandemic-related social media posts from U.S. Congress members over an 8-month period in 2020 finds clear partisan differences, with Democrats using a slightly negative tone compared with Republicans, who appeared to use more strongly positive language in their COVID-19 messaging. Democrats were also far more likely than Republicans to use neutral language. The study also indicates that tone plays a critical role in elite communications, finding that the public engages more with content that has a negative tone. The study authors note that messaging from political elites during a crisis such ...

A new study on the effects of Airbnb listings on Boston neighborhoods suggests that the prevalence of listings may hamper local social dynamics that prevent crime. However, tourists themselves do not appear to generate or attract higher levels of crime. Babak Heydari, Daniel T. O'Brien, and Laiyang Ke of Northeastern University in Boston, MA, USA present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on July 14, 2021. Widespread sentiment holds that Airbnb listings cause increased crime in residential neighborhoods. However, there has been limited research to explore and clarify this link. To better understand the relationship ...

A team of international researchers, led by the University of Bologna, has discovered the fossilised remains of methane-cycling microbes that lived in a hydrothermal system beneath the seafloor 3.42 billion years ago. The microfossils are the oldest evidence for this type of life and expand the frontiers of potentially habitable environments on the early Earth, as well as other planets such as Mars. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, analysed microfossil specimens in two thin layers within a rock collected from the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa. This region, near the border with Eswatini and Mozambique, contains some of the oldest and best-preserved sedimentary rocks ...

GALVESTON, TEXAS - A new study published in Science Translational Medicine reports on the Ebola vaccine-mediated protection of five mucosal vaccine vectors based on the human and avian paramyxoviruses. The study comprehensively characterized the antibody response to each vaccine, identifying features and functions that were elevated in survivors and that could serve as vaccine correlates of protection. The multi-year study, led by Alexander Bukreyev, PhD, of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) Galveston National Laboratory looked at whether all the vaccines conferred protection and produced ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Write down the benefits of obtaining a college degree and, more than likely, all the items on the completed list will relate to graduates: higher salaries, autonomous jobs and better access to health care, for instance. All of those factors, supported by extensive research, help draw a direct line connecting higher education and health. Similar research suggests how the education of parents affects their children. Now, two University at Buffalo sociologists have used a new wave of data from a survey launched in 1994 to further extend the geometry linking educational attainment and health that demonstrates another dimension of the intergenerational effects ...