A new approach to tackling viruses by targeting the 'control centre' in viral RNA could lead to broad spectrum anti-viral drugs and provide a first line of defence against future pandemics, according to new research at the University of Birmingham. In a new study, published in Angewandte Chemie, researchers have shown how this approach could be effective against the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier modelling and in vitro analysis by the team and published in Chemical Science has also shown effectiveness against the HIV virus. Professor Mike Hannon, from the University of Birmingham's School of Chemistry, is co-lead author ...

Captive pelicans that are free to choose their own friendships are more likely to breed successfully on repeated occasions, new research suggests. Social network analysis on captive great white pelicans, led by the University of Exeter, found that providing social choice within the flock and allowing partnerships to form naturally led to improved breeding success. The study revealed that the pelicans chose their specific social relationships, and that there was a social structure across the flock, in which sub-adults (the equivalent of teenagers) spent more time with each other than with adult birds. Zoo-housed pelicans are common, but their breeding record is poor and they receive little ...

FRANKFURT. The virostatic agent remdesivir was developed to disrupt an important step in the propagation of RNA viruses, to which SARS-CoV-2 also belongs: the reproduction of the virus's own genetic material. This is present as RNA matrices with which the host cell directly produces virus proteins. To accelerate the production of its own proteins, however, RNA viruses cause the RNA matrices to be copied. To do so, they use a specific protein of their own (an RNA polymerase), which is blocked by remdesivir. Strictly speaking, remdesivir does not do this itself, but rather a substance that is synthesized from remdesivir in five steps when remdesivir penetrates a cell. In ...

A new Dartmouth-led study, published this week in the journal Pediatrics, has found that the disproportionate use of premiums within child-targeted TV advertising for children's fast-food meals is deceptive. The researchers examined thousands of advertisements from 11 fast-food restaurants, but one company--McDonald's--accounted for nearly all the airtime and, as a result, the findings. The researchers report that these ads often overemphasize premiums such as toy giveaways and games relative to the primary product being sold, the fast food itself. This marketing practice violates the industry's own guidelines--put in place to ensure that the use of premiums in ads is not deceptive or unfair--as young children lack the cognitive ability ...

Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this review the authors Yuheng Bao, Jifan Chen, Pintong Huang and Weijun Tong from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China discuss the synergistic effects of acoustics-based therapy and immunotherapy in cancer treatment. Cancer immunotherapy to enhance the autogenous immune response to cancer tissue is reported to be a promising method for cancer treatment. After the release of damage-associated molecular patterns, dendritic cells mature and recruit activated T cells to induce immune response. To trigger the release of cancer associated antigens, cancer acoustics-based therapy has various prominent advantages and has been reported in various research. ...

In a retrospective study of trauma patients over 65 years of age attended by KSS, it was found that, although a number of these patients had sustained a minor injury through seemingly innocuous mechanisms, a high proportion of this group required advanced clinical interventions and subsequent tertiary level care at a major trauma centre. The study also identified that dispatch time to these patients was typically longer, in particular in instances when KSS's critical care was requested by an ambulance crew already in attendance. With response time often critical to patient outcomes, the ...

Soon after E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey appeared in 2015, the book market was inundated with a flood of erotic bestsellers. People from all corners began wondering what this type of novel's secret of success could be. Now, a research team at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, has taken a closer look at the readership of erotic novels and investigated the causes of this literary predilection. In the media as well as the academy, contemporary erotica is typically dismissed as being of low literary value. Critics and scholars tend to classify its readers as having mediocre to poor taste, without, however, examining ...

Twenty dollars a month might not seem like a lot to pay for health insurance. But for people getting by on $15,000 a year, it's enough to make some drop their coverage - especially if they're healthy, a new study of Medicaid expansion participants in Michigan finds. That could keep them from getting preventive or timely care, and could leave their insurance company with a sicker pool of patients than before, say the researchers from the University of Michigan and University of Illinois Chicago. They have published their findings as a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research, ahead of publication in the American Journal of Health Economics. The study has implications for other states that require ...

DURHAM, N.C. - A potential new vaccine developed by members of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute has proven effective in protecting monkeys and mice from a variety of coronavirus infections -- including SARS-CoV-2 as well as the original SARS-CoV-1 and related bat coronaviruses that could potentially cause the next pandemic. The new vaccine, called a pan-coronavirus vaccine, triggers neutralizing antibodies via a nanoparticle. The nanoparticle is composed of the coronavirus part that allows it to bind to the body's cell receptors and is formulated with a chemical booster called an adjuvant. ...

A Flinders University researcher has finally fathomed why large numbers of killer whales gather at a single main location off the Western Australian southern coastline every summer. In a new paper published in Deep Sea Research, physical oceanographer Associate Professor Jochen Kampf describes the conditions which have produced this ecological natural wonder of orcas migrating to the continental slope near Bremer Bay in the western Great Australian Bight from late austral spring to early autumn (January-April). "The aggregation is connected to the local marine food web that follows from the upwelling of benthic particulate organic matter (POM) ...

A novel approach to immunotherapy design could pave the way for new treatments for people with an aggressive form of brain cancer called glioblastoma. Using specifically designed receptors, researchers were able to completely clear brain cancer tumours in preclinical models, using chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy. Published today in Clinical & Translational Immunology and led by Associate Professor Misty Jenkins, the research is a crucial step towards developing new immunotherapy treatments for this devastating illness. More than 1800 Australians are diagnosed with brain cancer every year. ...

A new micro-light-emitting diode (micro-LED) developed at KAUST can efficiently emit pure red light and may help in the quest to develop full-color displays based on just a single semiconductor. Micro-LEDs are a promising technology for the next generation of displays. They have the advantage of being energy efficient and very small. But each LED can only emit light over a narrow range of colors. A clever solution is to create devices that combine many different LEDs, each emitting a different color. Full-color micro-displays can be created by combining red, green and blue (RGB) micro-LEDs. Now, a KAUST team of Zhe Zhuang, Daisuke Iida and Kazuhiro Ohkawa have worked to develop ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (May 10, 2021) -- The Gulf of Guinea islands harbor an abundance of species found nowhere else on Earth. But for over 100 years, scientists have wondered whether or not a population of limbless, burrowing amphibians--known as caecilians--found on one of the islands is a single or multiple species. Now, a team of researchers from the California Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has contributed the strongest evidence to date that there is not one, but two different species of caecilians on São Tomé ...

Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego have developed a more accurate navigation system that will allow robots to better negotiate busy clinical environments in general and emergency departments more specifically. The researchers have also developed a dataset of open source videos to help train robotic navigation systems in the future. The team, led by Professor Laurel Riek and Ph.D. student Angelique Taylor, detail their findings in a paper for the International Conference on Robotics and Automation taking place May 30 to June 5 in Xi'an, China. The project stemmed from conversations with clinicians over several years. The consensus was that robots would best help physicians, nurses and staff ...

An international team led by researchers from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography (XIEG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Geneva has found that flash floods may triple across the Earth's "Third Pole" in response to ongoing climate change. Their findings were published in Nature Climate Change on May 6. The Hindu Kush-Himalaya, Tibetan Plateau and surrounding mountain ranges are widely known as the "Third Pole" of the Earth. It contains the largest number of glaciers outside the polar regions. Due to global warming, the widespread and accelerated melting of glaciers over ...

Remote quantum distribution on the ground is limited because of the loss of photon in optical fibers. One solution for remote quantum communication lies in quantum memories: photons are stored in the long-lived quantum memory (quantum flash drive) and then quantum information is transmitted by the transportation of the quantum memory. Given the speed of aircrafts and high-speed trains, it is critical to increase the storage time of the quantum memories to the order of hours. In a new study published in Nature Communications, a research team led by Prof. LI Chuanfeng and Prof. ZHOU Zongquan from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) extended the storage time of the optical memories to over one hour. It broke the record of one minute achieved by German researchers in 2013, ...

Chinese researchers achieved 51.5dB nonreciprocal isolation in the atomic ensemble, which is the highest isolation ratio in the non-magnetic nonreciprocal field. They discussed the quantum noise problem in nonreciprocal devices for the first time. The result was published on Nature Communications on April 22, 2021. Nonreciprocity is an important basic concept in the optical field. The isolators and circulators derived from it are all indispensable components in the optical path. Faraday isolator based on circular birefringence of magneto-optical effect is widely used because of its easy construction, high isolation and low loss. However, in the integrated optical path, the traditional faraday isolator is subject to various limitations. ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Watching meaningful films - those that we find moving and poignant - can make us feel more prepared to deal with life's challenges and want to be a better person, a new study found. The findings point to one reason why people may choose to see movies that make them sad as well as happy and that may explore difficult subjects that aren't always uplifting. Researchers found that when people recalled watching meaningful films like The Shawshank Redemption and Up, they reported a variety of positive reactions, such as being better able to accept the human condition and make sense of problems in life. Those positive experiences were less likely to be reported when people thought about watching Hollywood fare like The Big Lebowski or Catch Me ...

TAMPA, Fla. (May 10, 2021) -- Blocking the fat-busting enzyme lipoxygenase with a synthetic inhibitor throws the immune system's innate inflammatory response out of whack, compromising cardiac repair during acute heart failure, USF Health researchers found. Their new preclinical study was published April 13 in Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy. Acute heart failure - triggered by a heart attack, severely irregular heartbeats, or other causes -- occurs suddenly when the heart cannot pump enough blood to meet the body's demands. Following a heart attack or any cardiac injury, signals to immune cells called leukocytes ...

WASHINGTON - A neurologic pathway by which non-damaging but high frequency brain impact blunts normal brain function and causes long-term problems with learning and memory has been identified. The finding suggests that tailored drug therapy can be designed and developed to reactivate and normalize cognitive function, say neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center. The investigators, working with collaborators at the National Institutes of Health, had previously found that infrequent mild head impacts did not have an effect on learning and memory, but in their new study, reported May 10 in Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22744-6), the investigators found that when the frequency of these ...

How is it possible to move in the desired direction without a brain or nervous system? Single-celled organisms apparently manage this feat without any problems: for example, they can swim towards food with the help of small flagellar tails. How these extremely simply built creatures manage to do this was not entirely clear until now. However, a research team at TU Wien (Vienna) has now been able to simulate this process on the computer: They calculated the physical interaction between a very simple model organism and its environment. This environment is a liquid with a non-uniform ...

The morphological compatibility between flowers and insects was given in the famous textbook example of Darwin's orchids and hawkmoths. As in this example, many studies have shown that geographical variations in flower size match the size of insects in each region. In other words, studies have shown "flower-sized regional adaptation" in which large flowers evolve in areas pollinated by large insects and small flowers evolve in areas pollinated by small insects. However, when examining the genetic similarity between populations, are plants in each region more similar, or are plants with large ...

A team of researchers at the Institute of Laser Engineering, Osaka University, in collaboration with Bielefeld University and Technical University Braunschweig in Germany, came closer to unraveling the complicated optical response of wide-bandgap semiconductor multiple quantum wells and how atomic-scale lattice vibration can generate free space terahertz emission. Their work provides a significant push towards the application of laser terahertz emission microscopes to nano-seismology of wide-bandgap quantum devices. Terahertz (THz) waves can be generated by ultrafast processes occurring in a material. By looking at THz emission, researchers have ...

Point-of-Care UltraSonography (POCUS) deployed during the emergency treatment of patients with acute dyspnea has enormous advantages over standard diagnostic pathways. This is the finding of a joint review conducted by Danube University Krems and MedUni Vienna and recently published in the prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine. It allows serious conditions to be identified more quickly so that appropriate treatment can be initiated. Working on behalf of the American College of Physicians, a joint study group from MedUni Vienna and Danube University Krems conducted a review of the value of Point-of-Care UltraSonography (POCUS) in patients with acute dyspnea (shortness of breath), with a view to drawing up a practical clinical treatment guideline. ...

End-of-life circuit boards, certain magnets in disc drives and electric vehicles, EV and other special battery types, and fluorescent lamps are among several electrical and electronic products containing critical raw materials (CRMs), the recycling of which should be made law, says a new UN-backed report funded by the EU. A mandatory, legal requirement to recycle and reuse CRMs in select e-waste categories is needed to safeguard from supply disruptions elements essential to manufacturers of important electrical and electronic and other products, says a European consortium behind the report, led by the Switzerland-based World Resources Forum. The CEWASTE consortium warns that access to the ...