BOSTON -- While PCR testing has been used widely for COVID-19 diagnosis, it only provides information on who is currently infected. Antibody testing can tell who has been previously exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, a metric that is essential for tracking spread across a population. It may also, as a study recently published in the journal Nature Communications shows, hold the key to understanding the immune response to the virus. Led by Galit Alter, PhD, Core Member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, this study found that while antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 may be a good way to measure exposure to the virus, their presence alone wasn't enough to determine if a person had long-lasting protection. Instead, antibody effector functions associated ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. - Radiomics--the extraction of very detailed quantitative features from medical images--provides a refined understanding of how cocaine use and other risk factors affect the course of coronary artery disease, according to a study published in Radiology. Researchers said the study shows the power of radiomics to improve understanding of not just cardiovascular disease, but cancer and other conditions as well. Coronary artery disease typically develops over time as plaque builds up inside the arteries. This process, known as atherosclerosis, ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. - Researchers using MRI have found significant abnormalities in the eyes of some people with severe COVID-19, according to a study published in the journal Radiology. The study results support the need for eye screening in these patients to provide appropriate treatment and management of potentially severe ophthalmological manifestations of COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected more than 100 million people since it began early in 2020. While the virus primarily attacks the lungs, it has been linked with eye abnormalities ...

Launched in 1988, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) stands out as one of the largest, internationally coordinated global public health major projects conducted to date, with cumulative spending of over $16.5 billion for 1988-2018, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). More than 30 years later, stubborn outbreaks of wild poliovirus still occur in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where cases have been increasing since 2018. The global eradication of polio continues to be an elusive goal. A special issue of the journal Risk Analysis, titled "Global Poliovirus Risk Management and Modeling," looks at the current status of polio eradication ...

Earth is home to millions of known species of plants and animals, but by no means are they distributed evenly. For instance, rainforests cover less than 2 percent of Earth's total surface, yet they are home to 50 percent of Earth's species. Oceans account for 71 percent of Earth's total surface but contain only 15 percent of Earth's species. What drives this uneven distribution of species on Earth is a major question for scientists. In a paper published February 16 in the Journal of Biogeography an international team of researchers led by Jacob S. Suissa, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, ...

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) physicians and scientists presented new research at the 2021 American Society of Clinical Oncology Genitourinary Cancers Symposium held virtually February 11-13. Notably, MSK medical oncologist Robert Motzer, MD, presented encouraging data from a phase III randomized study that assessed two new treatment combinations as first-line treatments that may prolong survival in people with advanced kidney cancer. Dr. Motzer's findings were also published on February 13 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In this large, international trial involving 200 sites across 20 countries, Dr. Motzer and a team of investigators ...

Using advanced RNA sequencing, scientists have identified two unique subtypes of a prominent mutation present in many patients with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) - called NPM1 - that could help predict survival and improve treatment response for patients whose leukemic cells bear the mutation. In research published Feb. 16, in Nature Communications, a team led by Princess Margaret Cancer Centre Senior Scientists, Drs. Benjamin Haibe-Kains, Aaron Schimmer and Mark Minden, have discovered that within the NPM1 mutation of AML there exists two unique subtypes, one of which can be effectively treated with drugs already in use. It is the first study to classify within the common NPM1 mutant form of AML two subtypes, one being "primitive" and the other ...

Most people infected with SARS-CoV-2 are able to recover from the disease at home - even if they might experience very stressful disease progressions. Some have no symptoms at all. But about ten percent of those affected become so severely ill that they have to be treated in a hospital. The assumption that a weak immune system is behind a severe progression is short-sighted. Especially with critical progressions, the immune system works under intense pressure, but does not manage to control the virus. A Berlin research group has now observed how SARS-CoV-2 uses an immune system defense mechanism to increasingly hijack ...

Computing - Modeling COVID dynamics To better understand the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have harnessed the power of supercomputers to accurately model the spike protein that binds the novel coronavirus to a human cell receptor. These simulations also shed light on the ligand molecules that can inhibit such binding, pointing the way to potential drug therapies. An ultrafast quantum chemical modeling method provides information about the critical electronic interactions between protein and ligand chemicals, going beyond the classical interaction models that are normally employed in computational drug discovery. The findings will enable accurate predictions of the performance of currently available inhibitors ...

The University of Kent has led a study highlighting the urgent need for the UK's Government and renewable energy industries to give vital attention to decommissioning offshore wind turbines approaching their end of live expectancy by 2025. The research reveals that the UK must decommission approximately 300 and 1600 early-model offshore wind turbines by 2025 and 2030, respectively. Urgent focus is needed now to proactively use the remaining years until turbines installed in the 1990s and early 2000s are no longer safely functional in 2025, to prevent safety lapses, potentially huge costs and the irretrievable loss of the skillset required for safe decommission. The research shows that these original turbines have an approximate lifetime of 20 to 25 years, but this expectation ...

Atropisomers are a class of stereoisomers (chemical compounds that differ in spatial arrangement of atoms) arising from restricted rotation around a single bond and have various applications in chemistry. To date, most research on atropisomers has focused on "biaryl atropisomers" (due to the rotational restriction around a carbon-carbon bond), but it is also possible for atropisomers to arise from rotational restrictions around a nitrogen-carbon (N-C) bond. These N-C axially chiral compounds are found in various natural products and bioactive compounds and thus have promising applications in medicine ...

A POSTECH research team has developed a transparent amorphous silicon that transmits visible light - which permits us to distinguish the colors of objects - enabling the development of paper-thin lenses usable in head-mounted displays (HMD) that show virtual and augmented reality images in real time. A research team - led by Professor Junsuk Rho of POSTECH's mechanical engineering and chemical engineering departments, and Ph.D. candidate Younghwan Yang and Dr. Gwanho Yoon of the Department of Mechanical Engineering - has developed visibly transparent amorphous silicon by improving the plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) method, a practice widely used by Korean display manufacturers. ...

Tsukuba, Japan - Sleep is very important for athletes, and sleep loss can affect physical performance and cognitive ability. But now, researchers from the University of Tsukuba have identified the prevalence of sleep disorders in visually impaired athletes, as well as specific risk factors associated with lower sleep quality. In a study published last November in Sleep Medicine, researchers from the University of Tsukuba conducted a survey of 99 visually impaired athletes in Japan and analyzed data from 81 respondents. They found that approximately one-third of the respondents had sleep disorders. Further, higher levels of stress regarding interpersonal relationships ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Statistical modeling developed by Oregon State University researchers has confirmed that changes to melanoma patients' gut microbiome led them to respond to a type of treatment capable of providing long-term benefit. Findings were published in Science. The modeling technique invented by Andrey Morgun of the OSU College of Pharmacy and Natalia Shulzenko of Oregon State's Carlson College of Veterinary Medicine is known as transkingdom network analysis. The human gut microbiome is a community of more than 10 trillion microbial cells from about 1,000 different bacterial species, and transkingdom network analysis integrates ...

Water is a necessity for all life but its availability can be limited. In geographical areas experiencing dry seasons, animals congregate near the few freshwater sources, often reaching large densities. At these sites many animals from different species come to the same spots to drink, potentially operating as key locations for pathogen transmission within and between species. An international team of scientists lead by the German Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) suggests that viruses can use restricted freshwater sources as a vector to be spread among animals. The key prediction of this idea is that animal viruses remain stable and infectious in water. The team ...

The effects of microplastics on our health and the environment are being rigorously studied all across the world. Researchers are identifying microplastic sources and their potential routes to the environment by examining rainwater, wastewater, and soil. Microplastics have been found in nearly all organisms and habitats everywhere in the world. However, factors contributing to the influx and accumulation of microplastics in water ecosystems aren't fully understood yet. The focus of microplastics research has, for a long time, been on the age of microplastics found in sediments, and on the ...

The researchers analysed cells, mouse models, and human patient samples using biochemical, mathematical, and biophysical methods. They identified a protein present in the mesh-like membrane structure (the basement membrane) associated with tumour and vessel softness, and good survival of cancer patients. The researchers tested if removing this protein from the basement membrane would enhance the spread of cancer, which it did, and if supply of this protein would reduce cancer spread, which it did. They proceeded to show that the levels of this protein (netrin-4) already present in basement membrane of organs may determine cancer spread even before cancer develops, ...

Cells of organisms are organized in subcellular compartments that consist of many individual molecules. How these single proteins are organized on the molecular level remains unclear, because suitable analytical methods are still missing. Researchers at the University of Münster together with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (Munich, Germany) have established a new technique that enables quantifying molecular densities and nanoscale organizations of individual proteins inside cells. The first application of this approach reveals a complex of three adhesion proteins that appears to be crucial for the ability of cells to adhere to the surrounding tissue. The research results have been published in the journal Nature ...

Using an advanced technique, scientists from the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research have demonstrated that a chemical reaction powered by light takes place ten thousand times faster at the air-water interface--what we usually call the water surface--than in the bulk of the water, even when the light has equivalent energy. This finding could help our understanding of the many important chemical and biological processes that take place at the water surface. Water is the most important liquid in nature, and research has shown that there is in fact something special about the interface. For reasons that were not well understood, it appears that some chemical reactions take place readily when the molecules are partly in the water, but not when they are fully ...

The risk of both mortality and rehospitalisation after an elective revascularisation procedure for coronary artery disease is similar for people with and without Alzheimer's disease (AD), but people with AD had worse outcomes after an emergency procedure, according to a new study from the University of Eastern Finland. Previous studies have investigated the effectiveness of revascularisation in persons with cognitive disorders, but only in terms of short-term outcomes and in acute care settings, and they also have not accounted for electivity. Similar to previous ...

New analysis published in The Lancet Psychiatry has shown a lack of strong evidence to support current guidance on psychological therapies for treating anorexia nervosa over expert treatment as usual. The findings highlight a need for further research and support a call for individual trial data to be made available so the benefits of treatments in specific patient populations can be better understood. Conducted by an international team of clinical experts and researchers, the analysis included 13 randomised controlled trials and a total of 1049 patients. The studies compared psychological therapies to treatment as usual in adults receiving outpatient treatment for anorexia. The trials measured eating disorder ...

Drilling a 270,000-year old core from a Tasmanian lake has provided the first Australian record of a major global event where the Earth's magnetic field 'switched '- and the opportunity to establish a precedent for developing new paleomagnetic dating tools for Australian archaeology and paleosciences. "This is the first study of this kind in Australia since pioneering studies in the 1980s," said author Dr Agathe Lisé-Provonost, a McKenzie Fellow from the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne. "Just two lakes in north-east Australia previously provided such "full-vector" record, where both the past directions and the past intensity of the Earth magnetic field are obtained from the same cores." Published in the journal Quaternary Geochronology, Chronostratigraphy ...

Milan, 15 February 2021 - Excitons are quasiparticles which can transport energy through solid substances. This makes them important for the development of future materials and devices - but more research is needed to understand their fundamental behaviour and how to manipulate it. Researchers at Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies IFN-CNR and a theory group from the Tsukuba University (Japan) and the Max Plank Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of matter (Hamburg, Germany), have discovered that an exciton can simultaneously adopt two radically different characters when it isstimulated ...

The researchers of TPU together with their colleagues from Russian and foreign scientific centers have found a way to estimate the temperature of a chemical reaction activated by pseudo-particles - plasmons. Two organic molecules served as ultra-small sensors or thermometers. According to scientists, the experiments are of great fundamental importance: beyond the mere fact of evaluating the temperature with the use of molecules, it was possible to demonstrate that properties of plasmon serving as an activator of chemical reactions depend not only on thermal ...

Certain plasma microRNAs could serve as diagnostic biomarkers in mild traumatic brain injury, a new study from the University of Eastern Finland shows. The biomarkers were discovered in an animal model and they were successfully used also to diagnose mild traumatic brain injury in a subgroup of patients. The study was published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. Mild traumatic brain injury is difficult to detect by contemporary conventional imaging methods. In fact, most patients do not exhibit visible structural damage to the brain, which could ...