Higher excess COVID-19 death risk in middle-aged people with type 2 diabetes raises vaccine prioritisation questions A largescale analysis led by the University of Exeter and funded by Diabetes UK, has found a disproportionately higher COVID-19 death risk in middle-aged people with type 2 diabetes, raising questions over vaccination strategies across Europe. The study, accepted for publication in Diabetologia, found that compared to people of a similar age without type 2 diabetes, the additional COVID-19 mortality risk from having type 2 diabetes increases the younger someone is. Although the ...

Children aged between 5 months and 4 years attending daycare during lockdown in March to May 2020 in France had low rates of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in their blood - known as seroprevalence - suggesting that virus infection rates were low in this population. Research assessing seroprevalence in daycare centres that remained open during the first national lockdown in France, suggests that the rate of SARS-CoV-2 virus infection was low at 3.7%, with positive cases likely infected by an adult in their household, rather than whilst at daycare. The seroprevalence rate among daycare staff was similar to that of a control group of adults who were not exposed to children or COVID positive patients ...

In the event of a pandemic, delayed reactions and a decentralized approach by the authorities at the start of a follow-up wave can lead to longer-lasting, more severe and more fatal consequences, researchers from the universities of Zurich and Toronto have found. The interdisciplinary team compared the Spanish flu of 1918 and 1919 in the Canton of Bern with the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. The Spanish flu was the greatest demographic catastrophe in Switzerland's recent history, causing approximately 25,000 deaths in the country during 1918 and 1919. In the wake of the current coronavirus pandemic, there has been increased public and scientific interest in the events of that time. An interdisciplinary team of researchers in evolutionary medicine, history, geography and ...

Oakland, Calif. -- An analysis of Kaiser Permanente members in Northern California early in the COVID-19 pandemic found racial and ethnic disparities in the likelihood of testing positive for the coronavirus, but no significant disparities in mortality among those who were hospitalized. According to the study published Feb. 8 in Annals of Internal Medicine, Latino patients were nearly 4 times as likely as white patients to become infected with the virus, while Asian and Black patients were 2 times as likely to get COVID-19 as white patients. The odds of hospitalization were also higher for Latino, Asian, and Black patients with ...

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 8, 2021 - With the aid of sophisticated machine learning, researchers at UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine demonstrated that a tool they developed can rapidly predict mortality for patients facing transfer between hospitals in order to access higher-acuity care. This research, published today in PLOS One, could help physicians, patients and their families avoid unnecessary hospital transfers and low-value treatments, while better focusing on the goals of care expressed by patients. Each year, nearly 1.6 million patients--or as much as 3.5% of all inpatient admissions--are transferred from one hospital to another to access specialized care for complex conditions. ...

Economic growth is often prescribed as a sure way of increasing the well-being of people in low-income countries, but a study led by McGill and the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) suggests that there may be good reason to question this assumption. The researchers set out to find out how people rate their subjective well-being in societies where money plays a minimal role, and which are not usually included in global happiness surveys. They found that the majority of people reported remarkably high levels of happiness. This was especially true in the communities with the lowest levels of monetization, where citizens reported a degree of happiness comparable to that ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Soft robots may not be in touch with human feelings, but they are getting better at feeling human touch. Cornell University researchers have created a low-cost method for soft, deformable robots to detect a range of physical interactions, from pats to punches to hugs, without relying on touch at all. Instead, a USB camera located inside the robot captures the shadow movements of hand gestures on the robot's skin and classifies them with machine-learning software. The group's paper, "ShadowSense: Detecting Human Touch in a Social Robot Using Shadow ...

URBANA, Ill. - From flooded spring fields to summer hailstorms and drought, farmers are well aware the weather is changing. It often means spring planting can't happen on time or has to happen twice to make up for catastrophic losses of young seedlings. According to a joint study between University of Illinois and USDA-ARS, it also means common pre-emergence herbicides are less effective. With less weed control at the beginning of the season, farmers are forced to rely more heavily on post-emergence herbicides or risk yield loss. "We're having more variable precipitation, including conditions where folks aren't able to plant because fields are too wet. In those cases, pre-emergence herbicide applications are getting pushed back into a period that is consistently drier," ...

Colorectal cancer screening rates jumped by more than 1,000 percent when researchers sent take-at-home tests to patients overdue for testing at a community health center that predominantly serves people of color. Instead of the oft-standard text message that simply reminds a patient that they are overdue for screening, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania made it the default to send a take-at-home test to the patient's home unless they opted out via a text message prompt. The research was published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. "Colorectal cancer screening rates remain limited ...

New research from West Virginia University biologists shows that trees around the world are consuming more carbon dioxide than previously reported, making forests even more important in regulating the Earth's atmosphere and forever shift how we think about climate change. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Richard Thomas and alumnus Justin Mathias (BS Biology, '13 and Ph.D. Biology, '20) synthesized published tree ring studies. They found that increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the past century have caused ...

A new study suggests that differences in the expression of gene transcripts - readouts copied from DNA that help maintain and build our cells - may hold the key to understanding how mental disorders with shared genetic risk factors result in different patterns of onset, symptoms, course of illness, and treatment responses. Findings from the study, conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health, appear in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. "Major mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder, share common genetic roots, but each disorder presents differently in each individual," said Francis J. McMahon, M.D., a senior author of the ...

PHILADELPHIA (February 8, 2021) - An abundance of data underscore the importance of breastfeeding and human milk for the optimal health of infants, children, mothers, and society. But while breastfeeding initiation rates have increased to more than 80% in the U.S., a disparity exists for African American mothers and infants. In this group, breastfeeding is initiated only about 69% of the time. A new study to help identify the best strategies and practices to improve breastfeeding in the African American community leverages the opinions, knowledge, and experiences of subject matter exerts (SMEs) with national and international exposure to policies and practices influencing African ...

Wearable devices can identify COVID-19 cases earlier than traditional diagnostic methods and can help track and improve management of the disease, Mount Sinai researchers report in one of the first studies on the topic. The findings were published in the END ...

As human interaction with robots and artificial intelligence increases exponentially in areas like healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, space exploration, defense technologies, information about how humans and autonomous systems work within teams remains scarce. Recent findings from human systems engineering research demonstrate that human-autonomy teaming comes with interaction limitations that can leave these teams less efficient than all-human teams. Existing knowledge about teamwork primarily is based on human-to-human or human-to-automation interaction, which positions humans as supervisors of automated partners. But as autonomy has increasingly ...

How did rocks rust on Earth and turn red? A Rutgers-led study has shed new light on the important phenomenon and will help address questions about the Late Triassic climate more than 200 million years ago, when greenhouse gas levels were high enough to be a model for what our planet may be like in the future. "All of the red color we see in New Jersey rocks and in the American Southwest is due to the natural mineral hematite," said lead author Christopher J. Lepre, an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. ...

How come we don't hear everything twice: After all, our ears sit on opposite sides of our head and most sounds do not reach both our ears at exactly the same time. "While this helps us determine which direction sounds are coming from, it also means that our brain has to combine the information from both ears. Otherwise, we would hear an echo," explains Basil Preisig of the Department of Psychology at the University of Zurich. In addition, input from the right ear reaches the left brain hemisphere first, while input from the left ear reaches the right brain hemisphere first. The two hemispheres ...

Louisiana State University College of the Coast & Environment Boyd Professor R. Eugene Turner reconstructed a 100-year record chronicling water quality trends in the lower Mississippi River by compiling water quality data collected from 1901 to 2019 by federal and state agencies as well as the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board. The Mississippi River is the largest river in North America with about 30 million people living within its watershed. Turner focused on data that tracked the water's acidity through pH levels and concentrations of bacteria, oxygen, lead and sulphate in this study published in Ambio, a journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Rivers ...

Alexandria, Va., USA -- High-volume aspirators are recommended in dental clinics during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the study "SARS-CoV-2 Seropositivity Among Dental Staff and the Role of Aspirating Systems" published in the JDR Clinical & Translational Research (JDR CTR), shows that the type of aspirating system significantly affects the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection among dental specialists. In this retrospective cohort study of 157 healthcare workers in Ekaterinburg, Russia, data on the seroprevalence of COVID-19 from dental clinics using three different types of aspirating systems were compared. Clinic A and B used a V6000 aspirating system with a vacuum controller and high-efficiency ...

Systems designed to detect deepfakes --videos that manipulate real-life footage via artificial intelligence--can be deceived, computer scientists showed for the first time at the WACV 2021 conference which took place online Jan. 5 to 9, 2021. Researchers showed detectors can be defeated by inserting inputs called adversarial examples into every video frame. The adversarial examples are slightly manipulated inputs which cause artificial intelligence systems such as machine learning models to make a mistake. In addition, the team showed that the attack still works after videos are ...

The Atala butterfly (Eumaeus atala) and its five closest relatives in the genus Eumaeus like to display their toxicity. This sextet's toxicity comes from what they eat as caterpillars: plants called cycads that have been around since before dinosaurs roamed the Earth and contain a potent liver toxin called cycasin. Because they are filled with poison, Eumaeus are big, gaudily iridescent and flap about like they have no place to go. Even their caterpillars are conspicuous, congregating in groups to munch cycad plants all while sporting flashy red and gold ...

CLEVELAND - A Cleveland Clinic-led team of researchers has developed a personalized genomic medicine platform that will help advance accelerate genomic medicine research and genome-informed drug discovery, according to new study results published recently in END ...

CHICAGO --- Northwestern University professor and researcher Linda Teplin will discuss the psychosocial outcomes of incarcerated youth at the virtual 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting. Teplin will moderate the scientific session "Consequences of Incarceration on Health Inequity and Racial Injustice" at 2 p.m. EST, Monday, Feb. 8. During the session, she will also present "Consequences of Incarceration in Detained Youth: A 15-Year Longitudinal Study." Nearly 2.2 million Americans are incarcerated annually, ...

A new machine-learning framework uses reported test results and death rates to calculate estimates of the actual number of current COVID-19 infections within all 50 U.S. states and 50 countries. Jungsik Noh and Gaudenz Danuser of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on February 8, 2021. During the ongoing pandemic, U.S. states and many countries have reported daily counts of COVID-19 infections and deaths confirmed by testing. However, many infections have gone undetected, resulting in under-counting of the total number of people currently infected at any ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) -- Researchers in the labs of Christopher Bates, an assistant professor of materials at UC Santa Barbara, and Michael Chabinyc, a professor of materials and chair of the department, have teamed to develop the first 3D-printable "bottlebrush" elastomer. The new material results in printed objects that have unusual softness and elasticity -- mechanical properties that closely resemble those of human tissue. Conventional elastomers, i.e. rubbers, are stiffer than many biological tissues. That's due to the size and shape of their constituent polymers, which are long, linear molecules that easily entangle like cooked spaghetti. In contrast, bottlebrush polymers ...

Classifying a death as suicide may be easiest for medical examiners and coroners in the western United States, which reports the highest suicide rates officially. Suicide by firearm is the leading method there, and usually clear in terms of evidence. By contrast, suicides by drug overdose, spurred primarily by the opioid epidemic in the remainder of the country, are less obvious to investigators. But a new West Virginia University-led injury mortality study combines most drug overdose deaths with all suicides into an expanded self-injury category. Exposing a mental health crisis that has unraveled across the United States over the past two decades, study data have direct implications for suicide prevention efforts. Ian Rockett, professor ...