Israel is the first country to report national data on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, with observational analysis showing that two doses provide more than 95% protection against COVID-19 infection, hospitalisation, and death, including among the elderly, at a time when the B.1.1.7 variant was the dominant strain. A single dose of the vaccine was associated with 58% protection against infection, 76% against hospitalisation, and 77% against death, emphasising the importance of fully vaccinating adults. Challenges to controlling the pandemic remain, including uncertainty about ...

R21/Matrix-M becomes the second malaria vaccine candidate ever to start a phase III licensure trial This builds on the recent finding of high level efficacy of this vaccine in a phase IIb trial in children in Burkina Faso, published today in The Lancet The first phase III trial doses were administered by the team at the Malaria Research and Training Centre, Bamako, Mali, one of five trial sites across West and East Africa The malaria vaccine was designed at the Jenner Institute, University of Oxford, who have partnered with the Serum Institute of India for commercial development The annual death toll from ...

A new mutation found in a gene associated with an increased risk of atrial fibrillation poses a significantly increased risk for heart failure in Black people. The discovery, made by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago, could change current guidelines that recommend against genetic testing in people with atrial fibrillations, also known as AFib. "We found that this new variant confers a significantly increased risk in African Americans, and this mutation has a 50% chance of being passed on to offspring," said Dr. Dawood Darbar, UIC professor of medicine and pharmacology at the College of Medicine. "Since it increases risk for heart failure, it would be wise to test people with atrial fibrillation to see if ...

According to a new study published in the journal Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy, hospitals that participate in the 340B Drug Pricing Program provide more medication access services -- which are services that help remove barriers to accessing necessary medications -- than comparably sized non-340B hospitals. The University of Illinois Chicago researchers who conducted the study, which included a survey of available services sent to a nationally representative sample of hospitals across the U.S., suggest that 340B participating hospitals may be better positioned to create and administer programs that support patients who are uninsured ...

Older people with kidney disease have a higher risk of dementia, and the risk increases with the rate and stage of kidney function decline. That is according to a large observational study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, published in the journal Neurology. The findings stress the significance of screening and monitoring for dementia in persons with kidney disease, the researchers say. "Our study underscores the importance of low kidney function as a possible under-recognized risk factor for dementia," says co-author Juan Jesus Carrero, professor at the Department ...

With increased media attention and political campaigns focusing on the gender pay gap, the fact that women -- on average -- are paid less than men, has become an important public discussion. While much of the focus has been on the corporate sector, a new study that looked at executive compensation at nonprofit organizations found that women earn 8.9% less than men with the gap becoming greater when there is room for salary negotiations. The study co-authored by Curtis Hall, PhD, an associate professor in Drexel University's LeBow College of Business; Andrew R. Finley, assistant professor at the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance at Claremont McKenna College; and LeBow College of Business doctoral student Amanda R. Marino, analyzed data from IRS ...

A multidisciplinary team of researchers from INRAP, CNRS, the universities of Ottawa, Rennes 2, Toulouse III Paul Sabatier and the Max Planck Institute has recognised the soldiers of the last battles of the siege of Rennes in 1491. These are the only witnesses of the forces involved in the conflict between the armies of Duchess Anne of Brittany and the King of France. This research and its methodology are currently the subject of two articles in the PLOS ONE review. The excavation of the Jacobins convent in Rennes From 2011 to 2013, a team from INRAP excavated the convent of the Jacobins, site of the future congress centre in Rennes Métropole, giving rise to numerous scientific ...

New Haven, Conn. -- A Yale-led study reveals that new medicines and vaccines approved for use in the United States are often unavailable in countries that hosted their clinical trials, suggesting that the benefits of drug research are not being shared equitably among populations that participate in testing. The study, published May 5 in JAMA Network Open, covers 34 novel drugs sponsored by large pharmaceutical companies that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved between 2012 and 2014. Approvals were made on the basis of a total of 898 trials that were held in the United States and 70 other countries worldwide. By analyzing the 563 trials for which location data was available, the researchers found that, five years after approval in the United States, only 15% of the drugs ...

By discovering a potential new cellular mechanism for migraines, researchers may have also found a new way to treat chronic migraine. Amynah Pradhan, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois Chicago, is the senior author of the study, whose goal was to identify a new mechanism of chronic migraine, and propose a cellular pathway for migraine therapies. The study, "Neuronal complexity is attenuated in preclinical models of migraine and restored by HDAC6 inhibition, is published in eLife. Pradhan, whose research focus is on the neurobiology of pain and headache, explained that the dynamic process of routing and rerouting connections among nerve ...

PHILADELPHIA-- It turns out that not all build-ups of tau protein are bad, and a team of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania developed a method to show that. Using mammalian cell models, the researchers combined extremely high-resolution microscopy with machine learning to show that tau actually forms small aggregates when a part of the body's normal physiology. Through this, they could distinguish between the aggregates occurring under healthy conditions from the ones associated with neurological diseases, potentially opening the door to screening for treatments that ...

Scientists from Russia and Italy studied a new axis of the pathway that prevents the development of liver fibrosis. The role of GILZ protein in curbing the disease progression was shown in a study using mice models and confirmed by clinical data. These findings can be used in the treatment of liver fibrosis in humans. The research was published in the journal Cell Death & Disease. Fibrosis combines an overgrowth of connective tissue and a decline in the liver function that can be caused by a viral infection, alcohol intoxication, autoimmune diseases or other liver disorders. If left untreated, fibrosis can lead to cirrhosis and even death. ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., May 5, 2021-- A massive collaborative research project covered in the journal Nature this week offers projections to the year 2100 of future sea-level rise from all sources of land ice, offering the most complete projections created to date. "This work synthesizes improvements over the last decade in climate models, ice sheet and glacier models, and estimates of future greenhouse gas emissions," said Stephen Price, one of the Los Alamos scientists on the project. "More than 85 researchers from various disciplines, including our team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, produced sea-level rise projections based on the most recent ...

Sea ice cover in the Southern Hemisphere is extremely variable, from summer to winter and from millennium to millennium, according to a University of Maine-led study. Overall, sea ice has been on the rise for about 10,000 years, but with some exceptions to this trend. Dominic Winski, a research assistant professor at the UMaine Climate Change Institute, spearheaded a project that uncovered new information about millennia of sea ice variability, particularly across seasons, in the Southern Hemisphere by examining the chemistry of a 54,000-year-old South Pole ice core. The Southern Ocean experiences the largest seasonal ...

ARLINGTON, TX (May 5, 2021) -- Nanoscope Technologies LLC, a biotechnology company developing gene therapies for treatment of retinal diseases, is featuring multiple scientific presentations highlighting its groundbreaking research on optical gene delivery for vision restoration and OCT-guided electrophysiology platforms for characterization of retinal degeneration and assessment of efficacy of cell-gene therapy at the 2021 ARVO annual (virtual) meeting, May 1-7. ARVO, the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, is the largest eye and vision research organization in the world with nearly 11,000 members in more than 75 countries. Nanoscope's lead product is an optogenetic ...

Increased access to birth control led to higher graduation rates among young women in Colorado, according to a study following the debut of the 2009 Colorado Family Planning Initiative (CPFI). The study identified a statistically significant 1.66 percentage-point increase in high school graduation among young women one year after the initiative was introduced. The findings provide concrete evidence for the rationale behind the U.S. Title X program, which calls for access to reproductive health services for low-income and uninsured residents, in part to help ensure women's ability to complete their education. However, at a time when funding for family planning programs is debated, robust scientific evidence to support this claim has been lacking. To investigate the link between access ...

Methane, a chemical compound with the molecular formula CH4, is not only a powerful greenhouse gas, but also an important energy source. It heats our homes, and even seafloor microbes make a living of it. The microbes use a process called anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM), which happens commonly in the seafloor in so-called sulfate-methane transition zones - layers in the seafloor where sulfate from the seawater meets methane from the deeper sediment. Here, specialized microorganisms, the ANaerobically MEthane-oxidizing (ANME) archaea, consume the methane. They live in close association with bacteria, which use electrons ...

Who made more accurate predictions about the course of the COVID-19 pandemic - experts or the public? A study from the University of Cambridge has found that experts such as epidemiologists and statisticians made far more accurate predictions than the public, but both groups substantially underestimated the true extent of the pandemic. Researchers from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication surveyed 140 UK experts and 2,086 UK laypersons in April 2020 and asked them to make four quantitative predictions about the impact of COVID-19 by the end of 2020. Participants were also asked to indicate confidence in their predictions by providing upper and lower bounds of where they were 75% sure that the true answer would fall - for example, ...

When access to free and low-cost birth control goes up, the percentage of young women who leave high school before graduating goes down by double-digits, according to a new CU Boulder-led study published May 5 in the journal Science Advances. The study, which followed more than 170,000 women for up to seven years, provides some of the strongest evidence yet that access to contraception yields long-term socioeconomic benefits for women. It comes at a time when public funding for birth control is undergoing heated debate, and some states are considering banning certain forms. "One of the foundational ...

One of the dangerous health conditions that can occur among premature newborns, children born with heart defects, and some others is pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). Commonly mistaken for asthma, this condition occurs when blood vessels in the lungs develop excessive resistance to blood flow. This forces the heart's right ventricle to work harder, causing it to enlarge, thicken and further elevate blood pressure. While early treatment usually succeeds, the condition can become persistent and progressive, which can lead to heart failure and death. The exact incidence and prevalence of PAH remains unclear, but reviews of patient registries in Europe have estimated that the condition occurs in nearly 64 of every 1 million children, including transient cases. ...

Inspired by the powerful eyes of the mantis shrimp, scientists have designed an imaging system that can distinguish between cancerous and healthy tissues during cancer surgery. The system accurately labeled tumors in mice and visualized lymph nodes near tumors in 18 patients undergoing surgery for breast cancer. With further development, the camera could help surgeons remove the marginal tumor tissues that can remain after unguided surgery, potentially lowering the risk of cancer relapse. It is critical for surgeons to remove as much tumor tissue as possible during surgery, but anywhere from 25% ...

Machine learning algorithms can leverage vast amounts of consumer data, allowing automation of business decisions such as pricing, product offerings, and promotions. Airbnb, an online marketplace for vacation rentals and other lodging, created an algorithm-based smart-pricing tool that is free to all Airbnb hosts and allows hosts to set their properties' daily price automatically. A new study investigated the impact of Airbnb's algorithm on racial disparities among Airbnb hosts. Adopting the tool narrowed the revenue gap between White and Black ...

An Austrian-American research team (University of Vienna, Department Evolutionary Anthropology and Harvard Medical School, Department of Genetics), in collaboration of Hungarian experts from Eötvös Loránd University, has developed a new method that allows the almost non-destructive extraction of genetic material from archaeological human remains. The method allows anthropologists, archaeologists and archaeogeneticists to avoid the risk of serious damage to artefacts of significant scientific and heritage value, which can then be fully examined in future research. Bioarcheological ...

The first mental health study of Black communities in Canada has found the majority of Black Canadians display severe depressive symptoms - women, even more so - with racial discrimination confirming the appearance of these signs for nearly all. The study, published in Depression and Anxiety, discovered nearly two-thirds (65.87 percent) of surveyed participants reported severe depressive symptoms. Higher rates were found among women; those who are employed; those born in Canada; and nearly all who have been experienced high racial discrimination. "Rates of depressive symptoms among Black individuals are nearly six times the 12-month prevalence reported for the general population in Canada," says ...

Granular materials, such as sand and gravel, are an interesting class of materials. They can display solid, liquid, and gas-like properties, depending on the scenario. But things can get complicated in cases of high-speed vehicle locomotion, which cause these materials to enter a "triple-phase" nature, acting like all three fundamental phases of matter at the same time. As reported in the April 23, 2021 issue of the journal Science Advances, a team of engineers and physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Georgia Institute ...

The field of photonics aims to transform all manner of electronic devices by storing and transmitting information in the form of light, rather than electricity. Beyond light's raw speed, the way that information can be layered in its various physical properties makes devices like photonic computers and communication systems tantalizing prospects. Before such devices can go from theory to reality, however, engineers must find ways of making their light sources -- lasers -- smaller, stronger and more stable. Robots and autonomous vehicles that use LiDAR for optical sensing and ranging, manufacturing and material ...