LA JOLLA--(March 31, 2021) Clinicians using a new viral screening test can not only diagnose COVID-19 in a matter of minutes with a portable, pocket-sized machine, but can also simultaneously test for other viruses--like influenza--that might be mistaken for the coronavirus. At the same time, they can sequence the virus, providing valuable information on the spread of COVID-19 mutations and variants. The new test, dubbed NIRVANA, was described online today by a multi-institution team of scientists in the journal Med. "This is a virus detection and surveillance method that doesn't require an expensive infrastructure like other approaches," says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, co-corresponding author and a professor in Salk's Gene Expression ...

AURORA, Colo. (March 31, 2021) - A new study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry finds that patients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) as well as other psychiatric comorbidities, such as autism spectrum or tic disorders, may respond well to Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). DBS is a minimally invasive neurosurgical procedure that uses coordinates to target certain areas of the brain, implanting electrodes that can help regulate abnormal brain activity. DBS procedures are rare for OCD in the United States; only a couple hundred patients have received this treatment for OCD management since its FDA approval ...

An aggressive type of brain cancer, glioblastoma has no cure. Patients survive an average of 15 months after diagnosis, with fewer than 10% of patients surviving longer than five years. While researchers are investigating potential new therapies via ongoing clinical trials, a new study from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that a minor adjustment to the current standard treatment -- giving chemotherapy in the morning rather than the evening -- could add a few months to patients' survival. The study appears online in the journal Neuro-Oncology Advances. Average overall survival ...

AURORA, Colo. (March 30, 2021 - Researchers at the University of Colorado College of Nursing have found that nearly one-quarter of graduate nursing students have reported elevated levels of stress, anxiety and depression, compounded in the past year by the COVID-19 pandemic. Study findings, published recently in END ...

A new invention that uses sunlight to drive water purification could help solve the problem of providing clean water off the grid. The device resembles a large sponge that soaks up water but leaves contaminants - like lead, oil and pathogens - behind. To collect the purified water from the sponge, one simply places it in sunlight. The researchers described the device in a paper published this week in the journal Advanced Materials. The inspiration for the device came from the pufferfish, a species that takes in water to swell its body when threatened, and then releases water when danger passes, said the device's co-inventor END ...

When it comes to powering mobile robots, batteries present a problematic paradox: the more energy they contain, the more they weigh, and thus the more energy the robot needs to move. Energy harvesters, like solar panels, might work for some applications, but they don't deliver power quickly or consistently enough for sustained travel. James Pikul, assistant professor in Penn Engineering's Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, is developing robot-powering technology that has the best of both worlds. His environmentally controlled voltage source, or ECVS, works like a battery, in that the energy is produced by repeatedly breaking ...

In looking at the broader impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health and wellbeing, public health experts are examining screening rates for cancer. A new study looking at U.S. mammography screening rates during the first five months of the pandemic found both a strong rebound in breast cancer screening rates and a concerning cumulative deficit in mammograms due to missed appointments, as well as uncovering disparities when looking at screening according to race. The study was released this week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Conducted by investigators from the Breast Cancer Surveillance Coalition (BCSC), a federally-funded, national network of breast imaging registries, the study sought to quantify the impact of the COVID-19 ...

Denver, CO, March 31, 2020 - Children with Down syndrome are 20-times more likely to develop acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) and 150-times more likely to develop acute myeloid leukemia (AML) compared to their typical peers. According to a new study by researchers at the Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome, the reason could be that children with Down syndrome are more likely to present with clonal hematopoiesis (CH), a process in which a blood stem cell acquires a genetic mutation that promotes replication. The findings, published online by Blood Advances, add to a growing body of evidence, much of which has been established ...

Washington, DC-- Diamonds that formed deep in the Earth's mantle contain evidence of chemical reactions that occurred on the seafloor. Probing these gems can help geoscientists understand how material is exchanged between the planet's surface and its depths. New work published in Science Advances confirms that serpentinite--a rock that forms from peridotite, the main rock type in Earth's mantle, when water penetrates cracks in the ocean floor--can carry surface water as far as 700 kilometers deep by plate tectonic processes. "Nearly all tectonic plates that make up the seafloor eventually bend and slide down into ...

PITTSBURGH --31 March 2021 - A detailed examination of more than 10,000 medical records at maternity clinics and hospitals in urban Malawi, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe has yielded important insight about pregnancy and neonatal outcomes in these communities as well as the frequency with which different complications occur. The findings, which were published in PLOS ONE, include data not often available or reported in much of eastern and southern Africa. The medical chart review was undertaken by researchers from the National Institutes of Health-funded Microbicide Trials Network ...

A new study has found the first evidence of sophisticated breathing organs in 450-million-year-old sea creatures. Contrary to previous thought, trilobites were leg breathers, with structures resembling gills hanging off their thighs. Trilobites were a group of marine animals with half-moon-like heads that resembled horseshoe crabs, and they were wildly successful in terms of evolution. Though they are now extinct, they survived for more than 250 million years -- longer than the dinosaurs. Thanks to new technologies and an extremely rare set of fossils, scientists from UC Riverside can now show that trilobites breathed oxygen and explain how ...

March 31, 2021 - The United States is facing a persistent and worsening shortage of physicians specializing in preventive medicine, reports a study in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. "The number of preventive medicine physicians is not likely to match population needs in the United States in the near term and beyond," according to the new research by Thomas Ricketts, Ph.D., MPH, and colleagues of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The study appears ...

DETROIT (March 31, 2021) - In a study that looked at racial differences in outcomes of COVID-19 patients admitted to the intensive care unit, researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit found that patients of color had a lower 28-day mortality than white patients. Race, however, was not a factor in overall hospital mortality, length of stay in the ICU or in the rate of patients placed on mechanical ventilation, researchers said. The findings, published in Critical Care Medicine, are believed to be one of the first in the United States to study racial differences and outcomes specific to patients hospitalized ...

An enormous telescope complex in Tibet has captured the first evidence of ultrahigh-energy gamma rays spread across the Milky Way. The findings offer proof that undetected starry accelerators churn out cosmic rays, which have floated around our galaxy for millions of years. The research is to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters on Monday, April 5. "We found 23 ultrahigh-energy cosmic gamma rays along the Milky Way," said Kazumasa Kawata, a coauthor from the University of Tokyo. "The highest energy among them amounts to a world record: nearly one petaelectron volt." That's three ...

DURHAM, N.H.-- As the Biden administration announces a plan to expand the development of offshore wind energy development (OWD) along the East Coast, research from the University of New Hampshire shows significant support from an unlikely group, coastal recreation visitors. From boat enthusiasts to anglers, researchers found surprisingly widespread support with close to 77% of coastal recreation visitors supporting potential OWD along the N.H. Seacoast. "This study takes a closer look at the lingering assumption that offshore wind in the United States might hurt coastal recreation ...

The first imaging of substantial freshwater plumes west of Hawai'i Island may help water planners to optimize sustainable yields and aquifer storage calculations. University of Hawai'i at Mānoa researchers demonstrated a new method to detect freshwater plumes between the seafloor and ocean surface in a study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters. The research, supported by the Hawai'i EPSCoR 'Ike Wai project, is the first to demonstrate that surface-towed marine controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) imaging can be used to map oceanic freshwater plumes in high-resolution. It is an extension of the groundbreaking discovery of freshwater beneath the seafloor in 2020. Both are important findings in a world facing climate change, where ...

LOWELL, Mass. - Researchers studying mercury gas in the atmosphere with the aim of reducing the pollutant worldwide have determined a vast amount of the toxic element is absorbed by plants, leading it to deposit into soils. Hundreds of tons of mercury each year are emitted into the atmosphere as a gas by burning coal, mining and other industrial and natural processes. These emissions are absorbed by plants in a process similar to how they take up carbon dioxide. When the plants shed leaves or die, the mercury is transferred to soils where large amounts also make their way into watersheds, threatening wildlife and people who eat contaminated fish. Exposure to high levels of mercury over long ...

BRAZZAVILLE, Republic of Congo (March 31, 2021) - Researchers with the Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Congo Program and the Nouabalé-Ndoki Foundation found that female putty-nosed monkeys (Cercopithecus nictitans) use males as "hired guns" to defend from predators such as leopards. Publishing their results in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the team discovered that female monkeys use alarm calls to recruit males to defend them from predators. The researchers conducted the study among 19 different groups of wild putty-nosed monkeys, a type of forest guenon, in Mbeli Bai, a study area within the forests in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, Northern Republic of Congo. The results promote the idea that females' general alarm requires males to assess the nature ...

(Denver, Colo., -- March 31, 2021)- A new Molecular Database Project initiated by the International Association for the Study of Lung (IASLC) will accelerate the understanding of lung cancer biology, clinical care and care delivery on a global scale and will improve the prognosis and optimal treatment of lung cancer across time and space, according to an editorial in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, an official journal of the IASLC. The editorial can be viewed here: https://www.jto.org/article/S1556-0864(21)01781-0/fulltext. In the editorial, the IASLC Staging and Prognostic Factors Committee's Molecular Sub-Committee, and committee members, emphasized that there is great opportunity, with the emergence of molecular biomarkers of disease behavior, to improve ...

Viruses lurk in the grey area between the living and the nonliving, according to scientists. Like living things, they replicate but they don't do it on their own. The HIV-1 virus, like all viruses, needs to hijack a host cell through infection in order to make copies of itself. Supercomputer simulations supported by the National Science Foundation-funded Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) have helped uncover the mechanism for how the HIV-1 virus imports into its core the nucleotides it needs to fuel DNA synthesis, a key step in its replication. It's the first example ...

The qubit is the building block of quantum computing, analogous to the bit in classical computers. To perform error-free calculations, quantum computers of the future are likely to need at least millions of qubits. The latest study, published in the journal PRX Quantum, suggests that these computers could be made with industrial-grade silicon chips using existing manufacturing processes, instead of adopting new manufacturing processes or even newly discovered particles. For the study, researchers were able to isolate and measure the quantum state of a single electron (the qubit) in a silicon transistor manufactured using a 'CMOS' technology similar to that used to make chips in computer processors. Furthermore, the spin of the electron was found to remain stable for a period of up ...

Neuroscientists agree that a person's brain is constantly changing, rewiring itself and adapting to environmental stimuli. This is how humans learn new things and create memories. This adaptability and malleability is called plasticity. "Physicians have long suspected that remodeling processes also take place in humans at the contact points between nerve cells, i.e. directly at the synapses. Until now, however, such a coordinated adaptation of structure and function could only be demonstrated in animal experiments," says Prof. Dr. Andreas Vlachos from the Institute of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Freiburg. But now Vlachos, together with Prof. Dr. Jürgen Beck, head of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University Medical Center Freiburg, has provided experimental evidence ...

Astronomers have detected X-rays from Uranus for the first time, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This result may help scientists learn more about this enigmatic ice giant planet in our solar system.   Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun and has two sets of rings around its equator. The planet, which has four times the diameter of Earth, rotates on its side, making it different from all other planets in the solar system. Since Voyager 2 was the only spacecraft to ever fly by Uranus, astronomers currently rely on telescopes much closer to Earth, like Chandra and the Hubble Space Telescope, to learn about this distant and cold planet that is made up almost entirely of hydrogen and helium.   In the new study, researchers used Chandra observations ...

In 1890, psychologist William James described attention as the spotlight we shine not only on the world around us, but also on the contents of our minds. Most cognitive scientists since then have drawn a sharp distinction between what James termed "sensorial attention" and "intellectual attention," now usually called "attention" and "working memory," but James saw them as two varieties of the same mental process. New research by Princeton neuroscientists suggests that James was on to something, finding that attention to the outside world and attention to our own thoughts are actually two sides of the same neural coin. What's more, they have observed the coin as it flips inside the brain. A paper published in Nature on March 31 by END ...

Using complementary computing calculations and neutron scattering techniques, researchers from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories and the University of California, Berkeley, discovered the existence of an elusive type of spin dynamics in a quantum mechanical system. The team successfully simulated and measured how magnetic particles called spins can exhibit a type of motion known as Kardar-Parisi-Zhang, or KPZ, in solid materials at various temperatures. Until now, scientists had not found evidence of this particular phenomenon outside of soft matter ...