Scientists have developed a pioneering new procedure that will help diagnose a potentially lethal fungal lung disease with greater speed and accuracy, and with less distress to the patient. A team of international scientists, including Professor Chris Thornton from the University of Exeter, has created a new diagnostic procedure for pulmonary aspergillosis. Aspergillus is a common mold readily found worldwide in a variety of environments, such as soil and decaying plant material, and can easily be inhaled as air-borne spores in everyday life. While people with ...

Serious complications due to blood clots, such as heart attacks and strokes, that are experienced by some COVID-19 survivors may be caused by a lingering immune response in the blood vessels after recovery, suggests a study published today in eLife. The findings may help explain why some COVID-19 survivors, so-called 'long-haulers', report lasting COVID-19 symptoms or why some experience strokes or heart attacks weeks or months after recovery. They may also suggest potential strategies to help prevent these complications. "During the initial stages of infection, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that ...

The last glacial period, which lasted about 100,000 years, reached its peak about 20,000 to 25,000 years ago: Huge ice sheets covered large parts of northern Europe, North America and northern Asia, some of them kilometres thick, and the sea level was about 125 metres below today's level. The Earth looked very different during this so-called Last Glacial Maximum than it does today. This relatively recent period of the last maximum ice extent has long been of interest to researchers and subject to intensive research. What actually led to this extreme glacier growth, however, ...

A study of young men with COVID-19 has revealed a genetic variant linked to disease severity. The discovery, published recently in eLife, means that men with severe disease could be genetically screened to identify who has the variant and may benefit from interferon treatment. For most people, COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, causes only mild or no symptoms. However, severe cases can rapidly progress towards respiratory distress syndrome. "Although older age and the presence of long-term conditions such as cardiovascular disease or diabetes are known risk factors, they alone do not fully explain differences in severity," explains first author ...

New research from Copenhagen Business School finds sexual harassment in the workplace severely hurts company value. "Sexual harassment has serious consequences for the victim. But it is also something managers and investors should be interested in for purely financial reasons, as it can wipe off enormous amounts of market value in a matter of days," says Associate Professor Ulf Nielsson from the Department of Finance at Copenhagen Business School. The research found that the stock market value of a listed company drops by 1.5% following sexual ...

When so-called beauty quarks are produced during the collision of high-energy proton beams in the Large Hadron Collider - the particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva - they decay almost immediately on the spot. Researchers of the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment (LHCb) reconstruct the properties of the composite particles based on their decay products. According to the established laws of particle physics - the so-called Standard Model - it is expected that beauty quarks decay with the same probability into a final state with electrons and muons, the ...

In 2016 the Bank of England introduced plastic (polymer) banknotes, alongside 50 other countries that use polymer banknotes Counterfeit polymer banknotes on the streets have increased over the last few years, therefore the need to prevent and identify counterfeit banknotes has increased Using a technique called Polymer Substrate Fingerprinting, researchers from the University of Warwick are able to identify each banknote's own fingerprint, which is unique and unclonable Since the introduction of plastic (polymer) banknotes in 2016, the number of counterfeit notes on the streets has increased, however, researchers from Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick have developed a novel technique called Polymer Substrate Fingerprinting, which identifies every ...

Maps generally indicate elevation in meters above sea level. But sea level is not the same everywhere. A group of experts headed by the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has developed an International Height Reference System (IHRS) that will unify geodetic measurements worldwide. How high is Mount Everest? 8848 meters? 8844 meters? Or 8850 meters? For years, China and Nepal could not agree. In 2019, Nepal sent a team of geodesists to measure the world's highest mountain. A year later a team from China climbed the peak. Last December the ...

A gene not previously linked to cancer has been shown to play a key role in the spread of certain cancers to the lungs, new research from scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute has shown. The team found that when the gene LRRN4CL was over-expressed in mice, the skin cancer melanoma was more likely to metastasise to the lungs. The study, published today (23 March 2021) in Communications Biology, also confirmed that over-expression of LRRN4CL was linked to metastasis of colon, breast and bladder cancers to the lung. Several factors make LRRN4CL an attractive drug target. It encodes a protein found on the surface of cancer cells, making it easier to target with drugs. And because it is expressed at low levels elsewhere in the body, it may ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - March 22, 2021 - The fear, anxiety and stress associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on mental health. But a new study suggests these symptoms may be alleviated through safe and convenient online mindfulness practices. The study, which was recently published in the journal Global Advances in Health and Medicine, shows that an online mindfulness intervention may reduce momentary stress, anxiety and COVID-19 concern. At the onset of the pandemic, Rebecca Erwin Wells, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor of neurology at Wake Forest School of Medicine, part of Wake Forest Baptist Health, and principal investigator ...

Fatigue, depression, sleep disorders, burnout: the number of cases where employees are unable to work for mental health-related reasons has increased dramatically in recent years. Professor Sascha Alavi, Chair at the Sales Management Department (SMD), has long been keeping a critical eye on this development in society, especially in the corporate world. Together with his former PhD student Dr. Kim Linsenmayer and Professor Johannes Habel from the University of Houston, Alavi has now demonstrated in the Journal of Marketing the negative effects that pressure in the form of performance-based remuneration schemes can have on health. Rubin, the science magazine from RUB, reports on this. In ...

Knee osteoarthritis is a painful condition that affects over 14 million U.S. adults, many of whom have extreme obesity, defined by body mass index (BMI) greater than 40kg/m2. Total knee replacement (TKR) is often recommended to treat advanced knee osteoarthritis, but surgeons may be hesitant to operate on patients with extreme obesity due to concerns about the increased risks of tissue infection, poor wound healing and higher risk of implant failure. Using an established, validated and widely published computer simulation called the Osteoarthritis Policy (OAPol) Model, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital, together with collaborators from Yale and Boston University ...

Candidiasis is a fungal infection caused by a yeast called Candida. It is a serious global health problem and it can be vaginal, oral or systemic. The latter is the most severe form of infection, as it can lead to death, but vaginal candidiasis infection is the most prevalent, affecting 80% of women at some point in their lives. Scientists led by Dr. Toni Gabaldón, ICREA researcher and group leader at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), in collaboration with Dr. Bernhard Hube's group at the Hans Knoell Institute and the University of Jena in Germany, have described the various mechanisms used by the fungus Candida to infect the ...

LA JOLLA, CA--A discovery involving multiple teams from across Scripps Research has revealed a powerful new approach for treating diabetic foot ulcers, which affect millions of people in the US and often lead to serious complications. By targeting a gene that controls tissue growth and regeneration, the scientists were able to boost cell division at the site of injury and repair chronic wounds quickly. The new research appears in Nature Chemical Biology. Given the growing prevalence of diabetes and limited options for treating foot ulcers--which can lead to amputation, in severe cases--it's clear that more effective treatments are needed, says chemist Michael ...

Metal-insulator transition (MIT) driven by many-body interactions is an important phenomenon in condensed matter physics. Exotic phases always emerge around the metal-insulator transition points where quantum fluctuations arise from a competition among spin, charge, orbital, and lattice degrees of freedom. Two-dimensional (2D) materials are a large class of materials. Their simple structure, low dimensionality, and highly tunable carrier density make them an ideal platform for exploring exotic phases. However, the many-body interactions are normally weak in most 2D materials, hence, the correlation-related phenomena ...

Call it the evolutionary march of the penguins. More than 50 million years ago, the lovable tuxedoed birds began leaving their avian relatives at the shoreline by waddling to the water's edge and taking a dive in the pursuit of seafood. Webbed feet, flipper-like wings and unique feathers all helped penguins adapt to their underwater excursions. But new research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has shown that the evolution of diving is also in their blood, which optimized its capture and release of oxygen to ensure that penguins wouldn't waste their ...

LA JOLLA, CA--An analysis of thousands of genomes from people with and without the rare eye disease known as MacTel has turned up more than a dozen gene variants that are likely causing the condition to develop and worsen for a significant share of patients. The discovery, by a team of scientists from Scripps Research and the Lowy Medical Research Institute, in collaboration with Columbia University in New York and UC San Diego, provides a new avenue to pursue for diagnosis and treatment. It also sheds light on fundamental aspects of metabolism in the retina, a tissue with one of the highest energy demands in the human body. Findings appear today in the journal Nature Metabolism. "It's exciting to uncover new answers to the ...

The cost of the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries used for phones, laptops, and cars has fallen dramatically over the last three decades, and has been a major driver of the rapid growth of those technologies. But attempting to quantify that cost decline has produced ambiguous and conflicting results that have hampered attempts to project the technology's future or devise useful policies and research priorities. Now, MIT researchers have carried out an exhaustive analysis of the studies that have looked at the decline in the prices these batteries, which are the dominant rechargeable ...

Stuttgart - A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Germany, from Seoul National University in Korea and from the Harvard University in the US, successfully developed a predictive model and closed-loop controller of a soft robotic fish, designed to actively adjust its undulation amplitude to changing flow conditions and other external disturbances. Their work "Modeling and Control of a Soft Robotic Fish with Integrated Soft Sensing" was published in Wiley's Advanced Intelligent Systems journal, in a special issue on "Energy Storage and Delivery in Robotic Systems". Each ...

THz waves have a plethora of applications ranging from biomedical and medical examinations, imaging, environment monitoring, to wireless communications, because of the abundant spectral information, low photon energy, strong penetrability, and shorter wavelength. THz waves with technological advances not only determined by the high-efficiency sources and detectors but also decided by a variety of the high-quality THz components/functional devices. However, traditional THz devices should be thick enough to realize the desired wave-manipulating functions, hindering the development of THz integrated systems and applications. Although metamaterials have been ...

Tailoring light is much like tailoring cloth, cutting and snipping to turn a bland fabric into one with some desired pattern. In the case of light, the tailoring is usually done in the spatial degrees of freedom, such as its amplitude and phase (the "pattern" of light), and its polarization, while the cutting and snipping might be control with spatial light modulators and the like. This burgeoning field is known as structured light, and is pushing the limits in what we can do with light, enabling us to see smaller, focus tighter, image with wider fields of view, probe with fewer photons, and to pack information ...

Distributed optical fiber sensing (DOFS) is currently a mature technology that allows "transforming" a conventional fiber optic into a continuous array of individual sensors, which are distributed along its length. Between the panoply of techniques developed in the field of DOFS, those based on phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (ΦOTDR) have gained a great deal of attention, mainly due to their ability to measure strain and temperature perturbations in real time. These unique features, along with other advantages of distributed sensors (reduced weight, electromagnetic immunity ...

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are changing the lighting and display industry and have obtained significant advances than traditional lighting sources. The traditional materials LEDs, e.g., III-V semiconductor LEDs, organic LEDs (OLEDs) and quantum-dot LEDs (QLEDs), have achieved great success and gradually realized commercialization, but still face some challenges. The OLEDs have the low carrier transport capability and exciton recombination, which would hinder the improvement of brightness. Besides, QLEDs show challenges for the tedious manufacturing process and the reliance on hydrophobic insulating long ligands also hinders their stability and electrical conductivity. Compared with these traditional materials, quasi-2D ...

A large proportion of dementia deaths in England and Wales may be due to socioeconomic deprivation, according to new research led by Queen Mary University of London. The team also found that socioeconomic deprivation was associated with younger age at death with dementia, and poorer access to accurate diagnosis. Dementia is the leading cause of death in England and Wales, even during the COVID pandemic, and is the only disease in the top ten causes of death without effective treatment. The research, published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, examines Office for National Statistics mortality data for England and Wales, and finds that in 2017, 14,837 excess dementia deaths were attributable to deprivation, equating to 21.5 per cent of all dementia deaths ...

Uncovering detailed travel patterns and habitat use of sharks along and across shelf territories has been historically challenging - especially for most pelagic shark species - which remain offshore for most of their lives. Their vertical diving behavior has been a subject of inquiry for a long time, and for young sharks in particular, has remained elusive. Using cutting-edge 3D satellite technology, a study led by Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, in collaboration with NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service; OCEARCH; The South Fork Natural History Museum and Nature Center; and the Wildlife Conservation Society, is ...