A RAND Corporation report funded by The Rockefeller Foundation shows that COVID-19 testing can be effectively integrated into K-12 schools' pandemic response plans, helping families and staff feel more comfortable with in-person instruction. The report found that even for well-resourced districts and schools, launching a COVID-19 testing program was a major undertaking that required access to rapid-turnaround tests, additional staffing or strong partners for logistical support, technical assistance for the design and execution of testing programs, and a strategy for successfully engaging the school community to participate ...

Adding a simple polymer to fertilizers or pesticides could dramatically reduce agricultural pollution, suggests a new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia. When agrochemicals are sprayed onto crops, a large amount typically ends up in the surrounding environment due to droplets splashing, rebounding or rolling off the target plants. This amount could be cut at least in half by mixing fertilizers and pesticides with a small quantity of polyethylene oxide, a common polymer additive that improves the ability of agrochemical solutions to stick to plant surfaces, ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - A quarter-century-old harvesting restriction intended to last one year has served as an obstacle to returning eastern Oregon national forests to the healthier, more fire-resilient conditions they embodied in the late 1800s, research by the Oregon State University College of Forestry shows. The findings, published in Ecosphere, are both important and timely because the U.S. Forest Service recently revised what has widely become known as the "21-inch rule" - a prohibition against cutting trees greater than 21 inches in diameter at breast height on Forest Service land in eastern Oregon. "Under the old policy, live trees more than 21 inches in diameter ...

Strongly correlated systems are materials that exhibit strong interactions between electrons, a property unseen in ordinary conductors or insulators. Typical examples include metal-insulator transitions or unconventional high-temperature superconductivity where the resistance becomes zero at high temperatures. There have been studies to explain this strong interaction between electrons and their characteristic energy scales, but no direct observation on such energy scales through theory or experiments has been reported. To this, the POSTECH-IBS joint research team has succeeded in directly observing the evolution of coherence energy ...

WASHINGTON--Illegal use of anabolic steroids not only has dangerous side effects during use but also can harm of men's testicular function years after they stop abusing steroids, according to a study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. Anabolic steroids are synthetic forms of testosterone, and their abuse is prevalent among athletes worldwide. Some people use these steroids without a prescription to improve athletic performance or get a more muscular look. Known side effects of these drugs in men include breast growth, hair loss, shrunken testicles and lower testosterone levels. Also called hypogonadism, low testosterone can cause decreased sex drive, poor erections and a low sperm count. "It is still debated whether illicit ...

A worryingly high number of Asian bamboo longhorn beetles (Chlorophorus annularis) turn out to have been emerging across Europe for about a century already, finds an international research team, headed by researchers from the Center of Natural History, University of Hamburg, Germany. Curiously, the recent records of the invasive, non-native to the Old Continent species are mostly sourced from citizen scientists and online platforms, which proves the power of involving the public in species monitoring. The study is published in the open-access, peer-reviewed ...

A two-week course of high doses of CBD helps restore the function of two proteins key to reducing the accumulation of beta-amyloid plaque, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, and improves cognition in an experimental model of early onset familial Alzheimer's, investigators report. The proteins TREM2 and IL-33 are important to the ability of the brain's immune cells to literally consume dead cells and other debris like the beta-amyloid plaque that piles up in patients' brains, and levels of both are decreased in Alzheimer's. The investigators report ...

An analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genome diversity in more than 1,000 people in the United Kingdom suggests that if viral mutations do arise, they can be transmitted in some cases but they rarely persist in subsequent transmissions. "Our observations indicate the within-host emergence of vaccine- and therapeutic-escape mutations is likely to be relatively rare," say the authors, "at least during early infection when viral loads are high." However, because mutations that can escape therapies like antibodies were identified, including in higher viral load samples, the authors encourage continued monitoring and vigilance, particularly as vaccines and therapeutics that put "pressure" on viruses to adapt are rolled out more widely. ...

While receiving just one dose of a two-dose SARS-CoV-2 vaccine tends to decrease infections in the short-term if it produces a strong immune response, it may increase the potential for the virus to "escape" therapies in the longer-term if one-dose vaccinal immunity is weak, reports a new modeling study "[O]ur work emphasizes that the impact of vaccine dosing regimes are strongly dependent on the relative robustness of immunity conferred by a single dose," the authors write. As COVID-19 vaccines have been distributed internationally, several countries including the United Kingdom and Canada have chosen to delay the second dose to increase the number of individuals ...

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, children's hospitals across the United States have seen signification reductions in the number of children being treated for common pediatric illnesses like asthma and pneumonia, according to a new multicenter study led by Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt. Researchers at Children's Hospital found that 42% fewer children were being seen and hospitalized at 44 children's hospital across the U.S. for both respiratory and non-respiratory illnesses, with the most significant reduction seen in children under age 12. Hospitals saw a decline in the number of children seen or hospitalized for respiratory illness by 62%, while there was 38% reduction for non-respiratory illnesses. The trend, ...

University of Arizona researcher Jekan Thanga is taking scientific inspiration from an unlikely source: the biblical tale of Noah's Ark. Rather than two of every animal, however, his solar-powered ark on the moon would store cryogenically frozen seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from 6.7 million Earth species. Thanga and a group of his undergraduate and graduate students outline the lunar ark concept, which they call a "modern global insurance policy," in a paper presented over the weekend during the IEEE Aerospace Conference. "Earth is naturally a volatile environment," said Thanga, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering in the UArizona College ...

Neuroendocrine tumours are cancers that begin in specialised cells called neuroendocrine cells. These cells have traits similar to those of nerve cells and hormone-producing cells. Neuroendocrine tumours, while rare, can occur anywhere in the body. Most affect the cardiothoracic region, eg lungs, appendix, small intestine, pancreas as well as the rectum. There are many types of neuroendocrine tumours: some grow slowly while others develop very rapidly. Neuroendocrine tumors are characterised by abundant production of somatostatin receptor 2, a naturally circulating hormone that is an important target for scientists studying new treatment approaches. Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy (PRRT) is the most commonly used treatment for refractive ...

Home delivery of HIV medicines in South Africa significantly increased viral suppression compared to those who received clinical care, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The study, conducted with Amazon.com guidance during COVID-19 restrictions in South Africa, showed that among study participants, paying a fee for home delivery and monitoring of antiretroviral therapy (ART) was highly acceptable in the context of low income and high unemployment, and improved health outcomes as a result. The researching findings were ...

Researchers at the Buck Institute analyzed data from the COVID-19 Symptom Tracker app used by 3 million people in the United Kingdom, adding the use of immunosuppressant medication, use of a mobility aid, shortness of breath, fever, and fatigue to the list of symptoms and comorbidities that increase the risk for severe COVID-19. Results are published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. "Even though there are established risk factors for severe COVID-19 there are no good predictors that enable healthcare providers, or even those who have tested positive, to assess who should seek advanced medical care," says Buck Institute ...

TAMPA, Fla. (March 8, 2021) -- Preterm birth is a END ...

Recently, Prof. CHEN Gao from Institute of Geometry and Physics of the University of Science and Technology of China has made breakthrough in the field of complex differential geometry. Using mathematical invention, he buildt a new bridge between the relativity of Einstein and quantum mechanics. This work was published in Inventiones Mathematicae. In the field of complex differential geometry, there are two crucial physical equations: the Hermitian-Yang-Mills equation, which became the standard model of quantum mechanics, and the Kähler-Einstein equation, which is closely related to relativity. To stably solve these two equations ...

A team of researchers led by Professor Yaakov Nahmias, director of the Grass Center for Bioengineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and founder of Tissue Dynamic, introduced a new technological approach that has the potential to rapidly develop new drugs without the need for animal experiments. According to Professor Nahmias, "Drug development is a long and expensive endeavor that is defined by multiple failures. The main reason for this failure is that clinical experiments are ultimately based on minimal information gained from animal experiment which often fail to replicate the human response." The primary animals used in drug development ...

For decades, there has been a trend in microelectronics towards ever smaller and more compact transistors. 2D materials such as graphene are seen as a beacon of hope here: they are the thinnest material layers that can possibly exist, consisting of only one or a few atomic layers. Nevertheless, they can conduct electrical currents - conventional silicon technology, on the other hand, no longer works properly if the layers become too thin. However, such materials are not used in a vacuum; they have to be combined with suitable insulators - in order to seal them off from unwanted environmental influences, and ...

Prosody is a branch of linguistics that analyses and formally represents the elements of oral expression such as pitch, tones and intonation. A study published in Cognition on 5 February shows that there are universal prosodic cues that help with learning in humans and in animals. This study, published by Juan Manuel Toro, ICREA research professor and Paola Crespo-Bojorque, researchers of the Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC) of the UPF Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC), is part of the research into language evolution that is being conducted thanks to a European Research Council Starting Grant. Some of the mechanisms we humans use to learn language are based on general principles ...

Long life is common among bird parents that get help with childcare. This finding comes from researchers at the universities of Lund and Oxford who reviewed data from more than 9,000 studies. Being a parent can be tough. In general, animals that care for many offspring die young, at least in species where parents are not helped by others. However, in some species things are different and parents recruit 'helpers' to assist with childcare. In such group-living species, parents often produce lots of young and also live an exceptionally long time. This new research ...

Thrombotic occlusion of blood vessels, which leads to myocardial infarctions, strokes and venous thromboembolisms, is the major cause of death in the western hemisphere. Therefore, it is of critical importance to understand mechanisms preventing thrombus formation. A new study by the research group of Christoph Binder, Principal Investigator at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Professor at the Medical University of Vienna, now explains the important role of immunoglobulin-M (IgM) antibodies in preventing thrombosis. The study published in the journal Blood shows that these antibodies recognize microvesicles, which are ...

Spiders from the genus Phoneutria - also known as banana spiders - are considered aggressive and among the most venomous spiders in the world, with venom that has a neurotoxic action. These large nocturnal spiders usually inhabit environments disturbed by humans and are often found in banana plantations in the Neotropical region. One of these spiders, P. boliviensis, is a medically important species widely distributed in Central and South America, whose behaviour, habitat, venom composition, toxicity and bites on humans have already been paid considerable attention in previous research work. Nevertheless, after examining a large pool of museum specimens, biologists from The George Washington University (N. Hazzi and G. Hormiga) began to ...

Tsukuba, Japan - Because human females have two X chromosomes and males have one X and one Y, somatic cells have special mechanisms that keep expression levels of genes on the X chromosome the same between both sexes. This process is called dosage compensation and has been extensively studied in the fruit fly Drosophila. Now, researchers at the University of Tsukuba (UT) continued work with Drosophila to show that dosage compensation does not occur in the germ cells of male flies. In an article published in Scientific Reports, the UT researchers investigated this phenomenon in fly primordial germ cells (PGCs), which are present in embryos and are the precursor cells to what ultimately become ...

Pierfranco Demontis said in 1988, "Ice becomes a fast-ion conductor at high pressure and high temperatures," but his prediction was only hypothetical until recently. After 30 years of study, superionic water ice was verified experimentally in 2018. Superionicity may eventually explain the strong magnetic field in giant planetary interiors. What about Earth, whose interiors are also under extreme pressure and temperature conditions? Although three-quarters of Earth's surface is covered by water, standalone water or ice rarely exists in Earth's interiors. The most common unit of "water" is hydroxyl, which is associated with host minerals to make ...

The melting of the Earth's ice cover intensified in the 20th century, with glaciers and sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic regions melting at alarming speeds. In fact, The Antarctic Peninsula (AP), which is the only landmass of Antarctica extending out past the Antarctic Circle, was found to be one of the most rapidly warming regions on the planet during the second half of the 20th century. This rapid change in climate has raised serious concerns of rising sea levels the world over. Multiple factors have been associated with the melting of the ice cover: the primary factor being the greenhouse gas emissions from human activities that cause ...