The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic shutdowns have severely disrupted and spotlighted weaknesses in the U.S. food system. Farmers, food distributors and government agencies are working to reconfigure supply chains so that food can get to where it’s needed.
Culture
To answer a question crucial to technologies such as energy conversion, a team of researchers at the University of Michigan, Purdue University and the University of Liverpool in the U.K. have figured out a way to measure how many "hot charge carriers"--for example, electrons with extra energy--are present in a metal nanostructure.
A new study published in Economic Modelling by researchers at Ca' Foscari University and CMCC shows that owning and using an Air Conditioner greatly increases the electricity bills of households, with important implications for the energy poverty of the less well-off.
Germany was not hit as hard by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic as many other European countries. The reason for this is that the wave of infection reached Germany later, that the authorities were warned by the situation in Italy and Spain and at an early stage ordered a lockdown and conducted extensive testing. Up to June 2, 2020, there were 182,028 cases of COVID-19 and 8,522 deaths. As in other countries, dialysis patients were at high risk, due to the fact that they often are of older age, have more comorbidities and, of course, suffer from an impaired immune system.
Cystic fibrosis is the most frequent severe inherited disorder worldwide. Every year, hundreds of families are confronted with this diagnosis - and to date, there is no cure for this disease that mainly affects the respiratory system. Besides supportive treatments, a lung transplant is often the only option to save a patient's live. Researchers of the Universities of Münster and Regensburg have now discovered a novel disease that might lead to a better understanding of cystic fibrosis and new treatment options in the future.
Early data from a clinical study suggest that blocking the Bruton tyrosine kinase (BTK) protein provided clinical benefit to a small group of patients with severe COVID-19. Researchers observed that the off-label use of the cancer drug acalabrutinib, a BTK inhibitor that is approved to treat several blood cancers, was associated with reduced respiratory distress and a reduction in the overactive immune response in most of the treated patients.
Editorial: COVID-19 Pandemic Likely to Result in Lasting Changes to Medical School Curricula
The drug acalabrutinib, FDA-approved for the treatment of several types of B cell cancers, improved the oxygenation levels and decreased molecular markers of inflammation in a majority of 19 patients hospitalized for the treatment of severe COVID-19, according to a new study by Mark Roschewski and colleagues. The drug was administered to 11 patients on supplemental oxygen and 8 patients on mechanical ventilation over a 10-to-14-day course of treatment.
Researchers at the University of Hawai?i Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have been hard at work studying the solar corona, the outermost atmosphere of the sun that expands into interplanetary space. The properties of the solar corona are a consequence of the Sun's complex magnetic field, which is produced in the solar interior and extends outward into space.
AUSTIN, Texas -- When the novel coronavirus began spreading during the early months of 2020, it put kinks in multinational production chains -- first in China and then around the globe. But it didn't have to happen that way, according to Francisco Polidoro, associate management professor at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.
The international First-line Radiosurgery for Small-Cell Lung Cancer (FIRE-SCLC) analysis led by University of Colorado Cancer Center researchers and published today in JAMA Oncology details clinical outcomes for 710 patients with brain metastases from small cell lung cancer treated with first-line stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), without prior treatment with whole-brain radiation (WBRT) or prophylactic cranial irradiation (PCI).
A group of Japanese scientists has developed an ultrastable, selective catalyst to dehydrogenate propane - an essential process to produce the key petrochemical substance of propylene - without deactivation, even at temperatures of more than 600°C.
Palaeontologists from St Petersburg University have been the first to study in detail the structure of the brain and blood vessels in the skull of the ankylosaur Bissektipelta archibaldi. It was a herbivorous dinosaur somewhat similar in appearance to a modern armadillo. The first three-dimensional computer reconstruction of a dinosaur endocast made in Russia - a digital cast of its braincase - was of help to the scientists.
Research from the University of Sheffield has found that the chance of finding Earth-like planets in their early stages of formation is much higher than previously thought.
The team studied groups of young stars in the Milky Way to see if these groups were typical compared to theories and previous observations in other star-forming regions in space, and to study if the populations of stars in these groups affected the likelihood of finding forming Earth-like planets.
BOSTON - Long-term care facilities (LTCFs) are a major driver of total COVID-19 deaths. Reported today in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Boston Medical Center (BMC) and Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) geriatricians Rossana Lau-Ng, Lisa Caruso and Thomas Perls studied the past month's case and death data reported by the Massachusetts Department of Health's COVID-19 daily Dashboard along with data provided by the Kaiser Family Foundation and other countries.