Culture

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 to nine seconds. The next step is to use a similar manufacturing technology to show how an array of qubits can interact to perform quantum logic operations.

Professor John Morton (London Centre for Nanotechnology at UCL), co-founder of Quantum Motion, said: "We're hacking the process of creating qubits, so the same kind of technology that makes the chip in a smartphone can be used to build quantum computers.

"It has taken 70 years for transistor development to reach where we are today in computing and we can't spend another 70 years trying to invent new manufacturing processes to build quantum computers. We need millions of qubits and an ultra-scalable architecture for building them, our discovery gives us a blueprint to shortcut our way to industrial scale quantum chip production."

The experiments were performed by PhD student Virginia Ciriano Tejel (London Centre for Nanotechnology at UCL) and colleagues working in a low-temperature laboratory. During operation, the chips are kept in a refrigerated state, cooled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero (?273 degrees Celsius).

Ms Ciriano Tejel said: "Every physics student learns in textbooks that electrons behave like tiny magnets with weird quantum properties, but nothing prepares you for the feeling of wonder in the lab, being able to watch this 'spin' of a single electron with your own eyes, sometimes pointing up, sometimes down. It's thrilling to be a scientist trying to understand the world and at the same time be part of the development of quantum computers."

A quantum computer harnesses laws of physics that are normally seen only at the atomic and subatomic level (for instance, that particles can be in two places simultaneously). Quantum computers could be more powerful than today's super computers and capable of performing complex calculations that are otherwise practically impossible.

While the applications of quantum computing differ from traditional computers, they will enable us to be more accurate and faster in hugely challenging areas such as drug development and tackling climate change, as well as more everyday problems that have huge numbers of variables - just as in nature - such as transport and logistics.

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 of the threat and that it serves to recruit males to ensure group defense. Females only cease the alarm call when males produce calls associated with anti-predator defense. Results suggest that alarm-calling strategies depend on the sex of the signaler. Females recruit males, who identify themselves while approaching, for protection. Males reassure their female of their quality in predation defense, probably to assure future reproduction opportunities.

Males advertise their commitment to serve as hired guns by emitting general "pyow" calls while approaching the rest of their group - a call containing little information about ongoing events, but cues to male identity, similar as to a signature call. Hearing his "pyow" call during male approaches enables females to identify high quality group defenders already from a distance. This might contribute to long-term male reputation in groups, which would equip females to choose males that ensure their offspring's survival most reliably.

Said the study's lead author Frederic Gnepa Mehon of WCS's Congo Program and the Nouabalé-Ndoki Foundation: "Our observations on other forest guenons suggest that if males do not prove to be good group protectors, they likely have to leave groups earlier than good defenders. To date, it remains unclear whether female guenons have a saying in mate choice, but our current results strongly suggest this possibility."

In the course of this study, a new call type was consistently recorded named "kek." They found that the males used the "kek" call when exposed to a moving leopard model created by researchers for field experiments. Previous studies of putty-nosed monkeys in Nigeria never reported "keks." This new type of call could thus be population-specific or it could be uttered towards moving threats. If "kek" calls are population specific, this could suggest that different "dialects" exist amongst putty-nosed monkeys - a strong indicator for vocal production learning, which is fiercely debated to exist in the animal kingdom.

Said co-author Claudia Stephan Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Congo Program and the Nouabalé-Ndoki Foundation: "Sexual selection might play a far more important role in the evolution of communication systems than previously thought. In a phylogenetic context, what strategies ultimately drove the evolution of communication in females and in males? Might there even be any parallels to female and male monkeys' different communication strategies in human language?"

The authors say that current results considerably advanced the understanding of different female and male alarm calling both in terms of sexual dimorphisms in call production and call usage. Interestingly, although males have more complex vocal repertoires than females, the cognitive skills that are necessary to strategically use simple female repertoires seem to be more complex than those necessary to follow male calling strategies. In other words, female putty-nosed monkeys' alarms may contain little information, but they do so by purpose, namely to facilitate the manipulation of male behavior.

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 in a supplement to the May/June issue of JPHMP, presenting new research and commentaries on preventive medicine, funded by the US Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).

Preventive medicine physician workforce: Getting older, not enough new trainees

Preventive medicine physicians work at the intersection of clinical medicine and public health, using specialized skills in health services planning and evaluation, epidemiology, and public health practice, management, and leadership. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new attention to preventive medicine's role in bridging the health care and public health sectors.

Previous reports have noted a "real and significant shortage" of preventive medicine specialists. The most recent analysis found that the number of preventive medicine physicians decreased from 2.1 percent of the total workforce in 1970 to 0.9 percent in 1997. Dr. Ricketts and colleagues present an updated analysis of trends in the US supply of preventive medicine physicians.

Based on data from the American Board of Preventive Medicine, the number of Board-certified preventive medicine physicians increased from 6,091 in 1999 to 9,720 in 2018. The increase was largely driven by growth in occupational medicine, as well as the newer specialty of undersea and hyperbaric medicine.

On analysis of American Medical Association 2018 data, 6,866 physicians reported a specialty in preventive medicine. The figure held relatively steady, compared to previous years. However, there were only about two preventive medicine specialists for 100,000 population - approaching half the national supply at its peak in the 1970s.

In an encouraging development, the percentage of women specializing in preventive medicine has increased; women now account for 35 percent of preventive medicine physicians. However, the specialty is aging: in 2017, nearly half of US preventive medicine physicians were aged 60 years or older.

Meanwhile, the number of new trainees in preventive medicine residency programs has decreased: from 420 in 1999 to 313 in 2020. "This decline will contribute to a reduction in preventive medicine physician supply, but the future supply will initially be most affected by the aging of the current workforce," Dr. Ricketts and coauthors write. "Even with the growth of women...the training pipeline is not producing enough new preventive medicine physicians to keep pace with population growth and retirements."

These trends highlight an "urgent need for extension of training programs." Some efforts are already in place, including funding for preventive medicine residency programs through HRSA. Loss of funding would not only exacerbate the ongoing shortage, but "would also result in a leadership gap in public health and prevention in the United States that would last well into the future," Dr. Ricketts and colleagues add.

The new JPHMP supplement highlights HRSA's investment in preventive medicine, focusing on the strategic goal of achieving health equity and enhancing population health, according to an introduction of HRSA officers and guest editors Paul Jung, MD, MPH, FACPM, and Sophia Russell, DM, MBA, RN, NE-BC.

The special issue presents HRSA-funded projects by preventive medicine residents, targeting public health priorities such as vaping/e-cigarettes, the opioid crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the population health needs of rural America. Drs. Jung and Russell conclude: "The future of the specialty of preventive medicine remains strong, and HRSA will continue to manage Congress' valuable financial support for the specialty to ensure that it remains viable and relevant for the future."

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 orders of magnitude greater than any known cosmic-ray-induced gamma ray--or any particle humans have accelerated in state-of-the-art laboratories on Earth.

Since 1990, dozens of researchers from China and Japan have hunted for the elusive high-energy cosmic gamma rays. The Tibet ASγ Collaboration made its discovery using nearly 70,000 square meters of ground arrays and underground muon detectors on the Tibetan Plateau, sitting more than 14,000 feet above sea level.

"Scientists believe high energy gamma rays can be produced by the nuclear interaction between high energy cosmic rays escaping from the most powerful galactic sources and interstellar gas in the Milky Way galaxy," said Huang Jing, a coauthor from Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Chen Ding of the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, another coauthor, added, "The detection of diffuse gamma rays above 100 teraelectron volts is a key to understanding the origin of very-high-energy cosmic rays, which has been a mystery since their discovery in 1912."

Balloon experiments first identified cosmic rays, revealing they were a key source of radiation on Earth. Cosmic rays are highly energetic particles, mostly protons, that travel across space. Millions of these particles pass through your body every day. (They are believed harmless.)

But where do cosmic rays come from?

"We live together with cosmic-ray muons, though we are usually not sensitive to them," said Kawata. "Isn't it a fantasy to think of where and how these cosmic rays are produced and accelerated, traveling all the way to Earth?"

A popular theory argues that accelerators known as "PeVatrons" spew cosmic rays at energies up to one petaelectron volt (PeV). Possible PeVatrons include supernova explosions, star-forming regions, and the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

So far, no one has detected any such accelerators. If PeVatrons exist, their cosmic rays should leave trails of glowing gamma rays strewn across the galaxy. The new study reports the first evidence of this highly-energetic haze.

"These gamma rays did not point back to the most powerful known high-energy gamma-ray sources, but spread out along the Milky Way," said Masato Takita, a coauthor and colleague of Kawata. "Our discovery confirms evidence of the existence of PeVatrons."

The researchers now want to determine if the probable PeVatrons are active or dead.

"From dead PeVatrons, which are extinct like dinosaurs, we can only see the footprint--the cosmic rays they produced over a few million years, spread over the galactic disk," said Takita.

"But if we can locate real, active PeVatrons, we can study many more questions," he said. "What type of star emits our sub-PeV gamma rays and related cosmic rays? How can a star accelerate cosmic rays up to PeV energies? How do the rays propagate inside our galactic disk?"

Other future directions include looking for PeVatron footprints in the southern hemisphere and confirming the gamma-ray results using neutrino detectors in Antarctica and beyond.

The research could also aid in the quest for dark matter. Underground detectors allowed the researchers to cut away cosmic-ray background noise, revealing the kind of pure, diffuse gamma rays predicted to emanate from dark matter.

"We can reduce the cosmic ray background by a factor of one million. Then we see a high-purity gamma ray sky," said Takita.

The experimental achievement moves physicists significantly closer to discovering where cosmic rays are born.

"This pioneering work opens a new window for the exploration of the extreme universe," said Huang. "The observational evidence marks an important milestone toward revealing cosmic ray origins, which have puzzled mankind for more than one century."

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 and tourism when in fact, we found the opposite," said Michael Ferguson, assistant professor of recreation management and policy. "Our findings suggest that offshore wind energy development will likely have little impact on coastal recreation and tourism, and in some instances, may even help amplify visitation."

In the study, recently published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, researchers collected data from N.H. coastal recreation visitors using on-site surveys at 18 different locations along the seacoast, including beaches, marinas, boat launches, angling locations and yacht clubs. They surveyed a variety of visitors from sightseeing and charter operators to beach goers, surfers and anglers assessing overall perceptions toward acceptance, support, fit, and recreation impact of OWD. The researchers found that when asked about OWD, 77% of coastal visitors were supportive, 73% were accepting and 58% agreed that OWD would fit the N.H. seascape.

To help coastal recreation visitors visualize what a commercial scale offshore wind farm would look like on the N.H. Seacoast, the researchers showed 50% of respondents a photo simulation of an OWD project while the other 50% of respondents did not view it. Findings indicated that it did not matter if respondents saw the photo simulation of not, their attitudes remained the same; largely positive and supportive. Additionally, most respondents agreed that OWD would not cause them to alter or substitute their recreation activities, behaviors, or experiences.

"Most of these coastal recreation visitors frequented the area, so these are people with strong ties to the N.H. Seacoast," said Ferguson. "And, since offshore wind energy development has had its hurdles gaining traction and acceptance in the United States, our findings suggest that coastal recreation visitors are open and supportive of it and policymakers, natural resource managers, and the OWD industry should recognize coastal recreation and tourism as critical stakeholder sectors."

The researchers cite in their paper that along the N.H. Seacoast, coastal recreation is an essential sector of the state economy, accounting for more than $1.5 billion in annual economic impact. Across the nation, beaches and their associated coastal recreation activities serve as a leading source of tourism revenue in states with coastlines.

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 Nurse Educator, also reveal that 23.8% of student respondents scored within the area of clinical concern for PTSD and immune system suppression.

"Professions in healthcare are assumed to be high-stress, but the past year brought challenges so unprecedented that it's critical to understand how our students - who juggle clinical work and studies - are faring," says Laura Rosenthal, DNP, associate professor at the University of Colorado College of Nursing and study author.

Graduate students (n=222) within CU's College of Nursing participated in the study, which utilized a cross-sectional 149-item electronic survey that included two validated instruments: Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21) and Impact of Events Scale - Revised (IES-R). Nearly 10% of respondents reported severe or extremely severe scores in depression and anxiety axes, while 14% responded similarly on the stress axis in the DASS-21. The IES-R results found 23.8% of respondents had clinically concerning scores, 9.5% had a possible diagnosis of PTSD and 6.2% scored high enough to possibly suppress immune system functions.

Study findings also suggest that students who experienced abrupt and mandatory changes in clinical work hours - decrease or increase - or had previously worked in a hospital pre-pandemic were at greater risk for clinically concerning scores.

"These study results are crucial in understanding how to take care of our future workforce who are already on the front lines," says Rosenthal. "Controlled and current mental health challenges can be amplified, and students without any underlying mental health concerns can experience trauma during extreme periods of stress and uncertainty as experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gauging anxiety, stress and depression can help educators and administrators provide adequate support to our student population who may be struggling."

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 and forming chemical bonds, but it escapes the weight paradox by finding those chemical bonds in the robot's environment, like a harvester. While in contact with a metal surface, an ECVS unit catalyzes an oxidation reaction with the surrounding air, powering the robot with the freed electrons.

Pikul's approach was inspired by how animals power themselves through foraging for chemical bonds in the form of food. And like a simple organism, these ECVS-powered robots are now capable of searching for their own food sources despite lacking a "brain."

In a new study published as an Editor's Choice article in Advanced Intelligent Systems, Pikul, along with lab members Min Wang and Yue Gao, demonstrate a wheeled robot that can navigate its environment without a computer. By having the left and right wheels of the robot powered by different ECVS units, they show a rudimentary form of navigation and foraging, where the robot will automatically steer toward metallic surfaces it can "eat."

Their study also outlines more complicated behavior that can be achieved without a central processor. With different spatial and sequential arrangements of ECVS units, a robot can perform a variety of logical operations based on the presence or absence of its food source.

"Bacteria are able to autonomously navigate toward nutrients through a process called chemotaxis, where they sense and respond to changes in chemical concentrations," Pikul says. "Small robots have similar constraints to microorganisms, since they can't carry big batteries or complicated computers, so we wanted to explore how our ECVS technology could replicate that kind of behavior."

In the researchers' experiments, they placed their robot on aluminum surfaces capable of powering its ECVS units. By adding "hazards" that would prevent the robot from making contact with the metal, they showed how ECVS units could both get the robot moving and navigate it toward more energy-rich sources.

"In some ways," Pikul says, "they are like a tongue in that they both sense and help digest energy."

One type of hazard was a curving path of insulating tape. The researchers showed that the robot would autonomously follow the metal lane in between two lines of tape if its EVCS units were wired to the wheels on the opposite side. If the lane curved to the left, for example, the ECVS on the right side of the robot would begin to lose power first, slowing the robot's left wheels and causing it to turn away from the hazard.

Another hazard took the form of a viscous insulating gel, which the robot could gradually wipe away by driving over it. Since the thickness of the gel was directly related to the amount of power the robot's ECVS units could draw from the metal underneath it, the researchers were able to show that the robot's turning radius was responsive to that sort of environmental signal.

By understanding the types of cues ECVS units can pick up, the researchers can devise different ways of incorporating them into the design of a robot in order to achieve the desired type of navigation.

"Wiring the ECVS units to opposite motors allows the robot to avoid the surfaces they don't like," says Pikul. "But when the ECVS units are in parallel to both motors, they operate like an 'OR' gate, in that they ignore chemical or physical changes that occur under just one power source."

"We can use this sort of wiring to match biological preferences," he says. "It's important to be able to tell the difference between environments that are dangerous and need to be avoided, and ones that are just inconvenient and can be passed through if necessary."

As ECVS technology evolves, they can be used to program even more complicated and responsive behaviors in autonomous, computerless robots. By matching the ECVS design to the environment that a robot needs to operate in, Pikul envisions tiny robots that crawl through rubble or other hazardous environments, getting sensors to critical locations while preserving themselves.

"If we have different ECVS that are tuned to different chemistries, we can have robots that avoid surfaces that are dangerous, but power through ones that stand in the way of an objective," Pikul says.

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 by the Crnic Institute, linking immune dysregulation to a dramatically different disease spectrum, whereby people with Down syndrome are highly predisposed to some diseases (e.g., leukemia, autoimmune disorders, and Alzheimer's disease) and highly protected from others (e.g., solid tumors).

"We found a higher-than expected rate of CH in individuals with Down syndrome between the age of one to 20 years old," says study author Dr. Alexander Liggett, who spearheaded the study as a doctoral candidate in the lab of Dr. James DeGregori, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. "It is a surprising finding, as the phenomenon is typically only observed in elderly people."

To perform the study, Liggett and DeGregori and colleagues applied an advanced sequencing technique they developed, called FERMI, to blood samples from the Crnic Institute Human Trisome Project BiobankTM. Not only were mutations detected more often in young individuals with Down syndrome, but those mutations were more likely to be oncogenic, or potentially cancerous. In the typical elderly population, oncogenic mutations are commonly found in the genes DNMT3A, TET2, ASXL1, TP53, and JAK2. Interestingly, in the Down syndrome cohort, oncogenic CH was dominated by mutations of the TET2 gene.

"Given the increased risk of leukemia that accompanies clonal expansion of blood cells carrying oncogenic mutations, these expansions may become an important biomarker of cancer risk in the future," says Dr. Liggett.

The study also found that CH in Down syndrome is associated with biosignatures of immune dysregulation that are linked to diseases that commonly co-occur with Down syndrome, including thyroiditis, Alzheimer's disease, and leukemia. This discovery opens new lines of investigation to understand how CH impacts a variety of health outcomes in Down syndrome and how to potentially counteract its effects.

"This is truly transformative. This team has identified a new trait of Down syndrome that has strong implications for understanding the appearance of comorbidities more common in this population, such as leukemia and premature ageing," said Dr. Joaquin Espinosa, Executive Director of the Crnic Institute. "The next step is to define the long-term impacts of this precocious clonal hematopoiesis and how to prevent its harmful effects."

Abusive alcohol drinking considerably impacts human health. Alcoholism, better defined as Alcohol Use Disorders (AUD), includes a group of pathological entities related to alcohol-induced damage. Individuals with AUD exhibit compulsive alcohol drinking and negative emotional states when alcohol drinking ceases. In the most severe AUD forms, the individuals lose control over consumption despite a decided will to stop. Some controversial issues have arisen as to whether the definition of AUD can help to delimit and characterize clinical entities related to abusive alcohol ingestion.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that approximately 3,3 million people (5,9% of global deaths) die yearly because of harmful alcohol consumption (According to WHO, as of 4 February 2021, there have been 2,25 million deaths caused by COVID-19, globally). Besides, alcohol is directly responsible for 5 % of disabling diseases and injuries worldwide.

Authorized agencies have officially approved very few pharmacological treatments to treat AUD (for example, disulfiram, opioid antagonists, acamprosate, baclofen, or topiramate). Many patients are reluctant to treatment for different reasons based on their features (age, gender, ethnicity, genetic and epigenetic background) and their alcohol drinking behavior.

Currently, no silver bullet shall rescue humankind from the burden of alcohol on health. Notwithstanding, a better understanding of ethanol's repercussion on molecular cell targets is imperious to plan out pharmacological strategies that ameliorate or block alcohol detriment.

Despite limited favorable results, efforts continue to find drugs acting on causes and effects observed in AUD, including relapse, withdrawal, stress, or anxiety. Nowadays, clinical studies in phases I and II explore the effectiveness of drugs in AUD treatment. Examples of compounds investigated are glutamate and GABA modulators, neuropeptide antagonists, or regulators of neuroimmune responses. Some drugs administered for the treatment of mental disorders have proved efficient in the treatment of AUD. For example, aripiprazole, an antipsychotic drug, and agomelatine, a melatonergic antidepressant, showed beneficial effects by preventing alcohol relapse and craving.
The influence of alcohol on epigenetic mechanisms is a relatively new explored field that offers new avenues for research in the field. The term epigenetics includes chemical changes in DNA, proteins (histones, mainly), mRNAs, and non-coding RNAs with regulatory capacity that control gene expression.

This study provides an in-depth review of recent research that reveals the impact of alcohol on the biochemical mechanisms responsible for epigenetic control within cells. Besides, it analyzes candidate drugs that may counteract the impact of alcohol on epigenetic mechanisms and serve to advance new and tailored pharmacological treatments. Research carried out in animal models and humans (with the obvious ethical limitations imposed on human research) provides valuable information on the epigenetic regulatory processes intercepted by alcohol. The design and laboratory synthesis of new drugs aimed at specific molecular targets offers significant advances in this field.

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 Laboratory. "We can accomplish with one portable test the same thing that others are using two or three different tests, with different machines, to do."

Around the world, more than 100 million people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. A staggering 500,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 to date. Testing the population is key to stopping the spread of the virus. In addition, tracking the spread of new SARS-CoV-2 variants--some of which could respond differently to treatments or vaccines--is critical.

Today, the standard approach to determining whether a nasal swab is positive for COVID-19 is to run a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test to detect genetic material from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. If the sample is negative, however, patients and clinicians don't get any information on what might be causing the coronavirus-like symptoms--unless they run separate PCR tests, using different swab samples, for other viruses. And if the sample is positive for SARS-CoV-2, they don't learn which COVID-19 variant a patient is infected with unless another set of tests is run; those require a large and expensive next-generation gene-sequencing machine.

Last summer, Mo Li, an assistant professor of bioscience at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, was pondering ways he could lend his expertise in genetic engineering and nanopore sequencing to combatting the COVID-19 pandemic. Li, who previously spent six years as a Salk postdoctoral researcher in the Izpisua Belmonte lab, wondered whether a gene-detection approach called isothermal recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) coupled with real-time nanopore sequencing might be more useful--and faster, cheaper and more portable--than the current COVID-19 testing approach. He teamed up with Izpisua Belmonte to find out.

Unlike PCR, which cycles through lower and higher temperatures to separate DNA strands and copy them, RPA uses proteins--rather than temperature changes--to accomplish the same thing in only 20 minutes. The technology lets researchers copy longer stretches of DNA, and probe for multiple genes at the same time.

"We quickly realized that we could use this technique to not only detect SARS-CoV-2, but other viruses at the same time," says Li.

In the new paper, Li and Izpisua Belmonte describe a small, portable device that can screen 96 samples at the same time using the RPA assay. They call the method NIRVANA, for "nanopore sequencing of isothermal rapid viral amplification for near real-time analysis."

The scientists designed NIRVANA to simultaneously test samples for COVID-19, influenza A, human adenovirus, and non-SARS-CoV-2 human coronavirus. In just 15 minutes, the researchers report, the device begins to report positive and negative results. And within three hours, the device finalizes results on all 96 samples--including the sequences of five regions of SARS-CoV-2 that are particularly prone to accumulate mutations leading to new variants such as the B.1.1.7 variant identified in the UK.

Li and Izpisua Belmonte tested NIRVANA on 10 samples known to be positive for SARS-CoV-2, 60 samples of unknown SARS-CoV-2 status, as well as samples of municipal wastewater harboring the SARS-COV-2 virus and others. In all cases, the assay was able to correctly identify which viruses were present. The sequencing data also allowed them to narrow down the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in positive samples; differentiating strains from China and Europe, for instance.

"The design of this assay is really flexible, so it's not just limited to the examples we've shown," says Li. "We can easily adapt it to tackle another pathogen, even something new and emergent."

With the small size and portability of the NIRVANA workflow, it could be used for fast virus detection at schools, airports or ports, the researchers say. It also could be used to monitor wastewater or streams for the presence of new viruses.

"The pandemic has provided two important lessons: first, test widely and quickly, and second, know your variants. Our NIRVANA method provides a promising solution to these two challenges not only for the current pandemic but also for possible future ones," says Izpisua Belmonte, who holds the Roger Guillemin Chair at Salk. Market analysis would be required to determine whether the initial cost of commercialization--and the constant tweaks to the test needed to make sure it detected new variants or new viruses of interest--are worth it, Belmonte adds.

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 in 2009 via a Humanitarian Device Exemption. The effectiveness of DBS for OCD has been well-documented in literature, but the interplay with comorbid disorders has not been as thoroughly explored.

"This study helps us understand more about real-world use of DBS for OCD," says Rachel Davis, MD, associate professor in the CU Department of Psychiatry and study principal investigator. "Most patients seeking treatment don't only have OCD, comorbidities are more the rule than the exception. So it's important to understand how this life-changing procedure can benefit our more typical patients."

Davis and clinicians at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus retrospectively examined five patients seeking DBS for OCD between 2015 and 2019. Patients exhibited comorbidities including substance use disorder, eating disorder, autism spectrum disorder, major depression, ADHD, and tic disorder. Three patients were awake during DBS surgery, allowing clinicians to check for response to stimulation (improved mood, increased energy, and reduction in anxiety), an additional way to confirm correct electrode placement. After surgery, Davis assessed response and determined the correct settings by asking patients about changes in mood, energy, and anxiety. Improvement in these areas tend to be associated with reduction in OCD symptoms later on. Change over time was monitored with a variety of IRB-approved questionnaires, gauging changes in mood, anxiety, depression and other quality of life elements affected by OCD.

Overall, these patients experienced significant improvement in OCD and mood symptoms. A standard scale for assessing symptom severity and treatment response in OCD, the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (YBOCS), measures degree of distress and impairment caused by obsessions and compulsions. A good clinical response is considered to be greater than a 35% reduction. In this study, patients averaged a 44% reduction on this scale; four out of five experienced full response with the fifth having a partial response, with approximately 25% reduction in OCD symptoms. Patients also reported an average of 53% reduction in depression symptoms.

"For these treatment-refractory OCD patients, our Psychiatric DBS program, led by Dr. Davis, is finally providing relief," says John Thompson, PhD, associate professor of neurosurgery at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and one of the co-authors on this manuscript. "While DBS for OCD is rare, this study is a glimpse at its potential. There is much yet to be learned about the complex interplay between circuit modulation and co-morbid symptom management in OCD patients treated with DBS."

The pandemic is affecting every country, but not every country has equal access to the lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines. Recent estimates show that high-income countries -- which have just one-fifth of the global adult population -- have purchased more than half of the world's total vaccine doses, resulting in disparities for low- and middle-income countries.

A new study by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University investigates a key question: Will the U.S. population support donating part of its COVID-19 vaccine stockpile to less prosperous countries?

"COVID-19 is a true global pandemic that has touched every nation on Earth. Borders closed, economic consequences and an incredible level of human suffering, with now more than half a million people who have died of COVID in the U.S. and many more worldwide," said lead author Jeanine Guidry, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Richard T. Robertson School of Media and Culture in the College of Humanities and Sciences and director of the Media+Health Lab at VCU. "COVID-19 has shown how interconnected we all are, and to defeat it we will need to work together on a global scale."

For the study, "U.S. Public Support for COVID-19 Vaccine Donation to Low- and Middle-Income Countries during the COVID-19 Pandemic," the researchers conducted a survey of 788 U.S. adults that assessed the support of different population groups for donating vaccines, as well as in what quantity and in what time frame.

It found that older respondents were both less likely to endorse higher levels of COVID-19 vaccine donations and were more likely to want to wait until all in the U.S. who want the vaccine have received it.

"We know that while COVID affects everybody, the majority of the people who die from it are people who are older," Guidry said. "So this finding may reflect that vulnerability."

It also found that respondents who identified as Democrats were more likely to endorse more and faster COVID-19 vaccine donations to low- and middle-income countries than Republicans.

"It is possible that those who identify as Democrats were more likely to support higher levels of donation because it may be connected to a belief in health care as a human right and health care for all," Guidry said.

People without health insurance also were less likely to support donation, and wanted to wait until everyone in the U.S. who wants a vaccine has received it.

The study also found that people who rated higher on the "social dominance orientation" scale were both less likely to endorse higher levels of COVID-19 vaccine donations as well as more likely to want to wait until all in the U.S. who want the vaccine have received it. Social dominance orientation is a personality trait measuring a person's support for social hierarchy and belief that their group is superior to others.

"Social dominance orientation may actually be a fundamental driver of support for vaccine donations during the pandemic," said Paul Perrin, Ph.D., a co-author on the study and an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at VCU. "When people believe in their heart that some individuals are inherently better than others and should therefore be afforded more societal privileges, that is a deep worldview that can color many of their other belief systems."

The study's results also have some encouraging signs, said co-author Bernard Fuemmeler, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Policy in the VCU School of Medicine.

"Despite some of the differences we observed with respect to age, party affiliation or social dominance, it is encouraging that, for the most part, there was a majority support for donating as much as 10% of vaccines we have available in the U.S. to other countries," he said. "Despite some hesitancy among a minority of the sample, many we surveyed recognized the importance of closing the gap. Policymakers should be encouraged that proposals to donate the vaccine will be met with acceptance."

The study's findings could be valuable to policymakers, health care providers and public health communication professionals working to persuade and target key segments of the U.S. public to support the donation of vaccines to countries that lack the resources to develop and purchase sufficient quantities.

"Our goal is to provide indications about how we can best communicate to the public. How can we best say: 'OK, we need to [donate vaccines] but we want your buy-in. We want your support,'" Guidry said. "Having support for these decisions is going to be critically important. [This study] provides an important starting point."

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have shown for the first time that animal DNA shed within the environment can be collected from the air.

The proof-of-concept study, published in the journal PeerJ, opens up potential for new ecological, health and forensic applications of environmental DNA (eDNA), which to-date has mainly been used to survey aquatic environments.

Living organisms such as plants and animals shed DNA into their surrounding environments as they interact with them. In recent years, eDNA has become an important tool to help scientists identify species found within different environments. However, whilst a range of environmental samples, including soil and air, have been proposed as sources of eDNA until now most studies have focused on the collection of eDNA from water.

In this study, the researchers explored whether eDNA could be collected from air samples and used to identify animal species. They first took air samples from a room which had housed naked mole-rats, a social rodent species that live in underground colonies, and then used existing techniques to check for DNA sequences within the sampled air.

Using this approach, the research team showed that airDNA sampling could successfully detect mole-rat DNA within the animal's housing and from the room itself. The scientists also found human DNA in the air samples suggesting a potential use of this sampling technique for forensic applications.

Dr Elizabeth Clare, Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London and first author of the study, said: "The use of eDNA has become a topic of increasing interest within the scientific community particularly for ecologists or conservationists looking for efficient and non-invasive ways to monitor biological environments. Here we provide the first published evidence to show that animal eDNA can be collected from air, opening up further opportunities for investigating animal communities in hard to reach environments such as caves and burrows."

The research team are now working with partners in industry and the third sector, including the company NatureMetrics, to bring some of the potential applications of this technology to life. Dr Clare added: "What started off as an attempt to see if this approach could be used for ecological assessments has now become much more, with potential applications in forensics, anthropology and even medicine."

"For example, this technique could help us to better understand the transmission of airborne diseases such as Covid-19. At the moment social distancing guidelines are based on physics and estimates of how far away virus particles can move, but with this technique we could actually sample the air and collect real-world evidence to support such guidelines."

The project was supported by Queen Mary's Impact Acceleration Accounts (IAAs), strategic awards provided to institutions by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) that support knowledge exchange (KE) and help researchers generate impact from their research.

Key Points

The PURE study is the first multinational study exploring the association between unprocessed and processed meat intakes with health outcomes in low-, middle-, and high-income countries.

The consumption of unprocessed red meat and poultry was not found to be associated with mortality nor major cardiovascular disease events.

In contrast, higher processed meat intake was associated with higher risks of both total mortality and major cardiovascular disease.

Rockville, MD - Red meat is a major source of medium- and long-chain saturated fatty acids, which may lead to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Processed meat, which has been modified to improve taste or extend its shelf-life, has also been associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Dietary guidelines therefore recommend limiting the consumption of both red and processed meat based on studies that have linked them to higher risks of cardiovascular disease. These studies, however, have come primarily from populations in North America and Europe, limiting their global applicability.

Published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN), "Associations of Unprocessed and Processed Meat Intake with Mortality and Cardiovascular Disease in 21 countries (PURE): A Prospective Cohort Study," has helped to rectify a major research gap, helping us better understand the global health impact of meat and meat product consumption. Dr. Romaina Iqbal, first author of the study noted, "evidence of an association between meat intake and cardiovascular disease is inconsistent. We therefore wanted to better understand the associations between intakes of unprocessed red meat, poultry, and processed meat with major cardiovascular disease events and mortality."

In order to conduct their research, the authors of this study worked with data from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiological (PURE) study, a long-term study launched in 2003 by Dr. Salim Yusuf, Director of Population Health Research Institute, Canada, and Principal Investigator of the PURE study. The PURE study has tracked the dietary habits and health outcomes of more than 164,000 participants from 21 low-, middle-, and high-income countries across five continents.

According to Dr. Mahshid Dehghan, one of the study's authors and Investigator at the Population Health Research Institute of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences, "the PURE study is the first multinational study that provides information on the association between unprocessed and processed meat intakes with health outcomes from low- and middle-income countries. Moreover, the PURE study examines substantially more diverse populations and broad patterns of diet, enabling us to provide new evidence."

Participants' dietary habits were recorded via the use of food frequency questionnaires. In addition, data was collected on participants' mortality and major cardiovascular disease events, enabling the study authors to determine the associations between meat consumption patterns and cardiovascular disease events and mortality.

Upon completing their analysis, the study authors "did not find significant associations between unprocessed red meat and poultry intake with mortality or major cardiovascular disease." By contrast, processed meat intake was associated with higher risks of total mortality and major cardiovascular disease.

The authors believe that additional research may enhance our current understanding of the relationship between meat consumption and health outcomes. For example, it isn't clear what study participants with lower meat intakes were eating instead of meat, and if the quality of those foods differed between countries. These substitutions may have implications in further interpreting the associations between meat consumption and health outcomes. Nonetheless, the authors believe their findings "indicate that limiting the intake of processed meat should be encouraged."

Tomatoes are an important and popular crop, but the tasty ketchup, salsa and pasta sauce they yield comes at a price: overuse of chemical fertilizers. Now, researchers report in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry they have recruited a fungus to bolster fertilizer efficiency, meaning tastier tomatoes can be grown with less fertilizer.

Tomato plants have a long growth period and need more nutrients -- particularly nitrogen and phosphorus-- than many other crops. Supplying these nutrients through a chemical fertilizer is inefficient, because the nutrients can leach away, evaporate or get trapped in insoluble compounds in the soil, among other problems. Some farmers react by overusing fertilizers to boost tomato yield, but this results in poor fruit quality, fertilizer waste, soil deterioration and environmental pollution. Another option is to apply microbes that free nitrogen and phosphorus from the soil for the crop to absorb, though this technique generally hasn't performed well in farm fields. However, Jianguo Huang and colleagues previously succeeded in using a fungus to enhance nutrient uptake and growth in field-raised eggplants. In their latest study, they wanted to find out if the microbe could work with ketchup tomato crops.

The researchers used the HG2011 strain of Ceriporia lacerata, a white-rot fungus with applications in medicine, wastewater treatment, and sugar and biofuel production. Known to grow on trees and other plants and in soil, it deploys proteases, phosphatases and other enzymes to obtain nutrients from its environment. In the process, it converts elements and compounds into forms that plants can use. In the new study, the team showed the fungus promoted enzyme activity in the soil, and improved tomatoes' nutrient uptake and yield in both fertilized and unfertilized soils. The results suggest that compost from this fungus has potential as a cheap supplement that could reduce the need for chemical fertilizer. The fungus -- which doesn't harm tomatoes -- also enhanced nutrition and flavor by increasing the tomatoes' sugar-acid ratio, as well as their soluble sugar and vitamin C content, according to the researchers.