Culture

Researchers from Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Western Australia have found a simple way to analyse the effectiveness of exercise training that could one day be conducted easily at a local gym or physio.

Using vertical jumps as a test activity, the researchers could predict detailed information regarding technique and muscle activation patterns just through a relatively simple analysis of forces produced against the ground during the jump.

Professor Tony Blazevich from ECU's School of Medical and Health Sciences said the new concept could transform injury diagnosis and treatment.

"Most human movements, whether high-speed sporting skills or daily activities in and around the home or workplace, are incredibly complex," Professor Blazevich said.

"Determining your technique and how your nervous system controls your muscles during those tasks requires a lot of complex data collection. This means your local doctor, physio, or gym or sports coach can't easily do it.

"We aimed to develop a simple method to describe how you move using a technique that you can use in the home or gym to assess whether your training, or rehabilitation from an injury, illness or disease, is on track."

By looking at the forces produced on the ground while someone is jumping as high as possible the researchers were able to then accurately describe the person's jump technique, determine how the muscles were controlled to perform the jump, and compare to others who use different strategies.

This information was checked against recorded movement technique and muscle activation patterns during the jumps.

The researchers also found a relatively easy way to more accurately and rapidly get the information that sports scientists need from vertical jump tests, which are commonly used in elite athletes.

Professor Blazevich said that the successful trial would now be tested on a range of human movements.

"We need to determine whether we can now use the same strategy to test other complex movements such as walking, stair climbing, running," he said.

"We are also examining the potential for using the accelerometer on a mobile phone to capture the data and then estimate the forces from that."

The use of yank-time signal as an alternative to identify kinematic events and define phases in human countermovement jumping can be read on the Royal Society Open Science website.

Fragrances - promising mystery, intrigue and forbidden thrills - are blended by master perfumers, their recipes kept secret. In a new study on the sense of smell, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers have managed to strip much of the mystery from even complex blends of odorants, not by uncovering their secret ingredients, but by recording and mapping how they are perceived. The scientists can now predict how any complex odorant will smell from its molecular structure alone. This study may not only revolutionize the closed world of perfumery, but eventually lead to the ability to digitize and reproduce smells on command. The proposed framework for odors, created by neurobiologists, computer scientists, and a master-perfumer, and funded by a European initiative for Future Emerging Technologies (FET-OPEN), was published in Nature.

"The challenge of plotting smells in an organized and logical manner was first proposed by Alexander Graham Bell over 100 years ago," says Prof. Noam Sobel of the Institute's Neurobiology Department. Bell threw down the gauntlet: "We have very many different kinds of smells, all the way from the odor of violets and roses up to asafoetida. But until you can measure their likenesses and differences you can have no science of odor." This challenge had remained unresolved until now.

This century-old challenge indeed highlighted the difficulty in fitting odors into a logical system: There are millions of odor receptors in our noses, consisting hundreds of different subtypes, each shaped to detect particular molecular features. Our brains potentially perceive millions of smells in which these single molecules are mixed and blended at varying intensities. Thus, mapping this information has been a challenge. But Sobel and his colleagues, led by graduate student Aharon Ravia and Dr. Kobi Snitz, found there is an underlying order to odors. They reached this conclusion by adopting Bell's concept - namely to describe not the smells themselves, but rather the relationships between smells as they are perceived.

In a series of experiments, the team presented volunteer participants with pairs of smells and asked them to rate these smells on how similar the two seemed to one another, ranking the pairs on a similarity scale ranging from "identical" to "extremely different." In the initial experiment, the team created 14 aromatic blends, each made of about 10 molecular components, and presented them two at a time to nearly 200 volunteers, so that by the end of the experiment each volunteer had evaluated 95 pairs.

To translate the resulting database of thousands of reported perceptual similarity ratings into a useful layout, the team refined a physicochemical measure they had previously developed. In this calculation, each odorant is represented by a single vector that combines 21 physical measures (polarity, molecular weight, etc.). To compare two odorants, each represented by a vector, the angle between the vectors is taken to reflect the perceptual similarity between them. A pair of odorants with a low angle distance between them are predicted similar, those with high angle distance between them are predicted different.

To test this model, the team first applied it to data collected by others, primarily a large study in odor discrimination by Bushdid and colleagues from the lab of Prof. Leslie Vosshall at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. The Weizmann team found that their model and measurements accurately predicted the Bushdid results: Odorants with low angle distance between them were hard to discriminate; odors with high angle distance between them were easy to discriminate. Encouraged by the model accurately predicting data collected by others, the team continued to test for themselves.

The team concocted new scents and invited a fresh group of volunteers to smell them, again using their method to predict how this set of participants would rate the pairs - at first 14 new blends and then, in the next experiment, 100 blends. The model performed exceptionally well. In fact, the results were in the same ballpark as those for color perception - sensory information that is grounded in well-defined parameters. This was especially surprising considering each individual likely has a unique complement of smell receptor subtypes, which can vary by as much as 30% across individuals.

Because the "smell map," or "metric" predicts the similarity of any two odorants, it can also be used to predict how an odorant will ultimately smell. For example, any novel odorant that is within 0.05 radians or less from banana will smell exactly like banana. As the novel odorant gains distance from banana, it will smell banana-ish, and beyond a certain distance, it will stop resembling banana.

The team is now developing a web-based tool. This set of tools not only predicts how a novel odorant will smell, but can also synthesize odorants by design. For example, one can take any perfume with a known set of ingredients, and using the map and metric, generate a new perfume with no components in common with the original perfume, but with exactly the same smell. Such creations in color vision, namely non-overlapping spectral compositions that generate the same perceived color, are called color metamers, and here the team generated olfactory metamers.

The study's findings are a significant step toward realizing a vision of Prof. David Harel of the Computer and Applied Mathematics Department, who also serves as Vice President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and who was a co-author of the study: Enabling computers to digitize and reproduce smells. In addition, of course, to being able to add realistic flower or sea aromas to your vacation pictures on social media, giving computers the ability to interpret odors in the way that humans do could have an impact on environmental monitoring and the biomedical and food industries, to name a few. Still, master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, who is also a co-author of the study, remarks that he is not concerned for his profession just yet.

Sobel concludes: "100 years ago, Alexander Graham Bell posed a challenge. We have now answered it: The distance between rose and violet is 0.202 radians (they are remotely similar), the distance between violet and asafoetida is 0.5 radians (they are very different), and the difference between rose and asafoetida is 0.565 radians (they are even more different). We have converted odor percepts into numbers, and this should indeed advance the science of odor."

Forensic science experts at Flinders University are refining an innovative counter-terrorism technique that checks for environmental DNA in the dust on clothing, baggage, shoes or even a passport.

The Flinders-led research, led by postdoctoral research associate Dr Jennifer Young, will developed a system to trace the source of dust on suspect articles to match a soil profile of a specific area or overseas country.

"This could help provide evidence of where a person of interest might have travelled based on the environmental DNA signature from dust on their belongings," says Dr Young, from the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University.

"This microscopic environmental trace evidence, based on soil geochemical, bacterial and fungal analysis would complement and enhance current forensic intelligence tools," she says in new research in Forensic Science International: Genetics.

The project has received a State Government Defence Innovation Partnership (DIP) grant of almost $150,000 to develop the intelligence and forensic potential of dust traces for counter-terrorism and national security, working with the Australian Federal Police and university partners (University of Adelaide and University of Canberra) to match the DNA extraction and amplification technique to Australian soil profiles from Geosciences Australia.

Professor Linacre, chair in Forensic DNA Technology at Flinders, says environmental samples serve as ideal forms of contact trace evidence as detection at a scene can establish a link between a suspect, location and victim.

"Environment samples extracted via the 'massively parallel sequencing' technology provide biological signatures from complex DNA mixtures and trace amounts of low biomass samples," he says.

The project is among more than $1 million in funding announced in the fourth round of the Defence Innovation Partnership's Collaborative Research Fund.

InFoDust: The intelligence and forensic potential of dust traces for counter-terrorism and national security, led by Dr Young, will put the new technique on trial with soil reference data from across Australia provided by partner Geoscience Australia.

This project will utilise a series of soils with contrasting properties to understand the relationship between soil biogeochemical signals and the derived dust signal under controlled conditions, before introducing environmental variables through an 'in-situ' experiment.

According to the current state of knowledge, there are no cases that have shown evidence of humans being infected with the novel coronavirus via the consumption of contaminated food. Nor has any reliable evidence being presented to date concerning transmission of the virus via contact with contaminated objects or contaminated surfaces - such as packaging - which would have led to subsequent infections in humans. Imported refrigerated or frozen food and its packaging that has been produced under unhygienic conditions in regions affected by SARS-CoV-2 could contain the virus. Accordingly, the basic rules for day-to-day hygiene and for the preparation of food should always be followed.

The BfR is not aware of any reports of SARS-CoV-2 infections resulting from the consumption of meat or contact with contaminated meat products. According to the current state of knowledge, farm animals used for the production of meat cannot become infected with SARS-CoV-2 and are therefore unable to transmit the virus to humans via this pathway. Contamination of meat and meat products or its packaging with coronavirus could occur during the slaughtering, butchering, processing and packaging processes, however.

According to the reports in the Chinese media, traces of SARS-CoV-2 were found on the packaging of pork knuckles imported from Germany and on a door knob in a cold store. It is unclear whether the detected traces of virus are derived from an infectious virus or whether the virus had already been inactivated by storage or transportation. Nor do the reports state whether the traces of the virus were already present on the imported product or had been transferred to the packaging and door knob by the infected worker.

Generally, coronaviruses can potentially be transferred from an infected person to meat products if hygiene rules are not followed, for example, by sneezing or coughing onto these products, or through contaminated hands. The same applies to surface contaminations (on packaging, for example). However, the hygiene rules and safety precautions that are commonly observed during the slaughtering, processing and packaging of meat minimise the risk of contamination with pathogens, which also applies for SARS-CoV-2. Coronaviruses cannot multiply in or on food; they require a living animal or human host to do this. Transmis-sion of the virus to another person via a contact infection appears possible only if this person touches a contaminated item of food or packaging and then transfers the virus to the mucous membranes of their nose or eyes with the hands. According to the current state of knowledge, the oral/alimentary route of transmission through the consumption of meat is not relevant for the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

To protect yourself from viral infection, always observe the general rules for everyday hy-giene: ensure that you wash your hands regularly and avoid touching your face with your hands - especially while preparing food. Furthermore, meat and poultry in general should be heated sufficiently and evenly before consumption, until the meat juice trickling out is clear and the meat is a whitish (poultry), greyish-pink (pork) or greyish-brown (beef) colour. More information on hygiene when handling food can be found here:

https://www.bfr.bund.de/cm/364/protection-against-foodborne-infections.pdf

We all react to stress in different ways. A sudden loud noise or flash of light can elicit different degrees of response from people, which indicates that some of us are more susceptible to the impact of stress than others.

Any event that causes stress is called a "stressor". Our bodies are equipped to handle acute exposure to stressors, but chronic exposure can result in mental disorders, e.g. anxiety and depression and even physical changes, e.g. cardiovascular alterations as seen in hypertension or stroke-disorders.

There has been significant effort to find a way to identify people who would be vulnerable to develop stress-related disorders. The problem is that most of that research has relied on self-reporting and subjective clinical rankings, or exposing subjects to non-naturalistic environments. Employing wearables and other sensing technologies have made some headway in the elderly and at-risk individuals, but given how different our lifestyles are, it has been hard to find objective markers of psychogenic disease.

Approaching the problem with VR

Now, behavioral scientists led by Carmen Sandi at EPFL's School of Life Sciences have developed a virtual-reality (VR) method that measures a person's susceptibility to psychogenic stressors. Building from previous animal studies, the new approach captures high-density locomotion information from a person while they explore two virtual environments in order to predict heart-rate variability when exposed to threatening or highly stressful situations.

Heart rate variability is emerging in the field as a strong indicator of vulnerability to physiological stress, and for developing psychopathologies and cardiovascular disorders.

VR stress scenarios

In the study, 135 participants were immersed in three different VR scenarios. In the first scenario they explored an empty virtual room, starting from a small red step, facing on of the walls. The virtual room itself had the same dimensions as the real one that the participants were in so that if they touched a virtual wall, they would actually feel it. After 90 seconds of exploration, the participants were told to return to the small red step they'd started from. The VR room would fade to black and then the second scenario would begin.

In the second scenario, the participants found themselves on an elevated virtual alley several meters above the ground of a virtual city. They were then asked to explore the alley for 90 seconds, and then to return to the red step. Once on it, the step began to descend faster and faster it reached the ground level. Another fade, and then came the final scenario.

In the third scenario, the participants were "placed" in a completely dark room. Armed with nothing but a virtual flashlight, they were told to explore a darkened maze corridor, in which four human-like figures were placed in corner areas, while three sudden bursts of white noise came through the participant's headphones every twenty seconds.

Developing a predictive model

The researchers measured the heart rates of the participants as they went through each VR scenario, collecting a large body of heart-rate variation data under controlled experimental conditions. Joao Rodrigues, a postdoc at EPFL and the study's first author, then analyzed the locomotor data from the first two scenarios using machine-learning methods, and developed a model that can predict a person's stress response - changes in heart rate variability - in the third threatening scenario.

The team then tested the model and found that its predictions can work on different groups of participants. They also confirmed that the model can predict stress vulnerability to a different stressful challenge in which participants were put through a final VR test, where they had to quickly perform arithmetic exercises, and see their score compared to others'. The idea here was to add a timed and social aspect to stress. In addition, when they gave wrong answers, parts of the virtual floor broke down while a distressing noise played.

Finally, the researchers also confirmed that their model outperforms other stress-prediction tools, such as anxiety questionnaires. Carmen Sandi says: "The advantage of our study, is that we have developed a model in which capturing behavioral parameters of how people explore two novel virtual environments is enough to predict how their heart rate variability would change if they were exposed to highly stressful situations; hence, eliminating the need of testing them in those highly stressful conditions."

Measuring stress vulnerability in the future

The research offers a standardized tool for measuring vulnerability to stressors based on objective markers, and paves the way for the further development of such methods.

"Our study shows the impressive power of behavioral data to reveal individuals' physiological vulnerability. It is remarkable how high-density locomotor parameters during VR exploration can help identify persons at risk of developing a myriad of pathologies -cardiovascular, mental disorders, etc - if exposed to high stress levels. We expect that our study will help the application of early interventions for those individuals at risk."

Researchers have identified a new druggable target for heart failure in neonates and infants, a condition for which there has been no specific treatment. Approximately 60 percent of children born with congenital heart abnormalities will develop overt heart failure within the first year of life. The progression of heart failure in these infants is often rapid, with a high frequency of fatalities. Stimulation of this target significantly increased the cardiac contractility of newborns and infants in mice with few side effects such as tachycardia, arrhythmias, and increased myocardial oxygen consumption, which are common problems with many cardiotonic drugs.

Unlike chronic heart failure in adults, evidence is lacking for the appropriate treatment of pediatric heart failure. The main reason for this is the great variety of pathogeneses and pathophysiologies of heart failure in children, making large-scale clinical trials difficult. Therefore, pediatric heart failure patients are currently being treated with adult medications without compelling evidence of their safety and effectiveness in children. The research group led by Professor Mitsuhiko Yamada of Shinshu University hopes to develop the world's first small molecule therapeutics for pediatric heat failure that can be easily used also by outpatients through collaborations with pharmaceutical companies.

The research group began this study in a bottom-up but not an outcome-oriented manner, which would be the most standard and effective way of translational science. Professor Yamada was interested in the molecular mechanism underlying the regulation of cardiac L-type Ca2+ channels (LTCC) by intracellular signaling pathways. In 2010, Professor Yamada came across a paper written by Prof. William A. Catterall's group describing that casein kinase can phosphorylate the main subunit of cardiac LTCC (Fuller, M.D. et al. (2010) Sci Signal: ra70). They started efforts to seek for the physiological significance of this phenomenon and fortunately found that it mediates the positive inotropic effect of angiotensin II only found in the neonatal period (Kashihara T. et al. (2017) J. Physiol. (Lond.) 595: 4207-4225). With this information, the research group changed their style and decided to serve a long-lasting unmet medical need, therapeutics specific for pediatric heart failure, by utilizing this pathway.

Children, especially those before weaning are not "miniture adults". They are in a so-called 'critical period' of life and thus, vulnerable but at the same time, formidably robust. Therefore, it may be sometimes more appropriate to develop drugs for children not only by extrapolating scientific and medical knowledge regarding adults to infants and children but by scrutinizing druggable targets underlying their robustness. Professor Yamada states that it was difficult "To gain lines of evidence against todays' scientific and medical dogma that angiotensin II and its type 1 receptors are a common cause of almost all cardiovascular and renal diseases."

The renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system was discovered more than a hundred years ago. Its importance in the mammalian perinatal period had been established by the end of the 20th century but had been almost completely forgotten mainly because of the great success of inhibitors of this system in adult medicine. The research group at Shinshu University School of Medicine and Institute of Biomedical Sciences fortunately succeed in digging up this valuable "fossil" in basic research work.

Professor Yamada sends a message on behalf of the group regarding their findings to "clinical practitioners to let us develop and dispatch novel therapeutics specific for pediatric heart failure together to all children worldwide. There is a Japanese word "onko-chishin" that means to study the past to learn new things. Nowadays, science is progressing at an astonishing speed. But it may be advisable that we sometimes stop and look back on the past. If you found something very old but shining in the darkness, it might be the very essence of nature."

A UC Davis Health pediatric team presented a powerful case series of three teenagers who had unexplained breathing problems during the COVID-19 pandemic. The series highlighted the similarities between e-cigarette, or vaping, product use-associated lung injury (EVALI) and COVID-19 symptoms and manifestations.

"EVALI and COVID-19 share many symptoms but have very different treatment plans," said Kiran Nandalike, associate professor of pediatrics and lead author on the study. "For this reason, providers caring for pediatric patients with unexplained respiratory failure should consider EVALI and ask for relevant smoking/vaping history."

Teenagers facing COVID-19 and EVALI

As of February 2020, over 2758 EVALI hospitalized cases and 64 deaths have been reported in the U.S. More than half of those hospitalized were younger than 25 years old.

According to Nandalike, most adolescents who vape using recreational marijuana get the substance from friends, family members or unlicensed dealers. The unregulated access to these products is linked to continued outbreaks in this underage population. E-cigarette products obtained through these informal channels may contain vitamin E acetate, an additive strongly connected to lung injury.

Recent studies indicate that COVID-19-related practices may increase vaping among teenagers. Isolation from the school environment, loneliness, stress of the current pandemic, and lack of social support could increase the potential for substance use. This risk is especially true for young people with preexisting mental health conditions.

EVALI and COVID-19 common symptoms

There are many similarities between EVALI and COVID-19 symptoms, laboratory results and radiologic findings. Common symptoms include fever, cough, nausea, abdominal pain and diarrhea. Both conditions also show bilateral ground glass opacities in chest imaging.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, it is easy to miss EVALI diagnosis. The patients in the case series showed up with fever, nausea and cough. They had fast heart rate, rapid breathing and low oxygen levels in their blood. Their laboratory results pointed to inflammation commonly seen in COVID-19, with higher white blood cells (WBC) count and elevated inflammation. Their chest imaging revealed non-specific ground glass opacities. While everything indicated COVID-19 infection, their SARS-CoV-2 testing returned negative.

The providers probed the teenagers and their parents for any history of vaping in the last 90 days. When the patients shared information about recent vaping, the providers could diagnose EVALI and treat them successfully with corticosteroids.

Daphne Darmawan, pediatric resident at UC Davis Health and first author of the study, is looking at the clinical course and long-term health impacts of teenagers with EVALI. She is working on developing protocols to help with the early identification and treatment of these cases. Starting steroids early for patients with EVALI can be lifesaving and may minimize the duration of hospital stay.

"To help reduce risk of EVALI recurrence, providers would recommend vaping cessation counseling to patients and close outpatient monitoring," Nandalike said.

The antiviral drug remdesivir is not suggested for patients admitted to hospital with covid-19, regardless of how severely ill they are, because there is currently no evidence that it improves survival or the need for ventilation, say a WHO Guideline Development Group (GDG) panel of international experts in The BMJ today.

The recommendation is part of a living guideline, developed by the World Health Organization with the methodological support of MAGIC Evidence Ecosystem Foundation, to provide trustworthy guidance on the management of covid-19 and help doctors make better decisions with their patients.

Living guidelines are useful in fast moving research areas like covid-19 because they allow researchers to update previously vetted and peer reviewed evidence summaries as new information becomes available.

Remdesivir has received worldwide attention as a potentially effective treatment for severe covid-19 and is increasingly used to treat patients in hospital. But its role in clinical practice has remained uncertain.

Today's recommendation is based on a new evidence review comparing the effects of several drug treatments for covid-19. It includes data from four international randomised trials involving over 7,000 patients hospitalised for covid-19.

After thoroughly reviewing this evidence, the WHO GDG expert panel, which includes experts from around the world including four patients who have had covid-19, concluded that remdesivir has no meaningful effect on mortality or on other important outcomes for patients, such as the need for mechanical ventilation or time to clinical improvement.

The panel acknowledged that the certainty of evidence is low and said the evidence did not prove that remdesivir has no benefit; rather, there is no evidence based on currently available data that it does improve important patient outcomes.

But given the remaining possibility of important harm, as well as the relatively high cost and resource implications associated with remdesivir (it must be given intravenously), they judged this to be an appropriate recommendation.

They also support continued enrolment into trials evaluating remdesivir, especially to provide higher certainty of evidence for specific groups of patients.

In a linked feature article, US journalist Jeremy Hsu asks what now for remdesivir, given that it is unlikely to be the lifesaving drug for the masses that many have hoped for?

The full story of remdesivir will not be known until manufacturer Gilead releases the full clinical study reports, writes Hsu, but much will depend on whether future studies are designed to test remdesivir's potential effectiveness.

In the meantime, he says alternative treatments, such as the well known, cheap, and widely available corticosteroid dexamethasone, that has been proved to reduce mortality among severely ill covid-19 patients, are now impacting discussions about remdesivir's cost-effectiveness.

DALLAS - Nov. 19, 2020 - Pregnant women who test positive for COVID-19 and their newborn babies have a low risk of developing severe symptoms, according to a new study from UT Southwestern.

The study, published today in JAMA Network Open, shows that 95 percent of women who tested positive for COVID-19 during pregnancy had no adverse outcomes. Additionally, the study found that the virus was transmitted to the fetus in just 3 percent of the cases.

"Our findings are that approximately 5 percent of all delivered women with COVID-19 infection develop severe or critical illness. Five percent is a major concern when a pandemic is making its way through a population; however, it's lower than previous reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)," says Emily Adhikari, M.D., an obstetrician, gynecologist, and first author of the study. "Most women with asymptomatic or mild infection will be relieved to know that their babies are unlikely to be affected by the virus."

The researchers set out to measure how COVID-19 infection impacts pregnancy outcomes, how severely ill a pregnant woman gets, placental pathology, and neonatal infections by studying women at Parkland Health and Hospital System - a high-volume prenatal clinic system and public hospital affiliated with UT Southwestern. The team followed 3,374 mothers, 252 of whom tested positive for the virus during pregnancy, from March through August. The group was predominantly Hispanic (75 percent), followed by Black (18 percent) and white (4 percent). There were no significant differences between the expectant mothers in age, number of previous births, BMI, or diabetes.

The pandemic has hit the Hispanic population in Dallas particularly hard. "While they make up 75 percent of the population of over 12,000 women delivering annually at our institution, women of Hispanic ethnicity made up over 90 percent of COVID-19-positive women. The higher frequency among Hispanic women in our study is consistent with data on racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 cases and deaths reported nationwide," says Adhikari, medical director of perinatal infectious diseases at Parkland Memorial Hospital and an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology.

Among the 252 women who tested positive, 239, or 95 percent, were asymptomatic or had mild symptoms at first. Six of those women subsequently developed severe or critical COVID-19 pneumonia. Comparing mothers with and without COVID-19 diagnosed any time during pregnancy, the COVID-19 virus did not increase the risk of adverse outcomes, including preterm birth, preeclampsia with severe features, or cesarean delivery for abnormal fetal heart rate. However, preterm birth was increased among mothers who developed severe or critical illness before reaching 37 weeks in their pregnancy, and it's hard to predict who that will be. The study found that diabetes may be one factor that increases the risk for severe or critical maternal illness.

Pathologists who examined placentas - the organ that functions as the source of oxygen and nourishment for unborn babies - found that the majority were unaffected by the virus.

COVID-19 mothers who were outpatients were followed using telemedicine with a scripted evaluation of symptoms and protocol-based management, including instructions for referral to the emergency department for worsening respiratory symptoms or obstetric concerns. Telemedicine has been a vital tool used by many UT Southwestern and Parkland physicians during the pandemic.

Further study is needed to understand whether maternal infection with COVID-19 impacts long-term maternal or infant health.

"Our goal is to develop evidence-based guidelines for the majority of pregnant women who are recovering at home," Adhikari says. "It's difficult to predict who will become severely ill, which is why prevention strategies such as hand-washing, masking, and social distancing are still extremely important."

Dr Zi Yang MENG from Division of Physics and Astronomy, Faculty of Science, the University of Hong Kong (HKU), is pursuing a new paradigm of quantum material research that combines theory, computation and experiment in a coherent manner. Recently, he teamed up with Dr Wei LI from Beihang University, Professor Yang QI from Fudan University, Professor Weiqiang YU from Renmin University and Professor Jinsheng WEN from Nanjing University to untangle the puzzle of Nobel Prize-winning theory Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) phase.

Not long ago, Dr Meng, Dr Li and Dr Qi achieved accurate model calculations of a topological KT phase for a rare-earth magnet TmMgGaO4 (TMGO), by performing computation on the Supercomputers Tianhe 1 and Tianhe 2 (see supplementary information); this time, the team overcame several conceptual and experimental difficulties, and succeeded in discovering a topological KT phase and its transitions in the same rare-earth magnet via highly sensitive nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and magnetic susceptibility measurements, means of detecting magnetic responses of material. The former one is more sensitive in detecting small magnetic moments while the latter one can facilitate easy implementation of the experiment.

These experimental results, further explained the quantum Monte Carlo computations of the team, have completed the half-a-century pursuit of the topological KT phase in quantum magnetic material, which eventually leads to the Nobel Physics Prize of 2016. The research findings are recently published in renowned academic journal Nature Communications.

KT phase of TMGO is detected

Quantum materials are becoming the cornerstone for the continuous prosperity of human society, including the next-generation AI computing chips that go beyond Moore's law, the high-speed Maglev train, and the topological unit for quantum computers, etc. However, these complicated systems require modern computational techniques and advanced analysis to reveal their microscopic mechanism. Thanks to the fast development of the supercomputing platforms all over the world, scientists and engineers are now making great use of these facilities to discover better materials that benefit our society. Nevertheless, computation cannot stand alone.

In the present investigation, experimental techniques for handling extreme conditions such as low temperature, high sensitivity and strong magnetic field, are required to verify the predictions and make discoveries. These equipments and technologies are acquired and organised by the team members coherently.

The research is inspired by the KT phase theory discovered by V Berezinskii, J Michael Kosterlitz and David J Thouless, of which the latter two are laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2016 (together with F Duncan M Haldane) for their theoretical discoveries of topological phase, and phase transitions of matter. Topology is a new way of classifying and predicting the properties of materials, and now becoming the mainstream of quantum material research and industry, with broad potential applications in quantum computer, lossless transmission of signals for information technology, etc. Back to 1970s, Kosterlitz and Thouless had predicted the existence of topological phase, hence named after them as the KT phase in quantum magnetic materials. Although such phenomena have been found in superfluids and superconductors, KT phase has yet been realised in bulk magnetic material, and is eventually discovered in the present work.

To detect such interesting KT phase in a magnetic material is not easy, as usually the 3-dimensional coupling would render magnetic material to develop ordered phase but not topological phase at low temperature, and even if there exists a temperature window for the KT phase, highly sensitive measurement technique is required to be able to pick up the unique fluctuation pattern of the topological phase, and that is the reason why such phase has been enthusiastically perused, but its experimental discovery has defied many previous attempts. After some initial failures, the team member discovered that the NMR method under in-plane magnetic fields, do not disturb the low-energy electronic states as the in-plane moment in TMGO is mostly multipolar with little interference on magnetic field and intrinsic magnetic moments of the material, which consequently allows the intricated topological KT fluctuations in the phase to be detected sensitively.

As shown in Fig.1, NMR spin-lattice relaxation rate measurements indeed revealed a KT phase sandwiched between a paramagnetic phase at temperature T > T_u and an antiferromagnetic phase at temperature T

This finding indicates a stable phase (KT phase) of TMGO, which serves as a concrete example of topological state of matter in crystalline material, might have potential applications in future information technologies. With its unique properties of topological excitations and strong magnetic fluctuations, many interesting research and potential applications with topological quantum materials can be pursued from here.

Dr Meng said: "It will eventually bring benefits to the society, such that quantum computers, lossless transmission of signals for information technology, faster and more energy-saving high-speed trains, all these dreams could gradually come true from quantum material research."

"Our approach, combining the state-of-art experimental techniques with unbiased quantum many-body computation schemes, enables us to directly compare experimental data to accurate numerical results with key theoretical predictions quantitatively, providing a bridge way to connect theoretical, numerical and experimental studies, the new paradigm set up by the joint team will certainly lead to more profound and impactful discoveries in quantum materials." He added.

The supercomputers used in computations and simulations

The powerful supercomputers Tianhe-1 and Tianhe-2 in China used in the computations are among the world's fastest supercomputers and ranked No.1 in 2010 and 2014 respectively in the TOP500 list (https://www.top500.org/). Their next-generation Tianhe-3 is expected to be in usage in 2021 and will be world first exaFLOPS scale supercomputer. The quantum Monte Carlo and tensor network simulations performed by the joint team make use of the Tianhe supercomputers and requires the parallel simulations for thousands of hours on thousands of CPUs, it will take more than 20 years to finish if performed in common PC.

How do people experience time alone and time with others? Findings from a new Bar-Ilan University study reveal the intricacies of people's experiences in these basic social conditions.

The study used a unique approach of analyzing self-generated text from more than 1,700 participants who performed a sentence-completion task regarding their experience alone and their social experience when in the company of others. This approach shed light on people's perceptions when free to express themselves without being bound to specific questions.

The results of the study, just published in the journal Social Psychology, showed that when people think about themselves with others, they are more focused on the present, and less focused on the past or the future than when they think about themselves alone. Furthermore, when with others, more anxiety and anger, but less sadness, are expressed than when alone.

Time alone is reflected in people's thoughts as an opportunity to think about past experiences and future plans, to relax from the stress of social interactions, and to engage in self-selected leisure activities.

"Being alone and being with others are represented in people's minds as qualitatively different experiences, each contributing to the formation of an integrated self," says Dr. Liad Uziel, of the Department of Psychology at Bar-Ilan University, who conducted the study. "One needs a combination of constructive alone and social experiences, as each type of social setting contributes much-needed, unique advantages" he adds.

For those facing current lockdowns alone, Uziel says the present findings, which highlight potential constructive effects of time alone, indicate that this could also be an opportunity for personal growth.

It is something quite common in physics: electrons leave a certain material, they fly away and then they are measured. Some materials emit electrons, when they are irradiated with light. These electrons are then called "photoelectrons". In materials research, so-called "Auger electrons" also play an important role - they can be emitted by atoms if an electron is first removed from one of the inner electron shells. But now scientists at TU Wien (Vienna) have succeeded in explaining a completely different type of electron emission, which can occur in carbon materials such as graphite. This electron emission had been known for about 50 years, but its cause was still unclear.

Strange electrons without explanation

"Many researchers have already wondered about this," says Prof. Wolfgang Werner from the Institute of Applied Physics. "There are materials that consist of atomic layers that are held together only by weak Van der Waals forces, for example graphite. And it was discovered that this type of graphite emits very specific electrons, which all have exactly the same energy, namely 3.7 electron volts."

No known physical mechanism could explain this electron emission. But at least the measured energy gave an indication of where to look: "If these atomically thin layers lie on top of each other, a certain electron state can form in between," says Wolfgang Werner. "You can imagine it as an electron that is continuously reflected back and forth between the two layers until at some point it penetrates the layer and escapes to the outside."

The energy of these states actually fits well with the observed data - so people assumed that there is some connection, but that alone was no explanation. "The electrons in these states should not actually reach the detector," says Dr. Alessandra Bellissimo, one of the authors of the current publication. "In the language of quantum physics one would say: The transition probability is just too low."

Skipping cords and symmetry

To change this, the internal symmetry of the electron states must be broken. "You can imagine this like rope skipping," says Wolfgang Werner. "Two children hold a long rope and move the end points. Actually, both create a wave that would normally propagate from one side of the rope to the other. But if the system is symmetrical and both children behave the same way, then the rope just moves up and down. The wave maximum always remains at the same place. We don't see any wave movement to the left or right, this is called a standing wave". But if the symmetry is broken because, for example, one of the children moves backwards, the situation is different - then the dynamics of the rope changes and the maximum position of the oscillation moves.

Such symmetry breaks can also occur in the material. Electrons leave their place and start moving, leaving a "hole" behind. Such electron-hole pairs disturb the symmetry of the material, and thus it can happen that the electrons suddenly have the properties of two different states simultaneously. In this way, two advantages can be combined: On the one hand, there is a large number of such electrons, and on the other hand, their probability of reaching the detector is sufficiently high. In a perfectly symmetrical system, only one or the other would be possible. According to quantum mechanics, they can do both at the same time, because the symmetry refraction causes the two states to "merge" (hybridize).

"In a sense, it is teamwork between the electrons reflected back and forth between two layers of the material and the symmetry-breaking electrons," says Prof. Florian Libisch from the Institute of Theoretical Physics. "Only when you look at them together can you explain that the material emits electrons of exactly this energy of 3.7 electron volts."

Carbon materials such as the type of graphite analyzed in this research work play a major role today - for example, the 2D material graphene, but also carbon nanotubes of tiny diameter, which also have remarkable properties. "The effect should occur in very different materials - wherever thin layers are held together by weak Van der Waals forces," says Wolfgang Werner. "In all these materials, this very special type of electron emission, which we can now explain for the first time, should play an important role".

The largest freshwater bacterium, Achromatium oxaliferum, is highly flexible in its requirements, as researchers led by the IGB have now discovered: It lives in places that differ extremely in environmental conditions such as hot springs and ice water. The bacterial strains from the different ecosystems do not differ in their gene content, but rather chose what to express. The adaptation is probably achieved by a process which is unique to these bacteria: only relevant genes are enriched in the genomes and transcribed, while others are archived in cell compartments.

Achromatium is special in many respects: It is 30,000 times larger than its "normal" counterparts that live in water and owing to its calcite deposits it is visible to the naked eye. It has several hundred chromosomes, which are most likely not identical. This makes Achromatium the only known bacterium with several different genomes.

The researchers have analyzed sequence data bases of sediments and show that Achromatium is universal. It is found in a broad range of environments: in shallow waters as well as in the ocean at a depth of 4000 metres. It can be found in hot springs and ice-cold water; in acidic and alkaline environments as well as in hypersaline waters.

Typically, such a wide range of environmental conditions would result in the establishment of new species, well-adapted to their specific environment. However, Achromatium defies this expectation. Though, equipped with equal functionality, the bacteria in the various ecosystems differ in their gene expression patterns by transcribing only relevant genes.

Compartments formed by folded cell membrane might serve as gene archives

"We suggest environmental adaptation in Achromatium occurs by increasing the copy number of relevant genes across the cell's hundreds of chromosomes. This is in stark contrast to other bacteria which eventually lose irrelevant genes. So the high number of genomes makes the versatility possible", explains Dr. Danny Ionescu, leader of the study from IGB.

Achromatium is full of calcium carbonate crystals that are located between the outer and cytoplasmic membranes. These crystals fold the cytoplasmic membrane forming pockets of cytoplasm which the researchers suggest to hold clusters of chromosomes. They hypothesize that these clusters enable Achromatium to "archive" genes of no immediate use.

No copy of the mother cell: each bacterium is unique

"The functional versatility of Achromatium and its genomic features contradict what we know for other bacteria, for example the concept of bacterial species and the driving forces of bacterial speciation. In Achromatium, mother and daughter cells are likely not identical and each cell is unique holding a multitude of genes, some of which are not essential for life in a particular habitat. Therefore, each cell keeps the potential to rapidly adapt to changing or new environmental conditions", concludes Professor Hans-Peter Grossart, co-author of the study and head of the aquatic microbial ecology group at IGB.

In normal circumstances, particles will follow well-established random motions as they diffuse through liquids and gases. Yet in some types of system, this behaviour can be disrupted - meaning the diffusion motions of particles are no longer influenced by the outcomes of chains of previous events. Through research published in EPJ E, Bernhard Mitterwallner, a Ph.D. student in the team of Roland Netz at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, has developed new theories detailing how these unusual dynamics can be reproduced in generalised mathematical models.

The team's approach could enable researchers to learn more about behaviours including the transport of biological cells, and the motions of 'active' materials - whose particles harvest energy in their surrounding environments to propel themselves forwards. Typically, these diffusion characteristics only appear briefly as systems transition between stable states - but under the right conditions, they can persist over far longer timescales. Researchers can study this effect by introducing a 'memory term' into their calculations, which can account for the influences of past events on different timescales. Several studies have now used this principle to explore how this 'transient persistent motion' can be captured in models of viscoelastic media - which can resist deformation when stress is applied.

The authors took a more general approach in their study; basing their calculations around an equation of motion which offered a useful framework for describing unconventional diffusion behaviours. When adding a memory term into the equation, their models give rise to transient persistent motion in a range of different systems, which had not been explored in previous studies. The team's results could now enable researchers to accurately model diffusion behaviours in a broader range of situations - and could be particularly useful for studies of advanced materials which respond to their surrounding environments.

Pairs of antibodies may be more effective than single antibodies at preventing and treating COVID-19, according to a new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and The Rockefeller University in New York. The study, published November 19 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), also suggests that in addition to blocking SARS-CoV-2’s entry into cells, the antibodies may combat the virus by enlisting various types of white blood cells to fight the infection.

Human antibodies that neutralize SARS-CoV-2 hold great potential for preventing and treating COVID-19, and researchers have identified several potent antibodies that bind to the spike protein on the virus’s surface, thereby preventing it from mediating the virus’s entry into cells.

“However, the neutralizing activity of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 has primarily been tested using cells cultured in the laboratory, and how these in vitro results translate to protection in animals or humans has not been determined,” says Timothy P. Sheahan, an assistant professor at the Gillings School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Research teams led by Sheahan and co-lead author Michel C. Nussenzweig, who is a professor, investigator, and senior physician at The Rockefeller University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, tested the ability of several human antibodies to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection in mice or hamsters. Surprisingly, the researchers found that certain antibodies were more potent than expected. Some antibodies that were relatively poor at blocking viral entry into cultured cells were much more effective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection in rodents. The researchers determined that this is partly because, in addition to blocking viral entry, the antibodies can activate various types of white blood cells. These “antibody effector functions” help the immune system target the virus and/or virally infected cells.

Sheahan and Nussenzweig’s team also found that antibodies may be even more effective when used in combination with each other. Pairs of antibodies that target slightly different parts of the viral spike protein could successfully prevent or treat SARS-CoV-2 infection in mice and hamsters at much lower doses than single-antibody treatments. This is a particularly attractive approach because targeting multiple parts of the spike protein reduces the chance of the virus mutating and becoming resistant to antibody treatments.

“Some antibody combinations can be effective for prevention and early therapy of SARS-CoV-2 even at relatively low doses,” Sheahan says. “Overall, our data support the idea that specific combinations of antibodies with the ability to activate immune cells should be developed for optimal protection and therapy against SARS-CoV-2.”