Tech

People with a history of positive social interactions with Chinese people were less likely to support discriminatory anti-Chinese policies as Covid-19 reached the UK - according to new research from the University of East Anglia.

Researchers studied how UK residents felt towards the Chinese community as Covid-19 reached our shores, and how these feelings might relate to British support for anti-Chinese policies.

In the coming years and decades, various nations want to explore the moon, and plan to send astronauts there again for this purpose. But on our inhospitable satellite, space radiation poses a significant risk. The Apollo astronauts carried so-called dosimeters with them, which performed rudimentary measurements of the total radiation exposure during their entire expedition to the moon and back again.

What The Study Did: This systematic review and meta-analysis evaluates current evidence on the susceptibility to and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 among children and adolescents compared with adults.

Authors: Russell M. Viner, Ph.D., of the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in London, United Kingdom, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.4573)

Translational research aims to speed research breakthroughs into the clinic. And yet, training for basic scientists and clinicians too often remains siloed, leading to divergent cultures and a loss of opportunity for cross-disciplinary collaboration.

In a special session addressing global mental health before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic held at the ESCMID Conference on Coronavirus Disease (ECCVID) Professor Vikram Patel H(arvard Medical School, USA) will present a new review of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global mental health.

He will explain: "Mental health problems were already a leading cause of suffering and the most neglected health issue globally before the pandemic. The pandemic will, through worsening the social determinants of mental health, fuel a worsening of this crisis,"

A team of chemists from RUDN University created an antibacterial coating for food products. The mixture consists of two components that are safe for human health and form a thin, non-toxic, and biodegradable film. The film has no color or flavor and can increase the shelf life of different products 2.5 to 8 times. The results of the study were published in the Food Packaging and Shelf Life journal.

A Dartmouth-led study, published in the journal Pediatrics, offers new details about pediatric mental health boarding in emergency departments across the country, a problem that has steadily increased in the last 10 years and been made worse by a shortage of psychiatric resources.

Boarding refers to the practice of admitting children and adolescents--who are in need of inpatient mental health treatment--to emergency departments or inpatient medical units while they wait for a psychiatric bed to become available in the hospital.

Wildfires have been burning across the state of California for weeks - some of them becoming larger complexes as different fires merge. One of those was the August Complex Fire, which reportedly began as 37 distinct fires caused by lightning strikes in northern California on Aug. 17. That fire is still burning over a month later.

Researchers at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering have made new discoveries on the effects of temperature on sustainable polymers. Their findings may help the industry to produce plastics that are better for the environment.

"Plastics made from petroleum, a non-renewable resource, remain too long in our land and water when discarded," said Rufina Alamo, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering. "We are researching how sustainable polymers are heated and cooled so we may produce more 'environmentally friendly' plastics."

Below please find a summary and link(s) of new coronavirus-related content published today in Annals of Internal Medicine. The summary below is not intended to substitute for the full article as a source of information. A collection of coronavirus-related content is free to the public at http://go.annals.org/coronavirus.

More data needed before the National Institutes of Health COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel can recommend for or against convalescent plasma for the treatment of COVID-19

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept around the world early this year, shortages of protective equipment such as N95 masks left healthcare workers little choice but to reuse the masks they had - increasing the risk of infection for both them and their patients.

People with pale coloured melanomas are more likely to have a gene mutation associated with albinism, University of Queensland research has found.

Study lead author Dr Jenna Rayner said albinism, a rare genetic disorder affecting one in 10,000 people, prevented brown pigment from being synthesised in the body and led to fair hair and extremely pale skin that was easily sunburned and prone to skin cancers.

"Albinism develops when there are two mutated genes, so people with one mutation usually don't know they have it," Dr Rayner said.

If you've eaten vegan burgers that taste like meat or used synthetic collagen in your beauty routine - both products that are "grown" in the lab - then you've benefited from synthetic biology. It's a field rife with potential, as it allows scientists to design biological systems to specification, such as engineering a microbe to produce a cancer-fighting agent. Yet conventional methods of bioengineering are slow and laborious, with trial and error being the main approach.

The largest-ever study of tree rings from Norilsk in the Russian Arctic has shown that the direct and indirect effects of industrial pollution in the region and beyond are far worse than previously thought.

An international team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, has combined ring width and wood chemistry measurements from living and dead trees with soil characteristics and computer modelling to show that the damage done by decades of nickel and copper mining has not only devastated local environments, but also affected the global carbon cycle.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers spotted a pair of massive baby stars growing in salty cosmic soup. Each star is shrouded by a gaseous disk which includes molecules of sodium chloride, commonly known as table salt, and heated water vapor. Analyzing the radio emissions from the salt and water, the team found that the disks are counter rotating. This is the second detection of salt around massive young stars, promising that salt is an excellent marker to explore the immediate surroundings of giant baby stars.