Findings independent of age, sex, general health and lifestyle. Widespread pain is linked to a heightened risk of all types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, and stroke, finds research published online in the journal Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine. And this association is independent of potentially influential factors, such as age, general health, and lifestyle, the findings indicate. Widespread pain is a common subtype of chronic pain that may reflect musculoskeletal disorders....

However, those protections could backfire during hot-weather events, a time when heart attacks are already more likely. A new study published on August 1 in the journal Nature Cardiovascular Research found that, among people suffering non-fatal heart attacks associated with hot weather, an outsize portion are taking these heart medications. “Patients taking these two medications have higher risk,” said Kai Chen, an assistant professor in the Yale School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology (Environmental Health) and first author of the study....

Researchers used a computer simulation to show how a flushing toilet can create a cloud of virus-containing aerosol droplets that is large and widespread and lasts long enough that the droplets could be breathed in by others. With recent studies showing the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 can survive in the human digestive tract and show up in feces of the infected, this raises the possibility the disease could be transmitted with the use of toilets....

Their very small size is what makes PM2.5 so dangerous. Easily inhalable, they accumulate inside the lungs, where they severely increase the risk of cancer and other deadly diseases. Yet it is the poor that are especially vulnerable to PM2.5 and die prematurely. “Most deaths are in developing countries, and without international coordination the situation will worsen,” said Dr. Keisuke Nansai, Research Director at the Material Flow Innovation Research Program of the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan, who had been a visiting professor at ISA of the University of Sydney, and one of the lead authors of the study....

“Automotive cybersecurity is an area we don’t understand well in the social sciences. While there are groups of computer scientists and engineers digging into some of the issues, the social aspects are extremely relevant and under-examined,” said Thomas Holt, professor of criminal justice at MSU. “As the technology gets a greater market share, it’s critical to get ahead of the curve before there are issues we can’t rein in.” As vehicles become smarter and more connected to WiFi networks, hackers will have more opportunities to breach vehicle systems....

The discovery not only identified a potential future risk for neurodegenerative conditions in people who have had COVID-19, but suggested also a possible treatment. The UQ team was led by Professor Trent Woodruff and Dr. Eduardo Albornoz Balmaceda from UQ’s School of Biomedical Sciences, and virologists from the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences. “We studied the effect of the virus on the brain’s immune cells, ‘microglia’ which are the key cells involved in the progression of brain diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s,” Professor Woodruff said....

Lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines are allowing us to feel optimistic again, after more than a year of anxiety and tragedy. But vaccines are only one side of the coin – we also need treatments that can prevent severe disease after someone has been infected. In the past year, there has been significant progress in developing effective antibody-based therapies, and three drugs are currently available through emergency use authorization (EUA) by the Food and Drug Administration....

Liquid and solid – most people are unaware that there can be states in between. Liquid crystals are representative of one such state. While the molecules in liquids swim around at random, neighboring molecules in liquid crystals are aligned as in regular crystal grids, but the material is still liquid. Liquid crystals are thus an example of an intermediate state that is neither really solid nor really liquid­­. They flow like a liquid, and yet their molecules are grouped in small, regularly ordered units....

From global volcanism to planet-cooling ice ages and dramatic shifts in solar radiation, the Earth’s climate has undergone some big changes. And yet for the last 3.7 billion years, life has kept on beating. Now, new research by MIT scientists confirms that the planet harbors a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range....

The discovery of The Sparkler was made using some of the first data from the James Webb Space Telescope. The Sparkler, named for its two dozen orbiting globular clusters, provides unique insight into the formation history of the Milky Way during its infancy. Globular clusters are dense collections of around a million stars. The Milky Way is currently host to around 200 globular clusters. The Sparkler can be found in the constellation of Volans in the southern sky....

Researchers have found that out of the more than 300 COVID-19 machine learning models described in scientific papers in 2020, none of them is suitable for detecting or diagnosing COVID-19 from standard medical imaging, due to biases, methodological flaws, lack of reproducibility, and ‘Frankenstein datasets.’ The team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, carried out a systematic review of scientific manuscripts — published between January 1 and October 3, 2020 — describing machine learning models that claimed to be able to diagnose or prognosticate for COVID-19 from chest radiographs (CXR) and computed tomography (CT) images....

Scientists at Stanford University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have created a 3D-printed vaccine patch that provides greater protection than a typical vaccine shot. The trick is applying the vaccine patch directly to the skin, which is full of immune cells that vaccines target. The resulting immune response from the vaccine patch was 10 times greater than vaccine delivered into an arm muscle with a needle jab, according to a study conducted in animals and published by the team of scientists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

“Our study – the first of its kind that quantifies the effect of 5G on weather prediction error – suggests that there is an impact on the accuracy of weather forecasts,” said senior author Narayan B. Mandayam, a Distinguished Professor at the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB), who also chairs the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the School of Engineering at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. The peer-reviewed study was published this month at the 2020 IEEE 5G World Forum, sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers....

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has seen a lot since August 5, 2012, when it first set its wheels inside the 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) basin of Gale Crater. Its mission: to study whether Mars had the water, chemical building blocks, and energy sources that may have supported microbial life billions of years ago. Curiosity has since journeyed more than 14 miles (23 kilometers), drilling 26 rock samples and scooping six soil samples along the way as it revealed that ancient Mars was indeed suitable for life....

An international study has discovered a coronavirus epidemic broke out in the East Asia region more than 20,000 years ago, with traces of the outbreak evident in the genetic makeup of people from that area. Professor Kirill Alexandrov from CSIRO-QUT Synthetic Biology Alliance and QUT’s Centre for Genomics and Personalised Health, is part of a team of researchers from the University of Arizona, the University of California San Francisco, and the University of Adelaide who has published their findings in the journal Current Biology....

Vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 have proved effective at reducing the number of cases of severe COVID-19. However, the emergence of new viral variants, limited distribution of the vaccine, and declining immunity are problems that drive scientists to find more efficacious treatments for the disease. “We need to understand more about underlying immunological mechanisms in order to find better treatments. There is also a need for improved diagnostics in COVID 19-patients,” says Eduardo Cardenas, postdoc researcher at the Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, and principal author of the new pilot study....

Understanding how much carbon is housed in our forests, including in the soil, is important because forests capture and store carbon, which can help mitigate climate change by reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Historically, soil carbon has been less studied because it is easier to count and measure trees than it is to measure how much carbon is in the soil. The study is one of the first to examine total carbon in an actively managed northeastern U....

The research, led by Finland’s Aalto University, developed a powerful, incredibly small spectrometer that fits on a microchip and is run by artificial intelligence. Their research was recently published in the journal Science. The study used a relatively new class of super-thin materials known as two-dimensional semiconductors, and the result is a proof of concept for a spectrometer that could be easily integrated into a number of technologies such as quality inspection platforms, security sensors, biomedical analyzers, and space telescopes....

On December 22, 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued emergency use authorization for Paxlovid for the treatment of mild-to-moderate coronavirus disease in adults and children 12 years of age and older who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19. Paxlovid is the first oral antiviral to be authorized by the FDA for use to treat COVID-19. Pharmaceutical company Pfizer has announced the results of clinical trials of its new oral antiviral treatment against COVID-19....

Dr. Ivan Valerievich Borzenets, Assistant Professor at CityU’s Department of Physics, collaborated with scientists from Germany, Japan, and Korea on achieving this breakthrough. Their research findings were published in the latest issue of the highly prestigious scientific journal Nature. What is the Kondo cloud? Kondo effect is a physical phenomenon discovered in the 1930s. In metals, as the temperature drops, electrical resistance usually drops. However, if there are some magnetic impurities in the metal, it will show the opposite result....