An inexpensive oral anti-depressant can save the lives of COVID-19 patients and cut hospital admissions by up to 30 per cent, says a study co-led by McMaster University.
McMaster researcher Ed Mills and his team treated 738 randomly selected Brazilian COVID-19 patients with fluvoxamine, with another 733 received a placebo, between Jan. 20 to Aug. 6 of this year.
Every patient receiving fluvoxamine during the trial is tracked for 28 days to determine their health outcomes and if they still need hospital treatment. They found about a 30% reduction in events among those receiving fluvoxamine and those that did not.
The McMaster Faculty of Health Sciences specializes in health related fields such as: Nursing, Medicine, and Rehabilitation Sciences.
Intelligent sensing and tele-presence robotic technology, enabling health practitioners to remotely assess a person’s physical and cognitive health from anywhere in the world, is being pioneered in research co-led at the University of Strathclyde.
The technology could aid cost-effective diagnosis, more regular monitoring and health assessments alongside assistance, especially for people living with conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive impairments.
The system was demonstrated for the first time to the UK Government Minister, Iain Stewart during a visit to the construction site of the National Robotarium, hosted at Heriot-Watt University, which is co-leading the research with Strathclyde.
“We show that focusing on genes whose expression patterns are evolutionarily conserved across species enhances our ability to learn and predict ‘genes of importance’ to growth performance for staple crops, as well as disease outcomes in animals,” explained Gloria Coruzzi, Carroll & Milton Petrie Professor in NYU’s Department of Biology and Center for Genomics and Systems Biology and the paper’s senior author.
Machine learning can pinpoint “genes of importance” that help crops to grow with less fertilizer, according to a new study published in Nature Communications. It can also predict additional traits in plants and disease outcomes in animals, illustrating its applications beyond agriculture.
Using genomic data to predict outcomes in agriculture and medicine is both a promise and challenge for systems biology. Researchers have been working to determine how to best use the vast amount of genomic data available to predict how organisms respond to changes in nutrition, toxins, and pathogen exposure—which in turn would inform crop improvement, disease prognosis, epidemiology, and public health. However, accurately predicting such complex outcomes in agriculture and medicine from genome-scale information remains a significant challenge.
In the Nature Communications study, NYU researchers and collaborators in the U.S. and Taiwan tackled this challenge using machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence used to detect patterns in data.
Disaster sciences, digital twins & artificial intelligence — craig fugate, chief emergency management officer, one concern.
Mr. Craig Fugate is the former Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA — an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security, whose primary purpose is to coordinate the response to disasters that have occurred in the United States and that overwhelm the resources of local and state authorities.)
Mr. Fugate is currently the Chief Emergency Management Officer of One Concern, (a Resilience-as-a-Service solutions company that brings disaster science together with machine learning for better decision making).
Mr. Fugate is also senior advisor at BlueDot Strategies, where he assists a range of clients with emergency management implementation strategies and crisis communications.
Mr. Fugate serves on the Board of Directors of PG&E Corp., one of the largest electric and natural gas utilities in the U.S., and on the staff at Indian River State College, serving as a strategic consultant in emergency management.
Bacteria may get a bad reputation in general, yet it’s actually generally healthy and serves an important role in many habitats, including human bodies. From supporting life on Earth to being employed in industrial and medicinal processes, bacteria have their figurative fingers in many pots — some varieties of bacteria can even filter tainted water and make it safe for human consumption.
A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IIT-BHU) has found a bacteria that can do just that — Named “microbacterium paraoxydans strain VSVM IIT (BHU)” by the scientists, it can separate toxic hexavalent chromium from water in an effective and eco-friendly manner, according to a research published in the Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering.
Hexavalent chromium is a heavy metal ion that is used in electroplating, welding, and chromate painting, among other things. It’s said to be responsible for health problems in humans like cancers, kidney and liver malfunctioning, and infertility. When compared to current approaches, the scientists believe that this bacterial strain, which can tolerate high amounts of hexavalent chromium, is particularly successful at eliminating the harmful substance from wastewater.
A decent chunk of energy usage goes towards lighting, so scientists at MIT are developing a new kind of passive lighting – glow-in-the-dark plants. In the latest experiment, the team has made them glow much brighter than the first generation plants, without harming their health.
The emerging field of “plant nanobionics” involves embedding nanoparticles into plants to give them new abilities. Past work by the MIT team has created plants that can send electrical signals when they need water, spinach that could be used to detect explosives, and watercress that glows in the dark.
As interesting as that last one was, the glow wasn’t particularly bright – about on par with those plastic glowing stars many of us stuck to our ceilings as kids. That’s a cool novelty but not much help for the ultimate use case of passive lighting.
What if you could become invisible to mosquitoes?
Live news, investigations, opinion, photos and video by the journalists of The New York Times from more than 150 countries around the world. Subscribe for coverage of U.S. and international news, politics, business, technology, science, health, arts, sports and more.
Amit Awasthi, an immunologist with the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute in India and corresponding author of the study, says he and his colleagues pursued this line of inquiry because previous research had linked high salt intake with autoimmune diseases, suggesting that increased salt stimulates immune cells. Meanwhile, tumors are well known to grow in immune-suppressive environments.
ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, CHAOFANN
In mice, a diet high in salt suppresses tumor growth—but only when gut microbes are there to stimulate immune cells, a September 10 study in Science Advances reports. The findings raise tantalizing questions about the role of diet and gut microbes in human cancers, and may point to new avenues for therapeutic development.
While the study isn’t the first to connect a high-salt diet to shrinking tumors, “[the authors] have shown a unique mechanistic role of high salt induced gut microbiome changes as the central phenomenon behind their observed anti-cancer effect,” writes Venkataswarup Tiriveedhi, a biologist at Tennessee State University who has studied the effect of salt on cancer progression but was not involved in the study, in an email to The Scientist.
This is for all who like coffee:
“To our knowledge, this is the largest study to systematically assess the cardiovascular effects of regular coffee consumption in a population without diagnosed heart disease,” said study author Dr. Judit Simon, of the Heart and Vascular Centre, Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary.
Our results suggest that regular coffee consumption is safe, as even high daily intake was not associated with adverse cardiovascular outcomes and all-cause… See More.
Your access to the latest cardiovascular news, science, tools and resources.