Lifeboat Foundation

Elucidating human contact networks could help predict and prevent the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and future pandemic threats. A new study from Scripps Research scientists and collaborators points to which public health protocols worked to mitigate the spread of COVID-19—and which ones didn’t.

In the study, published online in Cell on December 14, 2023, the Scripps Research-led team of scientists investigated the efficacy of different mandates—including stay-at-home measures, social distancing and travel restrictions —at preventing local and regional transmission during different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic.

They found that local transmission was driven by the amount of travel between locations, not by how geographically nearby they were. The study also revealed that the partial closure of the U.S.-Mexico border was ineffective at preventing cross-border transmission of the virus. These findings, in combination with ongoing genomic surveillance, could help guide public health policy to prevent future pandemics and mitigate the new “endemic” phase of COVID-19.

University of Wisconsin–Madison engineers have used a spray coating technology to produce a new workhorse material that can withstand the harsh conditions inside a fusion reactor.

The advance, detailed in a paper published recently in the journal Physica Scripta, could enable more efficient compact fusion reactors that are easier to repair and maintain.

“The fusion community is urgently looking for new manufacturing approaches to economically produce large plasma-facing components in fusion reactors,” says Mykola Ialovega, a postdoctoral researcher in nuclear engineering and engineering physics at UW–Madison and lead author on the paper. “Our technology shows considerable improvements over current approaches. With this research, we are the first to demonstrate the benefits of using cold spray coating technology for fusion applications.”

Johns Hopkins researchers have identified minuscule particles that supercharge therapeutic cancer vaccines, which train the immune system to attack tumors. These new lipid nanoparticles—tiny structures made of fat—not only stimulate a two-pronged immune system response that enhances the body’s ability to fight cancer but also make vaccines more effective in targeting tumors.

“This research marks a pivotal turning point in our understanding of how lipid nanoparticles can be harnessed to optimize anticancer immunity,” said Hai-Quan Mao, director of Johns Hopkins’ Institute for NanoBioTechnology and professor in the Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “Our findings unlock new avenues for enhancing the efficacy of RNA-based treatments for cancer and infectious diseases.”

The team’s results appear in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

In a novel study, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have introduced LoGoFunc, an advanced computational tool that predicts pathogenic gain and loss-of-function variants across the genome.

Unlike current methods that predominantly focus on loss of function, LoGoFunc distinguishes among different types of harmful mutations, offering potentially valuable insights into diverse disease outcomes. The findings are described in Genome Medicine.

Genetic variations can alter protein function, with some mutations boosting activity or introducing new functions (gain of function), while others diminish or eliminate function (loss of function). These changes can have significant implications for human health and the treatment of disease.

A study published in the journal Physical Review Letters by researchers in Japan solves a long-standing problem in quantum physics by redefining the uncertainty principle.

Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a key and surprising feature of quantum mechanics, and he can thank his hay fever for it. Miserable in Berlin in the summer of 1925, the young German physicist vacationed on the remote, rocky island of Helgoland, in the North Sea off the northern German coast. His allergies improved, and he was able to continue his work trying to understand the intricacies of Bohr’s model of the atom, developing tables of internal atomic properties, such as energy, position and momentum.

Continue reading “Extending the uncertainty principle by using an unbounded operator” »

Have you ever felt you were being watched? Almost everybody has. It’s a scientific phenomenon that is universal.

More than 80 per cent of women, and nearly three-quarters of men, questioned in Britain, the U. S. and Scandinavia, say they have experienced it — turning around to find someone staring at them, or looking at someone from behind who turned and looked back.

Numerous studies have proved that the sensation can be reproduced under rigorous laboratory conditions. Those who watch people for a living, such as private detectives and celebrity photographers, have no doubt it’s real. Professionals who use long-range lenses, including paparazzi and snipers, know the moment when the target senses their gaze and looks straight at them.

All living systems perpetuate themselves via growth in or on the body, followed by splitting, budding, or birth. We find that synthetic multicellular assemblies can also replicate kinematically by moving and compressing dissociated cells in their environment into functional self-copies. This form of perpetuation, previously unseen in any organism, arises spontaneously over days rather than evolving over millennia. We also show how artificial intelligence methods can design assemblies that postpone loss of replicative ability and perform useful work as a side effect of replication. This suggests other unique and useful phenotypes can be rapidly reached from wild-type organisms without selection or genetic engineering, thereby broadening our understanding of the conditions under which replication arises, phenotypic plasticity, and how useful replicative machines may be realized.

Simulations of binary neutron star mergers suggest that future detectors will distinguish between different models of hot nuclear matter.

Researchers used supercomputer simulations to explore how neutron star mergers affect gravitational waves, finding a key relationship with the remnant’s temperature. This study aids future advancements in detecting and understanding hot nuclear matter.

Exploring neutron star mergers and gravitational waves.

There has been a breakthrough when it comes to whale language that gives us a huge window into their communication.