An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Sleeping in the dark may reduce your risk of heart disease and diabetes, a new study suggests. Exposure to overhead lighting during sleep at night, compared to sleeping in a dimly lit room, harms heart function during sleep and affects how well the body responds to insulin the next morning, researchers found. They suggest it is important for people to avoid or minimize the amount of light exposure during sleep, and that if people are able to see things well, it is probably too light. The study found that, when exposed to more light during sleep, the body went into a state of alert, with the heart rate rising and the body not being able to rest properly.

According to the scientists, people should not turn lights on, but if they do need to have some light -- for example, in the interests of safety for older adults -- it should be a dim light that is closer to the floor. The color is also important, with amber or a red/orange light less stimulating for the brain. White or blue light should be kept far away, the experts suggest. Blackout curtains or eye masks are a good option if outdoor light cannot be controlled. The study of 20 people found that insulin resistance occurred the morning after people slept in a light room. This is when cells in muscles, fat and the liver do not respond well to insulin and cannot use glucose from the blood for energy. To make up for it, the pancreas makes more insulin and, over time, blood sugar goes up. Senior study author Dr Phyllis Zee, chief of sleep medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in America, said: "The results from this study demonstrate that just a single night of exposure to moderate room lighting during sleep can impair glucose and cardiovascular regulation, which are risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome." Dr Daniela Grimaldi, a co-first author and research assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern, added: "We showed your heart rate increases when you sleep in a moderately lit room. "Even though you are asleep, your autonomic nervous system is activated. That's bad. Usually, your heart rate together with other cardiovascular parameters are lower at night and higher during the day."

The study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

During at least the first few months following a coronavirus infection, even mild cases of Covid-19 are associated with subtle tissue damage and accelerated losses in brain regions tied to the sense of smell, as well as a small loss in the brain's overall volume, a new British study finds. Having mild Covid is also associated with a cognitive function deficit. NBC: These are the striking findings of the new study led by University of Oxford investigators, one that leading Covid researchers consider particularly important because it is the first study of the disease's potential impact on the brain that is based on brain scans taken both before and after participants contracted the coronavirus. "This study design overcomes some of the major limitations of most brain-related studies of Covid-19 to date, which rely on analysis and interpretation at a single time point in people who had Covid-19," said Dr. Serena S. Spudich, a neurologist at the Yale University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.

The research, which was published Monday in Nature, also stands out because the lion's share of its participants apparently had mild Covid -- by far, the most common outcome of coronavirus infections. Most of the brain-related studies in this field have focused on those with moderate to severe Covid. Gwenaelle Douaud, an associate professor at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Oxford and the paper's lead author, said that the excess loss of brain volume she and her colleagues observed in brain scans of hundreds of British individuals is equivalent to at least one extra year of normal aging. "It is brain damage, but it is possible that it is reversible," she said. "But it is still relatively scary because it was in mildly infected people."

Two new studies involving tens of thousands of British men and women "found that, most of the time, people who ran and rode vigorously had larger brain volumes and lower risks for dementia than their less active peers," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.)

"But if people exercised in areas with even moderate levels of air pollution, the expected brain improvements from exercise almost disappeared...." [F]or the first of the new studies, published in January in Neurology, researchers at the University of Arizona and University of Southern California pulled records for 8,600 middle-aged adults enrolled in the UK Biobank. A huge trove of health and lifestyle records, the Biobank holds information on about more than 500,000 British adults, such as their ages, home locations, socioeconomic status, genomes and extensive health data. Some of the participants also completed brain scans and wore activity monitors for a week to track their exercise habits.

The researchers focused on those who had worn a monitor, had a brain scan and, according to their trackers, often exercised vigorously, such as by running, which meant they breathed heavily during workouts. The heavier you breathe, the more air pollutants you draw in. The researchers also included some people who never worked out vigorously, for comparison. Using established air quality models, they then estimated air pollution levels where the people lived and, finally, compared everyone's brain scans.

As expected, vigorous exercise was linked, in general, to sturdy brain health. Men and women who lived and presumably worked out in areas with little air pollution showed relatively large amounts of gray matter and low incidence of white matter lesions, compared to people who never exercised hard. And the more they exercised, the better their brains tended to look. But any beneficial associations almost disappeared when exercisers lived in areas with even moderate air pollution. (Levels in this study were mostly within the bounds considered acceptable for health by European and American air quality standards.) Their gray matter volume was smaller and white matter lesions more numerous than among people living and exercising away from pollution, even if their workouts were similar.

Extending these findings in a second, follow-up study published this month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the same scientists repeated aspects of this experiment with another 35,562 older UK Biobank participants, comparing people's exercise habits, local pollution levels and diagnoses of dementia, if any. The data showed the more people exercised, the less likely they were to develop dementia over time — provided their local air was clear. When it was moderately polluted, though, they had an increased long-term risk of dementia, whether they exercised or not.
The Times also got this assessment of the studies from pollution researcher Pamela Lein, a professor of neurotoxicity at the University of California, Davis.

"The observation that air pollution negates the well-established beneficial effects of exercise on brain health is alarming and increases the urgency for developing more-effective regulatory policies" related to air quality.

By combining CRISPR technology with a protein designed with artificial intelligence, it is possible to awaken individual dormant genes by disabling the chemical "off switches" that silence them. Researchers from the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle describe this finding in the journal Cell Reports. Phys.Org reports: The new technique controls gene activity without altering the DNA sequence of the genome by targeting chemical modifications that help package genes in our chromosomes and regulate their activity. Because these modifications occur not in, but on top of genes, they are called epigenetic, from the Greek epi "over" or "above" the genes. The chemical modifications that regulate gene activity are called epigenetic markers. Scientists are particularly interested in epigenetic modifications because not only do they affect gene activity in normal cell function, epigenetic markers accumulate with time, contribute to aging, and can affect of the health of future generations as we can pass them on to our children.
[...]
In the new paper, [the researchers] show that by using this technique, they were able to block PRC2 and selectively turn on four different genes. They were also able to show they could transdifferentiate induced pluripotent stem cells to placental progenitor cells by simply turning on two genes. Finally, the researchers were able to show how the technique can be used to find the location of specific PRC2-controlled regulatory regions from where individual genes are activated. The location of many of these are unknown. In this case, they identified a promoter region -- called a TATA box -- for a gene called TBX18. Although current thinking is that these promotor regions are close to the gene, within in 30 DNA base pairs, they found for this gene the promoter region was more than 500 base pairs away.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Vegetarians have a 14% lower chance of developing cancer than carnivores, according to a large study that links meat-eating to a heightened risk of the disease. A team of researchers from Oxford University analyzed data on more than 470,000 Britons and found that pescatarians had a 10% reduced risk. Compared with people who eat meat regularly -- defined as more than five times a week -- those who consumed small amounts had a 2% lower risk of developing cancer, the study found. "In this large British cohort, being a low meat-eater, fish-eater or vegetarian was associated with a lower risk of all cancer sites when compared to regular meat-eaters," the analysis found.

However, the authors, led by Cody Watling from Oxford's population health cancer epidemiology unit, made clear that their findings did not conclusively prove regular meat-eating increased the risk of cancer. Smoking and body fat could also help explain the differences found, they said. Their study of participants in the UK Biobank study also found that:

- Low meat-eaters -- who consume meat five or fewer times a week -- had a 9% lower risk of developing bowel cancer than regular meat-eaters.
- Vegetarian women were 18% less likely than those who ate meat regularly to develop postmenopausal breast cancer, though that may be due to their lower body mass index.
- Vegetarian men have a 31% lower risk of prostate cancer while among male pescatarians it is 20% lower. The researchers published their findings in the journal BMC Medicine.

UPI reports on the results of a new randomized-controlled trial of ivermectin, the "gold standard" of medical research.

UPI reports that treatment with ivermectin "failed to prevent patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 from progressing to serious illness, a study published Friday by JAMA Internal Medicine found." Of 241 patients in the study with mild to moderate symptoms treated with the medication, 52, or 22% developed severe COVID-19, the data showed. Meanwhile, 43 of 249 patients, or 17%, who received "standard" treatment, including corticosteroids and, in a handful of cases, other experimental drugs, progressed to serious illness from the virus, the researchers said.

"Essentially, our study findings have dismissed the notion of ivermectin being a 'miracle drug' against COVID-19," study co-author Dr. Steven Chee Loon Lim told UPI in an email.... In addition, study participants treated with ivermectin reported more side effects than those given other drugs, Lim said. This "raises concerns about the widespread use of this drug," he said.... 14 of the ivermectin patients developed severe diarrhea and four suffered potentially life-threatening kidney damage, the researchers said.
The new study also examined whether patients had to go on a ventilator, needed intensive care or died from their infections — and discovered "there were no significant differences between groups."

And the researchers' study also points out that two additional randomized clinical trials conducted in 2021 also "found no significant effect of ivermectin on symptom resolution and hospitalization rates." UPI now quotes Dr. Lim as saying Friday that despite early hopes for ivermectin, "large and well-designed randomized clinical trials, including ours, have consistently shown that ivermectin offered little or no significant clinical benefits.

"I believe the findings in our study will likely 'close the door' on the use of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Luc Montagnier, a French virologist who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering the virus that causes AIDS, died on Tuesday in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. He was 89. [...] The discovery of H.I.V. began in Paris on Jan. 3, 1983. That was the day that Dr. Montagnier (pronounced mon-tan-YAY), who directed the Viral Oncology Unit at the Pasteur Institute, received a piece of lymph node that had been removed from a 33-year-old man with AIDS. Dr. Willy Rozenbaum, the patient's doctor, wanted the specimen to be examined by Dr. Montagnier, an expert in retroviruses. At that point, AIDS had no known cause, no diagnostic tests and no effective treatments. Many doctors, though, suspected that the disease was triggered by a retrovirus, a kind of germ that slips into the host cell's DNA and takes control, in a reversal of the way viruses typically work; hence the name retro. From this sample Dr. Montagnier's team spotted the culprit, a retrovirus that had never been seen before. They named it L.A.V., for lymphadenopathy associated virus.

The Pasteur scientists, including Dr. Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who later shared the Nobel with Dr. Montagnier, reported their landmark finding in the May 20, 1983, issue of the journal Science, concluding that further studies were necessary to prove L.A.V. caused AIDS. The following year, the laboratory run by the American researcher Dr. Robert Gallo, at the National Institutes of Health, published four articles in one issue of Science confirming the link between a retrovirus and AIDS (for acquired immune deficiency syndrome). Dr. Gallo called his virus H.T.L.V.-III. There was some initial confusion as to whether the Montagnier team and the Gallo team had found the same virus or two different ones. When the two samples were found to have come from the same patient, scientists questioned whether Dr. Gallo had accidentally or deliberately got the virus from the Pasteur Institute. And what had once been camaraderie between those two leading scientists exploded into a global public feud, spilling out of scientific circles into the mainstream press. Arguments over the true discoverer and patent rights stunned a public that, for the most part, had been shielded from the fierce rivalries, petty jealousies and colossal egos in the research community that can disrupt scientific progress.

Dr. Montagnier sued Dr. Gallo for using his discovery for a U.S. patent. The suit was settled out of court, mediated by Jonas Salk, who had years earlier been involved in a similar battle with Albert Sabin over the polio vaccine. Both Dr. Montagnier and Dr. Gallo shared many prestigious awards, among them the 1986 Albert Lasker Medical Research Award, which honored Dr. Montagnier for discovering the virus and Dr. Gallo for linking it to AIDS. That same year, the AIDS virus, known by Americans as H.T.L.V.-III and the French as L.A.V., was officially given one name, H.I.V., for human immunodeficiency virus. The following year, with the dispute between the doctors still raging, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of France stepped into the fray and signed an agreement to share patent royalties, proclaiming both scientists co-discoverers of the virus. In 2002, the two scientists appeared to have resolved their rivalry, at least temporarily, when they announced that they would work together to develop an AIDS vaccine. Then came the announcement of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. Dr. Gallo had long been credited with linking H.I.V. to AIDS, but the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine singled out its discoverers, awarding half the prize jointly to Dr. Montagnier and Dr. Barre-Sinoussi. (The other half was awarded to Dr. Harald zur Hausen of Germany "for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer.")

A new bipartisan bill, introduced on Wednesday, could mark Congress' first step toward addressing algorithmic amplification of harmful content. The Social Media NUDGE Act, authored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), would direct the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to study "content neutral" ways to add friction to content-sharing online. From a report: The bill instructs researchers to identify a number of ways to slow down the spread of harmful content and misinformation, whether through asking users to read an article before sharing it (as Twitter has done) or other measures. The Federal Trade Commission would then codify the recommendations and mandate that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter put them into practice. "For too long, tech companies have said 'Trust us, we've got this,'" Klobuchar said in a statement on Thursday. "But we know that social media platforms have repeatedly put profits over people, with algorithms pushing dangerous content that hooks users and spreads misinformation."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Three men paralyzed in motorcycle accidents have become the first success stories for a new spinal stimulation device that could enable faster and easier recoveries than its predecessors. The men, who had no sensation or control over their legs, were able to take supported steps within 1 day of turning on the electrical stimulation, and could stroll outside with a walker after a few months, researchers report today. The nerve-stimulating device doesn't cure spinal cord injury, and it likely won't eliminate wheelchair use, but it raises hopes that the assistive technology is practical enough for widespread use.

For now, sending commands to the device is cumbersome. Users must select their desired movement on a tablet, which sends Bluetooth commands to a transmitter worn around the waist. That device must be positioned next to a 'pulse generator' implanted in the abdomen, which then activates electrodes along the spine. Setting up to use the stimulation takes 5 to 10 minutes. But the next generation of devices should allow users to activate the pulse generator by giving voice commands to a smartwatch. The company behind the technology plans to test this newer mobility system in a multisite clinical trial of 70 to 100 participants that the team hopes will lead to U.S. regulatory approval. The researchers reported their findings in the journal Nature Medicine.

sciencehabit writes: It took just one virus to cripple the world's economy and kill millions of people; yet virologists estimate that trillions of still-unknown viruses exist, many of which might be lethal or have the potential to spark the next pandemic. Now, they have a new -- and very long -- list of possible suspects to interrogate. By sifting through unprecedented amounts of existing genomic data, scientists have uncovered more than 100,000 novel viruses, including nine coronaviruses and more than 300 related to the hepatitis Delta virus, which can cause liver failure. "It's a foundational piece of work," says J. Rodney Brister, a bioinformatician at the National Center for Biotechnology Information's National Library of Medicine who was not involved in the new study. The work expands the number of known viruses that use RNA instead of DNA for their genes by an order of magnitude. It also "demonstrates our outrageous lack of knowledge about this group of organisms," says disease ecologist Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research group in New York City that is raising money to launch a global survey of viruses. The work will also help launch so-called petabyte genomics -- the analyses of previously unfathomable quantities of DNA and RNA data.

That wasn't exactly what computational biologist Artem Babaian had in mind when he was in between jobs in early 2020. Instead, he was simply curious about how many coronaviruses -- aside from the virus that had just launched the COVID-19 pandemic -- could be found in sequences in existing genomic databases. So, he and independent supercomputing expert Jeff Taylor scoured cloud-based genomic data that had been deposited to a global sequence database and uploaded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. As of now, the database contains 16 petabytes of archived sequences, which come from genetic surveys of everything from fugu fish to farm soils to the insides of human guts. (A database with a digital photo of every person in the United States would take up about the same amount of space.) The genomes of viruses infecting different organisms in these samples are also captured by sequencing, but they usually go undetected.

Friday the results of several large studies showed that getting a third Covid vaccine "booster shot" dramatically decreased infections from the Omicron variant.

And now the Times of Israel reports that the country's Health Ministry "said on Sunday that the fourth vaccine dose for those aged 60 and up offers a threefold protection against serious illness and twofold protection against infection in the current wave driven by the Omicron variant." The ministry said the figures are the result of initial analysis by experts from various leading academic and health institutions, and compares the fourth vaccine with those who received three doses at least four months ago.

The figures are based on 400,000 Israelis who received the fourth vaccine and 600,000 who received three doses, with the ministry stressing that the methodology is similar to previous papers the experts have published in the peer-reviewed New England Journal of Medicine.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Ars Technica: Space isn't easy on humans. Some aspects are avoidable -- the vacuum, of course, and the cold, as well as some of the radiation. Astronauts can also lose bone density, thanks to a lack of gravity. NASA has even created a fun acronym for the issues: RIDGE, which stands for space radiation, isolation and confinement, distance from Earth, gravity fields, and hostile and closed environments. New research adds to the worries by describing how being in space destroys your blood. Or rather, something about space -- and we don't know what just yet -- causes the human body to perform hemolysis at a higher rate than back on Earth.

This phenomenon, called space anemia, has been well-studied. It's part of a suite of problems that astronauts face when they come back to terra firma, which is how Guy Trudel -- one of the paper's authors and a specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation at The Ottawa Hospital -- got involved. "[W]hen the astronauts return from space, they are very much like the patients we admit in rehab," he told Ars. Space anemia had been viewed as an adaptation to shifting fluids in the astronauts' upper bodies when they first arrive in space. They rapidly lose 10 percent of the liquid in their blood vessels, and it was expected that their bodies destroyed a matching 10 percent of red blood cells to get things back into balance. People also suspected that things went back to normal after 10 days. Trudel and his team found, however, that the hemolysis was a primary response to being in space. "Our results were a bit of a surprise," he said. [...]

Trudel's team isn't sure exactly why being in space would cause the human body to destroy blood cells at this faster rate. There are some potential culprits, however. Hemolysis can happen in four different parts of the body: the bone marrow (where red blood cells are made), the blood vessels, the liver, or the spleen. From this list, Trudel suspects that the bone marrow or the spleen are the most likely problem areas, and his team has plans to investigate the issue further in the future. "What causes the anemia is the hemolysis, but what causes the hemolysis is the next step," he said. It's also uncertain how long a person in space can continue to destroy 54 percent more red blood cells than their Earth-bound kin. "We don't have data beyond six months. There's a knowledge gap for longer missions, for one-year missions, or missions to the Moon or Mars or other bodies," he said.

The omicron-driven surge has sent COVID-19 hospitalizations skyrocketing across the U.S., reaching a new pandemic high this week with 145,982 patients hospitalized. From a report: This exceeds the previous high recorded in January last year, according to data tracked by the Department of Health and Human Services, from more than 5,400 hospitals in the country. Patients with COVID now fill about 30% of ICU beds in the nation and pediatric COVID hospitalizations are also at the highest rate of the pandemic. The record-breaking numbers are a sign of just how quickly the omicron variant has swept across the country. Overall, infections are also at record levels, with the U.S. averaging more than 700,000 new cases a day. And researchers and health workers warn that the crowded conditions could be leading to a rise in avoidable deaths, as clinicians struggle to provide the level of care they would normally. "Things are looking grim and substantially worse in many ways than even just a year ago," says Dr. Doug White, a critical care physician at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs. It is the first successful transplant of a pig's heart into a human being. The eight-hour operation took place in Baltimore on Friday, and the patient, David Bennett Sr. of Maryland, was doing well on Monday, according to surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center. "It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart," said Dr. Bartley Griffith, the director of the cardiac transplant program at the medical center, who performed the operation. "It's working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don't know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before."

The heart transplant comes just months after surgeons in New York successfully attached the kidney of a genetically engineered pig to a brain-dead person. Researchers hope procedures like this will usher in a new era in medicine in the future when replacement organs are no longer in short supply for the more than half a million Americans who are waiting for kidneys and other organs. "This is a watershed event," said Dr. David Klassen, the chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing and a transplant physician. "Doors are starting to open that will lead, I believe, to major changes in how we treat organ failure." But he added that there were many hurdles to overcome before such a procedure could be broadly applied, noting that rejection of organs occurs even when a well-matched human donor kidney is transplanted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Shortly after coronavirus vaccines were rolled out about a year ago, women started reporting erratic menstrual cycles after receiving the shots. Some said their periods were late. Others reported heavier bleeding than usual or painful bleeding. Some postmenopausal women who hadn't had a period in years even said they had menstruated again. A study published on Thursday found that women's menstrual cycles did indeed change following vaccination against the coronavirus (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The authors reported that women who were inoculated had slightly longer menstrual cycles after receiving the vaccine than those who were not vaccinated.

Their periods themselves, which came almost a day later on average, were not prolonged, however, and the effect was transient, with cycle lengths bouncing back to normal within one or two months. For example, someone with a 28-day menstrual cycle that starts with seven days of bleeding would still begin with a seven-day period, but the cycle would last 29 days. The cycle ends when the next period starts and would revert to 28 days within a month or two. The delay was more pronounced in women who received both vaccine doses during the same menstrual cycle. These women had their periods two days later than usual, the researchers found. [...] One serious drawback of the study, which focused on U.S. residents, is that the sample is not nationally representative and cannot be generalized to the population at large. The data were provided by a company called Natural Cycles that makes an app to track fertility. Its users are more likely to be white and college educated than the U.S. population overall; they are also thinner than the average American woman -- weight can affect menstruation -- and do not use hormonal contraception. "I want to make sure we dissuade people from those untrue myths out there about fertility effects," said Dr. Hugh Taylor, the chair of the department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at Yale School of Medicine. "A cycle or two where periods are thrown off may be annoying, but it's not going to be harmful in a medical way."

With that said, postmenopausal women who experience vaginal bleeding or spotting, whether after vaccination or not, should be evaluated by a physician, says Dr. Taylor. It may be a sign they have a serious medical condition.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Weighing 80-100kg and sporting long straight horns, white spots on its face and large facial scent glands, the saola does not sound like an animal that would be hard to spot. But it was not until 1992 that this elusive creature was discovered, becoming the first large mammal new to science in more than 50 years. Nicknamed the "Asian unicorn," the saola continues to be elusive. They have never been seen by a biologist in the wild and have been camera-trapped only a handful of times. There are reports of villagers trying to keep them in captivity but they have died after a few weeks, probably due to the wrong diet. It was during a survey of wildlife in the remote Vu Quang nature reserve, a 212 square mile forested area of north central Vietnam, in 1992, that biologist Do Tuoc came across two skulls and a pair of trophy horns belonging to an unknown animal.

Twenty more specimens, including a complete skin, were subsequently collected and, in 1993, laboratory tests revealed the animal to be not only a new species, but an entirely new genus in the bovid family, which includes cattle, sheep, goats and antelopes. Initially named Vu Quang Ox, the animal was later called saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis) -- meaning "spindle horns," the arms or posts (sao) of a spinning wheel (la) according to Lao-speaking ethnic groups in Laos and neighbouring Vietnam. The discovery was hailed as one of the most spectacular zoological discoveries of the 20th century but less than 30 years later the saola population is believed to have declined massively due to commercial wildlife poaching, which has exploded in Vietnam since 1994. Even though the saola is not directly targeted by poachers, intensive commercial snaring that supplies animals for use in traditional Asian medicine or as bushmeat serves as the primary threat.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: A new COVID-19 vaccine, developed by researchers from the Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine, is being offered patent-free to vaccine manufacturers across the world. Human trials have shown the vaccine to be safe and effective, with India already authorizing its use as production ramps up to over 100 million doses per month. The vaccine has been named Corbevax and it is based on a traditional protein-based technology that has been safely used for decades. Like other COVID-19 vaccines, Corbevax focuses on the coronavirus spike protein, but instead of using mRNA to direct our cells to produce those spike proteins internally it delivers lab-grown spike proteins to the body. The researchers took the gene that codes for the spike protein and engineered yeast to produce it. These proteins are collected, purified, and combined with an adjuvant to enhance immune responses. This exact method has been used to produce the hepatitis B vaccine for years.

In late 2020 the US research team developing the vaccine joined forces with India-based pharma company Biological E to begin clinical trials and establish manufacturing capacity. Across 2021 those clinical trials included several thousand participants and ultimately found Corbevax to be safe and effective at generating robust immune responses to SARS-CoV-2. The trial data was compared to an already approved vaccine called Covishield (the Indian-made version of Astrazeneca's well-known COVID-19 vaccine). Corbevax generated significantly fewer adverse effects than Covishield and produced superior immune responses. Neutralizing antibody responses to Corbevax indicate the vaccine should be at least 80 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 from the Delta variant. Specific data against the Omicron variant is expected soon but it is hypothesized to be at least as effective as most currently available vaccines. Perhaps the most important feature of this new vaccine is the fact it has been developed as a patent-free product that can be easily manufactured by vaccine-producers around the world. The project has been described as "gift to the world" by researcher Peter Hotez. "India is the first country to issue emergency authorization to Corbevax and Biological E reportedly has 150 million doses ready to go, with production capacity set for 100 million doses per month from February," reports New Atlas.

Time reports on virtual doppelgangers — also known as "digital twins". (Alternate URL here.) Created by feeding video, images, blueprints or other data into advanced 3-D mapping software, digital twins are being used in medicine to replicate and study internal organs. They've propelled engineers to devise car and plane prototypes — including Air Force fighter jets — more quickly. They allow architects and urban planners to envision and then build skyscrapers and city blocks with clarity and precision. And this year, digital twins began to break into the mainstream of manufacturing and research. In April, chipmaker Nvidia launched a version of its Omniverse 3-D simulation engine that allows businesses to build 3-D renderings of their own — including digital twins. Amazon Web Services announced a competing service, the IoT TwinMaker, in November...

The need was always there. In the 1960s, NASA created physical replicas of spaceships and connected them to simulators so that if a crisis ensued on the actual vehicle hundreds of thousands of miles away, a team could workshop solutions on the ground. Dave Rhodes, the senior vice president of digital twins at Unity Technologies, a video-game and 3-D-platform company, says that digital-twin technology is only now being widely released because of several confluent factors, including the increased computing power of cloud-based systems, the spread of 5G networks, improvements in 3-D rendering and the remote work demands of COVID-19....

Digital-twin technology is being trialed across the medical landscape, for planning surgical procedures and exploring the heart risks of various drugs... Digital twins are also being used in other complex and potentially dangerous machines, from nuclear reactors in Idaho to wind turbines in Paris.... Digital twin humans are coming too: the NFL and Amazon Web Services have created a "digital athlete" that will run infinite scenarios to better understand and treat football injuries.... BMW could soon implement digital twins at all facilities.

Frank Bachmann, the plant director in Regensburg, says that the advantages of digital twins will only be fully realized when every factory is digitized in a standard way. "We need these processes of digital twins everywhere," he says.
The technology "raises questions about privacy and cybersecurity," Time warns. "Many of these digital twins are made possible by a multitude of sensors that track real-world data and movement.

"Workers at factories with digital twins may find their every movement followed; the hacker of a digital twin could gain frighteningly precise knowledge about a complex proprietary system."

A sugar additive used in several foods could have helped spread a seriously dangerous superbug around the US, according to a 2018 study. ScienceAlert reports: The finger of blame is pointed squarely at the sugar trehalose, found in foods such as nutrition bars and chewing gum. If the findings are confirmed, it's a stark warning that even apparently harmless additives have the potential to cause health issues when introduced to our food supply. In this case, trehalose is being linked with the rise of two strains of the bacterium Clostridium difficile, capable of causing diarrhea, colitis, organ failure, and even death. The swift rise of the antibiotic-resistant bug has become a huge problem for hospitals in recent years, and the timing matches up with the arrival of trehalose.

"In 2000, trehalose was approved as a food additive in the United States for a number of foods from sushi and vegetables to ice cream," said one of the researchers, Robert Britton from the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, back in January 2018. "About three years later the reports of outbreaks with these lineages started to increase. Other factors may also contribute, but we think that trehalose is a key trigger."

The C. difficile lineages Britton is referring to are RT027 and RT078. When the researchers analysed the genomes of these two strains, they found DNA sequences that enabled them to feed off low doses of trehalose sugar very efficiently. In fact, these particular bacteria need about 1,000 times less trehalose to live off than other varieties of C. difficile, thanks to their genetic make-up. [...] It's still not certain that trehalose has contributed to the rise of C. difficile, but the study results and the timing of its approval as an additive are pretty compelling. More research will now be needed to confirm the link. According to figures from the CDC, "C. difficile was responsible for half a million infections across the year and 29,000 deaths within the first 30 days of diagnosis," adds ScienceAlert.

The findings were published in the journal Nature.

The experimental process of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in oceans could help limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, explain Romany Webb and Michael B. Gerrard, both of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. Overcoming challenges presented by this treatment will need coordination with all stakeholders, including research scientists, investors, and environmental groups, they say. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg Law: At last month's climate conference in Glasgow, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres declared that the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius was still alive, but "on life support." Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) -- the process of drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it on land or in the oceans -- could be part of the medicine needed to bring it back to life. But, like all experimental treatments, its use presents a range of challenges. Overcoming them will require a coordinated effort by a wide range of stakeholders, from research scientists and investors to policymakers and lawyers to environmental and community groups. So far, no CDR techniques have been deployed at a large scale, and many require significantly more research before that can happen.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences identifies over $1 billion worth of "priority research" that will be needed over the next 10 years to better assess the feasibility and impacts of key ocean CDR techniques. That includes $125 million for so-called "foundational research" on legal, policy, social science, and related issues. [...] On the legal side, there is significant uncertainty as to how different CDR techniques, particularly ocean-based techniques, will be regulated. Because the oceans form part of the global commons, ocean-based activities are subject to a large body of international law. But there is currently no comprehensive international legal framework specific to ocean CDR.

There are no U.S. federal laws dealing specifically with ocean CDR. Unless and until that changes, projects will end up being regulated under general environmental laws that were developed with other activities in mind, and so may be poorly suited to ocean CDR. We've documented some of the potential problems in two recent reports on the laws governing ocean alkalinization and seaweed cultivation for the purposes of CDR. As recognized in the National Academies report, developing a "clear and consistent legal framework for ocean CDR is essential to facilitate research and (if deemed appropriate) full-scale deployment, while also ensuring that projects are conducted in a safe and environmentally sound manner."It is vital that framework be developed with input from all stakeholders -- scientists, entrepreneurs, governments, NGOs, environmentalists, indigenous peoples, coastal communities, and other potentially impacted groups. Those same groups must continue to be engaged as projects are developed and deployed. [...] Further engagement and coordination with the full range of stakeholders are important to ensure safe and responsible CDR development and deployment. Without that, our hopes of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius may well be dead and buried.