Rose Pastore reporting via Gizmodo: A new way of producing powerful X-ray beams -- the brightest on Earth -- is now making it possible to create 3D images of matter at astounding resolutions. This "Extremely Brilliant Source" officially opened last month at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France, and scientists are already using it to study the coronavirus behind covid-19. These X-ray beams will image the interiors of fossils, brains, batteries, and countless other interesting items down to the atomic scale, revealing unprecedented information and supercharging scientific research.

A typical medical X-ray, like you would get for a broken bone, can show doctors details about your particular fracture and the tissue around it. X-rays penetrate the body and are absorbed at different rates by different tissue; once they've passed through you, they hit a detector, creating the familiar black-and-white X-ray image. The Extremely Brilliant Source produces X-rays 10 trillion times more powerful than those used in hospitals. With such a beam, scientists could create a 3D image of your broken bone so detailed that they could see the individual atoms in the blood cells surrounding your fracture. Of course, you wouldn't want to be hit with this particular beam -- the dose of radiation would be fatal.

The possibilities that the Extremely Brilliant Source opens up feel endless. One area that particularly excites Francesco Sette, director general of the ESRF, is research into the structure and functioning of brains, which could eventually enable brain-like electronics. "It would be a major revolution, not only for neuroscience, but also for all those applications that are coming up to use possibly the human brain architecture for a new generation of devices," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Stomach ulcers and other gastric wounds afflict one in eight people worldwide, but common conventional therapies have drawbacks. Now scientists aim to treat such problems by exploring a new frontier in 3-D printing: depositing living cells directly inside the human body. [...] In their effort to treat stomach lesions less invasively, scientists in China wanted to develop a miniature bioprinting robot that could enter the human body with relative ease. The researchers used existing techniques for creating dexterous electronic devices, such as mechanical bees and cockroach-inspired robots, says the study's senior author Tao Xu, a bioengineer at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The resulting micro robot is just 30 millimeters wide -- less than half the width of a credit card -- and can fold to a length of 43 millimeters. Once inside a patient's body, it unfolds to become 59 millimeters long and can start bioprinting. "The team has constructed clever mechanisms that make the system compact when entering the body yet unfurl to provide a large working area once past the tight constrictions at entry," says David Hoelzle, a mechanical engineer at the Ohio State University, who did not take part in the study. In their experiments, the researchers in China fitted the micro robot onto an endoscope (a long tube that can be inserted through bodily openings) and successfully snaked it through a curved pipe into a transparent plastic model of a stomach. There, they used it to print gels loaded with human stomach lining and stomach muscle cells (which were grown in culture by a commercial laboratory) onto a lab dish. The printed cells remained viable and steadily proliferated over the course of 10 days. "This study is the first attempt to combine micro robots and bioprinting together," Xu says. The study has been published in the journal Biofabrication.

Two professors at the University of Massachusetts have co-authored a new essay explaining how open source licensing "could keep Big Pharma from making huge profits off taxpayer-funded research" in the international, multi-billion-dollar race for a Covid-19 vaccine: The invention of the "General Public License," sometimes referred to as a viral or reciprocal license, meant that should an improvement be made, the new software version automatically inherits the same license as its parent. We believe that in a time of a global pandemic, a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine should be licensed with General Public License-like properties...

Fortunately, some pharmaceutical companies, national governments, nonprofits like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and international organizations like the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Initiatives — which supports vaccine development — are putting policies in place that embrace openness and sharing rather than intellectual property protection. Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Initiatives officials have stated that all of their funding agreements require that "appropriate vaccines are first available to populations when and where they are needed to end an outbreak or curtail an epidemic, regardless of ability to pay." That's an important start.

However, when there is a safe, effective COVID-19 vaccine, the U.S. and other national governments need to create contractual agreements with firms that provide fair and reasonable funding to cover their costs or even some reasonable profit margin while still mandating the open sharing of the processes for vaccine production, quality assurance and rapid global distribution.

"Oxford University announced Saturday it was resuming a trial for a coronavirus vaccine it is developing with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, a move that comes days after the study was suspended following a reported side-effect in a U.K. patient," reports the Associated Press: In a statement, the university confirmed the restart across all of its U.K. clinical trial sites after regulators gave the go-ahead following the pause on Sunday. "The independent review process has concluded and following the recommendations of both the independent safety review committee and the U.K. regulator, the MHRA, the trials will recommence in the U.K.," it said.

The vaccine being developed by Oxford and AstraZeneca is widely perceived to be one of the strongest contenders among the dozens of coronavirus vaccines in various stages of testing around the world...

The university said in large trials such as this "it is expected that some participants will become unwell and every case must be carefully evaluated to ensure careful assessment of safety." It said globally some 18,000 people have received its vaccine so far. Volunteers from some of the worst affected countries — Britain, Brazil, South Africa and the U.S. — are taking part in the trial... Brazil's health regulator Anvisa on Saturday said it had approved the resumption of tests of the "Oxford vaccine" in the South American country after receiving official information from AstraZeneca... The university insisted that it is "committed to the safety of our participants and the highest standards of conduct in our studies and will continue to monitor safety closely."

Pauses in drug trials are commonplace... The Oxford-AstraZeneca study had been previously stopped in July for several days after a participant developed neurological symptoms that turned out to be an undiagnosed case of multiple sclerosis that researchers said was unrelated to the vaccine.

gollum123 shares a report from CNBC: Dining out raises the risk of contracting Covid-19 more than other activities, such as shopping or going to a salon, according to a report published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings come as many states consider the safest ways to reopen businesses, especially restaurants. Those who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, "were approximately twice as likely to have reported dining at a restaurant than were those with negative SARS-CoV-2 test results," the study authors wrote. And those who were diagnosed without any known exposure to the virus were more likely to report having visited a bar or coffee shop in the previous two weeks. The increased risk makes sense; it's easy to wear a mask in stores or in places of worship, but it's nearly impossible to do so while eating and drinking. In addition to being maskless, individuals are often close together when eating at a restaurant, sitting across the table from one another.

Apple has developed two types of masks that the company is beginning to distribute to corporate and retail employees to limit the spread of Covid-19. From a report: The masks -- called the Apple Face Mask and Apple ClearMask -- are the first developed in-house by the Cupertino, California-technology giant for its staff. The company previously created a different face shield for medical workers and distributed millions of other masks across the health-care sector. Apple told staff members that the masks were developed by the Engineering and Industrial Design teams, the same groups that work on devices such as the iPhone and iPad. The Apple Face Mask is made up of three layers to filter incoming and outgoing particles. It can be washed and reused as many as five times, the company told employees. In typical Apple style, the mask looks unique with large coverings on the top and bottom for the wearer's nose and chin. It also has adjustable strings to fit around a person's ears. Apple told staff that the masks were designed and manufactured completely by Apple. The company, which confirmed the news, said it conducted careful research and testing to find the right materials to filter the air properly while not disrupting the supply of medical personal protective equipment.

phalse phace writes: A large, Phase 3 study testing a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford at dozens of sites across the U.S. has been put on hold due to a suspected serious adverse reaction in a participant in the United Kingdom. A spokesperson for AstraZeneca, a frontrunner in the race for a Covid-19 vaccine, said in a statement that the company's "standard review process triggered a pause to vaccination to allow review of safety data." In a follow-up statement, AstraZeneca said it initiated the study hold. The nature of the adverse reaction and when it happened were not immediately known, though the participant is expected to recover, according to an individual familiar with the matter. The spokesperson described the pause as "a routine action which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness in one of the trials, while it is investigated, ensuring we maintain the integrity of the trials." The spokesperson also said that the company is "working to expedite the review of the single event to minimize any potential impact on the trial timeline." An individual familiar with the development said researchers had been told the hold was placed on the trial out of "an abundance of caution." A second individual familiar with the matter, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the finding is having an impact on other AstraZeneca vaccine trials underway -- as well as on the clinical trials being conducted by other vaccine manufacturers.

A reader shares a report from The New York Times: As the world awaits the arrival of a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine, a team of researchers has come forward with a provocative new theory: that masks might help to crudely immunize some people against the virus. The unproven idea, described in a commentary published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, is inspired by the age-old concept of variolation, the deliberate exposure to a pathogen to generate a protective immune response. First tried against smallpox, the risky practice eventually fell out of favor, but paved the way for the rise of modern vaccines.

Masked exposures are no substitute for a bona fide vaccine. But data from animals infected with the coronavirus, as well as insights gleaned from other diseases, suggest that masks, by cutting down on the number of viruses that encounter a person's airway, might reduce the wearer's chances of getting sick. And if a small number of pathogens still slip through, the researchers argue, these might prompt the body to produce immune cells that can remember the virus and stick around to fight it off again. "You can have this virus but be asymptomatic," said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the commentary's authors. "So if you can drive up rates of asymptomatic infection with masks, maybe that becomes a way to variolate the population."

That does not mean people should don a mask to intentionally inoculate themselves with the virus. "This is not the recommendation at all," Dr. Gandhi said. "Neither are pox parties," she added, referring to social gatherings that mingle the healthy and the sick. The theory cannot be directly proven without clinical trials that compare the outcomes of people who are masked in the presence of the coronavirus with those who are unmasked -- an unethical experimental setup. And while outside experts were intrigued by the theory, they were reluctant to embrace it without more data, and advised careful interpretation.

As countries race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, just determining who's infected remains a major challenge. From a report: Large-scale testing is a crucial element in containing the virus, experts say, because many who contract it exhibit little to no symptoms. Without widespread testing, it's a daunting task to identify contagious individuals and isolate them. To help meet that challenge, the XPRIZE Foundation, which aims to spur technological and industry advancements, is offering a $5 million prize to develop a new Covid-19 rapid test. Competitors can enter until midnight Tuesday. Since July, 659 teams from 68 countries have registered. Currently, test results for the novel coronavirus can take up to two weeks, creating headaches for medical professionals, public-health experts and elected officials. Without the ability to test people often and with speedy results, many cases may go undetected, which can lead to new clusters of infections.

"We have, like everyone else around the globe, seen the impact this has had on mental health, physical health, bringing the wheels off of the economy," said Anousheh Ansari, chief executive officer of the XPRIZE Foundation. "We always look at innovation to solve grand challenges." Ansari and her family poured millions into funding the first XPRIZE in 2004 that launched the commercial space race. That $10 million prize brought in about $100 million of investment to the teams that competed, helping fuel what is now a more than $100 billion industry. Ansari's hope is that the Covid prize will seed a similar investment boom to fight a virus that has infected more than 27.3 million people and killed more than 892,000 worldwide.

That Covid-19 reinfection in Hong Kong was followed by similar reports in Belgium and the Netherlands. It was announced today that a 27-year-old woman in Karnataka, India also tested positive for the disease a second time (though the government is still seeking confirmation), and now researchers in Nevada are also reporting a "likely" case of reinfection.

The health-news site Stat reports: What caught experts' attention about the case of the 25-year-old Reno man was not that he appears to have contracted SARS-CoV-2 (the name of the virus that causes Covid-19) a second time. Rather, it's that his second bout was more serious than his first. Immunologists had expected that if the immune response generated after an initial infection could not prevent a second case, then it should at least stave off more severe illness. That's what occurred with the first known reinfection case, in a 33-year-old Hong Kong man.

Still, despite what happened to the man in Nevada, researchers are stressing this is not a sky-is-falling situation or one that should result in firm conclusions. They always presumed people would become vulnerable to Covid-19 again some time after recovering from an initial case, based on how our immune systems respond to other respiratory viruses, including other coronaviruses. It's possible that these early cases of reinfection are outliers and have features that won't apply to the tens of millions of other people who have already shaken off Covid-19. "There are millions and millions of cases," said Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The real question that should get the most focus, Mina said, is, "What happens to most people...?"

Researchers are finding that, generally, people who get Covid-19 develop a healthy immune response replete with both antibodies (molecules that can block pathogens from infecting cells) and T cells (which help wipe out the virus). This is what happens after other viral infections.

Science Alert reports: People who eat a lot of industrially processed junk food are more likely to exhibit a change in their chromosomes linked to aging, according to research presented Tuesday at an online medical conference. Three or more servings of so-called "ultra-processed food" per day doubled the odds that strands of DNA and proteins called telomeres, found on the end of chromosomes, would be shorter compared to people who rarely consumed such foods, scientists reported at the European and International Conference on Obesity.

Short telomeres are a marker of biological aging at the cellular level, and the study suggests that diet is a factor in driving the cells to age faster. While the correlation is strong, however, the causal relationship between eating highly processed foods and diminished telomeres remains speculative, the authors cautioned.

Russia's "Sputnik-V" COVID-19 vaccine produced an antibody response in all participants in early-stage trials, according to results published on Friday by The Lancet medical journal that were hailed by Moscow as an answer to its critics. Reuters reports: The results of the two trials, conducted in June-July this year and involving 76 participants, showed 100% of participants developing antibodies to the new coronavirus and no serious side effects, The Lancet said. Russia licensed the two-shot jab for domestic use in August, the first country to do so and before any data had been published or a large-scale trial begun. "The two 42-day trials -- including 38 healthy adults each -- did not find any serious adverse effects among participants, and confirmed that the vaccine candidates elicit an antibody response," The Lancet said. "Large, long-term trials including a placebo comparison, and further monitoring are needed to establish the long-term safety and effectiveness of the vaccine for preventing COVID-19 infection," it said.

The vaccine is named Sputnik-V in homage to the world's first satellite, launched by the Soviet Union. Some Western experts have warned against its use until all internationally approved testing and regulatory steps have been taken. But with the results now published for the first time in an international peer-reviewed journal, and with a 40,000-strong later-stage trial launched last week, a senior Russian official said Moscow had faced down its critics abroad. "With this (publication) we answer all of the questions of the West that were diligently asked over the past three weeks, frankly with the clear goal of tarnishing the Russian vaccine," said Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), Russia's sovereign wealth fund, which has backed the vaccine. "All of the boxes are checked," he told Reuters. "Now... we will start asking questions of some of the Western vaccines."

Antibodies that people make to fight the new coronavirus last for at least four months after diagnosis and do not fade quickly as some earlier reports suggested, scientists have found. From a report: Tuesday's report, from tests on more than 30,000 people in Iceland, is the most extensive work yet on the immune system's response to the virus over time, and is good news for efforts to develop vaccines. If a vaccine can spur production of long-lasting antibodies as natural infection seems to do, it gives hope that "immunity to this unpredictable and highly contagious virus may not be fleeting," scientists from Harvard University and the U.S. National Institutes of Health wrote in a commentary published with the study in the New England Journal of Medicine. One of the big mysteries of the pandemic is whether having had the coronavirus helps protect against future infection, and for how long. Some smaller studies previously suggested that antibodies may disappear quickly and that some people with few or no symptoms may not make many at all. The new study was done by Reykjavik-based deCODE Genetics, a subsidiary of the U.S. biotech company Amgen, with several hospitals, universities and health officials in Iceland. The country tested 15% of its population since late February, when its first COVID-19 cases were detected, giving a solid base for comparisons.

The Trump administration will decline to pay tens of millions of dollars owed to the World Health Organization (WHO) in annual dues as part of the U.S.'s withdrawal from the global body, which is scheduled for next year. The Hill reports: The Associated Press reported that the U.S. will not pay just over $60 million owed in 2020 dues to the organization, and Reuters reported that the decision also will affect about $19 million still owed in 2019 dues. A decision to forgo the payments comes as the Trump administration has hammered the WHO for months over supposedly bowing to China's wishes and essentially acting as a PR shop for China's government during the early stages of the pandemic while Chinese officials allegedly stymied international health experts from learning about the virus.

In a statement, a WHO spokesperson said the agency would review its options and encourage the U.S. to reverse course. "We refer you to our previous statements of regret regarding the U.S. decision to withdraw. We await further details, which we will consider carefully," the spokesperson told Reuters.

schwit1 shares a report from the New York Post: As governments around the world scramble to approve a vaccine against the deadly coronavirus, an increasing number of scientists have started administering DIY vaccines to themselves and even their friends and family members. The methods, results, and claims have varied widely among the dozens of scientists around the world who have taken this unconventional route.

One such effort is by scientist Johnny Stine, who runs North Coast Biologics, a biotech company in Seattle. In June, Washington attorney general slapped Stine with a lawsuit for administering his DIY vaccine to San Juan Island Mayor Farhad Ghatan and around 30 people, charging them $400, the New York Times reported. Another vaccine effort going outside FDA approval is the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative, or RaDVaC, which has among its 23 collaborators Harvard geneticist George Church. Proponents have welcomed the idea of going outside the normal regulatory process, given the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic. But critics say these DIY vaccines are not being put to the test of placebo-controlled studies and could have unforeseen negative consequences.

Thelasko shares a report from Medium: Earlier this summer, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee set about crunching data on more than 40,000 genes from 17,000 genetic samples in an effort to better understand Covid-19. Summit is the second-fastest computer in the world, but the process -- which involved analyzing 2.5 billion genetic combinations -- still took more than a week. When Summit was done, researchers analyzed the results. It was, in the words of Dr. Daniel Jacobson, lead researcher and chief scientist for computational systems biology at Oak Ridge, a 'eureka moment.' The computer had revealed a new theory about how Covid-19 impacts the body: the bradykinin hypothesis. The hypothesis provides a model that explains many aspects of Covid-19, including some of its most bizarre symptoms. It also suggests 10-plus potential treatments, many of which are already FDA approved. Jacobson's group published their results in a paper in the journal eLife in early July.

According to the team's findings, a Covid-19 infection generally begins when the virus enters the body through ACE2 receptors in the nose, (The receptors, which the virus is known to target, are abundant there.) The virus then proceeds through the body, entering cells in other places where ACE2 is also present: the intestines, kidneys, and heart. This likely accounts for at least some of the disease's cardiac and GI symptoms. But once Covid-19 has established itself in the body, things start to get really interesting. According to Jacobson's group, the data Summit analyzed shows that Covid-19 isn't content to simply infect cells that already express lots of ACE2 receptors. Instead, it actively hijacks the body's own systems, tricking it into upregulating ACE2 receptors in places where they're usually expressed at low or medium levels, including the lungs.

The renin-angiotensin system (RAS) controls many aspects of the circulatory system, including the body's levels of a chemical called bradykinin, which normally helps to regulate blood pressure. According to the team's analysis, when the virus tweaks the RAS, it causes the body's mechanisms for regulating bradykinin to go haywire. Bradykinin receptors are resensitized, and the body also stops effectively breaking down bradykinin. (ACE normally degrades bradykinin, but when the virus downregulates it, it can't do this as effectively.) The end result, the researchers say, is to release a bradykinin storm -- a massive, runaway buildup of bradykinin in the body. According to the bradykinin hypothesis, it's this storm that is ultimately responsible for many of Covid-19's deadly effects. Several drugs target aspects of the RAS and are already FDA approved, including danazol, stanozolol, and ecallantide, which reduce bradykinin production and could potentially stop a deadly bradykinin storm.

Interestingly, the researchers suggest vitamin D as a potentially useful Covid-19 drug. "The vitamin is involved in the RAS system and could prove helpful by reducing levels of another compound, known as REN," the report says. "Again, this could stop potentially deadly bradykinin storms from forming." Other compounds could treat symptoms associated with bradykinin storms, such as Hymecromone and timbetasin.

The Trump administration said it will not join a global effort to develop, manufacture and equitably distribute a coronavirus vaccine, in part because the World Health Organization is involved, a decision that could shape the course of the pandemic and the country's role in health diplomacy. The Washington Post reports: More than 170 countries are in talks to participate in the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax) Facility, which aims to speed vaccine development and secure doses for all countries and distribute them to the most high-risk segment of each population. The plan, which is co-led by the WHO, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and Gavi, the vaccine alliance, was of interest to some members of the Trump administration and is backed by traditional U.S. allies, including Japan, Germany and the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union.

But the United States will not participate, in part because the White House does not want to work with the WHO, which President Trump has criticized over what he characterized as its "China-centric" response to the pandemic. "The United States will continue to engage our international partners to ensure we defeat this virus, but we will not be constrained by multilateral organizations influenced by the corrupt World Health Organization and China," said Judd Deere, a spokesman for the White House. The Covax decision, which has not been previously reported, is effectively a doubling down by the administration on its bet that the United States will win the vaccine race. It eliminates the chance to secure doses from a pool of promising vaccine candidates -- a potentially risky strategy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Apple has begun letting its iPhones carry out contact-tracing without the need for users to download an official Covid-19 app. As an alternative, owners are being invited to opt in to a scheme called Exposure Notifications Express (ENE). This keeps a 14-day log of other phones detected via Bluetooth and serves an alert if one or more of their users is later diagnosed to have the virus. The local public health authority will determine what the notification says. It might tell the user to download a more fully functional app for further guidance. However, it also gives officials the option of not developing an app of their own, in which case the user could be directed to go to a testing centre or to call a hotline for more information.

IPhone owners who become ill without having received a warning message can still cause a cascade of alerts to be sent to others. But since they will not have an app to start the process, this will be done by tapping on a text message sent by the public health authority to their smartphone after a positive diagnosis. The facility is being rolled out as part of the latest update to Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 13.7, which has just been released. Android is expected to have a similar scheme that will launch later this month. "It will go by the same name, but rather than go down the app-less route, Google has opted to automatically create a basic coronavirus tracing app for public health authorities based on the criteria they provide," reports the BBC.

The Guardian ran an article by the author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World looking at problems with our own race for a vaccine in 2020: On 2 August, Steven Salzberg, a computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, suggested in Forbes magazine that a promising vaccine be rolled out to a wider pool of volunteers before clinical trials had been completed, triggering an outcry (and some sympathy) that prompted him to recant the next day. Meanwhile, a research group with links to Harvard University continues to defend its publication in July of a recipe for a do-it-yourself Covid-19 vaccine — one that only the group's 20-odd members had previously tested...

The accumulation of such incidents has left many scientists feeling deeply uneasy. "I'm more and more concerned that things are getting done in a rush," says Beate Kampmann, who directs the Vaccine Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (and whose work email account was subject to a failed hack in July). On 13 August, the editor-in-chief of the journal Science issued a call to order. "Short cuts in testing for vaccine safety and efficacy endanger millions of lives in the short term and will damage public confidence in vaccines and in science for a long time to come," wrote H Holden Thorp.

He went on to point out that the stakes are higher than with unproven therapies such as hydroxychloroquine, because a vaccine is given to healthy people. "Approval of a vaccine that is harmful or isn't effective could be leveraged by political forces that already propagate vaccine fears," he warned... Kampmann, meanwhile, feels it's important not to let the recent shenanigans in the vaccine community overshadow its huge achievements. If current forecasts are correct, a Covid-19 vaccine will be available in 2021 — smashing all records for vaccine development — and there will be many more reasons to trust it than not to. Still, those with their eye on that glittering prize should remember what is at stake. "We have to be careful," she says, "because what we do with Covid-19 could have repercussions for trust in all vaccine programs."

CNET reports: Twice a year most of the U.S. stumbles around in confusion while missing appointments, resetting their clocks and grumbling about daylight saving time. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine thinks we should knock that nonsense off and just stick with standard time year-round. The AASM released a position statement this week as an accepted paper in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine calling for an end to daylight saving time...

The professional organization represents sleep medicine professionals and accredits sleep medicine facilities. "Permanent, year-round standard time is the best choice to most closely match our circadian sleep-wake cycle," said lead author M. Adeel Rishi, a sleep specialist with the Mayo Clinic and vice chair of the AASM Public Safety Committee. "Daylight saving time results in more darkness in the morning and more light in the evening, disrupting the body's natural rhythm."

Studies have pointed to health risks connected to daylight saving time and the sleep disruptions it causes. The AASM called out stroke risks, stress reactions and an increase in motor vehicles crashes, particularly in relation to the springtime clock change. "Because the adoption of permanent standard time would be beneficial for public health and safety, the AASM will be advocating at the federal level for this legislative change," said AASM president Kannan Ramar in a release on Thursday.