Culture
SEATTLE (10 December 2020) - As the world watches how UK residents respond to COVID-19 vaccinations, three leading experts on the virus are urging Americans and the US government to be vigilant against anti-vaccination advocates and their "rumors, misinformation, and conspiracy theories in a fractured media universe."
HOUSTON - (Dec. 10, 2020) - Rice University researchers have discovered a more efficient way for social media companies to keep misinformation from spreading online using probabilistic filters trained with artificial intelligence.
The immunomodulatory activity of a drug would improve the efficacy of immunotherapy in breast cancer
Despite the success of immunotherapy in the treatment of cancers such as lung or melanoma, it is still not effective in breast cancers for being 'cold', with low infiltration of immune cells. Tumours use strategies to evade immune surveillance by reducing the infiltration of cells that could attack them or by attracting immunosuppressive cells. These strategies can contribute to the poor prognosis observed in breast cancer of young women and make them unresponsive to immunotherapy.
Ann Arbor, December 10, 2020 - Quantifying the mitigating impact of social distancing on the spread of COVID-19 is critical for evaluating the efficacy of social restrictions and informing future health policy decisions. While most studies have used government stay-at-home dates in their models, new research finds that individuals actually changed their behavior in reaction to the presence of COVID-19 in their state a median 12 days before a government lockdown.
A planet in an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away may offer a clue to a mystery much closer to home: a hypothesized, distant body in our solar system dubbed "Planet Nine."
The environment is polluted by microplastics worldwide. The tiny particles enter food chains, and thereby the digestive systems of animals and humans; moreover, they can be inhaled. Instead of being excreted, small microplastics can be incorporated into the body tissue. A research team at the University of Bayreuth has now discovered that microplastic particles find their way into living cells more easily if they were exposed to natural aquatic environments, i.e. fresh water and seawater.
A new and less invasive treatment developed by Cancer Research UK researchers is safer than standard major surgery for early-stage rectal cancer, giving patients a better quality of life with fewer life-altering side effects, results from a pilot study show.
Results from the TREC trial show that a combination of local keyhole surgery and radiotherapy, rather than major surgery that removes the whole rectum, prevents debilitating side effects, such as diarrhoea, or the need for a permanent colostomy bag.
Researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) have developed a method of generating high-quality chest X-ray images that can be used to diagnose COVID-19 more accurately than current methods. The research team, led by Sumeet Menon, a Ph.D. student in computer science at UMBC, will publish its findings in the proceedings of the IEEE Big Data 2020 Conference to be held virtually in December.
Astronomers are still searching for a hypothetical "Planet Nine" in the distant reaches of our solar system, but an exoplanet 336 light years from Earth is looking more and more like the Planet Nine of its star system .
Planet Nine, potentially 10 times the size of Earth and orbiting far beyond Neptune in a highly eccentric orbit about the sun, was proposed in 2012 to explain perturbations in the orbits of dwarf planets just beyond Neptune's orbit, so-called detached Kuiper Belt objects. It has yet to be found, if it exists.
Researchers from Skoltech and their colleagues from Russia and the US have described two new, compact Cas9 nucleases, the cutting components of CRISPR-Cas systems, that will potentially expand the Cas9 toolbox for genome editing. One of the two nucleases has been shown to work in human cells and thus can have biomedical applications. The paper was published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.
SARS-CoV-2 was introduced to the Boston area of Massachusetts many times in early 2020, according to a new analysis of virus genomes, but only a small number of importations - including one related to an international business conference - led to most cases there. Because viruses circulating at the conference happened to be marked by distinct genomic signatures, the study's authors were able to track its downstream effects far beyond the superspreading event itself.
Dartmouth Researchers Work to Reduce Child-Directed Food Marketing on Educational Websites
A new article, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine by a team of researchers and advocates including Dartmouth faculty, asserts that current gaps in the regulation of commercial educational websites are exposing children to unhealthy food marketing.
A new computational mass spectrometry imaging method enables researchers to achieve high mass resolution and high spatial resolution for biological samples while providing data sets exponentially faster.
Researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology developed a subspace mass spectrometry imaging approach that accelerates the speed of data acquisition -- without sacrificing the quality -- by designing a model-based reconstruction strategy.
COVID-19 has been found in conjunctival swabs and tears of infected patients, according to a new study published in The Ocular Surface.
The 11-Jupiter-mass exoplanet called HD106906 b occupies an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away and it may be offering clues to something that might be much closer to home: a hypothesized distant member of our Solar System dubbed "Planet Nine." This is the first time that astronomers have been able to measure the motion of a massive Jupiter-like planet that is orbiting very far away from its host stars and visible debris disc.