news 2020

Men have almost three times the odds of needing admission to intensive care and 40% higher odds of dying from COVID-19 than women, according to a new study led by researchers at UCL, Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) and the University of Cape Town. The study, published and the largest review of its kind, looked at publicly available data from 92 reports across 47 countries to investigate why COVID-19 may affect genders differently.

A new genetic approach can accelerate the study of phage-microbe interactions with implications for health, agriculture, and climate Scientists are continually searching for new and improved ways to deal with bacteria, be it to eliminate disease-causing strains or to modify potentially beneficial strains.

Injecting a gene therapy vector into one eye of someone suffering from  LHON , the most common cause of mitochondrial blindness, significantly improves vision in both eyes, scientists have found. Saving sight with gene therapy is now a reality Patrick Yu-Wai-Man In a landmark phase 3 clinical trial, the international team, coordinated by Dr Patrick Yu-Wai-Man from the University of Cambridge and Dr José-Alain Sahel from the University of Pittsburgh and Institut de la Vision, Paris, successfully treated 37 patients suffering from Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON) .

Behavioral scientists at EPFL introduce DeepLabCut-Live!, a deep-learning tool that can enable real-time feedback studies on animal movement and posture. The software features "maker-less" real-time motion capture, can interface with lab hardware for neurological analysis, and is now available open source for use by researchers.

Most people underestimate exponential growth, including when it comes to the spread of the coronavirus. The ability to grasp the magnitude of exponential growth depends on the way in which it is communicated. Using the right framing helps to understand the benefit of mitigation measures. The coronavirus outbreak offered the public a crash course in statistics, with terms like doubling time, logarithmic scales, R factor, rolling averages, and excess mortality now on everyone's tongue.

High-precision measurements of the strong interaction between stable and unstable particles The positively charged protons in atomic nuclei should actually repel each other, and yet even heavy nuclei with many protons and neutrons stick together. The so-called strong interaction is responsible for this.

A number of types of cancer are prone to adapt to targeted treatment, enabling resistance. Prof. Mark Rubin, Department for BioMedical Research and Bern Center for Precision Medicine, together with colleagues from the Weill Cornell Medicine and the University of Manchester have now published a 'Perspective' in the journal Molecular Cell.

New research reveals significant changes to the circulation of the North Pacific and its impact on the initial migration of humans from Asia to North America. The international study, led by the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and published Dec. 9 in Science Advances, provides a new picture of the circulation and climate of the North Pacific at the end of the last ice age, with implications for early human migration.

Large variations in exposure at home, in the community and at work-rather than case-fatality rates-may explain the well-documented racial disparities in COVID-19 mortality during the first wave of the pandemic last spring, according to a new University of Michigan study. "Our results highlight yawning gaps in COVID-19 incidence and mortality in Michigan that cannot be explained away by differences in population age and sex composition,” said lead author Jon Zelner, assistant professor of epidemiology.

When wildfires swept through the North Bay in 2017, graduate student Gabriel Smith saw a unique opportunity to study how fire affected his research subject: soil fungi. In the wake of the 2017 North Bay fires, the golden hills of Santa Rosa, California, were unrecognizable. Smoky, seared and buried under ash, the landscape appeared desolate, save for some ghostly, blackened - but still alive - oak trees.

A service that predicts passenger intent to travel can be used across the UK rail network to reduce overcrowding and help people maintain social distancing. Researchers from the University of Birmingham's Birmingham Centre for Railway Research and Education (BCRRE) worked in collaboration with British technology start-up Zipabout to validate the data powering the service, which was designed by Zipabout.

Scientists at EPFL have developed a game-changing perovskite material that can be used as a cheaper and highly efficient alternative to gamma-ray detectors. Perovskites are materials made up of organic compounds bound to a metal. Propelled into the forefront of materials' research because of their structure and properties, perovskites are earmarked for a wide range of applications, including in solar cells, LED lights, lasers, and photodetectors.

By testing approximately 1,000 blood donation samples each month in in the Brazilian cities of São Paulo and Manaus, an international team of researchers have shown that, while both cities have experienced large epidemics with high mortality, as much as three-quarters of the population in Manaus was infected between March and October, and a third of the population in São Paulo.

Healthcare workers are seven times as likely to have severe COVID-19 infection as those with other types of 'non-essential' jobs, finds research led by the University of Glasgow which focused on the first UK-wide lockdown The study, which is published in the journal Occupational & Environmental Medicine, found those with jobs in the social care and transport sectors are twice as likely to have severe COVID-19, emphasising the need to ensure that essential (key) workers are adequately protected against the infection, say the researchers.

Was burial of the dead practiced by Neandertals or is it an innovation specific to our species? There are indications in favour of the first hypothesis but some scientists remain sceptical. For the first time in Europe, however, a multi-disciplinary team led by researchers at the CNRS and the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (France) and the University of the Basque Country (Spain) 1 has demonstrated, using a variety of criteria, that a Neandertal child was buried, probably around 41,000 years ago, at the Ferrassie site (Dordogne).

By Christoph Pelzl The SABATLE project coordinated by TU Graz focuses on the sustainability and safety of redox flow technologies, which are of immanent importance for the stabilization of the power grid. The increasing use of battery technologies in the mobility sector and in stationary applications has been leading to increasing efforts in battery research of operational safety and battery recycling.

Scientists from Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have designed a rechargeable N95 mask with a custom fit In the early days of the pandemic, amidst all the uncertainty, one thing was for sure: N95 masks - the personal protective respiratory devices that filter out viruses, bacteria, and wildfire smoke - were in short supply.

Humans have taken spiders into space more than once to study the importance of gravity to their web-building. What originally began as a somewhat unsuccessful PR experiment for high school students has yielded the surprising insight that light plays a larger role in arachnid orientation than previously thought.

Only 40 per cent of forests are considered to have high ecological integrity, according to a new global measure, the Forest Landscape Integrity Index. The Index was created by 47 forest and conservation experts from across the world, including Professor James Watson of The University of Queensland and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Researchers have found a way to protect highly fragile quantum systems from noise, which could aid in the design and development of new quantum devices, such as ultra-powerful quantum computers. Until we can find a way to make quantum systems more robust, their real-world applications will be limited Shovan Dutta The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, have shown that microscopic particles can remain intrinsically linked, or entangled, over long distances even if there are random disruptions between them.