Category: Science

There are substantial gaps in the American public’s knowledge of maternal health, according to new survey data.

The findings come amid a maternal health crisis in the US, which has the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed nation, more than double the rate of peer countries, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

In addition, the survey, conducted nearly a year after the federal government introduced the new 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, finds that just 10% of the public knows the number.

“The Suicide Lifeline’s ability to save lives presupposes that those in need know the 988 number,” says APPC director Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who directs the survey for the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania. “We need to redouble our efforts to add 988 to the numbers everyone has at hand.”

The survey, conducted with a nationally representative panel of 1,601 US adults from May 31-June 6, 2023, finds:

• Just over 1 in 4 people (27%) know that the CDC recommends that pregnant individuals get a Tdap vaccine against whooping cough.
• Just over half of those surveyed know that getting vaccinated against COVID-19 during pregnancy is safe (52%) and that getting vaccinated against COVID-19 can reduce the risk of complications from the disease (55%) that can affect a pregnancy.
• Only a quarter of those surveyed (26%) know that a pregnant person who gets the flu is at higher risk of delivering the baby early.
• Nearly 3 in 4 people (73%) know that having untreated high blood pressure increases the likelihood that a pregnant person will have a stroke.

Asked which vaccinations the CDC recommends individuals get during pregnancy, majorities know that the CDC does not recommend a chickenpox or measles vaccine, which are live virus vaccines.

• 87% know that the CDC does not recommend the chickenpox vaccine
• 85% know that the CDC does not recommend a measles shot
• But 73% incorrectly said the CDC does not recommend a vaccine for whooping cough known as Tdap during pregnancy. In fact, the CDC does recommend the whooping cough vaccine during pregnancy, as 27% know.

Both the Tdap vaccine against whooping cough and the flu shot are inactivated vaccines and are recommended by the CDC during each pregnancy. During pregnancy, the CDC recommends the flu shot, not the live attenuated vaccine known as LAIV or nasal spray.

Natural immunity: Two-thirds of those surveyed (67%) know it is false to say that because babies are born with natural immunity, they don’t need to be vaccinated against childhood illnesses until they are likely to be exposed to them. But one-third of those surveyed think either that this is true (17%) or are not sure (16%).

The flu and pregnancy

In a series of true-or-false questions:

Only 1 in 4 people (26%) know that a pregnant person who gets the flu is at higher risk of delivering the baby early. About the same number (27%) think that is false. Nearly half of those surveyed (46%) are not sure.

Only half of those surveyed (52%) know it is true that a flu shot protects pregnant people and their babies from serious health problems both during and after pregnancy.

COVID-19 and pregnancy

The CDC says that pregnant people “are more likely to get severely ill with COVID-19 compared with non-pregnant people.” The CDC says pregnant people “can receive a COVID-19 vaccine” and that getting the vaccine during pregnancy can prevent an individual from getting severely ill from COVID-19. The survey found that:

• Over half (55%) know it is false to claim that COVID-19 vaccination affects a couple’s chances of getting pregnant, but 15% incorrectly think it is true and 30% are not sure.
• Only 1 in 5 people (22%) know it is true that COVID-19 vaccines can cause “a small, temporary increase in the length of a vaccinated person’s menstrual cycle,” while 17% incorrectly say it is false and most people (61%) are unsure.
• Just over half of those surveyed (52%) know that COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy is safe, while 22% incorrectly think it is false and 26% are not sure.
• Just over half (55%) know that getting a COVID-19 vaccine can reduce the risk of COVID-19 complications that can affect a pregnancy, while 17% incorrectly say this is false and 28% are not sure.
• Just over half (56%) know that COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy is effective at minimizing the chances of hospitalization with COVID-19, while 25% are not sure and 19% say it is false.
• Over 1 in 3 people know (36%) that getting a COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy can protect an infant from birth to six months of age from COVID-related hospital stays. But 23% think this is false and 41% are not sure.

Other health risks

Many of those surveyed are aware of certain health risks:

• 73% know that untreated high blood pressure increases the likelihood that someone who is pregnant will have a stroke, though 21% say they are not sure and 6% incorrectly think it is false.
• 78% know that pregnant people should be tested for diabetes, though 16% are not sure and 6% incorrectly think it is false. According to the CDC, from 1 in 50 to 1 in 20 pregnant women has gestational diabetes, which sometimes does not go away after delivery or can return as type 2 diabetes.
• 90% know that how well a person takes care of their health before getting pregnant affects the health of their baby.
• 92% know that how well a person takes care of their health during their pregnancy affects the health of their baby.

Smoking and drinking

After years of warnings about the dangers of smoking, many in the public are knowledgeable about the potential harms during pregnancy:

• 72% know that smoking during pregnancy increases the chances that the baby will be born early, though 18% are not sure and 10% think this is false.
• 83% know that smoking during pregnancy increases the chances that the baby will have birth defects, though 9% are not sure and 8% think this is false.
• 85% know it is false to say that drinking wine or beer while pregnant is safe though 8% say this is true and 6% are not sure.

Smoking and SIDS: Fewer people are aware of the connection between smoking and sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. Just over half (52%) know that smoking in the home of a baby increases the chances that the baby will die from sudden infant death syndrome, while 30% are not sure and 18% say this is false.

Smoking and birth weight: Asked what effect smoking during pregnancy would likely have on a baby’s weight at birth, most (76%) said it increases the chances that the smoker’s baby will be underweight at birth, compared with those who think it increases the chances the baby will be overweight (2%) or have no effect on the baby’s weight (2%). 20% were not sure.

Drinking and pregnancy: Asked which statement is most accurate, 65% know that someone who wants to get pregnant should stop drinking alcohol before pregnancy and not drink during pregnancy—compared with 25% who say someone who wants to get pregnant should stop drinking as soon as they learn they are pregnant, 4% who say someone who wants to get pregnant should limit their alcohol intake while pregnant to two drinks a day, and 6% who are not sure. The CDC says someone who is trying to get pregnant might already be pregnant, so “the best advice is for women to stop drinking alcohol when they start trying to get pregnant.”

Pregnancy health care

Folic acid: Most of those surveyed know that pregnant people should take vitamins containing folic acid: 76% know that individuals who are or may become pregnant should take a daily vitamin that contains folic acid, which is a B vitamin, though 21% are not sure and 3% say it is false. The CDC recommends this for people who are pregnant.

Pregnancy weight gain: Asked which is the most accurate statement about weight gain for a person of “normal weight” during pregnancy, 45% correctly say a gain of between 25 and 35 pounds; 24% say a gain of between 5 and 10 pounds; 26% are not sure; and 5% say “try not to gain weight during pregnancy.” The CDC says 25 to 35 pounds is the recommended weight gain for a person of normal weight.

Benefits from breastfeeding: 71% know it’s most accurate to say that breastfeeding benefits both the breastfed baby and parent, as opposed to 17% who say it benefits the baby, 1% who say it’s the parent, and 1% neither. The CDC says breastfeeding benefits both baby and parent.

Getting a newborn to sleep

How to put a baby down to sleep: 61% correctly say a new baby should be put down to sleep on its back, 12% say on its side, 12% say on its stomach, and 15% are not sure. The CDC recommends putting a baby to sleep on its back.

Avoid soft bedding: The CDC recommends keeping “soft bedding such as blankets, pillows, bumper pads, and soft toys out of their baby’s sleep area…” but many of those surveyed are not aware of this. Asked which of the following should be kept out of a baby’s sleep area:

• 72% say that pillows should be kept out of a baby’s sleep area
• 69% say soft toys
• 54% say soft bedding such as blankets
• 43% say bumper pads

Mental health: The 988 suicide lifeline

The survey also sought to determine whether the public had become familiar with the new three-digit Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, 988, introduced in July 2022. Nearly a year after its introduction, however, the survey found that only 20% of those surveyed said they knew the number—and when asked to provide it, just over half that group could do so, or 10% of the total.

This finding is not statistically different from January 2023, four and a half months earlier, when 9% could provide the number—suggesting that there has been little progress in familiarizing the public with a vitally important suicide-prevention resource.

By contrast, 86% of the public knows to dial the number 911 when someone is experiencing a health emergency.

The survey data come from the 11th wave of a nationally representative panel of 1,601 US adults, first empaneled in April 2021, conducted for the Annenberg Public Policy Center by SSRS, an independent market research company. This wave of the Annenberg Science and Public Health Knowledge (ASAPH) survey was fielded May 31-June 6, 2023. It has a margin of sampling error (MOE) of ± 3.3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

Download the topline and the methodology.

Source: Penn

New research digs into why the paths of meandering rivers change over time and how climate change could affect them.

The researchers first looked at the Mississippi River before adding other rivers on Earth and ancient riverbeds on Mars to the study.

The study specifically looks at river sinuosity, or how much rivers curve. The sinuosity of rivers changes over time, depending on the age of the river and environmental changes. Some of these changes include sediment and water supply and riverbank vegetation, all of which climate change affects.

As reported in Nature Geosciences, river sinuosity is related to the changes in how much water flows through the river. Rivers have different water levels depending on environmental factors, like precipitation levels.

The researchers looked at maps of the rivers on Earth over time by using historical data from as early as the fifth century and images from as early as 1939. They used data of 21 lowland meandering rivers.

For the ancient riverbeds on Mars, they used previously identified ancient river channels from remote sensing data.

The ancient riverbeds on Mars, untouched by human influence, gave the researchers a system to test their hypotheses on how the river systems migrated and what their sinuosity looked like by the time they dried up.

Their analysis is also a step toward understanding what the hydroclimate on Mars was like when there was still surface water.

“It really lays the foundation for more advanced topics,” says Chenliang Wu, a postdoctoral researcher at Tulane University School of Science and Engineering. “Like, were the environmental conditions suitable for life on Mars?”

After performing analysis on the rivers, the researchers separated them into two categories: variable-sinuosity and constant-sinuosity. The variable-sinuosity rivers never reached a steady state, meaning their sinuosities continue changing, and the constant sinuosity rivers did reach a steady state, meaning their average sinuosity remained relatively constant.

Of the 21 Earth rivers studied, 13, including the Mississippi River, had variable sinuosity, while eight had constant sinuosity.

Understanding what factors affect the sinuosity of rivers will give researchers and engineers insight into how to manage rivers in the future. It can help with river restoration, future infrastructure projects, and flood management. This insight can be invaluable in attempts to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

As more extreme weather happens more frequently due to the effects of climate change, research like Wu’s will become even more important when it comes to protecting and helping populations who live near rivers.

According to a 2019 study in the International Journal of Water Resources Development, half of the world’s population lives in river basins, all of whom could be affected by future floods from extreme weather events.

Source: Tulane University

A new way to see details smaller than half the wavelength of light has revealed how nanoscale scaffolding inside cells bridges to the macroscale during cell division.

Unlike earlier superresolution techniques, this one doesn’t rely on molecules that wear out with prolonged use.

Superresolution can reveal structures down to 10 nanometers, or about the same breadth as 100 atoms. It opened a whole new world in biology, and the techniques that first made it possible received a Nobel Prize in 2014. However, its weakness is that it can only take snapshots over tens of seconds. This makes it impossible to observe the evolution of the machinery of a cell over long periods of time.

“We were wondering—when the system as a whole is dividing, how do nanometer-scale structures interact with their neighbors at the nanometer scale, and how does this interaction scale up to the whole cell?” says Somin Lee, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan, who led the study published in Nature Communications.

To answer that question, Lee and colleagues needed a new kind of superresolution. Using their new method, they were able to continuously monitor a cell for 250 hours.

“The living cell is a busy place with proteins bustling here and there. Our superresolution is very attractive for viewing these dynamic activities,” says Guangjie Cui, a PhD student in electrical and computer engineering and co-first author of the study with Yunbo Liu, a PhD graduate in electrical and computer engineering.

Like the original method, the new technique uses probes near the nanoscale objects of interest to shed light on them. Superresolution 1.0 used fluorophores for this, fluorescent molecules that would send out an answering light after being illuminated. If the fluorophores were closer together than the size of whatever was being imaged, the image could be reconstructed from the bursts of light produced by the fluorophores.

The new technique uses gold nanorods, which don’t break down with repeated exposure to light, but making use of the light that interacts with them is more challenging. Nanorods respond to the phase of the light, or where it is in the up-and-down oscillation of the electric and magnetic fields that compose it. This interaction depends on how the nanorod is angled to the incoming light.

Like the fluorophores, the nanorods can attach to particular cell structures with targeting molecules on their surfaces. In this case, the nanorods sought out actin, a protein that adds structure to soft cells. Actin is shaped like branching filaments, each about 7 nanometers (millionths of a millimeter) in diameter, though they link together to span thousands of nanometers. Even though the nanorods are often more than twice the diameter of the actin, the data they provide as a group can illuminate its tiny details.

To locate the nanorods, the team built filters made of thin layers of polymers and liquid crystals. These filters enabled the detection of light with a particular phase, enabling the team to pick out nanorods with particular angles to the incoming light. By taking 10 to 30 images—each looking at a different subset of nanorods—and merging them into a single image, the team was able to deduce the nanometer-scale details of the filaments inside the cells. These details would be blurred out in conventional microscopes.

Using the technique, the team discovered three rules governing the way that actin self-organizes during cell division:

• Actin expands to reach its neighbors when actin filaments are far apart.
• Actin will draw nearer to its neighbors to increase connections, although this tendency is tempered by the drive to expand and reach more neighbors.
• As a result, the actin network tends to contract when it is more connected, and it will expand when it is less connected.

The behavior of the actin is connected to the behavior of the cell—but the cell contracts when the actin expands, and it expands when the actin contracts. The team wants to explore this further, discovering why the motions are opposite at different scales. They also want to investigate the consequences of dysregulating this molecular process: Is this at the root of some diseases?

More broadly, they hope to use superresolution to understand how self-organization is built into biological structures, without the need for central control.

“Our genetic code doesn’t actually include enough information to encode every detail of the organization process,” Lee says. “We want to explore the mechanisms of collective behaviors without central coordination that are like birds flying in formation—in which the system is driven by interactions between individual parts.”

The study had support from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

Source: University of Michigan

After decades of decline, fatal coronary heart disease may rise again unless Americans modify three major risk factors: smoking, drinking, and obesity.

A new study published in American Heart Journal finds that deaths from coronary heart disease among people ages 25 to 84 dropped to 236,953 in 2019 from 397,623 in 1990, even though Americans’ median age increased to 38 from 33 over the last three decades.

Between 1990 and 2019, the US age-standardized coronary heart disease mortality rate per 100,000 fell from 210.5 to 66.8 for females (4% decline per year) and from 442.4 to 156.7 for males (3.7% decline per year). However, the decline has slowed significantly since 2011. People born after 1980 were actually at slightly increased risk of dying from coronary heart disease at any age than people from the previous generation.

The findings echo those from the same team’s investigation of stroke-related deaths in the US.

The researchers note that while future advances in treatment continue reducing fatal heart disease, complementary lifestyle modifications may play an important role. They estimated that the elimination of smoking, drinking, and obesity would have prevented half of the deaths observed during the study period.

“The overall numbers are good. We saw a substantial decline in deaths from all types of coronary heart disease for both females and males,” says lead author Cande Ananth, chief of the division of epidemiology and biostatistics in the obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences department at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

“However, because we examined how these three modifiable risk factors affected mortality rates, we can see that there is room for considerable improvement.”

Tobacco use is already headed in the right direction: The percentage of Americans who smoked tobacco fell to 14% in 2019 from 26% in 1990. Obesity rates, on the other hand, rose sharply during the study period to 43% in 2019 from 12% in 1990. Alcohol usage rose slightly during the study period.

In addition to the reduction in smoking, other factors driving the decline in coronary heart disease mortality include statins (which lower cholesterol), better diagnostic tests, and more frequent use of those tests.

“Although myocardial infarctions happen without warning, the other two major types of coronary heart disease—chronic ischemic heart disease and atherosclerotic heart disease—can be diagnosed and treated years before they damage the heart muscles,” says Ananth, whose analyses of past trends aspire to improve future care.

To achieve this, Ananth’s research team analyzes the largest possible datasets to differentiate risk among various patient subsets. The new study used anonymized data from the National Center for Health Statistics to track all heart disease fatalities in the targeted age range for the three-decade period.

“The ultimate goal is to help inform standards of care and public health priorities by determining which patients face the highest level of risk for cardiovascular events,” Ananth says.

“Although increased screening and population-wide interventions are possible, the returns are likely to be minimal, at best, while costs will be prohibitively high. We need to maximize returns from our limited resources by identifying high-risk subsets of patients and targeting intervention to them.”

The team’s next study will analyze cardiovascular disease risk among pregnant patients.

Source: Rutgers University

A new robotic gripping device offers high degrees of strength, gentleness, and dexterity, researchers report.

The gripper is gentle enough to pick up a drop of water, strong enough to pick up a 14.1 pound weight, dexterous enough to fold a cloth, and precise enough to pick up microfilms that are 20 times thinner than a human hair.

In addition to possible manufacturing applications, the researchers also integrated the device with technology that allows the gripper to be controlled by the electrical signals produced by muscles in the forearm, demonstrating its potential for use with robotic prosthetics.

“It is difficult to develop a single, soft gripper that is capable of handling ultrasoft, ultrathin, and heavy objects, due to tradeoffs between strength, precision, and gentleness,” says Jie Yin, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the study in Nature Communications. “Our design achieves an excellent balance of these characteristics.”

The design for the new grippers builds on an earlier generation of flexible, robotic grippers that drew on the art of kirigami, which involves both cutting and folding two-dimensional sheets of material to form three-dimensional shapes.

“Our new grippers also use kirigami, but are substantially different, as we learned a great deal from the previous design,” says coauthor Yaoye Hong, a recent PhD graduate from NC State. “We’ve been able to improve the fundamental structure itself, as well as the trajectory of the grippers—meaning the path at which the grippers approach an object when grabbing it.”

The new design is able to achieve high degrees of strength and gentleness because of how it distributes force throughout the structure of the gripper.

“The strength of robotic grippers is generally measured in payload-to-weight ratio,” Yin says. “Our grippers weigh 0.4 grams and can lift up to 6.4 kilograms. That’s a payload-to-weight ratio of about 16,000. That is 2.5 times higher than the previous record for payload-to-weight ratio, which was 6,400. Combined with its characteristics of gentleness and precision, the strength of the grippers suggests a wide variety of applications.”

Another benefit of the new technology is that its attractive characteristics are driven primarily by its structural design, rather than by the materials used to fabricate the grippers.

“In practical terms, this means that you could fabricate the grippers out of biodegradable materials, such as sturdy plant leaves,” says Hong. “That could be particularly useful for applications where you would only want to use the grippers for a limited period of time, such as when handling food or biomedical materials. For example, we’ve demonstrated that the grippers can be used to handle sharp medical waste, such as needles.”

The researchers also integrated the gripping device with a myoelectric prosthetic hand, meaning the prosthesis is controlled using muscle activity.

“This gripper provided enhanced function for tasks that are difficult to perform using existing prosthetic devices, such as zipping certain types of zippers, picking up a coin, and so on,” says coauthor Helen Huang, professor in the joint biomedical engineering department at NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“The new gripper can’t replace all of the functions of existing prosthetic hands, but it could be used to supplement those other functions,” Huang says. “And one of the advantages of the kirigami grippers is that you would not need to replace or augment the existing motors used in robotic prosthetics. You could simply make use of the existing motor when utilizing the grippers.”

In proof-of-concept testing, the researchers demonstrated that the kirigami grippers could be used in conjunction with the myoelectric prosthesis to turn the pages of a book and pluck grapes off a vine.

“We think the gripper design has potential applications in fields ranging from robotic prosthetics and food processing to pharmaceutical and electronics manufacturing,” Yin says. “We are looking forward to working with industry partners to find ways to put the technology to use.”

The National Science Foundation supported the work.

Source: NC State

A new paper details the discovery of the highest-energy light ever observed from the sun.

“The sun is more surprising than we knew,” says Mehr Un Nisa, a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University. “We thought we had this star figured out, but that’s not the case.”

Nisa, who will soon be joining Michigan State’s faculty, is the corresponding author of the new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The team behind the discovery also found that this type of light, known as gamma rays, is surprisingly bright. That is, there’s more of it than scientists had previously anticipated.

Although the high-energy light doesn’t reach the Earth’s surface, these gamma rays create telltale signatures that Nisa and her colleagues working with the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, or HAWC, detected.

HAWC is an important part of the story. Unlike other observatories, it works around the clock.

“We now have observational techniques that weren’t possible a few years ago,” says Nisa, who works in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Natural Science.

“In this particular energy regime, other ground-based telescopes couldn’t look at the sun because they only work at night,” she says. “Ours operates 24/7.”

In addition to working differently from conventional telescopes, HAWC looks a lot different from the typical telescope.

Rather than a tube outfitted with glass lenses, HAWC uses a network of 300 large water tanks, each filled with about 200 metric tons of water. The network is nestled between two dormant volcano peaks in Mexico, more than 13,000 feet above sea level.

From this vantage point, it can observe the aftermath of gamma rays striking air in the atmosphere. Such collisions create what are called air showers, which are a bit like particle explosions that are imperceptible to the naked eye.

The energy of the original gamma ray is liberated and redistributed amongst new fragments consisting of lower energy particles and light. It’s these particles—and the new particles they create on their way down—that HAWC can “see.”

When the shower particles interact with water in HAWC’s tanks, they create what’s known as Cherenkov radiation that can be detected with the observatory’s instruments.

Nisa and her colleagues began collecting data in 2015. In 2021, the team had accrued enough data to start examining the sun’s gamma rays with sufficient scrutiny.

“After looking at six years’ worth of data, out popped this excess of gamma rays,” Nisa says. “When we first saw it, we were like, ‘We definitely messed this up. The sun cannot be this bright at these energies.’”

The sun gives off a lot of light spanning a range of energies, but some energies are more abundant than others.

For example, through its nuclear reactions, the sun provides a ton of visible light—that is, the light we see. This form of light carries an energy of about 1 electron volt, which is a handy unit of measure in physics.

The gamma rays that Nisa and her colleagues observed had about 1 trillion electron volts, or 1 tera electron volt, abbreviated 1 TeV. Not only was this energy level surprising, but so was the fact that they were seeing so much of it.

In the 1990s, scientists predicted that the sun could produce gamma rays when high-energy cosmic rays—particles accelerated by a cosmic powerhouse like a black hole or supernova—smash into protons in the sun. But, based on what was known about cosmic rays and the sun, the researchers also hypothesized it would be rare to see these gamma rays reach Earth.

At the time, though, there wasn’t an instrument capable of detecting such high-energy gamma rays and there wouldn’t be for a while. The first observation of gamma rays with energies of more than a billion electron volts came from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in 2011.

Over the next several years, the Fermi mission showed that not only could these rays be very energetic, but also that there were about seven times more of them than scientists had originally expected. And it looked like there were gamma rays left to discover at even higher energies.

When a telescope launches into space, there’s a limit to how big and powerful its detectors can be. The Fermi telescope’s measurements of the sun’s gamma rays maxed out around 200 billion electron volts.

Theorists led by John Beacom and Annika Peter, both professors at Ohio State University, encouraged the HAWC Collaboration to take a look.

“They nudged us and said, ‘We’re not seeing a cutoff. You might be able to see something,” Nisa says.

Now, for the first time, the team has shown that the energies of the sun’s rays extend into the TeV range, up to nearly 10 TeV, which does appear to be the maximum, Nisa says.

Currently, the discovery creates more questions than answers. Solar scientists will now scratch their heads over how exactly these gamma rays achieve such high energies and what role the sun’s magnetic fields play in this phenomenon, Nisa says.

When it comes to the cosmos, though, that’s part of the excitement. It tells us that there was something wrong, missing, or perhaps both when it comes to how we understand our nearest and dearest star.

“This shows that HAWC is adding to our knowledge of our galaxy at the highest energies, and it’s opening up questions about our very own sun,” Nisa says. “It’s making us see things in a different light. Literally.”

The HAWC Collaboration includes more than 30 institutions across North America, Europe, and Asia and has funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Council of Humanities Science and Technology.

Source: Matt Davenport for Michigan State University

Targeting the bubble-like membrane of a virus, rather than its proteins, could lead to a new generation of antivirals, researchers report.

Antiviral therapies are notoriously difficult to develop, as viruses can quickly mutate to become resistant to drugs. But what if a new generation of antivirals ignores the fast-mutating proteins on the surface of viruses and instead disrupts their protective layers?

“We found an Achilles heel of many viruses: their bubble-like membranes. Exploiting this vulnerability and disrupting the membrane is a promising mechanism of action for developing new antivirals,” says Kent Kirshenbaum, professor of chemistry at New York University and senior author of the study in the journal ACS Infectious Diseases.

In the study, the researchers show how a group of new molecules inspired by our own immune system inactivates several viruses, including Zika and chikungunya. The approach may not only lead to drugs that can be used against many viruses, but could also help overcome antiviral resistance.

Urgent need for new drugs

Viruses have different proteins on their surfaces that are often the targets of therapeutics like monoclonal antibodies and vaccines. But targeting these proteins has limitations, as viruses can quickly evolve, changing the properties of the proteins and making treatments less effective. These limitations were on display when new SARS-CoV-2 variants emerged that evaded both the drugs and the vaccines developed against the original virus.

“There is an urgent need for antiviral agents that act in new ways to inactivate viruses,” Kirshenbaum says. “Ideally, new antivirals won’t be specific to one virus or protein, so they will be ready to treat new viruses that emerge without delay and will be able to overcome the development of resistance.”

“We need to develop this next generation of drugs now and have them on the shelves in order to be ready for the next pandemic threat—and there will be another one, for sure,” he says.

Our innate immune system combats pathogens by producing antimicrobial peptides, the body’s first line of defense against bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Most viruses that cause disease are encapsulated in membranes made of lipids, and antimicrobial peptides work by disrupting or even bursting these membranes.

While antimicrobial peptides can be synthesized in the lab, they are rarely used to treat infectious diseases in humans because they break down easily and can be toxic to healthy cells. Instead, scientists have developed synthetic materials called peptoids, which have similar chemical backbones to peptides but are better able to break through virus membranes and are less likely to degrade.

“We began to think about how to mimic natural peptides and create molecules with many of the same structural and functional features as peptides, but are composed of something that our bodies won’t be able to rapidly degrade,” says Kirshenbaum.

The researchers investigated seven peptoids, many originally discovered in the lab of Annelise Barron at Stanford University and a coauthor of the study. The NYU team studied the antiviral effects of the peptoids against four viruses: three enveloped in membranes (Zika, Rift Valley fever, and chikungunya) and one without (coxsackievirus B3).

“We were particularly interested in studying these viruses as they have no available treatment options,” says Patrick Tate, a chemistry PhD student at NYU and the study’s first author.

Antiviral effect

The membranes surrounding viruses are made of different molecules than the virus itself, as lipids are acquired from the host to form membranes. One such lipid, phosphatidylserine, is present in the membrane on the outside of viruses, but is sequestered towards the interior of human cells under normal conditions.

“Because phosphatidylserine is found on the exterior of viruses, it can be a specific target for peptoids to recognize viruses, but not recognize—and therefore spare—our own cells,” Tate says. “Moreover, because viruses acquire lipids from the host rather than encoding from their own genomes, they have better potential to avoid antiviral resistance.”

The researchers tested seven peptoids against the four viruses. They found that the peptoids inactivated all three enveloped viruses—Zika, Rift Valley fever, and chikungunya—by disrupting the virus membrane, but did not disrupt coxsackievirus B3, the only virus without a membrane.

Moreover, chikungunya virus containing higher levels of phosphatidylserine in its membrane was more susceptible to the peptoids. In contrast, a membrane formed exclusively with a different lipid named phosphatidylcholine was not disrupted by the peptoids, suggesting that phosphatidylserine is crucial in order for peptoids to reduce viral activity.

“We’re now starting to understand how peptoids actually exert their antiviral effect—specifically, through the recognition of phosphatidylserine,” says Tate.

The researchers are continuing pre-clinical studies to evaluate the potential of these molecules in fighting viruses and to understand if they can overcome the development of resistance. Their peptoid-focused approach may hold promise for treating a wide range of viruses with membranes that can be difficult to treat, including Ebola, SARS-CoV-2, and herpes.

Additional coauthors are from Loyola University Chicago Medical Center, Maxwell Biosciences, and the University of Louisville School of Dentistry.

The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health supported the work. Kirshenbaum is the chief scientific officer for Maxwell Biosciences, a biotech company that has licensed patents originating from his lab at NYU. The company is seeking to commercialize these compounds and bring them to the clinic to advance human health.

Source: NYU

A study of older US adults finds that the risk of negative effects of both mRNA COVID vaccines is exceptionally low, but lowest with the Moderna vaccine.

While mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 have been found to be safe and effective for the general population, in-depth evidence about safety and effectiveness for older adults and individuals with chronic health conditions is more limited.

To address that gap, researchers conducted the largest head-to-head comparison study of the two mRNA vaccines approved by the US Food and Drug Administration—the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.

The results showed that, for older adults, the Moderna vaccine was associated with a slightly lower risk of adverse events than the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

The findings are published in JAMA Network Open.

“The results of this study can help public health experts weigh which mRNA vaccine might be preferred for older adults and older subgroups, such as those with increased frailty,” says lead study author Daniel Harris, an epidemiologist and research scientist in the Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research at the Brown University School of Public Health.

The study looked at more than six million older adults, with the average age of 76 years, who were vaccinated against COVID-19 using one of the two mRNA vaccines, Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech. The vaccines have subtle differences in manufacturing, administration, and immune response.

The study confirmed that for older adults in both vaccine groups, the risk of serious adverse events was very low. The researchers also observed that for these older adults, the Moderna vaccine was associated with a 4% lower risk of pulmonary embolism, which is a sudden blockage in blood vessels of the lungs, and a 2% lower risk of thromboembolic events, defined as several conditions related to blood clotting.

The Moderna vaccine was also associated with a 15% lower risk of diagnosed COVID-19 compared to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

The risk of adverse events from a natural infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is substantially higher than the risk of adverse events from either mRNA vaccine, Harris emphasizes. But now that over 70% of the global population has received one type of COVID-19 vaccine and vaccine supply is less of a concern, he says there is a need for detailed information about vaccine effects and safety to guide decision-making.

“Immunization with either mRNA vaccine is substantially better and safer than not being vaccinated at all,” Harris says. “But in an ideal world where we can have a choice between which vaccine product is used, we wanted to see whether one vaccine was associated with better performance for older adults and those with increased frailty.”

There is also a need to understand vaccine performance in real-world populations, Harris says. He notes that older adults, who often have chronic health conditions, tend to be excluded from clinical trials or represented in small numbers. This is especially important considering that older adults, especially those in nursing homes, had a higher risk of developing severe COVID-19.

Older adults with frailty can also have differences in their immune responses to vaccines, Harris says, making it important to understand how these vaccines work for frail older adults compared to their non-frail counterparts.

The research is part of a project called the IMPACT Collaboratory, led by researchers at Brown University and Boston-based Hebrew SeniorLife, which is enabling massive monitoring of the long-term safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines for Medicare beneficiaries, in collaboration with CVS and Walgreens pharmacies.

“Because we had these real-world data and a cohort that included millions of older adults, we were able to tease apart potentially very small differences in vaccine safety and effectiveness and perform analyses on important clinical subgroups,” Harris says.

According to the researchers, the improved safety of the Moderna vaccine for some adverse events, like pulmonary embolism, could have been due to its greater protection against COVID-19, especially for non-frail older adults.

“We think that these two things, safety and effectiveness, are interrelated,” Harris says. “The slightly reduced risk of pulmonary embolism and other adverse events that we saw in individuals who received Moderna may be because the Moderna vaccine was also more effective at reducing COVID-19 risk.”

However, the study was unable to definitively conclude whether the differences in adverse events were due to safety or effectiveness, and the researchers recommended additional research in this area. The study also only looked at the first dose of the mRNA vaccines, so another potential next step could involve similar comparisons for subsequent vaccinations.

“You can imagine regularly updating these types of analyses as new vaccines are developed,” Harris says. “Depending on which one comes out on top, even on a very small scale, that may have big implications at the population level and render a preference for that particular vaccine.”

The National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health funded the work.

Source: Brown University

A new solution to car theft leverages perhaps the lowest-tech feature of today’s vehicles—the auxiliary power outlet, known to those of a certain age as the cigarette lighter.

Skyrocketing vehicle theft rates in some US cities have drawn attention to an inconvenient truth: the increasing amount of technology in our vehicles can make them increasingly vulnerable to hacking or theft.

The researchers are set to begin large-scale testing of Battery Sleuth, a vehicle security system that can protect against sophisticated wireless hacking, old-school jimmying, and everything in between.

Battery Sleuth bypasses both the wireless communication that key fobs depend on and the standardized onboard communication network that’s used in today’s vehicles. Instead, it authenticates drivers by measuring voltage fluctuations in a vehicle’s electrical system. Drivers interact with it through a keypad device plugged into the auxiliary power outlet.

“The great thing about the power outlet is its simplicity—it’s just a wire connected to the battery, so there’s nothing to hack,” says Kang Shin, professor of computer science at the University of Michigan and lead researcher on the project. “And creating voltage fluctuations with components like windshield wipers or door locks is even simpler.”

Battery Sleuth delivers a predetermined series of voltage fluctuations—a sort of “voltage fingerprint”—to the car’s electrical system when the driver enters a numerical code into the keypad device. A receiver then recognizes this fingerprint and enables the vehicle to start. Drivers can also deliver the voltage fluctuation manually using auxiliary functions that draw battery power. They might perform some combination of flicking the windshield wipers, turn signal, or headlights on and off, or locking and unlocking the doors.

Installed between a vehicle’s battery and the car’s electrical system, Battery Sleuth’s default mode allows the battery to deliver enough current to power systems like electronics and lights, but not enough to power the vehicle’s starter. Only when it detects the pre-set series of voltage fluctuations in the vehicle’s electrical system does it turn up the juice, allowing the battery’s full power through to the starter.

“The idea of measuring fluctuations in a car’s electrical system seems simple, but designing one device that can do it accurately on thousands of different vehicle models in varying environmental conditions gets quite complicated,” says Liang He, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Colorado, Denver and a researcher on the project. “We’re working to design a system that’s smart enough to measure the parameters of the vehicle it’s installed on and then customize itself to work effectively on that vehicle.”

Battery Sleuth also has defenses to guard against hacking or physical attacks on the device itself, including a siren that sounds if illegitimate activity is detected and a resistor that shuts down the vehicle’s electrical system if an unauthorized power source is connected to the vehicle. The system is designed to work as either an add-on to existing vehicles or a permanently installed component on new vehicles.

“Vehicle theft costs drivers and insurance companies more than $4 billion each year in the United States alone, and that’s partly because today’s vehicles use a hodge-podge of computer systems that were never designed to work together,” Shin says. “Each new layer of technology introduces new security vulnerabilities, and rather than try to patch each one, we’ve developed a system that works completely independently.”

In a field test study on eight vehicles published in July 2022, the researchers showed that a prototype of Battery Sleuth was more than 99.9% effective at detecting and preventing illegitimate activity without interfering with normal vehicle operation. The team plans to use a new grant to fund more extensive testing at the University of Michigan’s Mcity test facility. The next stage of the process will also explore expanding the system to enable it to control entry to the car, making it useful for applications like vehicle sharing.

At the end of the three-year project, the team aims to have a commercially viable prototype that can be scaled up to commercial production, first as a theft deterrent device, and potentially later as a complete vehicle entry and control system that could replace traditional keys and fobs.

Support for the research came from the National Science Foundation Division of Computer and Network Systems under the Computer Science and Engineering Directorate.

Source: University of Michigan

People exposed to a wildfire within a year after having lung cancer surgery have significantly lower chances of survival compared to lung cancer patients not exposed to wildfires, researchers report.

For the study, researchers selected 499,912 people who underwent surgical removal of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) between 2004-2019 from the National Cancer Database. Of those individuals, 168,645 (36%) were exposed to wildfires within a year of being discharged from the hospital, according to ZIP-code level data from NASA’s Fire Information Resource Management System.

The findings, published in JAMA Oncology, show those patients had worse overall survival than others in the study and that their chances of survival decreased the sooner the wildfire exposure occurred following their surgery.

People whose zip code overlapped with a wildfire event within three months of NSCLC surgery were 48% less likely to survive compared to patients not exposed to a wildfire event. Patients exposed to wildfires 4-6 months (38%) and 7-12 months (17%) following surgery also had lower survival rates than unexposed patients.

“This study shows that the health impact of climate change-related extreme weather events such as wildfires is multi-faceted and further-reaching than we typically think,” says Yang Liu, professor in environmental health department at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health.

Satellite data provided by NASA, which also funded the study, allowed researchers to identify wildfire events globally and for an extended period.

“In addition to the health consequences of inhaling fire smoke, the interruption of care, anxiety due to property loss or financial hardship, as well as the mental trauma associated with experiencing a fire event can work together to negatively affect people’s health and well-being,” Liu says. “The impact of smaller fires in the eastern US also shouldn’t be ignored as they are often much closer to people.”

Lung cancer is the second most common cancer diagnosis in the United States and the leading cause of cancer-related deaths. Meanwhile, exposure to air pollution decreases the chance of lung cancer survival, and wildfire smoke is a major contributor to air pollution.

“Surgery for lung cancer is a major operation with serious side effects and recovery takes months,” says Leticia Nogueira, scientific director of health services research at the American Cancer Society. “During recovery, individuals struggle with physical (diminished pulmonary and physical function, decreased mobility, increased fatigue), psychological (stress, anxiety, depression), and socioeconomic (out-of-pocket costs, ability to remain employed or maintain income levels, etc.) consequences of surgery, which can impact patients’ ability to prepare and respond to the threats posed by an approaching wildfire.”

However, air pollution was only one of several health threats—such as water and soil contaminations, increased stress, and mental health issues, displacement, and disruption to health care access—posed by wildfires that can negatively affect the long-term survival of individuals recovering from lung cancer surgery.

“While wildfire smoke contributes to worsening air quality, which has been associated with increased cancer risk, proximity to wildfires poses several challenges that go beyond inhaling polluted air,” Nogueira says.

“These include the stress associated with the threat wildfires pose to property and life, the financial resources necessary to evacuate or shelter in place, and the health hazards associated with exposure to contaminated water and dust. The additional challenges are especially concerning for cancer patients and survivors, who are already dealing with the physical, psychological, and socioeconomic consequences of cancer diagnosis and treatment.”

The researchers warn the health risks from wildfires will only intensify in the era of climate change.

“Climate change will result in reduced rainfall, higher temperature, and drier soil in much of western North America, further exacerbating wildfire activity in the region,” Liu says. “We will see a longer fire season and more frequent, more intense fires.”

Additional coauthors are from Yale University, the American Cancer Society, and Emory.

Source: Emory University