IMAGE: After four hours, if the infection is not treated it kills all the cells (line 1); Unformulated tobramycin keeps the cells alive, but it does not eradicate the infection (line…
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Credit: UniSA

World-first nanotechnology developed by the University of South Australia could change the lives of thousands of people living with cystic fibrosis (CF) as groundbreaking research shows it can improve the effectiveness of the CF antibiotic Tobramycin, increasing its efficacy by up to 100,000-fold.

The new technology uses a biomimetic nanostructured material to augment Tobramycin – the antibiotic prescribed to treat chronic Pseudomonas aeruginosa lung infections in severe cases of CF – eradicating the infection in as little as two doses.

In Australia, cystic fibrosis (CF) affects one in 2500 babies – or one baby born every four days – causing severe impairments to a person’s lungs, airways and digestive system, trapping bacteria and leading to recurrent infections. Lung failure is the major cause of death for people with CF.

The UniSA research team, which includes Professor Clive Prestidge, Dr Nicky Thomas, and PhD candidate, Chelsea Thorn, says the discovery could transform the lives of people living with CF.

“CF is a progressive, genetic disease that causes persistent, chronic lung infections and limits a person’s ability to breathe,” Thorn says.

“The disease causes thick, sticky mucus to clog a person’s airways, attracting germs and bacteria, such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which leads to recurring infections and blockages.

“Tobramycin is commonly used to treat these infections but increasingly antibiotics are failing to make any significant difference to lung infections, leaving sufferers requiring life-long antibiotic therapy administered every month.

“Our research successfully treats advanced human cell culture lung infections using nano-enhanced Tobramycin and shows how it can eradicate serious and persistent infections after only two doses.

“This could be a real game-changer for people living with CF.”

Researchers enhanced the Tobramycin with a biometric, nanostructured, lipid liquid crystal nanoparticle (LCNP)-based material, testing it on a new lung infection model to showcase its unique ability to penetrate the dense surface of the bacteria and kill the infection.

Dr Nicky Thomas, says the discovery continues the global battle to eradicate and prevent Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Tobramycin works by inhibiting the synthesis of bacteria and causing cell membrane damage. Yet, as it’s a concentration-dependent antibiotic, achieving a sufficiently high concentration is critical,” Dr Thomas says.

“Our technology improves the performance of Tobramycin without increasing the toxicity of the drug, so what we’re doing is a far more effective and efficient treatment for chronic lung infections.”

The technology is currently entering pre-clinical trials and hopes to be on the market in the next five years.

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Notes to editors:

The research group for this study includes the University of South Australia; the Basil Hetzel Institute for Translational Health and Research; the ARC Centre for Excellence in Bio-Nano Science and Technology; the Biofilm Test facility at UniSA’s Cancer Research Institute; the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland; and Saarland University.

The research directly relates to these papers:

* Thorn, C. R., Carvalho-Wodarz, C. D., Horstmann, J. C., Lehr, C-M., Prestidge, C. A., Thomas, N., “Tobramycin liquid crystal nanoparticles eradicate cystic fibrosis-related Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilms”. Small: 2021. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smll.202100531

* Thorn, C. R., Raju, D., Lacdao, I., Gilbert, S., Sivarajah, P., Howell, P. L., Prestidge, C., Thomas, N., “Protective liquid crystal nanoparticles for targeted delivery of PslG – a biofilm dispersing enzyme”. ACS Infectious Diseases: 2021. Online ahead of print: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsinfecdis.1c00014

Media contact: Annabel Mansfield T: +61 8 8302 0351 M: +61 417 717 504

E: Annabel.Mansfield@unisa.edu.au

Researcher: Chelsea Thorn T: +61 439 703 006 E: chelsea.thorn@mymail.unisa.edu.au

Dr Nicky Thomas T: +61 8302 0125 E: Nicky.Thomas@unisa.edu.au

Professor Clive Prestidge T: +61 8 8302 2438 E: Clive.Prestidge@unisa.edu.au

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

Originally Appeared On: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/uosa-nni051221.php

Stiff penalty imposed by Italian watchdog over Google’s alleged decision to restrict access of one Italian firm to its Android Auto platform

Google has been accused of favouring its Google Map app by preventing an Italian rival app designed for electric cars from accessing its Android Auto platform.

The Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) fined Google 102m euros ($123m) for restricting access to Android Auto by an electric car charging app called JuicePass, made by energy company Enel X Italia.

Android Auto of course allows motorists to pair their Android smartphones to an in-car infotainment system. It also provides access to a number of third party apps, which can be accessed by the car’s infotainment screen.

Restricted access?

But Google is alleged to have restricted Enel X Italia’s JuicePass app from being accessed by Android Auto.

The AGCM has alleged that Google violated Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union – and has ordered it to make the JuicePass available via the platform.

It also says Google must to provide the same interoperability with Android Auto to other third party app developers.

Essentially, the Italian regulator says that Google Maps provides some basic services concerning charging of electric cars (charging station locations etc).

“By refusing Enel X Italia interoperability with Android Auto, Google has unfairly limited the possibilities for end users to avail themselves of the Enel X Italia app when driving and recharging an electric vehicle,” the Italian regulator alleges.

“Google has consequently favored its own Google Maps app, which runs on Android Auto and enables functional services for electric vehicle charging, currently limited to finding and getting directions to reach charging points, but which in the future could include other functionalities such as reservation and payment,” it reportedly said.

Google however has denied this, but it is not certain at the time of writing whether the search engine giant intends to appeal the fine.

Google claims the restrictions it places on apps’ access to Android Auto are necessary to ensure drivers are not distracted.

Originally Appeared On: https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-regulation/google-fined-100-million-euros-by-italian-antitrust-regulator-397645

IMAGE: Artistic impression of the experiment in which Häusler and colleagues first heat one of two quantum-?gas clouds and then connect them with a two-?dimensional channel, such that they can equilibrate….
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Credit: D. Husmann & S. Häusler, ETH Zurich

When a piece of conducting material is heated up at one of its ends, a voltage difference can build up across the sample, which in turn can be converted into a current. This is the so-called Seebeck effect, the cornerstone of thermoelectric effects. In particular, the effect provides a route to creating work out of a temperature difference. Such thermoelectric engines do not have any movable part and are therefore convenient power sources in various applications, including propelling NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance. The Seebeck effect is interesting for fundamental physics, too, as the magnitude and sign of the induced thermoelectric current is characteristic of the material and indicates how entropy and charge currents are coupled. Writing in Physical Review X, the group of Prof. Tilman Esslinger at the Department of Physics of ETH Zurich now reports on the controlled reversal of such a current by changing the interaction strength among the constituents of a quantum simulator made of extremely cold atoms trapped in shaped laser fields. The capability to induce such a reversal means that the system can be turned from a thermoelectric engine into a cooler.

Which way please?

The experiment, conducted by doctoral researcher Samuel Häusler and co-workers in the Esslinger group, starts with a cloud of fermionic Lithium atoms that are cooled to temperatures low enough that quantum effects determine the behaviour of the ensemble. The cloud is then separated into two independent halves of equal atom number. One of them is heated, before the two reservoirs are connected by a two-dimensional channel. The equilibrium state that thus develops is as expected: after a sufficiently long time, the two halves contain equal atom numbers at equal temperatures. More interesting is the transient behaviour. During the equilibration process, the atom number in each reservoir changes, with the atoms ebbing and flowing between them. In which direction and with what amplitude this happens depends on the thermoelectric properties of the system.

Thanks to the exquisite control over the system, the researchers were able to measure the transient behaviours for different interaction strengths and atomic densities inside the channel and compared them to a simple model. In contrast to solid-state systems, where most thermoelectric properties can be measured in simple, well-defined experiments, in these small clouds of atoms the parameters are inferred from fundamental quantities such as the atom density. Finding a procedure that properly extracts the thermoelectric quantities over a wide range of parameters was a key point of the work.

The team found that the current direction results from a competition between two effects (see the figure). On the one hand (left), the thermodynamic properties of the reservoirs favour the increase of atom number in the hot reservoir, to equilibrate the chemical potentials of the two halves. On the other hand (right), the properties of the channel typically make the transport of hot, energetic particles easier — because they have a large number of possible pathways (or, modes) available to them — leading to an increase of the atom number in the cold reservoir.

A superfluid traffic regulator

With a non-interacting gas, it is possible to compute the dominating trend between the two competing effects once the precise shape of the atom cloud is known and taken into account. In the system of Häusler et al. this can be done very accurately. Both in the computation and in the measurements, the initial atom current flows from the hot to the cold reservoir and is stronger for low atomic densities in the channel. When the interactions are tuned up to the so-called unitary regime, the behaviour of the system becomes considerably more difficult to predict. The computation becomes intractable without wide-ranging approximations, due to the strong correlations that build up in the gas.

In this regime, the quantum simulation device of the ETH researchers showed that for high-enough mean temperature and low atom density in the channel, the current also flows from the hot to the cold reservoir. However, it can be reversed when the channel density is increased using an attractive gate potential. Above a certain density threshold, the atoms in the channel undergo a phase transition where they form pairs showing superfluid behaviour. This superfluid region in the channel limits the transport of unpaired, energetic particles, favouring the transport from the cold to the hot reservoir and hence the reversal of the thermoelectric current.

Towards better thermoelectric materials thanks to interactions

Understanding the properties of matter through thermoelectric measurement improves the fundamental understanding of interacting quantum systems. Equally important is to identify new ways to design well-performing thermoelectric materials that could efficiently transform small heat differences into work or, if used in reverse mode, act as a cooling device (known as a Peltier cooler).

The efficiency of a thermoelectric material is characterized by the thermoelectric figure of merit. Häusler et al. have measured a strong enhancement of the value of this figure when cranking up the interactions. While this enhancement cannot be directly translated into material science, this excellent cooling capability could already be used to reach lower temperatures for atomic gases, which in turn might enable a broad range of novel fundamental experiments in quantum science.

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Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

Originally Appeared On: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/ezdo-ctr051321.php

Google is constantly improving the features and functionality of Google Assistant. Earlier this month reports detailed that Google was working on a feature that would enable Android users to trigger Google Assistant by pressing the power button. Now, a new report says that the company is reshuffling the menus and adding new features to its virtual assistant.

Android Police reports that Google Assistant has been renamed to ‘Communications’ Menu. Earlier, it was called ‘Voice and video calls’. Notably, while the name of the app has been updated, the settings inside remain mostly unchanged. The new Communications menu has ‘Call Providers’, ‘Video & Voice Apps’, ‘Device & Call Settings’, and ‘Your Contacts’ settings inside.

The only change in the menu is the addition of Broadcast settings. This section houses two toggle buttons. The ‘Broadcast on personal devices’ button enables users to broadcast messages on their personal devices, while the ‘Family broadcasting for guests’ button enables users to allow guests to broadcast messages to the personal devices of a family. 

The company as per the report has started rolling out this feature widely.

Originally Appeared On: https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/google-assistant-gets-an-updated-menu-new-features-71620928450832.html

Originally published in Newsday for May 13, 2021.

In an announcement on Wednesday, Microsoft introduced the wide availability of new certifications for cybersecurity professionals across a range of capabilities.

The four certifications, Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals, Information Protection Administrator Associate, Security Operations Analyst Associate and Identity and Access Administrator Associate are part of a refreshed initiative by the company to encourage good practices in preventive cybersecurity.

In an exclusive virtual briefing with Newsday on Tuesday, Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft’s Corporate vice-president for Security, Compliance and Identity, noted the sharp increase in computer intrusion attempts since the pandemic began.

“Hackers are attacking 579 times a second, from individual phishing to nation state attacks,” Jakkal said.
“Microsoft protected against 30 billion email threats in 2019 alone.”

“We have the tools, but we are not always making use of them. There are 18 billion password attacks a year and we are not using existing identity protection systems, such as multi-factor authentication.”

“Effective cybersecurity means moving to a Zero-Trust architecture, and that means looking at everything, all the time.”
Jakkal noted the effectiveness of the Solorigate intrusion attempt on the company’s systems.

Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center has since renamed that attack Nobelium, and it was part of a concerted cyberattack on the US Federal government, went on for at least eight months, and is believed to have affected 200 organisations around the world.

Solarwinds’ Orion governance software, VMWare, a computer virtualisation product and Microsoft’s cloud services were vectors in the exploit.
Access was gained through stolen authentication and took advantage of single-sign-on security infrastructure.
The exploit was successful and sustained because it took advantage of a wide range of lapses in programming, in supply chain security and in how the systems were configured to be used.

Vasu Jakkal. Photos courtesy Microsoft.

In an official Microsoft blog post in February titled “Turning the page on Solorigate” Jakkal acknowledged the incident and the lapses that led to it as a critical moment in Microsoft’s approach to cybersecurity.

“Baseline layers of protection are not enough for today’s sophisticated threats,” Jakkal wrote.
“Defense strategies must match up to these increasingly sophisticated attacks while factoring in the complexities of securing a remote workforce.”
“One of the most important pieces of guidance for any security posture that we can share right now is to layer up, no matter who your security vendors are.”

Microsoft’s emphasis in this week’s announcements addressed remote and hybrid work.
“How do we move to hybrid work and how do we thrive?” Jakkal asked rhetorically during Tuesday’s meeting.
“Even after things are settled, we are likely to see a 300 per cent increase in the numbers of people who are willing to work from home.”

“It’s going to take between three to five years to fully integrate that change.”
Microsoft wants companies to start thinking about the security architecture needed to support that change, even though, as Jakkal admitted, all customers are not on the same journey.
“The hybrid world is largely perimeterless, so wrapping protections around identity and devices is critical,” Jakkal wrote in a new post released yesterday.

“As part of Zero-Trust, we also think the future is passwordless and we will start to see that transition this year.”
The company announced a new Zero-Trust Assessment tool yesterday and continues to encourage its users to take advantage of existing multi-factor authentication (MFA), which the company frets, only 18 per cent of its users have turned on.

“We’re actively working to make MFA rollout easier and more seamless for our customers, as well as ensuring that the end-user experience is as frictionless and friendly as possible,” Jakkal noted in yesterday’s announcement.

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Originally Appeared On: https://technewstt.com/microsoft-better-cybersecurity-needed/

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday said masks and social distancing are no longer necessary for people who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19. It’s a move the agency said was driven by scientific evidence that the vaccines play a major role in curbing both infections and transmission of the virus.

In announcing the agency’s updated guidelines, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said there are “numerous reports in the literature” to demonstrate the safety and real-world effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines.

Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

Walensky highlighted, in particular, three recent studies that demonstrated the impact of the vaccines on symptomatic and asymptomatic infections and one study published just last week on the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines against two variants that are known to be circulating in the United States.

The findings all add to a growing body of evidence that the vaccines are effective at preventing severe illness and death from Covid-19 and that they help prevent people from spreading the virus to others.

“The trends are all going down because vaccines are making a big difference,” said Dr. Isaac Weisfuse, a medical epidemiologist at Cornell University and former New York City deputy health commissioner. “The fewer people you have who are susceptible, the more likely the trends will keep going down.”

In the U.S., the number of newly reported Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all decreasing. The most recent seven-day average for new cases fell about 23 percent over the previous week, Walensky said. The seven-day average for daily deaths also declined to 587 per day, according to the CDC.

“Today, Covid-19 deaths are at the lowest point since April 2020,” Andy Slavitt, the White House Covid-19 adviser, said Thursday in a news briefing.

These statistics help reinforce that the vaccines are working — and working well, said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

“It’s like we reached a tipping point in terms of the weight of the evidence showing that these are profoundly effective vaccines, beyond our wildest dreams, and they’re really good at blocking transmission,” Gandhi said.

The change in recommendations was overdue, according to Dr. David Dowdy, an associate professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“I think part of the problem before this was that there was something of a mixed message: The vaccines are very effective, but you still have to wear a mask,” Dowdy said. “This is now a strong statement that we know these vaccines work, and for those who are fully vaccinated, it’s appropriate to take some steps toward living life a bit more normally.”

Download the NBC News app for full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

In one of the studies cited by the CDC, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was shown to be 97 percent effective at protecting against symptomatic infection and 86 percent effective at protecting against asymptomatic infection. Those results, published May 6 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, were based on a study of more than 6,700 vaccinated health care workers in Israel.

Walensky also referenced two recent U.S.-based studies that were published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. One study demonstrated that Covid-19 vaccines were 90 percent effective at preventing both symptomatic and asymptomatic infection among nearly 4,000 health care workers and front-line workers. A second study found the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were 94 percent effective at preventing Covid-19-related-hospitalizations among adults 65 and older who have been fully vaccinated.

The CDC’s study on adults 65 and up was particularly important, Gandhi said, because there were early concerns about how well the vaccines would perform in older populations.

“The cumulative weight of all these studies show that taking masks off a vaccinated person is completely fine,” she said.

While it is possible for someone who is fully vaccinated to get infected, these breakthrough infections are considered very rare. Out of the more than 117 million people in the U.S. who have been fully vaccinated, just 9,245 people later tested positive for Covid-19. The CDC has also said illnesses from breakthrough infections are typically mild.

Walensky also highlighted the results of a study published May 5 in The New England Journal of Medicine that looked at the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against two coronavirus variants. The research, based on the results of a mass vaccination campaign in Qatar, showed the vaccine was 89.5 percent effective at preventing infection from the so-called B.1.1.7 variant, a more-contagious strain of the virus that was first reported in the U.K. The Pfizer vaccine was also 75 percent effective at protecting against the B.1.351 variant, which was first identified in South Africa.

These results are significant because there have been concerns that vaccines wouldn’t be as effective against the B.1.351 variant, and the B.1.1.7 variant has taken hold in the U.S., becoming, in early April, the dominant strain in the country.

It’s possible other variants of the virus could emerge that force the CDC to alter its guidance, but Dowdy said it’s the right time to ease restrictions for people who are fully vaccinated.

“If and when those variants emerge, we will react accordingly,” he said. “But the important message right now in the U.S. is that things are trending in the right direction, to a place where we’re able to recommend to over one-third of Americans that they can now take off their masks.”

Weisfuse said the updated guidance represents an important milestone for the country and a breakthrough in the course of the pandemic.

“It has been such a long and terrible road,” he said, “but this is a landmark day.”

Originally Appeared On: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/s-science-convinced-cdc-lift-mask-mandates-rcna932

Google has won a deal to provide cloud services to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has launched a slew of Starlink satellites to provide high-speed internet, it said on Thursday.

SpaceX will set up ground stations within Google’s data centers that connect to the Starlink satellites, enabling fast and secure internet services via Google Cloud, the search giant said.

This service is expected to be available in the second half of 2021 for enterprise customers, the company said.

The deal comes at a time when demand for cloud-computing services has soared, with players like Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc dominating the market. Cloud companies have also tapped into the telecoms sector, thanks to a jump in demand for 5G connectivity.

Google’s cloud business accounts for about 7% of its total revenue, as of the latest earnings report.

Last October, Microsoft won a similar deal from SpaceX to connect its Azure cloud computing platform to Starlink.

Privately held SpaceX, known for its reusable rockets and astronaut capsules, is ramping up satellite production for Starlink, a growing constellation of hundreds of internet-beaming satellites that Musk hopes will generate enough revenue to help fund SpaceX’s interplanetary goals.

Originally Appeared On: https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/google-wins-cloud-deal-from-spacex-for-starlink-internet-service-71620958148070.html

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that the car company would no longer accept bitcoin to purchase its vehicles, citing concerns about the environmental impact of the cryptocurrency.

“We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” Musk said in a statement posted to his Twitter account.

The announcement comes a little more than three months after Tesla first announced it would begin accepting bitcoin as payment. The company also said at the time that it had purchased $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin.

The value of bitcoin declined sharply after Musk’s tweet, dropping from about $54,700 per coin to about $52,000 in less than an hour.

Musk, one of the world’s richest people, said in the statement Wednesday that the company would not be selling any of its bitcoin and intends “to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy.”

He added that the company is also looking at cryptocurrencies that use less energy.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies rely on computing power for their distributed networks, creating a decentralized system to create and track digital assets. But as cryptocurrencies have continued to gain attention, use and popularity, that computing power has become the subject of scrutiny from critics who say they are now significant contributors of carbon emissions.

Musk has pitched Tesla’s electric vehicles and energy infrastructure as a major step forward for reducing carbon emissions. As host of the most recent “Saturday Night Live” episode, he plugged the company’s efforts to reinvent electric cars.

But he has also been a strong proponent of cryptocurrencies, particularly bitcoin and dogecoin, both of which have shot up in value in recent years.

The announcement was a rare reversal from Musk, who has fashioned himself in recent years as a person who courts controversy and rarely gives in to public pressure.

Jason Abbruzzese is the senior editor for technology, science and climate for NBC News Digital.

Originally Appeared On: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-backtracks-says-tesla-wont-accept-bitcoin-rcna918

A large-scale randomised trial of annual screening for ovarian cancer, led by UCL researchers, did not succeed in reducing deaths from the disease, despite one of the screening methods tested detecting cancers earlier.

Results from the UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening (UKCTOCS) have been published in a report in the medical journal The Lancet.

In the UK, 4,000 women die from ovarian cancer each year. It is not usually diagnosed until it is at a late stage and hard to treat. UKCTOCS was designed to test the hypothesis that a reliable screening method that picks up ovarian cancer earlier, when treatments are more likely to be effective, could save lives.

The latest analysis looked at data from more than 200,000 women aged 50-74 at recruitment who were followed up for an average of 16 years. The women were randomly allocated to one of three groups: no screening, annual screening using an ultrasound scan, and annual multimodal screening involving a blood test followed by an ultrasound scan as a second line test.

The researchers found that, while the approach using multimodal testing succeeded in picking up cancers at an early stage, neither screening method led to a reduction in deaths.

Earlier detection in UKCTOCS did not translate into saving lives. Researchers said this highlighted the importance of requiring evidence that any potential screening test for ovarian cancer actually reduced deaths, as well as detecting cancers earlier.

Professor Usha Menon (MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL), lead investigator of UKTOCS, said: “UKCTOCS is the first trial to show that screening can definitely detect ovarian cancer earlier. However, this very large, rigorous trial shows clearly that screening using either of the approaches we tested did not save lives. We therefore cannot recommend ovarian cancer screening for the general population using these methods.

“We are disappointed as this is not the outcome we and everyone involved in the trial had hoped and worked for over so many years. To save lives, we will require a better screening test that detects ovarian cancer earlier and in more women than the multimodal screening strategy we used.”

Women aged between 50 and 74 were enrolled in the trial between 2001 and 2005. Screening lasted until 2011 and was either an annual blood test, monitoring changes in the level of the protein CA125, or a yearly vaginal ultrasound scan. About 100,000 women were assigned to the no screening group, and more than 50,000 women to each of the screening groups.

Blood test screening picked up 39% more cancers at an early stage (Stage I/II), while detecting 10% fewer late-stage cancers (Stage III/IV) compared to the no screening group. There was no difference in the stage of cancers detected in the ultrasound group compared to the no screening group.

The initial analysis of deaths in the trial occurred in 2015, but there was not enough data at that time to conclude whether or not screening reduced deaths. By looking at five more years of follow up data from the women involved, researchers are now able to conclude that the screening did not save lives.

Professor Mahesh Parmar, Director of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL and a senior author on the paper, said: “There have been significant improvements in the treatment of advanced disease in the last 10 years, since screening in our trial ended. Our trial showed that screening was not effective in women who do not have any symptoms of ovarian cancer; in women who do have symptoms early diagnosis, combined with this better treatment, can still make a difference to quality of life and, potentially, improve outcomes. On top of this, getting a diagnosis quickly, whatever the stage of the cancer, is profoundly important to women and their families.”

Professor Ian Jacobs, from the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney), a co-investigator who has led the ovarian cancer screening research programme since 1985 and who was lead investigator of UKCTOCS from 2001-2014, said: “My thanks to the thousands of women, healthcare professionals and researchers who made this trial possible. The multimodal screening strategy did succeed in detection of ovarian cancer at an earlier stage, but sadly that did not save lives. This is deeply disappointing and frustrating given the hope of all involved that we would save the lives of thousands of women who are affected by ovarian cancer each year.”

Professor Jacobs noted: “Population screening for ovarian cancer can only be supported if a test is shown to reduce deaths in a future randomised controlled trial. I remain hopeful that a new effective screening test will be found eventually, but it will take many years to conduct a large trial of the test. Realistically, this means we have to reluctantly accept that population screening for ovarian cancer is more than a decade away.”

A huge wealth of samples and data from the trial has been donated by the participants for future research. This resource, referred to as the UKCTOCS Longitudinal Women’s Cohort (UKLWC), is now being used by researchers worldwide, helping to improve understanding of ovarian cancer as well as other cancers and other diseases such as cardiovascular disease.

Researchers say that the study has also generated insights into how best to design, conduct and analyse a large-scale randomised clinical trial particularly in individuals who have no signs of disease. These insights will be helpful to future trials in all areas of health. It has also contributed to advances in risk assessment, prevention and diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

The UKCTOCS trial was funded by the NIHR Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Programme and the charities Cancer Research UK and The Eve Appeal.

Michelle Mitchell, Cancer Research UK’s Chief Executive, said: “Trials don’t always find the result we had hoped for, but we need long-term studies like this to know whether new tests save lives. Cancer Research UK will continue to fund vital research into aggressive forms of ovarian cancer so we can reduce the impact of this disease.

“Screening is for people without symptoms, so it’s still important that if you notice unusual or persistent changes to talk to your doctor. Symptoms of ovarian cancer can be quite vague and similar to symptoms caused by less serious conditions, which can make spotting the disease tricky. Whether it’s needing to go to the toilet more often, pain, bloating, or something else, raise it with your GP – in most cases it won’t be cancer but it’s best to get it checked out.”

Professor Nick Lemoine, Medical Director, NIHR Clinical Research Network, said: “These important findings from a large-scale trial, involving 200,000 participants, show that annual screening did not succeed in reducing deaths from ovarian cancer.

“However, it’s important to note that negative results can be as important as positive. The study has provided important new evidence and insights into how to conduct and analyse future large-scale randomised clinical trials into ovarian cancer, in the hope that this will prevent and diagnose this disease more effectively in the future.

“We thank every single person who took part.”

Athena Lamnisos, CEO, The Eve Appeal, said: “The threshold for introducing a national cancer screening programme is a mortality benefit. Of course this is key – saving lives. It’s disappointing that this research programme did not show a reduction in mortality from ovarian cancer and so can’t be recommended as a national screening programme. However, the impact it had on earlier diagnosis is impressive and important.

“Ovarian cancer is so often diagnosed at stage 3 or 4 and shifting diagnosis one stage earlier makes a huge difference to both treatment options and quality of life. Earlier diagnosis will often reduce the amount and intensity of treatment, and this makes all the difference to women and their families who are living with cancer. It may have also given them more precious time with their loved ones.”

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Originally Appeared On: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/ucl-sfo051321.php

The birds and the buoys: using googly eyes to avert extinction

Every day, thousands of hooks and nets meant for fish end up catching seabirds – a global problem that is pushing many seabird species to the brink of extinction. But perhaps no fishing gear does more damage than the gillnet, which entangles and kills at least 400,000 seabirds each year.

What if all it took to save them was a pair of googly eyes?

It’s not quite that simple, but a team of scientists, conservationists and engineers are developing a device that has the potential to save many seabirds from gillnets. This device, known as the looming-eyes buoy, is essentially a floating scarecrow.

A prototype was recently tested on long-tailed ducks in Kudema Bay in Estonia. The results of this study, published on 5 May in the journal Royal Society Open Science, suggest that looming-eyes buoys can reduce the number of seabirds by up to 30 per cent within a 165ft radius. Although the looming-eyes buoy won’t completely solve the problem, it’s a step in the right direction, experts say.

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Preventing albatross, petrels, gannets, boobies and other seabirds from being caught in gillnets is not easy. The smell of a gillnet loaded with fish can attract seabirds from miles away. And when these birds dive into the water to get what they thought was a free meal, they can become entangled in the gillnet and drown.

A fieldwork station for observing the deployed buoys in Kudema Bay in Estonia

(Andres Kalamees via NYT)

In 2018, conservationists from BirdLife International, a conservation organisation, began brainstorming ways to prevent such occurrences.

“We thought that if we could prevent vulnerable seabirds from diving too close to the gillnets in the first place, we might be able to finally tackle bycatch [the problem of birds or other sealife being caught by accident] significantly,” says Yann Rouxel, a project officer at BirdLife International and lead author of the new study. That’s when Rouxel and his team came up with the idea for a marine scarecrow.

He and his colleagues shared their idea with scientists from the Estonian Ornithological Society and engineers from Fishtek Marine, a company that makes fishing equipment, and just over a year later the looming-eyes buoy was born.

Much like the scarecrows that line cornfields or the plastic owls that sit atop office buildings, the looming-eyes buoy deters birds through intimidation. The large, rotating eye spots that sit atop the bobbing buoy are designed to resemble the staring eyes of a large predator.

“If we put ourselves in the place of the diving birds, it is not surprising that large staring eyes at the surface of the water may dissuade them from coming near,” says Brendan Godley, a professor of conservation science at the University of Exeter in England. Annie Roth

A conceptual illustration of Homotherium cats feasting on a juvenile mammoth

(Mauricio Anton via NYT)

Baby mammoths were meals for these sabre-toothed cats

On a landscape that would one day become a suburb of San Antonio, mammoths were stalked by predatory cats with scimitar teeth. The cats would snatch a juvenile mammoth. Having eaten their fill, they would take the carcass back to their den. This was a meal that could be shared again later.

Researchers recently published a paper in the journal Current Biology providing evidence that supported this scenario. What it also shows is that the cats had a diet unlike any other large cat, either extinct or alive today.

When most people think of sabre-toothed cats, they think of North America’s Smilodon. But they prowled the same terrain as another ferocious but less well-known feline, Homotherium serum, also known as a scimitar cat. While the authors compare Homotherium to a cheetah in some respects, this cat appears to have been built more for long-distance running than sprinting. Its teeth were sharp and coarsely serrated, and its fangs were shorter than Smilodon’s iconic fangs. These shorter sabres may have been better at slashing as opposed to stabbing.

“Everything that we looked at basically told us that Smilodon and Homotherium are totally different cats,” says Larisa DeSantis, the paper’s lead author and a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University. She adds that although they were more closely related to each other than to any cat species living today, “They were able to coexist in these ecosystems likely due to having very different dietary niches.”

A rendering from a 3D analysis of Homotherium teeth

(Blaire Van Valkenburgh via NYT)

The Friesenhahn Cave outside San Antonio is a Pleistocene treasure trove, offering a diversity of fossil species, including a large number of juvenile mammoth bones. The abundance of Homotherium and mammoth suggests they may have been connected. But were they?

To answer this question, DeSantis and her colleagues had to establish the Homotherium diet.

They started with a three-dimensional analysis of the surface of Homotherium teeth, comparing them with those of similar predators during the Pleistocene era as well as those that hunt today. They found that Homotherium ate soft and tough food, but not bones. If they were eating mammoths, this meant they could eat the animals’ tough hides and soft flesh, but avoided crunching bone material.

The researchers also found chemical signatures that offered clear evidence that these cats were eating herbivores that grazed in open habitats.

This analysis, combined with the discovery of numerous detached mammoth-limb bones in a cave populated by Homotherium, led the researchers to conclude that mammoths were on the menu, and remains were dragged home after a successful hunt.

“I definitely think they would have hunted juvenile mammoths,” says Aaron Woodruff, a paleontologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History who was not involved in this research. “But I don’t think they would have done this often. Jeanne Timmons

Flat-to-plump pasta, before and after boiling

(Morphing Matter Lab/Carnegie Mellon University via NYT)

Flat pasta that turns into 3D shapes – just add boiling water

Don’t be fooled. This pasta may look like your average fettuccine. But cook it for seven minutes in boiling water and it will transform, coiling into a neat spiral.

The dynamic noodle is one of several designed and debuted recently by researchers at a Carnegie Mellon University lab.

Each new pasta design starts out flat and unassuming, but bounces and swells into three dimensions when boiled. In a paper published on 5 May in Science Advances, the researchers say the flat-to-plump pasta is not only fun to make, but uses less packaging, has a smaller carbon footprint, and cooks faster than traditional dried pasta.

“I think it’s really cool and elegant,” says Jennifer Lewis, a professor of biologically inspired engineering at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. “Anytime you can bring science to people through food, it’s a huge win.”

The research project didn’t begin as a culinary endeavour to remake one of the world’s most popular foods, says Lining Yao, a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon and a co-author of the new study. Instead, in 2017, Yao and her colleagues set out to pattern and build two-dimensional structures that could transform themselves into three-dimensional shapes.

“We were thinking edible material could be very interesting,” Yao says. “We landed our eye on pasta.” It’s not only simple and ubiquitous, but has the added bonus of being “very rich in its shape design,” she says.

Four different designs of the shape-shifting pasta

(Morphing Matter Lab/Carnegie Mellon University via NYT)

In the food industry, pasta is typically made by folding or by squeezing dough through a metal die and into the desired shape, be it an elbow, a twist or a tube.

For their new, shape-shifting pasta design, Yao’s team took a different tack. They began with a conventional recipe, mixing a simple combination of semolina flour and water, then using a classic roller to create sheets of dough.

Then, they strategically stamped the flattened dough to create tiny patterned grooves on its surface. During cooking, surfaces with grooves expand less than smooth ones, giving rise to shapes like boxes, saddles and waves.

“You can just make a modification to a pasta dough and get a very impressive shape-change,” says Teng Zhang, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at Syracuse University and a co-author of the study.

For the research, Zhang developed a computer model that predicted the final transformation of various designs based on factors including how heat and water would change the dough’s gluten and starch during the cooking process. “It’s more complex than just swelling,” he says.

The resulting models and designs could be useful for food delivery to disaster sites or for astronauts in space stations – two environments where it is useful if large amounts of food take up as little space as possible. Marion Renault

© The New York Times

Originally Appeared On: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/science-googly-eye-mammoth-pasta-b1845394.html