Koalas exposed to double whammy health threat

Credit: Tara Gatehouse

An AIDS-like virus that is plaguing Australia’s koala population is leaving them more vulnerable to chlamydia and other threatening health conditions, University of Queensland research has found.

One of UQ’s leading COVID-19 vaccine researchers, Associate Professor Keith Chappell, has discovered that the chlamydia epidemic plaguing endangered koala populations in Queensland and NSW is linked to a common virus that likely suppresses koalas’ immune systems.

Dr Chappell and Dr Michaela Blyton, from UQ’s Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology and School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, made this discovery after studying more than 150 koalas admitted to Currumbin Wildlife Hospital.

Dr Chappell said this study could have far reaching impacts and lead to better protective measures like breeding programs and new anti-viral medications.

“We know Queensland and NSW koala populations are heavily impacted by chlamydia infections and a retrovirus, but until now a clear link between the two has not been conclusively established,” Professor Chappell said.

“Our research has found that the amount of retrovirus circulating within an animal’s blood was strongly associated with chlamydia and symptoms like cystitis and conjunctivitis, as well as overall poor health.

“It’s a double whammy for already-endangered koalas.”

Secret to treating ‘Achilles’ heel’ of alternatives to silicon solar panels revealed

Solar panels 
Credit: Alachua County

The researchers used a combination of techniques to mimic the process of aging under sunlight and observe changes in the materials at the nanoscale, helping them gain new insights into the materials, which also show potential for optoelectronic applications such as energy-efficient LEDs and X-ray detectors, but are limited in their longevity.

Their results, reported in the journal Nature, could significantly accelerate the development of long-lasting, commercially available perovskite photovoltaics.

Perovksites are abundant and much cheaper to process than crystalline silicon. They can be prepared in liquid ink that is simply printed to produce a thin film of the material.

While the overall energy output of perovskite solar cells can often meet or – in the case of multi-layered ‘tandem’ devices – exceed that achievable with traditional silicon photovoltaics, the limited longevity of the devices is a key barrier to their commercial viability.

A typical silicon solar panel, like those you might see on the roof of a house, typically lasts about 20-25 years without significant performance losses.

Building a Pipeline of Space Cyber Defenders

Source/Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Cybercrime is a growing threat to critical space-based technologies—from the satellites that feed communication devices to the global positioning systems that enable military operations. And as the United States continues to expand capabilities in space, the need to secure and protect space-based assets from hackers and other malicious actors has never been greater.

But finding cybersecurity professionals is tough. Currently, there are 600,000 open cybersecurity jobs in the United States, but only enough qualified workers to fill 400,000 of them. This deep shortage of cybersecurity talent not only puts a strain on employers, but it leaves crucial digital systems—both on Earth and in space—vulnerable to cyberattacks.

In an effort to grow the cybersecurity workforce needed to build more resilient and secure space systems, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has teamed up with U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command to create the Cyber Halo Innovation Research Program—or CHIRP.

AI reveals unsuspected math underlying search for exoplanets

Artist’s concept of a sun-like star (left) and a rocky planet about 60% larger than Earth in orbit in the star’s habitable zone. Gravitational microlensing has the ability to detect such planetary systems and determine the masses and orbital distances, even though the planet itself is too dim to be seen. 
Image credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms trained on real astronomical observations now outperform astronomers in sifting through massive amounts of data to find new exploding stars, identify new types of galaxies and detect the mergers of massive stars, accelerating the rate of new discovery in the world’s oldest science.

But AI, also called machine learning, can reveal something deeper, University of California, Berkeley, astronomers found: unsuspected connections hidden in the complex mathematics arising from general relativity — in particular, how that theory is applied to finding new planets around other stars.

In a paper appearing this week in the journal Nature Astronomy, the researchers describe how an AI algorithm developed to more quickly detect exoplanets when such planetary systems pass in front of a background star and briefly brighten it — a process called gravitational microlensing — revealed that the decades-old theories now used to explain these observations are woefully incomplete.

‘Beam Me Up:’ Nation’s First Quantum Drone Provides Unrivaled Security

Hacked bank and Twitter accounts, malicious power outages and attempts to tamper with medical records threaten the security of the nation’s health, money, energy, society and infrastructure. Harnessing the laws of nature – namely quantum physics – cutting–edge teleportation technology is taking cybersecurity to new, “unhackable” heights using miniscule particles of light or “beams.”

Florida Atlantic University’s Warner A. Miller, Ph.D., in concert with Qubitekk and L3Harris, is leading the United States’ efforts to deliver the first drone-based, mobile quantum network to seamlessly maneuver around buildings, inclement weather and terrain and quickly adapt to changing environments such as warfare.

Together with Qubitekk, an award-winning leader in manufacturing entangled photon sources and other hardware for networking quantum processors and sensors, FAU has been entrusted by the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense to develop the project.

The network includes a ground station, drones, lasers and iber optics to share quantum-secured information. Today’s telecommunication networks use fiber optics, connected by laser beams from the ground and between planes and satellites — called fiber and free space optical networks. Drones are used to save lives, secure infrastructure, help the environment and thwart hostile military advances such as the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Population-scale study highlights ongoing risk of COVID-19 in some cancer patients despite vaccination

Illustration of the coronavirus
Credit: Gerd Altmann

A study co-led by the Universities of Oxford, Birmingham and Southampton and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), published in Lancet Oncology today by the UK Coronavirus Cancer Evaluation Project, has found that while COVID-19 vaccination is effective in most cancer patients, the level of protection against COVID-19 infection, hospitalization and death offered by the vaccine is less than in the general population and vaccine effectiveness wanes more quickly.

Dr Lennard Lee, Department of Oncology, University of Oxford who led the study said: ‘We know that people with cancer have a higher risk of severe COVID-19 disease and that the immune response in cancer patients following COVID-19 vaccination is lower. However, no study has looked at vaccine effectiveness and its waning in cancer patients at a population level. We have undertaken the largest real-world health system evaluation of COVID-19 in cancer patients globally.’

This study analyzed 377,194 individuals with active or recent cancer who had received two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine and undergone a SARS-CoV-2 PCR test in England. The numbers of breakthrough COVID-19 infections and COVID-19-associated hospitalizations and deaths in this cohort of cancer patients were compared to a control population without active or recent cancer.

New tool measures atomic scale defects, identifies transistor limitations

Engineering science and mechanics doctoral student Fedor Sharov adjusts settings in a very low frequency EDMR spectrometer.
Credit: Kelby Hochreither/Penn State

A new technique for studying defects in semiconductor materials could lead to improved speed, power and performance of electronic devices by revealing the atomic-level limitations of advanced materials.

Developed by a Penn State-led team of researchers and lead by former Penn State graduate student James Ashton, the analytic tool makes use of extremely small magnetic fields and frequencies far smaller than those typically used in such measurements to detect and measure imperfections in new materials, providing structural information about the magnetic interactions between electrons and nearby magnetic nuclei in a simpler way than previously possible.

The approach was published as a cover article in Applied Physics Letters. According to Patrick Lenahan, distinguished professor of engineering science and mechanics at Penn State and Ashton’s doctoral thesis adviser, the tool allows researchers to take a big step toward solving a variety of faults in next-generation devices.

New countermeasure against unwanted wireless surveillance

The intelligent reflective surface IRShield is positioned next to a Wi-Fi router to disguise the environment-dependent radio channel.
Credit: CASA, Michael Schwettmann

Wirelessly functioning devices are now omnipresent. However, wireless communication endangers privacy: passive eavesdroppers can access sensitive data through intercepted high-frequency signals.

Smart devices should make our everyday life easier. At the same time, however, they are a gateway for passive eavesdropping. In order to prevent possible monitoring of the movement profile in your own four walls, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at the Ruhr University Bochum and the Technical University of Cologne have a new system developed to protect privacy in wireless communication. The researchers will present the process, based on the technology of intelligent reflective surfaces, on 24. May 2022 at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

Reducing TV viewing to less than one hour a day could help prevent more than one in ten cases of coronary heart disease

Credit: yousafbhutta

In a study published today in BMC Medicine, researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit show that – assuming a causal link – 11% of cases of coronary heart disease could be prevented if people watched less than an hour of TV each day.

According to the British Heart Foundation, coronary heart disease is one of the UK’s leading causes of death, responsible for around 64,000 deaths each year. In the UK, one in eight men and one in 15 women die from the disease. People with coronary heart disease are twice as likely to have a stroke.

One of the major risk factors for coronary heart disease is sedentary behavior – in other words, sitting for long periods of time rather than being physically active. To examine the link between time spent in screen-based sedentary behaviors such as TV viewing and leisure-time computer use, an individual’s DNA, and their risk of coronary heart disease, researchers examined data from the UK Biobank, a biomedical database and research resource containing anonymized genetic, lifestyle and health information from half a million UK participants.

Unravelling how climate, pollution and runoff combine in coastal ecosystems

Source: Griffith University

Griffith University researchers are unravelling how stressors like climate change, pollution, dissolved nitrogen and sediment from run-off are having combined effects in coastal ecosystems.

Two studies published in Ecology Letters and Proceedings of the Royal Society B reveal combining increasing ocean temperatures, pollution or dissolved nitrogen with the reduced light caused by sediment in the water can either amplify or reduce the impact of these stressors individually on seagrass or algal growth.

Dr Mischa Turschwell, Research Fellow
at the Australian Rivers Institute

“Crucially, we show that the combined effects on seagrass and algal growth can vary significantly dependent on the amount of the two stressors and duration of exposure,” said Dr Mischa Turschwell, Research Fellow at the Australian Rivers Institute.

“With the onset of climate change, coastal and marine ecosystems are under threat on more than one front from stressors such as rising ocean temperatures, poor water quality and pollution.

“To effectively look after these coastal ecosystems, managers need a thorough understanding of the effects these human induced changes have, both individually and in combination.”

Associate Professor Chris Brown, head of the Seascape Models group at Australian Rivers Institute and the Coastal and Marine Research Centre lamented that “to-date most attempts to discover of how such stressors interact, using data pooled from multiple studies, have failed to find consistent predictions for combined effects.”