Stroke cuts life expectancy by one third

Almost two thirds of acute stroke patients fail to survive more than a decade and have high risk of recurrence, prompting researchers to call for better patient care.

University of Queensland researchers analyzed data from more than 300,000 patients admitted to hospital following a sudden stroke between 2008 and 2017 in Australia and New Zealand.

The team also investigated how many years were lost to stroke by comparing a patient’s predicted life expectancy with the length of actual survival.

Study leader and UQ epidemiologist, Dr Yang Peng, a Research Fellow with the Prince Charles Hospital Northside Clinical Unit, said only 36.4 per cent of patients survived beyond 10 years, and 26.8 per cent had another stroke.

“We found that a stroke reduced a patient’s life expectancy by five and a half years on average, compared with the general population,” Dr Peng said.

“In proportional terms, this meant a stroke reduced a person’s life expectancy by one third.

“Patients with a hemorrhagic stroke who have bleeding in the brain are at greater risk of death, another stroke and reduced life expectancy, than those with an ischemic stroke, which is caused by a burst blood vessel.”

Acute stroke is one of the most common causes of hospitalization and disability in Australia and has been linked to risk factors such as high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels, diabetes, smoking and heart disease by the Stroke Foundation.

Nationwide maps of bird species can help protect biodiversity

Researchers mapped the number of bird species found across the contiguous U.S. Blue areas host fewer bird species than green or yellow areas do. 
Images by Kathleen Carroll and Anna Pidgeon

New, highly detailed and rigorous maps of bird biodiversity could help protect rare or threatened species.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison developed the maps at a fine-enough resolution to help conservation managers focus their efforts where they are most likely to help birds — in individual counties or forests, rather than across whole states or regions.

The maps span the contiguous U.S. and predict the diversity of birds that live in a given area, related by traits such as nesting on the ground or being endangered. Those predictions are based on both detailed observations of birds and environmental factors that affect bird ranges, such as the degree of forest cover or temperature in an area.

Changes in vegetation shaped global temperatures over last 10,000 years

Alexander Thompson, a postdoctoral research associate in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, updated simulations from an important climate model to reflect the role of changing vegetation as a key driver of global temperatures over the last 10,000 years.
Source: Washington University in St. Louis

Follow the pollen. Records from past plant life tell the real story of global temperatures, according to research from a climate scientist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Warmer temperatures brought plants — and then came even warmer temperatures, according to new model simulations published in Science Advances.

Thompson had long been troubled by a problem with models of Earth’s atmospheric temperatures since the last ice age. Too many of these simulations showed temperatures warming consistently over time.

But climate proxy records tell a different story. Many of those sources indicate a marked peak in global temperatures that occurred between 6,000 and 9,000 years ago.

Thompson had a hunch that the models could be overlooking the role of changes in vegetation in favor of impacts from atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations or ice cover.

Scientists resurrect ancient enzymes to improve photosynthesis

 Maureen Hanson, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Plant Molecular Biology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Myat Lin, research associate, work in their lab in the Biotechnology Building.
Credit: Ryan Young/Cornell University

A Cornell study describes a breakthrough in the quest to improve photosynthesis in certain crops, a step toward adapting plants to rapid climate changes and increasing yields to feed a projected 9 billion people by 2050.

The study, “Improving the Efficiency of Rubisco by Resurrecting Its Ancestors in the Family Solanaceae,” published in Science Advances. The senior author is Maureen Hanson, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Plant Molecular Biology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. First author Myat Lin is a postdoctoral research associate in Hanson’s lab.

The authors developed a computational technique to predict favorable gene sequences that make Rubisco, a key plant enzyme for photosynthesis. The technique allowed the scientists to identify promising candidate enzymes that could be engineered into modern crops and, ultimately, make photosynthesis more efficient and increase crop yields.

Their method relied on evolutionary history, where the researchers predicted Rubisco genes from 20-30 million years ago, when Earth’s carbon dioxide (CO2) levels were higher than they are today and the Rubisco enzymes in plants were adapted to those levels.

Researcher identifies peptide active against certain cancers

Shugeng Cao in his lab.
Credit: University of Hawaiʻi

A University of Hawaiʻi researcher has identified a rare bacterium that is active against certain cancers. The bacterium, Lentzea flaviverrucosa, that produces petrichorin A, was discovered by Shugeng Cao, associate member of the Cancer Biology Program at the UH Cancer Center, and co-investigators Chunshun Li and Xiaohua Wu, in collaboration with Joshua Blodgett of Washington University in St. Louis. The research team proved that petrichorin A is active against cancers such as ovarian cancer, fibrosarcoma, prostate cancer and T-cell leukemia.

These findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Petrichorin A is a peptide that contains special amino acids, and each amino acid has a nitrogen-nitrogen bond. Petrichorin A, a dumbbell-like natural product, was evaluated for anti-cancer activity against multiple cancer cell lines. The researchers conducted a preliminary test and discovered that petrichorin A was not toxic to a normal human cell line. With this observation, his team proved that petrichorin A was active against ovarian cancer, fibrosarcoma, prostate cancer and T-cell leukemia. This highlighted the importance of including petrichorin A in future research of pharmaceutical design and discovery programs.

Cloud server leasing can leave sensitive data up for grabs

Renting space and IP addresses on a public server has become standard business practice, but according to a team of Penn State computer scientists, current industry practices can lead to "cloud squatting," which can create a security risk, endangering sensitive customer and organization data intended to remain private.

Cloud squatting occurs when a company, such as a bank, leases space and IP addresses — unique addresses that identify individual computers or computer networks — on a public server, uses them, and then releases the space and addresses back to the public server company, a standard pattern seen every day. The public server company, such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, then assigns the same addresses to a second company.  If this second company is a bad actor, it can receive information coming into the address intended for the original company — for example, when you as a customer unknowingly use an outdated link when interacting with your bank — and use it to its advantage — cloud squatting.

"There are two advantages to leasing server space," said Eric Pauley, doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering. "One is a cost advantage, saving on equipment and management. The other is scalability. Leasing server space offers an unlimited pool of computing resources so, as workload changes, companies can quickly adapt." As a result, the use of clouds has grown exponentially, meaning almost every website a user visits takes advantage of cloud computing.

A right to clean drinking water?

Dr. Edith Nettmann is a microbiologist at the Chair for Urban Water Management and Environmental Technology.
Credit: Damian Gorczany

Water is the elixir of life on our planet. The free availability of clean water must not be a privilege. Therefore, in 2010 the United Nations decided that everyone has the right to clean water and sanitation. However, this human right has not yet been implemented globally. Around 2.2 billion people still have no access to drinking water and around 4.4 billion no sanitary facilities are available. Given these numbers, it is difficult not to speak of a crime against humanity.

People in emerging and developing countries and / or in rural regions are particularly affected. There are many reasons for this: among other things, a lack of / missing wastewater treatment and corresponding infrastructures, environmental pollution, still a lack of information about hygiene, armed conflicts and climate change.

Many fatalities

Worldwide, over 80 percent of all wastewater is still fed into the water cycle untreated. They not only pollute the environment and drinking water resources, but also contribute to the spread of diseases in addition to poor hygiene. These include cholera, typhoid, dysentery and hepatitis A. Children in particular are worst hit: in the past ten years, more children worldwide have died of water-related diarrhea than people in all armed conflicts since the Second World War. Today, 450 million children already live in areas with high or extremely high-water uncertainty. And climate change is exacerbating this precarious situation. The increasing extreme weather conditions caused by global warming, such as droughts, floods and heavy rain events, have a very strong influence on the amount and quality of our drinking water.

Quantum teleportation: the express lane for quantum data traffic

An artist’s conception of an error-correction protocol: the photons affected by environment are fixed then used to carry the data teleported into them.
Credit: Maria Slussarenko

Teleportation may be a concept usually reserved for science fiction, but researchers have demonstrated that it can be used to avoid loss in communication channels on the quantum level.

The team, including researchers from Griffith University’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics, has highlighted the issues around inherent loss that occurs across every form of communication channel (for example, internet or phone) and discovered a mechanism that can reduce that loss.

Dr Sergei Slussarenko
from the Centre of Quantum Dynamics.

Professor Geoff Pryde, Dr Sergei Slussarenko, Dr Sacha Kocsis and Dr Morgan Weston, and researchers from The University of Queensland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, say the finding is an important step towards implementing ‘quantum internet’, which will bring unprecedented capabilities not accessible with today’s web.

Dr Slussarenko said the study was the first to demonstrate an error reduction method that improved the performance of a channel.

“First, we looked at the raw data transmitted via our channel and could see a better signal with our method, than without it,” he said.

“In our experiment, we first sent a photon through the loss – this photon is not carrying any useful information so losing it was not a big problem.

Decoy particles trick coronavirus as it evolves

Decoy nanoparticle explainer
Credit: Northwestern University

Emerging therapeutics could overcome drug-resistant variants

They might look like cells and act like cells. But a new potential COVID-19 treatment is actually a cleverly disguised trickster, which attracts viruses and binds them, rendering them inactive.

As the ever-evolving SARS-CoV-2 virus begins to evade once promising treatments, such as monoclonal antibody therapies, researchers have become more interested in these “decoy” nanoparticles. Mimicking regular cells, decoy nanoparticles soak up viruses like a sponge, inhibiting them from infecting the rest of the body.

In a new study, Northwestern University synthetic biologists set out to elucidate the design rules needed to make decoy nanoparticles effective and resistant to viral escape. After designing and testing various iterations, the researchers identified a broad set of decoys — all manufacturable using different methods — that were incredibly effective against the original virus as well as mutant variants.

In fact, decoy nanoparticles were up to 50 times more effective at inhibiting naturally occurring viral mutants, compared to traditional, protein-based inhibitor drugs. When tested against a viral mutant designed to resist such treatments, decoy nanoparticles were up to 1,500 times more effective at inhibiting infection.

Protease inhibitors safer than thought for pregnant women with HIV

University of Oxford researchers assessed evidence from 34 studies, involving over 57,000 pregnant women with HIV, and found that protease inhibitor-based antiretroviral therapies significantly increased the risk of babies being small or very small for their gestational age, but there were no other adverse pregnancy outcomes, compared to therapies without protease inhibitors.

Globally, more than 37 million people were living with HIV in 2020, including 19 million women of childbearing age (UNAIDS). Each year, around 1.3 million of these women become pregnant, most of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa where rates of maternal and child mortality remain high.

Antiretroviral therapy is recommended for all pregnant women living with HIV, since this plays a crucial role in improving maternal health and reducing transmission of HIV from mother to child. However, to date there has been a critical lack of evidence on whether antiretroviral therapies increase the risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes such as preterm birth, low birth weight, stillbirth, and babies being small for their gestational age.*

In particular, there has been concern about a type of antiretroviral drug called protease inhibitors (including atazanavir, lopinavir, and darunavir). Current guidelines recommend that protease inhibitor-based therapies should be used in pregnancy only if ‘first-line’ treatments (such as integrase and reverse-transcriptase based treatments) are either unsuitable or unavailable. These guidelines also often advise against the use of a specific protease inhibitor, lopinavir/ritonavir (LPV/r), citing an increased risk of preterm birth. However, these recommendations are based on limited evidence, and can restrict treatment options for pregnant women with HIV.

Light, oxygen turn waste plastics into useful benzoic acid

Credit: Pexel 

Styrofoam egg cartons, hard plastic compact disc cases, red drinking cups and many other common products are composed of polystyrene, a type of plastic that makes up a third of landfill waste worldwide.

“In terms of plastic production and end-of-life waste streams, we are on the road to an unsustainable future,” said Erin Stache, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences.

But there’s good news: Stache has discovered a new path for polystyrene waste that includes being upcycled into benzoic acid, a chemical with wide commercial demand, through a mild process that uses light, an oxygen-rich environment and an abundant iron-based catalyst. The reaction can even take place in a sunny window.

The paper, “Chemical Upcycling of Commercial Polystyrene via Catalyst-Controlled Photooxidation” published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Doctoral candidate Sewon Oh is the lead author.

In line with her lab’s mission to tackle environmental concerns through interesting chemistry, the new process is mild, climate-friendly and scalable to commercial waste streams, Stache said. It efficiently produces benzoic acid, a product stocked in undergraduate and high school chemistry labs and also used in fragrances, food preservatives, and other ubiquitous products.

Meat industry not threatened by plant-based alternatives, study suggests

Vegan patties like these made with pea protein may mimic the sensory experience of eating a real burger, but aren’t putting much of a dent in fresh meat sales.
Credit: Unsplash

At least for now, there is no reason for the traditional meat industry to have much of a beef with producers of plant-based burgers and other meat alternatives, new research suggests.

The study showed that while sales and market share of new-generation plant-based meat alternatives have grown in recent years, those gains haven’t translated into reduced consumer spending on animal meat products.

Overall, the analysis of national meat purchases suggested that plant-based meats sold in patty, link and ground form are mostly an add-on to beef and pork and tend to serve as a substitute for chicken, turkey and fish.

Wuyang Hu Source: OSU

“We thought plant-based meat alternatives would be a potential replacement for red meat, but they’re not. It’s more of a complement,” said study co-author Wuyang Hu, professor of agricultural, environmental and development economics at The Ohio State University. “People buy pork and beef, and at the same time they also buy plant-based meats.”

Researchers noted the study is not intended to take any industry’s side or give consideration to the comparative healthfulness of products.

“This new generation of plant-based meat, by mimicking the taste and sensory experience of eating real meat, appeals to consumers who are not only vegetarian but also people who are curious about plant-based meat and even meat eaters,” said lead author Shuoli Zhao, assistant professor of agricultural economics at the University of Kentucky.

“We wanted to look at the most up-to-date market response to a new product and see how the demand for such a product is interacting with the rest of the meat categories, especially within the fresh meat sector.”

World-leading simulation model to improve future pandemic quarantine response

A world-leading epidemiological simulation model to help improve future border quarantine practices for Australia and overseas has been developed by researchers at the University of Melbourne, the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity and collaborating institutions.  

The team of researchers – who advised the Federal Government on its National Plan to Transition Australia's National COVID Response last August – have published their model findings in the journal Sciences Advances.

The simulation model combines a detailed representation of person-to-person contact and virus transmission among both travelers and the quarantine workforce, with an accurate simulation of how infectiousness and virus testing accuracy varies over the course of a person’s period of infection.

Researchers were able to include these factors into the simulation model by drawing on growing data from the operation of Australian hotel quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic, and their inclusion can aid the design of quarantine systems to reduce the risk of virus transmission from infected arrivals in quarantine to the wider community.

Lead researchers Associate Professor Nic Geard and Dr Cameron Zachreson, from the University’s School of Computing and Information Systems (CIS), said the simulation model was developed to be adaptable and better calculate risks associated with various quarantine pathways including hotel quarantine, home quarantine and dedicated quarantine facilities such as the Victorian Quarantine Hub at Mickleham.

Lockheed Martin Stalker VXE UAS Completes a World Record 39-Hour Flight

Stalker VXE
Credit: Lockheed Martin Corporation

Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) Skunk Works® demonstrated the expanded endurance capabilities of a specially configured Lockheed Martin Stalker VXE unmanned aerial system (UAS) through a world record endurance flight on Feb. 18, 2022, at the Santa Margarita Ranch in California.

The flight establishes a new record in the Group 2 (5 to <25-kilogram) category with a flight time of 39 hours, 17 minutes and 7 seconds. The flight has been submitted to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), the world sanctioning body for aviation records, through its U.S. affiliate, the National Aeronautic Association, for certification.

A production Stalker VXE was modified for this record-setting flight with an external, wing-mounted fuel tank. The flight provided valuable insight for improvements to Stalker VXE aimed at scaling its mission capabilities for the future.

Stalker VXE’s class-leading endurance, broad operating envelope, modular payload compliance, vertical take-off and landing capability, and open system architecture allow it to execute diverse and demanding missions while maintaining a small operational footprint and crew.

Aprotinin is effective in COVID-19 patients

A clinical study from Spain recently confirmed laboratory experiments made by researchers of Goethe University Frankfurt and University of Kent who showed that the protease inhibitor aprotinin prevented cells to be infected by SARS-CoV2. The authors of the clinical study report that patients receiving an aprotinin aerosol could be discharged from hospital significantly earlier.

SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, needs its spike proteins to dock onto proteins (ACE receptors) on the surface of the host cells. Before this docking is possible, parts of the spike protein have to be cleaved by host cell's enzymes called proteases. In 2020, a scientific team led by Professor Jindrich Cinatl (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany), Professor Martin Michaelis and Professor Mark Wass (both University of Kent, UK), conducted cell culture experiments and found that aprotinin, a protease inhibitor, could inhibit virus replications by preventing SARS-CoV-2 entry into host cells.

In a more recent study, the research consortium further showed that aprotinin is also effective against the Delta and Omicron variants.