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Two of the studies described in this article have been published on a preprint server but have not yet been peer-reviewed by experts in the field. As the U.S. speeds up distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, the question of equity keeps surfacing. Who gets priority? If the pandemic is hitting certain communities harder, can they be adequately supplied with vaccine doses? What’s the best way to balance the needs of different groups within society?...

A report recently published in the journal eLife highlights the ineffectiveness of the current 300 mg dose of the antimalarial drug tafenoquine for certain patients. The study reveals that while the 300 mg dose reduces recurrent vivax malaria infection by 70%, increasing the dose to 450 mg would increase the effectiveness to 85%. In other words, increasing the dose to 450 mg would result in one additional person being cured for every 11 people treated....

A new study by researchers at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai identifies different types of cardiac structural damage experienced by COVID-19 patients after cardiac injury that can be associated with deadly conditions including heart attack, pulmonary embolism, heart failure, and myocarditis. These abnormalities are associated with higher risk of death among hospitalized patients. The findings, published in the October 26, 2020, issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, offer new insights that may help doctors better understand the mechanism of cardiac injury, leading to quicker identification of patients at risk and guidance on future therapies....

Although the D ring of Saturn is so thin that it’s barely noticeable compared to the rest of the ring system, it still displays structures seen in other Saturnian rings. Here the spiral structures in the D ring are on display. The D ring spirals, discovered in Cassini images, are believed to be due to a warp in the ring created in the early 1980s. The precise mechanism remains the subject of scientific debate....

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered a new mechanism by which clumps of tau protein are created in the brain, killing brain cells and causing Alzheimer’s disease. A specific mutation to an enzyme called MARK4 changed the properties of tau, usually an important part of the skeletal structure of cells, making it more likely to aggregate, and more insoluble. Getting to grips with mechanisms like this may lead to breakthrough treatments....

The earliest batch of COVID-19 tests distributed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) exhibited false positive reactivity of negative controls due to flaws in assay design and contamination in one of the assay components, according to a CDC internal investigation published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. The complete SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence from a patient in Wuhan, China was published on January 12, 2020, and CDC scientists began rapid development of a Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel to detect the novel coronavirus....

The SIR-C instrument, built by NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the X-SAR instrument, built by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), constituted the most advanced imaging radar system ever used in air or space. During hundreds of orbits on two flights aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, in April and October 1994, the radar system made multiple passes over 19 “supersites” — areas of scientific interest in such locations as the Sahara, Brazil, the Alps, and the Gulf Stream....

There are millions of Americans seeking the use of complementary medicines, and many researchers applaud efforts to test and debunk folk treatments. However, what happens when such an alternative therapy actually works? In a study funded by the US National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, a trial indicates that a fringe therapy intended to sop up metal ions in the blood might reduce the participants’ risk of heart attacks....

In the last few years, scientists have made great inroads in understanding the crucial interactive role gut bacteria play in harvesting nutrients, assisting immune systems, and protecting the host against pathogens. Now Yale University researchers have discovered that humans and chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relatives, share the same three distinct communities, or ecosystems, of bacteria in their guts. “This shared organization of the gut microbial community is millions of years old and the findings attest to their functional importance,” said Howard Ochman, director of the Microbial Diversity Institute on West Campus and an author of the study, which appears in the November 13 issue of the journal Nature Communications....

By looking at the sun with this new technique, heliophysicists — who study how our dynamic sun drives change in the very physics of space around Earth and other planets — now can answer fundamental questions about the sun’s chromosphere, an important layer of the outer atmosphere of our turbulent star. “We can’t directly image everything that’s going on in the solar atmosphere, but studying the polarization of ultraviolet light reveals the physics of the magnetic fields in the upper chromosphere and the transition region to better understand activity in this enigmatic region,” said Amy Winebarger, CLASP’s principal investigator at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama....

A team led by University of Oregon geologist Rebecca Dorsey has published two papers that provide new insights into the origins of the Colorado River, using data from ancient sedimentary deposits located east of the San Andreas fault near the Salton Sea in Southern California. The papers, led by former master’s student Brennan O’Connell and doctoral candidate Kevin Gardner, respectively, present evidence that the now desert landscape of the river’s lower valley was submerged roughly 5 million to 6 million years ago under shallow seas with strong, fluctuating tidal currents that flowed back and forth along the trajectory of the present-day river....

Over a century ago, one of the most renowned modern physicists, Albert Einstein, proposed the ground-breaking theory of special relativity. Most of everything we know about the universe is based on this theory, however, a portion of it has not been experimentally demonstrated until now. Scientists from Osaka University’s Institute of Laser Engineering utilized ultrafast electro-optic measurements for the first time to visualize the contraction of the electric field surrounding an electron beam traveling at near the speed of light and demonstrate the generation process....

For the first time, researchers led by Professor Paul Spagnuolo have shown how a compound found only in avocados can inhibit cellular processes that normally lead to diabetes. In safety testing in humans, the team also found that the substance was absorbed into the blood with no adverse effects in the kidney, liver, or muscle. The study was recently published in the journal Molecular Nutrition and Food Research. About one in four Canadians is obese, a chronic condition that is a leading cause of Type 2 diabetes....

Studies have been carried out to characterize the electromagnetic and gravitational-wave signals from freely-precessing neutron stars, mostly focused on biaxial stars; however, in the most generic cases, triaxially-deformed neutron stars demonstrate more complex features as a result of free precession. In this study, co-authored by OzGrav Associate Investigator Lilli Sun from Australian National University (who was working with Caltech at the time of this research), scientists extend previous work and derive the dynamical evolution of a generic, triaxially-deformed, freely-precessing neutron star with both analytical and numerical approaches....

Astrophysical evidence suggests that the universe contains a large amount of non-luminous dark matter, yet no definite signal of it has been observed despite concerted efforts by many experimental groups. One exception to this is the long-debated claim by the DArk MAtter (DAMA) collaboration, which has reported positive observations of dark matter in its sodium-iodide detector array. The new COSINE-100 experiment, based at an underground, dark-matter detector at the Yangyang Underground Laboratory in South Korea, has begun to explore DAMA’s claim....

An international team of astrophysicists has found a distinctive signature of black hole event horizons, unmistakably separating them from neutron stars — objects, comparable to black holes in mass and size but confined within a hard surface. This is by far the strongest steady signature of stellar-mass black holes to date. The team consisting of Mr. Srimanta Banerjee and Professor Sudip Bhattacharyya from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India, and Professor Marat Gilfanov and Professor Rashid Sunyaev from Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Germany and Space Research Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia is publishing this research in a paper that has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society....

Scientists have known for a while that SARS-CoV-2’s distinctive “spike” proteins help the virus infect its host by latching on to healthy cells. Now, a major new study shows that they also play a key role in the disease itself. The paper, published on April 30, 2021, in Circulation Research, also shows conclusively that COVID-19 is a vascular disease, demonstrating exactly how the SARS-CoV-2 virus damages and attacks the vascular system on a cellular level....

The research study, which analyzed the health records of over half of the Danish population, found that those who had tested positive for COVID-19 were at a much higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and ischaemic stroke. Out of 919,731 individuals that were tested for COVID-19 within the study, researchers found that the 43,375 people who tested positive had a 3.5 times increased risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, 2....

Research uses data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA). The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the mental health of older people living in the community, with those who are lonely faring far worse, according to new research from McMaster University. Using data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA), a national team of researchers found that 43% of adults aged 50 or older experienced moderate or high levels of depressive symptoms at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that increased over time....

More people died from cardiovascular-related causes in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, than in any year since 2003, according to data reported in the American Heart Association’s 2023 Statistical Update.The largest increases in deaths were seen among Asian, Black, and Hispanic people.While the pandemic’s effects on death rates may be noticed for several years, lessons learned offer major opportunities to address structural and societal issues that drive health disparities, according to Association leaders....