Technology Org October 13, 2020 Using high-speed imaging an international team of researchers (France, USA – Princeton University) has shown how phonation of common stop consonants, found in most of the world’s spoken languages, form and extend salivary filaments in a few milliseconds as moist lips open or when the tongue separates from the teeth. Both saliva viscoelasticity and airflow associated with the plosion of stop consonants are essential for stabilizing and subsequently forming centimeter-scale thin filaments, tens of microns in diameter, that break into speech droplets. The plosive consonants induce vortex rings that drive meter-long transport of exhaled air, […]
Tag Archives: COVID-19
Has the Summit Supercomputer Cracked COVID’s Code?
IEEE Spectrum August 2, 2020 According to a team of researchers in the US (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University Tennessee, University of Cincinnati, University of Kentucky, Yale University, medical schools) lung fluid samples from COVID-19 patients consistently revealed over-expression of genes that produce bradykinin, while also under-expressing genes that would inhibit or break down bradykinin. This is the core mechanism that explains a lot of the symptoms. They arrived at this conclusion by crunching data sets representing some 17,000 genetic samples while comparing each of these samples to some 40,000 genes. They highlight ten possible therapies developed for other conditions […]
Engineers design a reusable, silicone rubber face mask
MIT News July 9, 2020 A team of researchers in US (MIT, Brigham and Women’s Hospital) has designed a new face mask made of durable silicone rubber. Liquid silicone rubber can be easily molded into any shape using injection molding. It can be manufactured using injection molding, which is widely used in factories around the world. The mask includes an N95 filter, but it requires much less N95 material than a traditional N95 mask. Th filters are designed to be replaced after every use, while the rest of the mask can be sterilized and reused. They tested several different sterilization […]
K-State Infectious Disease Scientist Offers Road Map for Future COVID-19 Research
Global Biodefense May 23, 2020 Because of the rapid change of knowledge related to coronavirus, it is important to stress the importance of studying the ways that COVID-19 could spread between humans and animals. The scientists say that research should focus in several areas, including the potential for companion animals, such as cats and dogs, to carry the virus , the economic and food security effects if the virus can spread among livestock and poultry and national security areas, especially among service animals such as dogs that detect narcotics or explosives because COVID-19 is known to affect smell and cause […]
Anti-Vaccine Messaging Is Well-Connected on Social Media
Inside Science May 13, 2020 Social media platforms have removed the video for violating misinformation policies, but the 26-minute video highlights one way that the anti-vaccine movement is feeding into the recent surge of misinformation and disinformation swirling around COVID-19. In a new analysis researchers at Johns Hopkins University provide the first map of how three types of online communities interact: those who promote accurate information about vaccines, those who are against vaccines, and those who are interested in vaccines but don’t obviously lean in either direction, whom the researchers termed undecided. They found that pro-vaccine pages were not well […]
Forecasting COVID-19’s Trajectory
American Physical Society March 23, 2020 As COVID-19 spreads like wildfire across the globe, politicians must weigh difficult options to mitigate its impact. These decisions are guided by infectious-disease modelers, and physicists are an influential part of the mix. Harnessing today’s computing power, they solve models that capture the probabilistic nature of viral transmission and the dynamics of social behavior, delivering quantitative predictions with ever-increasing accuracy. Network theorists can integrate massive amounts of real data into their models, using publicly available databases on air travel and ground mobility. While it’s impossible to divert an extreme weather event epidemiological tools can […]
Scientific infrastructure for virus research
EurekAlert March 24, 2020 To simplify the exchange of data between the authorities, institutions and laboratories that are dealing with the SARS-CoV-2 virus researchers in Germany are providing the technical infrastructure: their Galaxy platform can handle analysis of Big Data in the life sciences. After being initiated at Penn State University, Galaxy was further developed by German researchers as part of the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI). Data are freely accessible online. Researchers who want to use the server do not need programming skills: all settings can be made using a graphic interface…read more. Data and analyses relating to […]
BAA for COVID-19 Diagnostics, Vaccines and Therapeutics
Global Biodefense March 6, 2020 The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) issued the BAA-18-100-SOL-00003-Amendment 13 to solicit proposals for advanced development and licensure of COVID-19 diagnostics, vaccines, or medicines such as therapeutics or antivirals. COVID-19 response related Areas of Interest includes: Diagnostic assay for human coronavirus using existing FDA-cleared platforms, Point-of-care diagnostic assay for detection of SARS-CoV-2 virus, Diagnostic assay for detection of COVID-19 disease (SARS-CoV-2 infection), COVID-19 Vaccine, COVID-19 Therapeutics, Immunomodulators or therapeutics targeting lung repair, Pre-exposure and post-exposure prophylaxis, Respiratory protective devices, Ventilators, Advanced Manufacturing Technologies. BARDA will only accept submissions related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus […]
Over 24,000 coronavirus research papers are now available in one place
MIT Technology Review March 16, 2020 Today researchers collaborating across several organizations released the Covid-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), which includes over 24,000 research papers from peer-reviewed journals as well as sources like bioRxiv and medRxiv. The research covers SARS-CoV-2, Covid-19 and the coronavirus group. The database was compiled under the request of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) through a collaboration between three organizations. The National Library of Medicine provided access to existing scientific publications; Microsoft used its literature curation algorithms to find relevant articles; and research nonprofit the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) […]
Big Data Helps Taiwan Fight Coronavirus
IEEE Spectrum March 12, 2020 According to an international team of researchers (USA – Stanford University, UCLA, Rand Corporation, Taiwan) Taiwan owes its success largely to the emergency implementation of big data analytics and new technologies. In late January, as the novel coronavirus began spreading through China, computer scientists modeling the outbreak ranked Taiwan the region with the second highest risk of importation of the virus. The island sits just 130 km off the coast of mainland China and shuttles thousands of passengers to and from the mainland daily. But so far Taiwan reports that it has largely mitigated the […]