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Oral health can be an additional, modifiable risk factor for high risk COVID-19 patients. The correlation between poor oral health and COVID-19 severity, as well as the correlation between oral health and delayed recovery, demonstrates a potential need to consider oral health an additional risk factor for cardiac patients who may contract COVID-19. The new sub-study, examining Egyptian cardiac patients, will be presented at ACC Middle East 2021, a hybrid meeting held in partnership by the American College of Cardiology, Egyptian Society of Cardiology, and the ACC Egypt Chapter on October 14-15, 2021....

Psychology and public health experts claim that that regular cannabis use, which they consider once a week, is not safe and may result in addiction and significant neurocognitive damage to the brains of teenagers and young adults. Frequent marijuana use can have a significant negative effect on the brains of teenagers and young adults, including cognitive decline, poor attention and memory, and decreased IQ, according to psychologists discussing public health implications of marijuana legalization at the American Psychological Association’s 122nd Annual Convention....

The magic of mathematics is particularly reflected in magic squares. Recently, quantum physicist Gemma De las Cuevas and mathematicians Tim Netzer and Tom Drescher introduced the notion of the quantum magic square, and for the first time studied in detail the properties of this quantum version of magic squares. Magic squares belong to the imagination of humanity for a long time. The oldest known magic square comes from China and is over 2000 years old....

A research team seems to have broken the most recent record of distance for quantum teleportation, posted by a Chinese research group. This new record is about the distance between New York City and Philadelphia and concerns the quantum state of a single photon. While it also might sound that the transfer happens instantaneously, the steps required to read out the teleported quantum state ensure that it doesn’t travel faster than the speed of light, which would break causality....

However, there is also the optical phenomenon of a corona, caused by the diffraction of light from a bright object — such as the Sun, other stars, the Moon, and bright planets — by water drops or ice crystals in the Earth’s atmosphere. This is occurring in this unusual image, where a rare corona of the planet Jupiter can be seen above the Atacama Desert in Chile. The beautiful red and green colors in the sky are due to atmospheric airglow, another light-related optical phenomenon....

On the Yamal Peninsula in West Siberia, the nomadic Nenets people have a long tradition of herding reindeer on the Arctic tundra. In recent decades, however, the tundra has been changing, and so are the ways that reindeer interact with it. The Yamal Peninsula is shown above in a natural-color image acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite on July 8, 2021. At that time of year, Nenets herders likely were making their summer migration to the north....

Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the study found that CBD blocked signals carried by a molecule called lysophosphatidylinositol (LPI). Found in brain cells called neurons, LPI is thought to amplify nerve signals as part of normal function, but can be hijacked by disease to promote seizures. Published online on February 13 in the journal Neuron, the work confirmed a previous finding that CBD blocks the ability of LPI to amplify nerve signals in a brain region called the hippocampus....

A scientist at the University of Guelph has discovered the type of stem cell that is behind the gecko’s ability to regrow its tail, a finding that has implications for spinal cord treatment in humans. Many lizards can detach a portion of their tail to avoid a predator and then regenerate a new one. Unlike in mammals, the lizard tail includes part of the spinal cord. Professor Matthew Vickaryous found that the spinal cord in the tail contained a large number of stem cells and proteins known to support stem cell growth....

In a new study appearing in the journal Nature Astronomy today, in which the IAC has participated, astronomers announce that they have new clues to this mystery. They studied one of the famous black hole binaries in our galaxy -V404 Cygni- when it was undergoing a bright episode of growth activity during June 2015. Using the ULTRACAM fast imager mounted on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING), at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma), combined with NASA’s NuSTAR telescope in Earth orbit, a fleeting time delay of just 100 milliseconds (0....

It’s difficult to miss the many news reports about severe storms that have occurred in various regions of the globe and are often attributed to climate change. Although weather forecasting and early warning systems have always been important, the current increase in storm activity appears to make them especially so. A team of scientists led by Professor Hiroyuki Tanaka of Muographix at the University of Tokyo has developed a novel method for identifying and analyzing tropical cyclones by using a quirk of particle physics that occurs over our heads all the time....

However, developing self-adaptive micro/nanorobots that can adjust their driving mechanisms across multiple biological barriers to reach distant lesions is still a challenge. Recently, a research team led by Prof. Lintao Cai from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a twin-bioengine yeast micro/nanorobot (TBY-robot) with self-propelling and self-adaptive capabilities that can autonomously navigate to inflamed sites to provide gastrointestinal inflammation therapy via enzyme-macrophage switching (EMS)....

What’s new? It’s their novel gas diffusion electrodes, which are transparent, porous, and conductive, enabling this solar-powered technology for turning water – in its gas state from the air – into hydrogen fuel. “To realize a sustainable society, we need ways to store renewable energy as chemicals that can be used as fuels and feedstocks in industry. Solar energy is the most abundant form of renewable energy, and we are striving to develop economically-competitive ways to produce solar fuels,” says Sivula of EPFL’s Laboratory for Molecular Engineering of Optoelectronic Nanomaterials and principal investigator of the study....

The luminescent dots are only a few nanometers wide, but are highly tunable for their unique optical and electronic properties. They are beginning to show up in modern displays, but lend themselves to industrial chemistry as well. The Rice lab of materials scientist Eilaf Egap focused on the latter with its demonstration of a stable and economical method to make polymers through photo-controlled atom-transfer radical polymerization. The method could replace molecular catalysts or expensive transition metals currently used to make things like methacrylates (common in plastics), styrene and block copolymers....

Soyuz is delivering 946 pounds of supplies to the International Space Station. This new Soyuz will replace the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft following a radiator coolant leak on December 14, 2022. The Soyuz MS-22 transported NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin to the space station last September. The three crew members will return to Earth on the new Soyuz MS-23 later this year. The damaged Soyuz MS-22 is scheduled to undock from the station in late March and return to Earth for an uncrewed parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan, and post-flight analysis by Roscosmos....

Their study, which predicts what the earliest proteins looked like 3.5 billion to 2.5 billion years ago, is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists retraced, like a many thousand-piece puzzle, the evolution of enzymes (proteins) from the present to the deep past. The solution to the puzzle required two missing pieces, and life on Earth could not exist without them. By constructing a network connected by their roles in metabolism, this team discovered the missing pieces....

A New Zealand researcher thinks that he has solved the riddle of a mysterious South Pacific island shown on Google Earth and world maps, but which doesn’t really exist. He thinks that a whaling ship from 1876 is to blame. The phantom landmass in the Coral Sea is shown as Sandy Island on Google Earth and Google Maps, and it is supposed to be midway between Australia and New Caledonia....

They’ve developed what is believed to be the first systematic way to catch natural killer cells and get them to release cancer-killing packets called exosomes. These nano-scale exosomes are thousands of times smaller than natural killer cells — or NK cells for short — and thus better able to penetrate cancer cells’ defenses. A proof-of-concept study in blood samples from five patients with non-small cell lung cancer demonstrated that the approach was able to capture natural killer cells on a microfluidic chip and use them to “farm” the NK exosomes....

DNA-based, self-assembled nanostructures are promising building blocks for new kinds of micro- and nanodevices for biomedical and environmental applications. Much research is currently focused on adding functionality to such structures in order to expand their versatility. For example, engineered capsules called liposomes that have a lipid-bilayer membrane are already successfully being used as sensors, diagnostic tools, and drug delivery systems. Another group of capsules that do not have a lipid bilayer but are instead composed of colloidal particle membrane, known as Pickering emulsions1 or colloidosomes, also have the potential for many biotechnologically useful applications....

Researchers in Japan have uncovered the mechanism for how the measles virus can cause subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, or SSPE, a rare but fatal neurological disorder that can occur several years after a measles infection. Although the normal form of the measles virus cannot infect the nervous system, the team found that viruses that persist in the body can develop mutations in a key protein that controls how they infect cells....

Much of the research on HIV has focused on preventing infection but little is understood about how the body keeps the virus in check post-infection. A new study by Yale investigators reveals the role of a protein that serves to block HIV gene expression once it has entered human cells. The research team, led by Manabu Taura, a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of immunobiologist Akiko Iwasaki, studied T cell lines infected with latent HIV....