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The most well-known HCAIs are caused by Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and Escherichia coli (E. coli). They commonly occur during in-patient medical or surgical treatment, or from visiting a healthcare setting and pose a serious health threat, making them a key priority for the NHS to address*. The research, published today in Nature Communications, is the first to show a light-activated antimicrobial coating successfully killing bacteria in low intensity, ambient light (300 Lux), such as that found in wards and waiting rooms....

The UCI system can go a long way toward the deployment of a vaccine for COVID-19 and toward reopening the economy, as both require widespread testing for the virus and its antibodies. So far, antibody testing in the U.S. has been too inaccurate or expensive to reach the necessary numbers. But UCI investigators Weian Zhao, Per Niklas Hedde, Enrico Gratton and Philip Felgner believe that their new technology can help accelerate the testing process quickly and affordably....

A study led by Michigan Medicine has found that transgender and gender-nonconforming teens and young adults are four times more likely to have a sleep disorder than cisgender youth. The study analyzed claims data from over 1.2 million individuals aged 12 to 25, including 2,603 who identified as transgender or gender-nonconforming. The results, published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, show that transgender youth have a 5.4 times higher likelihood of insomnia and a three times higher likelihood of sleep apnea or other sleep disorders....

A newly published study on solar storms led by Tibor Durgonics from the Technical University of Denmark finds that they not only can cause regions of excessive electrical charge in the upper atmosphere above Earth’s poles, they also can do the exact opposite: cause regions that are nearly depleted of electrically charged particles. The team of researchers made the discovery while studying a solar storm that reached Earth on February 19, 2014....

The study examines investor responses to board diversity and finds that one additional woman on the board results in a 2.3% decrease in the company’s market value on average, which could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. Authors Isabelle Solal and Kaisa Snellman, both of INSEAD, looked at 14 years of panel data from U.S. public firms and saw that firms with more female directors were penalized. “Firms that increase board diversity suffer a decrease in market value and the effect is amplified for firms that have received higher ratings for their diversity practices across the organization,” said Solal....

Anxiety disorders are the most common type of psychiatric illness, yet researchers know very little about factors associated with recovery. A new University of Toronto study investigated three levels of recovery in a large, representative sample of more than 2,000 Canadians with a history of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). The study reports that 72% of Canadians with a history of GAD have been free of the mental health condition for at least one year....

An international team with the participation of Prof. Dr. Michael Kues from the Cluster of Excellence PhoenixD at Leibniz University Hannover has developed a new method for generating quantum-entangled photons in a spectral range of light that was previously inaccessible. The discovery can make the encryption of satellite-based communications much more secure in the future. A 15-member research team from the UK, Germany, and Japan has developed a new method for generating and detecting quantum-entangled photons at a wavelength of 2....

UCLA scientists and engineers have developed a new process for assembling semiconductor devices. The advance could lead to much more energy-efficient transistors for electronics and computer chips, diodes for solar cells and light-emitting diodes, and other semiconductor-based devices. A paper about the research was published in Nature. The study was led by Xiangfeng Duan, professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the UCLA College, and Yu Huang, professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering....

Using a combination of spectro-photoelectron holography, electrical property measurements, and first-principles dynamics simulations, the 3D atomic structures of dopant impurities in a semiconductor crystal were successfully revealed. The need for a better understanding of the atomic structures of dopants in semiconductors had been long felt, mainly because the current limitations on active dopant concentrations result from the deactivation of excess dopant atoms by the formation of various types of clusters and other defect structures....

Federal funding of new technology is crucial for astronomy, according to results of a study released on September 21, 2020, in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments and Systems. The study tracked the long-term impact of early seed funding obtained from the National Science Foundation. Many of the key advances in astronomy over the past three decades benefited directly or indirectly from this early seed funding. Over the past 30 years, the NSF Advanced Technologies and Instrumentation program has supported astronomers to develop new ways to study the universe....

Dr. Anran Cheng (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford), lead author of the study, said: “Our model shows the importance of factoring in the high diffusivity of helium and the long timescales needed to accumulate significant gas quantities, and the fact that the entire geological system acts dynamically to affect the process. This model provides a new perspective to help identify the environments that slow helium gases down enough to accumulate in commercial amounts....

Logic gates are the basic building blocks of computer processors. Conventional logic gates are electronic, working by shuffling around electrons. However, researchers have been developing light-based optical logic gates to meet the data processing and transfer demands of next-generation computing. Aalto University scientists developed new optical chirality logic gates that operate about a million times faster than existing technologies, offering ultrafast processing speeds. This new approach, which is described in a paper published in the journal Science Advances, uses circularly polarized light as the input signal....

“The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum is the closest thing we have in the geologic record to anything like what we’re experiencing now and may experience in the future with climate change,” said Lee Kump, professor of geosciences at Penn State University. “There has been a lot of interest in better resolving that history, and our work addresses important questions about what triggered the event and the rate of carbon emissions.” The team of scientists studied core samples from a well-preserved record of the PETM near the Maryland coast using astrochronology, a method of dating sedimentary layers based on orbital patterns that occur over long periods of time, known as Milankovitch cycles....

NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars have returned clues for understanding seasonal features that are the strongest indication of possible liquid water that may exist today on the Red Planet. The features are dark, finger-like markings that advance down some Martian slopes when temperatures rise. The new clues include corresponding seasonal changes in iron minerals on the same slopes and a survey of ground temperatures and other traits at active sites. These support a suggestion that brines with an iron-mineral antifreeze, such as ferric sulfate, may flow seasonally, though there are still other possible explanations....

‘Oumuamua was discovered on October 19, 2017, by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System 1 (Pan-STARRS1) located in Hawaii. As the first known interstellar object to visit our Solar System, ‘Oumuamua is absolutely nothing like anything else in the Solar System. Its dry surface, unusually elongated shape and puzzling motion even drove some scientists to wonder if it was an alien probe. “It is really a mystery,” said ZHANG Yun, first author of the study, “but some signs, like its colors and the absence of radio emission, point to ‘Oumuamua being a natural object....

For the first time, physicists extracted the detailed “energy-dependent neutrino-argon interaction cross section,” a key value for studying how neutrinos change their flavor Physicists studying ghost-like particles called neutrinos from the international MicroBooNE collaboration have reported a first-of-its-kind measurement: a comprehensive set of the energy-dependent neutrino-argon interaction cross sections. This measurement marks an important step towards achieving the scientific goals of next-generation of neutrino experiments—namely, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE)....

Confirmation, twenty years later “Almost twenty years ago, in 1999, with our study published in Science, we were the first to confirm the existence of this superionic phase through simulations which were truly advanced at the time,” explains Professor Erio Tosatti, one of the authors of that research. “The new experimental result is a further evidence that the theoretical model we defined many years ago was able, despite the then-limited computational resources, to predict very well physical situations which were difficult to reproduce in a laboratory....

Both genetic and lifestyle factors likely contribute to disease risks. A new genetic study of Native Hawaiians by Charleston Chiang at the University of Southern California and colleagues finds that people who have a greater proportion of Polynesian ancestry in their genomes face a higher risk of obesity, Type-2 diabetes and heart failure. The study was published in the journal PLOS Genetics. Previous studies have shown that Native Hawaiians appear to have high rates of cancers and chronic health conditions, especially when compared to other people living in Hawaii....

Around the world, governments have widely attempted two strategies meant to reduce the use of gasoline by making it more expensive. One is implementing taxes in order to raise the price that consumers pay at the pump; the other is cutting back on the longstanding subsidies that governments have provided to producers, with the goal of making gas more costly for companies to sell. However, a new study found that such reforms are curtailed so quickly that they are not being given a chance to have any effect....

Less traffic in first lockdown reduced air pollution but caused potentially damaging surface ozone levels to rise. Less traffic on the roads during the first lockdown led to a reduction in air pollution but may have caused potentially damaging surface ozone levels to rise, a new study has revealed. The study — led by the University of York — shows levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) down on average across the UK by 42 percent, but surface ozone (O3) increased by 11 percent on average....