13 Feb

Posted at 23:20h in Scoop.it

Maccabi health fund releases preliminary results of a study comparing vaccinated and not vaccinated members’ likability to contract the disease and said vaccine 92% effective.  A total of 371 out of 715,425 Israelis who passed at least a week after receiving two doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine have contracted the virus – 0.04%, with 16 being sent to the hospital – according to a Health Ministry report released on Thursday. Immunity to COVID-19 is supposed to kick in a week after receiving the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. According to the studies conducted by Pfizer, the vaccine had an efficacy of about 95%, which is considered very high. The Israeli data appear to confirm the inoculation’s effectiveness, showing an even more promising result. Later in the day, Maccabi Healthcare Services – one of the country’s four health maintenance organizations – released the first results of the vaccination campaign of its members, with the organization also comparing the data to a control group that did not get inoculated.

 

Read the full article at: www.jpost.com

13 Feb

Posted at 23:20h in Scoop.it

Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania have identified ionizable lipid nanoparticles that could be used to deliver mRNA as part of fetal therapy. The proof-of-concept study, published today in Science Advances, engineered and screened a number of lipid nanoparticle formulations for targeting mouse fetal organs and has laid the groundwork for testing potential therapies to treat genetic diseases before birth.

 

“This is an important first step in identifying nonviral mediated approaches for delivering cutting-edge therapies before birth,” said co-senior author William H. Peranteau, MD, an attending surgeon in the Division of General, Thoracic and Fetal Surgery and the Adzick-McCausland Distinguished Chair in Fetal and Pediatric Surgery at CHOP. “These lipid nanoparticles may provide a platform for in utero mRNA delivery, which would be used in therapies like fetal protein replacement and gene editing.”

 

Read the full article at: phys.org

13 Feb

Posted at 23:19h in Scoop.it

Remnants of planets with Earth-like crusts have been discovered in the atmospheres of four nearby white dwarf stars by University of Warwick astronomers, offering a glimpse of the planets that may have once orbited them up to billions of years ago.

 

These crusts are from the outer layers of rocky planets similar to Earth and Mars and could give astronomers greater insights into the chemistry of the planets that these dying stars once hosted.

The discovery is reported today in the journal Nature Astronomy and includes one of the oldest planetary systems seen by astronomers so far.

 

The University of Warwick-led team were analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope of over 1,000 nearby white dwarf stars when they came across an unusual signal from one particular white dwarf. The researchers at the University of Warwick received funding from the European Research Council and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

 

They used spectroscopy to analyze the light from the star at different wavelengths, which allows them to detect when elements in the star’s atmosphere are absorbing light at different colors and determine what elements those are and how much is present. They also inspected the 30,000 white dwarf spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey published over the last 20 years.

 

The signal matched the wavelength of lithium and the astronomers soon discovered three more white dwarfs with the same signal, one of which was also observed with potassium in its atmosphere. By comparing the amount of lithium and potassium with the other elements they detected—sodium and calcium—they found that the ratio of elements matched the chemical composition of the crust of rocky planets like Earth and Mars, if those crusts and been vaporized and mixed within the gaseous outer layers of the star for 2 million years.

Read the full article at: phys.org

29 Jan

Posted at 12:12h in Scoop.it

The Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) is home to many interdisciplinary projects which benefit from the synergy of a wide range of expertise available at the institute. One such project is the study of black holes that could have formed in the early universe, before stars and galaxies were born.

 

Such primordial black holes (PBHs) could account for all or part of dark matter, be responsible for some of the observed gravitational waves signals, and seed supermassive black holes found in the center of our Galaxy and other galaxies. They could also play a role in the synthesis of heavy elements when they collide with neutron stars and destroy them, releasing neutron-rich material. In particular, there is an exciting possibility that the mysterious dark matter, which accounts for most of the matter in the universe, is composed of primordial black holes. The 2020 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to a theorist, Roger Penrose, and two astronomers, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, for their discoveries that confirmed the existence of black holes. Since black holes are known to exist in nature, they make a very appealing candidate for dark matter.

 

Read the full article at: www.ipmu.jp