Day: July 12, 2020

To prepare for current and future waves of COVID-19, the US Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center asked teams from across the country to compete to build a telehealth prototype that would provide adequate ICU capacity when cases surge. Of the 78 teams that competed, only nine were invited to complete a series of tasks designed to establish the feasibility of their prototypes. A Medical University of South Carolina team of bioinformatics, telehealth and critical care experts was one of those…

The COVID-19 pandemic is putting significant stress on college students, many of whom are worried about increasing financial pressures caused by the pandemic and the lack of easily accessible mental healthcare. Those are two of the troubling findings of a survey of more than 18,000 college students on 14 campuses, published July 9 by the Healthy Minds Network, which found the rate of depression among college students has increased since the start of the pandemic. The survey, conducted between March…

The quality, safety, and authenticity of our food is of the utmost importance in society today. The ability to rigorously test these factors is therefore critical for scientists working within the food industry. One technique particularly suited to this task is fluorescence spectroscopy. Fluorescence spectroscopy is a non-destructive technique that is able to give rapid and sensitive results. The technique uses a light beam (usually ultraviolet) to excite electrons, thereby causing them to fluoresce. This light is then directed towards…

Group of biomedical engineers from biotech company Gruppo Fos Lithuania together with researchers at Kaunas University of Technology and Lithuanian University of Health Sciences have patented technology for advanced health monitoring of stroke survivors. It is the first solution in the world which monitors and analyses simultaneously a patient's health parameters from the affected part of the brain and those of the cardiovascular system. Stroke is a sudden impairment of the cerebral circulation, resulting in the death of the brain…

Researchers have demonstrated that a fatty acid called dihomogamma-linolenic acid, or DGLA, can kill human cancer cells. The study, published in Developmental Cell on July 10, found that DGLA can induce ferroptosis in an animal model and in actual human cancer cells. Ferroptosis is an iron-dependent type of cell death that was discovered in recent years and has become a focal point for disease research as it is closely related to many disease processes. Jennifer Watts, a Washington State University associate professor…