YouTube will begin removing content questioning any approved medical vaccine, not just those for Covid-19, a departure from the video site's historically hands-off approach. From a report: The division of Alphabet's Google announced Wednesday that it will extend its policy against misinformation to cover all vaccines that health authorities consider effective. The ban will include any media that claims vaccines are dangerous or lead to chronic health outcomes such as autism, said Matt Halprin, YouTube's vice president for trust and safety. A year ago, YouTube banned certain videos critical of Covid-19 vaccines. The company said it has since pulled more than 130,000 videos for violating that rule. But many videos got around the rule by making dubious claims about vaccines without mentioning Covid-19. YouTube determined its policy was too limited. "We can imagine viewers then potentially extrapolating to Covid-19," Halprin said in an interview. "We wanted to make sure that we're covering the whole gamut."

Air pollution is likely to have been responsible for up to 6 million premature births and 3 million underweight babies worldwide every year, research shows. From a report: The analysis, which combines the results of multiple scientific studies, is the first to calculate the total global burden of outdoor and indoor air pollution combined. Indoor pollution, mostly from cooking stoves burning solid fuel such as coal or wood, made up almost two-thirds of the total pollution burden on pregnancies in 2019, according to the latest findings. This is especially true in developing areas, such as in some parts of south-east Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. "At an individual level, indoor air pollution exposure appears to carry a much higher burden compared to outdoor levels," said Rakesh Ghosh, an epidemiologist at University of California, San Francisco and lead researcher on the paper, published in the journal Plos Medicine.

"So, minimising household pollution exposure, to the extent possible, should be part of the message during prenatal care, especially where household pollution is prevalent." Air pollution is usually measured according to exposure to particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns: once inhaled, the minuscule size of these particles allows them to be absorbed deep into the bloodstream, potentially causing far-reaching health problems.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: For the past 10 years, Sonia Grego has been thinking about toilets -- and more specifically what we deposit into them. "We are laser-focused on the analysis of stool," says the Duke University research professor, with all the unselfconsciousness of someone used to talking about bodily functions. "We think there is an incredible untapped opportunity for health data. And this information is not tapped because of the universal aversion to having anything to do with your stool." As the co-founder of Coprata, Grego is working on a toilet that uses sensors and artificial intelligence to analyze waste; she hopes to have an early model for a pilot study ready within nine months. "The toilet that you have in your home has not functionally changed in its design since it was first introduced," she says, in the second half of the 19th century. There are, of course, now loos with genital-washing capabilities, or heated seats, but this is basic compared with what Grego is envisaging. "All other aspects of your life -- your electricity, your communication, even your doorbell -- have enhanced capabilities."

Smart toilet innovators believe the loo could become the ultimate health monitoring tool. Grego believes her product -- which analyses and tracks stool samples and sends the data to an app -- will provide "information related to cancer and many chronic diseases." For general consumers, it will provide peace of mind, she says, by establishing "a healthy baseline": "Having technology that tracks what is normal for an individual could provide an early warning that a checkup is needed." For people with specific conditions, such as inflammatory bowel disease, the device could provide helpful monitoring for doctors. "It's very difficult to know when to escalate or de-escalate treatment," she says. "Stool-based biomarkers can provide that information." At some point, she thinks, a smart toilet could make lifestyle suggestions -- it could tell you to eat more fibre or certain nutrients, for instance, or work out what kind of food triggered an uncomfortable gastric episode. "The science of nutrition is really moving in the direction of personalized nutrition," says Grego. "Our technology will be an enabler of this, because you have information of what you eat, but we can make seamless the obtaining of information of what comes out." Researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine have been working on technology that can analyze feces (including "stool dropping time") and track the velocity and color of urine, as well as test it. According to the Wall Street Journal, the researchers have partnered with Izen, a Korean toilet manufacturer that's developed a scanner that can recognize the physical characteristics of whoever is sitting on the toilet -- or, in the words of the researchers, "the distinctive features of their anoderm" (the skin of the anal canal). While many people are ready for the smart toilet era, Stanford's study of user acceptance found that the "least favored module is analprint."

The Guardian article continues: Is all this -- your analprint out in the world, the makeup of your bowel movements analyzed -- a privacy breach too far? "Can it be kept secure?" asks Eerke Boiten, a professor of cybersecurity at De Montfort University in Leicester. [...] Many people "wouldn't, for very good reasons, like cameras pointing up their bottoms," says Phil Booth, the coordinator of MedConfidential, which campaigns for the confidentiality of medical records. That said, under the guidance of a medical professional, "there are not necessarily inherent privacy risks" in using a smart toilet as a medical device, he says. However, it might get interesting if the data created by general consumer use was owned by a company: "You may trust that particular company, but every company is pretty much buyable by Google or Facebook or Amazon. Then, what I thought was something for my own health monitoring has become fodder to business models I really know nothing about."

Where does it end? Could the police or others involved in surveillance track you by analprint, via the public and home smart lavatories you visit? Might you be asked to provide a print at a police station? [...] "Once you start to measure something that is of the body, the privacy line is stepped over," says Booth. "If you don't measure what's going on with someone's bowel movements, the bowel movement is private." This is an alarming thought -- but, says Booth with a laugh, it is not as though governments will mandate smart toilets. He says there will always be people -- those into the "quantified self" movement -- who are happy to measure and track themselves. If smart loos are considered clinical devices collecting medical data, "then it's a straight medical breach risk -- not special to toilets, but because you've turned the toilet into a medical data-generating experience. Are they managing those risks correctly?"

A crop of companies want to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young men, as employers start to offer it as a benefit. From a report: For decades, the conversation about waning fertility has been focused largely on women. Think of Marisa Tomei stomping on the floorboards of a front porch to emulate her biological clock ticking in "My Cousin Vinny." More employers cover the cost of cryogenic egg freezing as a workplace benefit. Recently, a small group of biotech startups have hatched, dedicated to what they say is an underserved market: male fertility. Armed with recent scientific research suggesting that the quality of sperm is declining in the West, the companies are trying to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young, healthy men, one covered by health insurance and free of stigma.

"My fundamental belief is that if the product is affordable, this should be a no-brainer for every man," says Khaled Kteily, the 32-year-old founder of Legacy, one of the companies that Mr. Alam used to freeze his sperm. "I believe that in the future," he adds, "this will be something that parents will buy for their kids as a not-so-subtle gift." The push to make a case for its business is starting to catch on. The company recently struck a deal to eventually provide free sperm testing and storage to all active duty service members in the U.S. military, starting with the Navy SEALs, of which there are about 1,200 a year, and expanding next to all special operations forces. The Navy didn't respond to a request for comment. Soldiers regularly experience risky situations and time away from their partners, says Ellen Gustafson, a Navy wife and co-founder of the Military Family Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for coverage of fertility medicine for members of the armed forces.

theodp writes: On Monday, tech-bankrolled Code.org announced the CS Journeys program, which the nonprofit explains is designed to help teachers "excite, encourage, and empower your students to continue their CS journeys in and beyond your class." Besides live, virtual field trips to Amazon's Fulfillment Centers, kids aged 5-and-up will also participate in live, weekly classroom conversations with professionals from the likes of Google and Amazon, where they "will learn about a number of ways they can use computer science to have a positive impact, as well as different journeys that people have taken to get to meaningful careers and achieve their goals." A Googler will speak to kindergartners and other younger students about Developing responsible artificial intelligence on Sep. 22nd. Teachers are also being asked to show students inspiring Careers in Tech videos featuring employees from Facebook/Instagram, Microsoft, and Google.

Explaining that "students who hear from parents that they would be good at computer science are 2-3 times more likely to be interested in learning it," Code.org urges teachers to also "connect with parents and recruit their help in encouraging students to learn and continue on their computer science journey." Code.org even provides teachers with talking points to include in emails and letters home. A sample: "Computer science teaches students critical thinking and problem solving. In fact, studies show that students who learn computer science do better in other subjects, excel at problem solving, and are more likely to go to college. [...] Parent/guardian encouragement is critical to student success and interest in learning and success. So ask your student to see something they created in class."

The launch of CS Journeys comes less than a year after Google VP Maggie Johnson -- a long-time Code.org Board member -- reported that a Google-commissioned Gallup report showed that "students are generally unconvinced that computer science is important for them to learn," adding that "Interventions from parents, educators, community leaders, policymakers, nonprofits and the technology industry are needed to encourage girls, Black students and Hispanic students to take computer science courses. These students also need to be shown how CS knowledge can help them meet their goals in a variety of fields including the humanities, medicine and the arts." According to the report, only 22% of boys and 9% of girls "believe it is very important to learn CS."

Ivermectin is making the rounds again online after Joe Rogan casually mentioned he took the drug after testing positive for COVID-19. Some researchers claim it helps treat symptoms of the virus; others, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have yet to make that determination. "While there are approved uses for ivermectin in people and animals, it is not approved for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19," the FDA says in a FAQ.

So where did this drug come from and why have people been using it to try and treat COVID-19? WFAA, an ABC-affiliated television station licensed to Dallas, Texas, helps answer those questions: In the 1970s, Japanese biochemist Satoshi Omura discovered the avermectin family of compounds, which are a series of drugs used to treat parasites and insect pests. Ivermectin is one of these drugs. Ivermectin has a mixture of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. It was modified and first introduced as medicine in 1981. It soon became registered around the world to treat parasitic worms in cattle, sheep, and other animals. It can be taken as a pill or applied to the skin depending on why it's needed.

By 1988, ivermectin was approved as a medical treatment in humans. This "wonder drug," as many called it, was prescribed to treat illnesses, which include head lice, scabies, river blindness (onchocerciasis), strongyloidiasis, trichuriasis, ascariasis, and lymphatic filariasis. Since its discovery, ivermectin has been used by more than 700 million people in the world specifically to treat river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, according to a National Institutes of Health study.

A medical study led by Dr. Ahmed Elgazzar in Egypt was published in November 2020. It said that hospitalized patients with COVID-19 who received this antiparasitic drug improved more quickly and had a better chance of staying alive. It was retracted in July. Multiple medical agencies -- including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) -- have been unable to find any evidence this drug helps with COVID-19. The CDC put out a press release in August, making clear that ivermectin is not authorized or approved by the FDA for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19. In that same CDC press release, health experts also warned about the dangers that can come from taking ivermectin incorrectly.

Scientists at Northwestern University found that people became less sensitive to food odors based on the meal they had eaten just before. These findings show that just as smell regulates what we eat, what we eat -- in turn -- regulates our sense of smell. Phys.Org reports: The study found that participants who had just eaten a meal of either cinnamon buns or pizza were less likely to perceive "meal-matched" odors, but not non-matched odors. The findings were then corroborated with brain scans that showed brain activity in parts of the brain that process odors was altered in a similar way.

Feedback between food intake and the olfactory system may have an evolutionary benefit, said senior and corresponding study author Thorsten Kahnt, an assistant professor of neurology and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "If you think about our ancestors roaming the forest trying to find food, they find and eat berries and then aren't as sensitive to the smell of berries anymore," Kahnt said. "But maybe they're still sensitive to the smell of mushrooms, so it could theoretically help facilitate diversity in food and nutrient intake."

Kahnt said while we don't see the hunter-gatherer adaptation come out in day-to-day decision-making, the connection between our nose, what we seek out and what we can detect with our nose may still be very important. If the nose isn't working right, for example, the feedback loop may be disrupted, leading to problems with disordered eating and obesity. There may even be links to disrupted sleep, another tie to the olfactory system the Kahnt lab is researching. Kahnt said with a better understanding of the feedback loop between smell and food intake, he's hoping to take the project full circle back to sleep deprivation to see if lack of sleep may impair the loop in some way. He added that with brain imaging, there are more questions about how the adaptation may impact sensory and decision-making circuits in the brain. The study has been published in the journal PLOS Biology.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News, written by Harriet Blair Rowan: In a significant twist that could reshape our understanding of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, death records now indicate the first COVID-related deaths in California and across the country occurred in January 2020, weeks earlier than originally thought and before officials knew the virus was circulating here. A half dozen death certificates from that month in six different states -- California, Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin -- have been quietly amended to list COVID-19 as a contributing factor, suggesting the virus's deadly path quickly reached far beyond coastal regions that were the country's early known hotspots. Up until now, the Feb. 6, 2020, death of San Jose's Patricia Dowd had been considered the country's first coronavirus fatality, although where and how she was infected remains unknown.

Even less is known about what are now believed to be the country's earliest victims of the pandemic. The Bay Area News Group discovered evidence of them in provisional coronavirus death counts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) -- widely considered the definitive source for death data in the United States -- and confirmed the information through interviews with state and federal public health officials. But amid privacy concerns and fierce debate over pandemic policies, the names, precise locations and circumstances behind these deaths have not been publicly revealed. That is frustrating to some experts.

The existence of January 2020 deaths would dramatically revise the timeline of COVID's arrival in the United States. China first announced a mysterious viral pneumonia in late December 2019, and reported the first death from the illness on Jan. 9, 2020. The U.S. originally recorded its first case in mid-January when a traveler tested positive after returning from Wuhan, China. The first deaths reported in the United States, in late February, were also tied to travel. In its current death count, which reflects the six newly-discovered fatalities, the NCHS now lists the country's first COVID death during the week of Jan. 5-11 -- the first full week of 2020. The agency is in the final stages of preparing its 2020 annual mortality report, a review and analysis of all deaths in the United States last year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceDaily: Eating fructose appears to alter cells in the digestive tract in a way that enables it to take in more nutrients, according to a preclinical study from investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian. These changes could help to explain the well-known link between rising fructose consumption around the world and increased rates of obesity and certain cancers. The research, published August 18 in Nature, focused on the effect of a high-fructose diet on villi, the thin, hairlike structures that line the inside of the small intestine. Villi expand the surface area of the gut and help the body to absorb nutrients, including dietary fats, from food as it passes through the digestive tract. The study found that mice that were fed diets that included fructose had villi that were 25 percent to 40 percent longer than those of mice that were not fed fructose. Additionally, the increase in villus length was associated with increased nutrient absorption, weight gain and fat accumulation in the animals.

After observing that the villi were longer, the team wanted to determine whether those villi were functioning differently. So they put mice into three groups: a normal low-fat diet, a high-fat diet, and a high-fat diet with added fructose. Not only did the mice in the third group develop longer villi, but they became more obese than the mice receiving the high-fat diet without fructose. The researchers took a closer look at the changes in metabolism and found that a specific metabolite of fructose, called fructose-1-phosphate, was accumulating at high levels. This metabolite interacted with a glucose-metabolizing enzyme called pyruvate kinase, to alter cell metabolism and promote villus survival and elongation. When pyruvate kinase or the enzyme that makes fructose-1-phospate were removed, fructose had no effect on villus length. Previous animal studies have suggested that this metabolite of fructose also aids in tumor growth. From an evolutionary standpoint, the findings make sense. "In mammals, especially hibernating mammals in temperate climates, you have fructose being very available in the fall months when the fruit is ripe," said one of the researchers. "Eating a lot of fructose may help these animals to absorb and convert more nutrients to fat, which they need to get through the winter."

Humans, on the other hand, did not evolve to eat the amount of fructose they consume now.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Almost 20 years before SARS-CoV-2, a related and even more lethal coronavirus sowed panic, killing nearly 10% of the 8000 people who became infected. But the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) may have left some survivors with a gift. Former SARS patients who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 appear able to fend off all variants of SARS-CoV-2 in circulation, as well as ones that may soon emerge, a new study suggests. Their formidable antibodies may even protect against coronaviruses in other species that have yet to make the jump into humans -- and may hold clues to how to make a so-called pancoronavirus vaccine that could forestall future outbreaks.

A team led by emerging disease specialist Linfa Wang from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore identified eight SARS survivors who recently received two shots of a messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccine. In the test tube, antibodies sieved from their blood potently "neutralized" an early strain of SARS-CoV-2 as well as SARS-CoV, the virus that caused SARS, Wang and colleagues report today in The New England Journal of Medicine. The team further found these neutralizing antibodies worked well against the Alpha, Beta, and Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2 and stymied five related coronaviruses found in bats and pangolins that potentially could infect humans.

When a World Health Organization-led team traveled to China earlier this year to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, a top official said he was worried about safety standards at a laboratory close to the seafood market where the first human cases were detected, according to a documentary released Thursday by Danish television channel TV2. The Associated Press reports: The Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was handling coronaviruses "without potentially having the same level of expertise or safety or who knows," Peter Ben Embarek said during a conference call in January, according to footage shown by TV2. Ben Embarek is a WHO expert on disease transmission from animals to humans and one of the team's leaders. But months later, when WHO released its dense report on its mission to Wuhan, the U.N. health agency concluded that a leak of the virus from the lab was "extremely unlikely" to have caused COVID-19. The WHO report even lent credence to a fringe theory promoted by the Chinese government that the virus may have been spread via frozen seafood packaging.

In recent weeks, however, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has acknowledged it was "premature" to rule out a possible lab leak as the source of COVID-19, saying last month that he was asking China to be more transparent about the early days of the pandemic. "I was a lab technician myself. I'm an immunologist and I have worked in the lab and lab accidents happen," Tedros said. "It's common." In the Danish TV2 documentary, the WHO's Ben Embarek is pictured arriving in China, inspecting the stalls at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan and examining what he hypothesizes might have been living quarters for people who handled live animals there -- raising the possibility that the virus may have jumped from animals to people at the market. "It would mean that the contact between the human beings and whatever may have been in the market i.e. virus and maybe live animals would have been more intense," Ben Embarek said. "It goes without saying that the close contact would be doubled many times between humans and animals if you are among them around the clock."

The Danish documentary also featured Ben Embarek expressing his worries in January about the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC, concerns that have never been publicly disclosed by WHO. While numerous experts have questioned whether there might have been a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology -- where scientists were studying coronaviruses -- there has been less interest in another nearby facility. "What is more concerning to me is the other lab," Ben Embarek said. "The one that is next to the market," he explained, referring to the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC, located just 500 meters (547 yards) away from the Huanan market. In a June interview, Ben Embarek told TV2 that the possibility of a lab staffer being infected with the coronavirus while collecting bat samples was "likely."

Researchers around the world have continued breathing new life into a retracted study, which suggested that common antihypertensive medications were harmful in patients with COVID-19. From a report: Published online on May 1, 2020 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study relied on Surgisphere data to claim an association between renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS) inhibitor therapy and worse outcomes in hospitalized COVID-19 patients with cardiovascular disease. The journal retracted the paper due to concerns about fraudulent data on June 4, 2020 in a widely publicized move, but the study has continued to rack up citations -- totaling at least 652 as of May 31, 2021, reported Todd Lee, MD, MPH, of McGill University in Montreal, and colleagues.

Just 17.6% of verified citations acknowledged or noted that the paper was retracted, according to their research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine. In May of this year alone -- 11 months after the article was retracted -- it was referenced 21 times. "Our findings challenge authors, peer reviewers, journal editors, and academic institutions to do a better job of addressing the broader issues of ongoing citations of retracted scientific studies and protecting the integrity of the medical literature," Lee's group urged. The hypothesis that angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and angiotensin-receptor blockers (ARBs) may be harmful in patients with COVID-19 has been floated since the early days of the pandemic, with the reasoning being that since the SARS-CoV-2 virus enters human cells through ACE2 receptors, upregulation of these receptors could put patients at risk.

At the start of the pandemic, remembers MIT Technology Review's senior editor for AI, the community "rushed to develop software that many believed would allow hospitals to diagnose or triage patients faster, bringing much-needed support to the front lines — in theory.

"In the end, many hundreds of predictive tools were developed. None of them made a real difference, and some were potentially harmful." That's the damning conclusion of multiple studies published in the last few months. In June, the Turing Institute, the UK's national center for data science and AI, put out a report summing up discussions at a series of workshops it held in late 2020. The clear consensus was that AI tools had made little, if any, impact in the fight against covid.

This echoes the results of two major studies that assessed hundreds of predictive tools developed last year. Laure Wynants, an epidemiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who studies predictive tools, is lead author of one of them, a review in the British Medical Journal that is still being updated as new tools are released and existing ones tested. She and her colleagues have looked at 232 algorithms for diagnosing patients or predicting how sick those with the disease might get. They found that none of them were fit for clinical use. Just two have been singled out as being promising enough for future testing. "It's shocking," says Wynants. "I went into it with some worries, but this exceeded my fears."

Wynants's study is backed up by another large review carried out by Derek Driggs, a machine-learning researcher at the University of Cambridge, and his colleagues, and published in Nature Machine Intelligence. This team zoomed in on deep-learning models for diagnosing covid and predicting patient risk from medical images, such as chest x-rays and chest computer tomography (CT) scans. They looked at 415 published tools and, like Wynants and her colleagues, concluded that none were fit for clinical use. "This pandemic was a big test for AI and medicine," says Driggs, who is himself working on a machine-learning tool to help doctors during the pandemic. "It would have gone a long way to getting the public on our side," he says. "But I don't think we passed that test...."

If there's an upside, it is that the pandemic has made it clear to many researchers that the way AI tools are built needs to change. "The pandemic has put problems in the spotlight that we've been dragging along for some time," says Wynants.
The article suggests researchers collaborate on creating high-quality (and shared) data sets — possibly by creating a common data standard — and also disclose their ultimate models and training protocols for review and extension. "In a sense, this is an old problem with research. Academic researchers have few career incentives to share work or validate existing results.

"To address this issue, the World Health Organization is considering an emergency data-sharing contract that would kick in during international health crises."

Yasmeen Abutaleb, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Joel Achenbach, reporting at Washington Post: The delta variant of the coronavirus appears to cause more severe illness than earlier variants and spreads as easily as chickenpox, according to an internal federal health document that argues officials must "acknowledge the war has changed." The document is an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slide presentation, shared within the CDC and obtained by The Washington Post. It captures the struggle of the nation's top public health agency to persuade the public to embrace vaccination and prevention measures, including mask-wearing, as cases surge across the United States and new research suggests vaccinated people can spread the virus.

The document strikes an urgent note, revealing the agency knows it must revamp its public messaging to emphasize vaccination as the best defense against a variant so contagious that it acts almost like a different novel virus, leaping from target to target more swiftly than Ebola or the common cold. It cites a combination of recently obtained, still-unpublished data from outbreak investigations and outside studies showing that vaccinated individuals infected with delta may be able to transmit the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated. Vaccinated people infected with delta have measurable viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant.

"I finished reading it significantly more concerned than when I began," Robert Wachter, chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, wrote in an email. CDC scientists were so alarmed by the new research that the agency earlier this week significantly changed guidance for vaccinated people even before making new data public. The data and studies cited in the document played a key role in revamped recommendations that call for everyone -- vaccinated or not -- to wear masks indoors in public settings in certain circumstances, a federal health official said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: [A] team of surgeons has successfully completed the first human implantation in the US of an artificial heart device called the 'Aeson', developed by French company CARMAT. The artificial heart has two ventricular chambers and four biological valves, just like the real organ, and is powered by an external device. Made from "biocompatible materials" including bovine tissue, the artificial heart uses a combination of sensors and algorithms to maintain its pace and keep blood circulating through the body. "We are encouraged that our patient is doing so well after the procedure," says cardiologist Carmelo Milano from the Duke University School of Medicine. "As we evaluate this device, we are both excited and hopeful that patients who otherwise have few to no options could have a lifeline."

The patient in question is 39-year-old Matthew Moore, from Shallotte in North Carolina. Moore was initially due to have heart bypass surgery, but as his condition deteriorated the medical staff started to run out of options; he became so ill that even a regular heart transplant was too risky. Fortunately, he was in the right place: the Aeson device is being tested at Duke University, pending approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It's already been given the green light for use by regulators in Europe, after several years of tests in European patients, not all of which have been successful. The artificial heart has been developed specifically to help those whose hearts can no longer pump enough blood through both chambers. It replaces the entire natural heart, although it's not intended to be permanent -- it's designed to be a bridge towards a full heart transplant within six months or so.

CIA Director William Burns says he has redoubled the agency's efforts to uncover the cause of Havana syndrome -- the mysterious set of ailments that has afflicted more than 200 U.S. officials and family members around the world. NPR reports: That includes the assignment of a senior officer who once led the hunt for Osama bin Laden to lead the investigation and tripling the size of a medical team involved in the probe, Burns told NPR on Thursday in his first sit-down interview since being confirmed as the agency's chief in March. "I am absolutely determined -- and I've spent a great deal of time and energy on this in the four months that I've been CIA director -- to get to the bottom of the question of what and who caused this," Burns said. "We're no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block, especially with the rise of China. And as you know very well, there's a revolution in technology which is transforming the way we live, work, compete and fight. And so, CIA, like everyone else in the U.S. government, has to take that into account," he said.

Under Burns' direction, the CIA has tripled the number of full-time medical personnel at the agency who are focused on Havana syndrome and has shortened the waiting period for afflicted personnel to be admitted to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. "I'm certainly persuaded that what our officers and some family members, as well as other U.S. government employees, have experienced is real, and it's serious," Burns said. The director says he is seriously considering the "very strong possibility" that the syndrome is the result of intentional actions, adding that there are a limited number of "potential suspects" with the capability to carry out an action so widely across the globe. A report from last December by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that microwave radiation is the "most plausible" explanation for the symptoms.

To head the task force investigating the syndrome, Burns has appointed a veteran officer who helped lead the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The identity of that officer is still undercover, according to The Wall Street Journal. "We're throwing the very best we have at this issue, because it is not only a very serious issue for our colleagues, as it is for others across the U.S. government, but it's a profound obligation, I think, of any leader to take care of your people," Burns said. The syndrome first appeared in 2016 at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, where more than 40 diplomats complained of symptoms such as migraines, dizziness, and memory loss. Dozens more cases have been reported in the years since.

Last week, about two dozen U.S. intelligence officers, diplomats, and other government officials in Vienna have reported experiencing mysterious afflictions similar to the Havana Syndrome." The Biden administration is "vigorously investigating" the reports, but the causes of the syndrome still remain unclear.

Last year the artificial intelligence group DeepMind cracked a mystery that has flummoxed scientists for decades: stripping bare the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life. Now, having amassed a database of nearly all human protein structures, the company is making the resource available online free for researchers to use. From a report: The key to understanding our basic biological machinery is its architecture. The chains of amino acids that comprise proteins twist and turn to make the most confounding of 3D shapes. It is this elaborate form that explains protein function; from enzymes that are crucial to metabolism to antibodies that fight infectious attacks. Despite years of onerous and expensive lab work that began in the 1950s, scientists have only decoded the structure of a fraction of human proteins.

DeepMind's AI program, AlphaFold, has predicted the structure of nearly all 20,000 proteins expressed by humans. In an independent benchmark test that compared predictions to known structures, the system was able to predict the shape of a protein to a good standard 95% of time. DeepMind, which has partnered with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), hopes the database will help researchers to analyse how life works at an atomic scale by unpacking the apparatus that drives some diseases, make strides in the field of personalised medicine, create more nutritious crops and develop "green enzymes" that can break down plastic.

"The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt," reports the Guardian, "after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to 'ethical concerns'." The preprint study on the efficacy and safety of ivermectin — a drug used against parasites such as worms and headlice — in treating Covid-19, led by Dr Ahmed Elgazzar from Benha University in Egypt, was published on the Research Square website in November. It claimed to be a randomised control trial, a type of study crucial in medicine because it is considered to provide the most reliable evidence on the effectiveness of interventions due to the minimal risk of confounding factors influencing the results...

A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction... He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised. It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. "Humorously, this led to them changing 'severe acute respiratory syndrome' to 'extreme intense respiratory syndrome' on one occasion," Lawrence said.

The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence... "In their paper, the authors claim that four out of 100 patients died in their standard treatment group for mild and moderate Covid-19," Lawrence said. "According to the original data, the number was 0, the same as the ivermectin treatment group. In their ivermectin treatment group for severe Covid-19, the authors claim two patients died, but the number in their raw data is four..." Lawrence contacted an Australian chronic disease epidemiologist from the University of Wollongong, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, and a data analyst affiliated with Linnaeus University in Sweden who reviews scientific papers for errors, Nick Brown, for help analysing the data and study results more thoroughly... "The main error is that at least 79 of the patient records are obvious clones of other records," Brown told the Guardian. "It's certainly the hardest to explain away as innocent error, especially since the clones aren't even pure copies. There are signs that they have tried to change one or two fields to make them look more natural..."

Meyerowitz-Katz told the Guardian that "this is one of the biggest ivermectin studies out there", and it appeared to him the data was "just totally faked".
Meta-analyses incorporating the "just totally faked" data were then published in Oxford Academic's Open Forum Infectious Diseases and in the American Journal of Therapeutics.

Meanwhile, the Guardian also notes a new (and peer-reviewed) paper that was just published last month in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Its finding? Iermectin is "not a viable option to treat COVID-19 patients".

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A man unable to speak after a stroke has produced sentences through a system that reads electrical signals from speech production areas of his brain, researchers report this week. The approach has previously been used in non-disabled volunteers to reconstruct spoken or imagined sentences, but this is the first demonstration of its potential in the type of patient it's intended to help. The participant had a stroke more than 10 years ago that left him with anarthria -- an inability to control the muscles involved in speech. Researchers used a computational model known as a deep-learning algorithm to interpret patterns of brain activity in the sensorimotor cortex, a brain region involved in producing speech, and 'decoded' sentences he attempted to read aloud.

In the new study, [the researchers] temporarily removed a portion of the participant's skull and laid a thin sheet of electrodes smaller than a credit card directly over his sensorimotor cortex. To "train" a computer algorithm to associate brain activity patterns with the onset of speech and with particular words, the team needed reliable information about what the man intended to say and when. So the researchers repeatedly presented one of 50 words on a screen and asked the man to attempt to say it on cue. Once the algorithm was trained with data from the individual word task, the man tried to read sentences built from the same set of 50 words, such as "Bring my glasses, please." To improve the algorithm's guesses, the researchers added a processing component called a natural language model, which uses common word sequences to predict the likely next word in a sentence. With that approach, the system only got about 25% of the words in a sentence wrong, they report today in The New England Journal of Medicine. With the new approach, the man could produce sentences at a rate of up to 18 words per minute.

The University of Oxford this week started vaccinations of a novel HIV vaccine candidate as part of a Phase I clinical trial in the UK. From a report: The goal of the trial, known as HIV-CORE 0052, is to evaluate the safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of the HIVconsvX vaccine -- a mosaic vaccine targeting a broad range of HIV-1 variants, making it potentially applicable for HIV strains in any geographical region. Thirteen healthy, HIV-negative adults, aged 18-65 and who are considered not to be at high risk of infection, will initially receive one dose of the vaccine followed by a further booster dose at four weeks. The trial is part of the European Aids Vaccine Initiative (EAVI2020), an internationally collaborative research project funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020 health programme for research and innovation.

Professor Tomas Hanke, Professor of Vaccine Immunology at the Jenner Institute, University of Oxford, and lead researcher on the trial, said: 'An effective HIV vaccine has been elusive for 40 years. This trial is the first in a series of evaluations of this novel vaccine strategy in both HIV-negative individuals for prevention and in people living with HIV for cure.' While most HIV vaccine candidates work by inducing antibodies generated by B-cells, HIVconsvX induces the immune system's potent, pathogen obliterating T cells, targeting them to highly conserved and therefore vulnerable regions of HIV -- an "Achilles heel" common to most HIV variants.