Scientists at Stanford University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have created a 3D-printed vaccine patch that provides greater protection than a typical vaccine shot.
The trick is applying the vaccine patch directly to the skin, which is full of immune cells that vaccines target.
The resulting immune response from the vaccine patch was 10 times greater than vaccine delivered into an arm muscle with a needle jab, according to a study conducted in animals and published by the team of scientists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Considered a breakthrough are the 3D-printed microneedles lined up on a polymer patch and barely long enough to reach the skin to deliver vaccine.
“In developing this technology, we hope to set the foundation for even more rapid global development of vaccines, at lower doses, in a pain- and anxiety-free manner,” said lead study author and entrepreneur in 3D print technology Joseph M. DeSimone, professor of translational medicine and chemical engineering at Stanford University and professor emeritus at UNC-Chapel Hill.
The ease and effectiveness of a vaccine patch sets the course for a new way to deliver vaccines that’s painless, less invasive than a shot with a needle and can be self-administered.

Specific and dynamic changes on electrocardiograms (EKGs) of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 or influenza can help predict a timeframe for worsening health and death, according to a new Mount Sinai study. The work, published in the September 24 online issue of the American Journal of Cardiology, shows that shrinking waveforms on these tests can be used to help better identify high-risk patients and provide them more aggressive monitoring and treatment.
“Our study shows diminished waveforms on EKGs over the course of COVID-19 illness can be an important tool for health care workers caring for these patients, allowing them to catch rapid clinical changes over their hospital stay and intervene more quickly. With COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations continuing to rise again, EKGs may be helpful for hospitals to use when caring for these patients before their condition gets dramatically worse,” says senior author Joshua Lampert, MD, Cardiac Electrophysiology fellow at The Mount Sinai Hospital. “This is particularly useful in overwhelmed systems, as there is no wait for blood work to return and this test can be performed by the majority of health care personnel. Additionally, the EKG can be done at the time of other bedside patient care, eliminating the potential exposure of another health care worker to COVID-19.”
An EKG is a noninvasive test that records the electrical activity of the heart. It is widely used for diagnosing cardiovascular disease and arrhythmia, or abnormal heart rhythm. Small patches called electrodes are placed on the arms, legs, and chest, and connected by wires to a machine that turns the heart’s electrical signals into wavy lines.
Researchers did a retrospective analysis of EKGs on 140 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 across the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City between March 7 and April 12, 2020, and compared them with 281 EKGs from patients with laboratory-confirmed influenza A or influenza B admitted to The Mount Sinai Hospital between January 2, 2017, and January 5, 2020.
The researchers looked at three EKG time points for each patient: a baseline scan done within a year prior to COVID-19 or influenza hospitalization (and available in Mount Sinai’s records), a scan taken at hospital admission, and follow-up EKGs performed during hospitalization.
They manually measured QRS waveform height — a measure of the electrical activity of the ventricles, the major chambers of the heart — on all electrocardiograms; changes in this electrical activity could be a sign that the ventricles are failing. The researchers analyzed follow-up EKGs after hospital admission and analyzed changes in the waveforms according to a set of criteria they developed called LoQRS amplitude (LoQRS) to identify a shrinkage of the electrical signal on the EKG. LoQRS was defined by QRS amplitude measuring less than 5mm measured from the arms and legs or less than 10mm when measured on the chest wall as well as a relative reduction in waveform height in either location by at least 50 percent.
Fifty-two COVID-19 patients in the study did not survive, and the analysis shows 74 percent of those patients had LoQRS. Their EKG QRS waveforms became smaller roughly 5.3 days into their hospital admission and they died approximately two days after the first abnormal EKG was found.
Out of the 281 influenza patients studied, LoQRS was identified in 11 percent of them. Seventeen influenza patients died, and LoQRS was present in 39 percent of these cases. Influenza patients met LoQRS criteria a median of 55 days into their hospital admission, and the median time to death was six days from when LoQRS was identified. Overall, these results show influenza patients followed a less virulent course of illness when compared to COVID-19 patients.
“When it comes to caring for COVID-19 patients, our findings suggest it may be beneficial not only for health care providers to check an EKG when the patient first arrives at the hospital, but also follow-up EKGs during their hospital stay to assess for LoQRS, particularly if the patient has not made profound clinical progress. If LoQRS is present, the team may want to consider escalating medical therapy or transferring the patient to a highly monitored setting such as an intensive care unit (ICU) in anticipation of declining health,” adds Dr. Lampert.

Unusual visual inspection of objects by infants 9 months of age and older is predictive of a later diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a new UC Davis Health study has found.
Unusual visual inspection is defined as: looking out of the corners of the eyes, holding an object up very close to the face, looking at something with one eye closed, or staring at an object uninterrupted for more than 10 seconds.”Unusual visual inspection behavior has long been associated with autism but never yet as early as 9 months of age,” said Meghan Miller, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and UC Davis MIND Institute and the first author on the study.
The study, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, also found that this behavior at 9 months predicted 12-month social behavior, but not vice versa.
“The findings support major theories of autism which hypothesize that infants’ over-focus on objects might be at the expense of their interest in people. Ultimately, this study suggests that unusual visual inspection of objects may precede development of the social symptoms characteristic of ASD,” Miller said.
Visual inspection, repetitive behavior and social engagement in children with autism
About 1 in 54 children in the U.S. has been identified with ASD. Younger siblings of children with autism are at an elevated risk of being diagnosed with autism, at a rate of approximately one in five.

A new study delves into the evolution and function of the human growth hormone receptor gene, and asks what forces in humanity’s past may have driven changes to this vital piece of DNA.
The research shows, through multiple avenues, that a shortened version of the gene — a variant known as GHRd3 — may help people survive in situations where resources are scarce or unpredictable.
Findings will be published on Sept. 24 in Science Advances.
Here’s the story the study tells: GHRd3 emerged about 1-2 million years ago, and was likely the overwhelmingly predominant version of the gene in the ancestors of modern humans, as well as in Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Then, “In the last 50,000 years or so, this variant becomes less prevalent, and you have a massive decrease in the frequency of this variant among East Asian populations we studied, where we see the estimated allele frequency drop from 85% to 15% during the last 30,000 years,” says University at Buffalo evolutionary biologist Omer Gokcumen. “So the question becomes: Why? Was this variant favored in the past, and it fell out of evolutionary favor recently? Or is what we are observing just a blip among the complexity of genomes?”
The research provides new insights into the function of GHRd3 that may help explain why these evolutionary changes occurred, demonstrating that the variant may be useful in coping with nutritional stress.

School mask mandates have generated controversy in many parts of the country. Now, two studies, published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, provide additional evidence that masks protect children from the coronavirus, even when community rates are high and the contagious Delta variant is circulating.One study, conducted in Arizona, where children returned to school in July, found that schools that did not require staff and students to wear masks were 3.5 times as likely to have a virus outbreak as schools that required universal masking.A second study looked at infections among all children in 520 different counties across the United States, and found that once the public school year started, pediatric cases increased at a far higher rate in counties where schools did not require masks.The first study analyzed data on about 1,000 public schools in Maricopa and Pima counties, which include the metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Tucson, and account for most of the state’s population.Only 21 percent of the schools implemented a universal mask mandate upon opening, and nearly half had no mask requirement at all. Another roughly 30 percent enacted a mask requirement about 15 days after school started.Between July 15 and Aug. 31, there were 191 school-associated virus outbreaks that occurred about a week after school started. The majority of them — 113 outbreaks, or nearly 60 percent of the total — occurred in schools with no mask requirement.Only 16 outbreaks, or 8 percent of the total, took place in schools that implemented mask requirements regardless of vaccination status from the start. There were 62 outbreaks, or about one-third of the total amount, in schools that implemented a mask requirement after the school year had already started.The study defined an outbreak as two or more positive confirmed cases of infection among staff or students within a 14-day period.“The school year starts very early in Arizona, in mid-July, so we had the advantage of being able to get an early look at data for the new school year a bit sooner than was possible for the rest of the country, which was important, because of the transmission of the Delta variant,” said J. Mac McCullough, associate professor at Arizona State University and a co-author of the study.The C.D.C. recommends a layered approach to preventing coronavirus outbreaks in schools — masking, distancing, staying home when sick and vaccination for those eligible. “This study really shines a lens on the masking part of that,” Dr. McCullough said.The second study looked at the association between school mask policies in a given county and communitywide infections among children, finding that counties with no school mask requirement experienced a larger uptick in pediatric case rates after the start of school than counties with school mask requirements.Between the week before school started and the second week of school, the number of pediatric infections increased by 35 cases per 100,000 in counties without mask requirements, while the number increased by 16 cases per 100,000 population in counties with school mask requirements.

Researchers across the UK are trialling a range of cannabis extracts to treat conditions from pain and asthma to brain cancer.Charles Ogilvie-Forbes is taking part in a study at King’s College Hospital, London, using CBD to treat the hallucinations he experiences due to his Parkinson’s disease.Filming and graphics: Julius PeacockEdited: Rachael Buchanan

The ’90s-era supermodel said side effects from a fat-freezing procedure caused her to become depressed and turned her into a recluse after “not looking like myself any longer.”Linda Evangelista, the supermodel made famous in the 1990s, said she had become “brutally disfigured” and “unrecognizable” after a cosmetic body-sculpting procedure that had turned her into a recluse.In an Instagram post on Wednesday, she referred to filing a lawsuit, saying that she was taking “a big step towards righting a wrong that I have suffered and have kept to myself for over five years.”She added: “To my followers who have wondered why I have not been working while my peers’ careers have been thriving, the reason is that I was brutally disfigured by Zeltiq’s CoolSculpting procedure which did the opposite of what it promised.”Ms. Evangelista, 56, said that after the fat-freezing procedure she developed paradoxical adipose hyperplasia, a side effect in which patients develop firm tissue masses in the treatment areas.She said the cosmetic procedure left her “permanently deformed even after undergoing two painful, unsuccessful, corrective surgeries.” She said she had not been told of the risk.“PAH has not only destroyed my livelihood, it has sent me into a cycle of deep depression, profound sadness, and the lowest depths of self-loathing,” she wrote. “In the process, I have become a recluse.”Ms. Evangelista, who was known as one of the five top supermodels in the 1990s, detailed her story on Instagram, where she has 912,000 followers and where thousands of people commented or expressed support. Her story was also widely covered in international and national media outlets.Ms. Evangelista filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against Zeltiq Aesthetics Inc., in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suit said she was seeking compensatory damages of $50 million for her distress and loss of work, promotions and public appearances.Representatives for the company did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday. A lawyer for Ms. Evangelista was not immediately available for comment.The lawsuit said Ms. Evangelista had seven treatments from August 2015 through February 2016 to break down fat cells in her abdomen, flanks, back and bra area, inner thighs, and chin. Within a few months, she developed “hard, bulging, painful masses under her skin in those areas,” it said, and was given a diagnosis of PAH in June 2016.The filing said her quality of life, her career and her body “were all ruined in 2016 after she was permanently disfigured” by the procedure and the multiple attempts at corrective surgery that followed.“Ms. Evangelista enjoyed a wildly successful and lucrative modeling career from 1984 through 2016, until she was permanently injured and disfigured by Zeltiq’s CoolSculpting System,” the lawsuit said.The suit accused the company of having “intentionally concealed” the risks or “failed to adequately warn” about them, and said Ms. Evangelista developed depression and a fear of going outside.Ms. Evangelista had full body liposuctions after the diagnosis by a doctor referred to her by Zeltiq in 2016 and 2017, but the procedures were unsuccessful and resulted in scarring, the lawsuit said.“Ms. Evangelista was promised a more contoured appearance; instead, the target fat cells actually increased in number and size and formed hard, bulging masses under her skin,” it said.According to CoolSculpting, its procedure has been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of visible fat bulges.In response to questions, the F.D.A. said in an email that it could not comment on litigation, but that it was “committed to ensuring medical devices are safe and effective and that patients can be fully informed when making personal health decisions.” It said that it monitors reports from consumers of adverse events after a device reaches the market and would “take action where appropriate.”Cryolipolysis, the name of the nonsurgical fat-freezing procedure, uses cold temperature to break down fat cells, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.It is mostly used by patients who want to reduce a specific fat bulge that they have been unable to diminish through other means. Generally, the area of concern is “vacuumed” into the hollow of an applicator, where it is subjected to cold temperature.The surgeons’ society said the complication rate was low, with less than 1 percent of patients who may develop paradoxical fat hyperplasia, which is an unexpected increase in the number of fat cells. The side effect is more common in men than in women, the society said.Ms. Evangelista also said that the public scrutiny of her appearance had harmed her emotionally. “I have been left, as the media has described, ‘unrecognizable,’” she said.Jonah E. Bromwich

Alison Leiby has an hourlong set looking at the experience of an unwanted pregnancy. She’s among a spate of female artists finding humor in the issue.A stand-up show about abortion sounds like a bad idea. The comic Alison Leiby knows that. Just look at her title: “Oh God, an Hour About Abortion.”Leiby doesn’t just anticipate your expectations. She subverts them. As states like Texas pass laws dramatically restricting abortion rights, and the Supreme Court prepares to hear a case in December that could overturn Roe v. Wade, her deftly funny, jarringly understated show doesn’t respond to the news so much as clarify it.Abortion is not new territory in comedy, and there’s a long history of male comics doing against-the-grain bits staking out an abortion-rights position while also poking fun at the idea that a fetus isn’t a person. I saw this done decades ago by George Carlin, and again this month by Bill Burr. Neal Brennan also has a quick joke in his current show, “Unacceptable,” about how liberals show empathy for everyone — but fetuses. Leiby is part of a recent spate of female artists making comedy about reproductive rights that digs into the realities of abortion today more than abstract arguments about it.Leiby, who has been performing her show around New York City (next up: Caveat on Tuesday), employs none of the debating-society smirk of those jokes about the life of the fetus. Without a trace of didacticism, she finds humor in the messy, confusing, sometimes banal experience of an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion. This is comedy about the heartbeat of the mother — and to the extent it engages with the abstract question of life, it’s when Leiby mentions her friends’ first Instagram post of their newborn, which, she says, “I think we can all agree is when life really begins.”Her offhandedness is part of her charm, but it has a purpose. Leiby wants to give us a portrait of abortion not as a crisis or a moral question, but as a common and confusing medical procedure. The broader context of this show, as she reminds the audience, is a culture of silence surrounding women. From sex education to birth control, she explains how much is unspoken, rushed through or hidden from view. Leiby even shocked herself when she called Planned Parenthood, she says, and in asking about an abortion, whispered the word. She mocks the vague ads for birth control and imagines an honest one in which a 37-year-old woman wakes up in a cold sweat screaming next to a mediocre white man, which leads to a scene of him eating Cheetos in a hospital room as she gives birth.Leiby doesn’t move much onstage, and her gestures are limited. Her comedy leans on her nimble writing, which displays a range and density of spiky jokes — puns, metaphors, misdirection. She knows how to set a scene and is alert to the details of nightmares. She is terrified of scary movies and has a ticklishly amusing podcast, “Ruined,” in which a friend, Halle Kiefer, explains the plots of horror films to her. It’s like listening to a play-by-play announcer and color commentator of a game on the radio, except instead of balls or strikes, it’s about beheadings and exorcisms.What comes across on the podcast and in this show is a sensitivity to anxiety and fear mitigated by curiosity. Leiby understands that whether to have a child is a subject fraught with confusion for many, and she acknowledges it, but that’s not her issue. She presents herself as a wry if bumbling protagonist of her own story, describing her attitude toward the prospect of children like this: “I acted like my eggs were Fabergé: feminine but decorative.”In 2004, The New York Times published an article about culture and abortion titled “Television’s Most Persistent Taboo.” That has changed. In a short set on “The Comedy Lineup,” on Netflix, the comic Kate Willett has a sharp joke about how men looking to hook up should care about abortion rights. “I don’t even know if the men that I know understand that sex can make a kid,” she said. “They are super worried that sex can make someone your girlfriend.”In the past year, streaming services have put out two comedies, “Plan B” (directed by Natalie Morales) and “Unpregnant” (directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg), about girls who go on the road with a friend to get reproductive help. These knockabout buddy films aren’t explicitly about the recent state-level pushes for anti-abortion legislation, but they certainly haunt the action, with closed clinics and ideologues providing key plot points.Like Leiby’s show, these movies present getting an abortion or taking the morning-after pill, often called Plan B, as ordinary decisions made relatively easily, but because of the dictates of a commercial comedy, their plots are full of incident and action, romantic and villainous turns. They make the process of getting an abortion into a high-stakes adventure.Haley Lu Richardson, left, and Barbie Ferreira in “Unpregnant.”Ursula Coyote/HBO MaxVictoria Moroles, left, and Kuhoo Verma in “Plan B.”Brett Roedel/HuluIn observational comedy, Leiby has found a form better suited to what she wants to say. “Oh God” is about details, and by zeroing in on them, it navigates the difficult terrain of making a funny hour about a difficult, polarizing subject. Even so, this isn’t one of those comedy shows interrupted by grave talk or political speeches. It’s one where the response to the person at the clinic asking if she wants “pills or procedure” is: “That’s a real fries or salad.”There’s a power in the relatable details of storytelling. Before Leiby gets the procedure, she’s asked a series of questions: Does she want to know if there’s a heartbeat? Does she want to know if it’s twins? In her telling, these are poignant, even painful moments leavened by quips. To the question about twins, she wonders: “Does it cost more?”Leiby proves that light comedy can be as pointed and meaningful as that which advertises its own weightiness. For while she tells a story about a safe, legal and quick abortion, she doesn’t ignore other more fraught situations, either today or in a potential post-Roe future. She explores this indirectly through her relationship with her mother, which gives her an opportunity to dig into the issue before abortion was legal. Through this historical perspective, she frames the stakes of the next year, when abortion could grow even more prominent in the American discourse.Political stand-up typically lends itself to argumentative point-making, but it can use other tools. In repositioning abortion not as a political battle of ideas but as the real-world choices in the lives of flawed human beings, she brings this charged issue down to earth.

The interdisciplinary field of active matter physics investigates the principles behind the behavior and self-organization of living organisms. The goal is to reveal general principles that allow to describe and predict the performance of living matter and thereby support the development of novel technologies. Recently, the groups of Oliver Bäumchen and Marco Mazza from the MPIDS, the University of Bayreuth and the University of Loughborough in the UK published their results on the model describing microbial navigation. “As microbes are often challenged with navigating through confined spaces, we were asking ourselves if there is a pattern behind the microbial navigation in a defined compartment,” they explain the approach. To answer this question, the researchers followed a single motile microbe and experimentally determined the probability flux of its movements. That is to say, they subdivided an predefined compartment into sectors and determined the probability of movement direction for each sector. In this way, a map was created according to which the navigation behavior of the microbe can be predicted.
The curvature determines the flux
Surprisingly, the microbe was found not to move randomly though the open space. Instead, the average movement pattern was both highly organized and symmetrical: the map of movement patterns showed a defined distribution of probability fluxes. “In particular, the strength of the flux was found to depend on the curvature of the adjacent solid interface: a higher degree of curvature resulted in a stronger flux” explain Jan Cammann and Fabian Schwarzendahl, the lead authors of the study. For practical reasons, all measurements were done in a quasi 2-dimensional environment, meaning that the microbe was confined from the top and bottom to better monitor its movement and avoid defocusing. Observing its movement pattern, the group of Marco Mazza (University of Loughborough and MPIDS) created a model to predicts the probabilities to flow in a certain direction. This model was then applied to compartments with more complex interface curvatures and experimentally verified by the lab of Oliver Bäumchen (MPIDS and University of Bayreuth). “It turns out that the curvature of the interface is the dominating factor which directly determines the flux of the self-propelling microbe.,” Bäumchen summarizes.
A technological implication for the future
As this discovery constitutes a fundamental observation, the model might as well be applied to other areas of active matter physics. “With our model, we can basically statistically predict where the object of interest will be in the next moment,” Mazza reports. “This could not only significantly improve our understanding of the organization of life, but also help to engineer technical devices.”
Understanding the principles behind the organization of active matter therefore can have direct implications on our future technologies. Potential applications of the model could be directing the movement of photosynthetic microorganisms in such a way so their flux can propel a generator, which would be a direct way to convert sunlight into mechanical energy. But also, in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sector, the findings of the scientists might be applied: “A potential application in the medical sector is the development of micro-robots delivering drugs to their specific destination in an efficient manner,” Bäumchen concludes.
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