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When Courtney “CJ” Johnson pulls up footage from her Ph.D. dissertation, it’s like she’s watching an attempted break-in on a home security camera.
The intruder cases its target without setting a foot inside, looking for a point of entry. But this intruder is not your typical burglar. It’s a virus.
Filmed over two and a half minutes by pinpointing its location 1,000 times a second, the footage shows a tiny virus particle, thousands of times smaller than a grain of sand, as it lurches and bobs among tightly packed human intestinal cells.
For a fleeting moment, the virus makes contact with a cell and skims along its surface but doesn’t stick before bounding off again. If this were an actual home break-in, Johnson says, “this would be the part where the burglar has not broken the window yet.”
Johnson is part of a Duke University team led by assistant chemistry professor Kevin Welsher. Together with Welsher’s postdoctoral associate Jack Exell and colleagues, they have come up with a way to capture real-time 3D footage of viruses as they approach their cellular targets.
We inhale, ingest and take in millions of viruses every day. Most of them are harmless, but some of them — such as the viruses that cause the flu or COVID-19 — can make us sick.

Using swarms of pinhead-sized magnets inside a handheld, all-in-one lab kit, UCLA researchers have developed a technology that could significantly increase the speed and volume of disease testing, while reducing the costs and usage of scarce supplies.
The automated tests can be easily manufactured, deployed and performed timely at a doctor’s office, health clinic or at mass testing sites in airports and schools at the onset of any major infectious disease. The UCLA-led research team was motivated by the lack of equitable access to testing during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic when only a handful of clinical laboratories were authorized to run tests. The technology breakthrough could help the authorities better prepare for future pandemics by decentralizing testing and maximizing the use of resources.
UCLA Samueli School of Engineering professor Dino Di Carlo of bioengineering and associate professor Sam Emaminejad of electrical and computer engineering co-authored a study, which was published this week in Nature. The paper outlined how the lab kit works and included findings from a clinical study with test samples from individuals who experienced COVID-19 symptoms. More than 100 test results using the lab kit were compared to the same samples tested for COVID-19 using polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based molecular diagnostics performed as part of UCLA Health’s routine clinical care.
“Our handheld lab technology could help overcome some of the barriers of scarcity and access to tests, especially early in a pandemic, when it is most crucial to control disease spread,” said Emaminejad, who also holds a faculty appointment in bioengineering. “And beyond its potential to address issues of short supplies and high demand, it could be broadly adapted to test for many types of diseases in field and with lab-grade quality.”
Using a circuit board that controls a set of movable, 1-millimeter-sized magnetic discs known as “ferrobots” to transport samples through the diagnostic workflow of a nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT), the researchers’ ultra-sensitive lab kit was able to detect the presence of genetic material from a virus — in this case, SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19. The steps to separate, sort, mix and amplify testing samples are all automated and performed at a miniaturized level inside the kit.
“This platform’s compact design and automated handling of samples enable easy implementations of pooled testing where you can test dozens of patient samples at the same time, and all with the same materials it currently takes to test just one patient,” said Di Carlo, who holds UCLA’s Armond and Elena Hairapetian Chair in Engineering and Medicine. “For example, you could test students in an entire college residence hall with just a few dozen test kits.”
By designing the kit for pooled testing, the system requires much lower amounts of reagent chemicals than those needed for testing the samples individually. Up to 16 samples were combined and tested at once in the team’s study. If the pooled test showed a positive result, subsequent tests would automatically take place within the same platform until the actual positive samples were identified. This entire process took between 30 to 60 minutes, depending on whether there were positive samples. Thanks to the technology’s assay miniaturization and pooled-testing capabilities, the chemical reagent costs could be reduced by 10 to 300 times.
Aside from being able to test for several diseases simultaneously, the platform also offers precision and robust automation. For example, in a pooled-testing with 16 samples, more than 300 lab operations, including mixing and sorting, were automated by the ferrobots — that is more than 3,000 individual movements, or actuations. In their reliability studies, the researchers showed that the ferrobots could perform more than 8 million actuations without mistakes.
In addition to Di Carlo and Emaminejad, who are both faculty members of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, the lead authors on this study are UCLA postdoctoral researcher Haisong Lin, and graduate students Wenzhuo Yu and Kiarash Sabet — all are members of Emaminejad’s Interconnected & Integrated Bioelectronics Lab at UCLA.
Other authors are UCLA engineering graduate students Michael Bogumil, Jacob Hambalek and Shuyu Lin; and postdoctoral researcher Yichao Zhao; as well as UCLA Health’s assistant clinical professor Sukantha Chandrasekaran and associate clinical professor Omai Garner of pathology and laboratory medicine.
The research was supported by the W.M. Keck Foundation’s COVID-19 Research Award Program, the National Science Foundation and the Precise Advanced Technologies and Health Systems for Underserved Populations (PATHS-UP) NSF Engineering Research Center. The UCLA Nanoelectronics Research Facility provided access to the fabrication equipment used for the study. Lin, Yu, Sabet, Di Carlo and Emaminejad have submitted a patent application through the UCLA Technology Development Group for the technology used in the new system.

The lifting of masking requirements in school districts outside of Boston in February 2022 was associated with an additional 44.9 COVID-19 cases per 1,000 students and staff in the 15 weeks after the statewide masking policy was rescinded. This represented nearly 12,000 total COVID-19 cases or 30% of all cases in those school districts that unmasked during that time, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Boston Public Health Commission, and Boston University School of Public Health.
“Our study shows that universal masking is an important strategy to reduce transmission in schools and one that should be considered in mitigation planning to keep students and staff healthier and minimize loss of in-person school days,” said [CT1] [DT2] Tori Cowger, corresponding author and Health and Human Rights fellow in the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard Chan School. “Our results also suggest that universal masking may be an important tool for mitigating structural inequities that have led to unequal conditions in schools and differential risk of severe COVID-19, educational disruptions, and health and economic effects of secondary transmission to household members.”
The study was published online in the New England Journal of Medicine, Nov. 9, 2022.
When Massachusetts rescinded its statewide universal masking policy earlier this year, many schools in the state, including those in the greater Boston area, lifted their requirements over the next several weeks. However, two school districts — Boston and Chelsea — maintained universal masking policies through June. That staggered lifting of masking requirements gave the researchers the unique opportunity to examine the impact of lifting those requirements on the incidence of COVID-19 among students and staff across 72 school districts in the greater Boston area.
The researchers found that before the statewide masking requirements were lifted, the trends in the incidence of COVID-19 observed in the Boston and Chelsea school districts were similar to the trends in the districts that later lifted masking requirements. After the statewide policy was rescinded, the trends diverged, with a substantially higher incidence observed in districts that lifted masking requirements compared to districts that maintained their masking requirements.
The findings also showed that the effect of school masking policies was greatest during periods when COVID-19 incidence was highest in surrounding cities and towns, suggesting that implementing universal masking policies during times of high transmission would be most effective.
“This study provides clear support for the importance of universal masking to reduce transmission of COVID-19 in school settings, especially when community COVID levels are high,” said study co-author Eleanor Murray, assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health. “Masking reduces COVID-19 transmission in schools in an equitable and easy to implement way and should be part of any layered mitigation strategy.”
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People using prepayment energy meters consume less fruit and vegetables compared to those using alternative payment methods, according to new research.
The study, by academics at the Universities of East Anglia (UEA) and Reading in the UK, and the University of Macedonia in Greece, explores the role of prepayment meters in the ‘heat-or-eat’ dilemma, a trade-off typically between paying for food or heating.
Households with prepaid meters typically pay more for their energy and the researchers found a strong link between this and lower consumption of fruit and vegetables — on average almost three fewer portions a week compared to those using alternative payment methods, such as direct debit.
The difference in consumption is roughly split between one fewer fruit and two fewer vegetables. The results, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, suggest targeted support for prepayment users may have beneficial effects on people’s fruit and vegetable consumption patterns, and that this could be more effective in protecting women’s health in particular.
Drawing on a sample of more than 24,800 people living in Great Britain, the analysis further reveals that prepayment meter users are not only less likely to meet the World Health Organisation’s recommended ‘5-a-day’, but also more likely to use food banks, which often do not provide fruit and vegetables because of the cost and perishable nature of the goods, as well as demand, with households relying on cold boxes and kettle boxes that either do not need cooking or only need hot water from a kettle.
The researchers say the heat-or-eat dilemma has resurfaced during the ongoing energy price crisis and warn it has the potential to worsen diet quality among the UK population if expenditure on healthy food is traded-off for energy consumption.

Published10 minutes agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy James GallagherHealth and science correspondentPeople with untreatable cancers have had their immune system redesigned to attack their own tumours.The experimental study involved only 16 patients, but has been called a “leap forward” and a “powerful” demonstration of the potential of such technology.Each person had a treatment developed just for them, which targeted the specific weak spots in their tumour. It is too early to fully assess the therapy’s effectiveness and is expensive and time-consuming. The work focuses on a part of the immune system called T-cells, which patrol the body and inspect other cells for problems. They use proteins – called receptors – to effectively sniff out signs of infection or deviant cells that have become cancerous. Cancers can be tricky for T-cells to spot. A virus is distinctly different to the human body, but cancers are more subtle because they are a corrupted version of our own cells. The idea of the therapy is to boost levels of these cancer-spotting T-cells. It has to be tailored to each patient as each tumour is unique. This is how it works:The researchers scoured patient’s blood for rare T-cells that already had receptors which could sniff out their cancerThey then harvested other T-cells that could not find the cancer and redesigned themTheir original receptors, which may find other problems or infections, were replaced with those from the cancer-searching T-cells Finally, these modified T-cells were then put back into the patient to seek out the tumourTransforming T-cells into a form that can hunt cancer requires considerable genetic manipulation to both remove the genetic instructions for building their old receptors, and give them the instructions for the new ones. It was made possible by tremendous advances in the gene-editing technology Crispr, which acts like a pair of molecular scissors – allowing scientists to easily manipulate DNA. The researchers who developed Crispr won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020.Image source, Getty ImagesThe trial involved people with colon, breast or lung cancers that had failed to respond to other treatments. The study was designed to test the safety and feasibility of the technology, and showed the modified cells were finding their way into the tumour. The disease continued to get worse in 11 patients, but stabilised in the other five. However, it will take larger studies to work out the correct dose and how effective it really is.”This is a leap forward in developing a personalised treatment for cancer,” said Dr Antoni Ribas, one of the researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, who tested the approach developed by the company Pact Pharma.The results were presented at a meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer and published simultaneously in the journal Nature.Dr Manel Juan, head of the immunology service at Clinic Hospital in Barcelona, said it was “extraordinary work” and “undoubtedly one of the most advanced in the field”.He added: “It opens the door to using this personalised [approach] in many types of cancer and potentially in many other diseases.”‘Designer cells’ reverse one-year-old’s cancerDawn of gene editing medicine?Prof Waseem Qasim, who has given life-saving designer immune systems at Great Ormond Street Hospital, said it was a “powerful early demonstration of what might be possible with newer techniques”.Dr Astero Klampatsa, from the Institute of Cancer Research, London, said the study was “important” but warned that the “time, labour and expense involved” were “huge”.Follow James on Twitter

Healthier plant-based dietary patterns were associated with better environmental health, while less healthy plant-based dietary patterns, which are higher in foods like refined grains and sugar-sweetened beverages, required more cropland and fertilizer, according to a new study led by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The findings also showed that red and processed meat had the highest environmental impact out of all food groups in participants’ diets, producing the greatest share of greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the most irrigation water, cropland, and fertilizer.
“The differences between plant-based diets was surprising because they’re often portrayed as universally healthy and good for the environment, but it’s more nuanced than that,” said Aviva Musicus, postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard Chan School and corresponding author of the study. “To be clear, we’re not asserting that less healthy plant-based diets are worse for the environment than animal-based diets. However, our findings show that plant-based diets can have different health and environmental impacts.”
The study, which is one of the first to look simultaneously at the health and environmental impacts of various plant-based diets, was published in the November 2022 edition of The Lancet Planetary Health.
Previous research has documented that different types of plant-based diets have various health effects. For example, plant-based diets higher in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, vegetable oils, and tea/coffee are associated with reduced chronic disease risk, while plant-based diets high in fruit juices, sugar-sweetened beverages, refined grains, potatoes, and sweets/desserts are associated with an increased risk of chronic disease. Yet little research has been conducted to determine the environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions, use of high-quality cropland, nitrogen from fertilizer, and irrigation water, of these dietary approaches.
Using data from the Nurses’ Health Study II, the researchers analyzed the food intakes of more than 65,000 qualifying participants, and examined their diets’ associations with health outcomes, including relative risks of cardiovascular disease, and with environmental impacts. To differentiate plant-based dietary patterns, the researchers characterized participants’ diets using various dietary indices, including the Healthy and Unhealthy Plant-based Diet Indices. Higher scores on the unhealthy plant-based diet index indicated higher consumption of refined grains, sugary drinks, fruit juice, potatoes, and sweets/desserts; while higher scores on the healthy plant-based diet index indicated higher consumption of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts, legumes, vegetable oils, and tea/coffee.
Participants who consumed healthy plant-based diets had lower cardiovascular disease risk, and those diets had lower greenhouse gas emissions and use of cropland, irrigation water, and nitrogenous fertilizer than diets that were higher in unhealthy plant-based and animal-based foods. Participants who ate unhealthy plant-based diets experienced a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, and their diets required more cropland and fertilizer than diets that were higher in healthy plant-based and animal foods. The findings also reinforced earlier studies showing that diets higher in animal-based foods, especially red and processed meat, have greater adverse environmental impacts than plant-based diets.
“Because human health ultimately depends upon planetary health, future U.S. dietary guidelines should include nuanced consideration of environmental sustainability and recognize that not all plant-based diets confer the same health and environmental benefits,” said Daniel Wang, assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard Chan School, the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and co-author of the study.
This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH grants U01 CA176726, UM1 CA186107, HL35464, and 2T32CA057711).

People living with HIV have a significantly delayed internal body clock, consistent with the symptoms of jet lag, according to new findings reported by researchers from universities in South Africa and the UK.
The findings, which have been published in the Journal of Pineal Research, may explain some of the health problems experienced by people with HIV, and guide research towards improving their quality of life.
Researchers from Northumbria and Surrey universities in the UK and South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand and University of Cape Town studied people aged 45 years and above living in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province, where nearly one in four people is living with HIV. As such, the infection is endemic and does not associate with any difference in lifestyle.
They found that physiological daily rhythms, as measured by the hormone melatonin, were delayed by more than an hour on average in HIV positive participants. Their sleep cycle was also shorter, with researchers noting that their sleep started later and finished earlier.
This suggests the possibility that HIV infection may cause a circadian rhythm disorder similar to the disruption experienced in shift work or jet lag.
The authors believe that this body clock disruption may contribute significantly to the increased burden of health problems that people living with HIV are experiencing despite successful treatment, such as an increased risk of cardiovascular, metabolic, and psychiatric disorders.

Front-line physicians who cared for COVID-19 patients during the first wave of the pandemic in New York City and New Orleans reported multiple factors that contributed to their occupational stress during this extraordinarily trying time in their careers.
These included individual-level factors such as age, work experience and life stage; institutional-level factors such as resource disparities, institutional type and size, and policies; professional-level factors such as informal rationing and medical uncertainty; and societal-level factors such as the federal response, COVID politics, and social inequalities.
At this point in the pandemic, it’s well recognized that burnout is pervasive in medicine,” said Mara Buchbinder, PhD, professor and vice chair in the UNC Department of Social Medicine and lead author of the new study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
“What is less well understood is how deeply entrenched it is in health systems stress. Physicians are sick of being told to heal themselves through yoga and mindfulness when the underlying systems are broken.”
Study authors conducted qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 40 physicians from 14 hospitals in New York City and 39 physicians from 9 hospitals in New Orleans. All had spent at least 4 weeks providing inpatient COVID-19 care beginning in March 2020, when both cities were experiencing the first surge of the pandemic in the United States.
The stressors most frequently cited by the physicians during their interviews included: Concerns about being exposed to COVID-19 and/or transmitting it to their family The volume and burden of patient deaths The volume of patients/workload Medical uncertainty over how to care for COVID-19 patients Caring for patients without family support Mistrust toward physicians/COVID skepticism”The experience of responding to a public health emergency on this massive scale also created opportunities for innovative approaches to problem-solving by physicians and teams, and prompted hospital management to relieve the frontline of administrative burdens,” said Nancy Berlinger, PhD, a research scholar at The Hastings Center and a co-author of this study.
“Going forward, hospitals should continue to listen to the frontline for insights about work environments that support clinician integrity and wellbeing and promote better outcomes for patients.”
The study concludes that interventions to reduce physician stress and burnout may be more effective if they target systems factors and stressors, including organizational culture and team dynamics.
Additional co-authors of the study are Alyssa Browne, MA and Tania Jenkins, PhD, both in the UNC Department of Sociology; and Liza Buchbinder, MD, PhD, at UCLA’s Center for Social Medicine and Humanities and Semel Institute.
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Everyone ages at a different pace. That’s why two 50-year-olds, despite living the same number of years, may have different biological ages — meaning that a host of intrinsic and extrinsic factors have caused them to age at varying paces with different levels of risk for disease and early death.
Lifestyle choices, such as diet and smoking, and illness all contribute to accelerating biological age beyond one’s chronological age. In other words, your body is aging faster than expected. And for the first time, researchers have found that muscle weakness marked by grip strength, a proxy for overall strength capacity, is associated with accelerated biological age. Specifically, the weaker your grip strength, the older your biological age, according to results published in The Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle.
Researchers at Michigan Medicine modeled the relationship between biological age and grip strength of 1,274 middle aged and older adults using three “age acceleration clocks” based on DNA methylation, a process that provides a molecular biomarker and estimator of the pace of aging. The clocks were originally modeled from various studies examining diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, physical disability, Alzheimer’s disease, inflammation and early mortality.
Results reveal that both older men and women showed an association between lower grip strength and biological age acceleration across the DNA methylation clocks.
“We’ve known that muscular strength is a predictor of longevity, and that weakness is a powerful indicator of disease and mortality, but, for the first time, we have found strong evidence of a biological link between muscle weakness and actual acceleration in biological age,” said Mark Peterson, Ph.D., M.S., lead author of the study and associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at University of Michigan.
“This suggests that if you maintain your muscle strength across the lifespan, you may be able to protect against many common age-related diseases. We know that smoking, for example, can be a powerful predictor of disease and mortality, but now we know that muscle weakness could be the new smoking.”
The real strength of this study was in the eight to 10 years of observation, in which lower grip strength predicted faster biological aging measured up to a decade later, said Jessica Faul, Ph.D., M.P.H., a co-author of the study and research associate professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research.