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Dead gentoo penguins tested positive for the virus, and at least one suspected case has been reported in king penguins.The NewsA highly lethal form of bird flu has been detected in Antarctic penguins for the first time. The virus, which is known as H5N1, was confirmed in a few gentoo penguins that were found dead in the Falkland Islands, according to the British territory’s Department of Agriculture. Another few dozen gentoo penguins were reported sick or dead at the same location.At least one suspected case has also been reported in king penguins in South Georgia, another British territory, according to the Antarctic Wildlife Health Network, which is part of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.A gentoo penguin at the Maldonado base on Greenwich Island, Antarctica, this month.Juan Barreto/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhy It Matters: Penguins are already under pressure.The familiar black-and-white birds are facing numerous threats, including climate change, pollution and commercial fishing. Three Antarctic penguin species — emperor penguins, southern rockhopper penguins and macaroni penguins — are listed as vulnerable or near threatened.Before H5N1 arrived in the Antarctic region last fall, highly pathogenic bird flu viruses had never been documented in the area before. That means that the penguins are likely to have little existing immunity. And because they breed in large, crowded colonies, once one penguin is infected, the virus could spread rapidly, causing mass mortalities. (As the virus spread through South America last year, Chile reported the deaths of thousands of Humboldt penguins.)The extent of the virus’s spread in Antarctic penguin populations remains unclear, and the king penguin cases have not yet been confirmed.“We have no conclusive evidence that king penguin populations in South Georgia have been impacted by the virus,” Laura Willis, the chief executive of the government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, said in an email. “We are monitoring the situation across the islands and apply a precautionary approach, which includes closing some sites to allow further investigations to take place.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? 

Published2 days agocommentsCommentsShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesNew digital prescriptions mean NHS App users in England can now collect medication from a pharmacy without having to visit a GP or health centre.The usual paper slip given by doctors has been replaced by an in-app barcode, which can be scanned at any pharmacy.Users can already request repeat prescriptions on the app – and every digital order fulfilled will save the GP three minutes, NHS Digital says.It comes after a trial last year, involving more than a million users.Patients can use the app to check what medicines they have been prescribed, and when.Anyone who has a nominated pharmacy can continue to collect medication without a paper prescription or barcode, as the details are sent to their pharmacy electronically.The app also shows average local hospital waiting times for elective treatment, such as hip replacements.NHS talking therapy recommended for menopause woesHealthcare apps trialled to ease NHS pressureThe number of repeat prescriptions ordered digitally has grown by more than 45% in the past year, with an average 3.1 million requested each month.Now in its sixth year, the NHS App also allows its more than 33 million registered users – two-thirds pensioners – to:view their health record from their GPmanage hospital appointmentsnominate their preferred pharmacy Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said the update would “ease pressures on our hardworking pharmacists and GPs – freeing up valuable time for patients and helping to cut waiting lists”.More on this storyHealthcare apps trialled to ease NHS pressurePublished16 May 2023NHS talking therapy recommended for menopause woesPublished17 November 2023

Published2 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, The ChristieBy Richard SteadBBC News, ManchesterA skin cancer patient who took part in a trial which used a blood test to help doctors decide on his treatment has said it possibly “saved my life”.Doctors at The Christie Hospital in Manchester used a blood test to determine when José Sotorrio, 49, from Whalley Range, switched from targeted therapy to immunotherapy.The test showed it was the “optimum time” to change, Mr Sotorrio said.The Christie said the trial could help in “developing personalised treatment”.The blood test can help doctors to determine which treatment to start with and when to switch drugs for patients with advanced melanoma. The trial has shown the test is accurate enough to show real-time cancer responses to treatment.Mr Sotorrio said: “Growing up in the 70s and 80s, it was normal for me to spend long days on the beach on summer holidays to Spain. “I found a cancerous mole on my chest and had it removed in 2018 – but three years later, I noticed something under my arm and I was diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma”.’Specific combination’He has taken part in the clinical trial using the blood test.He said: “The blood test showed tumour levels in my blood had dropped by over 80% in just 28 days in response to targeted therapy. “So doctors decided this was the optimum time to switch from the targeted therapy to immunotherapy. “It’s possible the specific combination of treatments I had within this clinical trial has saved my life.”Dr Rebecca Lee, a consultant oncologist and clinician scientist at The Christie, said: “We’re really pleased José has had a complete response to the treatment. “He now has a very good chance that the melanoma will not come back. “We now know we can use this blood test in patients as a tool to guide treatment, which will be important in developing personalised treatment strategies in the future”. In future, its hoped a different blood test could help detect more than 50 types of cancer.Why not follow BBC North West on Facebook, X and Instagram? You can also send story ideas to northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.ukMore on this storyDuchess of York ‘shock’ at skin cancer diagnosisPublished22 JanuaryBlood test for 50 cancers excites scientistsPublished2 June 2023Related Internet LinksThe Christie NHS Foundation TrustThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Published6 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy Patrick JacksonBBC NewsTech billionaire Elon Musk says his Neuralink company has successfully implanted one of its wireless brain chips in a human for the first time. Initial results detected promising neuron spikes or nerve impulses and the patient is recovering well, he said.The company’s goal is to connect human brains to computers and it says it wants to help tackle complex neurological conditions.A number of rival companies have already implanted similar devices. BBC News has approached both Neuralink and the US’s medical regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for comment.Mr Musk’s company was given permission to test the chip on humans by the FDA in May, a critical milestone after earlier struggles to gain approval.This gave the green light for the start of the six-year study during which a robot is being used to surgically place 64 flexible threads, thinner than a human hair, on to a part of the brain that controls “movement intention”, according to Neuralink.The company says that these threads allow its experimental implant – powered by a battery that can be charged wirelessly – to record and transmit brain signals wirelessly to an app that decodes how the person intends to move.Posting on X, the social media platform he owns which was formerly known as Twitter, Mr Musk said Neuralink’s first product would be called Telepathy.Telepathy, he said, would enable “control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking”. “Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs,” he continued. Referring to the late British scientist who had motor neurone disease, he added: “Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal.”While Mr Musk’s involvement raises the profile of Neuralink, he faces rivals, some of who have a track record dating back two decades. Utah-based Blackrock Neurotech implanted its first of many brain-computer interfaces in 2004.Precision Neuroscience, formed by a Neuralink co-founder, also aims to help people with paralysis. And its implant resembles a very thin piece of tape that sits on the surface of the brain and can be implanted via a “cranial micro-slit”, which it says is a much simpler procedure.Existing devices have also generated results. In two separate recent US scientific studies, implants were used to monitor brain activity when a person tried to speak, which could then be decoded to help them communicate.More on this storyWhy is Elon Musk’s brain chip firm Neuralink in the news?Published26 May 2023

A parliamentary panel concluded that there are not enough doctors, particularly psychiatrists, in the country to properly assess patients.Canada is postponing a plan to offer people suffering from mental illnesses the option of a medically assisted death, two cabinet ministers said on Monday.The announcement by Mark Holland, the health minister, and Arif Virani, the justice minister, came after a special parliamentary committee looking into the plan concluded that there are not enough doctors, particularly psychiatrists, in the country to assess patients with mental illnesses who want to end their lives and to help them do so.“The system needs to be ready, and we need to get it right,” Mr. Holland told reporters. “It’s clear from the conversations we’ve had that the system is not ready, and we need more time.”Neither minister offered any timeline for the latest extension. Following an earlier delay, the expansion had been scheduled to come into effect on March 17.Canada already offers medically assisted death to terminally and chronically ill people, but the plan to extend the program to people with mental illnesses has divided Canadians.Some critics say the plan is a consequence of the inability of Canada’s public health care system to offer adequate psychiatric care, which is chronically underfunded and facing demand that outstrips its availability.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? 

Published24 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesNew digital prescriptions mean NHS App users in England can now collect medication from a pharmacy without having to visit a GP or health centre.They can already request repeat prescriptions on the app – and every digital order fulfilled will save the GP three minutes, NHS Digital says.It comes after a trial last year, involving more than a million users.The app will also show average local hospital waiting times for elective treatment, such as hip replacements.NHS talking therapy recommended for menopause woesHealthcare apps trialled to ease NHS pressureThe number of repeat prescriptions ordered digitally has grown by more than 45% in the past year, with an average 3.1 million requested each month.Now in its sixth year, the NHS App also allows its more than 33 million registered users – two-thirds pensioners – to:view their health record from their GPmanage hospital appointmentsnominate their preferred pharmacy Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said the update would “ease pressures on our hardworking pharmacists and GPs – freeing up valuable time for patients and helping to cut waiting lists”.More on this storyHealthcare apps trialled to ease NHS pressurePublished16 May 2023NHS talking therapy recommended for menopause woesPublished17 November 2023

For over three decades, a highly accurate early diagnostic test for ovarian cancer has eluded physicians. Now, scientists in the Georgia Tech Integrated Cancer Research Center (ICRC) have combined machine learning with information on blood metabolites to develop a new test able to detect ovarian cancer with 93 percent accuracy among samples from the team’s study group.
John McDonald, professor emeritus in the School of Biological Sciences, founding director of the ICRC, and the study’s corresponding author, explains that the new test’s accuracy is better in detecting ovarian cancer than existing tests for women clinically classified as normal, with a particular improvement in detecting early-stage ovarian disease in that cohort.
The team’s results and methodologies are detailed in a new paper, “A Personalized Probabilistic Approach to Ovarian Cancer Diagnostics,” published in the March 2024 online issue of the medical journalGynecologic Oncology.Based on their computer models, the researchers have developed what they believe will be a more clinically useful approach to ovarian cancer diagnosis — whereby a patient’s individual metabolic profile can be used to assign a more accurate probability of the presence or absence of the disease.
“This personalized, probabilistic approach to cancer diagnostics is more clinically informative and accurate than traditional binary (yes/no) tests,” McDonald says. “It represents a promising new direction in the early detection of ovarian cancer, and perhaps other cancers as well.”
The study co-authors also include Dongjo Ban, a Bioinformatics Ph.D. student in McDonald’s lab; Research ScientistsStephen N. Housley,Lilya V. Matyunina, andL.DeEtte (Walker) McDonald; Regents’ ProfessorJeffrey Skolnick, who also serves as Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair in the School of Biological Sciences and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology; and two collaborating physicians: University of North Carolina Professor Victoria L. Bae-Jump and Ovarian Cancer Institute of Atlanta Founder and Chief Executive OfficerBenedict B. Benigno. Members of the research team are forming a startup to transfer and commercialize the technology, and plan to seek requisite trials and FDA approval for the test.
Silent killer
Ovarian cancer is often referred to as the silent killer because the disease is typically asymptomatic when it first arises — and is usually not detected until later stages of development, when it is difficult to treat.

McDonald explains that while the average five-year survival rate for late-stage ovarian cancer patients, even after treatment, is around 31 percent — but that if ovarian cancer is detected and treated early, the average five-year survival rate is more than 90 percent.
“Clearly, there is a tremendous need for an accurate early diagnostic test for this insidious disease,” McDonald says.
And although development of an early detection test for ovarian cancer has been vigorously pursued for more than three decades, the development of early, accurate diagnostic tests has proven elusive. Because cancer begins on the molecular level, McDonald explains, there are multiple possible pathways capable of leading to even the same cancer type.
“Because of this high-level molecular heterogeneity among patients, the identification of a single universal diagnostic biomarker of ovarian cancer has not been possible,” McDonald says. “For this reason, we opted to use a branch of artificial intelligence — machine learning — to develop an alternative probabilistic approach to the challenge of ovarian cancer diagnostics.”
Metabolic profiles
Georgia Tech co-author Dongjo Ban, whose thesis research contributed to the study, explains that “because end-point changes on the metabolic level are known to be reflective of underlying changes operating collectively on multiple molecular levels, we chose metabolic profiles as the backbone of our analysis.”
“The set of human metabolites is a collective measure of the health of cells,” adds co-author Jeffrey Skolnick, “and by not arbitrary choosing any subset in advance, one lets the artificial intelligence figure out which are the key players for a given individual.”

Mass spectrometry can identify the presence of metabolites in the blood by detecting their mass and charge signatures. However, Ban says, the precise chemical makeup of a metabolite requires much more extensive characterization.
Ban explains that because the precise chemical composition of less than seven percent of the metabolites circulating in human blood have, thus far, been chemically characterized, it is currently impossible to accurately pinpoint the specific molecular processes contributing to an individual’s metabolic profile.
However, the research team recognized that, even without knowing the precise chemical make-up of each individual metabolite, the mere presence of different metabolites in the blood of different individuals, as detected by mass spectrometry, can be incorporated as features in the building of accurate machine learning-based predictive models (similar to the use of individual facial features in the building of facial pattern recognition algorithms).
“Thousands of metabolites are known to be circulating in the human bloodstream, and they can be readily and accurately detected by mass spectrometry and combined with machine learning to establish an accurate ovarian cancer diagnostic,” Ban says.
A new probabilistic approach
The researchers developed their integrative approach by combining metabolomic profiles and machine learning-based classifiers to establish a diagnostic test with 93 percent accuracy when tested on 564 women from Georgia, North Carolina, Philadelphia and Western Canada. 431 of the study participants were active ovarian cancer patients, and while the remaining 133 women in the study did not have ovarian cancer.
Further studies have been initiated to study the possibility that the test is able to detect very early-stage disease in women displaying no clinical symptoms, McDonald says.
McDonald anticipates a clinical future where a person with a metabolic profile that falls within a score range that makes cancer highly unlikely would only require yearly monitoring. But someone with a metabolic score that lies in a range where a majority (say, 90%) have previously been diagnosed with ovarian cancer would likely be monitored more frequently — or perhaps immediately referred for advanced screening.

A startling number of people conceal an infectious illness to avoid missing work, travel, or social events, new research at the University of Michigan suggests.
The findings are reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Across a series of studies involving healthy and sick adults, 75% of the 4,110 participants said they had either hidden an infectious illness from others at least once or might do so in the future. Many participants reported boarding planes, going on dates, and engaging in other social interactions while secretly sick. More than 61% of healthcare workers participating in the study also said they had concealed an infectious illness.
Interestingly, the researchers found a difference between how people believe they would act when ill and how they actually behave, said Wilson N. Merrell, a doctoral candidate and lead author on the study.
“Healthy people forecasted that they would be unlikely to hide harmful illnesses — those that spread easily and have severe symptoms — but actively sick people reported high levels of concealment regardless of how harmful their illness was to others,” Merrell said.
In the first study, Merrell and his colleagues — psychology professor Joshua M. Ackerman and PhD student Soyeon Choi — recruited 399 university healthcare employees and 505 students. The participants reported the number of days they felt symptoms of an infectious illness, starting in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began. They then rated how often they actively covered up symptoms from others, came to campus or work without telling others they were feeling ill, or falsified mandatory symptom screeners that the university had required for anyone using campus facilities.
More than 70% of the participants reported covering up their symptoms. Many said they hid their illness because it would conflict with social plans, while a small percentage of participants cited pressure from institutional policies (e.g., lack of paid time off). Only five participants reported hiding a COVID-19 infection.
In a second study, the researchers recruited 946 participants online and randomly assigned them to one of nine conditions in which they imagined being either moderately or severely sick while in a social situation. In each condition, the risk of spreading the illness was designated as low, medium, or high. (To control for the special stigma associated with COVID-19 at the time, the researchers asked participants not to imagine being sick with that disease.) Participants were most likely to envision themselves hiding their sickness when symptom severity was low, and least likely to conceal when symptoms were severe and highly communicable.

In another study, Merrell and colleagues used an online research tool to recruit 900 people —
including some who were actively sick — and asked them to rate the transmissibility of their real or imagined illness. The participants were also asked to rate their likelihood of covering up an illness in a hypothetical meeting with another person.
Results showed that compared to healthy participants who only imagined being sick, those who were actively ill were more likely to conceal their illness regardless of its transmissibility.
“This suggests that sick people and healthy people evaluate the consequences of concealment in different ways,” Merrell said, “with sick people being relatively insensitive to how spreadable and severe their illness may be for others.”
The COVID-19 crisis may have shaped the way the participants thought about concealing an illness, Merrell said, adding that future research could explore how ecological factors (e.g., pandemics) and medical advances such as vaccines influence people’s disease-related behavior. The research team is also expanding this line of investigation to other countries to uncover potential cultural differences in concealment behaviors, he said.
Overall, the findings carry significant public health implications, illuminating the motivations and tradeoffs we make in social interactions when we’re sick, Merrell added.
“After all, people tend to react negatively to, find less attractive, and steer clear of people who are sick with infectious illness,” he said. “It therefore makes sense that we may take steps to cover up our sickness in social situations. This suggests that solutions to the problem of disease concealment may need to rely on more than just individual good will.”

Nerve cells in the brain demand an enormous amount of energy to survive and maintain their connections for communicating with other nerve cells. In Alzheimer’s disease, the ability to make energy is compromised, and the connections between nerve cells (called synapses) eventually come apart and wither, causing new memories to fade and fail.
A Scripps Research team, reporting in the journal Advanced Science on January 18, 2024, has now identified the energetic reactions in brain cells that malfunction and lead to neurodegeneration. By using a small molecule to address the malfunction, which occurred in the mitochondria — the cell’s major energy producers — the researchers showed that many neuron-to-neuron connections were successfully restored in nerve cell models derived from human Alzheimer’s patient stem cells. These findings highlight that improving mitochondrial metabolism could be a promising therapeutic target for Alzheimer’s and related disorders.
“We thought that if we could repair metabolic activity in the mitochondria, maybe we could salvage the energy production,” says senior author Stuart Lipton, MD, PhD, Step Family Foundation Endowed Professor and Co-Director of the Neurodegeneration New Medicines Center at Scripps Research, and a clinical neurologist in La Jolla, Calif. “In using human neurons derived from people with Alzheimer’s, protecting the energy levels was sufficient to rescue a large number of neuronal connections.”
In the new study, Lipton and his team found a block in the enzymes that make energy due to an abnormal tag of nitrogen (N) and oxygen (O) atoms onto a sulfur (S) atom, all together forming a dysfunctional “SNO” enzyme. This reaction is termed S-nitrosylation, and the team demonstrated that a virtual “SNO-Storm” of these reactions occurred in the Alzheimer’s brain neurons.
Lipton and his colleagues initially made the discovery of the “SNO-tag” on energy enzymes by comparing human brains (obtained at autopsy from people with Alzheimer’s disease) to those with no brain disease. The researchers subsequently generated nerve cells from stem cells derived from skin biopsies of people with and without a genetic mutation that causes Alzheimer’s disease. Then, using a series of metabolic labels and an oxygen-measuring apparatus, they calculated cellular energy production and identified unique deficits in the Alzheimer’s nerve cells compared to controls.
The researchers found the neurons had a disrupted Krebs cycle — the cellular process in mitochondria that produces most of the body’s crucial molecular power source, ATP. The team pinpointed a bottleneck (or block) in the step where a key molecule is formed: succinate, which drives much of the subsequent production of ATP. In the study, the bottleneck inhibited the mitochondria’s ability to produce the energy needed to sustain neurons and their numerous connections.
The researchers hypothesized that if they could supply some of the missing succinate molecules, they might be able to restore energy production — essentially jumpstarting the stalled mitochondrial Krebs cycle. Since succinate does not easily travel in or out of cells, they used an analog that could better pass through nerve cell membranes. The strategy worked, repairing up to three quarters of the synapses that had been lost, while preventing further decline.

“Succinate is not a compound that people can now take as a treatment, but it’s proof-of-principle that you can re-energize the Krebs cycle,” says Lipton. “The beauty of the study is that we were able to show this in living nerve cells derived from Alzheimer’s patients, but we still have to come up with a much better compound in order to develop an effective drug for humans to take.”
Lipton has a history of developing FDA-approved drugs for Alzheimer’s disease, such as Namenda®, and acknowledges that much more work is needed here to produce an additional energy-preserving drug that is both safe and effective in humans. His lab will continue to pursue the mitochondrial Krebs cycle as a promising therapeutic target in the hopes they can restore neuronal connectivity in patients with Alzheimer’s, thereby stopping disease progression and enhancing cognitive function.
In addition to Lipton, authors of the study, “Metabolic Bypass Rescues Aberrant S-Nitrosylation-Induced TCA Cycle Inhibition and Synapse Loss in Alzheimer’s Disease Human Neurons,” include Alexander Andreyev, Nima Dolatabadi, Xu Zhang, Melissa Luevanos, Mayra Blanco, Christine Baal, Ivan Putra, and Tomohiro Nakamura of Scripps Research; Hongmei Yang and Steven Tannenbaum of MIT; and Paschalis-Thomas Doulias and Harry Ischiropoulos of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
This work was supported in part by funding from the National Institutes of Health (R01 AG061845, R61 NS122098, RF1 NS123298, R35 AG071734, RF1 AG057409, R56 AG065372, R01 DA048882, DP1 DA041722, and R01 AG056259).

As the world’s population increases, cultivated or lab-grown meat — animal muscle and fat cells grown in laboratory conditions — has emerged as a potential way to satisfy future protein needs. And edible, inexpensive plant proteins could be used to grow these cell cultures. Now, researchers in ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering report that the non-allergenic wheat protein glutenin successfully grew striated muscle layers and flat fat layers, which could be combined to produce meat-like textures.
Cultured cells need a base or scaffold to adhere to produce lab-grown meat. Plant proteins are appealing candidates for the scaffolds because they are edible, abundant and inexpensive. Previous researchers showed that a plant-based film made of glutenin was a successful base to cultivate cow skeletal muscle cells. But for this technique to produce a promising meat-like alternative, the muscle cells need to form aligned fibers, similar to the texture in real tissues. Additionally, fat needs to be included in the 3D structure to replicate the composition of traditional meat products. To take advantage of using glutenin, a protein in gluten that people with celiac disease or a gluten sensitivity don’t typically react to, Ya Yao, John Yuen, Jr., Chunmei Li, David Kaplan and colleagues wanted to develop plant-based films with it to grow textured muscle cells and fatty layers.
The researchers isolated glutenin from wheat gluten and formed flat and ridge-patterned films. Then they deposited mouse cells that develop into skeletal muscle onto the protein bases and incubated the cell-covered films for two weeks. Cells grew and proliferated on both flat and ridged films. As expected, compared to cells grown on control films made of gelatin, the performance of the glutenin-based films was inferior but sufficient. The researchers say further work needs to be done to improve how cells attach to the plant-based film to get closer to the growth on the animal-derived biomaterial. During the second week of the culture, the cells on the patterned film formed long parallel bundles, recreating the fiber structure of animal muscles.
In another test, mouse cells that produce fat tissues were deposited onto flat glutenin films. During the incubation period, as cells proliferated and differentiated, they produced visible lipid and collagen deposits.
The cultured meat and fat layers attached to the edible glutenin films could be stacked to form a 3D meat-like alternative protein. Because the glutenin material base supported the growth of both textured animal muscle and fat layers, the researchers say it could be used in an approach for more realistic cultivated meat products.
The authors acknowledge funding from MilliporeSigma and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some authors are employees of MilliporeSigma, Inc.