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1,205 news posts in Mind and body

Life sciences

26 Feb 2021

New open-source platform accelerates research into the treatment of heart arrhythmias

By Rozi Harsanyi / School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King’s College London Image: megaflopp / Shutterstock An open-source platform, OpenEP co-developed by researchers from the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences at King’s College London has been made available to advance research on atrial fibrillation, a condition characterized by an irregular and often fast heartbeat. It can cause significant symptoms such as breathlessness, palpitations and fatigue, as well as being a major contributor to stroke and heart failure. Current research into the condition involves the interpretation of large amounts of clinical patient data using software written by individual research groups. But a new study recently published in Frontiers in Physiology shows that the OpenEP platform, developed in collaboration between King’s College London, the University of Edinburgh, Invicro, a Konica Minolta Company, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and Imperial College London, is capable of doing close to 90 per cent of the types of analyses that are performed in contemporary electrophysiology studies, enabling researchers to focus on their specific hypothesis or research question. Having a standardized way of using data processing techniques can also help to make them reproducible for other scientists. Lead author, Dr Steven […]

Life sciences

26 Feb 2021

Improving water quality could help conserve insectivorous birds — study

Scarcity of insect prey in disturbed lakes and streams contributes to bird decline, show new results By Anna Sigurdsson and Mischa Dijkstra, science writers A new study shows for the first time that the alarming decline in insectivorous birds across the US may be due to a decline of emergent insects in lakes and streams with poor water quality. These findings highlight the need for holistic conservation across terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Western wood-pepee, Contopus sordidulus. Image: vagabond54/Shutterstock A new study shows that a widespread decline in abundance of emergent insects – whose immature stages develop in lakes and streams while the adults live on land – can help to explain the alarming decline in abundance and diversity of aerial insectivorous birds (ie preying on flying insects) across the US. In turn, the decline in emergent insects appears to be driven by human disturbance and pollution of water bodies, especially in streams. This study, published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, is one of the first to find evidence for a causal link between the decline of insectivorous birds, the decline of emergent aquatic insects, and poor water quality. Human activities, such as urbanization and agriculture, have adverse effects on […]

Health

16 Feb 2021

COVID-19 crisis – a technology providing unconventional supply relief

By Kate E. Mullins / EPFL Credit: Felix Schürmann and coauthors When the full-scale effect of the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to be understood in early 2020, the EPFL Blue Brain Project and ETH Zurich, as part of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force, began collaborating with Spiez Laboratory on an online Platform – Academic Resources for COVID-19 (ARC). In a paper published in Frontiers for Public Health, the authors explain how the ARC Platform was set up to be a service to support Swiss diagnostic laboratories that are testing for SARS-CoV-2. The ARC Platform matched requests for critical equipment, reagents and consumable goods required by Swiss diagnostic laboratories involved in combating COVID-19 with supplies available from Swiss academic groups. Since then, with further input from Swiss startup Apptitude SA, the Platform has evolved with the needs of the epidemiological situation and the technology has been open sourced with the purpose to serve public health as a response solution for other countries and communities in the current COVID-19 crisis or in future crises. In the beginning of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland, diagnostic testing had to be ramped up in a very short time, but even basic molecular […]

Life sciences

05 Feb 2021

Chief Editor of Organic Chemistry is elected to the European Academy of Sciences

Professor Iwao Ojima We are proud to announce that Professor Iwao Ojima, Chief Editor of the Organic Chemistry section of  Frontiers in Chemistry has been recently elected to the European Academy of Sciences (EurASc) as a Fellow. Iwao Ojima is professor at the Department of Chemistry, College of Arts and Sciences, as well as the director of the Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery, Stony Brook University. He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo. Throughout his research career, Dr. Ojima has had numerous ties to the European scientific community – he was first recognized by European chemistry communities in organometallic chemistry, catalysis and fluorine chemistry, prior to joining the faculty at Stony Brook. His inventions on natural product-based anticancer agents were licensed to both French and Italian pharmaceutical companies. In addition, he served on the External Advisory Board of a highly innovative and successful multidisciplinary Center of Excellence, “Cell in Motion,” at the University of Münster and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster, Germany. He received numerous awards and honors, including 4 National Awards from the American Chemical Society in 4 different fields of chemistry, which is a very rare achievement. The European Academy of Sciences (EURASC) – the pan-European […]