People typically spend 90 percent of their lives inside, at home, at work, or in transport. Within these enclosed spaces, occupants are exposed to a multitude of chemicals from various sources, including outdoor pollutants penetrating indoors, gaseous emissions from building materials and furnishings, and products of our own activities such as cooking and cleaning. In addition, we are ourselves potent mobile emission sources of chemicals that enter the indoor air from our breath and skin.
But how do the chemicals disappear again? In the atmosphere outdoors, this happens to a certain extent naturally by itself, when it rains and through chemical oxidation. Hydroxyl (OH) radicals are largely responsible for this chemical cleaning. These very reactive molecules are also called the detergents of the atmosphere and they are primarily formed when UV light from the sun interacts with ozone and water vapor.
Indoors, on the other hand, the air is of course far less affected by direct sunlight and rain. Since UV rays are largely filtered out by glass windows it has been generally assumed that the concentration of OH radicals is substantially lower indoors than outdoors and that ozone, leaking in from outdoors, is the major oxidant of indoor airborne chemical pollutants.
OH radicals are formed from ozone and skin oils
However, now it has been discovered that high levels of OH radicals can be generated indoors, simply due to the presence of people and ozone. This has been shown by a team led by the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in cooperation with researchers from the USA and Denmark.
"The discovery that we humans are not only a source of reactive chemicals, but we are also able to transform these chemicals ourselves was very surprising to us," says Nora Zannoni, first author of the study published in the research magazine Science, and now at the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate in Bologna, Italy. "The strength and shape of the oxidation field are determined by how much ozone is present, where it infiltrates, and how the ventilation of the indoor space is configured," adds the scientist from Jonathan Williams' team. The levels the scientists found were even comparable to outside daytime OH concentrations levels.
The oxidation field is generated by the reaction of ozone with oils and fats on our skin, especially the unsaturated triterpene squalene, which constitutes about 10 percent of the skin lipids that protect our skin and keep it supple. The reaction releases a host of gas phase chemicals containing double bonds that react further in the air with ozone to generate substantial levels of OH radicals. These squalene degradation products were characterized and quantified individually using Proton Transfer reaction Mass Spectrometry and fast gas chromatograph-mass spectrometry systems. In addition, the total OH reactivity was determined in parallel enabling the OH levels to be quantified empirically.
The experiments were conducted at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in Copenhagen. Four test subjects stayed in a special climate-controlled chamber under standardized conditions. Ozone was added to the chamber air inflow in a quantity that was not harmful to humans but representative of higher indoor levels. The team determined the OH values before and during the volunteers' stay both with and without ozone present.
In order to understand how the human-generated OH field looked like in space and time during the experiments, results from a detailed multiphase chemical kinetic model from the University of California, Irvine were combined with a computational fluid dynamics model from Pennsylvania State University, both based in the USA. After validating the models against the experimental results, the modeling team examined how the human-generated OH field varied under different conditions of ventilation and ozone, beyond those tested in the laboratory. From the results, it was clear that the OH radicals were present, abundant, and forming strong spatial gradients.
“Our modeling team is the first and currently the only group that can integrate chemical processes between the skin and indoor air, from molecular scales to room scales,” said Manabu Shiraiwa, a professor at UC Irvine who led the modeling part of the new work. “The model makes sense of the measurements — why OH is generated from the reaction with the skin.”
Shiraiwa added that there remain unanswered questions, like the way humidity levels impact the reactions the team traced. “I think this study opens up a new avenue for indoor air research,” he said.
Adapt test methods for furniture and building materials
"We need to rethink indoor chemistry in occupied spaces because the oxidation field we create will transform many of the chemicals in our immediate vicinity. OH can oxidize many more species than ozone, creating a multitude of products directly in our breathing zone with as yet unknown health impacts”. This oxidation field will also impact the chemical signals we emit and receive," says project leader Jonathan Williams, “and possibly help explain the recent finding that our sense of smell is generally more sensitive to molecules that react faster with OH.”
The new finding also has implications for our health: Currently, chemical emissions of many materials and furnishings are being tested in isolation before they are approved for sale. However, it would be advisable to also conduct tests in the presence of people and ozone, says atmospheric chemist Williams. This is because oxidation processes can lead to the generation of respiratory irritants such as 4-oxopentanal (4-OPA) and other OH radical-generated oxygenated species, and small particles in the immediate vicinity of the respiratory tract. These can have adverse effects, especially in children and the infirm.
These findings are part of the project ICHEAR (Indoor Chemical Human Emissions and Reactivity Project) which brought together a group of collaborating international scientists from Denmark (DTU), the USA (Rutgers University), and Germany (MPI). The modeling was part of the MOCCIE project based at the University of California Irvine and the Pennsylvania State University. Both projects were funded by grants from the A. P. Sloan foundation.
Original publication
The Human Oxidation Field Nora Zannoni, Pascale S. J. Lakey, Youngbo Won, Manabu Shiraiwa, Donghyun Rim, Charles J. Weschler, Nijing Wang, Lisa Ernle, Mengze Li, Gabriel Bekö, Pawel Wargocki, Jonathan Williams Science, 1 September 2022 Doi: 10.1126/science.abn0340
CVS Health Corp (NYSE:CVS) is in advanced talks to acquire home-healthcare company Signify Health Inc for around $8 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Last month, Covid vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson was allowed back on Twitter after being “permanently” suspended for allegedly violating the platform’s Covid-19 “misinformation” policy. Remarkably, Twitter acknowledged that his tweets “should have not led” to his suspension.
Now, new internal Twitter documents publicized by Berenson reveal that the Biden administration likely played a pivotal role in his suspension. As a Twitter employee reported on the company’s internal Slack messaging system, the company faced “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform” in an April 2021 White House meeting. Another employee reported that Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to President Biden’s Covid response team, claimed that he had seen evidence indicating that Berenson was “the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.”
In the summer of 2021, the federal government repeatedly pressured social media platforms to ramp up efforts to crack down on Covid “misinformation.” On July 16, 2021, Biden claimed that social-media companies were “killing people” by failing to censor Covid misinformation. A few hours after Biden’s comment, Twitter suspended Berenson’s account for the first time. The next month, Twitter banned him after he tweeted about the vaccine’s inability to stop transmission and infection over the long-term and its side-effect profile.
Berenson, who now plans to sue the White House after his recent legal success against Twitter, is the most prominent victim of social-media companies’ heavy-handed policies, but many distinguished scientists with far less public and financial support have faced similar fates.
Tracy Beth Hoeg, a consultant epidemiologist for Florida’s Department of Health, has faced sanctions for warning about post-vaccine myocarditis in young men. In June 2021, for example, Twitter labeled “misleading” one of her tweets that stated—citing data published by the CDC—that post-vaccine myocarditis rates were “above baseline.” This past April, Twitter suspended Hoeg for merely criticizing the platform’s decision to add a “misleading” tag to an Oxford bioethicist’s tweet that directly quoted a peer-reviewed Israeli study finding a correlation between mass vaccination and acute cardiac events. Twitter reinstated Hoeg to the platform weeks later, but has offered no rationale for her initial suspension.
Anish Koka, owner of a top cardiology clinic in Philadelphia, encountered a similar situation earlier this month for simply tweeting a link to Sanjay Verma’s “exhaustive review” of post-vaccine myocarditis (Verma is an interventional cardiologist, with 17 years of experience). Twitter suspended Koka for “violating the policy on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to Covid-19.” Twitter reinstated Koka’s account a few days later, after he decided that deleting the tweet would be more productive than trying to protest the decision behind the scenes.
Andrew Bostom, a research physician and former professor at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, remains barred from Twitter and is threatening legal action. Twitter initially suspended him in June for tweeting a peer-reviewed study that found a temporary reduction in sperm count after vaccination. “Alex Berenson’s lawyer intervened and Twitter was forced to acknowledge their error,” he stated in an email interview. His reinstatement was short-lived, though, as Twitter accused him of violating its misinformation policy again by tweeting references to scientific analyses of data concerning vaccine use in adults and children.
In many other cases, social-media platforms have reprimanded scientists merely for asking questions about vaccines or for quoting peer-reviewed studies. But even more troubling than the platforms’ evident bias against dissent from the mainstream public-health narrative is the federal government’s attempt, as seen in Berenson’s case, to set the parameters for acceptable scientific debate.
In 1984, when Anthony Fauci took over as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), his wife gave him a plant for the new office. Both the palm and the 81-year-old physician are still there, the giant plant now crowding the office of one of the most celebrated—and polarizing—scientific figures in U.S. history. But not for much longer. Fauci announced on 22 August that he would step down at the end of the year from both NIAID and his post as the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden.
“What am I going to do with this plant? It’s a monster. I can’t fit it in any other place,” he joked this week from his NIAID office to Science's senior correspondent Jon Cohen, who has conducted many candid interviews with the institute chief, starting more than 30 years ago with the emergence of an earlier pandemic, AIDS.
For many people in the United States, Fauci became the public figure trusted above all others to guide them through COVID-19. The hero worship was evident in Fauci bobbleheads, “In Fauci We Trust” yard signs, and baseball cards that feature him throwing out a first pitch. But many others—including former President Donald Trump and some of his top advisers—turned on Fauci. They saw his advice as inconsistent and misleading, and portrayed him as a threat to the social order, the economy, and the health of the public. In this alternative world, the yard signs say “Fauci for Prison,” T-shirts declare “Even My Dog Hates Fauci,” and ballcaps call him a fraud or worse. He and his family have faced death threats, and his house has had a Secret Service detail stationed outside for protection.
In a 2021 webcast interview at the annual meeting of AAAS (the publisher of Science), Fauci said he wouldn’t retire until there were vaccines for HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis (TB). In his interview with Science this week, Fauci explained his change of mind, acknowledged some missteps during the pandemic, and discussed what he might do next. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: What triggered your decision to leave at the end of this year? You had a much longer range view when we spoke in February 2021 for the AAAS meeting, and then you later said you would retire at the end of Biden’s first term.
A: No, no, I never said that I would retire at the end of Biden’s first term. Please go back and look at my words. Somebody asked me on television, If Donald Trump was the next president, would you stay and work with him? And I said, it doesn't matter if he's the next president or if there's another Republican or even if Joe Biden has a second term. I don't plan to be here at the end of the day.
I walked onto the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus as a 27-year-old guy who just finished his medical residency at the New York hospital, and it’s 6 decades years later. I've accumulated an unprecedented amount of experience. One of the things I had wanted to do deep down was to be here at the end of the discovery of an HIV vaccine. And this is the truth--and I'm telling you and I haven't told anybody—I said, you know, we're not going to get an HIV vaccine for another decade at least. I was joking when I said malaria and TB.
Q: You really haven't answered the question precisely. Was it the threats to your three daughters and your wife? The attacks in the media and Congress? What is it that finally just made you say, I'm done with this job?
A: It was none of the above. As a guy whose known me for decades, I don’t lie to you. As the Trump administration was ending, I was vaguely considering wanting to have at least a few years when I'm still energetic, enthusiastic, and passionate about doing something outside of the realm of the government. Then the president calls me up right after being elected and says, One of the first things I'm going to do, Tony, is ask you to be my chief medical adviser. I said yes, fully thinking that at the end of that first year of the Biden administration, we'd be done with COVID, it really would be in the rearview mirror.
At the end of that year, it became clear that that's not going to happen. And I had long conversations with my best adviser, namely my wife, who said, you know, this is not going to disappear. [Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, heads the bioethics division at NIH’s Clinical Center.] So I said to myself, you know, I'm going to be 82 in December, what do I have further to offer?
President Donald Trump appointed Anthony Fauci to his administration’s coronavirus task force, which held closely watched daily press conferences like this one on 31 March 2020.JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
Despite the knives and the slings and the arrows, I’ve achieved a degree of being kind of a hero to some people. So let me use that to inspire people. So I said, when can I do that? I decided over the spring and summer that the best time to do it is when you're getting somewhat of a steady state with this disease, so I could transition out of here.
Q: Is some of the vitriol toward you about being a flip-flopper with your pandemic advice a result of having to make public health decisions in public in real time?
A: When you're doing an experiment, you collect data, you validate it, you scrub it, you analyze it, and then you write something that's based on science that's not dynamic, but is immutable. When you’re dealing with a pandemic response, it’s very dynamic, and a somewhat mysterious evolution of a process that has a lot of consequences, because people's lives are involved. The public expects you to analyze the situation and come out with daily proclamations about what should be done. When you're humble and scientific enough to say, You know, we were saying this a week, a month, 2 months ago, but now things have really changed, that's taken as flip-flopping, being wrong, and having made a mistake.
The classic one I know that you're referring to is about masks, right? How many times are we gonna go over that? The surgeon general tweets, Please do not buy masks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, Masks are unnecessary. I, as one spokesman, say, You know, we don’t know if it works outside of the health care setting. Nobody is fully aware of the aerosol spread. And we had no real idea that 60% of the transmissions were by an asymptomatic person. So, right then, we shouldn't necessarily be wearing a mask. As soon as [the known facts] changed. I said, Whoa, wait a minute, we better be wearing a mask in an indoor setting. And that becomes flip-flopping arrogance.
Q: In retrospect, do you think you could have framed it more cautiously in the early days and said, We don't really know enough right now, it doesn't look like we need masks, and there's a shortage of N95s?
A: Yeah, probably so but that's not what people want to hear. They want to hear what should we do? I probably should have retrospectively couched it in a way that was a little bit more flexible. But I can tell you, Jon, if I did, it's likely I would have been labeled as a wallflower, he didn't know what he was talking about.
Q: So what are you going to do? You’ve said you're going to write a memoir. You’ve never been much motivated by money.
A: If I was motivated by money, I would have taken the 100 jobs I’ve been offered for 20 times my salary.
I don't know, Jon, and I'm being very honest with you. Let me tell you what I did. I went to the Office of the General Counsel, and I said, I want to know what I can plan [for my post-NIAID retirement]. And they said, if you want to stay pristine, you plan nothing until you walk out the door. Then no one can accuse you of any conflicts of interest, of letting out little signals about what I'm going to do. Why are you looking so skeptically at me?
Q: I just imagine you have some dreams.
A: I don’t know what that's going to be. It may be hooking up with a university that's willing to make me a senior professor on their faculty. It may be going with a foundation. I can tell you one thing I'm not going to do. I'm not going to sit in my house with a Gmail address.
Q: You’ve published more than 1100 papers. Your first one was in 1965 on celiac disease, and then over the next 15 years, you published 62 papers on Wegener’s granulomatosis. That could have been your career. You never broke into Nature or Science with those papers. It isn’t until AIDS surfaced that you started regularly publishing in high-impact journals. You were already well into your career before you found what became your deep passion and focus.
A: When I started seeing desperately ill young gay men, it turned me around. That moved me like I never was moved before in medicine. And I decided I was going to pivot. I had had a very successful career that had already gotten me into most of the societies, the young Turks, the old Turks, but then I said, this is really something that I want to devote my career to. From the fall of 1981, right up through the time that we had very successful antiviral drugs, I was taking care of very, very sick people who had HIV. And that inspired me with a passion that we really have got to learn about this disease. And that's what got me being fanatically a workaholic, about research on that.
Caring for AIDS patients, like this man at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in 1987, shifted Anthony Fauci’s focus to infectious diseases.NIAID/ALAMY
Q: Looking back, who was the easiest president to work with? I know who the most difficult one was.
A: I wouldn't want to say who was the easiest. They were very different. And the difference often was dictated by the circumstances that defined their presidency. I had a very, very warm, almost grandfather-to-grandson relationship with George H.W. Bush. A fine, fine gentleman. I had probably the most impactful relationship with George W. Bush, because he allowed me to be the chief architect of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). If you want to look at my career, in lives saved, the most important thing I've done might be PEPFAR. [PEPFAR has invested $100 billion in helping more than 50 countries prevent and treat HIV infections.] But I wouldn't have been in a position to do what I did with PEPFAR unless I had the president trusting me as I did in [Bill] Clinton's administration.
Anthony Fauci started PEPFAR, which helped supplies countries with HIV drugs, with support from President George W. Bush, who awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008.AFP PHOTO/KAREN BLEIER
Q: Do you think NIH directors should stay in the same position for decades, the way you have? Or should NIH set term limits?
A: It should be flexible. And it depends on the individual and on what's going on. I don't buy those kinds of broad statements. I think you should be evaluated the way we are, every 4 years, by an outside group. I'm all for performance-based longevity.
Q: Do you have any advice for NIH about who they should look for or what type of person?
A: The type of person but not a person—that would not be appropriate. You need somebody who clearly has scientific credibility and really understands the science. It also has to be somebody who is articulate enough to be able to navigate the degree of public exposure you will have, because you will be involved in the next outbreak and the next public health crisis, which very often is an infectious disease.
Q: What do you want to accomplish between now and December?
A: I’d like to guide the good research being done in the arena of both mucosal, nasal vaccines for respiratory diseases, as well as more durable vaccines that protect against entire families of viruses. I'm a pusher. We meet as a group at least three, four times a week and I go OK, what are we doing? I try to be not a pain in the ass, but I'd like to keep my foot on the pedal between now and then to keep that thing going.
Q: I’ve seen loads of people confront you over more than 30 years. No one seems to get under your skin as much as Senator Rand Paul. Why does that guy piss you off so much? [The Kentucky Republican has accused Fauci of helping to trigger the pandemic by funding scientists in Wuhan, China, whom Paul and others allege either created SARS-CoV-2 or had an accidental lab leak of a bat virus they had collected.]
A: I came into what I thought was a good faith, oversight hearing where politicians ask questions for the purpose of improving the situation, for the purpose of protecting and preserving the health of the country. When you start off by saying, How do you explain the fact that you are responsible for the death of 5 million people? No way am I going to stand for that on public television, on C-SPAN. Sorry, Jon. No way.
Q: You got into a debate with him about the meaning of gain of function. [The Wuhan scientists combined a bat coronavirus growing in culture with a piece from another one, and the chimeric virus, in mouse experiments, was more deadly than the original one—but it could not have been used to create SARS-CoV-2.]. The Tony Fauci I know, who's very calm under pressure, would have said, yes, the virus in this experiment gained some function, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about whether it met a definition of gain of function that put the public at risk.
A: You're absolutely right. If I had to do it over again, I would have done it a little differently. Instead of responding to his accusatory tone, I should have just said, That's irrelevant to the safety of the country. It stunned me when he publicly called me a murderer of 5 million people. I just should have dropped back off and said, This guy's a jerk.
There’s an important difference between that kind of attack versus when the AIDS activists were attacking me in the ’80s. What they were saying was based on real suffering, reaching out to get my attention. So when they put my head on a spike outside this window, those were people who were hurting, and they wanted me to listen to them. And I did listen to them. And it was one of the best things that I've ever done. I never, ever got angry with the activists.
Anthony Fauci at a Senate hearing on 20 July had a contentious showdown with Senator Rand Paul (R–KY).J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/POOL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Q: If the House of Representatives becomes Republican-majority, and they hold hearings, will you testify?
A: If I'm asked to testify, I’ll testify. I have nothing to hide. I can explain everything I've done and I could defend everything I've done. But if it becomes clear that it's not an in-good-faith oversight, but a character assassination, I might not play ball.
Q: A last question for you. Do you have a motto that you told your kids, like, this is what I learned in life?
A: Yeah, it's what I go by. It's called precision of thought and economy of expression. Know what your message is, know your audience, and say it in as few words as possible.
New research has found that repeated concussions can thicken the structure of skull bones. Previous studies have shown damage to the brain following concussion, but have not looked at the brain's protective covering.
A Monash-led study published in the journalScientific Reportsby Associate Professor Bridgette Semple from the Monash University's Central Clinical School Department of Neuroscience, found that repeated concussions resulted in thicker, denser bones in the skull.
It is unclear whether this thickening of the skull is a good thing or a bad thing. In theory, a thicker skull is a stronger skull, suggesting that this may be the bone's attempt to protect the brain from subsequent impacts.
"This is a bit of a conundrum," Associate Professor Semple said. "As we know, repeated concussions can have negative consequences for brain structure and function. Regardless, concussion is never a good thing."
The team hopes that the microstructural skull alterations caused by concussion are now considered by researchers in the field to better understand how concussions affect the whole body.
Concussion is a form of mild traumatic brain injury, and repeated concussions have been linked to long-term neurological consequences.
Most studies focus on understanding how these head injuries affect the brain and its function—but they largely ignore the overlying skull bones that protect the brain.
Although bones are considered a mostly structural component of the human body, bones are in fact active living tissues that can respond to applied mechanical forces.
Study collaborator Professor Melinda Fitzgerald, from Curtin University and the Perron Institute in Western Australia, has previously shown that repeated concussive impacts lead to subtle problems with memory, and evidence of brain damage.
In this new study, high-resolution neuroimaging and tissue staining techniques were used in a pre-clinical model, and revealed an increase in bone thickness and density, in close proximity to the site of injury.
"We have been ignoring the potential influence of the skull in how concussive impacts can affect the brain," Associate Professor Semple said. "These new findings highlight that the skull may be an important factor that affects the consequences of repeated concussions for individuals."
Future studies are planned, with collaborator and bone expert Professor Natalie Sims from St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, to understand if a thickened skull resulting from repeated concussions alters the transmission of impact force through the skull and into the vulnerable brain tissue underneath.
More information: Larissa K. Dill et al, Localized, time-dependent responses of rat cranial bone to repeated mild traumatic brain injuries, Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-18643-5
In the past, many neuroscientists have investigated the potential therapeutic value of classical music and other types of music or sounds for alleviating some of the symptoms or deficits associated with different neuropsychological disorders. While some studies have suggested that listening to classical music and white noise could improve cognitive function, these effects are still poorly understood.
Researchers at the Monash Medicine Discovery Institute and Monash University in Australia have recently carried out a study specifically exploring the possibility that classical music andwhite noisecould positively impact people's ability to process conflicting information. Their findings, however, published inFrontiers in Neuroscience, suggest that these two auditory stimuli have no benefits for this specific cognitive function.
"To better understand how the processing of certain acoustic properties can influence conflict processing, we had a large of cohort of undergraduate students complete the Stroop color and word test (SCWT) in three different background conditions: classical music, white noise, and silence," Alexander J. Pascoe and his colleagues told Medical Xpress. "Because of pandemic guidelines and the necessity to run the experiment remotely, participants also completed the Wisconsin card sorting test (WCST), so that the reliability and consistency of acquired data could be assessed."
The 67 undergraduate students who participated in the researchers' study were asked to complete two different tests (i.e., the SCWT and the WCST) either in silence, while listening to white noise, or classical music. The SCWT is a widely used neuropsychological test that assess a person's ability to process specific stimuli while presented with conflicting stimulus attributes. This typically entails naming the color of fonts, even if these fonts are used to spell out inconsistent color words (e.g., green, red, blue).
The WCST is another test often used to measure executive functioning, particularly people's abstract reasoning and cognitive flexibility skills. In this test, people are asked to match different cards based on a 'rule' that is unknown to them and that changes several times during the experiment.
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, each of the participants completed both the SCWT and WCST tests at home under the three different acoustic conditions (i.e., in silence, with classical music, and with white noise playing), with each of the three trials separated by at least three days. The researchers then analyzed the performance of the participants in each of the conditions.
"We found that white noise, but not classical music increased the response time difference between congruent (low conflict) and incongruent (high conflict) trials (conflict cost), hence impairing performance," Pascoe and his colleagues explained in their paper. "Results from the WCST indicated that home-based data collection was reliable, replicating a performance bias reported in our previous laboratory-based experiments. Both the auditory stimuli were played at a similar intensity, thus their dissociable effects may have resulted from differing emotional responses within participants, where white noise, but not music elicited a negative response."
Essentially, the findings gathered by Pascoe and his colleagues suggest that neither classical music nor white noise led to an improvement in the participants' ability to process conflicting stimuli (i.e., they did not lead to better performances in the SCWT and WCST test). White noise, however, appeared to negatively affect the performance of participating students, making it harder for them to process conflicting stimuli.
"Integrated with previous literature, our findings indicate that outside of changes in tempo and valence, classical music does not affect cognitive functions associated with conflict processing, whilst white noise impairs these functions in a manner similar to other stressors, and hence requires further research before its implementation into neuropsychiatric care," Pascoe and his colleagues added in their paper.
The recent work by this team of researchers offers new valuable insight about the effects of music and white noise on a specific cognitive function, namely the ability to process conflicting information. In the future, their study could inspire other teams to examine these effects further or assess the impact of these auditory stimuli on other cognitive processes.
More information: Alexander J. Pascoe et al, Dissociable effects of music and white noise on conflict-induced behavioral adjustments, Frontiers in Neuroscience (2022). DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2022.858576
In a recent study, researchers from Karolinska Institutet and others have characterized the new omicron variant BA.2.75, comparing its ability to evade antibodies against current and previous variants. The study, published in the journalThe Lancet Infectious Diseases, suggests that BA.2.75 is not more resistant to antibodies than the currently dominating BA.5, which is positive news.
In May 2022, a new variant of omicron, BA.2.75, was detected, which is driving a wave of infections in India, and has spread internationally. In the last few weeks, BA.2.75 has also been detected in Sweden.
"Identifying how vulnerable the population is, right now, to emerging variants is crucial," says Daniel Sheward, researcher at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, and the study's first author. "By producing a pseudovirus for BA.2.75, we were able to test its sensitivity to antibodies present in blood donors."
Same level of resistance
Tests were carried out using 40 random blood samples taken in Stockholm, both before and after the first omicron wave.
"Our study shows that omicron BA.2.75 has approximately the same level of resistance to antibodies as the dominant variant BA.5, which is reassuring news if we were to suffer a BA.2.75 wave in Sweden," says Ben Murrell, assistant professor at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, and the study's senior author.
The researchers from Karolinska Institutet, University of Cape Town, South Africa, ETH Zürich, Switzerland, Karolinska University Hospital, and Imperial College London, Great Britain, have also investigated whether antiviral monoclonal antibodies, which are used clinically to treat already infected patients, lose their effect against omicron BA.2.75, compared to BA.5. Here, too, the researchers found no alarming differences.
Ben Murrell's lab will continue to monitor new mutations that are arising in omicron sublineages that may undermine vaccines.
More information: Daniel J Sheward et al, Evasion of neutralising antibodies by omicron sublineage BA.2.75, The Lancet Infectious Diseases (2022). DOI: 10.1016/S1473-3099(22)00524-2
